Phasor Burn

Conundrum.

Wander into a Best Buy, where supposedly the blue shirts aren’t on commission, and but you will get bugged at least once in every aisle that you pause in to look at product ” Can I help you? ”

After the 2nd or third “No thankyou, just browsing” I feel more like saying “When I need help.. I’ll be looking around for a blue shirt or standing at a counter waiting my turn. It’ll be real obvious that I want help”.

Of course even just getting a bit curt with them will result in them claiming that they just want to help and that they are not on commision. No of course you aren’t on commission but I’ll bet you won’t have a job if you don’t get x number of sales or n number of extended warranties and other sales sugar per week..

Almost makes me want to organize one of these.

Flip Side, when I’m in a store like, oh, London Drugs and I need to get a new Braun Clean-and-charge cartridge (why the hell does the London Drugs near me keep those locked up and at one across town they are out in the open??). I know the sales critters are busy, I see them scurrying to help other people. I queue up. I wait. Wait. And Wait.

Nearly at the point of waited-enough (10 min for me, usually) and I’m just about ready to start yelling “Who wants to take my money? I know exactly what I want to buy and it will take very little effort for you to get the thing I want out of the locked cabinet and take my money. Money here. I want to spend money!”

So yeah, conundrum. I want it both ways.

Maybe a flashing neon hat that flashes red for “stay the hell away from me” and soothing blue or green for “come get the money!” ?

dtlogin, oh how I hate thee. Hopefully somebody working on {Open}Solaris will fix these things properly one day.

I have run into several dtlogin failures over the past several months working with Solaris 10 in both Sparc and X86 platforms. Symptoms are … after entering your name/password into dtgreet, the screen flashes to dtlogin briefly and then drops you back to the login screen (dtgreet).

In case this sounds familiar, here’s three things that I found that can cause this behaviour :

1. Have an ipv6 entry for localhost in /etc/inet/ipnodes ( ie ::1 localhost ). dtlogin doesn’t seem to be ipv6 ready. This is puzzling since a mostly stock jumpstart setup produces this line in /etc/inet/ipnodes. WTF crap is this, that dtlogin chokes on something that Solaris puts in by default? Something is not right here.

2. Fail to have an /etc/inet/hosts (aka /etc/hosts) entry for the machines name. dtlogin fails to resolve `hostname` and subsequently dies.

3. Use bge3 for your primary interface and plumb bge0 but do not put an ip on it. dtlogin seems to use the first interface, if it is plumbed, perhaps to set up $DISPLAY and then dies a horrible death.

This situation can happen if you jump a v210 via bge3 and have bge0 plugged into another switch port but fail to ip it or provide dhcp for it. On first boot the bge0 interface will be plumbed and then left with its ip set to ‘0.0.0.0′ which chokes dtlogin.

A reboot fixes this but is sub optimal if you are jump starting large numbers of machines and do not want to force them to reboot n minutes after first disk boot.

Caveat, my Solaris environment may be a wee bit different than yours. All of the machines are rejumped on a regular basis (multiple times a week) and they are accessed only via RealVNC and ALOM. Physical (gui) console access is never used, nor is raw X protocol. Perhaps there is some strange interaction going on here with Xvnc/dtlogin but come on . . . dtgreet has no issues whatsoever.

Handy tip if you are working on a system from remote. Make a backup copy of the network config files before you modify them, so that the systems support people can get the box back up and running easier.

Also, read the comments in the file you are editing. You know, a very light version of RTFM?

For example, on HP/UX the network stuff appears to be in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf and there are really clear comments about how to go about adding additional nics.

I haven’t had the opportunity to mess around with this file on HP/UX before, but now I get to fix a busted network config with little clue as to what a good one should look like. Alright, let’s dive in.

(This is just a small part of the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf file)


# Internet configuration parameters. See ifconfig(1m), autopush(1m)
#
# INTERFACE_NAME: Network interface name (see lanscan(1m))
#
# IP_ADDRESS: Hostname (in /etc/hosts) or IP address in decimal-dot
# notation (e.g., 192.1.2.3)
#
# SUBNET_MASK: Subnetwork mask in decimal-dot notation, if different
# from default
#
# BROADCAST_ADDRESS: Broadcast address in decimal-dot notation, if
# different from default
#
# INTERFACE_STATE: Desired interface state at boot time.
# either up or down, default is up.
#
# DHCP_ENABLE Determines whether or not DHCP client functionality
# will be enabled on the network interface (see
# auto_parms(1M), dhcpclient(1M)). DHCP clients get
# their IP address assignments from DHCP servers.
# 1 enables DHCP client functionality; 0 disables it.
#
# INTERFACE_MODULES: A list of modules to be pushed on a stream
# associated with an interface. For example,
# INTERFACE_MODULES[0]="mod1 mod2 ... modN-1 modN"
# pushes modN on top of modN-1.
#
# For each additional network interfaces, add a set of variable assignments
# like the ones below, changing the index to "[1]", "[2]" et cetera.
#
# IMPORTANT: for 9.x-to-10.0 transition, do not put blank lines between
# the next set of statements

Oh my. I can see the problem straight away.

Hello? Even if you ignored the comments, do you even know what an array is? Don’t you think those [0]’s might mean something?

You’re setting up a pair of systems to write up a lab for your company’s software. Perhaps you know your software inside-out, but you do not appear to know much about HP/UX. Or system administration in the real world for that matter.

First rule… make a backup of any config file before you change it.

Second rule, never practice copy-and-paste system administration.

I guess this is just another example of those that can not do, teach.
Those that can not teach, write course documentation.

A long time friend and often orange-furry-alien, zarquil zonar, has finally joined the 21st century.  Boo-ya, and welcome to the fray.