Managed to steal a little time to work on Anakin some more.
For those who don't know (yes, I mean you, whole wide world), anakin is the name I gave to my gentoo machine. Maybe it's the most powerful of all jedi, who knows? Maybe he'll restore balance?
Me, I just plain hope he won't fall into the dark side.
Where was I? Yes, last time, I managed to go back to my config and set the root password, 'cuz I forgot. Good thing I didn't lock out the console.
My newest problem was that the connection the the Internet was gone. Lan was fine. Web was not.
Easily done - I emerged the dhcp client and ran it. It made a config good.
Then, ssh daemon was gone. I can start it, but I don't want to have to manually start it everytime. I want to play with this config remote!
I figured out fast enough (cuz I'm lucky) that rc-update is Gentoo's most favored way to place your service in the boot.
See, what I had figured out was that /etc/conf.d/local.start was a script that was running at boot. So I added a command for the daemon to start from there.
Then I remembered I sometimes had to run a rc-something command after I emerged a package. As I was using a walkthrough, I didn't stop to properly examine and undertand, rc-something.
Turns out the bugger installs a neat-o start script (all neat-o start script are stored into /etc/init.d) at the runlevel you want.
All these neat-o start scripts work the same. /etc/init.d/<name of neat-o script> (start|stop|restart). There might be variant, but at this point, I don't care.
And yes, emerging sshd installed a neat-o script. So I removed whatever I did to local.start and rc-configed my ssh daemon.
(If only Windows was this simple! There'd be a whole lot less end-users and all of us tech-heads could party all night long like there'd be no yesterday)
Nothing too exciting, see. If you're a linux (I keep on typing lunix... I'm getting dyslexia or something) guy, this is all pretty everyday stuff, I guess.
What was a real challenge was configuring the office's network setup so that the machine could be accessed remote.
All would've gone very fast I were aware of the following things:
- There's a difference between TCP and UDP, and it's exactly the opposite of what I thought it was.
- When a PC on your network is resolving a DNS entry that brings it back to your network, you ain't gonna see that machine if it's not yours.
- The all-in-one-router-switch-thingie we're setup with is an old clunky piece of crap that just barely works.
(Thanks, Martin! Now I know. And knowing earlier would've spared me the battle).
So after a while, I ended up figuring out that the setup had been properly working for the last hour and that what I was doing to test it was never going to work.
Martin then got me acquainted with the hosts file, which I had already met when setting up gentoo. I wasn't completely aware of it's use and was unaware of its existence under windows (<windows>\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, if you gotta know). So I could setup my local network to access the server the same was as from outside the office.
My next step is to setup a cvs server.
Then, depending on what's happening, I'll be wanting to setup (KDE) or (postfix,httpd,mysql,php,tomcat) We'll see what the future has in store for padawan Maze and master Anakin.
