I’ve mentioned before that I do occasional freelance computer work on the side. Today a friend threw a job my way, and it sounded like easy money:

Client: I installed Service Pack 3 and now it just reboots over and over.

Me: Does it have an AMD processor?*

Client: It does, actually.

Me: Alright, I’ll be over in 15 minutes.

The actual fix took me all of 10 minutes, but I’m too honest:

Me: Well, you’re already paying for an hour of my time. Anything else I can fix for you?

Client: Yeah, there’s a few other things I need help with…

Long story short, I apparently impressed the hell out of him and now he wants me to build him a new website and become his go-to IT guy. I guess I need to decide which deadly sin is stronger here, greed or sloth. Right now I’m leaning towards greed…

* Bonus points for you if you know why that’s the right question to ask in this case.

My crappy little Linksys 100-Mbit switch has developed the charming habit of periodically dropping the whole LAN into 10-Mbit, half-duplex mode. A quick power-cycle brings it back to 100-Mbit, full-duplex, but I think its days are numbered.

Most of the house is already set up with Cat-5e so all I really need to go gigabit is a new switch. Any recommendations for a high-quality but affordable 8-port switch?

Came up with a silly but ultimately successful workaround for installing Mac OS X 10.4 onto that ancient G3 tower. What should be a simple process was complicated by a confluence of awkward limitations:

• My copy of 10.4 is on DVD, while the G3 only has a CD-ROM drive. A new DVD drive would cost more than the computer is worth, so I’m not buying one.
• The B&W (blue and white) G3s don’t support booting from either USB or FireWire devices, thus preventing me from installing via my external USB DVD drive. This also ruled out using the G5’s DVD drive in Target Disk Mode.
• Speaking of Target Disk Mode, the B&W G3s don’t support it, so I couldn’t install from the G5 to the G3 by mounting the G3’s disk as an external hard drive.
• The OS X installer doesn’t seem to support installing onto external USB hard drives, which foiled plan #3: pulling the hard drive from the G3, putting it into an external enclosure, and installing OS X onto the drive from my G5 system. This probably would have worked if I’d had a FireWire-equipped enclosure handy, which of course I did not.

So, here’s what I ended up doing:

1. Install 10.3 from CDs, with the hard drive divided into a large main partition and a little 3 GB partition.
2. Hook up the external DVD drive and use Disk Utility to “restore” the 10.4 install DVD onto the 3-gig partition.
3. Wait for-EVAR for the copy to finish. I was copying a 2.8 GB disk image onto a hard drive via a USB 1.1 connection. Ponderous, man. Fuckin’ ponderous. (someone please get that reference!)
4. Set the Mac to boot from the second partition.
5. Reboot and use the 10.4 installer to put 10.4 on the main partition.
6. Use the little 3-gig partition for an OS 9 installation. Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Shadow Warrior, and Warcraft II, here I come!

This 9-year-old box actually provides useable performance with 10.4. It’s not blazing fast, by any means, but it’ll do basic web browsing/email/IMing. I can easily overclock it from 350 MHz up to a blazing 400 MHz once I dig out the appropriately-sized jumper from my spare parts bin, and I’m sure I have a few sticks of suitable RAM lying around somewhere. Right now it’s running on 512 MB. Or perhaps “walking” is the more appropriate term.

In any case, I managed to get it working without spending a dime, so I’m happy.

I called up the Executive Inn hotel this afternoon and confirmed that they have free, hotel-wide wifi, with wireless adapters available for those who don’t have their own. I don’t know what the connectivity situation will be at the convention proper, but I believe registered bloggers will get real, grown-up Press Credentials and access to a media room of some sort, which ought to have Internet access. Maybe Sebastian and Bitter can add something to this?

In any case, if you’re bringing your laptop and plan to get on public wifi I highly suggest using some means of securing your traffic. My weapon of choice is a good old-fashioned SSH tunnel used as a SOCKS proxy to one of my home machines.

My own setup uses computers running Linux and OpenBSD, meaning that any instructions I write would be irrelevant to the 90%+ of you who use Windows. So, if you’re on Windows and you’re interested in setting up something like this, I suggest you take a look at this guide. I haven’t actually used those directions since I don’t have any Windows PCs, but they look quite reasonable. Not that you’d have to leave your home PC up and running, with an SSH server installed and configured, AND your router doing the appropriate port forwarding.

Oh, and be sure to set up Firefox to do your DNS lookups over the proxy if you’re really paranoid.

Me? I’m not paranoid; I’m just security-conscious. Which brings me to my next blog topic: tinfoil hats - shiny side in or out?

With winter semester behind me, for the past two days I’ve devoted my attention to computer maintenance here at home.

The G5 is up and running with a fresh install of Mac OS 10.4 (I moved some drives around and therefore had to reinstall the OS) along with the latest versions of all my programs. This took significantly longer than I expected; I’ve grown used to the Debian way of just running sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to magically update the entire machine with one command (okay, it’s technically two commands; bite me). Manually tracking down and installing the latest versions of all my programs, one by one? That’s just… barbaric.

The Blade had some downtime so I could replace the banshee-like case fan. I opened it up, fearing that Sun had fucked me by installing some impossible-to-locate proprietary fan assembly, only to find a standard 80mm case fan snapped into Sun’s little fan housing. Cool! 80mm case fans are off-the-shelf, $5 parts at any computer store in the country. I ran out and bought a new fan, went to plug it in and… Fuck.

Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

Yes, Sun used a regular case fan, but they stuck some weird-ass proprietary power connector on it. This means wire splicing is in order. Dammit.

Now, I am not a hardware guy. I can build PCs, I can do standard troubleshooting stuff, but I am not good with a soldering iron. Really NOT good. Splicing three wires is a five-minute job for a competent hardware guy. Here’s how the process goes for me:

1. Spend 15 minutes in a futile search for wire strippers before giving up and doing the sidecutters-and-fingernails wire stripping routine.
2. Lose a good 6″ of wire due to repeated butchery of the sidecutters-and-fingernails wire stripping routine.
3. Dig out soldering gun and solder.
4. No, that’s plumbing solder. I need electrical solder.
5. Spend 10 minutes failing to locate the electrical solder I KNOW I have.
6. Run out to the hardware store to buy electrical solder. With amazing forethought, also buy heatshrink tubing.
7. Twist together the first two wires and solder.
8. Realize that I forgot to put heatshrink over the wire before soldering.
9. Curse repeatedly, cut out my fresh solder job, and go back to step 7.
10. Resolder wires, getting more solder on the tabletop than on the actual wires.
11. Shrink the heatshrink into place, singing fingertips in the process.
12. Notice that I just soldered a black wire to a red wire; go back to step 7 AGAIN.
13. Eventually, after much sweating, swearing, and digit-scorching, complete the soldering job.
14. Install new fan.
15. Pray to all applicable deities that I’m not about to fry my computer.
16. Hit the power button.
17. No sparks, no smoke, the fan spins, AND it’s rotating in the right direction!
18. Bask in the glow of victory.
19. While putting everything away, find my wire strippers, electrical solder, and heatshrink tubing. Never fuckin’ fails.

The newly-quietened Blade also got an upgrade to OpenBSD 4.3, about which I’ll post more later. Short version: I loves me some OpenBSD.

Next up, the laptop gets a bump to Ubuntu 8.04 and TD gets seriously drunk.

TD’s desk (or, to swipe borrow Tam’s phrase, TUM Command Central):

On the left is a vintage NeXTstation loaded with NEXTSTEP 3.3. Not actually used for much, but it still works and it’s made of 100% awesome. Next (NeXT?) to it is the new/old Sun Blade 100 running OpenBSD 4.2; it’s actually headless and the monitor is connected to the Power Mac G5 (dual 2 GHz) peeking out from under the desk. Not shown is the Ubuntu Linux-powered Thinkpad T42.
Two remarkable things about this set-up:

1. All this crap is actually in my bedroom, and…
2. astonishingly, despite that fact, I have a real live girlfriend.

You’ll note there’s no Windows boxes anywhere; I’m not THAT tolerant.

But I’m only posting this:

… so TD can play with his new toy.

So pdb sez: “I’ve got some old programming books you might be able to use. I’ll send ‘em your way.”

Fast-forward four months, give or take, and I get these in the mail:

Yep, K&R C, first edition. written by The Men Themselves, and the “UNIX Bible.” I can feel my beard growing faster already.

Anyone else seeing a surge in traffic from Chinese IP addresses? I started getting a huge number of requests from 124.115.1.86 and 124.115.3.33, which trace back to CHINANET.

Dirty commies be hax0ring mah blog, apparently.