The Heart Is An Open Source: A Romance
Jessica Von Petzold was a woman in desperate peril. Pursued by the
minions of her evil husband the Baron, she rode her white stallion
furiously into the night, her enormous bosom heaving in fright. Oh how
they had laughed when she built the stables on the third floor of the
Union Square office building from which she had built up her lingerie
business into an international e-tailer that rivaled Amazon.com. But
dotcom money was plentiful in those days and tonight her investment was
paying off. Onward she rode, onward, headless of wind, rain, and the 45
minute delay at the Holland Tunnel. Onward to the only man who could save
her now.
Flint Hannigan stood in the doorway and gazed out at the rising sun. It
was time to attend to his morning wood. Flint always got wood in the
morning. With no sound but the occasional grunt, Flint got to work.
Within half an hour the job was done. Flint put down the axe next to the
pile of split logs and took of his shirt. A figure approaching over the
horizon had piqued his interest.
As Jessica spied Flint in the distance, his chiseled pectorals faintly
glistening with sweat, she felt a giddy sense of elation. A feel she had
not felt since the first time she reached the 8th level in JetPac. At
last the tide was turning in her favor! Her enormous bosom, heaved with
delight. But her musings had made her careless and her horse stumbled
sending her flying -- into the arms of Flint. She managed to stammer,
"Flint, oh Flint...MX records...I must...virtual domain...," then such
concentrated masculinity became too much to bear and she fainted.
Jessica did not awake till that evening. She found herself in a Victorian
four-poster bed. She pulled back the satin sheets and sat up to see the
shadowy form of Flint standing above her. As her eyes adjusted to the
gloom she gasped in astonishment. "My God Flint! That thing is huge!"
Flint turned on the antique Tiffany lamp by the bedside and placed the
Thinkpad upon her lap. "Yes my lady. I've been meaning to by a Visor but
I really like the keyboard on this. Look I've installed Linux on it.
Alan Cox says the next stable kernal will even include driver support for
the winmodem." The mention of Linux jarringly reminded Jessica of her
mission and its' urgency. "Oh Flint you've got to help. My husband the
Baron wants to kill me. All I did was to suggest we could achieve a
better TCO if we replaced our Windows 2000 based desktops with Linux and
maybe a Sparc for backend processing and then he flew into a murderous
rage. His cronies have comandeered our servers and if my marketing
department can't get email by tomorrow, we're doomed. Doomed I tell you!"
her body shaking like the fan on an overclocked athlon, she began sobbing
into his broad, guy-who-delivers-water-for-the-watercooler-like shoulder.
Flint gazed upon her in silence. Becoming aware of his silence Jessica
looked up into his somber grey eyes, her enormous bosom heaving with
concern. "Oh Flint", she said, "why won't you say something?" Flint
cleared his throat, said "my lady", and stopped again. "Oh Flint, do you
still hold the past against me? I know I gave you some bad advice but
I...I was young and foolish. The Unix market was deeply fragmented and
Visual Basic promised to be an innovative new paradigm. But know this
Flint Hannigan, I only wanted the best for you. I let the Baron seduce me
with his sexy teutonic accent and complete collection of Lego Mindstorms
but I see now that you are the only man I love. The only man I ever
loved." "My lady," Flint said again, even more hesitantly than before.
"Oh Flint", Jessica exclaimed sharply, "Forget all these false veneers
that hide your true feelings, and strip your soul down to the primeval
urges that bind a man and a woman and a buggy mail transport." At that, a
fire began to blaze in Flint Hannigans eyes, "I'll do it!" he said and
they kissed a smouldering, passionate kiss until 7pm when Futurama comes
on, followed by King Of The Hill, and The Simpsons.
8:30pm found them in Flint Hannigans' basement. Lit by the eerie glow of
two 21" flat-screen monitors (the second for xinerama when the nVidia
drivers get around to supporting it.) they sat in the cola-stained
swivel-chairs Flint had rescued from the dumpster of a former employer.
"Now Jessica", he said, "Do you have access to your primary DNS server?"
"Yes," she replied. "Good. We are going to change the MX record so it
points to my server. What is your domain?" "intl-lingerie.com." "Then
on a Debian box, you'll find the zone file for it in /etc/bind. Probably
in db.intl-lingerie.com though the administrator can change that. Check
in /etc/bind/named.conf to be sure." "Ok, got it." "Jessica, I've always
admired your vi skills, why don't you edit the file?" Blushing crimson,
Jessica did just that. "Ok, now run /etc/init.d/bind reload and the DNS
update will take effect. It could take upto a couple of days to fully
propogate throughout the internet though. now we add some users with
/usr/sbin/useradd. If we just want them to receive mail and not login, we
can set their shell to /bin/false. For remote access they can use an IMAP
client. For the IMAP server I recommend the uw-imapd-ssl package. I've
heard the maintainer is very diligent and responsive, not to mention the
only man on earth even more handsome than me." "But Flint," said Jessica,
"won't their email addresses be @hannigan.org? How do we associate these
user accounts with addresses @intl-lingerie.com?" "Excellent question my
dear, the answer: we use sendmail's virtusertable feature. First check it
is enabled by seeing that /etc/mail/sendmail.mc has a line like this:
FEATURE(virtusertable)dnl
if not then add it." "Ok, I've done that." "Then create a file called
/etc/mail/virtuser table with mappings of addresses to local users like
this:
jessica@intl-lingerie.com jessica
webmaster@intl-lingerie.com alice
bob@intllingerie.com bob
etc. It should work now. Try send an email to yourself and see." "Flint!
It's not working" exclaimed Jessica, her enormous bosom heaving in
puzzlement. "whoops, we forgot to regenerate the configuration" said
Flint. "sendmail.mc is just a collection of M4 macros that expand into
sendmail.cf. This is the real sendmail configuration file. and
virtusertable has to be turned into a Berkely DBM database called
virtusertable.db . run /usr/sbin/sendmailconfig and answer yes to the
questions it asks you. Ok, now does it work?" "Yes Flint, Oh Flint you
did it!" jubilantly they retired to the bedroom for a night of
sensitive, tender, romantic, yet crazed monkey-like lovemaking.
The next morning they awok to the martial blaring of trumpets, the
loathsome face of the Baron staring at them from every monitor. "Flint
Hannigan", he said or rather cackled, "It is I, Charles, Ze Barrron
Von...hold on blue screen of death...just have to reboot...hold on it
doesn't usually take that long...and...alright we're back. Ahem, Flint
Hannigan, it is I, Charles, Ze Barrron Von Petzold. Surrrrrrender ze
wench to me. Rrresistance is futile I haf ze serrrverrrs under lock und
key. No mail will...what? You have rrrouted ze mail around me. Damn you
Flint Hannigan! Damn you to Hell<click>"
"I think that's the last we'll see of him," said Flint gravely. But
Jessicas' mind was elsewhere. "Oh Flint will we ever be an item again?"
she sighed, her enormous bosom heaving gratuitously. "I'm afraid not my
darling. You use vi, I use pico. Society would never accept a passion
such as ours. I'm still up for some of that crazed-monkey love though."
"Oh Flint."
THE END...OR IS IT?
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
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