Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Came home from 3LF. Found another IDE/floppy controller shaped to go in the right specialfunky slots in Eon (the dead machine). No dice. No patience for hunting through spare drives to find working ones right size and install RedHat or Mandrake from scratch, so will have to do that tomorrow or when I get back from Pennsic. Instead looked to see what other machines had modems installed, one such was StJoan (the firewall), figured that was the quick way for a "tonight dammit" temporary workaround since I was already tired. No PPP tools on StJoan. Mdk and RH ppp RPMs present on Richards (the file server), but ... RPM would not install Mandrake RPM on 486 because it's the wrong architecture (Mandrake is compiled optimised for Pentium, but IME it'll usually run fine on a 386 if you can get it there -- StJoan & Eon are both Mandrake 6.0-2 on 486/66; Eon used to be 386/33), and RedHat RPMs had a major version number of "4" and the copy of RPM on StJoan refuses to install anything with major rev. > 3.

(Exsqueeze me; how'daHell duz ya upgrade to next version of RPM if'n ya can't use da old version of RPM to install da new version? Yah, I tried just in case. Compile RPM from tarball? Kinda' defeats da poipous of usin' RPM in da first place, nah?)

Tried copying 'rpm' executable from RH sys to a shared volume and naming it 'rpm4', and using that to install Red Hat PPP RPM under Mdk, but a) got warnings suggesting 'rpm4' executable itself wasn't quite happy, and b) errored out on dependencies that I didn't have the patience to recursively chase (and was nervous about replacing glibc on a currently running machine at expletive-o-clock in the morning). So I punted RPM.

Creative use of 'find', 'ls', and 'diff', followed by injudicious use of 'tar' (I did make a "DELETE THESE FILES TO UNDO" list and left it in ~root) to copy PPP from Wood (the name server -- I have no idea why there was a copy there!) piecemeal got me most of the way there (I had to go back and copy 'chat'). Then I had to dig through the masquerading HOWTO for the handful of config commands so that everyone else could see the net again (didn't do StJoan much good to have a net connection when the name server couldn't do its job). It's been so long since I've had to do that, since Eon has it all in the boot scripts. Took me a lot longer that it reasonably should have. A lot. Now it's up (obviously) but I'm pretty sure my firewall config isn't as safe as I want it to be with this toplogy. "Oddly" enough, so far it appears to be working correctly without any of the dependencies RPM insisted it needed. Pbbbbbbbt!

Frustrated. And grumpy. And sleepy. And did I mention grumpy?

Don't use RPM very much. Thought it was the Right and Quick way tonight, especially since what I had on the file server was a collection of RPMs copied from the install CDs. Thinking that maybe I'll stick to my habit of compiling from tarballs when I have tarballs available (I didn't tonight). There's some nifty magic in RPM, but it bites me on the arse a little too often.

GRUMPY!

"yes after 3 years of french and 5 years of Hebrew school the foreign languages I know best are Quenya and Sindarin." -- horvendile (according to bruhinb, in whose journal I saw it)