Upgrades from Hell : Masquerading 2 Upgrades from Hell : Masquerading 2Went over to friends place, with 1.2GB drive in Laser IDE frame, ready to do a backup in case things needed to be reinstalled. Turns out that they have a Pentium 133, and it's only got 32MB memory. They were starting up half a dozen programs at boot that they didn't need, and didn't know how to get rid of. I recovered some addresses from thin air (I have no idea where they came from) and they were very thankful.
That done, it was back home, and I went to try and sort out masquerading.
I enabled IP packet forwarding in the proc file system
Then I had to tell IP masquerading to do its thing.
I looked at the IP.Masq HOWTO file, and found a reference to IPFWADM, which I dutifully downloaded, only to find that it was superceded by IPCHAINS.
I got the IPCHAINS rpm, and tried to install it, but kpackage kept saying 'this version of RPM can only handle program revisions <3.0', which I found out was a reference to the fact that the Red Hat package manager system had changed to version 4, and RPMS packed with version 4 were UNREADABLE with version 3.
No problem, download the RPM4.0 rpm, but wait, it was packed with (you guessed it) RPM version 4! I couldn't unpack it to install it. Sheesh.
So I looked around the net, and many people had run into this brick wall, to which the answer was 'get rpm 3.0.5 it can read version 4 RPM's'. So I download the rpm 3.0.5.26mdk mandrake specific RPM, and try to install it, and it says that it needs a couple of dependancies, one of them being libbz.so, and the other was a conflict with something called menu<-????.
Ok, so I get the SOURCE for rpm4.0, but when I try to compile it, I get errors about libbz.so, I need bzip2.rpm to have the library ..
I got bzip2.rpm to get libbz so that I could try and compile 4, but it was packed with rpm version 4!!! Talk about catch 22.
I went looking on the net some more, and the answer kept being 'use 3.0.5 to unpack rpms packed with 4.0', but the libraries I needed to make 3.0.5 work weren't on my system. I checked on the CD's Chris had left me (Mandrake 8) and they were there, but packed in RPM4.
I later learned that in order to COMPILE rpm4 you needed GlibC2.2, which meant a kernel update! In other words I had to upgrade the ENTIRE operating system to be able to upgrade the package manager to install one lousy little ipchains package, which I needed because I coulnd't INSTALL the latest version of Linux because it wouldn't recognised my SCSI card.
What a fucking abortion.
Eventually I downloaded a 3.0.5rpm that wasn't Mandrake specific, and wonder of wonders, it actually let me look at Version 4 rpms. I was able to install ipchains, and then I was able to issue the masquerading command to make this box accept TCP/IP traffic from Val's machine.
Unfortunately I don't have DNS (named) running on here, and configuring it takes a bit of nous, and files that I don't have because my other linux box is in purgatory at the moment. Which meant that Val could get out to numeric IP addresses, but domain names like www.google.com were unavailable.
Eventually I figured I'd just set up her dns to what my DNS currently was according to conf.resolve, and whammo, suddenly Val can do web browsing, and downloading at 50Kbytes/second! Wheee.
Then I tried to install fancy mail readers and failed, so I used the built in one. Simple, but it works. Then I used krn, and it worked, and here I am.
I can't play the games I really want to play, and I just hate the incompatibilities that plague me whenever I want to install something. I tried to get tin (a newsreader) and got the source, but cannot compile it, because it's complaining about some damned curses library, which I cannot 'upgrade' because all these other libraries depend upon ncurses, blah blah blah.
Linux is a fucking pain in the arse.
Anyway, it's going.
My next step is to upgrade my linux box to something that doesn't have an ISA network card, and does have a CDROM. I think I'll just get a new network card, a new CDROM drive, and a new 30+GB hard drive (I think the motherboard is only 8GB aware ... so I'll put the 30gb drive in my machine, and take out the 6gb drive and put that into the linux box. Then I'll build a Mandrake 8 system on there ... eventually I'll piss linux off this box, and go back to Windows 2000, where I am FAR more comfortable, and able to play my games.
It's now 10:30 and I should be going to bed if I'm going to get up at 7am, but dammit, I want to play on the net! Another late night.
Hope you weren't all bored to tears. For those of you who think it was too technical, just read it all as 'it was too technical for Dac', for the linux gurus out there (Hello Dags) who think I'm a twonk for not being able to get around basic things like getting a kernel to compile, GO FUCK YOURSELVES, :-)
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