8:00 PM Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday dear... er... Me, Happy Birthday to me! <SEG>

Busy day at work today; much discussion of exactly how and why the home office had the wrong idea about what kind of infrastructure we needed, how to fix that problem, and who was going to do it. The answers, course, were A) the home office is never wrong, and it was no one's fault, B) fixing it will cost too much (in other words, a total savings of a considerable amount - just in the wrong categories) and C) me. Of course.

But at least I'm getting what I want (I think) so the situation, I guess, ends up in my favor. I only took a minor scolding for being right, too, which is always a good thing.

With all of that, I didn't eat lunch until 3, and didn't really notice the time until Keri called me at about 4. Sigh. But tonight there is birthday cake, so it all turns out OK. <G> Good night...

3:00 PM Hmmm. Round 2 has been called on account of rain. I win by default, due to the old adage "'Tis easier to gain absolution than permission." Not that' I'd ever do anything like that, of course. I'm a good boy. Not like Tom. <SEG> I'm sure Tom's a very good boy, right Leah? Leah? Why are you laughing, Leah?

Anyway. With that out of the way, I spent most of the day updating some security bits here and there. Kernel 2.2.16 on the "low security" firewall... hmmm. Odd. Out of the corner of my eye, I see this screen:

LILO
Welcome to blah blah blah (<-- that's what it really says, by the way; I like messing with minds <G>)

To list the possible choices, press <TAB>.
To load one of them, write its name and press <ENTER> or wait 5 seconds for default boot.
boot:
Loading linux-new............
Uncompressing Linux...

invalid compressed format (err=2)
-- System Halted_

And while I was at it, I went around and rattled the doors and windows on our home network; for a non-public system, there sure are a lot of systems in the "hosts.deny" file. Thanks, Portsentry. Apparently there are plenty of people who have too much time on their hands. Tripwire doesn't show any changes to critical files, though, and from the looks of the logs, there's nothing unusual going on. No processes running that shouldn't be; and it's tough to break into a system running only SSH, named, and portsentry. We'll be adding Apache and a mail server here shortly, but I don't expect to increase vulnerability any if I can manage it.

And now, the further adventures of The Bad Kernel...