Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

In all fairness, Perrine probably only deserves the blame for the first chunk of this, not the whole thing, unless she's learned my root password and has been very naughty in the past few days ...

Okay, so earlier Perrine managed to do something screwy when she stepped on my keyboard. I started writing a plea for help, before it dawned on me that I need to be able to type '-' to post using the LJ client I normally use ... and then my ride to 3LF rehearsal showed up before I managed to post using the web interface so y'all got the very abbreviated version via SMS. There were more details in ( the version I typed in but didn't manage to post earlier )

Well, I've got the keyboard working normally again, but other bits of the Debian box are acting messed up...

When I got home, I tried unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in, thinking the problem might be a keyboard firmware command rather than an OS or WM toggle. No change. ( other stuff I tried )

Then something I did finally effected a change!

The keyboards stopped working entirely. :-( Both of them.

Finally, I decided it was time to bite the bullet, close the gobs of windows open on three of the four virtual desktops, and shut down the several projects (and, of course, scattered web surfing) that I'd been in the middle of and hadn't wanted to lose my place in. Maybe logging out would take care of it?

Well no, I couldn't type anything in the username box on the X login screen, either. Nor, at that point, could I even shut the machine down cleanly. Finally, exasperated, I used the BRS shutdown option (actually it's a wee translucent pushbutton with a green LED behind it, but I don't think "WGGB" -- wee green glowing button -- has quite the same degree of recognition as "BRS") and counted on EXT3 to save me from an uncomfortable fsck later.

Well here's where this turns from a too-long-for-its-triviality "I cycled power and it's okay" story, into a full blown "WTF? + Why Me? + IsThisGoingToTurnIntoYakShaving?" type of adventure. You see, after I rebooted, I could not log in.

And so began the shaving of the yak. It turned out that I could log in as root, so I reset my password just in case it had gotten munged somehow. Nope, still couldn't log in as myself: enter username, get password prompt, enter password, get initial login screen again. Feh. So I tried a bogus password just to check, and waitaminute, that got me an error message instead of just #blink#ing back to the splash screen. So, something screwed up in one of those dot-files in $HOME controlling X sessions, that I'd never bothered to look at or learn anything about? Well logging in as root again and running "ls -a ~dglenn | more" did turn up an interesting-looking filename, .xsession-errors, with a relevant-seeming timestamp.

It was complaining that the X startup script in /etc/gdm/Xsession (oh! I guess that means I'm using Gnome then -- I'd wondered^[1]) couldn't access /dev/null. WTF?! "Can't access /dev/null?? That doesn't sound at all reasonable..." Sho' 'nuff, /dev/null was 660, which Looked Wrong to my eye. Very wrong. In case fatigue was clouding my judgement, I telnetted to a Linux box downstairs to compare: as I'd thought I'd remembered (and as really only makes any sense at all), /dev/null over there was 666. Chmod 'dat, try again. Different glitch, and no login screen; power cycle the puppy agin' and try once more ... and /dev/null is 660 again ...???? Log in as root, chmod the damned null device, log in as myself, and fail because there's no entropy collector. Ask 'man' about "random" and see that /dev/random and /dev/urandom are supposed to be 644 but they're 660 too. Chmod those, and /dev/hw_random as well on a hunch, and try <voice tone="whine" pitch-modifier="nasal" syllable-multiplier="3">again</voice> to log in as myself ...

*Whew!* A Gnome desktop. BUT...

... but when the very first thing I tried to do -- start a terminal window -- only half-worked, I feared I might wind up taking tweezers to the damned yak before the night ended. The window popped open, but so did an alert box telling me it couldn't start the child process for the window. I don't remember where I saw some error message refer to a pty, but (Wait, wait, can you guess what the Next Problem turned out to be? Sure you can; it fits the theme. Yeah, that's right, you got it ...) sure enough, when I looked at /dev/pty*, the permissions were fucked up there as well.

I wonder: are all these permissions going to be munged again the next time I reboot? Or just /dev/null? More importantly, what have I not found yet that's going to bite my ankles repeatedly in the next several days? [Later Edit: SSH is broken -- when I try to connect to the Suse box as myself, I get "ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/bin/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory", and if I try to do it from a root prompt it asks me for a password but no password I enter works. SSH was working perfectly fifteen hours ago!] And what screwed this up in the first place?

It's conceivable that some malicious cracker has broken into this computer -- security on my house LAN is not very strong, nowhere near as strong as I really know it really ought to be (and really will be, real soon now, when I get around to it) -- but seems pretty darned unlikely since it's behind a masquerading router. A worm or virus is much more likely considering that even though I am immune to malware that propogates via email, I have been surfing the web with Javascript enabled and could have picked up malware from a compromised web site.

But I suspect -- purely on a hunch, mind you, with no more evidence than a nagging distrust left over from the time it overwrote my kernel -- I suspect that some recent update via aptitude/apt-get/etc. mangled the permissions on a bunch of system device files that some upgraded package claimed dominion over. 'Cause yeah, I did run a couple of updates during the, uh, [pause to look it up] month + 1.5 days since the last time I logged off of this computer (or the last time the power went out or something ... I don't log off of the bedroom machines often).

Anyone with more current Linux sysadmin skillz and/or who has had something like this happen to them, care to provide additional clues? Evaluate my guesses as to the likelihood of the cause? Suggest where else I should look for related problems first (before trying to sift the entire file system)?

And are there any more ideas on what magic chord Perrine struck that triggered the odd keyboard behaviour^[2] that started this exercise in the first place, and how to undo it without the involvement of hirsute bovines if she manages to hit the same magic combination again?

All in all, I'd have to call the yak only half-shaved considering that I didn't wind up nested three topics deep in a Google search, or have to suddenly learn All The Details of X customization and management that I've been putting off reading up on for too long, but it was still a rather longer detour than I'd been prepared for when I decided to reboot the machine. (Keep saying it: "I love my cat. She didn't mean to do it. I love my cat. She didn't mean to do it. I love my cat ...")

And in the morning, I get to start figuring out where I was in various things that got closed when I rebooted. Whee.

[1] I knew I was most likely using either KDE or Gnome, but a) I hadn't gotten around to looking closely at both to see what the pros and cons of each are, b) I got this machine already configured, so all I did was change the root password and add an account for myself when I got it, not select all those install-time choices that would've tipped me off, and c) whenever I try to install something that says it's a Gnome app it just works, and whenever I try to install something that says it's a KDE app it just works, so that didn't seem like much of a clue either. The result was that yes, I've been using a modern Linux GUI for something like a year and a half without having gotten around to figuring out whether I was using Gnome or KDE until now. When things basically just work and the interface doesn't piss me off, details like that seem like things I should know but don't seem urgent[3], so the pertinent Round Tuit wasn't being stalked very aggressively.

[2] If I know how to reliably turn this mode on and off, it would actually be kind of useful. I've been saying for years that I wanted a SHIFT-LOCK button -- like on the manual typewriters I used to use -- on my computer keyboards somewhere in the same general area as the CAPS-LOCK key. Caps-lock is usually more useful than shift-lock, so I wouldn't want to get rid of it, but I find myself wanting shift-lock just often enough to fondly remember the dumb terminal I used a long time ago that had both. (Hey dmk, it was one of the ones we used at UD, wasn't it? Do you remember? I think it was one of the CRTs, but I'm not 100% certain that it wasn't the DecWriter.) Thing is, I want it just seldom enough to keep forgetting to look up whether it's easy to switch on and off on various modern operating systems that might have it as an accessibility feature. Now that I've been told two invocations I'll play with that under Windows, but neither seems to have any effect on this Linux box.

[3] Which brings up a topic for a separate entry of its own, when I get around to that.

"I'm amazed at how people who can't handle Excel to save their lives the other 11 months of the year suddenly become experts in generating multilayered, graphics-intensive spreadsheets [during the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, aka 'March Madness']" -- John Soat, "IT Confidental" column, InformationWeek, 2007-03-19 (#1130), p.12

[Ah, motivation makes a world of difference in the shape of the learning curve, doesn't it?]

Is it just me -- either my definitions being a bit off or my being the only one who notices -- or does it strike else as odd that television news reporters and anchors keep referring to those known to have committed crimes as "suspects", and to those merely suspected or accused of comitting crimes as "alleged suspects"? Shouldn't that be "perpetrators" and "suspects", respectively? I've been thinking about this for quite a while; posting at just this moment in particular was trigerred by turning on the television for the noon news and hearing "alleged suspect" as one of the first phrases I caught.

It seems to me that a person of known identity (to some deegree of 'known') under investigation and suspected of having perpetrated a crime, or perhaps already charged but not yet tried, is a suspect, and that the person of known partial description according to the victim, but unknown identity so far, is an unidentified perpetrator (or possibly "alleged perpetrator" if the victim's description is suspect). And when all that's known is that somebody done somethin' wrong but nobody has any idea who it was yet, that unknown person is the mysterious, unknown perpetrator but there are not yet any suspects. Hearing an unknown perpetrator's known acts described as what "the suspect" did when there are no leads and no suspects yet sounds Rather Strange to me.

What to call the person who has been tried and convicted and later (or earlier) admitted that sie did do what sie was accused of, is another question. If you take the epistemological approach and wish to emphasize that only the accused (and, if not the same person, the actual perpetrator) knows for sure whether the conviction was just and the admission truthful, I suppose you could continue to describe hir as "the suspect". But in many cases I would feel more comfortable simply saying "the perpetrator" (or, if the accused still denies guilt and has even a shred of credibility, "the alleged perpetrator").

A more interesting case, by the way, is when there is no doubt as to who did what but the question of whether what was done broke the law is still being sorted out. "Perpetrator" sounds prejudicial in that circumstance, but "suspect" appears to indicate uncertainty as to the who rather than the uncertainty regarding the law. Is there a legal term-of-art for that?

So: am I clinging too hard to etymologies, having fallen behind evolving usage, or am I right and the reporters wrong? Is the usage on crime dramas (where the cast may start out with a dozen suspects and spend the episode trying to determine which suspect is the actual perpetrator and which are innocent) the distortion, rather than the news reporters' usage being the one that's wrong? And if I'm right and they're wrong and neener neener neener and all that, is this just a Baltimore thing, or has it become common elsewhere as well?