Somewhere the Universe is Laughing Hysterically…

Did you ever have one of those years?

2008 wasn’t so hot.  2009 hasn’t exactly started off too well either.

My equipment is after me again.  Maybe the equipment is a proxy for the universe.  Something is out to get me and appears to be doing so via computers.

Let’s start off with the main machine, Stanley.  Stanley has been my faithful companion for a long time.  Through two or three motherboards, countless hard drives, and more power supplies than most people have hair.  A week ago, Stanley decided to shut down for no particular reason.  It started up fine.  The next day I couldn’t log in because Stanley went down again.

A cursory examination revealed that the problem was a power supply.  Another power supply, that is.  Stanley has a huge appetite for power supplies.  Stanley originally had one power supply that ran forever.  When it finally bit the big one, I installed a new one and found out the horrid noise floor on my shortwave receivers was caused by the ($#@ing power supply.  Since then Stanley has eaten more than his weight in quiet power supplies.

With the New Year upon us, I was going to have to wait anyway, so I used a laptop until I could get another power supply.

Meanwhile, email had become a problem, even before Stanley ate another one.  I needed an additional rule in the spam filter to deal with the spam that appeared to be coming from myself.  I wrote one that promptly ate my inbox in Thunderbird.  I fixed the issue and moved the messages back to the inbox, which is when the real fun started.  The headers and content got out of sync but that wasn’t all the fun, no sir.  When I hit the UP ARROW, instead of going to an earlier message, it DELETED A MESSAGE each time.

Giving up, I installed Evolution.  I had used Evolution years back but too many weird bugs and dependencies killed it for me and I wound up with Thunderbird, which has performed flawlessly for years on linux and the occasional Windows installation.  Evolution went in ok, fortunately.

Then the next day, Stanley started going down for no apparent reason, as mentioned above.  I gave up and just used the laptop (again, as stated above).

Meanwhile back at the laptop, I tried to recreate the Thunderbird rule to filter out self-spam, like I did on Stanley.  It turned out that I was able to recreate the rule exactly, down to the point where it ate my inbox and moved most of it to TRASH.

There is a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch called The Frog and Peach.

I highly recommend Peter Cook to any lover of British comedy who hasn’t already discovered him.  The man was a comic genius and I do not use that term lightly.  He came long before Monty Python although he did work with a few of them off and on.  He was way ahead of his time and unfortunately left us a while back.

In any case, the Frog and Peach was the name of a famous sketch of theirs wherein Sir Arthur Greeb-Streebling (sorry, Streeb-Greebling) opened up a restaurant by the name of the Frog and Peach.  It was a miserable failure.

During the interview, Sir Arthur was asked if he learned anything from his mistakes.  His reply:

“Yes, absolutely.  Absolutely.  I feel I have learned quite a lot from my mistakes and could replicate them again exactly.”

The great thing about replicating my mistakes exactly was noticing the almost effortless way my mistakes fell right into place, as if I had never made them before.  It was not so much that I have a short attention span, it is more likely that I have none.  Perhaps it is just that I don’t retain a blessed thing, I don’t know and frankly ruminating on it makes my head hurt.

After I had trashed yet a second Thunderbird inbox, it was most gratifying to note the consistency with which the software behaved.  Mozilla, the nice folks who gave us Thunderbird, are to be commended.  After my bizarre stab at rule-writing, both instances of Thunderbird failed exactly, and I do mean exactly, in the same manner.  Most of the messages in the inbox wound up in the trash, I moved them back to the inbox, and the up arrow started putting on its DELETE cape, taking most of the rest of the messages with it.  When I finally took my beloved finger off the UP ARROW, I noticed the messages were way out of sync, just like on Stanley.

It is at this precise point that I realize (not back then) that I have not given you the name of the laptop.  This is my omission and for that I apologize.  The laptop’s name is boobs.  Why boobs?  Because I always like to name them after something close to my heart.

It is often said that the best way to disable a man is to give him his own set of boobs.  If men had them, they’d simply sit there and play with them all day.  They’d (we’d) probably starve.

So let’s get back to boobs, as it were.

boobs now had exactly the same kind of broken Thunderbird installation as Stanley (don’t even think of asking me where Stanley came from).  I wasn’t going to install Evolution although I’m not sure why.  In the back of my head there was a voice telling me to go to the Mozilla site and figure out how to fix Thunderbird.  Fortunately for me I didn’t have to go, as the other voices either drowned out the Mozilla voice or they strangled it until it shut up.

So here I was with a quandary.  Well, several actually.  The current quandary revolved around which email client to use.  Since I hadn’t used anything else in years, I was at a loss as to which to try.  Firing up Synaptic package manager, I did a search on email, turning up virtually nothing.  That was interesting (in a mind-numbingly stupid way).

Don’t forget that linux is sort of derived from unix, where they had all sorts of interesting names for things and all sorts of interesting things to name.  Back at the good old CLI (command line interface), one used to get mail differently.  It’s been years so you can imagine my recall isn’t entirely accurate (years, seconds… whatever).  There was a Mail User Agent, a Mail Delivery Agent, a Mail Transport Authority (not to be confused with the very pleasant-sounding Chicago Transit Authority), a mail reader, and several guys named Biff (but for what reason nobody knows to this day).

All of these disparate Usurping Agencies were still represented in Synaptic but I didn’t feel all that nostalgic for command line mail so I went elsewhere.  On the other hand, email was safer before HTML mail (GADZOOKS, Batman…. NO HTML MAIL?? How did they read their mail without PICTURES??).

A fun place to look for linux (and Windows) programs is Softpedia.  They had a metric shitload of email readers.  You have to be careful that you’re looking at an X11 mail reader, lest you download a command line mail reader (Batman).  I downloaded Sylpheed from the Ubuntu repositories and somehow also wound up with something called Claws.  Wow, it’s like a bonus but without all the excitement of a bonus.  Besides, claws are what I keep threatening to manually remove from Satan, my cat (see above).

Claws is apparently related to Sylpheed.  It’s all dooded up but wouldn’t do something or other I wanted it to do (or not do; after all, this was a few days ago).  Sylpheed more or less did what I wanted it to so I’ve been using it for a few days.  I don’t have ridiculous expectations for mail readers like I do for other software (it just has to WORK – is that so hard?).  My wife tells me when I get agitated (which seems to be about every five minutes lately) that I have Unreasonable Expections<tm>.

• When I go to a restaurant and expect to get what I ordered, that’s Unreasonable Expectations.
• When I push POWER on an electronic device and expect it to start, that’s Unreasonable Expectations.

So my email is collecting on servers and I’m using POP to download copies until Stanley’s back up.

Today I went to work for the first time this year.  Yeah, ok, enough with the stupid new year’s jokes.  My company, which votes for some of its holidays, voted itself off 12/31 and 1/1.  This had the effect of us working Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.  (Don’t ask.)

One of my tasks today was to get the portable work laptop (whose name I do not remember at the moment but it might be sex) connecting to the firewall from outside of the building.  The manufacturer of the firewall, SonicWall, saw fit to put out their VPN client for Windows only.  This of course makes the VPN client completely useless to at least two of us.

The SonicWall website is a bizarre place, second only to Dell in the `what kind of drugs do they give those people’ department.  I tried three different browsers and none would let me in.  Finally I gave up and tried Internet Explorer under Windows, which let me in.  Nice going, SonicWall.  Whenver I got close to sending a support email or anything helpful, the browser would crash.  This must be yet another of my Unreasonable Expectations<tm>, I guess.

The website has a knowledgebase with a search function, which I actually went to first.  Searching for linux AND vpn, I came up with a ton of documents.  All of them referred to old versions of their software, hardware, or linux, which did not appear to be applicable to what I was using.  The second document listed came up and I did a search for linux on the document, which failed.  So I searched for linux AND vpn, and the second document did not contain linux.  I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if it contained vpn.  More Unreasonable Expections<tm>.

I did find a few other documents containing linux and vpn.  But understanding some of this requires understanding how firewalls work.  Quite frankly it’s enough to understand how to USE firewalls; I shouldn’t have to be digging into PSK’s, IKE’s, Diffie-Heilmans, and knowing the difference between my MDE5’s and SHA1’s (depending on which phase of the connection we’re talking about).  I apparently needed an AGGRESSIVE connection.  I tell you, when (if?) SonicWall calls me back, I will show them an aggressive connection.

Ok, I have to admit it.  I took the low road.  I actually called.  On the phone.  After ten minutes of hearing how busy they were, I opted to leave voicemail.  This was at about ten in the morning, Eastern.  By four thirty Eastern, I had not heard back.   Good thing it wasn’t an emergency, I guess.

It’s not like I didn’t do other research.  I Googled my little fingers off.  From the results, I wasn’t the only one with this issue.  And there was a serious dearth of answers.

I decided to tackle the issue sideways (it’s as good as any way, I guess).  Using a .pcf file, I managed to extract enough information to use `vpnc’, a command line program, with our provider’s vpn.  Using the same format, I tried substituting our firewall’s information and got ready to be all proud of myself.

“HA!” said one of the other internal voices.  This one tends to be louder than the rest.

It took less than a second to realize that `HA!’ was not an exclamation of success.

So I broke down and asked one of my teammates for help.  You know, the one who actually knows something about firewalls (or claims to anyway).  We went at it systematically (and unsuccessfully) for quite a while.  At least he had the good grace not to snicker at me like he usually does when I want to do something simple in linux that apparently can’t be done, although it should be.

Before he got the chance to snicker, I whipped out my VMplayer so I could run Windows on the linux laptop (that might be called sex but I don’t remember).  Oops.  I forgot that this was a recent install and I hadn’t made VMplayer work yet.  Crossing my fingers, I installed VMplayer.  And it worked.  This was unprecedented in my history of using VMplayer on linux.  It never just works.  Yet it did.

I figured I’d savor my small (but seeming large) victory when I realized I hadn’t transferred over my VM Windows images.  This did not want to work for an entire string of reasons so I gave up.  One of the little-advertised points of lightweight laptops is that you can throw them further.

Giving up entirely, I cursed myself and let the laptop boot into Windows.  I installed the SonicWall vpn software.  I hooked up to a secondary line.  And I watched as the vpn software completely failed to connect.  I tried another line.  And yet again, the vpn software stared at me, almost mocking my attempts to use it.

My erstwhile firewall expert said that if I used Windows, he could show me how to set it right up.  I advised him that I was already, in fact, booted into Windows so he could start showing me how easy it was Any Second Now.

He told me to hit CONNECT, which I did and it didn’t.  He said that was odd.

Yeah, that’s right… odd.  Nah, nothing odd around here.

He went over setting up the connection, just like I had done it the first and second times.  No connect.  He said it went right in on his installation.

Of course it went right in; that was his installation.  This was mine.  I’ve seen my installations defy physics rather than behave as expected.

After watching it fail a few more times for no apparent reason, I gave up.   Hours of my life wasted.

I learned a long time ago that when one has a Day From Hell<tm> like this, one has to go home and work on something with a greater chance of success, like perhaps counting steps or getting from the car to the front door successfully (which I managed).

Armed with a new power supply, I installed it in Stanley.  I’ve had enough of this 20/24 pin motherboard connection nonsense.  They say the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them.  I even discovered that the four pin fan power connection can now be six pins.  I am so much richer for the knowledge.

The power supply is rated a bit higher than before and is advertised as a QUIET supply.  I have to hand it to them as far as truth in advertising; the thing was dead quiet.  It turned out that it was dead quiet because it was dead.

Well, not dead… the power light on the pc came on but that was it.  I have to admit that this was a new one.  I have never seen just the power light come on with absolutely no other activity whatsoever.

Oddly enough, it still hadn’t occurred to me that there was Much Laughing going on somewhere.

I merely let out a minor stream of language inappropriate for drunken sailors and continued my work.  Disconnecting everything except the motherboard, I fired it up again.  With the same results.

Ok, it was here that I started to figure out that there was Laughing, even though I couldn’t hear it.

The new power supply featured two things not on the original: a power switch and a blue pushbotton switch.  I have never seen a pushbutton switch on a power supply before so I took the easy way out: I opened the instructions (sissy!).  And as one would guess, they contained nothing about a pushbutton.  In fact, they contained nothing about a power switch either, in the jumbled mess that was the translation from whatever language it was written in initially.

By this time my neck was in danger of Repetitive Stress Injury from my shaking my head back and forth so vigorously.  I still couldn’t hear the Laughter but I knew… oh boy did I know that it was happening somewhere….

Just for fun I wired the previous power supply back in.  It gave me the power light only, which it had never done previously.  I shook in different directions, defying my neck muscles.  I tried to see if I could shake my head in two directions simultaneously, which I strongly suggest you do not try at home, Kids.

Finally I could hear a small laugh.  It was the old power supply, now refusing to even light up the power LED.

Did you know that a full size, fully loaded computer case can easily traverse a medium size computer room when airborne, without even blinking an eye?  Without even stopping the (now sideways) motion of some combination of my head and neck shaking?

I learned along time ago that when one has a Day From Hell<tm> like this, one has to work on something with a greater chance of success, like just shutting everything down and aiming for the recliner in the living room.  I wasn’t so sure that there was even a chance of this but I figured I needed to at least try.

For reasons I cannot claim to understand, I made it to the recliner, one full room away.

I hooked up an external hard drive so I could move some data off my laptop.  I brought up a dual pane file manager, selected which files to move and told it to begin.

And it crashed.