Monday, August 28, 2000

I’m not sure I like the format of my “Statistics” page, but I’ll have to wait and see how it develops over time.

Work today was a nightmare… I spent most of my time fighting an excruciating little script. It was quite beautiful in it’s simplicity: From my main server, I wanted to add users to each of my other boxes with a single script (no, NIS is not an option ). I installed sudo on each of the machines and then ran a list of users through a while loop that would rsh into each box and add the users. Only problem was, the script would cycle through the while loop if I was logged in as root, but would not validate on the other machines (rightfully so, remote root is NOT allowed). When I was logged in as myself (they way I want the script to work, I could run the rsh commands and sudo on the remote boxes, but the script would NOT cycle through the while loop. This was extremely frustrating!!!! I tried looking at the differences in permissions between myself and root, I tore apart the script (it’s only eight lines of korn), looked at every possible angle as to why this was acting this way. I finally figured it out. How? “man rsh”. As usual, after studying the man pages, I realized that rsh was responding to the remote I/O and flaking out my entire loop. Rsh -n (at least on Solaris) fixes this problem. So now I have a nifty little script to add users across multiple boxes! ( I think this one may grow to include group permissions and access to certain tertiary switching equipment.

I installed a 3.5 drive and new hard drive (O.K. so not so new- it’s my original 80 meg hard drive from my first “IBM” style machine) into the Compaq Portable III. Lo and behold, I still had my original Compaq Diags disk to setup the new configuration! (see, there really is a reason that I’m holding on to all those old disks!) After configuring the machine, I put Minix on it just to see how it had changed over the three or so years since I had last played with it. Quite a difference. Minix 2.0.0 installs very easily and comes with a nifty little setup program that guides you through installing to the hard drive. Within maybe fifteen minutes, I had a fully operational minix box! (286-12, 640k 80meg- impressive, eh?) I still need to load the source code and compile a kernel with ethernet & tcp-ip support, but that will come later. I still want to try out ELKS, but that will probably wait until I finish playing with Minix.