Pants Full of Unix

I had a refreshing reminder of why, no matter how frequently I get pissed off by the dumb-ass, late-80s shit forced upon me by HP-UX (Were you aware that until the very-most-recent minor version you still had to RECOMPILE THE KERNEL and reboot if you wanted to change SysV IPC settings? Well, okay, just relink, because they only give you strip(1)ed objects, but still…) at $CURRENT_EMPLOYER, things are much more painful in Linux-land, where Wintel hardware reigns supreme, because anything better is priced out of the game.

Speaking of , he's been over at my place a lot over the past few days. In part, that's because he's teaching me How to Solder Good by helping repair my left-channel speaker (long story for another time), in part it's because he's housing his system in the eclipsed.net data center (it, and its UPS, are in the space where dlk's iMac, 6500, and bargain-basement-PC were when those pictures were taken) for the time being. There was an initial PIBKAC issue (um, yeah, default route should not equal your own IP address if you'd like to be getting traffic from outside the subnet), which was easily resolved. Then, the next day, his shit blew right on up again.

I responded to his email (to my home address, which is not something I can see from work these days… banks are picky about sending traffic, especially enciphered traffic, outside their network from a system with access to their internal systems) with a phone call when I got home, went to take a look, found the NetBSD box locked hard, soft-reset it, and it started spewing errors that screamed “I'm a crappy Western Digital P-ATA HD, and it's time for me to shit a brick on your day!” So, was here about half an hour later, replacement drive in hand (pre-loaded with–shudder–Linoox). And left… I don't know how much later (because I was IN FUCKING BED), having managed to get the thing up to limp-home mode. His story continues yonder.