tlug: post-saikochiku trauma

[Tony Laszlo <laszlo@example.com>]

First, a note on mojibake with kterm+pine and then what appears to 
be an annoying glitch in pcmcia configuring process. then, new problems
regarding a scsi card+tape drive, ppp and sendmail. I would appreciate
advice from sempaitachi on the latter. 


* Kterm+pine mojibake: 

for those wondering what became of the kterm+pine mojibake posted
earlier, I have received no suggestions.
I've decided to live with occasional mojibake while reading Japanese
messages in pine, at least until I find a better way of
sending/receiving both Japanese and Chinese mail (I plan to 
be looking at Mutt and Xemacs+gnus next). 

* PCMCIA: 
I have reconfigured kernel on my laptop again and haven't been 
so lucky this time (I've just used the 2.0.36 kernel source, as that was
handy on the CD that comes with TL 3.0.2 for Chinese).
after make dep, clean, zImage, modules and modules_install, I found
that I couldn't access pcmcia for the life of me. It took me a day and a
half with lots of 
recompiling, cussin' and swearin' before I found the problem to be in 
/etc/sysconfig/pcmcia . with "PCMCIA=no" (instead of =yes) written here,
obviously one is not going to be using pc cards. It seems that nothing
one does during compiling can change this line (but I could be wrong);
i.e., one must find the problem and change it manually. This seems to be
a problem that needs fixing to me. If the user knows about the situation
or knows where to check, it takes just a minute, but life for the
average duffer trying to compile the kernel could be made much easier if
this manual step were not necessary. 

SCSI card/tape drive: 
Happily, I have access to pcmcia slots now, but the next problem is
a Logitec lpm-scsi2 scsi card which is connected to a tape drive I 
picked up recently (card is listed among those supported). The tape
drive, an ibm internal backup tape drive, is not supported by ftape
(hasty buy, but it was the only tape drive I could find in all of Akihabara 
and was cheap; ya win some ya lose some). I have read that it may 
be possible to use the tape drive from linux with dosemu and cpbackup
(is cpbackup shareware or would I have to find it and buy it, btw?).
thought I would try that before giving up on this tape drive so I
connected everything up (the drive is sitting in a scsi case) and stuck
the scsi card in the pcmcia slot. this act causes all kinds tape
movement inside the tape drive and something like 
" scsi : aborting command due to timeout : pid 1, scsi0, channel 0, id 1,
lun 0 Test Unit Ready 00 00 00 00 00" . would be nice if that meant I
was getting somewhere, but the tape drive continues to make noise and
nothing more appears on the screen. I can't ctrl-z, -c, -x, -d or
three-finger salute it out of whatever it is into. only way out has been
to power down. The exact same error message appears when I attach 
a MO device to the scsi card or when I just insert the card with nothing 
attached. I hear this may be an IRQ conflict which will go away 
after compiling a more recent kernel. Why didn't I use more recent 
kernel source? Tried that but got some funky error which didn't allow 
me to mount the primary partition (error about VFS something?). tried
that a few times, wasn't able to remedy the problem so I took the path
of least resistance with the earlier kernel source. scsi card doesn't work
but at least everything mounts.
and the soundcard works so at least I can listen to Djavan and Tom Waits 
while making the upteenth zImage...


* PPP: 
You may notice from the email header that I am writing this from
Windows. That's because I have suddenly and mysteriously been 
relieved of my PPP. Just imagine: if something goes wrong with 
Windows, next I'll have to pull out an old Nec98 compatible dos 
machine to write to you folks. 
Anyway, the command "pppd" results in squiggly lines running across 
the screen (left to right - guess the tide's going out) so I suppose the 
 kernel has been configured for PPP. "insmod ppp"and "modprobe ppp"
result in a "can't find ppp module" error message. lsmod shows nothing
 related to ppp. 
Loss of ppp occurred after I changed /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia , btw. Until
that point, I'm pretty sure I was able to use ppp with the new kernel.
When booting the system with my old kernel (on which ppp has been
functioning), I don't have ppp either. I should mention that there is an
error message when booting which reads "can't locate ppp module". this 
same error message was present before recompiling but I had been able to
use ppp. I was able to get rid of this ppp module (and slip module) error
message by commenting out the relevant lines in /etc/conf.modules, btw. 

I should also mention that 
"grep -i serial /usr/src/linux/.config" revealed:
               CONFIG_SERIAL=y
and that I recall selecting "y" (rather than "m") on ppp related 
line in xconfig. These are the choices I made when compiling: 

#
# Appletalk devices
#
# CONFIG_LTPC is not set
# CONFIG_COPS is not set
# CONFIG_IPDDP is not set
CONFIG_PLIP=m
CONFIG_PPP=y

#
# CCP compressors for PPP are only built as modules.
#
# CONFIG_SLIP is not set
# CONFIG_NET_RADIO is not set


here is the relevant command from ppp-on, the file I use to start ppp
and connect to the isp:

exec /usr/sbin/pppd debug lock modem crtscts /dev/cua1 115200 asyncmap
20A0000 escape FF kdebug 0 noipdefault netmask $NETMASK defaultroute
connect $DIALER_SCRIPT name $ACCOUNT

running ppp-on does not give an error message; absolutely nothing
happens. 

* other module problems? 

other module problems exist, I think. When compiling the kernel I 
selected paride.o, ppa.o and the printer module. the zip drive is not 
recognized, insmod ppa doesn't work and the printer keeps complaining 
to syslog that it is out of paper. 

as you can see, I've still got quite a bit of work to do on this before 
everything is running normally. 


* Sendmail: 
I am using a friend's sendmail.cf and think it is working 
except for the line that I marked with "!!!". the sender's address winds 
up as "laszlo@" rather than laszlo@example.com (or laszlo@example.com 
on my localhost), resulting in a failure to send. 

# The following two macros modify for local delivery
R$-		$@$1@$W
R$+@$=w		$@$1@$W
R$+@$=w.$m	$@$1@$W
!!!     (could be this next one)   
Rlaszlo@$m	$@example.com@$W

# Ruleset to Overwrite Sender's Address to Internet
S10 
!!! (could be one or more of these) 
R$-		$@$1@$m		# Fortunatelly my email domainname is my
hostaddress
R$-@$w		$@$1@$m
R$-@$=w		$@$1@$m
R$-@$=w.$m	$@$1@$m


My previous sendmail.cf  which had been generated by linuxconf 
had the following lines in it: 

S10
R<@>                    $n                      errors to mailer-daemon
R$+                     $: $>50 $1              add local domain if needed
R$*                     $: $>94 $1              do masquerading


I got the bright idea to transplant the above four lines into
sendmail.cf instead of my friends lines that begin with S10 . 
This resulted in error messages saying something like "expected a 
tab after (each of the transplanted lines)"... looked to good to be 
possible and was...

I want to switch to my friend's sendmail.cf mainly because my old
configuration was causing a loss in incoming mail and didn't upload the
mail to the provider (rather it sat on line until each outgoing message was
sent). 

also just to check: 
both incoming mail and outgoing mail is appearing in /var/spool/mqueue . 
Is that the normal situation? If I run sendmail -q before procmail
finishes processes the incoming mail, it looks like sendmail tries to
send the _incoming_ mail out along with the outgoing mail. 

Appreciate your help on the above issues. 


             Tony Laszlo  laszlo@example.com (Jiyugaoka, Tokyo)
_/_/_/_/* ISSHO:  http://www.issho.gol.com


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