Sat Jun 23 23:00:00 CEST 2018

arto: not quite there

arto.marshlabs.gaertner.de is my first installation of the Arch Linux distribution. It lives in a disk partion of my fourth(!) Atom-N270 netbook. This one also hosts carlton (Solaris10) and philip (Debian-9). Because the Arch project dumped the i368 architecture last year, arto is actually an install hinged on the archlinux32.org fork.

I like Arch's combination of traditional BSD values (a lean base installation and the assumption that admins are capable of reading documentation) with modern linux technologies (systemd etc.).

After the install in March 2018 and some initial update, today was only my third or fourth boot of arto. So far, I had configured the network only manually and ad-hoc. The next step now is to find the proper place to nail some sort of network configuration down.

A few days ago I had already done some research. Arch systems come out of the box with the options to do the network setup either with plain systemd-networkd or the Arch-specific netctl. The latter is apparently a tool to manage different network setups and switch between them, for example when travelling around with a laptop. Today's original plan was to look more into this, and at least to get into the basics of systemd-networkd.

I didn't come even close to tackle anything of this today, though. What led me astray: my login.

I did not want to work directly on the netbook console today for various reasons:

  1. The netbook's keyboard layout is a bit awkward around the right shift key.
  2. The fan is activated every 5-10 minutes. It is just a short one-minute run but a bit noisy and irritating.
  3. I had other machines to tend to, too, all of them already present in my desktop screen assembly.
  4. I definitely needed a screen with a graphical web browser, not the least for reading the Arch Linux documentation.

So I wanted to log into arto from remote but the arch-linux base installation comes without sshd. It does have telnetd and rlogind on board, though. I manually started the latter, logged into the system, and the rest of the day was spent on just two topics:

  1. pacman(8): How to enquire about local and remote packages, check for packages, and add them. Find the files associated with a package and vice versa.
  2. systemctl(1) etc.: How to properly enable a service such as rlogind.

In particular, I learned that systemd's socket units replace the traditional inetd services.

Some surprises today: connecting to rlogind turned out to be difficult for various reasons. Out of the box, rlogind will listen on IPv4 and IPv6 (good), but the daemon will fail on DNS-verifting the IPv4 client address because it will be presented as a compatible v6 address (i.e. as ::ffff:1.2.3.4). Also, when run as systemd-service, the PAM modules wouldn't authorize my logins.

This still has to be analyzed in more detail.

Meanwhile, sshd is already installed and should be running the next time I boot arto. Perhaps, just perhaps, I'll get around to do the address configuration then.


Posted by neitzel | Permanent link | File under: learned, marshlabs
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