/dev/zero

@choochoobear wow, hope the cop nailed her ass.

Not as in I WAS antisocial, but as in I discovered how much I dislike people.
Now I don’t, as a general rule, have a problem with people. I’m a pretty gregarious kind of guy. However lately I’ve discovered how much I dislike groups of people. Groups in public places.

Hanging out with friends is all right. I enjoy going out to the movies with my friends, game night at friends houses, going out to dinner, etc. Churches are fine (without getting into religion or faith. That’s unrelated to my main theme here.)
It’s crowds, crowded places, places with lots of people, where most of them have nothing to do with each other, save for their physical presence at the same time and place. This is where people really annoy me. It’s the thoughtless acts, the “no one else here but me matters, so I don’t have to be polite”, that ticks me off.

I went out to a movie with vulpine137, Nymaz, Amethyst and Kestrel. 20 minutes into the movie, something starts flashing in the theater. Not a blinking light, a flash. As in a flash photography. It does it more than once. I turn around and see some Paris Hilton look-alike sitting in the row behind us with some kind of camera phone taking pictures of herself and her young friend. A picture or two during a movie, while rude and annoying, I could live with. 6 or 7 pictures was too much. Finally I told her, loud enough for most of the theater to hear, to “Put the damn camera away!” She said something snide in return, but there were no more flashes and we were able to enjoy the rest of the movie in peace. I highly recommend Kung Fu Panda, by the way.

The next day, Kestrel and I, having new dress codes handed down by both our places of employment during the same week and neither of us possessing enough appropriate clothes, went shopping. The trip reaffirmed how much I hate malls. I used to be a bit of a mall rat as a kid. Junior high and high school, I hung out with friends at the mall. Don’t look at me like that. It was the ’80s. A mall, on a Saturday, in June, in Texas, is the last place you want to be. Too many teens doing the mall rat thing, too many familys with little kids running around. Too many people who have never heard of deoderant, or in some cases even soap. Too many people who like to walk 3, 4, 5 abreast, slowly, taking the entire width of a passage so you can’t get around them to where you’re going.

It’s the “me and my friends are the only thing that matters. Everyone else in this place with us aren’t part of our group so they don’t matter. Simple manners are unimportant. Being aware of other people around us, having any consideration for anyone else’s comfort or enjoyment is irrelevant.” that drives me crazy.

The people in the mall are just annoying and I can avoid that by simply not going to malls. I did it mostly successfully for about 5 years. Flash photography in a movie theater, DURING the feature? That’s a whole new level of “the world revolves around ME”.

Coming home from work the other night, as I turned into my neighborhood I encountered a bit of police and fire activity. No lights and sirens and fire was leaving the scene, so I didn’t think much of it. Probably someone called 911 for a medical emergency and it was all over. There was one police car still in the neighborhood and he drove off when he realized he was blocking me from turning onto my street.

Kestrel said there were two police cars out front when she got ome and the officers were talking to Jeff, our neighbor across the street. I know Jeff has a past, so I was a little worried, but she said they seemed to be laughing and joking. I stopped worrying figured I’d just ask him what happened the next day.

I came home from work yesterday, saw that Jeff was home so headed over to ask what all the excitement was the day before. Jeff and Jonnetta, his wife, were sitting at their kitchen table with Chris, the neighbor that shares the other half of their duplex. I’d never met Chris before, though I had spoken with her boyfriend and roommate, Mark. I’d seen her coming home from work so I recognized her and Jeff introduced us.
Monday afternoon, Mark died, apparently of heart failure.

He’d been ill for several months, first pneumonia, then a couple of bouts of bronchitis. He was fighting off another round of bronchitis when his doctors told him if he didn’t quit smoking, it was just going to keep coming back and his lungs would never heal, so he quit. 8 days later he was dead.

Chris said she called around 3:45 to get a phone number. He said it would take him a minute to get to it, as he was rather weak and was moving slowly. When he didn’t come right back, she figured he got distracted by a book or something, as he was in the habit of doing. (I saw him many times, at all hours of the day and night, stepping out to his porch to have a cigarette, always reading a book. He made his living buying and selling books online. Their house is so packed with books they can barely move.) Later she got an uneasy feeling and came home early, to find him collapsed on the floor, unresponsive. She called 911 and they had to take him out through the bedroom window. He was probably already dead before she got home, but they transported him to the hospital, attempting to revive him.

After getting back from the hospital, she had to deal with calling his parents to let them know their son had died. While still on the phone the police showed up and made her get off the phone RIGHT NOW, so they could remove her from the house and seal it off. They wouldn’t even let her re-enter the house to feed the dog. It wasn’t until midnight that they had their search warrant, completed their search and let her back in, satisfied that there was no appearance of a crime.

Chris and Mark had just gotten engaged and were supposed planning to sign the papers on a house they are buying this Friday. Instead she’s traveling to Oklahoma City bury him.

“Well, that was an adventure.”

Weather closed in on the Irving call center and knocked power out. Power flickered, went out again and the generator kicked in (but didn’t restore power to us on the floor.) Window blowing outside, looking very much like tornado weather.
Wind died, power came back and we’re back to work.

Ugh. Later to work today than usual. Slept right through the alarm clock.

Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra “Concerts in the Garden” series.

Glinka

Overature to Ruslan and Ludmila

Tchaikovsky

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45

Liszt

Totentanz for Piano and Orchestra, G. 126
Kyle Orth, Piano

Intermission

Tchaikovsky

Waltz from the Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66

Tchaikovsky

Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, Op. 71

Tchaikovsky

Waltz from Swan Lake, Op. 20

Tchaikovsky

1812 Overature, Op. 49

Two of my favorite pieces, Capriccio Italien and 1812 Overature, very well done.
The guest pianist, Kyle Orth, didn’t impress me much, but he wasn’t bad either. He plays well, but I’ve certainly heard better. Still, for a 16 year old kid, he’s got his career started out on the right path.

Given the nature of Twitter, I don’t understand those who just automatically follow everyone who shows up on the Twitter home page. I just blocked about 5 “followers” who were each following a couple of thousand people. Some were following as many as 80k people! Clearly they’re not actually “following” any of them, just automatically adding everyone who posts, hoping to GET as many followers as possible. “TwitterMosaic”? If I wanted to see everything posted by everyone on twitter, I’d just look at the twitter home page, not follow a specific user, who just reposts everything everyone says.
Then there was the guy who’s every tweet was “Let me help you make your life better! Read my web site! makemoneyfast.com” and variations thereof. Yeah, I need twitter spam about as much as I need email spam.
On the other hand, having finally gotten up and started my e-day, one of the first emails I read told me a lovely red-head and good friend had started following me on Twitter.

@GregWillits I’m sorry to hear that. Seems to be the week for media personalities to pass on.

Finally up for the day. Catchng up on the e-world, then off to the grocery store.

Thanks to haela for linking to themissinghat

Turns out these random “salmon” IMs are a bot, picking two people who have recently updated their LJ / Deviant Art / Xanga / Whatever and connecting them by IM. Neither one of them knows who the other is and ends up being totaly confused.
I was getting seriously annoyed at this person, but turns out it’s someone different each time and has no more clue about it than I did.

I was at WalMart today during lunch and I swear I saw a zombie in the shoe section…

Oh god, we’ve already lost 12 servers. I logged out of all of them and am holed up in an ssh session on my home server. I’ve shut down all outside ports and have been using “kill” very carefully, but the zombie processes keep coming! I don’t know how much longer I can hold out until I have to reboot!

I finally got a CentOS 5 domU running under Debian.
The xen-tools xen-create-image method didn’t work. I managed to find an appropriate build script for centos5, but it was pretty badly out of date, trying to install RPM versions that don’t exist on the mirror servers any more. Trying to bring it back up to date would have been a PITA. It has the RPM versions hard-coded in the script.
However the instructions at http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Create_Centos5_DomU_on_Debian_Etch_Dom0 worked a treat.
After following those steps, I converted it from a file-based image, to an LVM, with the following steps:
Manually create logical volumes for the filesystem and swap. I use 40G filesystem LVs and 128M swaps.

# mkdir /mnt/loop
# mkdir /mnt/cenots
# mount /home/andrew/centos.5-0.img /mnt/loop -o loop
# mount /dev/mapper/ember-centos5–disk /mnt/centos
# cd /mnt/loop
# cp -Rp bin boot dev etc home lib media mnt opt root sbin selinux srv sys tmp usr var ../centos
# cd
# umount /mnt/loop
# umount /mnt/centos

Then edit /etc/xen/domains/centos.cfg and change the following lines:

kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-xen-686″
ramdisk = “/boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-xen-686″
vif = ['bridge=xenbr0']
disk = ['file:/xens/name_of_new_server_to_be/centos.5-0.img,sda1,w','file:/xens/name_of_new_server_to_be/centos.swap,sda2,w']

To:

kernel = ‘/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-xen-686′
ramdisk = “/boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-6-xen-686″
vif = [ 'ip=192.168.1.13' ]
disk = [ 'phy:ember/centos5-disk,sda1,w', 'phy:ember/centos5-swap,sda2,w' ]

Then “xm create centos”. Boom! Centos 5, running as a domU on a Debian Etch dom0, from a logical volume.
And I still have the original centos5 image file for creating fresh domUs.

Now that’s just not playing fair.

I never was any good at foreign languages.

Because I don’t think I should have money. Let Saudi Arabia have it all.

Aught to be a good title for a book on Xen, no?

Anyway, while discussing Xen with the COO (and it just occurred to me, really this project should be the CTO’s, not the COOs… odd how the COO does all this stuff…) he came to the conclusion that, like openVZ and Virtuozzo, Xen guest systems shared the kernel with the Host. That didn’t sound right to me, but I couldn’t disprove it with my Xen server, where every DomU had an empty /boot.

So I updated the kernel in Dom0, but didn’t reboot. I now have a newer kernel installed than the one it’s currently running.
I then tweaked the /etc/xen-tools/xen-tools.conf and built a new DomU, to use the new kernel. Everything went without a hitch. I now have a Dom0 running 2.6.18-4-xen-686, with a domU running 2.6.18-6-xen-686. So it would seem that while they all “share” a kernel in the sense that they share a single install on the hard drive (all pulling from the dom0 /boot directory), they aren’t sharing a single instance of the kernel in memory.

I then tried to get a working CentOS 5 domU running, but ran into some snags. That will be another post.

testing ljxp from real wordpress blog

Done with lunch. Back to working on Xen deploy scripts.

SSH fixed (stupid blacklist), vpn working. Yay!

Trying to get my ssh public key working on my VPN server

So far this week I’ve:
Finally gotten a working Xen system that will boot a Debian guest.
Successfully installed ispCP on the Debian guest.
Built another Debian guest to be an OpenVPN server.
Successfully built an OpenVPN server and got two clients to connect from outside the network, through the DSL modem/router.
Correctly configured the VPN server to give the client access to the full network via IP masquerading (next trick: get the network to simply route the packets instead of having to use masq).
Got ddclient working on the VPN server to keep dyndns updated so I don’t have to hard code an IP address in my VPN clients and check various server log files to see if it changed.
Fixed ddclient, when it failed to update dyndns with new IP address after my DSL provider mysteriously issued a new one, not 3 hours after setting up ddclient in the first place.

I can now log into my ispcp box from my desk at work, as though it was on the same network. I can now proceed with trying to get Mailman to play nice with ispCP when it’s slow at work.

I get productive when I ignore my games.

While installing Ubuntu Server 8.04 beta on an HP DL-320, I discovered I had some trouble getting HP’s “Proliant value added software” (hpasm) package installed. This package contains their system health check and control software which, among other things, switches the fans from “full-time full speed” (which is quite noisy) to temperature controlled speed (eg: normal (read: quiet) fan speed when system temp is normal).
The problem with installing and runnning this software stems from the fact that Ubuntu, for some reason, links /bin/sh to dash instead of bash. Dash is another bourne shell clone, but doesn’t understand Bash (bourne-again shell) specific syntax.
Re-linking /bin/sh to bash instead of dash solved the problem and the server is now humming (quietly) along.

About to update the blog to WP 2.5. It should be smooth but if things break, who knows how long I’ll be offline.
Not that I’ve been posting much lately…

<edit>Update mostly successful. The LJ crosspost plugin won’t reactivate, saying it caused a fatal error. Not very informative. I’ll have to figure that one out I guess.</edit>

Just a personal note so I can find how to install Debian on a DomU again

Last night I’m on my DoD clan’s Ventrillo server just before a scrimmage and yakking with teammates waiting for the game to begin.
I apologized for getting home and logging on only minutes before the game is due to start as I had to work late and only just got home.
One of them asks what I do for a living, I explain that I work for CI Host, one of the larger Internet server hosting companies and he asks if that means I know about networking. I explain that I’m more of a Unix guy than a Network guy, but that does come with having to know a little about networking. He mentions that since the clan switched servers, he and his wife (who also plays) have noticed quite an increase in his ping time. He did a trace to the server and saw the route go from Houston (where they live) out to California, bounce around a while, then back to Dallas (where the server is located).
I tell him to send me a copy of his traceroute and I’ll take a look.
I logged onto the clam forum site and see he sent me a private message.
Did he cut and paste the traceroute into the message?
Nope. He made a screenshot of the DOS window and attached the .bmp file.

Dunno what to say about a guy who knows how to do a traceroute, but not a cut’n'paste.

Not making the assumption that my gentle readers know what the hell I’m talking about…
Day of Defeat, a WWII simulation in the First Person Shooter genre.
A VoIP application popular amongst gamers, that creates something akin to a conference call.
A game that is more than a standard public “for fun” free for all but not as formal a league “match” that counts towards a team/clan’s standing in a game season.

This is the first I’ve heard of this, but this is the first trailer release of a new movie being produced entirely on Open Source software, under a Creative Commons license.

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer on Vimeo

Weird. Posts made with kblogger never show up in my blog. They’re “published”, they get a post ID, I can see them in the database and all fields are the same as posts that do show up (well, with the exception of things I expect to be different. Date. Title. GID, etc.) I even see my to “test” posts made it to twitter, but they don’t show up in the blog. Not even in the management interface where I should see ALL posts, published, draft or otherwise.

OK, WP is working. I can post just fine from the web interface.

I just received a message via MSN from “Colby” containing only the words “PARTY PARTY PARTY” and a URL.
They immediately closed the conversation window and when I tried to ask who the hell they were, was told that that user had signed off.
Out of curiosity, I visited the URL (since it didn’t contain any session / cgi ID stuff to uniquely identify the visitor)
The first thing it asks for is my MSN login and password.
No, not a prayer you’re getting me to put that in on your form.
Under that it gives the standard “by logging into this site you agree to the terms and conditions”. Pretty standard stuff, only it’s not in fine print and they print the terms and conditions themselves immediately below that, also not in fine print.
And the terms?
“By filling out this form, you authorize TST Management, Inc to spread the word
about this 100% real and upcomming Messenger Community Site.
You will receive your share of the credit in helping us spread the word. This is a harmless
Community site which is offering users a platform to meet each other for free.”

Yeah. I’ll sign up for your bullshit spamming service. Uh-huh.

OK, I think I have a clue to what is changing my theme on me.

After posting my last entry, due to the the problems with Drivel only allowing me to select a single category, and not having any way to enter “tags”, I loaded the blog in my browser to edit the post.
Having looked at my blog earlier today for something, I knew as of an hour ago it was showing the correct theme. After posting via drivel (via xmlrpc), the theme was reset to the default.

I’m posting this through Drivel. Let’s see if it resets again…

Well, so much for that theory. Post the entry, reload the main page, theme not reset. I’ll have to keep looking.
I don’t suppose Sadish will see this and offer some insight. Not that I think it’s in any way caused by his theme. I’m sure it’s a problem with /dev/null, but with all his experience with themes, maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll have some clue.