Started a new game. I’m sitting in my new spaceship and… that’s it. Actually, a small text on screen indicates that you can contact your “flight instructor” for a tutorial, but I missed that text the first time. Luckily, I selected the instructor ship and opened communication, starting the tutorial all by mysel.

The tutorial asks you to accelerate, providing you with a very helpful display of which key to press, only that it displays the wrong keys. Oops.. At least I discovered that the mouse wheel adjusts speed, so I accelerate. “Well done”, the instructor says.

Then I’m asked to stop and next, to fly backwards. Of course the key displayed is wrong. I press ‘S’ and strafe downwards. “Well done”, the instructor says. What the…? I still don’t know how to fly backwards!

Next I’m told to target a box. Just that… there is no box. After some fruitless searching, I start a new game, do all of the above again and this time, at the same point, some arrows lead me to a box. Were those arrows there before? I don’t know.

Next task. Dock. I select the station and ask for docking clearance. I’m told that I can dock when the docking lights are green. But, uhm, where are those docking lights?

Flying along the station (which takes minutes), I finally discover where my mission target points at. Some kind of docking arm. I fly close. I ram it. I pound into it several times until I notice that the target marker actually hovers over one tiny metal bone of what seems to be the fingers of the docking arm. I fly a tiny fraction towards the finger. Docked.

Immediately, I’m tasked with undocking again. Done. Now fly towards the instructor. He’s 30 km away!

Well, quite some time later, I reach the instructor. There’s another box I have to shoot with my lasers. Err, the box is 30 km away back in the other direction *sob*. I instinctively pressed the ‘J’ key. That always works in space games and so it did here!

Shot the box. I have to return to the instructor. Okay, 30 km back, again. Now, there’s yet another box I need to target with my missiles. Of course it’s 30 km away.

Reached the box. But where are the missiles? Clicked around on the weapons overlay on my HUD.  A small display shows “no missiles installed”. Great, the tutorial is broken, I’m supposed to fire a missile but they forgot to equip me with missiles!

I started over yet again, skipping the tutorial and docked straight away. Nothing to do. Mission: Patrol.

Well, let’s hope the friendly mission target marks guide me to the patrol dudes. Indeed, there’s a patrol ship to which I reported for duty. Everyone’s flying zig-zag. Boring. Pressed ‘J’. Incoming enemies. Finally action!

Some meager ships. Pressed ‘M’ to match speed with an enemy ship. The ship’s computer says “Missile installed”. WTF? So I had missiles with me after all, but have to ‘install’ them… in flight? Damn, I could have finished the tutorial after all.

Shot down the enemies with my lasers (because I don’t know how to fire a missile). Now I’m instructed to fly through some gate. Did so. More enemies. Instead of going for the fight, I search the “control” menu for the “target closest enemy” key (normally: ‘R’), it’s Shift+’T’. Whenever I press it, my selection is simply cleared.

Manually selected the enemies and shot two of them down. Nothing more to do. Wait, isn’t that lasers shooting in the distance? Set course, press ‘J’, wait. As I arrive, the enemies are already dead.

Some jump buoy floats around and just became my mission target. I shoot at it when the ship’s computer tells me “scanning”. Oops. The darn thing had maybe 5% health left. Better wait for the scan to end. Scan ended, read new instruction carefully: destroy buoy. Pang. Done.

Another transmission from somewhere telling me the attack was a diversion. Fly through some gate. Fly through another gate. Wait for messenger ship (huh? what’s up with the messenger? did I miss something?)

Waited some time, now I’m tasked to follow the messenger. The messenger is about 1.5 times as fast as I am, so my autopilot more or less keeps me poiunted at the messenger ship following its predefined path. More enemies appear - too bad I’m 10 km away from the messenger ship.
Cutscene, enemies are destroyed by some pretty brightly lit missile. My computer targeted an argonian ship in the distance. Is this the first contact? I don’t know the story of the series since I stopped playing its predecessors pretty much after the first 30 minutes. And I started this tradition all the way back with the original ‘X’

Nope, the other ships from my patrol arrive (where were they?). Some transmission from nowhere tells me that I’ve done excellent work and defeated all the enemies in the sector (oh yes my cluelessness must have scared them away!). There’s another battle going on or something. The patrol leader says we have to fly through some gate. Then he says “follow my lead” and flies in the wrong direction.

The gate is still marked as my mission target, so I fly through the gate on my own. Several enemies in range. I shoot down two of them when the ship’s computer proclaims “hellbender missile” or something like that. What? Did I just select that missile or is one flying at me? Who knows.

During a dogfight, the computer proclaims: Warning: missile closing in. Since I’m in a dogfight, I’m flying in sharp turns anyway. I’ll just keep doing that. Two seconds later, boom, game over. I lost.

-

Great. That’s exactly the experience I had in the original X 3, too, just that I remember a more polished game overall. I followed the story, then, soon, some pirates or some group attacked me and used missiles. I did that mission maybe 10 times and if the first missile didn’t hit, the second always did. One hit and I’m done for.

What is the point of this? If there’s a good game behind all that, why is the very first thing I could do already broken beyond repair? The tutorial I mean. The missiles are another chapter. Maybe there are flares or something. I would have looked for the key, but as I already found out earlier, the game doesn’t pause, so either I know the key beforehand, or I’ve got exactly two seconds to navigate to the controls menu, find the flare key, close the menu and press it.

I’m not going to part with my money just yet…

Well, last year I received an email from Paypal telling me that my account access had been limited due to suspicious activity and that I would have to verify my informations. Fully expecting this to be another one of those annoying email scams, I had already started a mail to spoof@paypal.com so they can take the scammer’s site down.

However, when I searched the supposed scam email’s source for the URL of the scammer’s site, I found none. I logged into my Paypal account and indeed, while I could browse my previous transactions and view my account history (all of which was as expected), the account page displayed a note that my account access has been limited and that I was to verify my account informations and, amongst other things, provide Paypal with a birth certificate. I wasn’t even allowed to close my account.

I wrote to Paypal, informing them that I’m not willing to provide a birth certificate since I see that as a breach of privacy and that whatever repercussions that would lead to, they should take action. My email was ignored and never answered. For one year, I kept getting nagging mails from Paypal telling me to provide the neccessary information, then it stopped.

Behold, when I try to log into my account now, this is what I see:

My tip if you’re using PayPal: don’t try to leave them with too much of your money at once and keep an eye on possible alternatives.

Update: I sent an email to the address from the error message above. Guess what the answer was?

Dear <name removed>,

We apologize but we are unable to respond to inquiries sent to this
e-mail address. Your e-mail was routed to an unmonitored mailbox and as
such will not be reviewed.  

To resolve account limitations, please complete the following steps:

1. Log in to your PayPal account.
2. Click Resolution Center at the top of the page.
3. Go to the Action column.
4. Click the "Resolve" button and complete the requested steps on each
lifting requirement outlined.

Very funny. I can not log into my account, but to tell PayPal about it, I have to log into my account first. Furthermore, the email is asking me to again follow the steps I am unwilling to comply with.

It appears to me that PayPal is a fully automated system with most decisions defaulting to the disadvantage of the customer. The system will freeze accounts following mysterious rules and an unhelpful, time-wasting and not thought-through customer support system blocks off any attempts to rectify such situations.

Update 2: Out of distress, I created a second PayPal account, navigated to the resolution center and wrote PayPal about my problems again. Make sure you don’t have anything in your mouth that could spill out if you’re starting to lough - here’s the reply from PayPal:

Dear <name removed>,

Thank you for contacting PayPal Customer Support. I will be happy to assist
you with your locked account.

To help you, please contact from your registered email address
cygon@nuclex.org of your locked account.

PayPal works hard to protect our customers, and uses many security measures
to help ensure your protection. For this reason, we can only send answers
for account related information when the request comes from an email
address that is associated with your PayPal Account. We feel that this is
the best way to ensure that your personal information is not compromised.

If you are unable to find an answer to your question in the Help Center,
you can reach our Customer Service Department by following these steps:

   1.  Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.
   2.  Click the "Contact Us" link.
   3.  Click the "Contact Customer Service" link.
   4.  Under "Choose a Topic" section, select the topic for your inquiry.
   5.  Under "Choose the Subtopic" section, choose the subtopic that best
fits your inquiry.
   6.  Enter your question in the "Summarize your question in one sentence"
box.
   7.  Click "Continue.".
   8.   On the "Contact Us" page you will find a few suggested search
results based on your question. If you do not receive suggested search
results or if the suggestions do not answer your question, please complete
the form provided.
   9.   Select the language you are writing your message in from the drop
down menu
   10.  Click "Continue."
If you have an issue of immediate concern and cannot find your answer in
the Help Center, see "Help by Phone" for assistance.

I understand your frustration regarding this matter and regret any
inconvenience it might have caused you, Mr. <name removed>.

For crying out loud. Could it be that PayPal is run by a group of mean jokers?

Let me summarize: Once your account is locked, you’re instructed to contact PayPal by email. The email adress provided auto-replies, telling you to log into your account (which you cannot) and contact PayPal from there. And just in case you create a second account, a friendly member of the support staff will tell you to please log into your other, locked account (which you still cannot) and contact PayPal from there.

I’ve just read my way through 3 of the finest books I’ve had the chance to enjoy in my life:

I have to admit that I have a certain bias towards fantasy stories set in medieval times and that, especially if dragons are involved, it’s hard for me not to give such books a bonus in my personal rating, but still, I think the books in the inheritance cycle are very well written and provide excellent narration.

Maybe my bias shows here already, but when Eragon appeared on the shelves, many critics moaned endlessly about how it was just a mix of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Some plot elements bore a distant likeness to Star Wars and Christopher Paolini used the well-known elv and dwarf stereotypes.

For me, this doesn’t lessen the books in any way. It would become a problem if he actually reused plot elements, because then, I could predict the story and all suspense would be destryoed, but that’s not the case here. Far from it. I think the inheritance cycle tells a genuinely good story.

It’s not without its weaknesses, either. The author sometimes falls trap to the “explainology” that is plaguing mainstream cinema: everything must have a clear and logical reasoning and you better stump the viewer (reader) with his nose into it and then, just to be sure, tell them that they’ve just observed an explanation for the behavior or happening of xy at time z.

The rules of magic in his world also feel like they are becoming a bit of a problem for the author. Magic in Alagaësia seems to be just too powerful. Whereas in other fantasy novels you wonder why the magicians don’t simply telekinetically sever a major artery or smash the brains of the soldiers in an approaching army, in the inheritance cycle, the magicians actually do it.

To counter these attacks, magicians erect wards to protect their own army against such spells. Attacking mages then again will try to find clever and obscure attacks the wards don’t protect against. And if that’s not complicated enough, being a magician is synonymous with also being a telepath, so magicians can battle each other physically, while attempting spells of doom, while using enchanted items and while trying to take control of the enemy magician’s mind.

In short, sometimes, magics seem quite out of control in this story. This earns both a point for a daring and novel idea, but also one for a common weakness in the plot.

Back on the bright side, everything else is solid good work. I am especially happy about how the storytelling doesn’t fell victim to the sightseeing syndrome: while it never stops being interesting, the story doesn’t just jump from spectacle to spectacle with everything inbetween just there to pave the way for another big event.

Granted, you will find this, too, in other books - and if the author is inept, it bcomes real nuisance that’s both boring to the reader and keeps the story from making progress, but I think this is one of the areas Christopher Paolini excels at. Whenever he tells about an unrelated experience by one of the characters, it satisfies something the reader was curious about and he still keeps the tension of the greater story alive.

The consequences of many decisions eragon has to face are as difficult to see for the reader as they appear to the character himself. And eragon doesn’t follow the accepted code of chivalry for modern action heroes. He loses his temper, makes a wrong decision or chooses to create a lesser evil to prevent a larger one. He is neither the typical anti-hero I guess most of us are now fed up seeing depicted again and again in mainstream entertainment nor is he the brilliant knight in shining armor.

The books also don’t shy away from depicting evil in the most real sense: torture, grave unjustice and crimes for which you just want to hit your clenched fist on the table while reading. Who wouldn’t want to punch Galbatorix in the face - again and again - after reading what he really did near the end of Book 3?

-

So, as you may guess, in my opinion, while the concepts used are not novel, the inheritance cycle is a very well executed and unique story with interesting characters and all the suspense, emotions and beauty I could have wished for.

When I google for reviews, I get the impression that everyone is fond of criticizing the inheritance cycle, but I say this was one of the best reads of my live. I’ve bought the first three books and when book four is published, I shall buy them all again in a matching slipcase.

A book doesn’t define itself by how eloquent it’s written or by how novel the ideas are alone. A book should stoke emotions, entertain and if you will, satisfy some primal urges along the way. That, at least for me, is what makes a good book.

When I played Sacred 2, I came across a guy with really good face textures that looked familiar somehow. Clicking on him, he revealed himself as Hansi from Blind Guardian! After doing some quests in which undead metal fans had stolen the band’s instruments, I was given a performance from the whole band in sunwind. Pretty cool!

The last time I’ve seen a real band appear in a game was Gothic 1, where one night, In Extremo played in the old castle. Now I’m torn between buying the game to support this fantastic idea (and the band, of course) and boycotting it to protest against the silly copy protection.

After thinking long and hard, my final decision was to buy the Collector’s Edition and post in the game’s forums, explaining just like I did here, that the only thing that made be rethink my decision to boycott the game was the performance by Blind Guardian.

Turns out Ascaron, the game’s developers, stand firmly behind this copy protection. Just so much as mentioning DRM in your post will get it deleted instantly, referring me to a forum with one (!) thread where everyone that wants to talk about DRM should post. So much for my attempt at providing friendly feedback to the developers. Apparently this is how it works these days:

a) Make random assumptions about how some crazed copy protection scheme is going to save the day

b) Dump your game out into the world

and c) if one of your customers comes along to give you some friendly, non-demanding feedback, plug your fingers into your ears and shout “lalalalala”

Or, if you prefer an analogy, assume your government would not allow people to voice their opinion except for in a small, dark room where hundreds of people complain to each other without the public being “influenced” by those naysayers. That would be a very ethical use of the government’s power, wouldn’t it?

So, to say it a little bit less friendly this time: Ascaron - you guys suck!

I’ll try to cancel my order on amazon and buy some Blind Guardian merchandise instead. Thanks for nothing.

Whenever I boot my top-of-the-range Asus motherboard, I’m greeted by a colorful picture intended to hide the actual boot messages, lest they scare the user. On this screen is written “Performance, Stability, Reliabilty“. Yes, that immediately convinces me that this message reflects the actual work that went into these things.

When I turn off my PC at the boot screen, it will warn me that the previous boot failed and asks me whether I want to continue or enter the BIOS setup. If I select continue, this message will come up again at the next boot, and the next, and the next. But if I turn off my PC at the boot screen again, the message disappears. Yes - if the user says it’s alright, keep nagging him. But if the same error occurs again, then it’s probably alright.

Recently, my brand new Western Digital 1 TB HDD (Raid Edition 2) developed bad sectors. 1365 of them, even though it was never moved an inch.

To locate and mark all current defects on the drive, each sector needs to be written to. Windows Vista’s checkdisk of course restarts at sector 0 each time it is run. It takes more than 6 hours to reach sector 100 (!), making it… mildly… inpracticable to scan the entire disk in one session. So checkdisk is out of the equation.

Trying to force the HDD’s controller to mark the bad sectors by formatting the entire drive has the same issue. Windows Vista’s partition manager doesn’t resume formatting after a reboot. The partition will just be marked as successfully formatted when you reboot during formatting.

If you try to cancel the formatting process, nothing happens. Even Minutes later, there’s no reaction from Vista. So that tells me the reboot is probably not even waiting for the partition manager to finish, leaving the partition in who knows what state.

While I’m formatting, whenever the drive encounters a bad sector, Windows Vista will deep-freeze for a fraction of a second. So it becomes quite hard to click on anything with the mouse and preventing you from working or playing on the machine while the drive is being formatted. Of course, audio playback stops too, so should you decide to watch a movie instead, that experience is utterly destroyed as well.

I’d like to close with a list of the files I found in my Mercenaries 2 folder:

d3dx9d_27.dll
d3dx9d_32.dll
d3dx9d_34.dll
D3DX9d_36.dll
d3dx9_32.dll
d3dx9_34.dll
d3dx9_35.dll
d3dx9_36.dll
dbghelp.dll
msvcp71.dll
msvcp71d.dll
msvcr71.dll
msvcr71d.dll
msvcr80.dll
msvcr80d.dll
xinput1_3.dll

For the non-programmers reading this, that’s the Visual C++ 2003 Runtime for C and for C++, the Visual C++ 2003 Debug Runtime for C and for C++, the Visual C++ 2005 Runtime for C, the Visual C++ 2005 Debug Runtime for C, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c December 2006, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c June 2007, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c August 2007 and D3DX from DirectX 9.0c November 2007.

Wow, just wow. Did anyone even have the slightest idea what they were doing? You’re not allowed to distribute even half of those DLLs in that form as per Microsoft’s license. I hope someone (hopefully a junior programmer or worse) just panicked and put everything he could think of in there to make it run because… the other possibility… scares me.

What I was looking for was a fast downloading client that used little resources and that I could run in the background as a service or daemon. I had tried MLDonkey on Windows Server 2008, but it was quite a pain to get set up right and torrent download speeds weren’t all that great (plus some trackers have actually banned MLDonkey). Azureus has a textmode GUI that I could theoretically combine with a WebUI plugin, but that would still be a bit too heavyweight.

That’s when I discovered rTorrent. It runs in the console (and thus, you can run it with DTACH) and can be controlled via a simple XMLRPC interface. And then there’s wTorrent, a nice-looking, nifty Web 2.0 AJAX GUI written in PHP that you can run in Apache or lighthttpd. I’m now running a daemonized rTorrent with the wTorrent GUI and it’s working so well it’s almost too good to be true

BitTorrent Performance

Now I have tried µTorrent, Azureus, Halite, BitComet, MLDonkey und some more, double checked that I had opened the required ports (using nmap from a server on the internet), used random ports >50,000 to avoid throttling, tweaked my settings and what not, but download speeds were, at best, average.

I left rTorrent running overnight with a 7 GB download. One that had somehow caused my Windows Server 2008 system to commit suicide by paging in no time, or that would complete but still have missing chunks. After one night, the torrent was at 60%, the next day it was finished. And that’s no exception.

RAID / Samba Performance

I reported a stable 20 MB/s upload in my last post. Forget that, it’s a stable 40 MB/s now that I’ve got no compile or torrent rehash running in the background. And download speeds are at a stable 60 MB/s — I believe that’s pretty close to what the hard drive I’m downloading to can do.

This is just incredible. It’s still the same hardware, but the new system could run circles around my old setup.

RAID5 was a simple matter of activating the required kernel options (which I already did beforehand). Somehow, mdadm created a RAID5 array with one spare. I haven’t investigated this much further, but it seems this allows the array’s initial synch to work faster. Whatever, I didn’t want it, so after finding out how to take the RAID array down again, I used mdadm with –spare-devices=0 and –force to have all disks UP from the beginning.

Using –chunk to set a block size of 128 kb and mke2fs with the -E stride=n,stripe-width=n options allowed me to tailor the RAID array’s stripe size to the file system. Not that I expect any noticeable gain, but it’s easily done and can’t hurt.

Next was samba. Gentoo makes this surprisingly easy. emerge samba, edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and you’re done. It took some effort to figure out how to create a password protected share, so this is what I did:

I’ve got a linux user named ‘cygon‘ on this system. This was created with the good ol’ useradd script. I added this user to /etc/samba/smbusers as an alias for “administrator” and “cygon“, so the file now looks like this:

# Unix_name = SMB_name1 SMB_name2 ...
# $Header: /var/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/net-fs/samba/files/config/smbusers,v 1.1 2007/09/07 21:07:40 dev-zero Exp $
#root = administrator admin
nobody = guest pcguest smbguest
cygon = administrator cygon

Then I set up a password for this user with smbpasswd -a cygon.

Finally, I created a folder that I wanted to share, assigned it to the user “nobody” (this is what samba uses for all files creates by guests) with chown nobody:nobody /var/storage/raid -R. This I then added in my /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[Protected]
  comment = Administrative share for the entire RAID array
  path = /var/storage/raid
  public = yes
  guest ok = no
  writable = yes
  printable = no
  force user = nobody
  force group = nobody
  create mask = 744
  directory mask = 755
  valid users = cygon

‘Public‘ says the folder can be seen by other network users. ‘force user‘ and ‘force group‘ make samba assign all files and folders created from networked users to the ‘nobody‘ linux user account and ‘nobody‘ linux group. Likewise, ‘create mask‘ and ‘directory mask‘ are the attributes assigned to folders created by network users. Finally, ‘valid users‘ tells samba to only let the listed users access the share.

That’s all it took to get this working.

The funny thing, again, is that performance and reliability increased by an order or magnitude compared to Windows Server 2008. I configured Samba to always act as my domain master browser, so when I browse my network neighborhood in windows, one click and all PCs on the network appear — immediately. Instead of 20 seconds of searching and then maybe half of the local PCs showing up.

File copies to and from the array are easily 4 times faster than with windows. And, most notably, they run much smoother. Windows Server 2008 accepted an average 20 MB/s for several seconds, then blocked hard for a while (probably flushing its insane cache), then accepted data again. Download speed was kept up longer, but also wouldn’t go over around 25 MB/s (30 MB/s tops) during the whole transfer (at least until the cache grows to the size of the physical RAM and the OS starts paging out unimportant things, like its own kernel, the DHCP server, its TCP/IP stack, DNS database, the RDP server and any running foreground application the user is currently working with)

Now Samba, which is just an implementation of Microsoft’s SMB protocol, pieced together by logging network packets, combined with a (Soft-)RAID 5 partition manages a stable 20 MB/s upload and a stable 60 MB/s download. And the kernel just takes the load - no suicide by paging, swapping out of vital system components or anything noticeable happening at all! The copy beats the original - by far.

The install CD passes some unterminated string coming from GRUB to the linux kernel as a parameter. This string then creeps into your environment. When you chroot into your system as it is being installed (and maybe forget to env-update && source /etc/environment - might have happened to me because I chrooted quite often until the thing could boot itself), this unterminated string in the environment gets saved.

Linux version 2.6.24-gentoo-r7 (root@poseidon) (gcc version 4.1.2 (Gentoo 4.1.2 p1.0.2)) #1 SMP Sat Jun 21 06:59:43 UTC 2008
Command line: root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc dokeymap looptype=squashfs
loop=/image.squashfs cdroot vga=791Y^ÛóØÐö^A^È´þ¸7Õ^Fð>å)Ë6B¿u
^Cª^×ÎV^Gé^K¿ú^Éþ¢Xm.^ÍdrRW½Y^×g^Ú^C¤^ÛQ’ñ÷^5÷Vb²Iuf2õ^Ê°ý^ÁÀ¶^U§^Ï7ãÞ÷;9^U^Òg^
Y^SÛKÈÅd^Ù_^Óê|äKºpN» ðK´¸¼ “NÇ@ܹ¤À×ÉTÊHõ^Rùc;¨øÁ²^Ñ=PcûmMùÒû^É^YH^Óò^É!

I think gentoo’s emerge stores the environment in which a package was installed so that, when the package is uninstalled, this can be done under the exact same environment. For example, if you installed PHP with the apache USE flag, it would have installed the apache extension for php. If you now remove the apache USE flag and uninstall PHP, it wouldn’t know that it has to uninstall the apache extension — unless you let it run in a sandbox with the exact environment at the time of installation.

/var/tmp/binpkgs/app-text/ghostscript-gpl-8.62/temp/environment

[…]
vga=$’791Y\233\363\330\320\366\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001
\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001
\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001
\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001\001…
[…]
vga=”791Y^ÛóØÐö^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A
^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A
^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A
^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A^A…

To make a long story short, this saved environment was close to 500 KB, maybe only limited by the maximum environment size being reached. Add just one more thing to the environment (something an uninstall sandbox would likely do) and restoring the environment causes it to overflow.

Whenever I tried to rebuild a package or update it, emerge would fail with an error message (and continue doing its stuff — ignoring that a required package just failed to install — wow!).

/usr/lib/portage/bin/ebuild.sh: line 1496: /bin/touch: Argument list too long

This sucks pretty hard. Not knowing how to solve this, I tried increasing my kernel’s environment size and then (after that didn’t work), tried to rob portage of its saved environments. For that, I used find|grep to make a list of all environment.bz2 files in /var/db/pkg. Then I tried to tar the files in the list with the –remove-files option and when couldn’t get tar to do what I wanted, I tried passing the list to rm.

Well, ultimately I managed to clean out my entire /var/db directory - with the exception of my list of files to delete.

I started a reinstall from scratch, this time explicitely unsetting the vga variable in my install CD’s environment before even so much as touching emerge. Hope it works out this time around.

My Gentoo Linux 2008.0 x64 install went extremely smooth. The install CD recognized my networking settings, PPPoE dial-in took just a few minutes to get working after launching the SSH daemon, I could conveniently install the system using PuTTY on my Vista box, allowing me to cross-reference the installation guide and playing some games during the longer tasks.

I still don’t have any idea how people get their linux kernels trimmed down — I simply don’t know what options I really need and which just sound like I might be needing them. Thus, I went ahead and selected any device drivers that sounded like my hardware, then added the most likely options for raid, vpn, ppp and routing.

After GRUB was installed (which was a lot easier this time around since I’ve only got one boot partition - the server hosting my blog uses two boot partitions on different hard drives as a fail-safe mechanism), the kernel booted, networking was working and basically everything just did what it should.

Amusing fact: my Corsair memory modules have LED indicators on them that display the current memory bandwidth similar to a volume indicator in a stereo. With Windows Server 2008 idling away, the LEDs were wildly flicking between 50% and 75% load. Now with linux idling, only one lonely LED (out of 20) is lit up.

It took me some time to get NAT (IP masquerading) working and I’m still not sure I got my iptables configuration right. The examples I could find on the net all had some confusing and from my limited knowledge erroneous rules in them, so I decided to try it myself. This is what I’ve come up with:

# Generated by iptables-save v1.3.8 on Sat Jul 19 16:00:29 2008
*filter

# According to man, there are three "chains"
#   INPUT = Packets from outside with a destination on this machine
#   FORWARD = Packets being routed by this machine
#             (happens when another machine in the network has this machine
#             configured as its gateway)
#   OUTPUT = Packets being sent from this machine
#

# These are the default rules. They will only apply if a packet makes it
# through our rule maze without matching any rule we set up.
#
:INPUT ACCEPT [158:13292]
:FORWARD DROP [4:224]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [1123:117012]

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #
# INPUT (packets destined for this machine)

# Allow all packets originating from the local network to reach this
# machine. This in effect means we trust anyone in the intranet.
#
-A INPUT -s 192.168.124.0/24 -j ACCEPT

# Of course, we will also accept packets we sent to ourselves.
#
-A INPUT -s 127.0.0.1 -j ACCEPT

# This lets any connections, once established, keep running without
# forcing the packets through all the rules we set up.
#
-A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

# Here would be the place to local open ports in your firewall. To allow
# a web server running on this macine to be contacted from the internet
# using your ppp0 adapter, use this example:
#
#-A INPUT -i ppp0 -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
#-A INPUT -i ppp0 -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

# All other packets are rejected
-A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #
# FORWARDING (packets being routed through this machine)

# Allow any packets from the local network to be routed to
# the internet connection on ppp0
#
-A FORWARD -s 192.168.124.0/24 -o ppp0 -j ACCEPT

# Allow any packets coming in from the internet connection on ppp0 to
# be routed to the local network
-A FORWARD -i ppp0 -d 192.168.124.0/24 -j ACCEPT

#-A FORWARD -i eth0 -
#-A FORWARD -s 192.168.124.0/24 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT

COMMIT
# Completed on Sat Jul 19 16:00:29 2008

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #
# NAT

# Generated by iptables-save v1.3.8 on Sat Jul 19 16:00:29 2008
*nat
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [38:2923]
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [31:2379]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [40:3005]

-A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

COMMIT
# Completed on Sat Jul 19 16:00:29 2008

# Generated by iptables-save v1.3.8 on Sat Jul 19 16:00:29 2008
*mangle
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [3568:275800]
:INPUT ACCEPT [3564:275576]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [4:224]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [3551:635930]
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [3551:635930]
COMMIT
# Completed on Sat Jul 19 16:00:29 2008

I’m currently recompiling the entire system to make sure the stage3 packages match my compiler settings. That will probably take a few hours, after which I will proceed to set up Samba, MySQL, Apache, KDE and, ultimately, 3D acceleration and Unreal Tournament 2004

Lots.

Installing the game killed my system. Obviously, the game employs the heinous StarForce copy protection system and the StarForce driver on the game DVD is incompatible with Windows Vista x64.

Luckily, I’m already prepared for these almost regular incidents and within 20 minutes, my drive image was restored. After some googling, I discovered a StarForce update that you can install after the game (but before rebooting) to get it working.

Next, I tried to register for an online account. The game simply displays the message “Registration Failed: Invalid CD-Key”. How great.

Being at least able to play offline, I tried to create an image of the game’s DVD in order to play with the image mounted in Daemon Tools (Advanced Pro’s IDE drive). Guess what? StarForce just hangs until I unmount the DVD, at which point it crashes.

Fantastic. So for buying the game, I can not play online and have to play disc jockey, fetching the CD each time I want to go for a drive.

Had I just downloaded a pirated version, I wouldn’t have been able to play online, too, just like it is now. But I wouldn’t have to keep the CD in my drive, my Vista x64 wouldn’t have been screwed up and I would not have the revolting StarForce drivers on my system.

What exactly was the point of all this key code and DVD verification stuff?

Maybe game producers could just stop pressing DVDs altogether and upload their game, cracked, to a warez site. Honest people then just transfer the money to their bank account and can play like everyone else - without fucking up their systems, trying to decipher badly printed CD keys and waiting for shipping.