Today I am old enough where I am required by law to become a conservative and stop listening to rap music. I get to wear my pants pulled up high and say "why these kids today..." a lot.

Last night I was up quite late setting up a SAMBA server.

I have a linux box that I built last year out of spare parts. I did splurge and bought a mainboard for something like $75, and I got a non-ATX board because of that idiotic power thing. Cripes, when you have a server, why do you want it to stay off if there's a power outage? Contrary to popular belief, Linux recovers quite well from a power outage. It just takes some time.
Now I originally got the box set up to learn Linux for a job which dissolved quickly, but I still like the idea of knowing Linux. It also helps me to understand network administration, and eventually I want to have it be the main gateway for my LAN. I'd also like to be able to serve web content from the machine as well. Maybe not the whole website, but things like media files which take up huge space. It's a little tricky with the firewall and all, but I know it can be done. It's not a priority, but it's still a plan.

The Samba server works as a file server for windows machines. It enables the Linux box to act like a windows file server that is shared across the network. It's not hugely necessary, as the internal network is pretty much peer-to-peer, but it does help me understand network admin stuff (as well as just being geeky-cool).

So once I got all of the IP issues worked out and was successfully able to ping all the individual 'puters from the Linux box, the main (Win2k) machine was able to see the shared directory just fine, but the Win98 machine couldn't. After some searching and swearing, I found that Win98 needs to have NetBEUI installed. Once that little thing happened, all was smooth and untroubled.
All in all, relatively painless. I still need to make sure I have smba and nmba properly added to the xinetd file to make sure they start up at boot time, but at least I know how to do that.

I slept in this morning (because I could). I awoke to ALL of the pets being on the bed wishing me a happy birthday by allowing me to pet them as much as possible. It was actually pretty nice.
Yesterday morning, I had put a piece of beef in a marinade and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Today I hauled out the grill, and had the first grilled beef of the season. Just managed to empty out the last of the propane from last year, and in the downtime, I played dog soccer, which consists mainly of a game of I-got-the-thing-you-want-the-thing. Fun dog-play time.
And tasty cow-flesh. Yummy!