Installed Ubuntu in the spare space on the laptop hard drive.
(I don't like it, I think. Might try switching to straight Debian. I'm not invested in the install on the laptop at this point.)
Took everything out from under the kitchen sink. Disassembled the drains. cleaned out all the pieces. Reassembled. Got to the bottom of the "disposal not running" issue, and repaired it.
(The dishwasher drains through the disposal. Recently, the bowl with the disposal has been filling up with yucky water when the dishwasher runs, and then draining slowly. This is immediately and easily cleared by turning on the disposal. But if the disposal is not working, that can't happen. So I was hoping that by cleaning the drain pipes, the dishwasher might drain more swiftly even without the disposal running. But when I got down to it I saw and remembered that the issue with the disposal/dishwasher draining is that the drain piping is not all properly pitched. And to fix it would involve Major Plumbing. So the answer is "live with it.")
Did three loads of laundry.
Boiled 1/2 dozen eggs.
(bought a dozen eggs a week ago and have not used them at all yet. Probably use some of them soon, but boiling some of them seems prudent)
Shuffled the 1-16 puzzle that is the living room. There is enough space for Eric's airbed, and now that space is almost all together and a useful shape. Soon.
I've got ALSA running. From the console I can use madplayer to play an MP3 and it plays fine. But KDE won't play any of it's system sounds or the generic bell. And it won't provide sound support to other KDE applications. So (for instance) juK won't play the same MP3.
(XMMS won't even load a file...XMMS starts just fine, but when I go to add a file to the paylist it pretends to do it but the playlist stays empty. Not sure if this is related, I assume not)
I figure it's got to be something I'm doing wrong with aRts or alsa.conf or something. But don't have any clue where even to start. Any thoughts?
Who do you guys like for domain registration these days? I need something inexpensive that offers free or inexpensive DNS hosting. If it was for me I'd just add to my existing dotster account, but it's for work and they don't want to pay the $24/year that I pay dotster ($14.95 + $10 for the DNS hosting)
I was doing some work with the spare hard drive that's in it and apparently there is badness in that hard drive. it froze about halfway through the surface check. I killed that process and as soon as I restarted it the whole box froze. Time to give up on that hard drive I think.
Hopefully the box will unfreeze on it's own. Otherwise it'll be tomorrow afternoon or so before it can be rebooted.
What's the current thinking on reacting to spam? I blackhole virus messages, because the from addresses are often spoofed. But what about straight-up spam? Right now I'm blackholing that as well. Are spammers spoofing from addresses as well? if they are not, I'll bounce the spam with "no such user." But if they are, I'd just be generating annoyance for the innocent third party.
I've always been a SuSE guy. But SuSE is now part of Novell, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. So I thought I should maybe branch out and/or migrate to another distro. So I tried to install Gentoo on my laptop, and it didn't work well. It gagged on some of the laptop's odd hardware.
Now I need to set up a web and mail server for my employer. Should I try Gentoo again, or go buy a copy of the current SuSE? If I did the SuSE, I'd be going with a known quantity. And I'd then have access to the latest SuSE for my own use, if need be. If I go with Gentoo, I'll be going in a new direction, but one that looked like it was a lot better (when I was playing with it on the laptop).
What do you people think?
I also need to consider security; I won't be dealing with credit card numbers and stuff, but I still need to keep the hackers out, and my employer's machine is going to be more exposed than my home box. And on a fatter pipe. Is one or the other of these choices vastly better or easier to deal with in the area of security?
(someday, I need to build a new lensman.org box too, so I'm also looking to the future for my own use)
accomplished
angry
curious
geeky