Tuesday, July 16, 2002

sshd wouldn't start upon reboot. It's missing libcrypto.so.2. O, I'm so tired of reading Linux "help" documents and installation notes because the writing is so awful no matter what software I'm reading about. One can take only so much of the geek-who-can't-write-well mentality: "if you don't know what it is, then you don't need it" and "that's not a bug in my code, that's a problem with someone else's code and it *won't* be fixed" and using "of course" when the statement is not obvious to everyone. Programmers. Particularly aggravating was the README file from Mark Crispin's IMAP Toolkit Environment (20 December 2001) which is titled "UNIX QUICK BUILD NOTES" and says essentially to follow the 5 poorly described steps and "That's all!". His "quick build" is my 12 hours of hunting for answers on google. I reinstalled openssl and openssh from the Red Hat 7.3 RPMs and that fixed the problem of sshd not starting upon reboot. Found the imap configuration I needed in some newsgroup called GLLUG: create a new file called /etc/xinetd.d/imap and put in this configuration: service imap { socket_type = stream (newline) wait = no (newline) user = root (newline) server = /usr/sbin/imapd (newline) log_on_success += DURATION USERID (newline) log_on_failure += USERID (newline) disable = no (newline) } (where "(newline)" is a newline character). I then restarted xinetd with '/sbin/service xinetd restart', exactly as Mike Rambo directed. Check that imap is now running with 'chkconfig --list | more' and now imap should show up as "imap: on". All is well (for me, anyway). Whew! Shared Patrick's bread pudding with Melissa, Debrah, and Kristina. I noticed that Ena's computer had arrived and she's out of the office today, so I set it up for her backing up her old computer and restoring files after the new one was set up. Dinner at home with Patrick: roast Chinese chicken, new potatoes and carrots. Spent an hour installing Riven, which we borrowed from Brian and Kelly. I didn't want to install a version of Quicktime from 3 years ago, so I tried skipping it but got an invalid page fault while it was searching for old versions of Quicktime. We played for about an hour and a half. It was fun but not seamless—we had to switch discs and the screen interruptions were unpleasant. The roller coaster ride parts were especially fun. One-year anniversary at UCSF.