This morning, I stuck around home. That's right, as the chatter talkers probably already know, this was DSL installation day. Yep. The guy came in, had to string some wire around, since the line from the box to my room wasn't getting a stable connection. (With all the crap wiring in this house, it's no wonder why.)

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After plugging the modem in, and a few calls to the ISP to get all the routing stuff corrected, the gateway became ping-able. Covad dude left, and the Louisville Compound was WIRED.
</greatly abbreviated>

Right now, I'm in the process of running apt-get on Dagobah. And holy cow, is it ever just plowing through those package downloads! This is freakin insane! :)

Now, with Illian on a static IP, I'm thinking it would be a worthy project to get it updated to a more recent kernel with some more up-to-date software. I'm very squeamish about making any changes though, because if I do anything which would cause it to become inaccessible by network, the only way to fix things is to take the hard drive out, transplant it into a machine where I can get at it, and attempt a post-mortem.

Now, if I were a customer of the company at which I am employed, I would be irate with smoke coming out of my ears at being sold a product which comes with the keyboard port needlessly sealed shut. How would you feel if you bought a car, and the hood was welded shut? I mean, some people think it was bad when Intel disabled overclocking in the Celerons. That ain't nothin, I tell you. But... given the idiots we sell to, they'd probably find some way to electrocute themselves if sold boxes with the keyboard port open, or something. (You think I exaggerate, but it really ain't that far from the truth.)

Oh dear, have I just insulted the clintele? I guess that's why they didn't put me in sales. :) But I digress...

Anyway, as I was saying, I've been thinking that -- especially now -- it would be a wise idea to update this here box to a more recent kernel. But since it's running on 2.0, that would require a bunch of utility updates, and since it's on a libc 5 distro, getting newer utilities which would work could be problematic. So we'd need to get libc 6... Well, you get the idea. It would just about be easier to wipe it clean and install from scratch. And, given the headless, keyboardless nature of the machine, doing that becomes nontrivial.

Ok, scratch that plan. What it really needs is a working ssh. Don't laugh, I have attempted to install one in the past, but for some reason, Illian is lacking a /dev/random, which is needed for generating keys. The alternative is to use a program called egd, which uses a fifo to spit out pseudo-random numbers. And let's see, what was the problem with that? Oh yes, it required some perl modules to work. And those perl modules required a version of perl that's newer than 5.003. Imagine that! lol.

When I did this before, I did not go so far as to attempt upgrading the perl version. Perhaps now would be the time to resort to that, or something. If you've got a static IP, ya just GOTTA have a working ssh to log in remotely. (sshhhh, don't tell anyone it's got an open telnet port at the moment; talk about hideous security! (And just so I don't end up defaming my company's product: No, it is not the default setting to have the telnet port open. In fact, it's only supposed to be enabled when calling tech support. But really, how else is one supposed to do stuff that isn't supported through the web interface? Oh, I forgot. People aren't supposed to do stuff that's not supported by the web interface. Like install an absolutely essential piece of software such as ssh. Anyway... I think I'm just digging myself in deeper with every word.))

I suppose it would also be prudent to put something other than the default web page up there. Oh, the fun of it. :)

For those asking why I don't just do the obvious, plug Dagobah directly into the DSL modem, and make it the router, which would remove all worries about getting ssh to work on ancient distros, the answer is roughly: Because if something is there, it seems like such a waste to not use it! :) Besides, Illian proves to be of very practical use on fests, when Dagobah gets moved into another room. Illian doesn't even have to blink, and the routing remains constant.

So anyway, if I can get Illian to function in this capacity to my satisfaction, that would be optimal. The more I think about it though, the more I'm inclined to believe that getting the distro upgraded is really the only way to go. I mean, if I want to run a web site off of here which will have any kind of scripting (and can you imagine me doing a web site that doesn't involve scripting? hahaha), perl is going to need to be upgraded, and a php 4 installation wouldn't hurt one bit either. :)

I might have to make a weekend of it one of these days. Have Illian running in style.

And yes, I realize doing such a thing would undoubtedly break the TEAM Internet web interface. To put it mildly, having a broken TI interface worries me a lot less that having a broken ssh, or a barely usable perl, or a lack of ipchains, or... You get the idea.)

Well then, now that Dagobah's potato is fully up to date (I think it took at least five times as long to run the install scripts as it did to download the packages), I think I'll run off and have myself a little romp across the web. Woohoohoo! :)