Wandering Thoughts archives

A year (and a bit) of WanderingThoughts

I'm bad with anniversaries and at making blog entries come out on time, so it was a year and nine days ago that I wrote the very first WanderingThoughts entry, not a pleasingly exact year. There's probably a lesson in this.

(Or a year and eight days, depending on how I count it; while I wrote the first two entries on June 11th, I only made the decision to keep writing at the pace of an entry a day on the 12th, when I wrote BlogGenesis.)

Over the course of the past year (and a bit) I've written 472 entries (not counting this one), amounting to 173,883 words and 1,087,994 bytes according to wc (which overcounts things). There's been 225 comments, only 77 of them written by me (I'm surprised that I haven't written a higher proportion). A less pleasant number is that there have been 78 pieces of comment spam that I've had to clean out.

(The sheer size of WanderingThoughts sometimes boggles me, since I still think of myself as a reluctant and slow writer.)

Clearly I've met my goal of putting up at least one entry a day; in fact, with one early exception I've actually written an entry every day (since this includes holidays, I'm some kind of masochist).

(Early on I wrote four entries one Saturday morning in a burst of enthusiasm and then trickled them out over the following days. That's when I discovered that sitting on completed entries kills my motivation, since it feels totally artificial to not just post them.)

The big effect of writing for a year is that I feel that my typing has gotten noticeably faster. I think that my spelling has improved to some extent, and I can probably now write faster than a hundred words an hour (on good days; I still have bad days when it feels like I'm trying to extract the entry from a stone with my bare hands).

But the big thing I've discovered is that blogging is surprisingly addictive; I'm actually looking forward to the next year of WanderingThoughts. (And it eats your brain. I think about entry topics all the time.)

More on the Solaris ssh stuff

I discovered today that the unpatched Solaris ssh program doesn't understand the 'GSSAPIKeyExchange' and 'GSSAPIAuthentication' configuration options that are necessary to fix the problem on the patched ssh. (I had them in a $HOME/.ssh/config file that was shared between a patched system and an unpatched system.)

So what appears to have happened is that Sun developed a new version of ssh that implements the GSS stuff, and as a result requires it and the Kerberos stuff to be installed and configured and so on. This is the 'new' ssh included in patch 114356-07 (but not in the -06 version of the same patch) that requires 112908-24 ('SunOS 5.9: krb5, gss Patch').

Later, Sun saw some problems and yanked all mention of current versions of patch 112908 from the patchdiag.xref file, thereby making 114356-07 uninstallable without special magic. However, they did not actually withdraw either 114356-07 or 112908-24 (and in fact 114356-07 remains marked as a recommended patch).

(Some investigation also shows that installing patch 117177 (mentioned in the README for 114356-07) does not help the problem any.)