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Finally managed to get Moveable Type up and going.

This is the tentative location of my new blog, as I'm finding it more and more useful than this typical /. journal stuff.... I like having direct access to my files, thank you very much.

Is anybody gonna read it? Who the hell knows. If you've actually followed me here, I congratulate you... And apologize that I don't update this site nearly enough. Hopefully this new blog will get more attention, though.

It's shoddy right now: green-on-black in the true ebbomega.com fashion, no real amount of images to decorate, not a whole lot of deviation from the typical MT default settings. That may change. It may not. As it sits I'm using version 2.64, which is apparently obsolete but it's what I had when I started a lot of this stuff and seems to be relatively secure and bloat-free. I'll let you decide that.

They told me it was buggy. They told me it was inconvenient. Damn were they right.

But I got it going. I now am using Wireless LAN on my Linuxbox.

My hacking skills have been getting rusty as of lately, basically because my main computer (and as such the one I've been able to screw around with) has been out of commission. I've been stuck on dialup networking and a vehement disregard to the concept of wiring up the house with ethernet on the part of the owners of this house. So my hacking has taken a severe turn for the worse.

  BUT ALAS! It's over now! Due to my relocation to my parents' basement, I've since been without decent internet in my room. However, with a little help from ndiswrapper and a lot of tinkering and asking the right questions (You'd be surprised how just doing that can solve your problems) I managed to get it working.

What I'd like to do now is just go over the Stupid Mistakes (tm) I made in the process here, in hopes that someone else may learn from them.

Stupid Mistake #1: Trying to install it on debian woody.

Just don't bother. Not worth it.

I originally wanted this to work on my router, but I soon put an end to all that tomfoolery. After attempt #3 at getting anything to want to talk to each other, I gave up... mostly because I found an RPM for fedora core, to which I said to myself... "Wait... my main box runs Fedora Core...." (Oh yeah, I've become a Red Hat user since I last spoke of computers... apt-rpm is very much so indeed my friend).

So last night I began the venture of installing it onto fedora core. However, I couldn't find the goddamn driver I needed (ndiswrapper requires you to get the win32 driver). So, me being the smart guy, I hopped on the net and downloaded it from Linksys' Website.

Everything worked fine except.... couldn't find the network. Now, through experience of running my Dad's laptop and getting _that_ set up on the wlan (_really_ easy) I knew that it wasn't on the router's side or even on the router's configuration side as I knew, for a fact, that there are TWO accessible unencrypted access points in this neighborhood. But neither was being picked up.

So I looked and googled and tried different combinations of words, asked all the linux gurus I could find and they all didn't know what was up.... So finally I join up and post a question to the ndiswrapper mailing list.

8 hours later, still no response, starting to get ansy, and I give up to a point. But then I find the actual cd that came with the nic, and I think to myself.... "I wonder...."

Stupid Mistake #2: Just use the drivers you're given.

MD5sum the two drivers, they're completely different. So I try again with the driver on the CD.... THIS time everything works happy. I can connect to the network and even ping my access point! Wunderbar!

So I ifconfig wlan0 up.

Still no network. No ipaddress. Nothing.

# dhclient wlan0

So, this is a bit better. I can get an ip address, but as soon as I disconnect and pull down eth0, I get no network. Can't access the internet at all. Can, interestingly enough, ping my access point still.

Stupid Mistake #3: Make sure you take it step by step and isolate the problem before jumping to the conclusion that it doesn't work. And don't go so long next time without exercising your l33t netw0rking skillz.

Finally I clue in that I should dhclient my wlan0 interface when eth0 is _NOT_ up and connected, and maybe it'll actually set my router as my gateway.

All is well now, as you can see. I'm talking to you from no connection to the internet save the air. Beautious thing. Once I get this downstairs and lodged into its new home, I'm going to have to adjust a bootscript or two though so I can get this thing nice and happily automated.

In the year 2003, the world came closer than it has ever been to biological war, all because of some obscure country in the Middle East called Iraq.

The Rolling Stones announced a concert immediately one week after July 23, 2003 to announce the end of the latest weapon in biological warfare (Leprosy Anthrax Pi, codename SARS) the largest rock concert in the history of rock 'n' roll, featuring The Guess Who, Justin Timberlake, AC/DC and Clark Kent and His Supermen are schedule pending. In the meantime, the 5 major countries on the UN Security Council are patting themselves on the back for a job well done in the middle east, despite any evidence that they did anything.

Time to see a master magician or a master con-man - the two are the same - convince a bunch of acidheads to run away from their own shadows. That or the final battle between good and evil, with Horus on both sides.

Well, it seems I'm finally buckling all of this "You must have an inane page where you seem to believe your opinion is valid or something like that" stuff and deciding to move these occasional insights and mentions of my geeky surroundings to my Personal Webpage and am attempting to get Moveable Type running sos this Slashdot journal becomes obsolete.

I may still post here occasionally to get some of the geekiness out of my system (For instance, my continuing chronicles of trying to get the Personal Iris up and running may still be documented here (I got a tranceiver to hook up the AUI to CAT-5, but it's not being too nice about it...).

So yeah, apart from gaining employment, I'm also working on getting this SGI machine working as well as getting the blog running, although it'll be interesting to see how this works on the basis that the configuration that I've got it set for on my home box is going to be a lot more different than my dedicated T1 server, since they decided to use Win2K server and I'm using apache on top of Mandrake 9.1 here. So that'll be fun. Oh well.

Alright. So I've been settling down with my computers lately. Debian is running perfectly on my router and I've been getting minimal problems thus far. I figure if I'm going to get any decent version of Debian then I probably need to get sid or some other unstable distro in order to get any decent updated stuff... so basically leave it at: Debian's main problem for me now is its stable tree is pretty bad for updating. Unstable would be cool but I'd much rather not bother with it.

In the meantime I've been playing with Drake 9.1.... beautiful distro if you ask me. I haven't had a single crash on this machine yet. And I mean on _ANYTHING_. I had a bit of trouble getting TuxNES to work, but I'll worry about that later (When I actually get my joypad hooked up to this baby and start using it.)

I like Mandrake. Mandrake si teh rox0r. Now I need to get a job and start paying for it.

Moving on, I've recently decided that I'd like to start hooking up decent UNIX machines of different varieties just so I can get the hang of the different flavours and maybe understand a thing or two more about UNIX in general and broaden what I already know about Linux.

So I tried to install FreeBSD on my laptop that is currently running a dual boot with Linux and the Win98 that came with it (I only really use that for running Impulse Tracker because DosEmu does weird things with visual stuff and SoundTracker for Linux does _not_ work too well... so I have a slight dependency on DOS. But I'm still technically not Windows Dependent. *sigh* About time for me to get an Amiga to play with if you ask me). It failed, but I think I can probably give it another whirl. I ultimately want to get it running so that I can then go on to other UNIX varieties. I have a Personal Iris I intend on running IRIX on, and another laptop on its way that I'm going to set aside as the OpenBSD guinea pig.

I'm unfortunately bound though to a Serial-based administering of the IRIX on the Iris, and I'm lacking the necessary AUI Ethernet capabilities that I'm going to need to get it on the net. In the meantime, though, I'm going to keep busy with trying to figure out if IRIX is on there or if I need to somehow get a cracked copy or something like that.

I wonder how pleased SGI would be to send me some archaic version of IRIX that'll install on a Personal Iris....

Anyways. Once I figure out all that I need to for this box I'll get Openssh on her, and hopefully then just run it entirely remotely.

In the meantime I think I'm gonna focus on this FreeBSD series of headaches (wee PCMCIA incompatibility... trying to do a floppy boot no less...).

So, once I get my second laptop and get all my OS's up and running, I'm gonna have Debian, Mandrake, IRIX, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

After that, who knows. Sparcstation, maybe. Then I'll save up for a G4 and get OSX.

Christ, I'm going Unix-happy. Soon I'm gonna be an old man passing out change saying to people "Here kid. Go get yourself a real operating system"

*sigh*