Stebalien's Blog

Hello, and welcome to my blog! I post sporadically on random subjects from Linux to Emacs. Check out my tags if you want to browse posts on a specific subject.

If you want to be notified about new posts, this blog has an Atom feed feed. However, unless you want to read my every rant, you may want to subscribe specific tags instead, each of which has its own Atom feed. Most feed readers will correctly deduplicate entries so you shouldn’t run into any issues if you subscribe to multiple tags.

2008-03-12

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

I just signed up with 1and1.com and found that they do not offer marginally advanced DNS settings and allow only five subdomains. To work around these limitations I signed up with Xname.org. They allow unfettered customization of the DNS record and are free. I very much recommend them (and thank them).

2008-03-09

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

Today I spent 10 hrs fixing my hostname.

I had just bought the domain stebalien.com and was fiddling around with my network settings with network-admin and found the domain box. I typed in my new domain to see what the setting did. Nothing happened for a while so I erased the setting and changed the hosts file back to its original state (without the domain name). Later, while I was using Firefox, my session crashed. I logged back in and received this error:

(process:6725): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

(process:6729): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

I was consequently logged out. This error had nothing to do with the hostname so I assumed that one of my files had been corrupted. After reinstalling half of my system (sudo aptitude reinstall packages) and looking through all of my configuration files I finally logged in using startx. I was immediately logged back out with a hostname internal error. I spent another hour going over my host configuration files (/etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, …) and all of my DNS configuration files. I finally logged back in using the Failsafe Terminal, typed in sudo network-admin and re-added my domain name, logged back out and in, and my session did not crash. I then proceeded to launch firefox. The page did not load. I could ping, tracerout, and use elinks (a text based web browser for the console) but I Firefox would not load any website. I tinkered with my network-admin settings for 15 minuets before I finally realized that I had a backup of my network-admin settings. I restored my settings and proceeded to write this blog post. I am still clueless as to what my problem was but am happy that it was at least fixed.