Nerdcore

A post on the DefCon forums prompted me to go find some free Nerdcore, which is Hip Hop/Rap which is geek oriented and created by geeks. It appeals to me since it uses sounds and songs that I know as a computer geek, as well as references, and other such cool things. I have found quite a few free songs here and there, but the best one has got to be Rhymetorrents. There is quite a bit available under the Creative Commons licenses. Let me know what you guys like!

Some of the ones I like:

• Emulation Station - 1337 G33K B3AT
• WoW - Futuristic Sex Robotz
• Fuck the MPAA - Futuristic Sex Robotz
• Vampire Girl - MCeeP

This stuff is awesome.

Solaris 10

So I decided I would install Solaris 10 to see if I am able to get a compiler going (GCC) to see if I can port certain parts of 0x58-unix to Solaris, most notably the event handling. It is proving to more difficult than I had imagined to get a real Unix system up and running. I am able to log in over SSH and use bash, which is better than the default shell that Solaris uses.

Everything is different, whereas in FreeBSD I am pretty used that when I go to Linux that some commands will act differently, Solaris is a totally different beast. The PS output I was looking for in FreeBSD is:

ps auxwww

in Solaris it is:

ps -Af

Took me a while to figure out. I have to re-learn different commands, where things are located. GCC is not even installed standard, so as far as I know there is no compiler on the system, and that for an install that is pretty hefty. First thing I need to teach myself is how to make the install lean. I want just core, no Xorg, no staroffice and other such stuff that makes no sense to have on something that is a server.

SPIN -- Awesome

I am usually not one to post videos on my blog, however this one is rathe excellent!

The sorry state of Open Source software

I just read the rather excellent articale The sorry state of Open Source software on The Jem Report. I will let the article speak for itself, I enjoyed the read!

Samba, thou has pissed me off!

I am really pissed off, Samba is throwing errors at me, and I have no clue how to fix them. Samba developers say read the documentation, but this is a standalone server. These are the error messages:

[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_administrators(785)
  create_builtin_administrators: Failed to create Administrators
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_users(751)
  create_builtin_users: Failed to create Users
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_administrators(785)
  create_builtin_administrators: Failed to create Administrators
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_users(751)
  create_builtin_users: Failed to create Users</pre>

So I did what the documentation told me to do, and tried to net groupmap them.

Guests (S-1-5-21-3909197182-276841819-79004845-546) -> nobody
Administrators (S-1-5-21-3909197182-276841819-79004845-544) -> wheel

There is no good documentation on what the error means or how to fix it. The weird thing is that the share used to be working fine until I decided I did not want to give others the ability to add items to the share, unless they were logged in as me, so I wanted to make it accessible by guests yet have it writeable by me. That is when the nightmare started. Now no-one could access the share, with valid username/password or without. (Yes, permissions were set up properly, I am not dumb).

Fuck samba. I can set up an FTP server, allow anonymous logins and make people use an FTP client to access the files. Samba is becoming too big, too convulated and too overwhelming for the standard user. I by no means think of myself as a standard user, however if I am unable to figure out how to get Samba working by reading the docs and having a clear grasp on the concepts then something is wrong. Setting up Samba used to be simple, compile it, install it, smbpasswd a new account edit smb.conf and off you go. Nowadays there are many more steps.

Is there a FUSE port for Windows yet? I bet there is a really good Fuse FTP plugin! Samba needs a timeout, some cleanup and some better documentation as to why it can't create it's own builtin users.