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Ross vs. NoMonthlyFees Tech Support

By ross | July 6, 2001

As you may or may not know, we are being hosted on a server owned by NoMonthlyFees. For $100 per annum, NoMonthlyFees hosts our website on this server. Of course, we share this server with other people… many other people. Does our site ever seem slow to you? It should, because the server is typically handling 3-4 times the load its supposed to be. In other words, 2 processors are doing to the work of 6-8 processors. But at least we get free and fairly timely tech support. I have used the tech support a fair amount, and it is the subject of this bit.

What follows is the back and forth between myself and the NoMonthlyFees tech support people. In summary, the text editor (emacs) I wanted to use while logged onto the server was not behaving as it should. After wrestling with tech support, I finally got them to correct the problem. I am proud of the following conversation because just one year ago I would not have had the knowledge to carry it out.

Here is my question/problem: I ssh into mokeys.org and run emacs. Every time I run emacs, it gives the following error at the bottom of the screen: Opening input file: no such file or directory, /usr/lib/X11/locale/locale.alias I can then use emacs as usual, but this prevents me from being able to start emacs with an open file, like: emacs I noticed that there is a /usr/share/locale/locale.alias I am guessing some config file needs to point there instead of /usr/lib/X11/locale/locale.alias

On Tuesday, 8th May 2001, at 11:11:02 A.M. PST, Carl wrote:
If you cannot live with this, try using pico.
Thanks :)
Carl

I should note at this point that “pico” is another text editor, vastly inferior to emacs.

I would really prefer to use emacs. I did some research and figured out how to fix the problem. I would appreciate it if you would just: ln -s /usr/share/locale/locale.alias /usr/lib/X11/locale/locale.alias which will create a symbolic link so that emacs will be able to find the locale.alias file.

On Tuesday, 8th May 2001, at 11:58:31 A.M. PST, Carl wrote:
Hello,
Sorry, thought of that already. There is already a symbolic link at /usr/lib/X11 that points to a different directory. So, unfortunatly there is no way to create the required path.
Thank you
Carl :)

An excellent point, however /usr/lib/X11 -> ../X11R6/lib/X11 which does not exist! If you cd /usr/lib/X11 you get bash: /usr/lib/X11: No such file or directory So since the link is bad anyway, is there any harm in changing it?

On Tuesday, 8th May 2001, at 1:09:46 P.M. PST, Carl wrote:
I will have one of the admins look at it. I don't want to remove it if it is there for a reason.
Thanks :)
Carl

So, any word from the sysadmin on this situation?

On Friday, 25th May 2001, at 07:46:38 A.M. PST, Bob wrote:
Emacs should now work.
Bob :)

And now I can use emacs with no problems! Of course, they only fixed the problem on the mokeys server, not the one for the secret page server. Crazy web hosting companies…

Topics: bits, conflict, tech | No Comments »

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