Rubenerd

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:16:42 – Frank Edward Nora!! Clara Tse!! Chad Bowers!! Rubenerd!! Doc Sleaze!! Sunday is discussed from a number of angles!! PQ Ribber hosts!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

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01:02:17 – Topics include gentrification, virtual worlds (limitations of physical world, Nightstation) geo-locked console fun, Need for Speed Most Wanted: Terminal Velocity expansion, consoles versus computers, Plex, Crunchyroll, Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, walking to find ATMs, Singapore's atm5, paying to get access to your money, lost with maps, insufficient PIN lengths, migraines, family folklore, depressing malls, visiting Mascot parks during the day, us as ant lifeforms, being closed minded, 209 (university days, apartment doors, the number 8 in Chinese, The Overnightscape 1209, email address), etymology behind the Rubenerd name, and fictitious billboards. Music by Who Ha, again!

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released August 2015 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

Seb shared this image on Twitter a while ago, and I’m still using it everywhere. So beautiful! The original arist was Asukaziye on Pixiv, but its also available on Konachan.

Type/moon had always been my favourite studio from an artistic perspective, but I only just recently started watching series from the Fate universe. It’s a fascinating world they’ve built.

This morning I posted how CoreOS needed more memory than its name implied. I also had an adventure with the installer.

If you look at the official install docs for CoreOS, you install from ISO with this command:

$ sudo su - root
# coreos-install -d /dev/sda

Except you can't. The ISO doesn't contain the production image. Or if it did, it wasn't made clear and/or I couldn't find it.

So I update my networking, to allow it to download.

# ifconfig eth0 <ethernet-ip/24>
# route add default gw <gateway-ip>

Still no dice, it complained it couldn't resolve the address. Shoot yes, I didn't have an entry in resolv.conf.

echo "208.67.220.220" >> /etc/resolv.conf

Still nothing. As John Cleese said of a certain gentleman's walk, this was getting rather silly.

Reading the documentation, you define networking in the following horrible systemd path. So I edited the file:

vim /etc/systemd/network/static.network

And added the following:

[Match]
Name=eth0
[Network]
Address=<ethernet-ip>
Gateway=<gateway-ip>
DNS=208.67.220.220

Then it was simply a matter of restarting networking:

# service network restart
==> -su: service: command not found

Then it was simply a matter of restarting networking, using systemd's more streamlined syntax:

# systemctl restart systemd-networkd

And finally we were cooking with gas.

==> Downloading, writing and verifying coreos_production_image.bin.bz2...

You'll also want to specify a cloud-config as well.

I’ve been looking at CoreOS at work. Specifically, at its error messages.

[FAILED] Failed to start Switch Root.
See 'systemctl status initrd-switch-root.service' for details.

After booting from the ISO, it got as far as this, and dropped to an emergency shell. My heart sank a little when I saw systemctl; throwing systemd into the mix would surely make this problem even more complicated to diagnose and correct.

Turns out, CoreOS has a 1GiB memory floor, and I’d only allocated it 512MiB. I only knew this through this Stack Overflow answer; the CoreOS site makes no mention of this anywhere obvious, as far as I can tell.

For an OS professing to be a “Core”, it’s regrettable it doesn’t support a very common memory size, particulary in the very cloud environments it’s targeted at. Perhaps containers introduce such overhead as to require it?

And while I’m ranting, why is it that everything from software appliances, to speciailised Linux distributions with specific requirements don't do a simple memory check before exploding in spectacular fashion?

If you’ll excuse me, I'm going to use my FreeBSD boxes for a bit.

After wrestling with profiles in dozens of terminal emulators, this week I downloaded a trial of SecureCRT from VanDyke software. It saved me so much friggen time, I bought an otherwise–steep US$99 licence for it without batting an eyelid.

If you manage dozens of machines, SecureCRT's Session Manager is worth its weight in gold-pressed latinum. You can define host hierarchies to perform actions on, automate logins through jumpboxes, and connect with more obscure protocols and ciphers. Most importantly for me, you can also export all your host definitions.

As an aside, PAC Manager is a free and open source alternative on Linux that's almost as good, but it‘s very fiddly to get running on OS X. You need to use XQuartz, build GTK+, and resolve a ton of Perl dependencies. SecureCRT just works.

About my only gripes are it doesn't support RDP (which PAC Manager does), and some of the icons look pretty janky on my retina MacBook Pro. VanDyke issued a user survey a few days after I registered, and I told them as much.

Overall though, a wonderful piece of kit. Over the coming weeks, I’ll likely be posting some tips and tricks I’ve learned in the process of using it. Though if you're a sysadmin, you likely already knew about this software ages ago.

Here's something fun my boss and I discovered today. Say you have this file:

$ cat test.txt
==> Zettai ryouiki in all the examples

And you want to replace a word with sed. You see GNU sed has a quiet flag, so thinking it means surpress warning messages and such (useful in scripts), you run this:

$ sed --quiet -i '' 's/all/some/g'

Checking the file again, you’re astonished to find:

$ cat test.txt
==> *crickets*

There’s nothing there. Kaput. It has ceased to exist, like a legendary feathered creature. Exactly what you’d expect for a function called quiet?

Not to get all Malcom Gladwell on you, but turns out the GNU folks decided quiet would be used in this context:

-n
--quiet
--silent

By default, sed prints out the pattern space at the end of each cycle through the script (see How sed works). These options disable this automatic printing, and sed only produces output when explicitly told to via the p command.

A perfectly reasonable, useful function. But I feel anything with the capability to clobber a file should be given a command with a less innocuous name.

sed on my beloved BSDs doesn’t have a quiet flag, and therefore there’s no such convenience/confusion.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:54:06 – Chad Bowers!! Clara Tse!! Frank Edward Nora!! Mike Boody!! Rubenerd!! Doc Sleaze!! A mind-expanding, multifaceted gaze at the cinema of the 1950s!! PQ Ribber is your host and guide!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

01:13:51 – Topics include Topics include unintentional three shows in a row, night roadworkers, social awkwardness with public podcasting, the end of my job honeymoon, QANTAS, Australian states, finding lava lamp bulbs, flood lamp power generators, insomnia, listener question from Jimbo, legal status of fire alarms, time (frames of reference, physics, diverging timelines and paths), Star Trek Voyager (Kes, 7 of 9), my own terrible sci-fi novel discussed publicly for the first time, nostalgia as a form of time travel (DOS games, holodecks versus "real" time travel), Nightstation, witty music (Phish, The Grateful Dead, Michael Franks), gooey logos (Holiday Inn, Qantas, Black and Decker, Avery), spraying bitumen around the joint, coffee shops, jaffles, loud motorcycles, and far too many Frank Nora name drops.

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released August 2015 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

This is one of those things I'm constantly forgetting, especially since I use Postgres for most of my work.

To replace the occurance of a string in a field with another, use the following. This replaces the value of the field with the value of the field where a text substitution has taken place:

MariaDB [DB]> UPDATE table 
    -> SET field=REPLACE(field,'original','replacement');

The MariaDB site lists further details.