vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$ scp -r vivin@www.vivin.net:~/code/agnostic .
Password:
ps: Process environment requires procfs(5)
Initializing new SSH agent...

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$

I fixed the procfs problem by adding the following to my /etc/fstab:

proc                    /proc           procfs  rw              0       0
linproc                 /compat/linux/proc      linprocfs       rw      0       0

and then running:

vivin@enterprise ~
$ sudo mount /compat/linux/proc

vivin@enterprise ~
$ sudo mount /proc

So I try to scp again and I get:

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$ scp -r vivin@www.vivin.net:~/code/agnostic .
Password:
Initializing new SSH agent...

vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code
$

WTF? Then I remembered making some changes to my .bashrc to be able to commit to github:

function start_agent {
  echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
  /usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' > "${SSH_ENV}"
  echo succeeded
  chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  /usr/bin/ssh-add;
}

# Source SSH settings, if applicable
if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
  . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
  #ps ${SSH_AGENT_PID} doesn't work under cywgin
  ps -ef | grep ${SSH_AGENT_PID} | grep ssh-agent$ > /dev/null || {
    start_agent;
  }
else
  start_agent;
fi

I pulled all that out of my .bashrc and made a separate shell script for it. After I did that, scp started working again. I had no idea that calling scp would actually run .bashrc

openssl s_client -connect localhost:995

Everything seemed fine. Furthermore, this problem seemed to be limited to both my FreeBSD servers. My Linux box seemed to be running fine. I tried a bunch of things. I restarted both machines, restarted the network interfaces, made sure firewalls weren’t running, reset my router… nothing seemed to work. Every time I tested the connection to the machines (using this awesome tool here), the connections would time out. What was even stranger was that a netstat showed connections to be in a SYN_RCVD state, which meant that the box had accepted the connection. It’s just that the response wasn’t getting out. Eventually I was so desperate that I decided to reinstall FreeBSD on one of the machines. I also posted to a BSD forum asking for help. I figured that next evening I could probably fix it after work.

Well, next morning I still felt terrible, but it wasn’t so bad. My throat wasn’t hurting as much and I didn’t have that much of a headache so I was able to work from home. Oh, and the installation had completed. I set everything up quickly and gave it a whirl. Nope. Same problem. Yeah, I was getting pretty frustrated and annoyed at this point. I went so far as to contemplate wiping my beloved FreeBSD off both machines and putting Linux on there. I updated my post at the forum and I checked on it periodically throughout the day as I kept working. Finally, a kind soul popped in to help me out. He helped me troubleshoot using tcpdump and I was able to confirm that the machine was responding to the incoming connection, but it wasn’t going out. Finally, he asked me to check the routing information. I’m not that well-versed with that so I didn’t see the problem until he pointed it out. The routing information was all wrong!

See, I have two network interfaces on the box. One for my internal network, and one pointing to the outside world. The one pointing to the outside world is statically configured, whereas the one for my internal network picks up its configuration from my AirPort Extreme router. What was happening was that dhclient was overwriting the route information. So when the machine tried to respond back, it saw its default route as the internal router, and not my modem! I had to update my dhclient.conf and force the router address to the correct one:

backoff-cutoff 2;
initial-interval 1;
retry 10;
select-timeout 0;
timeout 30;

interface "vr0" {
   supersede routers 209.x.y.54;
   supersede host-name "enterprise";
   supersede domain-name "xxxx.xxx";
   request subnet-mask,
           domain-name-servers;

   require subnet-mask,
           domain-name-servers;
}

The important line here is the one that says supersede routers 209.x.y.54; (I’ve hidden the actual numbers from teh hax0rs). This tells the dhclient to override the router information that it gets from the DHCP server. Once I did this, everything started working again. My thanks to jggimi at DaemonForums!

Source: Qwest.net: How much do static IP addresses cost and how many addresses do I get?

I had a hard time understanding this. I mean, I’ll admit that I’m not a networking expert. But how hard can setting up static IP’s be? Does it really take $50 worth of work? I’m assuming it involves some configuration – probably a few keystrokes or something of that nature. $50 for that? Maybe it’s completely different from what I think. Maybe IP addresses are huge blocks of stone that need to be moved from place to place, therefore there are obvious labor costs. Whatever. $50 sounds ridiculous to me. I figured I’d talk to Qwest and see if they could explain this cost to me. I didn’t get anywhere with the reps online, but the prompt and helpful folks at @TalkToQwest finally emailed me with an answer:

Hello Vivin,

After doing a little research on the matter I have found out a little more about the business decision to charge for setting up Static IP’s. Initially, there is a lot more in the way of system software that has to be implemented on our order side to facilitate these orders as apposed to the standard issue.

Additionally, the potential costs of features/functions that are afforded the customer with these services potentially require more resources and as such, cost to maintain and implement.

The setup cost is a way to spread that cost across the specific platform at what is considered a reasonable amount. How exactly they come up with this figure is of course something that I would not be privy to and would be considered proprietary marketing/business internally confidential information that I could not disclose any how, but that is the basic reason why we charge for the setup. There are cost unique to Static IP’s and they need to be covered.

Hope that helps explain it a bit anyway.

Not exactly the answer I was looking for, but I appreciate the time that the rep took to write me an email, and I guess I did understand the rep’s point that there are some costs involved. But come on, now… The point about “cost to maintain and implement” – I assume that this could easily be covered by the $14.99 I pay them every month. Other than that, I don’t see any reason to have a setup fee. If you ask me, there’s really only one reason. I apologize if I’m being cynical, but honestly I think it’s just a way for Qwest to make a quick buck. I can’t think of any other reason. I also don’t really buy into the whole “proprietary marketing/internal business/confidential” aspect of this, because come on… it’s just networking. I’m assuming that not too many people care about the fee, or ask about it and so Qwest is able to get away with it. Come to think of it, whoever invented the concept of a the “setup fee” is a genius. It’s a technical and important-sounding phrase that is also completely meaningless.

Anyway, I decided to take the hit and order them because I need the block. But overall I think it should be mandatory for companies to itemize and describe all the elements that make up a “setup fee” instead of just charging their customers some random amount. As customers we have a right to know what we’re paying for.

Problem

XP installation starts, runs for a while and then crashes with a blue screen. I rebooted and tried to install again. Same problem. Did this three times. No difference.

Solution

Forget about installing XP professional. See if you can use the Alienware recovery CD and get XP Home back.

New Problem

CD won’t boot for some bizarre reason. Later I found out that the machine had a problem recognizing signals from the USB Keyboard. The strange thing was that it would recognize the F2 keystroke for the BIOS setup, but wouldn’t recognize anything after that. It would say “Press any key to boot from CD…”, I’d press any key and nothing would happen. XP Installer would boot up (and crash).

Solution

Remove hard drives from the boot sequence. I’ll see if I can force it to boot from the CD.

Bigger Problems

Boot failure. Also, after restoring the boot sequence, it says the OS is corrupted. I still can’t boot from the Alienware Master CD.

Solution

Try to boot up with FreeBSD CD. It worked! I installed FreeBSD on the 20Gb hard drive. Tried to boot up, but kept locating the 75Gb hard drive. Switched boot sequences. It worked! Mounted the 75 Gb as an nfs mount using mount_ntfs. Tried to move everything to /. Said it ran out of space. That didn’t make sense! I knew there was a whole lot of space left on the 20 Gb. Then I realized that / was on a different partition and that I should install it on /usr. Did that. Pulled out hard drive, put it into my FreeBSD machine (I could have left it in there and just transfered it using another mount_ntfs after I wiped out the 75 Gb and installed XP Professional… but it was 3 am and this didn’t occur to me). XP Installs fine. So now I set up the network and set up a shared dir on the XP box. I try to mount it from the FreeBSD box using sharity light. It dies. Then I figured out I had changed the machine name. Tried it again with the new machine name – it worked! Then I mount the 20 Gb. I go to /usr on the 20 Gb to get my files…

Really Big Problem

I can’t find my files!! ls on /usr gives absolutely nothing!

Solution

Then suddenly I had an epiphany… I was mounting /dev/ad1s1. This means drive 1, slice 1 as FreeBSD organizes the drive into partitions, and different dirs are mapped to different partitions. I try to mount /dev/ad1 directly and it gives me a superblock error. So then I try /dev/ad1s2 – same problem. So I goto /dev and list all ad1 devices. I see a bunch of /dev/ad1s1a, /dev/ad1s1b and so on… So I tried mounting those and eventually found all the rescued files. Then I transferred everything over the home network to my XP shared dir. Problem solved! I have XP Professional and everything works fine… well almost. The BIOS and XP can see my 20 Gb hard drive, but it doesn’t assign it a drive letter… I formatted it (using FreeBSD so that might be a problem… except I don’t think so, because I just zapped all the partitions), but it still doesn’t see it… I’ll have to figure out how to fix it. Also, Qwest is sending me a Cisco 678. Then I can buy some static IP’s and set up my webserver… finally! Ahhh… This was a very trying experience, but I learnt a lot…

I’m sooo happy!!