SEMiSLUG Notes
13 January 2000
Question & Answer Sessions
- The monthly DSL report -- What's new? Where is it available? Who offers
it? Will they forward a class C?
- Paul Haas waited for four hours for Ameritech to show up today.
Steve Gibbard has it at home - likes it. You can call and order
it, but they may not show up to install right away.
SDSL ($150-$400) costs quite a bit more than ADSL ($40-$60).
The DSL section on http://www.lugwash.org/ has some pointers.
- Netscape on Caldera Linux - where can one find the Japanese character
fonts?
- Check the Caldera CD for the 16-bit fonts. If there's anything
on the CD relating to X fonts, install it.
Look for a Japanese Caldera users group. Look for font-oriented
web sites; use the search engine there.
- Has anyone played with sendmail 8.10.0 alpha?
- No.
- Caldera settles; Gates resigns. Coincidence?
- There are no coincidences. (The truth is out there.)
- bind appears to have a memory leak on an Alpha. Suggestions?
- Try dumping named (kill -INT) at 1-hour intervals and look for a
"looped domain."
- HPUX 11 with vanishing DCE endpoints? Any idea why?
- No idea.
- Troy is looking for a job again. Got one? Got one for anyone else?
- If so, talk to Troy. (Anything to get him out of his current
hell.)
- IPSEC tunneling through a Linux firewall/NAT?
- You have to hack your natd code.
- What's a reasonable rate for a small-office network consultant?
- For a small office with 2-3 printers that needs to be set up
with rudimentatry networking, anywhere from $25 - $125. Be
sure to get agreement on maintanance rates and put everything
in writing.
$50 to $75 is a good starting range.
- Given that K-mart is offering free net connectivity, are they now
Michigan's largest ISP?
- Quite probably.
- Which Linux distribution is best for graphics?
- Red Hat (or some other RPM-supporting distribution) is your best
bet.
- Looking for spare cycles on a Solaris box. Got any? (Need to compile
some things.)
- If so, contact Cliff Flynt.
- Is HPUX 11 working well these days? Does it play well with others?
Does it even play well by itself?
- Opinions vary. (Surprised?)
- Is word processing of Word Perfect docs under Star Office any good?
- StarOffice 5.1 saves documents in WP format quite well. Its
functionality is good; easier to use than WP.
-
Presentation
Y2K or Y02K?
Y2K policies included:
+ Everything's fine. Go away. No, we won't fill out your
forms.
During the actual New Year's Eve and weekend, people were:
+ At a Ted Nugent concert
+ New Year's party at 5th Avenue Billiards (and got five
pages asking for help shutting down machines)
+ Several clients shut down for the weekend (some didn't
warn the people that monitor them), but none of the people
present did.
+ UUnet was quiet and uneventful.
+ Msen was quiet and uneventful as well. One Windows NT
box grumbled a little.
+ One unnamed bank required staff to be in the building
with the computers. With flashlights. And four-wheel drive
vehicles outside the building. And cell phones.
Following the weekend:
+ MJO discovered that the NNTP protocol uses 2-digit years.
+ ARS had a similar bug (yes, the bug reporting had a bug)
Where were the success stories? No one cited an example of something that
could have been a disaster, but was averted due to a timely change.
More problems were caused by messing around with dates and fouling up
machines by shutting them down wrong than was caused by any of the Y2K
problems.
The best thing to come of of this was that code got reviewed. Old
machines were replaced with new ones.
Rumor & Innuendo (No names, please)
A site in Australia was rejecting all mail with a 2000 date.