Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

I've added commenting. It's likely not at all worth the effort involved, but eh. Maybe now I wont have to try and remember corrections/observations that people send my way via email, once or twice a year. Minor spam protection is in place, but no registration/captcha … for now (let's see how long that lasts). Not quite sure what's proper for this sort of thing, the comment form ends up in the RSS — maybe that's wrong? Doesn't seem to be normal. Existing comments also end up in the RSS version of entries, but do not have their own RSS feed and the UUID isn't altered so there isn't an RSS way of tracking them (that'd really not be worth bothing with!).

Along the way I had troubles getting LWP to work. The reason being that I run apache in a gaol (being a tech-term I guess I should use "jail"?) and it didn't quite have the full set of required files. Anyway, strace is your friend in these instances. Error along the lines of:

500 Can't connect to google.com:80 (Bad protocol 'tcp')

Caused by lack of /etc/protocols and /etc/libnss_files.so.2. Or:

500 Can't connect to google.com:80 (Bad hostname 'google.com')

Caused by lack of /lib/libnss_dns.so.2.

Example of inventorying the files required for something like LWP:

:; strace lwp-request http://google.com/ 2>&1 | \
    grep '^open' | \
    grep -v ENOENT | \
    cut -d'"' -f2 | \
    sort -u | \
    grep '^/\(etc\|lib\)'
/etc/host.conf
/etc/hosts
/etc/ld.so.cache
/etc/localtime
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/protocols
/etc/resolv.conf
/lib/libc.so.6
/lib/libcrypt.so.1
/lib/libdl.so.2
/lib/libm.so.6
/lib/libnss_dns.so.2
/lib/libnss_files.so.2
/lib/libpthread.so.0
/lib/libresolv.so.2

Note that while these files are used by the command they're not all necessarily required. That final grep is just to trim down the list, which is otherwise quite a flood from /usr/lib/