So I've been mostly silent here since Thursday last week. My weekend was spent largely away from the computer, as is often the case, lost in my own thoughts and reading. I read all of Terry Goodkind's Chainfire and most of The Phantom of the Opera (yes, the real book, not a novelization of the opera or movie). I also went to see PVI's production of "Bye, Bye Birdie" with the family and Lauren. It was very well done, very enjoyable. Chainfire was somewhat dissatisfying. While it did somewhat depart from his earlier habit of lecturing instead of advancing the story, it did not completely do so (which I suppose would be too much to ask, but would be nice considering the first couple books of the series). My real gripe however is the incomplete way in which it ended. It is very anti-climactic. Rather than a resolution, it merely achieves a recognition of the problem it presents and introduces. Hopefully the next in the series will be better. The Phantom of the Opera is more … complete than the movie or opera is. Naturally, or at least "naturally" in the sense that Hollywood always does so, Andrew Loyd Weber saw fit, in creating first his opera and then his movie, to edit and redact the novel, simplifying the plot line. One thing that does improve with the movie is a more successful portrayal of the author's attempt to act as a historian rather than a novelist. In the movie especially you get the sense of a flashback to real events, real history, real mystery, in the book, it is not carried off anywhere near so well. He refers to letters and interviews as the source of his story, but knows too much of the characters' motivations, emotions, and thoughts for that to be an accurate explanation. He references Christine's letters, some police reports, interviews with some of the other characters, yet in places he knows of things that the vicomte alone should have known, the one person he does not list as a reference. Still, it is a very good read, and I do not regret purchasing it. Far from it, for, as I said, that flaw aside, it is in may ways a more complete, well rounded story than the movie presents, and thus, in its way, more satisfying.
So much for my reading. An equally large reason for my absence
from this one-voiced forum is the perplexing nfs problem I've
been hitting. From all I understand, /etc/exports
should be able to handle both notation in the form of
192.168.50.0/24 and 192.168.50/255.255.255.0. However, after 2
days of blaming the kernel or the bproc configuration, we have,
more or less accidentally, discovered that only the former works.
Complicating the issue, both 192.168.50.0/255.255.255.0 and
192.168.50.* notations will work in some situations, most
notably where a reverse look-up fails.
It is the times where things work that it
is more strict. This seems incredibly
counter-intuitive to me, and was the cause of the delay in my
discovering the true cause of the problem. You see, the host in
question was serving nfs mounts on two interfaces, and the other
interface, denoted with the same /255.255.255.0 type notation,
was working. So naturally I did not think to suspect
the identical (except for the specific IP range of the network)
notation for the other network. Still, at least the problem was
discovered and is now fixed.