Tetigisti acu - You have hit the nail on the head

its gonna be one of those days...

2006-02-08T09:20:00.000-08:00

as I ride on the bart, passing hayward, I see a pigeon sitting on a pole... and I think to myself that one wasn't enough; there should be hundreds. and as I imagine those pigeons fluttering around I realize that if there were that many pigeons I would have found myself parked under them....

its gonna be one of those days...

Oracle Clustering Filesystem V2 (OCFS2) on gentoo!

2006-02-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

First I patched the kernel. I started with kernel linux-2.6.14-gentoo-r2. I found that this patch: ocfs2-configfs-all.patch applied flawlessly once I made a symlink from /usr/src/linux-2.6.14-gentoo-r2 to /usr/src/linux-2.6.14. Once patched all you have to enable is


 --> File systems
     --> <M> OCFS2 file system support (EXPERIMENTAL)

Build your kernel, and reboot. After that I populated my portage overlay (If you dont know what a portage overlay is, then you might want to consider learning a bit more about the more advanced features of gentoo and portage before trying something like this...) with these files, and build my ocfs2 tools.

FILE: sys-fs/ocfs2-tools/files/rc.ocfs2


#!/sbin/runscript

depend() {
        need net
        after *
}

start() {
        ebegin "Loading OCFS2 Modules: configfs: "
                modprobe configfs
        eend $? "Error Loading Module"
        ebegin "Loading OCFS2 Modules: ocfs2_nodemanager: "
                modprobe ocfs2_nodemanager
        eend $? "Error Loading Module"
        ebegin "Loading OCFS2 Modules: ocfs2_dlm: "
                modprobe ocfs2_dlm
        eend $? "Error Loading Module"
        ebegin "Loading OCFS2 Modules: ocfs2_dlmfs: "
                modprobe ocfs2_dlmfs
        eend $? "Error Loading Module"
        ebegin "Loading OCFS2 Modules: ocfs2: "
                modprobe ocfs2
        eend $? "Error Loading Module"
        ebegin "Mounting OCFS2 Special Filesystem: /dlm: "
                mkdir -p /dlm
                mount -t ocfs2_dlmfs ocfs2_dlmfs /dlm
        eend $? "Error Mounting Filesystem"
        ebegin "Mounting OCFS2 Special Filesystem: /config: "
                mkdir -p /config
                mount -t configfs    configfs    /config
        eend $? "Error Mounting Filesystem"
        ebegin "Starting OCFS2 Cluster Service: "
                ##
                ## Edit here (-n "ocfs2") to change the cluster name
                ##
                o2cb_ctl -H -n "ocfs2" -t cluster -a online=yes
        eend $? "Error Starting Service"
        ebegin "Mounting ocfs2: "
                ##
                ## Edit here.. This is all pretty normal stuff
                ##
                mkdir -p /mnt/ocfs2/
                mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ocfs2/ -t ocfs2
        eend $? "Error mounting ocfs2"
}

stop() {

        ebegin "Unmounting ocfs2"
                ##
                ## Edit here.. This is all pretty normal stuff
                ##
                umount /mnt/ocfs2
                sleep 2
        eend $? "Error Unmounting ocfs2"
        ebegin "Stopping OCFS2 Cluster Service:"
                ##
                ## Edit here (-n "ocfs2") to change the cluster name
                ##
                o2cb_ctl -H -n "ocfs2" -t cluster -a online=no
                sleep 2
        eend $? "Error Stopping Service"
        ebegin "Unmounting OCFS2 Special Filesystem: /dlm: "
                umount /dlm
        eend $? "Error Mounting Filesystem"
        ebegin "Mounting OCFS2 Special Filesystem: /config: "
                umount /config
        eend $? "Error Mounting Filesystem"
}

restart() {
        svc_stop
        svc_start
}

FILE: sys-fs/ocfs2-tools/ocfs2-tools-1.1.5.ebuild


inherit flag-o-matic eutils

DESCRIPTION="[C] Support programs for the Oracle Cluster Filesystem v2"
HOMEPAGE="http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/"
SRC_URI="http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2-tools/dist/files/source/v1.1/${P}.tar.gz"
RESTRICT="nomirror"

LICENSE="GPL-2"

SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="-* x86 amd64"
IUSE=""

DEPEND=""

RDEPEND=""

src_unpack() {
        unpack ${P}.tar.gz
        cd ${S}
}

src_compile() {
        local myconf=""
        econf   --prefix=/                                --enable-ocfs2console=no                  --enable-dynamic-fsck=yes                 --enable-dynamic-ctl=yes                  ${myconf}                                 || die "Failed to configure"
        emake   -j1 || die "Failed to compile"
}

src_install() {
        make    DESTDIR=${D} install || die "Failed to install"

        exeinto /etc/init.d
        newexe ${FILESDIR}/rc.ocfs2 ocfs2
}

After building the sys-fs/ocfs2-tools package, and having recompiled the kernel with OCFS2 as a module, format your device with mkfs.ocfs2 (see the OCFS2 Users Guids for details on HOW to format the filesystem), then make sure to create a proper /etc/ocfs2/cluster.conf (see the OCFS2 Users Guids for details on HOW to make a cluster.conf), exit the /etc/init.d/ocfs2 file (especially the cluster name, device, and mount points)

finally... if all goes well... you simply start the ocfs2 service on your machines, and... it... ought... to work.

if it doesnt work, debug, if it does work, add to default runlevel.

Why, you ask, would abyone care? Well be very sure that enterprise level admins care quite a bit that this kind of thing be available on any platform that they're using. Also, at the low level, if you have a single firewire drive you wish to share amongst many servers, this will do the trick quite nicely, and without the need for all that pesky unmounting and remounting to see new files/content (the os disk cache is a very nice usually, but a real bitch when it gets in the way)

Cheers

doh!

2006-01-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

Is it a bad thing when a server has a directory which houses only 226Gb of storage space thinks it's got 4000Gb worth of data

>eg<


serverx ~ $  df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             226G  176G   39G  83% /
none                  2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
serverx ~ $  du -hs /opt/builds/
4.1T    /opt/builds/

A locking cron job?! In bash?! You're joking right??

2006-01-26T14:31:00.000-08:00

Because its one of those things that people often times need to do, and because usually people are at a complete loss as to HOW to accomplish this feat, here's a very simple template which you can use to add locking to a cron job (or any script, really).

It's got a decent feature set for the code-size: A) custom lock file, B) lock expiration, C) decent log type output, D) easily used to wrap another script, or set of scripts inside


#!/bin/bash

###
### Simple bash script locking illustration
###
### By: Demitrious S. Kelly
###
### FWIW: YMMV: Use at your own risk
###

LOCKFILE=/var/lib/locks/this_job.lock
LOCKEXPIRE=600
NOW=$(date +%s)
CONT=1

if [ -f $LOCKFILE ]
 then
  echo -e $(date)"\tLock Found"
  CONT=0
  LOCKTIME=$(cat $LOCKFILE)
  let LOCKELAPSED=$NOW-$LOCKTIME
  if [ $LOCKELAPSED -gt $LOCKEXPIRE ]
   then
    CONT=1
    echo -e $(date)"\tLock Expired ($LOCKELAPSED), Contnuing"
   else
    echo -e $(date)"\tLock Not Yet Expired ($LOCKELAPSED), Aborting"
  fi
 else
  echo -e $(date)"\tLock Not Found"
fi

if [ $CONT -eq 0 ]
 then
  exit 1
fi

echo -e $(date)"\tCreating Lockfile"
echo $NOW > $LOCKFILE

###
### Job goes below here, inside the lockfile wrapper
###

        echo $(date +%s) > $LOCKFILE
 ## do stuff
 ## ...
        echo $(date +%s) > $LOCKFILE
 ## do stuff
 ## ...
        echo $(date +%s) > $LOCKFILE
 ## do stuff
 ## ...

###
### Job goes above here, inside the lockfile wrapper
###

echo -e $(date)"\tRemoving Lockfile\r\n\r\n"
rm $LOCKFILE

A firefox plugin to make ops/dev's happy (wish list)

2006-01-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

Wouldnt it be nice to have a firefox plugin which generated webinject code (xml configuration) for a page/form submission including the data filled into form inputs?

I think it would probably make countless developers (regression testing) and ops persons (service monitoring) lives considerably easier...

DK

Last nights dinner

2006-01-20T11:02:00.000-08:00

Last night partook in the geek version of the teddy bear picknick

http://fuzzyblog.com/archives/2006/01/20/who-came/

I had was quite an interesting time. Got to rub some elbows, and talk some shop. It's odd, though, how talking shop in a setting like this is completely different from doing so at work, or at home... We geek are a strange breed. I wish I were a little less of a wallflower at times like these... and I wish my hearing was better (I had to strain to hear anyone inside the noisy resturaunt.) Seeing as this was an amiable experience I may start going to similar events in the future... I ought to find a list of blogs to watch... Scott can probably help me with that.

Most of the people there were the kind of people who invent ideas, where I am the kind of person who sustains, houses, and supports. On one hand I was very out of my element with the charismatic inventive voices that the blogging community knows and loves... on the other hand people like them are dependant upon people like me, leaving me niether completely in, nor completely out, of the celebration of geekdom... It would be interesting to contrast this versus a similar event comprised of admins and ops personelle...

The people who's names you should hear often if they're doing their job right, versus the people who's names you rarely hear unless they're falling down on the job. :D

Anyhow...

DK

2005-11-25T22:03:00.000-08:00

Testing

testing the blogger on the go sms to blog gateway service (free mind you)

2005-11-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

Test

24 hour no nois policy

2005-11-15T00:51:00.000-08:00

The apartmnt complex in which my fiance (soon to be wife) live in for the rest of the month has a 24 hour no noise policy... Which... Our direct neighbors violate every night. Complaining and calling security accomplishes nothing... But every night it's THUMP THUMP THUMPing base... I keep telling myself 'soon we'll have grown up neighbors!!! But... Alas... The inbetween time is going to remain misery it seems

Transition

2005-11-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

Life has kept me busy lately... Especially 3 things. First and formost my upcoming wedding, I'm getting married on the 19th of this month, second my upcoming move from the central valey to the bay area, and third transitioning my employers infrastructure from small to medium... As far as these things go....

Needless to say both my wife and I are tired, grumpy, and stressed.

some of the things that I've meant to talk about in this weblog are:

gentoo linux
linux administration
growing infrastructures
life, the universe, and everything.

Interestingly though I've failed to accomplish anything of real value each of the numerous times that I've tried to blog. Which brings me to an interesting set of questions. First: what does blogging mean to (or do for) us non-players? And secondly how can those of us who are not natural journalists maintain and keep our weblogs?

n a more personal and specific note how does one, such as myself who is under contract to not be specific in talking about my interests (my interests are what I do at work,) maintain a weblog? Where's the line? How blurred is 'blurred enough??'

Unfortunately no answers accompany my questions today...

Really my interests are 90% informational and 10% entertainment... Perhaps a wiki, or a hybrid weblog wiki, is really what i'm more suited for...

I wonder, though... How much the world needs another over opinionated tech guy like me mouthing off about gnu this and os that and generally bitching about things all the time... It probably doesnt...

what then of my voice? i've always had an inner voice that's just dying to be heard, it happens any time people ask me for advice, I go nuts, and I dump loads of wisdone (ymmv) upon the unsuspecting... But when I have an hour to try and write down something I want to write nothing comes to mind. Like right now... The only thing i'm writing about is not being able to write...

Such is life I suppose. Over and out

"configure: error: cannot run /bin/sh config/config.sub"

2005-10-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

If no matter what you do you cant get things (notably libwww is a GREAT test of this problem) to compile, getting this error message" "configure: error: cannot run /bin/sh config/config.sub", an # emerge -e libtool did the trick for me.

DK Out.

Small PHP vs Python Comparison

2005-10-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

Non scientific, I know, No need to tell me so

Python Code:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
input = open(sys.argv[1], "r")
count=0
total=0
done = False
while not done:
        line = input.readline()
        if line != "":
                count=count+1
                total=total+float(line)
        else:
                done=True
input.close()
avg=total/count
print count,"gets for",total,"seconds =",avg,"seconds per get avg"

PHP Code:

#!/usr/bin/php
$fp=fopen($_SERVER['argv'][1], r);
$count=0;
$total=0;
while ( $val=fgets($fp) ) {
        $total=$total+$val;
        $count++;
}
fclose($fp);
$avg=$total/$count;
echo "$count gets for $total  seconds = $avg seconds per get avg\r\n"
?>

Of the two programs above, on 1000 floating point numbers, python ran considerably faster than php.

$ time ./avg.py n; time ./avg.php n
     1000 gets for 204.182 seconds = 0.204182 seconds per get avg
          real    0m0.028s
          user    0m0.022s
          sys     0m0.006s
     1000 gets for 204.182  seconds = 0.204182 seconds per get avg
          real    0m0.133s
          user    0m0.106s
          sys     0m0.027s
$ time ./avg.py y;time ./avg.php y
     1000 gets for 117.03 seconds = 0.11703 seconds per get avg
          real    0m0.028s
          user    0m0.016s
          sys     0m0.012s
     1000 gets for 117.03  seconds = 0.11703 seconds per get avg
          real    0m0.133s
          user    0m0.111s
          sys     0m0.022s

Back in SF for the day

2005-10-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

Well i'll be back in SF for monday. for work mainly. it ended up being convenient as the missus is attending an open house in the area.

Why 5% of linux rollouts... are problem children

2005-09-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

I'm sure everybody has read, by now, the article "Linux misses Windows of opportunity" I'm also sure that it's evoked many a varied reaction. I'd still like to chime in with my 2 cents. My 2 cents are devided pretty much evenly based on sympathy.

As a Director of Network Operations for an internet company -- an all Linux shop to boot -- I've actually run into this very type of problem before. When you have a highly specific application which requires highly specialized (or certified) pieces of hardware and software things tend to get a little hairy.

The subject in the article is quite right in saying that finding, and maintaining, a "best practices" linux machine in the middle of a 3 way tug-o-war is a very cloudy situation. The problem REALLY comes down to this: no one in the triangle is even remotely willing to take ownership of a problem. You have the software vendor (s) the hardware vendor (h) and the os vendor (o) and the network ops team (n). And when something goes wrong... it goes very wrong


+-S-+
| | |
| N |
|/ \|
O---H

The loop goes something like this:

application doesnt work as expected
contact application vendor
- send in requested reports and output
- application vendor looks, things should be ok
- application vendor thinks the problem is OS related
contact OS vendor
- send in requested reports and output
- OS vendor looks, things should be ok
- if OS ventor thinks its an application problem start over
- if OS vendor suggests a patch/tweak... probably doesnt work, start over
- if OS vendor things its a HW problem continue
contact HW vendor
- send in requested reports and output
- get a tech on site
- maybe replace some stuff -- just in case
- everything is good, nothing could possibly be wrong
- start over

The moral of this tail is that for 75% of shops linux is a no brainer fast economical and efficient solution to impliment for 20% linux probably will take a bit of time, a bit of money, but prove to once implimented have been the best choice. But woe betide the last 5%... in this upper echelon of proprietary and highly volitile configurations you cannot afford to move forward without someone who really really really knows his shit and if you do move forward without finding the right person things will NOT work out properly. The last few percentile is a case where you have an odd shaped peg... and you just have to use the hole that it fits into best. The company in the article, from the descriptions and comments given, did not have the right person. Let me HASTILY add that the person they have is likely outstanding at what he does, and the comment is *NOT* a slight on him -- the situation was just precarious enough to need someone else, maybe not better in general but better with this type of a situation.

Now... If I had to lay blame in the aforementioned article, it would be a 33.3% split between all 3 vendors. From my experience the problem is that all 3 vendors are quite good at what they do, but they're so specialized that they become peripherally blind. Let me share a real world example.

Working with a hardware vendor, and a software vendor to impliment failover in a fiber channel card under linux (something I had never done before this incident) we could not figure out why it wasn't working as expected. The problem was that it WAS working as expected, only none of the vendors involved knew all of the things they might be looking for. We were using a certified fiber device, a certified OS, and certified software, we had engaged support from the HW, and SW vendors, and no one knew precisely where to look at and point to so they could say "see, here, it's working... watch..." Eventually we did figure it out, and it wasnt any vendor or support agent who figured it out. It was lil ol' me via observation trials. A large block of time was wasted hunting down something that somebody should have known, but nobody did.

The problem: who should have known? The answer: everybody involved. However this was not the case. Between different configurations, different OS's, and different personal experiences with the techs involved... the issue had just never come up in this particular configuration before.

Every company with sophisticated, brittle, and cutting edge technology needs to have a healthy measure of self sufficiency to deal with implimenting a possibly tempermental solution via linux. But the payoff is quite high. I would say that basic skills people should look for in an engineer to help with this kind of an implimentation would be as follows:

0) highly adaptable, works very well under pressure
1) experience with the OS distribution on the class of hardware
2) experience with baseline benchmarking and comparrison
3) experience spotting and solving bottleneck problems in
3.a) Disk I/O
3.b) Bus I/O
3.c) CPU utilization
3.d) Memory utilization
3.f) IP and Ethernet network utilization (change as applicable)

I would probably stress (much to the opposition of "conventional wisdom" (if there is such a thing)) that proficiency in the application is a must BUT NOT FROM THIS INDIVIDUAL!!! Someone who is an expert with the application should work WITH whoever this is, and that someone should be capable of finding reproducable (or at least statistically predictable) problem points in the application workflow.

Also, whoever this person is needs to NOT be a "my way or the highway" type unless changing your workflow around the problem is an acceptable possible solution. In my opinion that should be a last resort solution.

Not that there's any good reason to listen to my opinions... but... there they are.

Gentoo for All the Unusual Reasons

2005-09-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

The Linux journal has an article titled Gentoo for All the Unusual Reasons which is awesome awesome awesome.

I cant say how many or what they're being used for, but I can tell you that I have Gentoo linux servers in production. They're ROCK solid, and preform VERY well.

Right on the money.

DK

A lovely vacation day... and an infestation...

2005-09-22T22:31:00.001-07:00

The perfect end to the perfect day? You decide.

My fiance and I took Thursday off from work. We drove down to Pismo, and walked the beaches, had lunch, looked at the lovely houses, and generally had an absolute BLAST of a time... When we arrive at home, tired, and ready to tone down after the long and exciting day, I notice a smell. And then the ants. Apparently a neighbor had an ant problem, and they bug-bombed, which was the smell, and the ants were driven out of their apartment... and into ours.

Back out we go for bait, and spray (since we didnt have any stocked)

Seemed like the perfect end to a really good day.

DK

False advertising and the movie industry

2005-09-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

We went to see Lord of War this week... It sucked... Bad.

It's not that the movie was in and of itself BAD I suppose (it definately isnt for everyone)... It's that I didnt get what I paid for. The crux of the problem is, I believe, wide spread: false advertising.

No, Seriously.

If I were to go to the store and buy, say, lucky charms I would, rightfully, expect a bunch of marshmallows mixed in with my cereal. If, when I opened the package, I found raisin bran with 3 little white marshmallows thrown in... I would be rather pissed. And the company packaging the product would be sued for false advertising. This is why you see disclaimers on cereal boxes when things dont measure up, things like "not actual size, picture enlarged to show texture" is pretty common because the cereal companies have to cover their respective asses when it comes to truth-in-advertising.

Where the idea of truth in advertising falls down, somehow, is the movie preview. Yes, for the record here and now a movie preview is a damned TC commercial, classified ad, and full page magazine advertisement all roled into one. We saw the movie preview for Lord of War a while back, and it looked great. Nick Cage with funny lines, guns, in (what appeared to be) a kind of Snatch-esque style movie.

It wasn't

What we got was a slow monologued mild mannered shockumentary (not quite a real documentary, a retelling, and focused on evoking shock and outrage on a topic) on the idea of our governments involvement in arms smuggling.

So, I bought my product (for $30 thats 2 prime time tickets, popcorn, and sodas)... but I didnt get what was advertised on the box. I would have taken it back, except, to whome?! It's not the theatres fault that the movie industry lies through its teeth.

I can understand WHY the movie industry does it... lets be realistic... they produce CRAP... their movies tend to be large piles of fly ridden beetle infested monkey crap... They have to package it as something else to get people to buy it. And the MPAA cant figure out why people are pirating movies? HAH! If they were worth buying people WOULD! (remember, children, the MPAA are a bunch of greedy dumb *****)

My burning question is: why have we let the movie industry get away with it for so long? A class action for false advertising, mandating a full refund ($9.50, average, say?) to every person owning a ticket stubb for the pile of dung in question... The MPAA and the RIAA are busy sending THEIR messages to US: "stop pirating", lets send one to them "STOP ASKING ME TO BUY SOMETHING NOT WORTH MY MONEY". Wait the RIAA too? YOU BET! You pay $20 for a CD with 1, 2, MAYBE 3 songs worth listening to... so... 7 songs to 20 dollars... thats $2.85 per song... so you pay $20 for a maximum of $8.57 worth of product... that means because you likes 3 songs you had to buy $11.42 worth of songs which you will likely never listen to again... Gee... you're making me pay MORE for the songs I dont want than the songs I DO want...

So... one false advertising suite to the MPAA, full refund for movies not closely enough matching their advertisements, and another to the RIAA for a full refund for any song on a CD which the purchaser wont listen to. False advertising, and... kidnapping? extortion? what would that fall under...

Anyhow... thats how I feel.

DK

Smoking at the childrens hospital charity?!

2005-09-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

So, we donated to (and collected for) a charity... the Childrens Hospital (Central Ca) fundraiser... for this we got to go to a country music concert. At this concert it was KNOWN that the patients of the hospital (the ones well enough to do so) were allowed to attend.

You would think, that for the cancer riddled children walking around that the smokers amongst the crowd AT the concert AT the hospital FOR the children would put the F******G cigs away for one damned night. But no... Little jim and jane walking around (LITERALLY, IM NOT KIDDING) with their IV's still in their arms got to breath in the cig smoke of our fellow considerate human beings.

So, I guess the logic is: "I'm still a good person, I helped save lots of kids... and I only killed one of the little bastards!"

FFS! COME ON!

DK

MySQL Voodoo

2005-09-06T01:12:00.000-07:00

why is it that, when it comes to replication, MySQL administration is as much voodoo as it is science? Keep in mind that while I dont have a problem with this area of MySQL administration... many people do. The reason for this, i think, is that it's not a very fault tollerant system. Any sneeze can really screw up replication. When you throw in different table types, etc, you have a recipie for disaster.

The funny thing about it is that it's actually less difficult to list out the steps to resolution for the various problems (there are relatively few paths available for correcting problems) than it is to tell somebody how to go about figuring out which of those very few paths to take. Between hardware,OS, filesystem, network, etc, there are thousands of things that could go wrong... meaning that it's nigh impossible to tell someone "how to fix replication if it breaks." It's more or less "well i've seen something that FEELS a lot like this before... so I have a pretty good idea of where to start..."

Theres something you dont want to list on your resume! "Hi, my names Demitrious, and you want to hire me because of the valuable voodoo administration experience I will bring to your ops team!" Whats scary is that the only people I'd trust to work on my servers are exactly that -- voodoo administrators. Nothing scares me more than someone with a root password thinking like an M.C.S.E. >EG< with a worn out "in my perfect world" checklist of what-ifs.

Heh... "Microsoft, if it doesnt fit in our little box... you shouldnt be doing it!" and "Linux f it doesnt fit in our little box... make your own... just.. dont expect people to understand what the hell you're doing"

I wonder if I were to make a troubleshooting wiki if people in the tech community would get involved. It sure would be nice to have a place with common (or not so common) paths from ACKFOO to resolution...

Probably just a dream... Butif enough people tolf me they were interested... I would put it up in a heartbeat.

--DK

Is it the weekend yet?

2005-09-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

I'm SO ready for the weekend. I've been dog sick all week, and I'm TIRED OF IT!

On a completely random note I wonder if there's a plugin for GAIM which could match messages against REGEX strings and play sounds (or popup windows) based on matches. That wouls be insanely cool. someone could then send me an IM which matches "^IMPORTANT: " and I could be notified... because lets face it... sounds for every IM SUCK...

Unrelated to work I hope to play some CoH and try some of the new power sets which were released with I5.

Also writing the above hyperlinks makes me wonder if there's a _blank_tab or whatever target for opening windows in new tabs without making users right click. that would be severely nice.

I'll be in SF next week for 1.5 ish days... Going to arrive on Tue night and leave Thu at noon. Which means pretty much that those 3 days are shot for productivity... Oh well... at least my new co-workers get to find out that I'm a real person.

My quest for linux on the desktop continues as I work on finding the right metacity/gnome/background set for my tastes. I fear I may have to make something. Ick. I also cant seem to get cedega running (in fullscreen mode) at widescreen resolutions (1280x800) which is a REAL pain in my backside. Once the above two things are figured out I just have 3 issues left, really: 1) printing to my konika/minolta pagepro 1350w through my dlink dp-300u print server just WONT work... grr... I would LOVE to have only ONE DAMNED CUT/COPY/PASTE BUFFER... this whole three different buffers crap is for the birds... and finally I'd like my volume level(s) remembered between reboots...

I've spent a LOT of time running linux on servers... lots of servers... all over the world... via ssh... but not so much time with linux as my desktop... it is truly a different world.

Ahh... the joys of being a picky bastard...

Anyhow... Out

--DK

Hollywood quality that we've all come to expect

2005-08-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

WARNING: there's some cursing in this post. sensative eyes: abandon all hope ye who read here

DISCLAIMER: I am not do not and will not condone piracy (audio, video, data or otherwise.)

After recently going to the movies, and reading this article I can't help but agree. I really dont think that the ability of potential moviegoers to download movies off of the internet is seriously hurting revenues. I mean, seriously.

2 Prime Time Movie tickets: $19
1 Water, 1 Hot Dog, 1 Nachos, 1 Large Soda, 1 Large Water: $18
Total movie going price: $37

I paid $37 dollars tonight for my fiance and I to spend about 2 hours in the dark watching a movie. Thats a full tank of gas, thats admittance ALL DAY to a water park, thats going to the fair, thats a whole buttload of rentals, thats a new PC game, thats 1 month of playing WoW, thats two months of playing city of heroes...

Let me be frank: I want my monies worth, and for the most part all hollywood does is shovel a pile os steaming horse shit into my brain. "You'll pay through the nose for the mindless drivel we remove from the horse stables attached to our multimilion dollar mansions and you'll like it you sniveling-pile-of-shit-that-is-consumer" says the MPAA.

Gee, I dont know why people arent going to the movies... do YOU?!

It's no wonder people are willing to spend time downloading and watching a crappy cam job of a movie. The sound's off, people are laughing during the movie through your computer, and some dude gets up seven times to use the restroom... but the bottom line is that you didnt pay $40 for the privilege of watching someones excuse for cinematic creativity (read: whatever the movie crew could throw together between the actors rehab stints)

Lets face it. People who go to movies like going to the movies! If they like a movie they'll see it in the theatre again and again and again. Even the people who download the movies go to see the ones they like in the theatres. It's an experience that no ones livingroom can match! you have a product going for you and it's called the "experience" If you bring up the quality of the movies that you put out on the market you will dramatically increase the quality of the experience of going to the movies and you'll make lots and lots of money which is, i know, what you want to do. Again: You're not competing with movie downloads on a frame per frame basis, but an EXPERIENCE PER EXPERIENCE basis... and lets face it... you can win on that premis.

You expect people to WANT the product you're selling, even at a greater price than it's worth. You CANNOT sustain that business model. It WILL break down. As your quality declines so does demand... but... you've flooded the market with a staggering amount of new movies *cough*crap*cough*! So... if quality is inversly proportional to supply, and if demand is directly associated with quallity, demand is therefor inversly proportional to supply in this case; because the more titles you produce at once the worse those titles are and (now this is important) the less I feel like spending $40 on a crap shoot at the movies about whether I'll have wasted two hours of my lifetime on a steaming pile of horse apples

Am I making sense here? Am I coming through? Or are you comfortably numb sitting there in your offices thinking to yourself "if we flood the market with this crap we'll force them into paying us for our incompetence! its great! its wonderful! its easy! its foolproof! they CANNOT RESIST IT!" Yea you're delusional, and it's backfiring... you dun crossed the line, and are getting the only backlash that you could reasonably expect.

HEY! MOVIE INDUSRTY! If you produced goods with better quality than algae... you wouldnt have so many problems with bottom feeders....

Movie Review: Redeye

2005-08-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: My fiance really really really enjoyed this movie, so take with a generous dosage of salt -- I have a tendency to disect movies that I watch as I watch them...

I thought the movie was completely transparent. It wasnt scary, wasnt even creepy (maybe odd during certain scenes but definately not venturing into the territory of the word creepy). There are very few times in the movie where you arent about 10 steps ahead of the watered down plot, barring a couple of surprises (which are suprising only because you've gotten so bored with the singlemindedness of the characters that you've come to expect manotony (think hostage meets air force one meets gataga, with stale popcorn)) the movie didnt even rate needing a strong attention span. The last 5 or 10 minutes of the movie were worthwhile, I even got into the stuggles that took place, but that small percentage of the movie didnt make having to sit through the first 95% worthwhile. All in all, the watching the previews was much better than watching the movie. Sorry, if you're looking for an intense movie go elsewhere.

Oh well

--DK

Linux, Love it or Hate it (Desktop Background, WS)

2005-08-26T22:44:00.000-07:00

I'm about as artistic as a thumbtack, but every once in a while I sit down with an image editor and screw around a bit... This is what I came up with. Maybe someone else will think it's neat too.

BTW, the tux image was stolen... ;)

Friday here I come! (or there I go?)

2005-08-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

I'm SO EXCITED about it being friday... I've been running non stop all month... one emergency to another... long hours... little sleep... house/dog sitting (fully 6 (yes SIX) spoled-as-grandchildren-dogs)... I want, need, and deserve some R&R! I'm not on call... and I'll see you all on the flip side... Aint gonna be nowhere near here unless I'm playing City of Heroes... but... dont friggen bother me unless someone or something is dying. Hasta. See Ya!

--DK

Comment Spam

2005-08-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

Hit a lot of comment spam on the last post I made... I've enabled blogger's capcha mechanism, we'll see how well it works.

--dk

The accidental reboot

2005-08-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Everyone who's running a server now has, or will, reboot the wrong server at least once in their life. It's one of those rights of passage things. Sometimes its worse than others, but it happens... It's just too damned easy to type "reboot" in the wrong place.

But you're running a large group of machines, and it's important, say for keeping your job, that niether you nor anyone else working on the servers accidentally just... well... reboots a machine randomly. What do you do?! Well here's at least one solution.

Step 1: Add "chmod 000 /sbin/reboot /sbin/shutdown" to your startup scripts (rc.local/boot.local/local.start)

Step 2: chmod 000 /sbin/reboot /sbin/shutdown (yes, right now)

Step 3: install this script somewhere on your system (tested with Red Hat EL WS, SLES, Gentoo)


#!/bin/bash

##
## Step 1: find the machines hostname
##
if [ -f /etc/hostname ]
 then
   hn=$(cat /etc/hostname    | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]")
   hn=${hn%%'.'*}
  else
   ## Handle SUSE
   if [ -f /etc/HOSTNAME ]
     then
      hn=$(cat /etc/HOSTNAME       | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]")
      hn=${hn%%'.'*}
    else
     ## Handle Red Hat
     if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/network ]
      then
       hn=$(cat /etc/sysconfig/network        | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"        | grep hostname)
       hn=${hn##*'='}
       hn=${hn%%'.'*}
     fi
  fi
fi

##
## Step 2: Verify that we were called 
##         with the right hostname
##

mdk=0
if [ ! "$1" = "$hn" ]
 then
  mdk=1
 else
  case $2 in
   shutdown|halt)
        cmd="/sbin/shutdown -h now"
        ;;
   reboot)
        cmd="/sbin/shutdown -r now"
        ;;
   *)
        mdk=1
        ;;
  esac
fi
if [ $mdk -eq 1 ]
 then
  echo -n "USAGE: $0 [short hostname] "
  echo "[shutdown|halt|reboot]"
  exit 1
 else
  ##
  ## Step 3: Shut the machines down
  ##
  pre1="chmod 755 /sbin/shutdown"
  pre2="chmod 755 /sbin/reboot"
  echo $pre1
  echo $pre2
  echo $cmd
  exit 0
fi

Step 4: now, lets say the machines hostname is "database.internal-lan.com", you'll have to type "[scriptname] database reboot" to reboot the machine. No more accidents here :)

Tech Song Snipplets

2005-08-26T12:45:00.000-07:00

These are some things I came up with all on my own... thought they were pretty funny

"Dont give me no files, and keep you spam to yourself!"

"While typing on my keyboard here
what to my surprise?
a new text message upon my phon
I think that I could cry"

"At first I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept thinkin i could lose my job if i dont get five nines
But then I spent so many nights
Doing all the work I could
And now my uptime is quite high!"

"And it's a good day for a
New kernel!"

"A long long time ago
I can still remember
When he web servers didnt work"

"Somewhere
down at the colo
third cage down
theres a box that was running
once
but not any more"

"Thats the sound of the ops
typing on their key
boards

thats the sound of the ops
typing on their key
boards"

"Worked all day
and a now it's night
daylights come and me want to sleep"

"Its going down down down in a burning right of fire
the servers down down down and the SLA's on fire
it fell in
a ring of fire
a ring of fire"

more to come if i think of any

Looking for a core for my FTP Indexer

2005-08-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

I think I've found a new core for my FTP Indexer: ncftpls (from the net-ftp/ncftp package.) I've never intended the dumb thing to run under windows, so, breaking windows support isnt even a remote concern for me. But if I can abstrace the actual FTP routines onto a program which is designed to handle this kind of work in a blazingly fast and efficient (not to mention easily machine parsable) manner, then count me in! I'll be working on testing it with different FTP servers to see whether it fits the bill, but I'm stubbornly hopeful! If this goes well I'll probably revamp my search engine around it, and offer RSS searches, themed searches (looking for rpms?), private site indexing, group indexing (private per organization) and RSS "new file" feeds. We'll see how it works out in the end :)

--apok

Stop spanking my table!

2005-08-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a neat little bash script for having to repair a table on a live server when it's not easy to turn off the code which is querying the server. When the queries build up on a table being (or needing) repair a LOT of load is generated, this will cut down on the load and allow the server to finish with the repair. It, quite simply, kills all selects to the table which are older than a specified time period... but it's nice in that it only does this while the repair is running. It's safe to leave this script and forget it knowing that once your repair is complete that your application will start working again with no killed queries.

This is presented with NO warranty whatsoever. It's not even a good idea. Don't use it -- it's evil!!! EVIL!!! it will melt your hard disk, it will boil your fingers in acid thus ending your sysadmin career, it will CAUSE SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION OF NATIONAL PARKS!!!!! (basically uless you're handing me a bug fix or a new feature patch I DONT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT ANY PROBLEMS, GO WRITE YOUR OWN DAMNED SCRIPTS! (just paste patches into comments...))

But if you're the daring, non-blaming, intelligent kind of person who understands what he's doing, and can read the script in under, say, 2 minutes and fully graps what it's doing (i'm fairly sure there are others... somewhere.) I've (yea I, not WE) found this to be quite useful.


#!/bin/bash

 # Syntax: scriptname.sh [user] [pass] [table] [interval]

 # Written with mysql 4.1.x in mind

IFS="
"
 tmp=1
 while [ $tmp -eq 1 ]
  do
  mysql -u$1 -p$2 -e "show full processlist\G"   | grep -q "repair table $3"
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]
   then
    echo
    uptime
    echo
    echo '--== [ SCANNING ] ==--'
    WAITC=0
    KILLC=0
    for i in $(mysql -u$1 -p$2 -e "show full processlist\G"     | grep -Ei "FROM[ ]+$3" -B7     | grep "Id:")
     do
      ID=${i##*' '}
      TIME=$(mysql -u$1 -p$2 -e "show full processlist\G"       | grep -A5 "Id: $ID"       | tail -n 1)
      TIME=${TIME##*' '}
      echo -en "\t$ID => $TIME\t"
      if [ $TIME -gt $4 ]
       then
        mysql -u$1 -p$2 -e"kill $ID"
        echo " KILLED"
        let KILLC=$KILLC+1
       else
        echo " WAITING"
        let WAITC=$WAITC+1
      fi
    done
    echo -e "\t--== [ Killed: $KILLC ] ==--"
    echo -e "\t--== [ Waited: $WAITC ] ==--"
    echo '--== [   DONE   ] ==--'
    echo
  fi
  sleep $4
 done

I want to talk, but google isnt listening :(

2005-08-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

I've set up GAIM (1.5.0) on my linux machine for googles jabber servers must be 5 different times now, and It never works. No error message (i've been too lazy to go and hunt down a probably cause) I'm wondering if anyone else is having this problem. Google is all the talk right now so it's tough searching out issues with the service amongst all the announcements and random praise.

EDIT: I've fixed this, apparently. I'm assuming that it was fixed when i re-emerged GAIM with the gnutls USE flag (on gentoo), but really i enabled +gnutls +silc and +nas. These are my USE settings for gaim on gentoo as of right now which work with google talk: -cjk -debug +eds +gnutls -krb4 +nas +nls +perl +silc +spell +tcltk -- Cheers!

I just... dont have... the words...

2005-08-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/pmate-for-the-ladies-118976.php

Seriously? I somehow doubt that the end goal of the sufferage movement was for... this... was it?

--DK

and it's wordpress by... 2 minutes!

2005-08-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

OK! Serious props to wordpress for being, bar none, the easiest to install blogging platform that I've ever setup. Someone asked me to set this application up for them to test various features, and I was truly amazed at the elegant beauty of it's setup process!

The installation document (linked above) said that it would take me 5 minutes to install. It didnt. From creating the database, user, downloading, untarring, moving, editing, and setting up... it took me maybe 2 minutes... without any type of overt effort on my part...

Congradulations, wordpress, my hat goes off to you for keeping the promises made on your front page. If i werent using blogger, and attempting like hell not to start hopscotching around wbelooging tools again like I have in the past... I would be using wordpesss in a hot minute... well... in two hot minutes... but you know what I mean!

--DK

OpenWRT

2005-08-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

I have a linksys WRT54G router here at home, and I'm intrigued by the idea of getting OpenWRT installed on it... But I have to stop and ask myself: why?

Sure its a novel idea, but is this something from which I will benefit?! I'm not so sure. I'll have to go take a look at the packagess available... But i have servers for web, and e-mail. And my requirements in those realm preclude something so simple. I'm too much of a PHP buff to be happy with a little router as my web server... plus... what kinf of a MySQL footprint could i really get on the thing. I think you get the idea :)

Still... freaking cool...

what's with the long absence?

2005-08-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

I got fed up with whichever blogging tool I was using last month to post from my phone. first time it lost a post which took me 15 minutes to type (such as my typing is...) on this stupid thing was the last straw. Its likely not fair to blame the app. it's as likely as not bloggers faullt... oh well... i'm back after finally removing that bitter taste from my mouth...

Of users and abusers

2005-08-18T23:03:00.000-07:00

There's not a fine line between use and abuse when it comes to web applications. What there *is* is a whole slew of clever individuals who dedicate their entire life to making money by ruining yours (the admin.) let's face it... this is a sorely loosing battle... from single threaded 'dumb' crawlers to massive distributed crawling via botnets (yes... you... we know you're there... we know what you're doing... it's only a matter of time... just wait you bastards!) the problem of data mining robots is a big pain for web enables business! what we need is an apache (ver1.3/2.0) module which impliments advanced checks against a centralized datavase based on url parsing.

for example. if your web db app has ?show=$CATAGORY&what=$VIEWTYPE&offset=$offset for a uri, you'll find tyat people can and will start to bleed tou dry simply by working the variables. a module which processes uri's and looks for incrimenting offsets in large numbers from an ip (or groups of them) especially on the same subject, and also impliments blacklists whitelists, dos, simple ddos, and rate limiting/banning with data stored in a centralized place (think memcached for the in memory working data and mysql for bans and lists needing retention) would allow an entire fleet of apche servers to act as a single entity which is capable of protectingb itself.

there are some hugely inadequate oss solutions for this (i haven't looked into anything commercial) but there's a HUGE smb market for this, I would think... say $50 for a standalone, and $150 for a networkable version and $25 per server...

makes me wish I were a really good C guy...

Earth to PalmOS software vendors!!!

2005-08-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

Have cash won't hotsync!!!

This just seems like rudimentary logic to me, but if I were marketing software to users of palm devices (which are quite likely to be internet enabled) I would offer my users a choice of download options: zip, or prc. Is anyone else dumbfounded by the lack of palm softyware distributed this way???

Ilm writing this post on my treo650 right now... with a fancy commercial blogging tool??? no... with the web browser... why??? because the tools I wanted to try (and possibly buy) were too inconvenient to try....

I'm lying in my pajamas in bed right now writing this at my CONVENIENCE. I think the software makers don't realize that we use the palm for two reasons: necessity, and convenience. for the convenience users... on the train, waiting for lunch, lying in bed (?) if your software can't be installed without a trip back to my PC... then its probably not going to be installed at all..

unzip? sorry, wrong answer.

Linux - taking the teeth our of bluetooth

2005-08-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

or putting it in ;)

http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200508-09.xml

As my old friend danny used to say "HEADSHOT!"

Why I havent moved to linux

2005-08-06T00:27:00.000-07:00

I have an unhealthy marriage to Microsoft Money... or I would have moved to linux long ago. But the call is becoming so great that I'm seriously seriously seriously considering changing things up a bit. If I could get a small nobody pc to run a couple of stupid little applications... I could do away with the windows operating system once and for all. This will take some serious consideration... Because I grow more fed up with windows with every passing day.

2005-07-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

So I fially got to drive OUR new truck (wifes been driving it so far) and it's gonna take some getting used to, but it is nice to be able to see over things...

My fiance will probably have to get a second job while we're trying to py for the wedding, but after that the budget should calm down considerably. It still grieves me that she will have to sdo that, but my job is a high availability job... I can't PROMISE another employer a part of my time knowing full well that I might not be able to give it... I guess i'll just have to live a while with injurd pride.

Been trying to give myself a little playtime lately... There's been a lot of stress and I don't want it building up to unmanageable levels.

we leave tomorrow for sf... Should be relaxing for the wife... Who knows... I might even enjoy myself too. But that means tomorrow is mostly cleaning and packing... The rays will appreciate a clean cage :)

the inlaws picked up another stray puppy! That's 6 dogs... In a normal sized home! You can barely walk for the animals... But the place just exudes love... Will be less painful once the new addition is rid of the arm chewing habbit...

2005-07-02T23:37:00.000-07:00

Today was a thoroughly exhausting day.... Our camry is in the shop... And we found out that it had become a money pitt... We're talkin thousands to fix it now, and much more to keep it maintained... So it was time to get it traded in... Ever wonder why people buy used car lemons? Now we know... So we traded it in at 80k miles, and bought ourself someone elses problems... A tundra with 40k miles on it... We'll see how it works out in the long haul... I'm hopeful but pessimistic... Then again I hate cars (no really... Maintaining, driving, buying, paying for gas, getting hit... I HATE the automobile... Worst invention since money! We don't need war when we're capable of slamming thousands of pounds of steel into eachother without skipping a beat on our cell phone conversation ("oh my god becky... I just hit someone... I'm like totaly buggin"))

on a lighter note... It's almost tomorrow... That's a plus...

And i'm going to sleep as much of it away as I can...

night

--dk

2005-07-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

So I finally have got my ti ultramedia smartcard reader working on my laptop... Painin the butt... I had to install drivers for some other laptop model... For windows xp tablet edition...

I've always known that I am a better indian than chief. Today I got a hard reafirmation that this is true. But I was good about it... I sought the advice of those more experienced than myself... And swalloed my pride for an apology. It worked out in the end.

been a busy week for server problems... Poor noel is getting a kind of hazing from the servers. Hopefully he doesn't get sared off. Its just been a bad week or two... It gets better...

I'm off to read my city of heroes comic... Very cool you get a new coh comic eery month free withgpthe subscription. Fitting perk :)

2005-06-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

So, on delphi, I have always had delusions of grandeur... I am an excellent scripter but that leaves me one rung short of ubergeek status (something I plan to attain before dying of monitor radiation related tumors or mutations). some day i'll be proficient in SOME compiled language. The compelling thing about delphi is it's cross compatibility with linus... Think kylix. Anyhow... Back to reading

2005-06-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

In an effort to more actively blog i've installed and (hopefuly) cojfigured vagablog (just recently released as open source.) now I can take situations like lying in bed cooling off from the fast pace of the day and use them to talk about whatever comes to mind. May god have mercy on us all! My fiance is in the living room watching west side story and here I am reading a delphi book and posting to my weblog. Takk about cool (in a severely geeky kinda way.) I guess we'll see if I stick with it. As a side note, i'll be in SF tue/wed and maybe part of thu. No this isn't a call to meet and greet in some odd location. Hell no one reads this (or meets and greets with me) anyways.

From whence we came, Part 1: in the beginning

2005-06-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was idea, and from idea sprang forth action. It was good action, largly fun, sometimes comical, but there was a LOT OF IT... It was the kind of action that other action sits around, and watches on TV like a rerun of dragnet. It was utter chaos, and it was good.

This is the tale of the life of a startup company, as seen from my point of view.

What's my point of view? I'm the guy who sits in front of a server and makes it behave. I'm the guy who's responsible for the fact that you can do with your server... whatever it is you want to do with it. I dont come up with new product ideas, You'll never see my picture on th front page, I'll never change your life, You'll never know I'm there. Thats why I'm hired, though, so that through my work you dont have to know who I am. If you know me; if you call me up on the phone; if you have to send me an IM or an e-mail... and you dont work with me... then I'm not doing my job. You'll never thank me for anything I do. That's ok though, thats the job. But rest assured that when some new piece of technology does change your life, that it stands on the hard work of people just like me. Thats my point of view. Sit down, read a while, you might find this interesting... Or you might not... whichever.

Where was I? Oh yes, chaos. There was a lot of chaos, and so few people. One, maybe two, running around frantically in a maddened rush of exhilleration. Their idea is currently sitting on their computer. A php application, some compiled binaries maybe, a little database looking for food. when the founders power goes out so does the site, and all it's services. Did I mention chaos?

Right now I'm just a friend, maybe an aquaintance, maybe an ex-coworker, maybe someone you asked for help at in a users group, someone from school, someone in a phone book. "I get the message: we have a server, can you make it work?"

"Of course I can"

Now this is an idea, at best, any funding comes from the founders pocket. I do work on the cheap, or free. Poeple dont know this. They dont remember, or never knew, but I was there... from about month 2. This new life changing thing has my blood sweat and tears all over it; but I digress. Cheap.

We've achieved the kitchen sink server! We're rollin with the big boys, now! The owner bought some little server from a place like rackspace. Maybe redhat, fedora, suse. If I'm lucky they didnt "trick it out;" I'm usually not. It's nights after my day job, a weekend maybe, and we have it: LAMP. Oh yes, LAMP and MORE! This server is like a TV dinner, everything all rolled into a nice little backage, but not really enough to go around. If you're me, back then, you had an apache + php + mysql + qmail + vpopmail + spamassassin + ssh + ftp + development server. Half the time it can only do 2/3 of its given tasks at once before it's loaded into oblivion, but it's a step up: the founders light switch no longer has any say in whether the "product" is online. And there was much rejoicing.

A few days later the rejoicing stops, and a lot of hard work begins. You see once this kind of a server is "really" setup, theres not a lot to do with it (from an administrative perspective.) And right here and now two very serious problems have taken root, and begun to fester. Oh yes, amongst the chewy goodness of the LAMP server there's a slimy underbelly!

The first problem that the founders will see is: "We're running out of resources!" We've used up our hard_disk|cpu_speed|io_speed|memory|bandwidth. Everyone who's run a company knows the drill: "time to expand!" *BUT* anyone who runs a company knows the drill even better: "we can't afford to expand!" and any administrator knows the next question out of the founders mouth: "can we bandaid it somehow?"

Pardon me... I need a drink...

But while this overt problem grows out of control the Second, and worse long term problem has been spreading like cancer: the usage of the root user. We all know the arguments: It's easier, its faster, and "but I'm the only one using the system!" by now the roor user (your friend the founder) has taken root in this server just like a cancer, and the ramifications of this is likely to last a long, long time...

And out of nowhere, there comes a little bit of money, and a second server. Usually this "nowhere" I'm referring to is catastrophic hardware failure of some sort. Lets face it we've been kicking this server like a dead horse towards the finish line for months, and NO ONE is under the false impression that it's going to make it... It just finally decided to give up, and you've got a new server to setup. This ones bigger, better, faster, more robust... you give it about 3 months... and thats about what you get

Join me in my next article: "And the're off!"

I'm thinking of putting together a presentation...

2005-06-02T00:30:00.000-07:00

I think I would call it "From Whence We Came", and it would describe (in general of course) the process of beginning life as a small web services company, cocooning, and emerging a medium size web services company -- from the ops perspective, of course. I think It might be interesting to have a highlights look at moving along from your "kitchen sink server" to "a couple of servers" to "your first datacenter" to "migrating from the first datacenter which is imploding on itself into our new improved datacenter with racing stripes." I wonder how much something like this would help people go through the types of things I've gone through. For that matter I wonder if anyone would take it even halfway seriously at all... I'll think about it. Maybe if I get some nods and prods I might even act on it...

I've beaten my own personal installation of RT

2005-06-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

I've finally won... in a seriously backhanded kind of way. I've got mod_perl, and Request Tracker up and running. To do so I've installed apache 1.3.x configured to run on :81 of my web server... yea... some would say I've admitted defeat... I just figure I'm moving on with my life ;) Truth is I despise mod_perl with a passion... The only reason I'm using it is because of RT, which happens to be the best TT system i've been able to come up with (for less than $1) and, well, shit, i'm giving away web hosting for free... I'm not looking to pay for customer support software :)

cheers

--DK

I think... maybe... I won?

2005-06-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

I read a dumb little online comic called Order Of The Stick and had been going back and forth about whether it was OK that I made a stupid little RSS feed to notify people that their comic has been updated, and gives a link to visit the page. and a search for RSS on their forums doesnt show the thread anymore. I figure it got deleted. Which means I figure I've won. SO THERE! anyone wanting notification and an easy to read link displayed WHERE THE REST OF THEIR CONVENIENT NEWS goes... can use this: http://www.apokalyptik.com/ReRss/www.giantitp.com/rss.xml

I had stopped it from updating while the site operators pissed and moaned about whether or not this was OK. Seeing as how, now, I've won and they're not being #@!$@ (or at least they're keeping their #@!$@ness to themselves) the feed is being updated, and ready for public use.

Merry freaking christmas...

This... deserved... its own patch... ???

2005-06-01T14:55:00.000-07:00

I was updating wget on one of my Gentoo Linux systems today, and I saw a patch applied called "referer-is-spelled-referrer.patch" (or something less paraphrased)

and I thought 2 things:

1) Thats a mistake that I *would* have made

2) Theres always someone... looking to rain on a perfectly good parade ;)

Cheers

--DK

Thinking about an LVS article

2005-05-31T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking maybe I should write a techy article about the LVS (linux virtual server) project... and my experiences with it... I think it'd be a good one... any takers?

I hate mod_perl

2005-05-31T22:56:00.000-07:00

apache's mod_perl is a pain in the ass... I'm sorry, but it is... Which is a pain in my ass because Request Tracker (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/) relies on mod_perl (or fastcgi which is also a piece of junk)... and I havent found anything even remotely as robust as RT for free TT systems...

I know "but I like mod_perl" you might say "and some people like java too... thats their problem, not mine" would be my reply...

So I'm iether forced to stick with mod_perl for RT... or write my own simple TT system... I'm increasingly in favor of the later... we'll see

Soon to be amongst the living?

2005-05-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

This just in, there are -as of yet- unconfirmed reports Demitrious Kelly (a.k.a Apokalyptik) may rejoin the human race! After being locked in the dungeons of a massive datacenter migration there may be a light at the end of this tunnel.

"He's been under a lot of stress lately" said one anonymous close friend of the network administrator "Feedster has been working on migrating their services from the east coast to the west [coast]." An, again, anonymous relative was recorded as saying "He's just one man, trying to juggle something like seventy servers... I hear they're getting him some staff, but he's been the only administrator for a long time now..."

As the end of Feedster dot com's datacenter migration looms closer, word on the street is that He might get to have a life again. "The dude, see, he's just... this guy... and... yea... just this guy" explained a random person on the street when asked how he felt about apokalyptik's long absence.

The only thing that we have recieved from him since all of this began is a note written on a torn piece of graph paper, delivered by an anonymous messanger, which reads "been in the datacenter a long time now... no clocks... lost all track... the vibrations! Oh God, the fans... MAKE IT STOP! SAVE ME"

This is Stan Dinintherain reporting live, and now back to your evening news!

I tried out Suse 9.3 Pro today

2005-04-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

While RPM based systems always give me an initial gut reaction which sends me grabbing for the nearest trashcan I've been uniquey curious to see how Novell plays the Suse card. SO interested, in fact, that i've installed every version of Suse from anouncement of purchase up to and including today.

Here's a synopsis
* Suse 9.1 was Old Suse
* Suse 9.2 was a steaming pile of maggot bile
* Suse 9.3 is better

Even though it didnt get everything on my laptop right (I have a very... picky... laptop new nvidia drivers dont work under linux... has to be a specific VERSION of the nvidia drivers... and for some reason no usb devices except my mouse EVER works unless you disable loading of the ehci (yea thats usb 2.0) module... so it's a usb 2.0 laptop which cannot (even in windows) operate at speeds above 1.0... like I said... it's picky) What it did do was noticeable.

It was clean. Damned clean. Very clean. Clear, crisp, CLEAN. the installers, et al, have come long way (yet still need to come an even longer way). Even though it's not "there" as far as in "mom and dad bought and installed suse yesterday" it's certainly capable of inspiring hope in those of us who hope there will be a good version of linux which mom and dad will be able to install. The one thing I noticed... above all other things... Is that when I booted back into windows (yea... I use windows for my desktop... SUE ME) it was the first time... EVER... a default install of linux made windows, visually, look bad... I noticed immediately that windows looked "dirty" (again, visually) by comparrison. Npw If I werent married to Ms Money for my finances... there might be hope for me to move to linux :) (anyone know if quicken runs under wine??)

Note to Novell:

Some things that need to be adressed before the average user will want to use this product

* make Y.O.U (thats Yast Onine Update for those now "in the know") able to download and install the mp3/avi/dvd libraries that we need to function while listening to our mp3's and watching our dvd's and looking at movies we took with out new spiffy digital video cameras... because no ones gonna want to download, compile, and install this crap manually from the "home market"

* the installer needs to go through all CD/DVD's as quickly as possible, and then reboot, hardware detect, and present the user with an OS.

* when asking for the root password make it visually clear that this is for "administrator access to the machine"

* make more animated slideshows, etc, for the installer... people want to see things moving... constantly... otherwise they fear that its locked up (hey... they came from windows after all)

* make the package progress meter in detailed mode more smooth.... jumping 50% after waiting 45 seconds... really... might as not even have a stupid progress meter.

* make a stupid little on-first-login animated help dude to tell brain dead users what they'll be using for writing, web browsing, e-mail, etc, etc... throw the average person a bone here... and for the love of everything holy... make both easy to skip for those of us who dont care AND to run again for grandma who constantly forgets...

* use netselect, or something, to determine the best mirror and stop asking people so much "technical crap" on update [Determining Best Update Server, Please wait 60 seconds...]

Thats all I can think of, for now, maybe more to come later... maybe not... I might try wine... I'm aweful at personal finance... so I definately need something that can interface with my bank...

Cheers -- DK

News Feeds, and IP (when are ownership rights carried to absurdity?)

2005-04-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

Lets say I visit a web site quite a lot. Lets say I feel it would be more convenient for me to have an RSS feed for that site, than to check manually for updates. So I make myself a script... ran as a cron job... once per day. This script checks the sites HTML, and looks for a specific <IMG> tag. If the source for the image has changed it makes a new RSS feed on my server for that site containing *ONLY* a link to the site. Put simply it's *JUST* an notification tool, I am not bypassing any content, images, advertisements, etc, via this news feed. The caveat is that I make this news feed (and the code used to generate the news feed) public.

Here's the question... Have I done anything wrong?

I don't think so. But some people are up in arms regarding what I've done. Lets run down the PRO's that I can see

* bandwidth that would be used by my viewing images over and over is spared
* no site content is bypassed, nor stored locally
* bandwidth for hosting the RSS feed is offloaded to my own server
* no reauthoring or handling of actual site content has taken place

So... Is the mere fact that a public site has been updated, owned by the sites creator? This seems absurd to me. Anyone else know?

This image just tickled my fancy

2005-04-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

Please note that no cows, hills, cities named redmond, megalithic monopolistic corperations (coughmicrosoftcough), or fancies were harmed in the posting of this entry.

Click the image for the full size version.

Cheers!

Just me [that's fed up and put out]?

2005-04-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

I wonder if i'm the only one who'se completely freaking fed up with the state of affairs on the internet. I just dont give a damn any more... Spyware this, Spam that Virus this, The music industry, The movie industry, Popups, Pupunders, Spoofing, Fishing, Cross Site Scripting, Back Doors... All of it... I went through several stages to get where I am right now

1) Concerned netezin
2) Peeved
3) Angry
4) Seething with holy rage
5) Brooding
6) Burnt out and cynical
7) Completey freaking numb

Granted depending on the day I'm usually iether a #2, #5, #6, or #7 (though mostly #7 now a days.) I just don't give a flying fsck anymore who's doing what. The state of everything is just "general ickyness." The good old days "general ickyness" meant you came across the wrong web site, and felt like you were going to wretch for a few minutes after closing the web browser... But lately I cant see the forest for the trees for the fact that we live in annoying ickyness...

Which brings me to another point... Am I also the only person whos'e lost their ability to be shocked? I mean... seriously... curiosity + internet = ( find out whatever the hell you want... get pictures, video, a chat room, message board, and dating service based on whatever your perversion is (and no i'm not talking purely sexual)) I'm just incapable of being shocked anymore... Sure I still dont like seeing people hurt, blood and guts, some things still make me want to wretch... they just dont suprise me anymore... I wonder how much this kind of a thing affects "reality" (you remember... that place in which the computer you're using exists?)

Maybe all modems, nic's, and routers should be sold with a warning labe that reads "Abandon all hope, and despair, ye who enter here."

:)

Free Web Hosting

2005-04-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

Well... I've got my server all setup. My domain's been moved over to it. And I'm offering it up to "needy causes" (think startup churches to gaming clans) First month -- no takers :) Will be interesting to see who/when the first request comes in... host.apokalyptik.com is the URL for anyone interested

Propaganda 04.12.2005

2005-04-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

Linux -- because a .bat file doesn't hold a candle to a decent .sh ;)

Propaganda 04.11.2005

2005-04-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

Linux, because your simian boss not being able to work with it directly is actually a good thing (don't worry... I promise never to tell him about that smirk you got when reading the word "simian")

Interesting... BUT... this may be a coincidence

2005-04-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

Trivia:

sed in latin means but in english... it's also a linux program in which we specify "not this text but that" in a stream of text... Interesting :)

The above may or may not be where sed gets its namesake, iether way it's an immensly useful tool (though it's got a fairly high learning curve) that's definately worth any time that it might take to master...

2005-04-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

Want to know how to tell how long I've been sitting at my computer? Here's a shot of my desk about half way through the day... :)

So, here we are... waiting for mysql to shut down

2005-04-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

If you've ever had a VERY large MySQL database relying heavily (90%) on a single innodb file, and shut the server down with innodb_fast_shutdown you know how painful this can be... painful... very painful... and if it's an important database server you need it back up ASAP, right? (We cant turn it off, and come back in, say, a week... we need it NOW!) I know what you're thinking: dont turn it off that way in the first place and my response is if innodb were built a littlebit better I wouldnt have to! Dont get me wrong, innodb is great... but its a freaking black box. Innodb lets you be privy only to a very small subset of information, and it's very lossy under hugh load... So here I am, shutting down mysql the hard way in an attempt to get innodb to reclaim "freed" space inside one hugemongus ibdata1 file... waiting for mysqld to finally shut down... and here's the script I came up with...

#!/bin/bash
my_sprint_pcs_phone_number=1112223333
sleep=60
loop=1
while [ $loop -eq 1 ]
do
total=$(ps wauxxx | grep -Ev "grep|safe" | grep -c mysqld)
echo `date`" -- mysqld processes left: $total"
if [ $total -eq 0 ]
then
echo "DBW DONE SHUTTING DOWN" | sendmail $my_sprint_pcs_phone_number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
sleep=600
fi
sleep $sleep
done

Sure... it's nothing extraordinary... but it does the trick ;) Page me as soon as it goes down... and once per 10 minutes after that... until i come and work on it.

Sweet! Now i can sleep!

Demon 1062 rears it's ugly little head

2005-03-27T23:09:00.000-08:00

Ran into an odd problem today. Without going into too many details we were getting MySQL replication error 1062 (which means that the replication master was trying to insert data into a table but reusing a unique key.) Determined why and that the problem was harmless (trust me), but if you're the admin getting the pages when replication dies... well... thats a problem isnt it?! Here's my bash "one liner" to deal with this problem temporarily until the dup's have passed. It's not elegant, but niether is the problem! The interesting thing is that this means that the MySQL server passes all (or at least the primary) key to the replication slave even if it doesnt say so in the replication error message or the log entry the evidence for this, in this case, is plain: the unique key we were getting the error on was an auto-incriment column... if the column value werent passed then there would have been no problem inserting the data into the database just with a higher auto inc vaue... Strange, though...

So here's the script... and a bief description to help wayward searchers...

Lets say you have a mysql replication setup going... And something odd happened with the master, and you KNOW there's a bunch of "duplicate key, 1062, you already have this... you idiot" replication errors coming down the pipe. Now you want to avoid these programatically (maybe you have hundreds of thousands coming down) but you dont want to stop mysql and start mysql and run with the --slave-skip-errors= [err_code1,err_code2,... | all] option because it's iether too permanent, or because it would require yet another mysql restart to un-do later on. Here's my quick and dirty little answer: 1062 error bypass script

Ever been stuck in "try each change" mode?

2005-03-09T15:04:00.000-08:00

To make life easier for the admin who has to "brute force" the solution to a problem...

# nano -w /etc/apache/conf/apache.conf && /etc/init.d/apache restart

So simple... so elegant... gotta love *nix

Propaganda Of The Day, 03.08.2005

2005-03-08T15:16:00.000-08:00

Linux -- because us smart people like to know whats going on...

w00t! managed server on the way!

2005-03-08T01:14:00.000-08:00

Not for the blog (i'm sticking with blogger as I have no reason to want to maintain my own blogging app) but for my site, e-mail, etc, etc, I'll be running on a 7L dedicated server! It's the cheapy 1.7ghz celeron/256mbram/30gb/gentoo deal for $59/month, but it'll be great!

I'll finally be able to provide some hosting for a couple of causes that I have lined up and would like to help, as well as remove the dependency of my cable modem connection for the majority of apokalyptik.com Which will be a big help to me!

I'm very excited about this. I might even offer paid web hosting accounts or outsourced e-mail domains, etc. I requested 5 IP addresses with the setup. I certainly hope that I get them. I also hope they dont pre-install and pre-configure a bunch of stuff... I'd hate to have to emerge unmerge everything, just because I'm not fond of the packages installed. I would assume that the gentoo setup would be pretty bare since gentoo is definately a power user/admin distro!

I would get a simple web hosting package, but the simple truth of the matter is that I just don't trust anyone else to run my servers same reason I'll be hosting my own DNS, never met an admin that couldnt royally screw up dns... on a good day. Besides, I have a right to live with the product of my own incompetence and not someone elses -- if I choose (don't I?)

Oh yea... I'm excited... Hell when I got the idea in my head... I couldnt sleep... So here I am... God, I'm such a server addict (is there a 12 step program for people like me? People addicted to setting up serers?)

The fun in our fundamentals

2005-03-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

I added a "shoutbox" to out corperate intranet web page today... just on a whim. I wonder if anyone will care. I did get something out of it though (no not the simple php coding necessary to write a stupid php shoutbox) but I did the layout for the shoutbox completely in CSS. Did a good job too, IMHO. It will be interesting to see if people use it to drop little "fun" messages. It could be a great toy (and, maybe, reason to check the page at all every now and again.) Heh, maybe it'll be a nuissance and Ill be asked to take it down? Who cares. It was something to do :D

Propaganda Of The Day, 03.06.2005

2005-03-06T17:51:00.000-08:00

Linux -- because piping from stdout to stdin is much too elegant for an MCSE!

Propaganda Of The Day, 03.05.2005

2005-03-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

mke2fs -- Helping squeeze more performance out of your windows machine!

A Brave New World, and a Bold Outlook

2005-03-04T16:18:00.000-08:00

File sharing has always gotten bad press. Piracy -- from the open seas, to the anto prohibitionists, to the drug trade, to the wild wild internet -- has always frustrated governments.

The problem is that it just doesnt fit. Not in our emerging capitalist democratic world (disclaimer: I'm not extremely political... and i know squat about foreign affairs... read with the appropriate salt grains ready). Something that in one physical reality is worth money, becomes worthless as soon as it's moved to another reality. Without worth how do we gain from something? Oh the corperations are going crazy too! "How do we profit in this mess they they call the internet?" they must exclaim frustratedly late nights sitting behind their desks. We dont know what to do with it, i think, primarily because it doesnt fit with our moral scheme: It's definately moral to make money.

WHOA! HOLD ON THERE! ARE YOU SAYING WHAT I THINK YOU'RE SAYING? No. I'm not. I think it's moral to make money too. The capitalist way of life doesnt bother me one bit. It's certainly no worse than other realistic ways of life. But hell, I've been raised in this moral value set... I'm jaded... On the flip side, I praise the fresh new perspectives that the internet brings. I enjoy seeing americas melting pot grow beyond its original dimensions. I like many of the ideas that come from this wired chaos we have created. The wars between the physical commercial world, and the wired virtual world, wage on. Where's my popcorn?

I remember growing up. It hurt like hell. No, no, I mean physically. I would go through terrible growth spurts where my legs and joints would hurt so bad the only thing I could do was cry. I was growing up, but I wasnt ready for it. This caused a lot of pain, chaos you might say, a lot of tears. It also caused a strengthening and was the catalyst for not only the physical, but also the emotional, evolution to maturity. I see strong parrallels here.

Like it or not our world is changing. Our governments, our people, our minds, our learning processes, our values, are all changing. Fast. We did it to ourselves realy. We pushed and pushed, strived for faster and efficient. We got it. And now we are having to deal with the ramifications of lives lived at exponential speeds when compared to the lives of our forefathers. We are our own modern day prometheus's. And our fire does burn. Ask the children who have TV for parents. Ask their parents who both have to work to keep up. Ask the people in your city who know places where you can walk across the street, literally, from luxury to poverty. Ask the lawyers who represent the best and the worst, but gain no matter who they represent. Ask the polition dealing with legal loopholes. Ask yourself when you read the paper. Have we opened pandoras box? Are we experiencing more growing pains?

Change is frightening. Growing up is hard. We as a race of human beings still have a much longer road ahead of us than anyone wants to admit. Do the warmongers push too hard? Are the protesters who proclaim that people can live in harmony before, or after, their time? Can we accept and adapt to the changes which are looming on our not so distant horizon? Of course, thats what our race does instinctively, but also barbarically. We will defend what we hold dear, even frm ourselves.

In the end its must be our individuality which makes it so hard. Each person has a different view, moral codes, interpretations, dreams, wishes, likes, dislikes. We see differences in the people around ourselves, and we react to those... hah... differently. Its funny that the conduct of each individual guides the whole. We're like a gigantic centipede, which has billions of legs -- each with a mind to go in a different direction. As long as a majority exists we'll always move, but not everyone will agree.

In our black and white minds we see duality, good and evil, right and wrong, valuable and worthless. We want peace, but everyone has a different idea of what peace IS, much less how to obtain it.

What does it matter anyways? If the world is at peace? We can be at peace, within ourselves, what else matters? If you can look at your world, your situation, people around you, and admit that you don't need permission to be at peace, then you've finally won. It's a kind of TAOism, sure, but it's definately practicable. And it has nothing to do with religion anyhow, before that sore subject immediately closes your mind forever to my ramblings, it has to do with existance. The simple fact of the matter is that you do exist, and everything else exists. You can therefore be content, or not -- it's your choice really, and who am I to stop you? You can reach out to others if it makes you happy. Or not. You can do much in this world if you just content yourself.

Here it comes, I can hear it, you're screaming at me, calling me an anarchist or a communist. But thats not true. I live in America. I like living here, and I enjoy our situation. And here comes your second outburst! But i'm not proclaiming evil, or supporting it. I'm Christian, and have very strong ideas of morality, good and evil. Evil people will be evil regardless of my attempts to teach them otherwise. And people in need of help should be given the chance to accept some, or not. And now your reply: "You're a complete mystery!". "Yes," i say, "but arent we all? I'm completely content with duality. Most of the time I'm content with everything. Laugh about it long and hard now, is my advice, for tomorrow it wont be serious enough anymore to be funny."

There is truth in what I say. I'm sure of it. I'm just not sure which part, exactly, is true.

:)

been a long week

2005-03-04T15:07:00.000-08:00

Between work, sick fiance's, calls for help from friends, consolidating debts, dealing with wedding stuff... It's been a really damned long week.

For anyone who wants to protect their companies (or hell personal for that matter) information, block the following subnet masks, owned by a company known to me personally as "a bunch of crawling leeching bastards" without any regard for the amount of bandwidth or load they're generating...

iptables -A INPUT -p all -s 67.18.96.0/255.255.255.0 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -p all -s 66.151.191.0/255.255.255.0 -j DROP

Hooray For My Laptop!

2005-02-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

Today has been a DAMNED productive day, as far as my laptop is concerned. Its important to understand two things: a) I depend on my laptop for both work, and play, and b) When dual booting it is my nature to stick with the best of the two operating systems, and completely neglect the other. The only "playing" that I do, really, is CoH, and the majority of my WORK is done in an ssh session or in a web browser. The inbetween is that I use MS Money 2005 to manage my finances.

I spent the day, off and on, installing/configuring Gentoo Linux version 2004.3 on my HP zv5380us laptop, and I have to say that things are REALLY looking up towards the day that I'm free of running locally on the Windows OS! (see the "!"? I'm very excited about this). I didnt bother with the amd64 kernel, because i dont feel the OS support is really there yet and I dont want to fight with it

Special Kernel Instructions (as I remember them)

genkernel --menuconfig all

change the processor type (Athlon/Duron/K7)
enable pre-emptible kernel
enable High Memory Support (4gb)
enable Allocate 3rd-level pagetables from highmem
Device Drivers -->

USB Support -->

USB compiled in <*>
<*> OHCI HCD support
Disable other Host Controller Drivers

Graphics Support -->

No support... at all... anywhere under here (for simplicity)

After the initial kernel compile and install, simply use "genkernel --oldconfig --menuconfig all" to make kernel changes, then reboot. Genkernel is your friend... If you want to tweak every ounce of performance... figure it out yourself...

Accomplishments (me, google, and everyone else - baby!):

Nvidia + WXGA 15.4" + 3d support working at 1280x800 in x.org

Caveat: as of this blog =media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6629-r1, and =media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.6629-r1 are the latest versions of the driver/glx set BUT they dont work with this laptop, whereas 1.0.6111 work for this setup

Sound Works

I used ALSA
Trivial, many docs cover this

BroadCom Wireless Nic Works

ndiswrapper
+ wireless-tools
+ some home grown init scripts)

Touchpad Works + USB Mouse

(trivial, just get the usbmouse working, an the touchpad should too)

Sanyo VM4500+USB Data Cable+ppp dialup works
Onboard NIC

has worked
Was trivial (my on board nic burnt out though, probably a fluke)
8139too driver module

LinkSys USB200M usb NIC

usbnet driver module

Cedega 4.1 + City of Heroes"

getting this installed can be tricky...

tip: during the installation process use "Managed" = "Y", and "Desktop" = "800x600". Then AFTER the installation, play with settings for your desired "desktop environment" in cedega

This finally works FLAWLESSLY

Kernel VM tweaks to help with cedega perfromance

So, Basically, All I want is to get MS Money working under cedega, and I'm 100% set.

If anyone wants help, or is looking for configs I used... feel free to e-mail me, take out all the :'s and spaces (yea... spam...) ":a :p :o : k :a: l:y :p:t:i :k::@ : : a : p : o:k :l :a:y :p: t : i:k ::.: :c : o :m:" also, if you dont prefix the SUBJECT of your e-mail with "APOK, HELP REQUEST: " I wont read it. If you cant follow instructions, I cant help you

Just claiming my feed at feedster

2005-02-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

The great Feedster search engine...

Pinky and Brain

2005-02-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone ... (waiting patiently for the echo ro reside) I'd like to introduce our (Nikki and Myself) first "children"

The apartment complex that we currently live in (and plan to keep living in for at least a year or two more) do not allow any pets that can soil the carpet in their natural state (read: "dogs and cats") fish, rodents, birds, all ok... So we've made our choice, and adopted two rats. Gobs of money later we have them caged, toy'd, watered, and fed.

Most people say "Eww" and think of NY sewer rats, but they're actually very intelligent creatures who can be taught tricks or to come when their name is called. They're very clean animals (as far as their fur, etc.) and after a few moves to find where they were best suited to be "kept" they'reended up taking a corner of my desk.

We've only had them a bit over a week now, and I think they are adapting well.

Up against a wall re: unstable software

2005-02-16T12:56:00.000-08:00

We're doing something that I feel is a bit... well... dumb... at work. We're testing the use of the mysql 4.0 development tree (yes thats mysql-4.0.24 BEFORE its released as a "stable" build.) This is bad. It doesnt feel right. I dont like it. One can argue the merits such as "Theres a bug that we're facing thats fixed in the development tree" and "if it were 4.0.0 or .0.1 or .0.2 I would agree we should stay away, but 4.0.24 is fairly mature." To any of those qrguments my answer is this: "some programmers "oops, that was an aweful mistake... good thing it was in the development version marked as unstable that no one would be dumb enough to actually use in a production environment"

nuff said...

I just hope we dont blend our data like a cheap margarita...

It looked... innocent...

2005-02-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

This one caught me by suprise... In retrospect I should have been more wary of a blind ICQ, but this didnt have any nagging telltale signs of illegitimacy... The english wasnt bad, the tone was polite, the request was reasonable.

Just opened a new Blog , could you check it for me? [... site title...] is new and the features are nice, let me know what you think of it:) Let me give you the Link ;) http://blog.[...domain...]/[...path...] , I launched it last week, jus a nice blog ;) appreciate it

However the site being linked to was... not... it was some porn site... nice.

ramdefrag.sourceforge.net

2005-02-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

The RamDefrag project is a stunning, innovative, provocative, sexy way to help make newbie windows converts feel right at home! A progress meter, some mindless stats, and no real functionality... Those people suffering a withdrawl from the clean crisp functional new world to which they are becomming accustom can find refuge in goodwill projects like this one. Highly recommended for anyone attempting to convert parents/aunts/uncles/etc to the brighter side of computing.

BeastBlade - Level 40!

2005-02-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

BeastBlade made level 40 Sunday, Feb 06, 2005. I'm very excited to be finally turning the last corner and seeing the level 50 finishline off in the distance.

BeastBlade is a Katana/Regen scrapper. He was built as a soloing powerhouse. He's probably not the best level 40 soloist around (that piece of pie probably goes to the fire controllers) but he's a mean can of whoop ass to be sure!

To give you an idea, he was hunting in Peregrin Island at level 37, and able to take on a mob of level 43 minions, or a Fake Nemesis + WarHulk + 1-3 Lut's level 41

The only thing he cannot solo is Arch-Villains, but they are meant to be exaduratedly tough.

One of the highlights of his career was a team I put together at level 37 to fight the Arch Villain "Envoy of Shadows." It was a team of 6 people, all of which were between level 30 and 35 (I run my missions on invincible, so we were fighting level 38-40ish mobs) the level 36 scrapper I Was with (Katana/Super Reflexes) commented that he had the same mission, but his missions were on "hard boiled" (which is the lowest mission difficulty rating, i believe, whereas invincible [my setting] is the absolute hardest). I made the remark that I could solo everything in his mission at his setting [except for the AV] without any help whatsoever, even with it set for the entire group of 6 people. At this point the level 30 healer (Empathy Defender) (wo, incidentally, I'd rendered almost absolutely useless the entire time, except for the AV fight [which was the reason he was there at all]) said "Normally this is the point where I would pipe up with a sarcastic comment, but I have to admit -- You're the man!" Needless to say, that felt good ;)

Cheers!

make cloneconfig

2005-02-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

They say that we learn something new everyday, and today is no exception. While trying to compile a kernel a) using /proc/conig.gz, b) on a suse linux enterprise server 8 system, I was unable to even "make dep." The compile was failing giving errors about a missing autoconf.h file, and it all went down hill from there.

I'd like to take this time to note a couple of facts
1. I cant stand rpm based systems. Period. I dont have a choice with this machine
2. I've long since grown apart from linux 2.4 and have become confortable using 2.6
3. I've never, actually, compiled cold source from /proc/config.gz

The solution? make cloneconfig!!! I was making assumptions about the build process that simply werent true. You live, you learn...
# cd /usr/src/linux
# cat /proc/config.gz > .config
# make cloneconfig
# make dep
# make modules modules_install bzImage

Sharing Lifes Little Lessons

2005-02-04T01:17:00.000-08:00

I decided to log into City Of Heroes, if only to play a sngle mission. I felt like teaming, so I logged into one of my lower level "alts" (an alternate character from the "main" character that you play most often) this toon ("toon" is slang for "character") happened to be a level 19 Earth/Storm controller.

A little background for the lay person: A controller is one of the various unique types of characters that are available to you when playing COH. The various types beakdown as follows:
1. Scrappers - short range ("melee") damage dealers

2. Blasters - Long range (often AOE ["area of effect"]) damage dealers

3. Tankers - Damage absorbers (dont teal much damage, but can take a TON of punnishment)

4. Defenders - Focus on iether making friends stronger or making foes weaker

5. Controllers - Focus on disabling the enemy

For a level 19 this controller has an impressive ability to chain lockdown a mob (groun of foes). You can HOLD foes, but this does not stop them from attacking with any ranged powers (or melee powers if you get to close to them) that they might have. But... locking down the mob is completely disabling them. Both unable to move, AND unable to attack. This controller has 2 different methods of lockdown which allow him to chain them back to back -- completely incapacitating the all of the enemies for long periods of times. The first of the two methods involves 2 parts: First stone cages holds all foes in place, and second Stalagmites disorient the held foes, rendering them unable to move and unable to attack. The second lockdown methos I have is called Salt Crystals. Salt crystals has one drawback, if you deal damage to a held foe, he breaks free -- immediately. Not a problem because as the group picks off the enemies my single target lockdown can be used to hold him as soon as he's free. I warn teammates up front about this, and take the first two fights to SHOW them the difference.

Enter "Rain" the level 18 blaster. She has an AOE attack the hurts everyone in a radius around her. With lockdown method A this isnt a problem, BUT, with salt crystals the whole mob breaks free as SOON as she uses her AOE. Also, for the record, her AOE attack is NOT POWERFUL... its minor... does very little damage... you can imagine that this just pisses the mobs off something fierce... After most of the mission is over (and about the 15th time she breaks my salt crystals [sending me scrambling for dear life to try and keep the team out of harms way]) the team is QUITE used to being able to just wear down mobs one foe at a time. So, since Rain is "uber" (a term meaning "the best ever", or some close approximation) I announce that SHE gets to be crowd control this fight.

As if on queue she's running ahead, not waiting for the team, AOE's the mob which promptly starts beating the hell out of her. I watch. the healer is desperately trying to keep rain alive and rain still almost dies not once, twice, three, or four, but SIX times before the battle is completed. Keep in mind that I was CLOSELY supersising the battle, and the health of ALL of the team, and had it taken a turn for the worse I would have immediately locked the mob down (I also assured the two other team members of this)... It didnt they cleared the mob with no deaths, but one very shaken "Rain the level 18 blaster." I pointed out to her that she made a lousy controller, a horrible scrapper, and an aweful tanker, she agreed on all points, I also pointed out that if she was going to undermine my crowd control that I would withdraw it. And, do you know, rain was very polite from then on not to break my salt crystals?

I think I helped Rain learn TWO valuable life lessons:
1. A good controller make life much easier

2. You have to work WITH your team, not against it

Maybe I was wrong in my treatment of Rain. Maybe I was being a bitter cynical overbearing knitpicking unwanted mentor. I'm willing to bet, however, that Rain will be a MUCH better heroe from this day forward... What do you think?

You know a server has bit the big one when....

2005-02-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):~]
# cd /etc/init.d/
[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):/etc/init.d]
# ls
[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):/etc/init.d]
# ls -lah
total 0
[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):/etc/init.d]
# killall syslog-ng
-bash: killall: command not found
[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):/etc/init.d]
# ps wuaxxx | grep sys
root 3775 0.0 0.0 1852 952 ? S Jan31 0:09 /usr/sbin/syslog-ng
root 21559 0.0 0.0 1480 500 pts/9 S 17:23 0:00 grep sys
[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):/etc/init.d]
# kill -9 3775
[root@(hostname removed for privacy purposes):/etc/init.d]
# ps wuaxxx | grep sys
root 21571 0.0 0.0 1476 464 pts/9 S 17:23 0:00 grep sys

City of Heroes: Expansion Issue 4 Preview

2005-02-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

They finally finished the COH winter event, which was quite a lot of fun. It was an overwhelming chance for the lower level characters to catch up, even just a little bit, with the higher level characters. "Farming Winter Lords" was all the rage and , frankly, worth great experience points up until the mid-20s-levels. Of particular interest was the ability to start a new character, and have the character between level 18 and 22 in 6 or so hours... which is GREAT because you don't get your "travel power" till level 14 which can make the lower levels a bit tedious (walking from place to place sucks)

So Issue 3 was released, a huge success
then the winter event was launched and completed, another huge success
and now they are already preparing issue4 (this is one of the things i love about this game... the world doesnt become stale) Check out Details Here: City of Heroes: Expansion Issue 4 Preview

Also even if you missed the "winter event" i highly recommend taking advantage of the aftermath... many lakes in Paragon city have bee frozen over... allowing for some ecellent Ice Skating. (waiting for the COH Ice Capades!)

Cheers, all!

Let me get out my champagne bottle

2005-02-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

This blog is hereby christened. Hopefully I'll be up to continually using this blog. My past attempts at blogging have been sad failed husks, thrown by the wayside. It was convenient enough for me, always a chore. Likely because I've always tried running my own blogging CMS. I've never liked CMS... I can write them, but its just not exactly my cup of jo. Thats where I hope blogger (kindly provided by google) will help me out -- I dont have to maintain the SW side of it (w00t)