sea nerd blog
high summer twenty fourteen
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soekris 4826 flashboot
I’ve a continuing project to use a pair of Soekris 4826s as OpenBSD 5.5 domain servers. They’re running, currently supporting my new domain’s time and DNS servers. They also run unconfigured identity servers. The installation is built on flashboot. This is my current version. It’s work in progress, so don’t expect too much. This archive is eviscorated; I’ve removed network confidential information. I’m posting it simply because someone might find it useful. Download the mangled flashboot archive. 17.8.14 |
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itunes, again, againToday, iTunes tried to unsubscribe me from a podcast that it claimed that I haven’t listened to for ages. It was fucking lying. I listened to an episode yesterday. On my iPod. That iTunes synced this morning. This software wanks. 
I added some Jacket 2 podcasts to iTunes. They have between 30 and 40 episodes apiece. This sodding bucket of shite could only find one of each, the most recent. For christ’s sake, iTunes, not everyone is mentally unfit. Most of us have working memories. All of us breathe without being prompted. Most of us can count to more than one. Jesus wept, you’re so fucking presumptive: for fuck’s sake, grow up. 
I want to browse through my albums, but all it shows is the pictures and the titles. This might come as a shock to you, iTunes, but albums contain music. You know, emotional sound? They have people called musicians who play them? (Well, usually). They often contain tracks, with titles themselves. These tracks have lengths, and players too, and notes, and lots of other things. You’re a bunch of fucking presumptive wankers, Apple, for denying me access to this information. The only reason I use your fucking cruddy software is that I have no sodding choice. FFS. You’re stopping me enjoying my music, and I detest you for that. Damned philistine wankers. You’re so incapable of understanding music that you’d talk during concerts. The only tears you’d bleed to a death march are those made by onions. You’d hear a peon, a John Clare, play a piece of exquisite pleasure and you’d wonder which door was creaking. 
iTunes, why is it when I play an album in the song section (given it’s impossible to even see the sodding things in the album section), why is it that you don’t stop at the end of the album, but go straight into the next one, whatever that might be? Have you no sodding understanding whatsoever of music, that it creates a mood? Do you not grasp that some people actually like this mood, and listen to music for this effect? Can you even grasp that moods don’t simply switch off? No, of course you sodding don’t, you’ve no clue about musical effect, and you don’t even grasp that people enjoy it. FFS. You have the emotional understanding of a blood–stained brick. You have the emotional depth of a blood–stained brick. In fact, in musical terms, you are a blood–stained brick. 
Apple, iTunes is so broken that you clearly are too. Can you tell I’m annoyed? I bet you don’t even notice. 16.8.14 |
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nrpe hackIn nagios & nrpe, I said that I’d written a fix for a problem I had with NRPE. I didn’t have access to syslog configuration, so I had to hack NRPE to log to a file. 
Here is ll.zip, which includes a drop–in replacement for nrpe.c from NRPE source, version 2.15. The new files, locallog.c and locallog.h, replace the syslog functions to output to a file. It’s a dirty hack, and does not deserve any praise. To use it, download NRPE 2.15, download ll.zip, added locallog.c to the Makefile, and rebuild. To use it, amend the config file to replace the facility name with a filename, and maybe add a log_level. For example: 15.8.14 |
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lazy journalismOh dear. The Birmingham Mail are running a quiz on Britishishness. And they get at least two things wrong. I wouldn’t expect every Brit to get the questions right (many have better things to do), but I do expect the self–appointed quizmasters to have done their job, to have checked their answers. And these guys are journalists. A core duty of a journalist is to check the story. If their employers don’t bother, what chance their employees take care to act professionally? How much else is false in the newspaper? 
Anyway, this is what they’ve got wrong:
Q. Who defeated the Vikings? The choices are King Alfred the Great, King Harold, and King Edward 1.
Q. When did the first world war end? The choices are 1918, 1919 and 1920.
The Birmingham Mail didn’t check their facts. One wonders what else they get wrong. 
I was so disappointed I tried a similar quiz, to see if the problem is endemic or just at the Birmingham Mail. I didn’t spot a problem, but, apparently, if the quiz details are correct, I can also get German citizenship. 14.8.14 |
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canada bans marmiteApparently, Canada has banned Irn–Bru, Marmite, Ovaltine, Bovril and Penguin biscuits. 
I’ve just had my breakfast, marmite on baguette. Yum! It’s the best of Britain and France, together. No wonder the Canadians want to ban marmite, marmite on baguette makes their cultural union kinda pointless. Irn–Bru being banned, though. Mmmm. It is pretty powerful stuff. I guess, given the quoted article says the banned substances pose no health threat, it means they believe Irn–Bru poses another kind of threat. The obvious possibility is a military threat. I can see that. The US seems to think Canada to be fluffy & harmless. If Irn–Bru became popular in Canada, it might turn Canadians into Glaswegians. It might be me, of course, but I just don’t see any connection between Glasgow and fluffy & harmless. The US would become very worried to find a huge country of Glaswegians to their north. Thus permitting free of movement of Irn–Bru would undoubtedly result in another abortive US invasion and subsequent Canadian victory, so the Canadians would end up havinge to occupy & run the US and all those other countries the US control. I can well understand why they wouldn’t want the hassle. 13.8.14 |
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itunes, again
Apple’s iTunes, on the Apple Mac, has multiple examples of poor user interface design. For example, when scrolling through podcasts on my iPod, the scrollbar for podcasts is inside a region scrolled by the scrollbar for episodes. The puck for the inner region is often scrolled off–screen. The two lists’ scrolling should be entirely independent. Another silliness is stopping downloading podcasts because it decides I’ve not listened to enough episodes for a while. By unsubscribing to subscribed podcasts without user intervention, Apple presume they know more about a user’s listening preferences than the user, a non–sequitor; they presume that not listening to a podcast series means it’ll never be wanted, another non–sequitor; and they clearly don’t understanding the concept of reference material. But now this Apple design flaw has got particularly silly. Just now, while listening to a podcast, I told iTunes to refresh all podcasts. It decided that some podcasts were to be ignored because “I hadn’t listened to episodes for a while”. This included the one I was listening to at the time. Apple, iTunes is broken. Please fix it. 10.8.14 |
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saarbrücken
We nipped across to Saarbrücken yesterday. We were going to go to Cologne, but it turns out the ticketing information I discovered on the net was wrong. I should have gone to SNCB; they usually get international train information correct (I often use them when planning train journeys in the UK). I slipped on the pavement outside Luxembourg station en route, and pulled a muscle, so wasn’t so enthusiastic. That means no photos. Also, Saarbrücken has some brilliant industrial architecture, but that’s nowhere near the centre, so, again, no photos. I would like to get back with my full photo kit to get some gloriously gnarly monochrome shots of huge industrial works, those of Saarstahl, but that’s for the future. 
Anyway, beyond the shopping, we made one lucky discovery. There’s a very good Chinese restaurant near Saarbrücken central station, way better than those we’ve found in Lux. It’s the Jasmin, at the Kaiserstraße tram stop. We had the rather cheap Saturday lunch–time buffet. The mushrooms were perfect, both delicious and with a firm exterior & soft interior. The tempura was great too. There was a decent selection of vegetarian dishes. Even so, the chef kindly prepared me a veggie chow mein without prompting, which was spot on, except I couldn’t eat all of it. It was buffet, so some things had been there a wee while, so not everything was ace, but for €7.80 a head for all you can eat, and boy I can eat, I’ll happily recommend the place. 10.8.14 |
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nagios & nrpe
I’ve a need to monitor some daemons on remote servers. The software is running from an ordinary user account. I do not have root access to those servers. I want to use nrpe, the nagios client plug–in daemon. Nrpe works when run from an ordinary user account, except that it logs to the syslog daemon, which requires root access to configure. For reasons I won’t go into, beyond mentioning recursive bureaucracy, I did not have access to the syslog configuration. Since I want access to those logs, I amended nrpe itself to add the option to log to a file. 
Now, it’s most probable there’s a good C package out there to log to a local file using a syslog–like API. I don’t believe for one moment I’m the first person to face this problem. But my google foo failed me. Whenever I searched for information on the Unix API, and got tons of crap on different languages’ programming libraries. Similarly when searching for local logging from C using a syslog like interface. Really, google, you think I said C in the search term because I wanted to see some information on Perl, then the same in Python, and Ruby, and so on? FFS. 
It didn’t help that I was targetting an older version of centos, which suffers from the Linux problem of crap man documentation. Yeah, I know about info, but I don’t like it: it is to man what a duck–billed platypus is to a duck, it looks odd and is useless at flying. I remote shelled through to my home system to get the OpenBSD gen. Those guys maintain quality documentation. Unfortunately, the OpenBSD API documentation makes no mention of a mechanism to control logging outputting without access to the syslog configuration file, which I did not have. So I wrote the code for nrpe to bypass syslog and log to a file. It’s imperfect, but it works. This code is available in nrpe hack. 8.8.14 |
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hah!
Belated happy zeroth birthday to my oldest great–niece, Billie. I really mustn’t call the poor girl Billie the kid. Billie, sorry I’m late with the pressie. It’s en route now. Mother and daughter are doing fine. :-) 7.8.14 |
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konscht am gronn the fourthMeanwhile, in the middle east, groups commit mass killing as though to prove their pixie has the biggest cock. Foul leaders recite their well–said dark fantasies to convince the easy to persuade that giant invisible pixies would have them commit mass killing. Guilt and responsibility is buck–passed to the nonexistent. Is there no leader man enough amongst them to deny the psychopathic lust? This is not just about those, responsible for innocents, who place them for their enemies to kill. This is not just about those enemies who then kill as expected. This is not just about the observers who cry horror at the photos and the statistics, who reward those who placed the innocents for killing with gold and poll results. Nor is this just about the slaughterers elsewhere, using their psychopathic fantasies to slaughter those who know their God better. Each group is convinced their God is on their side. Each supports mass killing, knowingly or naïvely. All Gods are used as mascots for slaughter. No God is unmarred by evil. The only good place to go is where Gods can never go. The only good place is atheism. An atheist cannot use a pixie or God to buck–pass responsibility. It takes strength to accept responsibility. An atheist has to be strong. The only strong place is atheism. That’s why the morally weak run to Gods, cower to Gods, that’s why the morally weak accept the leadership of psychopaths who invoke responsibility–eating pixies to allow the morally weak to mass kill. The only moral place is atheism. I do not say all atheists are moral. I do not say all atheists are good. I do not say all atheists are strong. I only say the place to find the moral, good and strong, is atheism. I didn’t get to knoscht am gronn. 3.8.14 |
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nagios reinstallation
Nagios is a suite of scripts to monitor computer health. If there’s a computer you depend on, but can’t watch, you can install nagios to watch it for you. It gives you a summary of the computer’s behaviour, & can email you should something on the computer throw or catch a strop. I had been running nagios on Centos 5, but decided it was time to upgrade. Actually, I did more than upgrade, I switched to an OpenBSD 5.5 server. It’s so much easier! This probably reflects my familiarity with OpenBSD more than anything else. The only non–standard plug–ins I’m using are to monitor Windows servers, of which I’ve a virtual handful, and remote access connectivity (both RDC and VNC). I did manage to blow up my backup website. I set it up to dislike regular abusers, but have evidentally set things to be a little too sensitive. The firewall blocked the nagios is–the–service–up check! The main hiccup is Centos 7, which is ironic because my old nagios server ran under Centos 6. I can’t find the packages. Admittedly, I’ve not looked that hard. I’ll sort the Centos problem out tomorrow. I revised my nagios installation because I want to install it at work, so I can be warned about impending crashes of essential services before they happen. It was more to refresh my knowledge than anything else. 2.8.14 |
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the art of failure“The art of failure” is a collection of photos of silicon chip failures from the IEEE. It looks better than it sounds … but if you go look see, use the zoom icon on the images. It presents so much better. It’s more than just size. I went a looking because I find pareidolia interesting. 1.8.14 |
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koblenz
We visited Koblenz yesterday. The local dish is ice cream, judging by the number of specialist restaurants. We didn’t spend so much time there, mostly because the train came in late. We saw the park with the famous statue, and the closed city centre. We ate dinner, which was ok (no, not ice cream). That’s about it. There’s nothing wrong with the city. It whelmed us, that’s all. I’m not showing a photograph of the famous horse’s huge arse. The poor animal might get a complex. So here’s a photo of the mosel, taken going home. 28.7.14 |
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automatic reply
I’ve got fed up with spam from scammers, so I’ve added this automatic reply to my email program. Hello, Thanks for the invite to Dylan to join Linked In. Do you know it was sent in your name? Dylan left Linked In in spring 2014 because they were promoting scammers. He didn’t like that at all. He won’t be returning. It’s not often he gets an opportunity to take a stand against dishonesty. He’s trying out xing.com and viadeo.com: perhaps he might see you there? Monster.com has helped him find clients and employers in the past. He is, of course, on faceboot. Dylan won’t have seen your invite to join Linked In. I deleted it before he had the chance. He’s asked me to do that. If you do want to discuss this with him, change the subject line in the email, otherwise I’ll delete that too. I’m not a very clever computer. Enjoy your day,
Constance the Computer 25.7.14 |
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palestine, again
Alright, this is going to be unpopular. A few days ago, Egypt organised a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Israel accepted it. Hamas rejected it. To quote the BBC at the time: “Hamas, which controls Gaza, is still discussing the plan, but its armed wing has rejected it as a “surrender”. Under the terms, the ceasefire should begin immediately, followed by a series of meetings in Cairo with high–level delegations from both sides.”. In other words, Hamas consider talks to be a form of surrender. It is Hamas who are responsible for the continuing suffering of the Palestinian people. Israel were very wrong to launch this fight, but the Palestinians who are dying are Hamas’ sacrifice to their own ideology. Hamas mean power, not people; belief, not life; ideology, not reality. They get propaganda pictures to post around the world, in the hope the world will forget the people taking the photos are the people who make the suffering continue. Just because the Gaza Palestinians are suffering does not mean their leaders are automatically right. There is no right in this conflict, there’s only ideologues with guns, and their victims. Then you get all the bollocks that ‘not taking sides is taking the side of the oppressors’. Actually, not taking sides in this conflict, now, is the only ethical position: taking sides is supporting a bunch of warmongers. 21.7.14 |
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beien an der stad
Sometimes, unfortunately, translations aren’t quite perfect. Luxembourg Town has launched a campaign to inform people about bees, called “Bees in the City”. I think it’s a good idea. Unfortunately, when explaining the difference between bees and wasps, and why they sting … well ….
20.7.14 |
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