The move.

Finally moved. Nicole and I (and two helpers) moved all of our crap to the new house here in South Seattle on Sunday. The old house was up in North Seattle, so this area is a big change for us (and about 20 miles away). The new house really does seem new, as it was recently remodeled.

Had to make two U-Haul trips... and ended up getting the U-Haul back to the center a day late (we tried to return it on Sunday, but they were closed, and we didn't see a night key drop). The guy there was so happy to see the truck that he didn't charge us for the extra mileage and extra day. That was a nice bonus.

Much work to still be done - although the computers and cable are now online, I still have a home theater to set up. Not to mention all the boxes that need to be emptied. Woo.

Hooray Liberalism.

Let's Not Devalue Ourselves, by Katha Pollitt

The truth is, most of the good things about this country have been fought for by liberals (indeed, by leftists and, dare one say it, Communists)--women's rights, civil liberties, the end of legal segregation, freedom of religion, the social safety net, unions, workers' rights, consumer protection, international cooperation, resistance to corporate domination--and resisted by conservatives.

Well put.

Twenty-six

Happy b-day to me today.

Ah, Friday the 13th. I love it when my birthday falls on a Friday.

Windows NT's Infernal Filesystem

Here be dragons.

This is the t-shirt I wore to work today. By the end of the day, it was a painful reminder of just how wrong a service pack install can go. So - I've installed SP2 on two XP boxes. One at home, and my test box at work. I waited until today during lunch to upgrade my normal workstation. And, oh how it did break. Sigh.

During the backing up of files, it complained about not being able to read one file. I skipped that file. Then, after the upgrade, RPC wouldn't start. Well now - considering how much on a Windows box depends on RPC, I was pretty well fucked. In task manager, my username did not show up for processes I had started. I couldn't view individual events in event viewer. I couldn't move icons on the desktop. New windows I opened were not showing up on the taskbar. I couldn't resize the taskbar unless Quick Launch was enabled, and even if it was I still sometimes couldn't resize it. I couldn't add a new local user to the local administrators group. I couldn't start RPC (access denied).

I exported my entire system log to a text file so I could see what happened. Bad block on the hard drive. Run chkdsk. Reboot. It finds errors. RPC still won't start!

Had to get one of the IT guys come by and change all of these services to start as the local system account rather than a network account. That got me back up and running, but I still had a bad hard drive to contend with. And these services are *supposed* to run with a network account. This breaks several things in a computer that's joined to a domain.

As it ends up, I got little work done this afternoon. I did, on the other hand, get a new computer. But then I spent 3 extra hours after work getting the apps I use on it. Oh wait, I forgot Ethereal. Dang it. I did not reinstall SP2 on the new machine. I'll sit tight and wait for IT's blessing. So much for being on top of Windows security.

But hey, the old machine was a 800MHz Pentium III w/512MB RAM and the new one's a 2.8GHz P4 w/1GB RAM. I'll live.

Let the moving begin...

Signed the lease for the new place today. Great, it's time to be REALLY broke now. We'll muddle through it. North Seattle just doesn't hold the appeal it once did, though.

Now comes the sorting, discarding, and packing. When Nicole and I moved into this place, we didn't really do much picking and choosing about what we brought. We were moving in together for the first time. We'd been living together, but she was living with my stuff. Now we get the ability to take stock of everything we have, bicker over what to keep, and then hopefully pare down what we bring into the new place. So far so good. We've got a growing pile of donatables in the garage.

I hate moving. But I like getting rid of stuff I have no need for.

Windows 2000 Certificate Authority and Apple Safari

Windows Servers can act as a certificate authority. (More info: http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/1473961) I have Windows 2000 Server running at home in a VirtualPC machine on my Mac. I fire it up, turn on the certificate authority, and then try to browse to http://servername/certsrv so that I can request and download a user certificate. Doesn't work in Safari. I can't log in to the site. Works fine in Firefox.

So, I mess around with settings. Perhaps Safari's trying to use some braindead version of NTLM authentication rather than basic authentication. Nope.... the tcpdump output I captured shows it isn't. Hrm... well, what if I use the Safari debug menu (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030110063041629) to change my User-Agent so that IIS thinks I'm using Mozilla, or IE6 on Windows? Nope, still doesn't work.

Finally, I go into the event log and see this gem:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 100
Date: 8/2/2004
Time: 9:30:50 PM
User: N/A
Computer: WIN2KSERVER
Description:
The server was unable to logon the Windows NT account 'bernielab\berniec' due to the following error: Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer. The data is the error code.

Safari's truly doing something wacky. I have no clue why IIS thinks Safari is trying to log on to the server (which happens to be the domain controller). Firefox doesn't pull this kind of tomfoolery!

I eventually had to go into Domain Controller Security Policy -> Local Policies -> User Rights Assignment -> Log on locally. In there, I added the "berniec" account to the list of users that are allowed to log in locally to the domain controller. I shouldn't have had to do this - ordinary users should have no rights to log into a domain controller. Hrm, stupid Apple.

So, after that, I finally was able to request and download a certificate. You can't directly import user certificates into Safari, but you can import them into a user's Keychain for future use by Safari. That part worked great. Keychain had zero problems importing the cert that was issued by the Windows CA. Hoorah.

Stupid lawnmower.

Mowed the front lawn the other day. Lawnmower ran OK. Not great, but OK. It only stalled once.

Next day, went to mow the back lawn and the damn thing won't run past what gas it's been primed with. Tried a new spark plug - it starts a lot easier now, but still won't continue to run after what's in its primer.

So, I drained the gas tank and checked to see if there were any blockages in the fuel line. Not as far as I can tell. Must be somewhere else. Not sure where, though. Air filter's a mess, but even without the air filter, the mower dies quickly.

This mower's in need of some work which I am ill-equipped to perform. Looks like I'll have to find someone to fix it for me. I'm no small engine genius... I work on cornputers all day long, dagnabit!

In other news, looks like Nicole and I have a fix on a new house in South Seattle. After the rash of arsons in the neighborhood (9 in the past two nights) we're quite anxious to move.