serinde

I have finally stomped a stupid-ass problem which had been nagging for awhile. We weren't processing the uk.* hierarchy control messages, and one of our number of ex-pats noticed and was sad. I looked into this awhile ago, saw "oh, we don't have their key on news's public key ring", rectified that, and considered it done.

Two months later, I had to add another key for another hierarchy, and noticed to my surprise that the uk.* one was missing. Hmm, thought I, could it be that the key ring is disted from the machine wot does disting? I checked, and no, it didn't seem to be. Shrug. I added it again, and made a note to check up on it later.

Last week, the aforementioned ex-pat sent prodding mail saying, basically, "er. Your uk.* hierarchy is so messed up it's not even funny, even though they just sent out a checkgroup the other day." Muh? I checked and, sho' nuff, the key was gone again...and the mod time on the file was last year. Obviously it was being disted. It turned out that, in the midst of my gpg/pgp confusion during the previous round, I'd typoed the path when searching for the file in the dist hierarchy. So I put the key in the disted key ring, disted out last night, and then found today that they don't send out regular checkgroups so I'd best do this one by hand, which news-xfer is now happily munching at. Adding 300-odd new groups and removing a few dozen deprecated ones, whee!

Leaving soon to start the Long Dark Drive of the Soul. I did get Mom's birthday present; I also think I completed all the actual work tasks I needed to get done, Go Me!, but as usual have the nagging feeling of having forgotten something important.