Strange package installation behaviour
 

Hi all,

I left my ADSL-connected PC updating to slack-current the other night. I happened to sit and watch for a while when I noticed packages were just sitting there and seemingly not installing.

As Swaret installs Gnome 2.6 packages, it seems to pause on some and the activity light on my network switch goes mad. Opening another console on the machine and running a netstat shows a lot of traffic towards a particular IP. An nslookup returned the IP being part of Cable & Wireless (.com) but did not resolve a host / machine or anything?

Has anyone else noticed this sort of behaviour when using the slackware-current gnome packages? The same behaviour can be seen when doing an installpkg /var/swaret/*.tgz so its obviously not a swaret problem.

Very strange...

I'd normally say to reboot and try later, but this isnt windows. I doubt it's a swaret problem, i've only used it a few times myself. It's possible it was the server you were connecting to that was having difficulty. Other options, kinda far fetched, are that you were being arp poisoned, or something to that effect.

Well it appeared to stop, so I suspect it was just a strange glitch. There was no inbound traffic according to the logs on my adsl firewall. I'll just put it down to little green men ;)

On the plus side, I now have Gnome 2.6 fully working. I love it! Now, if only waimea was stable and easily accessible...

Thanks for the reply :)

You running an unencrypted wireless network? Someone may be using your router with their card. I know it happens because when I went on vacation last month to North Carolina, I had access to 4 wireless networks from my hotel. Various businesses around the hotel were using these networks w/o encryption and i hopped right online.

Just a quick word, Frank --

A detective like you should know... While wardriving itself isn't illegal, utilizing someone else's bandwidth or network without their knowledge or consent definitely is ;)

--Shade

Sure it's illegal, but unless you get caught it's their fault. Even if you do get caught, they get nailed for it. They can't even pull the oh I didn't know how to secure my AP, the po po would have to say, oh well, too bad.

True, i'm guilty of it myself. Just playing the devil's advocate ;)

--Shade