Hooray! I was one of the first 400 participants in IBM’s Master the Mainframe competition to complete Part 1, giving me this cool, ridiculously geeky t-shirt:

IBM took down the image link :-(

Varun correctly pointed out that the font seems to come straight from Grand Theft Auto. I’m not quite sure what the allusion means.

I’m still debating as to whether I should complete Part 2. I have one more step to go and there are a few spots left to qualify for Part 3, but Part 3 itself is labeled “Approximate time to completion: Weeks to months.” That’s a bit intimidating and I think I have better things to do. That said, I learned more during the first two parts of the competition over the few days I was working on it than I have in any one class in a semester. We’ll see; continuing depends on my mood tonight.

I just encountered a problem where Samba failed to start and just hung before daemonizing.

The last few messages left in /var/log/samba/log.smbd referred to trying to find CUPS: "cups server left to default localhost" and "Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost - Connection timed out". I don't use CUPS since I don't have a printer and the service was not active. Why would it hang on connecting to a service that doesn't exist? For kicks, I started up CUPS without any defined printers to see what would happen to SMB. No luck, smbd still hung at exactly the same place.

Then I realized that I’m a big dummy. Network interface lo was not loaded. I’m not entirely sure how it was removed from my startup configuration. After doing an ‘ifconfig lo up’, I started samba:

Moral of the story: services need lo to use other services on the same box.