* * * * *

  Sometimes, I wish software were alive, so that I could take the occasional
 program out back behind the shed to put it out of my misery and maybe scare
 the rest of the little software programs to behave unless they too, wish to
  spend the last few seconds of life out behind the shed. What? Me? Bitter?

One of our customers has been having this weird email problem for the past
few weeks, and the fact that we're still working on it means that we haven't
exactly solved it yet, nor have we (rather, I) found the source of the
problem (and the problem? Mail from one of our webservers, S, is being sent
to our customer's colocated email server, W. Now, email for W goes through
our spam firewall B. So, we have S → B → W. But somewhere along the way, the
mail is bouncing back to S with the error “Client host rejected: too many
connections( 2 ).” Unfortunately, this is on B, the spam firewall, which is
an appliance, which means, we have very little control over its operation,
but I digress).

Now, because of that, I've been having to check the logs on various servers,
which include the spam firewall. The only way to check the logs on the spam
firewall is through a web interface. Said web interface is restricted such
that connections from certain IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are allowed,
all others rejected. That's fine, except when I'm not at Casa New Jersey.
Then, checking the spam filewall logs is rather difficult.

So I figured I would install Firefox [1] on my virtual workstation at The
Office. I could then run the browser there (which is allowed access to the
spam firewall) and have it displayed on whatever computer I happen to be
using (assuming I'm using X Windows [2]). So, on my virtual workstation, I
issue the following command: yum install firefox.

Problem number one: I haven't fully thought this through (more on this
later). Problem number two (and the more immediate problem at this point):
I'm using yum, a package management system. Oh, it installs Firefox all
right. But somehow in the process of installing Firefox, yum, for some
bizarre reason, decides to delete the contents of /dev.

Now, for those of you who might not be familiar with Unix (of which Linux is
a derivative), the contents of /dev are special files that enumerate the
devices on the computer. Deleting the contents doesn't actually delete the
device drivers (code that manage the devices), but it does make it hard for
any programs to find any devices to use. Which leads me to problem number
three: my virtual workstation is now useless.

[DELETED-How yum deleted /dev-DELETED] (no—scratch that—I know how yum
deleted the files, obviously by using the unlink() system call) why yum
deleted /dev/ I don't know. There's no reason why installing Firefox should
do that. I resist the urge to debug yum and figure out why it did that, and
just accept the inevitable fact that ocassionally, yum will just decide to
delete /dev (and possibly other useful stuff like /bin or
/home/sean/images/pr0n) and get on with my life (and the problem at hand,
which is a dead workstation).

I manage to get my virtual workstation in working condition and now I'm able
to log in, and run Firefox.

Oh, that's right—Firefox will check for a locally running instance and tell
that one to open up a window [3], because, you know, sending all that GUI
(Graphical User Interface) traffic across the network makes it run even
slower, **even though that's what I want, you stupid piece of XXXX!**

Sigh.

And it seems that the latest version of firefox doesn't even support the -no-
remote option.

Aaaaarrgggl!

So I go do what I should have done in the first place (problem one)—use an
ssh tunnel: ssh -L 8080:spamfirewall:443 virtual-workstation. Then I can
point my locally running broswer to http://localhost:8080/ and login to the
spam firewall.

Now I can get back to solving the actual issue with email.

[1] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/
[2] http://www.xorg/
[3] http://spc.hates-software.com/2007/01/25/73ba6651.html

Email author at [email protected]