Rubenerd

Knick, responding to a New York Times article on San Francisco’s Burning Man exodus:

While the adult-children of the Bay Area head out on a compass bearing of 48.8 degrees Northeast to Gerlach and environs for a few days of post-apocalyptic mud, dust and dissolution, the Bay Area’s adult-adults choose ANY other cardinal direction and revisit the universe of woods, rocks, beaches, water and magic night skies that are the real world.

To be fair, the desert can be beautiful too.

For those unaware, Burning Man is this thing where people do stuff. Along with the Comics O’logy thing, it also makes many podcasts insufferable.

Despite my pronounced departure from CentOS to Debian for most system tasks, FreeBSD is still my primary server OS of choice. Partly because I’ve loved the OS since at least 2006, partly as a hedge for when that ridiculous systemd takes down Debian with Jessie.

No, really, systemd really is that bad.

But I digress, as I always do. One of the first tasks I perform when setting up a FreeBSD box from scratch is install sudo, and enable access for my separated administration account.

If you read forum discussions, Stack Exchange answers and blog posts, its likely you’ve been told to use visudo, and add the following line:

username ALL=(ALL) ALL

While that works, FreeBSD has had the wheel user for this specific task for as long as I can remember. Much like Debian’s sudo user, just adding yourself to this:

# pw groupmod wheel -m username

Then you can run visudo, and uncomment the first %wheel line.

For finer grain permissions and control, you’ll want to configure for individual users. At least to start though, this is the simplest way to go.

(This originally appeared on Server Fault. I like to keep my own local copies of stuff like this, not least because all social networks are transient).

Question

I’m purchasing some second hand servers, which the seller has given me remote access to. Running ipmitool [..] ser list, they seem clean other than these repeated a few months ago on each:

 [..] | System Firmware Error | Unspecified | Asserted
 [..] | Memory | Configuration Error | Asserted | CPU 11 DIMM 1
 [..] | Memory | Configuration Error | Asserted | CPU 11 DIMM 1
 [..] | Memory | Configuration Error | Asserted | CPU 3 DIMM 1
 [..] | Memory | Configuration Error | Asserted | CPU 11 DIMM 1
 [..] | Memory | Configuration Error | Asserted | CPU 11 DIMM 1
 [..] | Memory | Configuration Error | Asserted | CPU 3 DIMM 1

I’m completely new to using ipmi. From a daily usage perspective, should the presence of these errors be concerning?

Answer

From Baruch Even:

From the ipmi spec version 1.5 in page 375 (about sensor 0x0C/0X07):

Configuration error. Indicates a memory configuration error for the entity associated with the sensor. This can include when a given implementation of the entity is not supported by the system (e.g., when the particular size of the memory module is unsupported) or that the entity is part of an unsupported memory configuration (e.g. the configuration is not supported because the memory module doesn’t match other memory modules)

Yes, that Buzzfeed-inspired heading was a joke, given the critique in today's post is reserved for this special article "Six reasons I hate cosplay". Let's take a gander:

1. He thinks patrons are rude, and the worst are those "dressed as Piku Chikka Uku GooGoo Gaga". While he may have a point for common courtesy, me thinks he could afford those targets of his racist diatribe the same.

2. Some people don't know all the details of those they're cosplaying. Oh you poor dear, have a Bex and good lie down.

3. Women only cosplay as hot characters to get attention, and guys all lear and drool because they want to sleep with them. Yay, sexism.

4. Something something your fake weapons take up space. The Golden Rule would have sufficed without belittling those who may have spent hours building a costume you don't feel they're worthy of wearing, or from some "insipid Manga/Japanimation".

5. Wear the costume you're built for. I admit, I used to think a little like this. I don't anymore, because people can express themselves without yours or my approval.

6. Crowds. Yes, he complained about crowds at a convention.

It's possible Mr Robinson wrote this as parody, given it so succinctly summarises all the cliché talking points people level at cosplayers. If he didn't, let's pretend he did.

Whether it’s Dr Grant Mooney from UTS, or some weird guy writing a blog, some of us just get more work done in coffee shops. I’ve attempted to pontificate on the reasons why over many a year here, but I’ve long since given up.

While working at a coffee shop recently:

See, this tool on his laptop, there isn’t even WiFi here

Normally I ignore these flippant remarks. To mess with them though, I put my browser full screen and started loading a ton of pages. It must have caught their attention:

Hey mate, you got WiFi here?

I could have said I was tethered to the phone in my pocket but…

Yeah, pretty good for a tool, huh?

Now to be fair… nah, let’s not be this time.

Happy Sunday everyone. Today I reached the rather inglorious milestone of having a hundred drafts. For 2014. Rather than attempt to fix these up for posting, have an image I took this afternoon of the sunshine in Sydney.

Singapore will always be my home and I miss it dearly, but nowhere on Earth has skies as beautiful as Australia. Absolutely spectacular.

This also marks two posts in a row of Australian skies. Better make the next one tie back into anime again, somehow.

So we have TPG home internet. Yes they’re not great, but all Australian internet is terrible after you’ve grown up in Singapore.

(Good grief, I miss MaxOnline cable internet fiercely. Since moving back, they’ve even implemented their own NBN while our politicians and talking heads decry fibre is minimally beneficial. Ah Australia, always on the verge of greatness but never allowing yourself to do it).

TPG are generally decent during the day, but their evening speeds approach the ISDN connection we had when I was a kid. Check out our latest isolation test, performed with speedtest-py:

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from TPG Internet ([our IP address])...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by Vodafone Hutchison Australia (SD) (Sydney) [19.49 km]: 59.047 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 1.72 Mbits/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 0.28 Mbits/s

That’s fairly average. Between 19:00 and 22:00, its’ normal to see that dip below 0.80 Mb/s down. Worse still, their peering arrangements result in speeds for the major social networks that are so slow, my tethered iPhone with 2 bars of reception performs better.

As the “IT guy” in the house, I get blamed for this. Normally I’d resent being the face of such an issue, but given it’s this bad, I can’t say I blame them for their resentment.

The next step is to check the phone line, swap out the modem, run regular tests, graph the results, then move back overseas.

If these fail to turn up anything, we may attempt to cancel our plan, citing their terms of service which lists “900kb/s” as the minimum acceptable speed (which is in itself a joke). I would hope it wouldn’t come to that.

Forgive the link to a paywall, but the opening summary of this article in The Australian newspaper is amazing:

THE former Labor government’s decision to pursue a fibre-to-the-home, super-fast, broadband network would have a net cost to taxpayers of $22.2 billion, but the Coalition’s model still leaves them paying billions to deliver access to the bush and urban fringes, a landmark cost-benefit analysis reveals.

Yeah, damn those people who don't live in cities. Don't they know how selfish their rural lifestyle is?

The Coalition-commissioned analysis

A government-commissioned analysis on the people they replaced.

[..] finds the expense of providing high-speed internet access to people who live in uncommercial rural and regional areas, as well as urban fringes, would cost nearly $5bn but the benefits are only a fraction of that.

It's why we only have electricity to the node. The only thing consumers use (and will ever use) power for is heating, stoves and light; and those are already serviced by our extensive natural gas network.

Well, here we are in another fine Tuesday morning in Sydney! Such was the volume of water pouring down the stairs in Town Hall station, I stacked. For those of you not from Australia (or New Zealand?), this referrs to face planting. Or tripping, or falling over, or smashing one's self on a ground in an unfortunate pose.

But enough of physical adventures. I've got a few Debian machines in production, having made the switch from CentOS to line up with what work is using. Interestingly, I've come fully around to the Debian/apt way of doing things, such that the Red Hat universe already feels a little foreign. Well, almost!

Somewhat in lieu of EPEL on my CentOS boxes, Debian has backports. According to the documentation, we can add this:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main

This points to a redirector, which sends you to a closer geo and network mirror. Now you can install backported software with:

# apt-get -t wheezy-backports install <SOMETHING>

So now that we've done that, let's tread into troubleshooting territory. That's a nice, warm, fuzzy way of saying don't type the following lines. In fact, lets make this into a subheading.

Don't type the following

No, really. The number of times I've accidently entered a command I saw on a girl or guy's site late at night before realising its an example of what not to type, is rather embarrasing. Consider yourself warned.

Say for example, you have the following in your sources list, as I did:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian-backports wheezy-backports main

Looks good, right? Alas, it will give you this.

E: The value 'wheezy-backports' is invalid for APT::Default-Release as such a release is not available in the sources

I scratched my head for hours trying to figure this out. I could ping the server, view it in my browser, what's up? If you've arrived here via a web search, maybe you're asking the same question.

The issue is confused syntax. For squeeze-backports, the URL is:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian-backports squeeze-backports main

To repeat the first line in this post, wheezy-backports is:

deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main

That's right, don't include "-backports" going forward with wheezy, and you'll be fine. Cue a reference to Looking Glass. And speaking of pointless references, that image of Yui inexplicably with a Debian Gnome desktop background was by WilusIronforge on DebianART DeviantART. Oh Ruben, you so funny.

UPDATE: I’ve since reverted back to not using featured images. Too many drawbacks, trivial visual benefit. Not that I’m fickle.

Yes, that's what my site looked like in 2006. I'll admit, I do miss dark themes terribly. But I suppose the public have spoken.

Back on topic. The Apple Dictionary.app defines “observant” as:

a railway carriage with large windows designed to provide a good view of passing scenery.

Wait, that was the definition of observation car. Never mind, point is I could change the letter spacing of my font here by 0.5 pixels, and @JamieJakov would notice.

Since about 2008, I've been including 500px wide images as the heading on each post. I'd long wanted them to be the heading for posts, but I never had the time nor inclination to figure out how to achieve this in WordPress. Given the software had only just been given tag support, let alone featured images, it seemed more trouble than it was worth.

Jekyll and Liquid markup make this trivial. Using a terrible Perl script, I extracted each of the 500px image URLs, added them as a separate "featured" front-matter field, then defined the markup in Liquid to render the background headers with the aforementioned image.

There are still some lingering bugs:

• RSS doesn't show images anymore. Given this is also entirely defined with Liquid, it should be simple enough to include the post.featured field inline above post.content, as it would have been displayed on the site.

• The mobile layout doesn't scale properly anymore. This I'm not sure how to fix; it'll probably involve even more inglorious CSS hacks. Yes HTML for layout was terrible, but CSS truly is an awful language.

I'm not sure the execution of featured images is great here, but just fun to experiment a little :).