From ghost Sun Aug 10 11:52:27 1997 Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 11:51:50 -0700 (PDT) From: ghost@vix.com (L Peter Deutsch) To: alvin@planet.fef.com cc: rasko@kset.com, rob@cisco.com, chrisd@loc201.tandem.com, rick@hugin.imat.com, ghost@vix.com, ghost@aladdin.com, director@well.com Subject: Results of Saturday's work at Aladdin Hi Alvin, I regret to say that the state in which you left Aladdin's systems at the end of your work on Saturday is contrary to my explicit instructions and has created severe problems for me. As you know, I had to leave at 5:10 PM: at the time, you were installing a tape drive in genie, and I understood that you would stop there and we would arrange a time for you to return to continue working. However, you apparently continued working for quite some time after that. 1) I stated in both e-mail and verbally to you that the first task I wanted carried out was to upgrade carpet (the laptop) to Red Hat 4.2, including getting X Windows to work and getting the 3com 3c562 PCMCIA card to be able to talk to both the Ethernet and the serial port. You did not upgrade carpet. You did get X Windows to work, but only at a very low resolution (apparently 240 x 180 pixels), which is useless. You did not get the 3c562 to talk to both the Ethernet and the serial port; at least, /dev/cua1 doesn't exist. (/dev/cua0 is the serial mouse.) 2) I stated in both e-mail and verbally to you that I did not want genie upgraded until carpet was upgraded to my satisfaction. You went ahead and upgraded genie anyway. The result of this is that (a) I don't know what state the hardware is in (df shows /dev/sdb1 and sdb2 -- did you install another disk? -- but not /dev/sda1 and sda2), (b) mail is not being delivered from vix to genie (but even if it were, I wouldn't be able to read it on lamp, since emacs' rmail facility relies on getting mail from /var/spool/mail which used to be a cross-mount to the same directory on genie but which I unmounted at your request), and (c) the ppp link is so unreliable as to be unusable -- it drops carrier about every 20 minutes (it stayed up for many days at a time before the upgrade), and as of midnight last night, it was unable to reconnect to vix.com after 2 dialing attempts and therefore (because of a poorly written restart daemon script) never reconnected. The evidence is from "last | grep ppghost" on vix.com: ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 23:57 - 00:41 (00:43) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 23:30 - 23:54 (00:23) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 22:39 - 23:16 (00:37) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 22:21 - 22:38 (00:16) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 22:13 - 22:21 (00:07) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 21:38 - 22:08 (00:30) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 17:57 - 18:06 (00:09) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 17:39 - 17:53 (00:14) ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 17:08 - 17:36 (00:27) >>> upgrade happened here ppghost tty06 Sat Aug 9 01:26 - 16:43 (15:17) ppghost tty06 Thu Aug 7 11:19 - 01:25 (1+14:06) ppghost tty06 Sun Aug 3 01:36 - 11:18 (4+09:42) 3) You left genie in a state where it apparently will not accept remote logins. While this may be desirable, it is not the way things were before; I gave no indication that I wanted this changed; and it makes it impossible for my previous system administrator (who is located on the East Coast) to assist me. I appreciate the work that you have done, especially the acquisition and installation of the tape drive, but at this point things are much worse than when you started, and if they don't get fixed within 24 hours they will have a severe negative impact on my business, which relies almost entirely on e-mail for communication with customers and business and development partners. Please call me immediately at my home # (650)329-0264 so that we may arrange for you to return as soon as possible and get my environment back to a usable state. L. Peter Deutsch | Aladdin Enterprises :::: ghost@aladdin.com 203 Santa Margarita Ave. | tel. +1-650-322-0103 (AM only); fax +1-650-322-1734 | ** NOTE ^^^ NEW AREA CODE AS OF AUG. 1 ^^^ ** Menlo Park, CA 94025 | http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill." From ghost Sun Aug 10 12:16:26 1997 Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 12:15:54 -0700 (PDT) From: ghost@vix.com (L Peter Deutsch) To: alvin@planet.fef.com cc: rasko@kset.com, rob@cisco.com, chrisd@loc201.tandem.com, rick@hugin.imat.com, ghost@vix.com, ghost@aladdin.com, director@well.com Subject: More on Saturday's work at Aladdin I noticed the following in the notes you left: 1) "We have successfully installed 4.2 onto our hard disk 4Gb (IDE drive = hdb)." Sorry for my confusion in the previous e-mail: I misread hdb as sdb in the df printout. I now understand that you installed a 4Gb IDE drive with 4.2 on it. This is worse than useless to me: if I use this drive for real work, I'm stuck with a lower-performance drive (IDE drives are generally lower-performance than SCSI), while if I don't, I either have to drop back to 3.0.3 (which I have no idea how to do) or be paralyzed (i.e., unable to use genie for any purpose that might involve storing new information) until you come back to install 4.2 on the SCSI drive. 2) "X11R6 is working -- need to fix bus mouse vs. serial mouse". In other words, X isn't usable on genie; it was perfectly usable before the upgrade, although some peculiarity of the display controller made it impossible to switch back from X to character mode (the display lost sync). 3) "Your old genie is still untouched, though the old 3.0.3 kernel does not recognize the network card while new Red Hat 4.2 is OK." genie had no problem talking to the network card before the upgrade. This means that whatever you did prevents me from going back to 3.0.3 and having a usable environment, because network connectivity is necessary for telnet, ftp, and mail. Please call me immediately when you get this e-mail, regardless of day or time. I didn't realize before reading your notes more carefully that not only are things badly broken, I apparently can't go back to the way they used to be. L. Peter Deutsch | Aladdin Enterprises :::: ghost@aladdin.com 203 Santa Margarita Ave. | tel. +1-650-322-0103 (AM only); fax +1-650-322-1734 | ** NOTE ^^^ NEW AREA CODE AS OF AUG. 1 ^^^ ** Menlo Park, CA 94025 | http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."