[conspire] Church of Get It Done Now ... linuxmafia.com --> virtual? :-)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> So ... how's it comin' along with setting up Linux on the spiffy newer
> host hardware (SSD(s), fanless, much more modern, ... if I recall
> correctly)?  And, somewhere along with that, converting linuxmafia.com
> physical host to virtual upon the much newer hardware?  :-)
> 
> Ah yes, much easier to dispense good advice than (always and/or
> consistently) follow it ... yeah, me too.  8-O

Guilty as charged.  I'll mostly leave it at that.

_Maybe_ part of it is that, a long time ago, furiously working on the
design for the next-generation server was _fun_ in a weird sort of way,
but then a lot of very-not-fun work experiences happened, and suddenly
it's easier to put it off, and put it off some more.  And... wait,
sunofabitch, more privet volunteer shoots attempting to become trees,
and I hate privets.  And, whoa, isn't that a native oak, trying to get
started on the edge of one of my planter boxes?  I'm going to have to
dig that sucker out.  And I'm pretty sure I see five or six more in the
_front_ yard.  And, dammit, the slugs and snails are threatening to
destroy my datil pepper plants, and the bermuda grass I thought I'd
nuked from orbit is trying to re-invade the gardening beds, and I have a
strong, justifiable suspicion that there are clogged drip-irrigation
emitters all over the 1/3 acre lot.  Whoa, I think that laundry sink
valve is shot, because apparently sixty years of continuous usage
eventually wears out sleeve bearings or whatever those use.  And the
floor needs sweeping, and Deirdre wants me to go to the store to get
more milk because she, essentially the sole person who uses milk (other
than the cat) could not _possibly_ anticipate progressively using up the
supply until it's exhausted, so suddenly it's an emergency that she
cannot possibly solve herself.

Whoa, what happened to the catnip plant?  It suffered during the winter,
but I saw that there was a little shoot trying to come back last month,
so I guess it died and I'll need to shop for a replacement, and... damn,
apparently the new English thyme also died the death and needs a
replacement.

Oh, the freezer is icing up.  But that's because I've overfilled it,
which resulted in the seals not quite lining up, and Duncan figured that
out and pried out all of the ice and repacked the drawer so that the
decline cycle wouldn't start all over again.  Good thing Duncan was
around to do that, because I was in Europe.

While I was in Europe, about 3000 mailing list messages and 500 unread
personal messages accumulated.  Some of this needs urgent attention, but
it's difficult to know what does until I'd assessed all of it, so, huge
lump of work before I can even know what to start on first.  And, wait,
why are there _500_ personal messages?  What are all these suspiciously
frequent, 350-line-long logcheck reports?  They seem to be all about
spamd being unable to run the SPF_NONE check.  I don't even _want_
spamassassin to run the SPF_NONE check!  Is it in /etc/spamassesin?
Nope.  /usr/share/spamassassin?  Nope.  Somewhere else in /usr?  Let's,
out of desperation, grep all of /usr.  Nope.  Wait, isn't there a
linting test for SpamAssasin?  I find it, I run it, it comes up clean.
So, wait, I get 'cannot run check SPF_NONE' but it still passes linting?
What does that even mean?  Switch tactics:  Web-search the errors.  Ugh,
doesn't seem to help.  Back to grepping.  Could it be in /var?  Wow,
stuff about a SPF_NONE check in
/var/lib/spamassassin/3.003001/updates_spamassassin_org/25_spf.cf .  I'd
forgotten the /var/lib/spamassassin tree even exists.  OK, just to stop
the bleeding, comment the SPF_NONE stuff out, since I don't even want
such a check anyway.  Log spamming ceases?  Nope.  Obviously have to
restart spamd.  Did that.  Log spamming ceases?  Nope.  Argh, don't have
time for this.

Much later:  Oh, forgot to comment out the corresponding SPF_NONE line
in /var/lib/spamassassin/3.003001/updates_spamassassin_org/50_scores.cf
Let's see if that helps -- and of course we're going to have to restart
spamd again, which takes ages because it's a big dumb Perl process.
Wait, and wait, and.... But other things are coming up, so we'll have to
get back to that later.

Why are there fragile dishes and glasses balanced on unstable piles of
papers in the living room?  Were these people, I dunno, raised to think
it's A Good Thing to court disaster?  Please, Rick, take those in and
wash those for us, because we hurt and don't want to get up.  OK, I
guess, but, seriously now, people cannot wash their own dishes?  And
there's a bunch of other unwashed dishes blocking the counter.  How
convenient:  In order to use the counter, now I need to wash those
other-people's-dishes, too.  Cute.  Apparently I'm their fscking butler,
with the difference that butlers sometimes get paid.

Great, more coffee spills on the floor.  Rick, would you mind cleaning
those up, you have working knees.  OK, fine, add it to the huge pile.
Except, here's a thought:  Maybe you should consider not frelling
spilling coffee onto the floor all the way out to the living room.
Like, if you insist on overfilling your glass, maybe do the totally
flippin' obvious and put it on a saucer?  But apparently it's easier to
just ask me to clean up the mess continually.

Oh, Deirdre says we might need more butter.  I'm about to buy butter
until I reparse what she said in my head, and the choice of wording
means she didn't actually _check_.  Aha.  I avoid buying more butter,
return home, and look in the freezer.  There's bounteous butter, but
Cheryl has covered it over with the frozen foods she is apparently
subsisting off while we were in Europe, because of course nobody but
Rick bothers to actually _cook anything at all_.  Much is now explained.
In the unlikely event of Deirdre having looking in the butter location
in the freezer before saying 'We might be out of butter', she wouldn't
have seen that there's plenty of butter even though she knows exactly
where it would be, because one small box would need to be moved out to
the way.  I move the small box out of the way.  Later, Deirdre notices
that, as it turns out, we don't need butter.  Hallelujah!  At this rate,
in a mere 50 more years, Deirdre might know how to properly use a
refrigerator and can teach Cheryl.

We're out of tortillas, because nobody but me believes in using shopping
lists, and even though Deirdre and Cheryl made a non-previously-planned
trip to the store, didn't bother to call me and ask 'Do we need
anything?'  I'm the only person who bothers to do that.

Oh, the lights are on in the office (room), with nobody there.  Cheryl
says she'd just been there, as if that made lights in a room where
nobody is become perfectly logical.  I go turn them off, and then remind
Cheryl that, gosh, it's nice that you were just there and thanks for
telling me that, but I hope she didn't miss what I actually said, which
is that whenever you leave a room you should turn off the lights when
you leave.  Cheryl then provides the backup explanation:  She couldn't
turn off the lamp before leaving the room because she'd just picked up
several things, therefore her hands were no longer available for turning
off lights.

I say, that's the most nonsensical explanation I've heard all day,
though there was time for even worse ones.  If you're hands are full and
you want to turn off a light, e.g., because you're about to leave the
room, you put _down_ what you are carrying, then turn the light off,
then pick up the stuff again.  Same thing with a car.  We would not
consider reasonable 'I wasn't able to turn off my headlights because my
arms were occupied with grocery bags.  No, fool, you put down the
groceries, turn off the headlights, pick up the groceries.  What about
this could possibly be difficult?  Is the game 'Justify incompetence
with non-sequitur explanations'?  Because, if so, I think you're
winning.

Why am I still being barraged with Logcheck mails?  Oh, right, the
SPF_NONE stumper is still (harmlessly but noisily) ravaging the system.

Oh, wait.  A bunch of plants in small plastic pots near the backyard
chimney are extremely dead.  These are the ones Cheryl took
responsibility for and promised to water, but then apparently did not
water any of them at any time.  So, they died.  Is Cheryl going to deal
with the dead plants?  Are you kidding?  No, another task dumped on
Rick, which I now take care of so guests won't see a big line of dead
plants.

And it never ends.  My time is treated as having no value.

The garden sheds are collapsing because they're cheap plastic and
overstfuffed.  Correcting this is going to require tying each shed
together laterally using a guy wire and some fittings to anchor the wire
outside the side panels, plus obviously drilling some holes.  Meanwhile,
I really can't get to anything in either of the sheds, because the
shelfs have slipped out, everything has collapsed into a heavy and
dangerous pile, and I can't even fix the shed as a whole without
extracting all of its formerly organised contents so it's empty, which
since we still have rain periods isn't very feasible.  So, with regret
after some design time, I have to put it off.

The garbage's overflowing, the very fact of which makes it gratuitously
more diffult to even take it out.  And, wait, everyon's supposed to help
in taking out the garbage, but somehow it's just me.  Anotehr broken
promise.  Ah well.

I need to redo the CompuLab for proper KVM/qemu operation, but don't
actually know how.  Need to find the time to study that.  Need a huge
bunch of time to construct the hardened host-OS environment including a
custom no-modules kernel.  And where on the revised network is Unbound
going to go?  I haven't figured that out, yet.  NSD will be port 53 on
the Internet-facing main host, which means Unbound cannot.  But that's
just as well, because recursive servers need to be carefully protected, 
(Cache poisoning.)  So, somehow on one of the private RFC1918 networks?
But if it's on one of those, it won't be visble to the other.  Do I need
two dedicated hosts just for recursive nameservice?  Seems extravolent.
But, if not that, what?  I don't know -- and it's like everything else
around here:  If I don't do it, it simply doesn't get done.

At a certain point in all this, I need an anagesic.  And some sleep.
After all, I'm still jetlagged, which helps not at all.

So, yeah, CompuLab.  Finish it.  Would be nice.  Inshallah.