THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 180 November 19 - 25, 2001

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Don't forget LOSCON at the Burbank Airport Hilton, Friday - Sunday. I'll be speaking a couple of times and doing a book signing.

The war in Afghanistan can now pretty well be left to bounty hunters. As to the "p0litical settlement" my advice is to bring in the King, give him some air support to finish the Taliban, and promise him more air support as needed; then get the hell out except for a small visible presence at an airport out of range of artillery from the mountains. Leave enough forces to have security there, set up a US compound to educate our kids and let any locals who work at the base have access, and just operate as a friendly ally. And stay the hell out of local politics.

I doubt we will do that.

It worked in Viet Nam for several years though, until the Democrats in Congress declined to keep that commitment and North Viet Nam invaded with more armor than the Wehrmacht ever had. Viet Nam accordingly fell, but we threw away a victory: the place had been won and was increasingly pacified until the massive invasion from the North. But Afghanistan doesn't face an enormous invasion from a sanctuary area.

Incidentally, the current strategy in Afghanistan was brilliant: start off looking incompetent. Have Pakistan open the borders to let the hotheads stream into Afghanistan to support the Taliban. Gain Air Supremacy, but don't do much, bombing mostly infrastructure and staying away from anything really significant.

Look incompetent. Look as if the US Air War is not going to do much. Let the hotheads stream in.  The allies are getting antsy. Hold off, hold off, let more in --

Close the Pakistan border and now turn the Air Force and Navy loose. Pound the suckers. Turn loose the now supplied allies.

The place falls in a couple of days and look how many Pakistani hotheads are trapped in Afghanistan!  Makes life simpler for the Pakistani government, doesn't it?  Brilliant, I say.

On BIOWAR: I have put up a long and sensible discourse. See the Security page of the Black September War section.

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Season or a bug, I have zero energy or ambition today. Apologies, but I think I am going to veg out.

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So. Yesterday DirecPC and WinProxy were working. Last night I shut down Mercury, the system that connects to the satellite and uses WinProxy to connect every other system on my internal net, and turned on the NetWinder. I have done this a couple of times a time since we started doing this. There is one site I cannot connect to unless I have an actual IP non-NATted address, and the DirecPC won't do that for me.

So this morning, because the NetWinder and my 56K modem system will not connect me to www.byte.com (presumably because of the complexity of the www.byte.com page, but I don't know; all I know is that I can't get it) I shut down the NetWinder and turned on Mercury and the satellite system.  Earthlink mail worked perfect. I could connect to www.byte.com just fine. But I could not connect to www.jerrypournelle.com or to www.msn.com or to mail.jerrypournelle.com or to a whole bunch of other stuff, and no mail to me at my primary address jerryp@jerrypournelle.com could get to me.

Investigation showed that I could not ping those addresses either, at least not from the machine here in my office. Some things worked. Most did not.

More investigation showed the problems were not the satellite: that I could connect just fine from Mercury, but anything going through WinProxy didn't work unless it was through WinProxy to Earthlink. That worked all right. But WinProxy didn't allow me to connect to mail.jerrypournelle.com or even find an address for it: unknown server. I did not get that error if I went to the Mercury console, but if it had to pass through WinProxy it wouldn't work.

I shut down Mercury and tried again. Nope. No ftp to anything so I can't update this site either. Since you are seeing this you may infer that I have shut down the satellite and I am back on 56K dialup.

Now I will, when I get this posted, go make one more try to get the satellite and WinProxy working again, but I have little confidence in it. And understand, nothing changed so far as I know, anywhere on my net. Just that WinProxy is caching nonsense and won't let go, or something like that. 

And I had intended to write fiction today. Instead I am stamping out small computer fires, and cruising the World Wide Wait trying to see why some people cannot order Roberta's program; yesterday was spend getting IC Verify working so she could accept credit card orders.  I am going to set her up with PayPals which ought to make some of that a little easier. But all that times time.

And it all means I will get nothing done today.

I get very discouraged. 

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May we be truly thankful.

The Gunner's Prayer on a Man O' War was "For what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful," said just before an enemy fired a broadside. 

The United States took a hour's worth of highway casualties from the anthrax attacks, and about a month's worth of highway casualties from the attacks on the World Trade Center. We have incurred more costs from our new security measures than the value of all property destroyed by terrorist attacks, and of course the war will cost more than that. We also submit to bullying that does little to nothing to improve security: the other night one man got through a metal detector without being searched, and an airplane took off before he was found, so all the people of TWO airports were sent outside, both airports were shut down, and to what purpose? But that is the way things are in this world.

WORM WARNING SEE MAIL

The saga of WinProxy and the DirecPC satellite continues. I'll turn off the NetWinder and try DirecPC and WinProxy one more time. The problem has "fixed itself" before; perhaps again. But I won't do it until I have posted this, so as of this moment neither you nor I know if it has corrected itself. Not that this is enough: I need to find some other system for sharing the satellite connection.

HURRAH! Dan Spisak came over. The satellite system was ALMOST working: it would get to mail.jerrypournelle.com and mail.earthlink.net but it could not find www.jerrypournelle.com or www.msn.com which meant clearly that the DNS servers were not working. Looking into WinProxy DNS server settings we saw a bunch of them, none of which we recognized. We have now replaced those with a list: Earthlink DNS (which was there before and is clearly not reliable), Pair.COM DNS server (which Bob Thompson says is always up), one at a system maintained by Dan because if it goes down he gets beeped, and one at RoadRunner. One of those should work.

You are getting this through the satellite. Hurrah.

And now I have the most amazing scam to report. See mail.

I noticed that you were interested in what was the latest on Sklyraov. This is the best information I could find...

http://freesklyarov.org/ 

--Dave

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Well, the satellite system is working now that we have given WinProxy some reliable DNS servers to look at. Now it looks first to Earthlink, then to Pair, then to one maintained by the company Dan works for on the theory that if it goes down he'll be paged before I can find out about it, and finally a DNS server run by RoadRunner.  If all four of those are gone, the Internet is probably gone too...

Fortunately this seems to have fixed the problem. Of course as soon as we got it fixed and went to do some testing the satellite itself decided to go intermittent. I wonder if the crows perch on the dish? But as soon as I begin to tear my hear in frustration the darned thing works again.

The only answer to this is the one I gave in the column, once it is working properly leave it alone, and have patience and faith. It will eventually begin to work again, usually within a couple of minutes. 

When it works it works well, and downloads are very fast. But it has a good critical need detector...

Thanks to Dan and Roland for helping me get this problem solved.

And I am off for LOSCON

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LOSCON today also.  

Yesterday at the XCORP demonstrations I was happy to find that Karen Anderson had come down for LOSCON. I'm always glad to see her. 

I have to get moving if I'm going to be there for my book signing...

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Yesterday was fun if exhausting. Dinner with Niven, Tim and Serna Powers, and Kelly and Laura Fries. 

I will probably stay home and work on Burning Tower today. And maybe open the Janissaries file...

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