Finally got myself a laptop

So, after 13 years of marriage and three laptops purchased for Cathy, she finally forced me to buy one.

I had been eying an Acer Timeline for church for weeks. The specs are such that it hits the sweet spot for me. 14", LED screen, 8hr battery life, 4.4 lbs, with a built-in optical drive. I love it.

At least I did until Saturday afternoon, when I closed the lid and it never came back on. Not even a POST. Acer said to send it in so I took it back to the Microsoft Store.

They have them back in stock, so I got my replacement, no hassles. They're also running a promotion, buy a laptop and get a monitor for free. Not only did I walk back out with my replacement laptop, I also got the last free LCD screen this week! They'll have more next week, though.

If you're in the market for a 14" laptop and a 21" monitor, call the Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo! It was about $540 out-the-door.

Samba 3 on SCO 5.0.6

SCO OpensServer 5.0.6 came with Samba 2.2.2, and you could update to 2.2.8. With the arrival of Vista, Microsoft began defaulting to NTLMv2. There are tweaks (Vista here, Windows 7 here) to allow workstations to connect to Samba 2.x, but ideally you would want to upgrade to Samba 3.x. There is not a release supplement from SCO to do this, but you can install Samba 3.0.14Aa via Skunkware.

On SCO OpenServer 5.0.6 we'll need the following patches (in this order of dependence):

• RS506A - Release Supplement for SCO OpenServer Release 5.0.6 (ver rs506a)
• OSS646C - Execution Environment Supplement (ver 1.2.0a)
• OSS663A - LPD supplement for OpenServer 5.0.6 with OSS646
• gwxlibs-2.1.0Ba - Supplemental Graphics, Web and X11 Libraries (ver 2.1.0Ba)

The gwxlibs-2.1.0Ba update is available from ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/opensrc/gwxlibs-2.1.0Ba/
The OSR 5.0.7 version of Samba 3.0.14Aa is available from ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/samba-3.0.14Aa-VOLS.cpio

You'll want to create a directory (say /tmp/samba3) and download the .cpio file there. If you are not familiar with CPIO files, you can examine the man page, or just run this command to produce the VOL files:
cpio -idmv -I samba-3.0.14Aa-VOLS.cpio

I'm going to assume you know how to install VOL files in SCO software manager. All four (rs506a, oss646c, oss663a, gwxlibs) can be installed as media images. For the existing Samba 2.x, I usually just disable it in custom rather than removing it, but YMMV.

The startup files are /etc/init.d/smb and /etc/init.d/nmb. Samba looks for /etc/samba/smb.conf for the configuration. You should be able to backup your original configuration and drop it right in for Samba 3.

Be sure to check /etc/rc2.d for startup files. I create symbolic links to the startup files like so:
ln -s /etc/init.d/smb /etc/rc2.d/S99smbd
ln -s /etc/init.d/nmb /etc/rc2.d/S99nmbd

You can reboot the server, or just run the the rc2.d scripts:
/etc/rc2.d/S99smbd start
/etc/rc2.d/S99nmbd start

I looked for a Samba 3 solution on SCO 5.0.6 for a client that is was having streams memory leak issues, and I'll have to wait to see if that helps upgrading to Samba 3 helped. Neither SCO's knowledge base nor Google was terribly helpful in the memory leak or running Samba 3 on 5.0.6. Frankly, I don't know if Samba 3 would break something else (such as CUPS / LPD). But, Samba 3 is running on my SCO 5.0.6 system now.

UPDATED (04/23/2010):  I added a note about installing OSS663A. Also, it did help with the streams memory leak on that SCO OpenServer system.

UPDATED (11/14/2011):  Updated the links to Samba3 on Skunkware and the patches. Expanded explanation on restarting Samba.