Blian nua faoi mhaise dhíbh uilig!

A happy and fruitful 2008 to you!

Feliz año nuevo a todos!

Feliz ano novo a todos!

Bonne année!

I downloaded and installed a rake of software to the Fluxbuntu box last thing yesterday evening. Such essential things (to me) as gftp, php and mysql were missing from the default install. And synaptic, the gui frontend to apt, didn’t find them. So a little bit of editing of the /etc/apt/sources.list file to enable the partner sources and a rerun of synaptic did the job. Mind you I had to wade through the entire list of not installed packages, which is very long indeed, to find what I wanted.

I’m happy to report that I’ve composed another poem - actually I didn’t have to do very much as it came out whole, just clean it up a little bit. It’s called Full Moon over America and made its appearance after midnight on 25 December 2007. I finished cleaning it up on 27 December so it’s now ready to be sprung upon the world.

I was hoping, though not very fervently, that when I booted the fluxbuntu box this morning the changes I made yesterday evening would have solved my eth0 problem. No such luck!

Another google gives up information on the ifcfg-eth0 file which controls the first ethernet interface. This file is probably in the /etc directory - no it isn’t! On Fedora it’s in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ but there is no sysconfig directory inside /etc on Fluxbuntu. Where in tarnation is the bloody file?

On a positive note, sudo ifdown eth0 no longer reports that eth0 is not configured as it did yesterday. So the changes I made have worked.

I’ll have a look at /usr/bin/network-config … I’ve got into the network-config gui tool. In the eth0 tab under config, the Active checkbox for PCI NE2000 clone driver is unticked. I’ve ticked it and made sure Auto (DHCP) radio button is selected. When I click apply, the applying changes window reads out the following:

Configuring device eth0:
ifconfig eth0 up
DHCP may take a while, please wait...
dhclient eth0
.....
.....
Listening on LPF/eth0/52:54:05:e5:23:0b
Sending on LPF/eth0/52:54:05:e5:23:0b
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
.............
............
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

ping -c 6 -i 0.2 192.168.1.2
connect: Network is unreachable

I’m going to recheck that I have the correct MAC address added to the router’s MAC Address filtering. That’s funny - the MAC address given to me yesterday by ifconfig -a for eth0, and the one I put in the router’s MAC address filtering, is different to the one reported above. I’ve now deleted the old MAC address and replaced it with the one above. Running the test again - yes it’s working! The terminal output for the test now gives DHCPOFFER from 192.168.2.1
.............
DHCPPACK from 192.168.2.1
bound to 192.168.2.2 -- renewal in 128004553 seconds

And the ping to 192.168.1.2 reports a 0% packet loss. Yippee! A refresh of the DHCP Client list on the routers config now shows a new entry though curiously it gives the router’s IP address as the host name - it should be fluxbox.

Now to start up the browser and see if it really is working - yes, google.ie has loaded! I notice that the browser is quite slow - page downloads should be almost instantaneous as they are on the other machines, but instead there is a delay of several seconds before the page appears. In any case, I’ve got the machine up and running on the network. Now to download the packages Ana needs for her shiny new Fluxbuntu box!

I’ve been rummaging around the Fluxbuntu system in search of likely .conf files for eth0. It’s based on Debian so the locations, file paths, and file names differ from the Red Hat system I’m used to. Came across /etc/sysctl.conf which sounds like it might configure system control. Opened it up in vi but couldn’t seem to edit it until I realised I’d opened it without prefixing sudo which is essential on a Debian system - takes a bit of getting used to not logging in as root as in Red Hat. And I’ve been asked for a password for root even though I never set one -weird!

When I opened it with sudo, I had no problem in editing and saving it. I’ve uncommented the relevant line to enable packet forwarding for IPv4. How do I get whatever reads it to reread /etc/sysctl.conf without rebooting so I can see if that works?

Found it by google - /sbin/sysctl -p . Let’s see if that works … yes, it’s reloaded the file. Still can’t ping so that’s no good. Must have another go at restarting eth0.

Came across ethtool command on a listserver via google. man ethtool says it displays or changes ethernet card settings. ethtool eth0 which prints current settings for the device only says No data available, so maybe eth0 is still down… sudo ifdown eth0 says interface eth0 not configured.

Another google, this time for configuring eth0 on ubuntu, finds info on editing a file called /etc/network/interfaces - less /etc/network/interfaces reveals that there is no entry for eth0 only for lo. I’ll now edit the file adding the appropriate eth0 stanza if vi lets me. No it won’t. Maybe it’s not the vi I’m used to. man vi reveals that the command is vim and with the -v switch it will run in vi mode. Yes- that’s it! I can now edit the file by adding:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Now to restart with sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart - says its listening and sending on eth0 and then the following:

DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7which is repeated four times before it exits saying No DHCPOFFERS received. No working leases in persistent database -sleeping

That ip address doesn’t look right - I think it should be 255.255.255.0.
It’ll have to wait til tomorrow.

The /etc/rc.d/init.d/networking restart command which works under Fedora gives command not found. A quick google for restarting eth0 suggests /etc/init.d/networking restart command for Ubuntu 5.10. which appears to have worked as it reports that reconfiguring network interfaces is OK. A ping of the router’s ip says that the network is unreachable.

A sudo ifdown eth0 reports interface eth0 not configured.

A sudo dhclient -r eth0 reports that it is now listening on eth0 and the correct MAC address. A ping still reports that the network is unreachable.

There is no inet addr line for eth0 in the ifconfig -a output, which is likely the cause. Now if I can only add it in manually…

I’ll try sudo ip address add eth0 followed by IP - this tells me an inet prefix is expected rather than “eth0″.

[To be continued after lunch…]

The Fluxbuntu install has been a success! The only problem was that it couldn’t configure networking, so I’m now having to do it manually. I think the fact that the router is running MAC address filtering might have something to do with it. I got the mac address of the ethernet card with ifconfig and added that to the MAC address filtering list on the router. Fluxbox is reporting that eth0 is down. A reboot in the hope that it might now work has not worked. So now to figure out how to turn on eth0…

On a positive note, Fluxbox is running really fast on the old hardware!

I’ve given up on trying to reconfigure lilo.conf on the Zenwalk installation - everything I’ve tried has failed. So, after a search on Distro Watch, I decided on Fluxbuntu as it will run on my low-end system, has all the software Ana will want, and (hopefully) uses GRUB as its bootloader. The 390Mb download took less than an hour yesterday evening, and I burnt the iso image onto cd for the install.
Right now it’s installing the software, so I’ll know soon enough if I’ve been successful. Fingers crossed!

I’m having a devil of a time trying to get Zenwalk 4.8 to reboot after installation. Basically lilo was not installed properly by the installer. I’m trying to edit lilo.conf to solve the problem but that’s proving to be a major pain in the arse. The problem seems to be that Zenwalk uses sdaX (where X is an integer) to name its partitions instead of the more usual hdaX. I’ve tried to edit lilo.conf from a Knoppix Live cd and then run the lilo command to write the changes to the MBR but that doesn’t work because of the different name convention of sda in place of hda. I’ve also tried Zenwalk Live cd with the same result. I’m giving it one more lash and if that fails I’ll have to resort to Damn Small Linux.

The reason I want Zenwalk at all is that it is one of the very few distros that will actually run on the system. The machine is 10 years old next May and uses a PII 350Mhz processor, 192Mb RAM, a CD-ROM, and 2 HDs of 11 and 5 gigs. It’s been sitting idly in the corner for a several years with only occasional forays into weird and wonderful OS installs for fun. I’ve promised Ana to set it up for her exclusive use.

I finally made it back to the Whitehouse Poetry Revival night on December 19th last, after many weeks trying - something would always happen at the last minute to prevent me going. Special guests US Performing Poets group “I am a Lagan” made up of Buddy Wakefield, Katie Wirsing, and Andrea Gibson opened proceedings to thankfully drown out and ultimately quench the drunken loudmouth balladeers who had been assaulting the atmosphere with their noise.

Their stuff was “pretty out there” to use an American expression. My favourite piece was the very first one performed in unison by Katie and Andrea, written by a male poet whose name I didn’t catch. It was very interesting to see them perform. But their work is too wordy for my liking. And they can’t help being loud, brash and in your face - that is the way they are. But for all that I liked a lot of what they did.

Then there was a competition which I hadn’t expected. I was up in third place and did “Death of the Swan” for the first time ever in public. I was happy enough with it, but I must remember to ground myself in future. At the end I decided to hold the silence but I feel now that I didn’t hold it for long enough. The judges were the 3 American poets, and I was disappointed by the marks they awarded me. I thought they would like the poem but the marks didn’t reflect that. After it was all over, Buddy to give him his due came over and told me he had given me his highest marks of the night but thought I had forgotten the last line of the poem because he felt the “ending was weird“. A weird ending for a weird poem I thought to myself, but I assured him that no I hadn’t forgotten any of it, that that was the way it ended. In light of Buddy’s comments the disappointing marks made sense - if Buddy thought I had forgotten the ending, then so too had the other judges and some of the audience no doubt. It was at this point I realised that my holding the silence at the end was misinterpreted. I need to work on that.

View slide show of the evening - I’m slide no. 10.