'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Today's discovery was a full /var/log/wtmp file.

Those of you who know what that is are probably staring at this going "WTF?". For those that don't know (i.e. non-die-hard-linux-geeks), this file tracks all logins and logouts. Every time someone (or something) logs in or out, an entry gets added to this. And, following the Unix philosophy, no program ever expects that this file might become full. Because, of course, such a thing could never possibly happen. Ever.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

It turned out that the ftpd variant we were using wrote to this file on login/out (oh yes - on Linux it's the responsibility of each individual program to log account usage, not the operating system), and this particular system had a 2GB file size limit. Why, I don't know - even FAT could handle files larger than that. Anyway, given that this is a load box it was quite easy to hit the 2GB limit, and when this happened rather than return an error code Linux's default behaviour is apparently to send a SIGXFSZ signal. And the default behaviour for *that* is to terminate the process.

This is one of the least documented effects of the Windows Firewall, and also one of the most important.

If the Windows Firewall service is disabled, under Windows XP, then the computer will not be able to become a browse master. This in turn means that it will not be able to advertise the workgroup it is a member of.

I do not know how or why the Windows Firewall service affects this. All I know is that it does, and it shouldn't.

I have just spent several hours going round in circles trying to fix this.


(apparently this is a known bug (KB 889320), but you can only get the fix by phoning Microsoft or waiting for XP SP3)

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.

Got killed by the final final boss, due to a mixture of a) not being able to see when my cure was ready to cast, b) the boss having an evil uber-rapid-fire-fireball-type-attack that takes off 4 hearts, c) my only having a maximum of 7 hearts, and d) my not re-equipping a Phoenix Down in time.

Bet it only needed a couple more hits, too.

Hmm, so it looks like the google toolbar is rather determined to auto-update.

I have just been treated to a button extolling the virtues of using Google Desktop Search. I'd like to state that I already know what GDS is, and if I wanted to use it I'd have already installed it. Since I haven't installed it, it can be concluded that I don't want it. Neither do I want a button to automagically appear advertising it, which I have to click on to get rid of. There's nothing in the options box to remove it, which earns the Google Toolbar a black mark from me. And look, to get rid of it it visits a special URL on the google website. Can we say security hole?

Oh, and look, on the laptop it's upgraded the toolbar. And added a spell check button (when was the last time I wanted to spell check a web page?) and the infamous AutoLink button. I think I want the links and words on web pages I visit to not change to point elsewhere. If I'd wanted either of these features, I would have enabled them myself.

Maybe Google needs to distribute "user" and "techie" versions. The user one would auto-update and display all the shiny new stuff, the techie one would never auto-update and require manual updates, would let you control all the buttons, and would not randomly decide to change everything.

Edit: Grr, you'd think that if the pop-up counter is currently over 500 (there are some very determined sites out there) that I would know what the popup blocker does? I suppose this has something to do witht he fact the upgrade added 3 new buttons that I had disabled before and disabled again within about 5 seconds?