su: who are you?

I'm still getting the NAT stuff set up on the xserve, and haven't even touched traffic shaping yet, but I was pretty amazed by how I managed to break things in the process of setting up a stateful firewall on OS X.

Apparently if you forget to allow connections via localhost, OS X sort of loses it. And I mean this to the extent that when logged in as admin, you no longer have an identity. _su_ asks you who you are.

I guess I hadn't considered the ramifications of directory authentication, even when you're not doing remote stuff.

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atprintd likes CPUs

Here at the office we have a dual 2.3gig G5 XServe 1U as sort of the office file server. It's a shame, really, because literally all it's been doing has been just that: acting as network storage.

I've gotten fed up with the crappy little Netgear router that's running NAT, so I'm finally going to give the Xserve a little more responsibility and let it do NAT, DHCP and some traffic shaping.

The one thing that scares me a little, though, is that the server also has a couple printers connected to it and these seem to give it some periodic stability issues. For instance, I ssh'ed in just now, ran top and saw:

PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS
 82 atprintd    54.4%  120 hrs   1    15
 81 atprintd    54.2%  120 hrs   1    15
 80 atprintd    53.3%  120 hrs   1    15

So basically a dual-G5 is sitting at a load average of 3 running printer spools. Yuck. Googling for atprintd doesn't give me a whole lot on where to look for this one.

CUPS on Apple has in my experience been no more fun than CUPS on Linux. There I ditched CUPS for lprng.

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Cable Management

From the network cabinet at the office. Before...

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The Office Isn't Cold, But...

I just dropped back by work to take care of a few things and filled up a Coke bottle with water from the water cooler. I set it down by my computer and a couple minutes later went to take a sip only to find ice floating in it. It's not possible for it to come out of the cooler as ice, so the only explanation is that it came out so cold that it froze sitting in the bottle. Weird.

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Fun With Disappearing Daemons

Apparently I didn't heed the warning at the bottom of the configuration page for the NTP pool that mentioned a bug with RHEL's ntpd. My score suffered greatly when ntpd disappeared around midnight.

The SRPM linked in the bugzilla post wouldn't compile cleanly for me, so I'm now running a self-compiled ntpd. Hopefully that'll stay up and happy.

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