Latcarf's Locution

Definition:

fractal wrongness

    The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

    Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

    If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

Taken from Keunwoo Lee : Lexicon 2

I saw this in the grocery store checkout line the other day... It struck me funny.

I coined a new term the other day to describe what happens while browsing the internet and following links to various places. Sometimes, you set out to look for some information on something and end up learning about something entirely different than what you set out to research.

This phenomenon happens alot on Wikipedia but it spans the cyberspace in general just by it's very nature of "hyperlinked" information.

So my new word is "infotrip." This the perfect name for the birdwalk that so often accompanies internet research.

So, have fun "infotripping!"

I just got two brand new Xserve build machines and the first thing I did was wipe out the default Tiger OSX Server install and install Leopard OSX Server instead. That wasn't too bad except for the fact that I had to go through the setup assistant first in Tiger before being able to boot off the Leopard disk, wipe the drive and install.

After I got Leopard OS X Server up and running on the Xserve, I tried to ssh out from a user account to another machine (my source repository server) that's running 10.4. While establishing communication, ssh had this huge delay (more than a minute - I think). I had to figure out what was going on so I ran ssh -v to get the verbose output from ssh while it was connecting.

The verbose output showed this.

debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information
Server not found in Kerberos database

debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information
Server not found in Kerberos database

debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information

So, I went spelunking in and ended up comparing the /etc/sshd_config files on both the local (Leopard Xserve) and remote (Tiger source repository) machines. I found on the remote machine (Tiger source repos) that Kerberos authentication was turned off by default but commented out.

So, I changed this:

# Kerberos options

# GSSAPI options
#GSSAPIAuthentication no

to this:

# Kerberos options
KerberosAuthentication no

# GSSAPI options
GSSAPIAuthentication no

in the /etc/sshd_config file on the remote (Tiger OS X server) and reconnected via ssh without a problem. Then it was on to more work setting up my new xserve build systems.