Some tales of current {soft,hard}ware woes.

iptables doesn't fully like sparc64: the limit module, very useful for limiting log entries in bursty situations, is fubar'd on 64bit archs:

..."the problem is that the limit match does an ugly hack: it stores a pointer in its struct matchinfo. That pointer is 64bits in the kernel, but userspace is 32bits, and thus the compilar only allocates 32bit for the pointer in the structure: boom. The structure was commented by the original author with: /* Ugly, ugly fucker. */"

Thanks guys, very helpful. Grrrrrrr. Ok, for now my syslogd is set to not sync on the file where these logs go to, to keep the box from melting down because of any silly scanner out there but that's far from perfect.

Then my alcadreck dsl thingie is flaky as hell: it really doesn't like service disconnections, and occasionally doesn't get the always-on connection into always-on state...Time to get a BPAC-5100 and enjoy proper syslog, SNMP, real CLI etc.

And my Ultra1 is showing the onboard HME lockup behaviour: suddenly no more data coming in, but ifdown/ifup fixes the issue. (or is it the alcadreck? seeing collisions and carrier loss errors on a lightly loaded Xover cable doesn't really inspire confidence in the other comms partner even without knowing about the alcadreck...) Built the kernel with the one-liner patch, seems to be ok for now.

And df is fucked on sparc64:

$ df -k /
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             -1324350         1         0   6% /
$ df -k //
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              1511856     80608   1354448   6% /

So a trailing slash coaxes it into working. Fugly.

And mozilla-firebird with the tabextensions on crashes when trying to do talk to ANZ (who are evil bastards wielding their javascript bludgeon inexpertly, but who - thank eris! - haven't discovered java...yet).

To make debugging easier, at work the same mozilla-firebird with the same extensions, a 99.9%-same config works without a hitch. Oh the joy. Mozilla needs some code to selectively disable each and every javascript function (not just the few silly things like preventing scripts from hiding the toolbar)!

Sigh.