Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I should be asleep. I was tired. I took the latest sleepy-pill prescribed. I got into bed. I closed my eyes. I may have slipped back and forth 'twixt sleep and wake a couple of times ...

But then the muse stalked into my bedroom and slapped me. Now I've got this really cool idea in my head that combines two forms I'm not good at, and I'm going to have to get a handle on the whole fugue thing and get better at estampies because this is one of those ideas that'll keep distracting me at inconvenient times until I've acquired the skills to pull it off, however many weeks or years that is.

(I've had a painting in my head for decades -- I think two muses got their lists mixed up one day -- I don't paint. Acquiring that skill at the level needed for this painting, starting from zero ... doesn't seem likely unless I completely change my ideas of what I want to do and how I spend my time. But the painting wants to be painted and even though it got stuck in the wrong brain by mistake it has haunted me since the early 1980s (or was it the late 1970s?) I keep hoping I can exorcise it if I can describe it well enough to a painter and get them excited about the idea of painting it. I think this musical idea is another one of those, except that it's at least in the right medium for me and I know where to start, so it shouldn't haunt me as long as that painting.)

"Snakes Fugue. Why did it have to be snakes fugue?" Fugues intimidate me. Oh, fun to listen to, yah, but ... Well, time to get over that. I got me some learnin' to do.

... uh, except that the plan had been to go to sleep now.

"Ladies, never ever ever wear a strapless evening gown when on crutches." -- marykaykare, 2006-06-07 in the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom (in response to Paul Ciszek's rhetorical, "Who among us has not had an embarrassing or profoundly inconvenient 'wardrobe malfunction'?") [Message-ID: <e5ednUra0--GEhrZnZ2dnUVZ_r2dnZ2d@zhonka.net>, Subject: "Re: Conventions that don't suck?"]

In 1752, in Britain and her colonies, there was no tomorrow.

In case anyone was wondering about what turned out to be wrong with that Windows 98 machine that could get through my LAN to the Internet but couldn't see any machines on my LAN, and how it was finally made to work, here is (as Paul Harvey would say) The Rest Of The Story.

First, a little more strangeness: For one thing, there were two entries in that computer's routing table exactly identical to each other, for the subnet for my LAN. And I could not delete any routes at all except for the default route (0.0.0.0). And at one point, using 'tcpdump' on a different computer, I saw an ARP packet that said:

arp who-has 192.168.49.193 tell 192.168.49.193

So the situation was that

1. Since it couldn't "see" my nameserver, it couldn't look up any addresses by name (so all other tests described here were done by typing IP addresses in by hand),
2. It didn't respond to pings from other machines,
3. Pings from it to other local machines timed out and never even appeared in 'tcpdump' listings on any other machine,
4. Even though it could not see 192.168.55.254, my gateway, it could still somehow send packets through the gateway onto the Internet and get responses back -- even establish telnet and FTP sessions.

When I finally learned that the Windows equivalent of the 'ifconfig' command is 'ipconfig', I saw that the computer thought it had two Ethernet interfaces. I looked at the back of the machine for another Ethernet connector and didn't find any, just as I expected (since I'd watched silmaril and Breno transplant the Ethernet card into the machine in the first place, and load Ethernet drivers off a Windows installation CD, the day the computer was brought into the house). Eventually it dawned on me that although it didn't have a second Ethernet interface, it could well have a second TCP/IP interface ... so I clicked the "Properties" button of the Dial-Up Networking interface in the Networking control panel, got the expected message in a pop-up window telling me that settings for dial-up connections were usually particular to, and handled by, the specific dial-up connections themselves, not applied generally to the interface at this level, clicked through to look at the configuration anyhow, and saw an IP address and netmask already set up there matching the settings for the Ethernet adaptor.

Reasoning that the reason it couldn't see local machines was because it was trying to use the unconnected modem, but somehow knew to send gatewayed packets through the Ethernet card, I clicked the DHCP button in the Control Panel:Networking:Dial-Up:Properties window, and rebooted the machine.

Even the boot sequence looked different. And it asked for silmaril's Windows Networking password (which it hadn't done before) and popped up an IM login box (which it hadn't done before) ... and suddenly everything that I had expected to Just Work when we plugged the machine in to begin with ... Just Worked. DNS worked. Pinging local machines by name or by number worked. Telnetting to my Linux machines worked. Once I sorted out Samba administration details that I'd forgotten how to do because I haven't needed to tweak my Samba settings in a long time, mapping a networked drive to a directory on my file server worked. Everything Just Worked.

So: problem solved, mystery solved, clues acquired. The one remaining question is: will I remember this if I ever bump into this set of symptoms again in the distant future?

*Whew*