Dirk Pilat - 2002.06.14

A good day to all of you who have been following my exploits trough the wild, wild world of free Linuxes and BSDs.

As today the rain is pouring on my little cottage on the beach of the south island of New Zealand, and even the penguins are huddling under the leaves of the next cabbage tree, I thought I tell you about the next amazing tale of Stinker and his quest to become a valuable node of the wide, wide world of the Internet.

As you heard the last time, Stinker was finally fully configured and happily browsing away on the Internet. Unfortunately it turned out that he lost the connection rather quickly and left me stranded with a brooding computer refusing to take his place in the Internet.

I quickly diagnosed behavioural problems and a possible borderline personality, but unfortunately this didn't seem to get my any further. Specialist input was needed, so I subscribed to the mailing list that was associated with the particular driver, and careful prodding already helped solving part of the issue.

Apparently something was wrong with the handling of my LQC packets. I know, I know, what are LQC packets? I wanted to know the same thing, so I took the usual "FAQ, HOWTO, MAN, Google" route of finding out what in the world was wrong, but unfortunately this did not take me any further. So I did the only logical step: Again, I dug out Snak and went on the search for Francois Rogler, the genius who wrote the OpenBSD driver for my modem, and found him in the appropriate channel.

As France and New Zealand have a 10 hour time difference, I caught him while he was having lunch, which did not stop him from solving my problem in a couple of minutes. After some polite exchanges about the food in NZ and France, I gave him my computers IP number, created an account with limited access rights for him, and tadaa: from 19000 kilometers away Francois had a quick look at my config files, corrected them, and bingo: everything works!

He is now the prospective owner of a thepilum.com T-shirt and hopefully will always keep it freshly cleaned and perfect when he walks down the beaches of southwest France. I will certainly keep him in mind every time I can use Stinker to browse around the Web.

The last time I promised to have access to Stinker via the Wonderful Wacky Web, but unfortunately I still didn't have time to implement Apache fully, with all the goings on around me, so please stay patient for just a week longer.

Thanks everyone!

Signing out....

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Dirk Pilat recently moved from London to the South Island of New Zealand. He's learning *nix.

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