Geek Awareness
I’ve been sitting here after midnight, doing what seems, upon
reflection, geeky things. I’ve been listening to jazz, reading
some social comment stuff, studying the Lyx introduction
and tutorial since I’m interested in doing some publishing,
running an ssh mission over to an XP box to see if certain
files were installed in Cygwin like what I’m using on this
OpenBSD box, using Snownews to read RSS feeds from
various OpenSource projects around the Web , especially
from Dru Lavigne’s Blog , accessing it with Lynx , my
text-based browser, registered at the LXF (Linux Format)
web site and retrieved my new password once again using
SSH to login to my Unix shell account and use Pine to
read my email at SDF , and so on.
I remember back in the early 90’s when I was just starting
out with computers and trying to get everything I could free,
since money is always an item to consider when you’re still
raising a family. Now, with all the resources listed above,
I’m slowly but surely weaning myself away from Microsoft ,
not because I don’t like the system or the people developing
and selling it, but once again due to the expense of keeping
up with it, as opposed to relying almost solely on opensource
to get my computing done. But hey, maybe one of these days
I’ll have more money again and invest in a brand new shiny
Vista cd or dvd set! Keyword here is “MAYBE”. 
Cygwin Login
Updated Cygwin on my XP box. Thought because it stopped several
times before finishing and having to choose a different server, that it
had something to do with it. Apparently not. Searched the Cygwin
mailing list archives and found the following:
You just copy C:\cygwin\etc\defaults\etc\profile over C:\cygwin\etc\profile
and restart cygwin. After that, everything goes back to normal. Just another
day in puter paradise. Speaking of which, I’m always bragging about how I
never have to reboot OpenBSD all the time like I do “Windoze”. Sitting here
this morning, reading the news in Firefox on the OpenBSD box, and BOOM,
down she went! I’ve read all sorts of problems and responses in the OpenBSD
mailing lists with spontaneous reboots, and nobody wants to think their hardware’s
crapping out, but in my experience, that’s almost always what’s caused it on any
of my boxes. Case in point: Same box, last year maybe, or earlier this year, everytime
I’d drag a large file across from XP to some dir on the OpenBSD box, it’d reboot.
Upon careful examination of the mobo, turned out to be some leaking capacitors.
Changed out the mobo and, while I was at it, put in a new power supply too. It sure
didn’t last very long. All boxes here are hooked into UPS’s, which is a prerequisite
around this area. The power company is always dropping power off, especially since
Katrina came to see us in 2005. I guess it’s a moot point, though. I’ve always had
good luck with power supplies, but I guess I just got a bad apple out of the barrel
last time.
Experimenting for Newbies
I thought it might help newbies to write about a learning strategy
I’ve usedsince I started out trying to learn the BSD’s. I’ve got this
old PIII 800 I’m working on running OpenBSD, an ancient PII 300
dual-processor HP Netserver running OpenBSD, a Toshiba Satellite
4015 (another relic) running OpenBSD, and a PIII 667 home-built
box running XP. I installed cygwin on the XP box, setup a vanilla
bash prompt so neither FreeBSD or OpenBSD, which has a different
term code and didn’t like the flashy default bash prompt in cygwin.
I also setup Microsoft Services for Unix Administration on the XP
box. I setup ficticious users on all the different boxes, and then I
taught myself how to do automated cronjob rsync backups across
the LAN, setup LAN file shares on on the XP box and NFS on the
BSD boxes, taught myself about ssh and scp along with authorized
keyfiles to eliminate typing passwords, and setup cvsup in root’s
crontab to keep all sources up to date. Forgot to mention a friend
gave me a very ancient Prioris P90 box given to him after Hurricane
Katrina, setup an IDE drive and 5 1GB scsi drives in it left over from
the storm and still working, installed OpenBSD 3.8 on it, set termcap
for serial port usage, hooked up a null modem cable bought locally,
and taught myself how to control it remotely from this box. While I was
out of town, I was told it wasn’t working properly, and was able to ssh
into this box and work on the ailing box from 700 miles away. All I
need to do, I guess, is set up the NIC for wake-on-lan and I could
even wake it up from somewhere else.
Whole point of this tirade is that you can use a bunch of old hardware
as your classroom. All of these boxes I have would be laughed at by
someone using the hot hardware that’s coming out these days, but
they have been a great help at relatively very low costs.
Just a thought!
