I’m going to take a break in conference converage to announce that Iowahawk, who has been AWOL during the entire month of April, has apparently not been abducted by a horde of beer-swilling, cheese-eating Amazons from Racine. Or if so, they let him near his computer long enough to tell us that things have been happening to him. Maybe that was just one of the things.

I’m at the conference, and the hotel has wireless everywhere, both rooms and conference rooms. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to connect to it with my D-Link card. It shows up when I do a site survey, but it won’t connect. When I borrowed an SMC card from the front desk and installed it, it connects, but I don’t get name resolution. I can ping known IPs on the internet, but it doesn’t know what (for example) “yahoo.com” is.

I’m typing this on a machine in the hotel business center, hoping that someone might have an idea what the problem might be.

As far as the conference goes, it’s largely the usual suspects so far, and nothing new, at least not in the presentations. More tomorrow, perhaps.

[Friday morning update]

I’m blogging live from the conference now. Michael Mealing figured out that the hotel’s DNS service is confused in such a way that XP, which is more forgiving of such things, didn’t mind, but various flavors of Unix and W2K do. He managed to find the right numbers via a DNS query, I hardwired them into my network connection, and all is right with the world again. Posts will appear as events warrant.

If I have connectivity in the hotel, I’ll be blogging from the conference, and in any event, hope to check in later. If not, though, back on Monday.

Those who read the byline on the last three posts will notice that I have a guest blogger, Sam Dinkin. Sam is a regular contributor to The Space Review, but wants to start publishing (on both space, and other topics) more than once a week. So if the rate of new content picks up noticeably in the next few days, that will be why.

I couldn’t get the broadband in the room to work last night, but it’s working now. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I’ve had a long day, and a big dinner of barbecue, and I’m beat. Probably not much new until Friday, since I’m at the workshop all day tomorrow, then flying back to Florida tomorrow evening, with a late arrival.

There are plenty of other great blogs over to the left, though.

No banjo on my knee, though. I may check in tonite–my room supposedly has broadband.

For the next three days or so. I’m off to Huntsville for a workshop on VSE, but also, I burned the fingers on my right hand on a hot dish tonight, so typing is problematic…

I’m hoping they’ll feel better on the morrow.

[Tuesday morning update]

I was being a baby. Just the middle finger has a little patch of blister on it, and not where I contact the keys–the others are fine. But I’ll still be busy.

I’ve found it useful whenever suffering a minor injury like that (and it really was trivial, though it hurt like hell for an hour or two) to think of the vastly more horrendous, almost unimaginable things that happen every day to people in regimes like Iran (and no longer, for the most part, in Iraq), in order to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Sorry, just one of those days. Or weeks.

Working on a book, and feeling a little burnt out.

Is there a Samba expert in the house?

I’ve got a machine running Fedora Core 3, and I can’t get Samba, or Swat to work properly. The Samba server seems to be running, and the machine shows up in my network neighborhood from the Windows client, but when I click on it, I get a “network path not found” message. The smbd and nmbd services seem to be running on the server.

When I try to log in to Swat from the server (even as root), I get a “connection refused” message.

I’m looking at the configuration. According to the troubleshooting guides, the xinetd.conf file should be looking for it in /usr/sbin/swat, but that file doesn’t seem to exist, even though I installed the full Samba package. When I do a “locate swat” the binary doesn’t show up anywhere–only the configuration file of that name in /etc/xinetd.d. The config file right now actually has this line (which I probably inserted as a result of some other troubleshooter):

swat stream tcp nowait.400 root simberg /usr/sbin/tcpd swat

Is that right? There is at least a program “tcpd” with that path.

The troubleshooting guides I’ve found all leave much to be desired. They will tell you to check if something is happening, but no guidance on what to do if it isn’t.

Anyone know what’s going on?

Oh, and yes, before anyone asks, this (among other reasons) is why posting is sparse.

[Update at 12:45 PM EST]

OK, thanks to help from the comments section, I’ve theoretically got swat installed. But still no joy–it refuses the connection. Now what?

I’m running a few private blogs, for business purposes, that are password protected via .htaccess on the main and archive directories. There are no external links to them from the open net, and they haven’t been archived by Google. Yet somehow the spammers have found them. A couple days ago, we had dozens of poker spams in the comments.

Anyone have any idea how they’re doing this?