Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-12-09:

"Deep inside, all of our bosses are pirates with Tourette syndrome." -- Bob Apthorpe, organizer of the Improv for Sysadmins session at the LISA 2005 conference, Dec. 7, 2005.

No, I still haven't gotten around to witing a proper War report, but I'll cheat a bit and keep the topic fresh by posting bits already written. Here's what should have been posted during War.

Background for anyone who doesn't find the minutiae of my life fascinating enough to memorize everything I babble: I've got two cell phones and one SIM that I can switch between them -- there are some features I like better on one and some I like better on the other, and it's nice to be able to charge oe while carrying the other around. I took both to Pennsic in case of trouble getting access to electricity to run the charger, figuring I'd have twice as much battery to use up before it became a problem. (That wasn't an issue for more than a couple of days, as it turned out, but I'll still play "just in case" wrt availability of electricity next year.) Not having previously sent email-via-SMS from one of the phones, I didn't know that one had a configuration glitch that caused such messages to be silently dropped in the bit-bucket, until I noticed that many of the LJ entries I'd tried to post from Pennsic hadn't been posted (and started looking for a pattern).

I've got the SMS-to-email problem sorted out (with help), and thus the post-to-LJ-via-SMS problem. So now both phones can post to LJ. Fortunately, I hadn't yet deleted most of the attempted messages (one or two are gone but the rest I hadn't gotten around to). Unfortunately, only the other phone stores the timestamp of sent messages, and this one, oddly enough, does not keep the sent-messages folder in chronological order. So I'm able to post belatedly the snippets you should have seen during War, but I can only partialy restore the order/timing of them.

So here's the sound-bite view of my Pennsic, which I'm sure would have been much more interesting/entertaining if you were reading it one message at a time while I was still out there. (*sigh*).

[2006-08-06 02:38 (posted from the other phone, but truncated)]: One of cacie's songs has Mighty Kung-Fu Action death grip on my brain. Oh! Snoring stopped; maybe I can go [to sleep now.]

[2006-08-08 15:38 (posted from other phone, included here for continuity)]: Already declaring this a productive War: Mike and I composed a tune last night.

[Don't remember when]: Odd feeling: just woke from a dream with my inner compass askew as though someone had turned my tent 90° while I slept. [The feeling persisted five or ten minutes after waking -- I looked out my window and saw the correct view looking south, but it very strongly felt like I was looking east. Quite disconcerting until the world straightened itself out again.]

[Don't remember when; between 8:00 and 10:00 some morning]: Half shade half sunlit, difference from one end of tent to other is 25°F. 70 by bed, 95 near door. [Note: my tent is about eleven feet from end to end at the floor, a bit less where I was holding the thermometer.]

[Late 2006-08-10 or midlle of 2006-08-11]: -- Missing message about planning to play with Emory, Mike, and Bob in the bardic competition at the Chalk Man later --

[2006-08-11, between 21:00 and 23:00]: At The Chalk Man pub waiting our turn to play. Wish I had my cape.

[2006-08-11, uh, 23ish?]: Problem with going on last: desipte my best efforts to keep them warm, my fingers were COLD when we played. Frustrated.

[Nearly midnight 2006-08-11 or a few minutes into 2006-08-12]: Didn't win anything but did sell a CD.

[2006-08-12 20:23 (posted from other phone and commented on, included here for continuity)]: Apparently I am a pervert. (On account of hazelnut decaf Turkish coffee with artificial sweeteners.)

[Don't remember when]: Nice thing about being next to Clan Cambion: when drums (&pipes) elsewhere stop, we hear harps. [One of many nice things -- I would have phrased it differently, but for the length limit on SMS messages.]

[2006-08-14, 9ish]: Morning paper just arrived: already 10,470 people on site as of 16:00 yesterday.

[Probably 2006-08-14, late afternoon (if I'm remembering correctly which day it rained)]: And we have rain. Got the tent mostly covered before it got heavy; hope the remaining exposed bits aren't the ones that leak.

[Probably 2006-08-14, after dark]: Our camp was just visited by minions from Hell...Who needed our help restoring their fire.

[Some evening in the second week]: Overheard from the road just now: "Whatever happens, it's alright, because we have a designated scapegoat."

[Probably 2008-08-16; might be able to figure it out from file timestamps on borrowed laptop later]: Pennsic so far: Haven't done any shopping or made it to any classes yet, but I've composed another tune.

[Late 2006-08-16/wee hours of 2006-08-17]: -- Missing message about busking during Midnight Madness --

[2006-08-20, around 10AM, I think]: Packed & ready to go; struck tent last night due to weather forecast (since changed). Trying to nap w/o sunburn while waiting for truck. [txt msg abbr expanded to less annoying form; original barely fit in an SMS message]

So there's the sound-bite version. Proper writeup still to come.

[UPDATE: Solved!]

I'm looking at a Win98 box that -- get this -- can't see any of the other machines on my LAN, but can get packets out to the Internet and back (by IP number) through my masquerading router even though it can't see the router! Ping times out between that machine and anything else on my LAN, in either direction, and traceroute only provides responses for machines past my firewall.

Additionally, tcpdump isn't showing me diddly when I ask a third machine to listen in on the ping traffic ... unless the box sending the pings is pinging the broadcast address. Does this mean that my "switch that acts like it's a mere router hub [grabbed the wrong noun last night, sorry] until you plug a terminal into the serial port and set a password and tell it to act like a switch" (according to the manual) is already acting like a switch without having been told that it is one? That ... makes tcpdump rather less useful as a troubleshooting tool, however more efficient it is.

Something is happening here that seems as though it sould not be possible. Perhaps two somethings. I am open to suggestions.