From ghost Sun Aug 10 11:52:27 1997
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 11:51:50 -0700 (PDT)
From: ghost@vix.com (L Peter Deutsch)
To: alvin@planet.fef.com
cc: rasko@kset.com, rob@cisco.com, chrisd@loc201.tandem.com,
        rick@hugin.imat.com, ghost@vix.com, ghost@aladdin.com,
        director@well.com
Subject: Results of Saturday's work at Aladdin

Hi Alvin,

I regret to say that the state in which you left Aladdin's systems at the
end of your work on Saturday is contrary to my explicit instructions and
has created severe problems for me.  As you know, I had to leave at 5:10
PM: at the time, you were installing a tape drive in genie, and I
understood that you would stop there and we would arrange a time for you to
return to continue working.  However, you apparently continued working for
quite some time after that.

        1) I stated in both e-mail and verbally to you that the first task
I wanted carried out was to upgrade carpet (the laptop) to Red Hat 4.2,
including getting X Windows to work and getting the 3com 3c562 PCMCIA card
to be able to talk to both the Ethernet and the serial port.  You did not
upgrade carpet.  You did get X Windows to work, but only at a very low
resolution (apparently 240 x 180 pixels), which is useless.  You did not
get the 3c562 to talk to both the Ethernet and the serial port; at least,
/dev/cua1 doesn't exist.  (/dev/cua0 is the serial mouse.)

        2) I stated in both e-mail and verbally to you that I did not want
genie upgraded until carpet was upgraded to my satisfaction.  You went
ahead and upgraded genie anyway.  The result of this is that (a) I don't
know what state the hardware is in (df shows /dev/sdb1 and sdb2 -- did you
install another disk? -- but not /dev/sda1 and sda2), (b) mail is not being
delivered from vix to genie (but even if it were, I wouldn't be able to
read it on lamp, since emacs' rmail facility relies on getting mail from
/var/spool/mail which used to be a cross-mount to the same directory on
genie but which I unmounted at your request), and (c) the ppp link is so
unreliable as to be unusable -- it drops carrier about every 20 minutes (it
stayed up for many days at a time before the upgrade), and as of midnight
last night, it was unable to reconnect to vix.com after 2 dialing attempts
and therefore (because of a poorly written restart daemon script) never
reconnected.  The evidence is from "last | grep ppghost" on vix.com:

ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 23:57 - 00:41  (00:43)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 23:30 - 23:54  (00:23)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 22:39 - 23:16  (00:37)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 22:21 - 22:38  (00:16)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 22:13 - 22:21  (00:07)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 21:38 - 22:08  (00:30)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 17:57 - 18:06  (00:09)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 17:39 - 17:53  (00:14)
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 17:08 - 17:36  (00:27)
>>> upgrade happened here
ppghost      tty06                         Sat Aug  9 01:26 - 16:43  (15:17)
ppghost      tty06                         Thu Aug  7 11:19 - 01:25 (1+14:06)
ppghost      tty06                         Sun Aug  3 01:36 - 11:18 (4+09:42)

	3) You left genie in a state where it apparently will not accept
remote logins.  While this may be desirable, it is not the way things were
before; I gave no indication that I wanted this changed; and it makes it
impossible for my previous system administrator (who is located on the East
Coast) to assist me.

I appreciate the work that you have done, especially the acquisition and
installation of the tape drive, but at this point things are much worse
than when you started, and if they don't get fixed within 24 hours they
will have a severe negative impact on my business, which relies almost
entirely on e-mail for communication with customers and business and
development partners.

Please call me immediately at my home # (650)329-0264 so that we may
arrange for you to return as soon as possible and get my environment back
to a usable state.

L. Peter Deutsch         |       Aladdin Enterprises :::: ghost@aladdin.com
203 Santa Margarita Ave. | tel. +1-650-322-0103 (AM only); fax +1-650-322-1734
                         | ** NOTE ^^^ NEW AREA CODE AS OF AUG. 1 ^^^ **
Menlo Park, CA 94025     |        http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html
            "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."


From ghost Sun Aug 10 12:16:26 1997
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 12:15:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: ghost@vix.com (L Peter Deutsch)
To: alvin@planet.fef.com
cc: rasko@kset.com, rob@cisco.com, chrisd@loc201.tandem.com,
        rick@hugin.imat.com, ghost@vix.com, ghost@aladdin.com,
        director@well.com
Subject: More on Saturday's work at Aladdin

I noticed the following in the notes you left:

	1) "We have successfully installed 4.2 onto our hard disk 4Gb (IDE
drive = hdb)."  Sorry for my confusion in the previous e-mail: I misread
hdb as sdb in the df printout.  I now understand that you installed a 4Gb
IDE drive with 4.2 on it.  This is worse than useless to me: if I use this
drive for real work, I'm stuck with a lower-performance drive (IDE drives
are generally lower-performance than SCSI), while if I don't, I either have
to drop back to 3.0.3 (which I have no idea how to do) or be paralyzed
(i.e., unable to use genie for any purpose that might involve storing new
information) until you come back to install 4.2 on the SCSI drive.

	2) "X11R6 is working -- need to fix bus mouse vs. serial mouse".
In other words, X isn't usable on genie; it was perfectly usable before the
upgrade, although some peculiarity of the display controller made it
impossible to switch back from X to character mode (the display lost sync).

	3) "Your old genie is still untouched, though the old 3.0.3 kernel
does not recognize the network card while new Red Hat 4.2 is OK."  genie
had no problem talking to the network card before the upgrade.  This means
that whatever you did prevents me from going back to 3.0.3 and having a
usable environment, because network connectivity is necessary for telnet,
ftp, and mail.

Please call me immediately when you get this e-mail, regardless of day or
time.  I didn't realize before reading your notes more carefully that not
only are things badly broken, I apparently can't go back to the way they
used to be.

L. Peter Deutsch         |       Aladdin Enterprises :::: ghost@aladdin.com
203 Santa Margarita Ave. | tel. +1-650-322-0103 (AM only); fax +1-650-322-1734
                         | ** NOTE ^^^ NEW AREA CODE AS OF AUG. 1 ^^^ **
Menlo Park, CA 94025     |        http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html
            "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."


