Back again….

That new job. I started my transition on Tuesday. Tuesday was my best single day at work in more than four years. For the record, I started my professional career in March 1997–so I haven’t been working much more than four years.
I picked up the laptop I’ll be using for my new job yesterday. It’s a Micron Transport LT, a short-lived lightweight. It was a good machine, but when Micron sold off its PC division, it got axed. Its replacement, the Micron Transport XT (a name that still makes me chuckle; old-timers will know why), is bigger and heavier. It has a bigger screen, which is worth the extra weight, but I like the small size of the LT. It’s a 700 MHz machine, so even though it’s about six months old, it’s no slouch.

I installed Windows 2000 and Debian 2.2 on it. Of course I quickly made Debian into a hybrid because I wanted to run packages like Galeon that aren’t available for 2.2. Yeah, so it hasn’t been deemed stable yet. The most bleeding-edge Linux distros I’ve ever seen are more stable than anything Microsoft’s ever slapped its name on, with the possible exception of MS-DOS 5.0. Even Debian-Unstable is more conservative than Mandrake, so having bits of Debian-Unstable on my PC doesn’t bother me in the least.

I got to dabble in my new position yesterday, even though I was officially doing my old job. There was a server to deploy, and I was reasonably idle, so naturally I worked on the server.

They should be ashamed of themselves. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the president of my church body, Dr. Jerry Kieschnick, and the president of the Atlantic district, Dr. David Benke, committed the unpardonable sin of praying with people who are members of church bodies other than the LCMS. They now face expulsion from the church body.

This account from a St. Louis television station is a fair summary of the events.

What that account doesn’t tell you is that the First Vice President of the LCMS, who would take office if the presidency were vacated, was widely considered a political enemy of Dr. Kieschnick before the two of them took office early this fall. Dr. Kieschnick is considered a progressive, while his would-be successor is a hard-line conservative. I don’t know anything about Oberdieck, but I do know that Lebanon, Mo. isn’t exactly a hotbed of progressivism.

KSDK oversimplified Oberdieck’s reasoning slightly. Oberdieck believes that Drs. Kieschnick and Benke’s actions imply that all religions are equal, and he objects to that implication. However, if you talk to Dr. Kieschnick, the last thing he’ll tell you is that all religions are equal. He’ll agree wholeheartedly with Oberdieck’s statement that there’s only one way to God–that’s Jesus Christ, in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about–and that it should be followed strictly. The motivation behind the two mens’ actions in NYC in September was to extend a hand, to tell people that the LCMS cares about what happens to them and wants to help them.

The overwhelming majority of Lutherans in this country know and understand that.

This is a political play, pure and simple. It’s just like what the Republicans tried to do to Clinton with Whitewater and what the Democrats tried to do with Gingrich after he became speaker.

And it may undermine the current president’s credibility. What it certainly will do is leave a bad taste in people’s mouth. In a month or two months or five years, people won’t remember these specifics anymore. What they will remember is having a bad taste in their mouth about the LCMS, or worse yet, about Christianity as a whole. The immortal Someone Else will have to work hard to overcome those feelings. Sometimes Someone Else will succeed. Inevitably, sometimes Someone Else will fail, and the hurt will continue. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s Someone Else’s problem, not theirs.

I hope Oberdieck and his allies are happy.

More of the same.

As I watched my Royals’ parent club, the Oakland Athletics, play the Yankees, I burned a CD under Linux for the first time. I honestly don’t remember when I last used my old Sony CD-R (it’s so old it’s a 2X burner!) but that was under Windows.
But burning an ISO image is insanely easy, at least if you’ve got a SCSI drive. Here’s the voodoo I needed:

cdrecord -v speed=2 dev=0,0 binary-i386-1.iso

By the time I could have pulled up the ISO image in Easy CD Creator, I’d typed the command line and cdrecord had already burned a meg.

How do you know the numbers? cat /proc/scsi/scsi.

And I know now why my people at work who are in the know on Linux love Debian. How big is a default installation of the current release? 141 megs. Including XFree86 3.36. It’s definitely not a distro for those who like the bleeding edge or even the leading edge, but if you’re wanting to build a Firewall, Debian looks like the distro of choice, and it’ll fit on a discarded 170-meg drive with room to spare.

I reformatted my experimental mail server, then I installed Debian. Then I made it a mailserver. Exim, a sendmail replacement, was already installed. So was procmail. So here’s what I did to make a mail server:

apt-get install courier-imap
apt-get install fetchmail

I created a .fetchmailrc file in my home directory:

poll postoffice.swbell.net with protocol pop3
user dfarq password noway is dfarq

Then I made the file secure:
chmod 0710 .fetchmailrc

I configured courier-imap. I had to scroll down to the bottom of /etc/courier-imap.config and uncomment the last line to activate it. Then I configured exim. I searched for the phrase “maildir” and uncommented the line that enables maildir format (courier doesn’t work with the default mbox format, and maildirs are more efficient anyway).

Then I ran fetchmail: fetchmail -d.

That should have worked. It didn’t. Exim continued to use mbox format. So I can connect to my IMAP server, which is populated by fetchmail, which is in turn served by exim, but since exim doesn’t put the mail in a format the server understands, I’ve got nothing to read.

So I guess I’m going to think about ditching exim for qmail. I have no great loyalty to exim except that Debian put it there by default.

And the Cardinals are eliminated (I’m furious with the way LaRussa handled Matt Morris; he won’t win 22 games next season, that’s a given now) and the A’s are going to have to play Game 5 without Jermaine Dye. I see the Royals have problems with the Yankees even when they’re wearing another uniform. Hopefully they can pull it off today. I’d have liked to have seen Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Jeremy Giambi and Mike Magnante go to the Series in Royals’ uniforms, but if they get there in someone else’s, I’ll take it.

Just had a conversation with Dan Bowman to confirm my feeble grip on sanity (but I was afraid I may have let go, so that is good news), and now it’s way late. It’s actually about 11:30; this server runs on Farquhar time. I’m gonna go make friends with my pillow. Apologies if this is poorly edited.

Back in the swing of things

Here are some odds and ends, since I’ve gone nearly a week without talking computers.
Intro to Linux. I found this last week. It’s a 50-page PDF file that serves as a nice Linux primer, from the experts at IBM. It’s a must-read for a Windows guru who wants to learn some Linux.

Linux from Scratch. Dustin mentioned Linux From Scratch last week. The idea is you download the source to an already-installed Linux box, then compile everything yourself. Why? Stability, security, and speed.

Security. You’ve got fresh, updated code, compiled yourself, with no extras. If you didn’t compile it, it’s not there. Less software means fewer holes for l337 h4x0r5 (“leet hackers,” or, more properly, script kiddies, or, even more properly, wankers who really need to get a life because they have nothing better to do than try to mess around with my 486s–Steve DeLassus asked me “what the #$%@ is an el-three-three-seven-aitch-four…” last week) to exploit.

Stability. Well, you get that anyway when you liberate your system from Microsoft’s grubby imperialistic mitts, but it makes sense that if you run software built by your system, for your system, it ought to run better. Besides, if you’ve got a borderline CPU or memory module or disk controller and try to compile all that code with aggressive compiler settings, you’ll expose the problems right away instead of later.

Speed. You’re running software built for your system, by your system. Not Mandrake’s PCs. Not Red Hat’s PCs. Yours. You want software optimized for your 486SX? You want software optimized for a P4? You won’t get either anywhere else. And recent GCC compilers with aggressive settings can sometimes (not always) outperform hand-built assembly. It’s hard to know what settings Mandrake or Red Hat or those Debian weirdos used.

I really want to replace my junky Linksys router with a PC running LFS and firewalling software. The Linksys router seems to be fine for Web surfing, but if you want to get beyond serfdom and serve up some content from your home LAN, my Linksys router’s even more finicky and problematic than Linksys’ NICs, which is saying something. It’ll just decide one day it doesn’t want to forward port 80 anymore.

Firewalling. And speaking of that, Dan Seto detailed ways to make a Linux box not even respond to a ping last week. It’s awfully hard for a l337 w4nk3r to find you if he can’t even ping you.

A story. My sister told me this one. She’s a behavioral/autism consultant, and one of her kids likes to belch for attention. He’ll let out an urp, and if you don’t respond, he’ll get closer and closer to you, letting out bigger and bigger belts until you acknowledge it. Di hasn’t managed to break that behavioral habit yet. She was telling her boss, a New Zealander, about this kid (he’s 3).

“Hmm,” he said. “Must be Australian.”

An update. I heard some howls of protest about a cryptic post I made last week. Yes, that was a girl I was talking to in the church parking lot until well past 11 the other night. Yes, we met at church. I’ve known her maybe six months. Yes, she’s nice. Yes, she’s cute. No, I haven’t asked her where she went to high school. Remember, I’m not a native St. Louisan… (And if you clicked on that link, be sure to also check out the driving tips.)

No, I’m not really interested in saying much more about her. Not now.