For the Birds

[altivo]

No, not the Hitchcock movie. But this afternoon I walked back to the pasture to find hundreds of blackbirds covering the ground and trees. The noise was staggering. When they saw me approaching the ones on the ground flew up into nearby trees and the noise increased. As I got nearer to the trees, the whole flock took off, flew about aimlessly for a few seconds then crossed the neighbors place to the east to settle in a wooded area beyond it. I could still hear them.

We often see starlings and grackles together in large groups, and I imagine that was the makeup. No crows, all were the same size or nearly so. Redwinged blackbirds may have been among them, but I couldn't make out the familiar, bell-like trill that they make. It was more like squawking for the most part, typical of the grackles and starlings.

Today I got the new server/router at work hooked up to a private network with one client, and proved that it successfully assigns IP addresses by DHCP, provides DNS services on request, and performs NAT and routes traffic appropriately. That's all sufficiently complicated that I wasn't sure it would work first try, but it did. Yay me. Or rather, yay Linux. Still needs bandwidth controls, squid web caching, and probably some extra security hardening, but the concept is proved at least.

I was less successful with the OpenVMS XDMCP issue. It's narrowed down to authentication being the source of the problem, as in OpenVMS is having trouble presenting an authentication widget when queried, though I can't figure out why. It appears that the Linux end is behaving properly, and somewhere I've missed an OpenVMS configuration issue.

Comments

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Linux seems to be more finetuned these days, I think I managed to install Ubuntu Server on one go, at least nothing's hideously broken yet. Built a firewall box from pfSense too, though that I already had to poke a bit, it had somehow corrupted some graphing stuff on the first boot... =)

Though, I'm not sure if it's the evolution of operating systems, or the larger hit count on Google that's helping me with my computer trouble... =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu has taken the Windows approach, packing the install routines with every imaginable hardware configuration to prepare itself. Even so, it seems to flop around a lot on older equipment, and especially the video display setups. If your stuff is new enough to support the framebuffer, it's OK (though the setup they give you may be klunky and inefficient.) Even Ubuntu still fails quite often on sound hardware and on wireless networking, or so I understand.

I don't blame Linux developers much for this, because they are constantly having to fight uncooperative and uncaring hardware vendors who just refuse to share the needed information.

I'm struggling right now with a USB modem. The kernel recognizes it as a serial device, tty class, and tries to attach it to /dev/ttyUSB0 which should work. Unfortunately, udev has no idea and doesn't create the actual device node. This is fixable of course, but tackling the udev configuration is daunting.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess the writing of new drivers is still need-based, and if there's little or no documentation provided by the manufacturer, it might be an impossible job to do. I recently browsed through the supported device list for FreeBSD, and it's quite an impressive one too, many manufacturers that I've never heard of. There's an awful amount of hardware out there.

USB is a bit odd really, it seems that there's really no platform with stable driver support. Hopefully they'll manage to fix that something in the next revision. More likely they'll add just more dead weight to the "standard". =)

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

The hundreds of birds all staring at you is bad enough, but when they suddenly fall deathly silent, that's when the creepy meter goes off the scale.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I just tell them I'm going to get my pie pans. They're always gone when I get back. ;p

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Yay you :D
*waves Horsey flags* Rah! Tivo Rah!