Rubenerd

Subject to addition.

“After the jump”

A superflous, stupid call to click read more, on sites that require it.

Gigantic fonts

When we need to hit [cmd]+[-] five times to read more than a paragraph.

Georgia

For those who didn’t want the default Times font, but still lack imagination.

The meatstack/hamburger icon

Inscrutable, pointless navigation obfuscation.

Helvetica Neue Ultralight on non–retina screens

There’s a reason we didn’t do this on screens before.

[FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE](http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/announce.html “”) now has Xen PV drivers compiled into the GENERIC kernel. Specifically:

Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve(8), virtio(4), and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V.

This means we can run it as an HVM Xen DomU, but with the performance of a paravirtualised VM for drivers, etc. We can also have console access, provided we initially install with VNC.

An example HVM configuration to get started:

## FreeBSD-10.cfg for Xen
## Kernel + memory size
kernel = '/usr/lib/xen-4.1/boot/hvmloader'
builder = 'hvm'
memory = '2048'
## Hostname
name = 'FreeBSD-10'
## Disk devices
boot = 'cd'
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg1/FreeBSD-10,hda,w',
         'file:/vm/ISO/fbsd10-amd64-d1.iso,hdc:cdrom,r' ]
## Networking
vif  = [ 'mac=<random mac>,bridge=xenbr0' ]
## Features
acpi = 1
apic = 1
## VNC + console
sdl    = 0
vnc    = 1
stdvga = 0
serial = 'pty'

Run the install as normal. After reboot, append this to /etc/rc.conf:

ifconfig_xn0="DHCP"

For console access, add the following to /boot/loader.conf:

boot_multicons="YES"
boot_serial="YES"
comconsole_speed="115200"
console="comconsole,vidconsole"

Then for /etc/ttys, comment out ttyu0 and replace with:

ttyu0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.115200 vt100 on secure

Now you can reboot, and access the console. From your hypervisor:

xm console FreeBSD-10

Or if you’re using the newer toolchain:

xl console FreeBSD-10

Now I want a DEC console.

After configuring a PVHVM FreeBSD guest with serial console access, using vim resulted in:

E437: terminal capability "cm" required

The Xen PVHVM tutorial uses this for /etc/ttys

ttyu0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.115200 dialup on secure

Using a more “modern”, capable console resolves this. For example:

ttyu0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.115200 vt100 on secure

Or theoretically for some colour:

ttyu0 "/usr/libexec/getty std.115200 vt102 on secure

As I’ve mentioned previously, now I want a DEC console.

In an attempt to build another home Xen tower, I configured a Dom0 on an older tower. Problem was, PCI passthrough wouldn’t work, despite the CPU supporting VT-x.

From the Unix & Linux Stack Exchange:

Since version 3.0, Xen has provided PCI passthrough to a paravirtual (PV) guest without VT-d CPU/Motherboard extensions.

I’d noticed my PV instances not having this problem.

Xen cannot provide PCI passthrough to a HVM (fully virtualized) guest without VT-d.

And there’s the issue. My Core 2 Duo CPU has VT-x, but not VT-d. Bottom line, if we’re using PV, there may still be some life in our older towers. Otherwise, we’ll have to shell out for some newer hardware.

Still hard to believe a machine I built in the Core 2 Duo days is already considered old. The march of progress…

Swift, iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite Sam came just as I was starting my new job, and had little time to discuss them. There’s nothing really I could say now that hasn’t already been exhaustively discussed to death, so suffice to say, it’s all ridiculously exciting.

(As I said here before, people really hadn’t heard of Yosemite before that OS X announcement? Really? I feel bad for people who didn’t get to watch cartoons growing up).

But now we have some more recent news which doesn’t rain on the parade, as much as it veers it off gold plated streets and onto something more resembling the real world.

For those who haven’t read, Apple has allegedly ceased development of Aperture and iPhoto in lieu of a new Photos application in Yosemite. I haven’t seen too many details, but I assume it will be akin to a FCPX release, where higher end features from the pro application are missing, but will be added back when people get antsy.

Suffice to say, I’ve already said that twice. Also, I’m a little bummed.

For a bit of context, I’ve been using Aperture for the last six months. Part of me was a little concerned about the long term viability of the application, given its lack of software updates and holdover UI elements, but it’s just so damn functional and fun to use. To quote Andy Ihnatko, who sums up my feelings:

I get more pleasure out of Aperture on an hourly basis than I get from any game. Losing Aperture means, truly, losing a lot of the joy of having a Mac.

If anything, Swift’s announcement gave me a little comfort. Here was a brand new language, written in secrecy for all these years. For all I knew, the next release of Aperture was similarly being developed in secret, with support for 3D displays or cameras where you could line up three Mac Pros and generate a holodeck. Impossible to plug leaks for something that size? For nerds especially, Swift shows Apple can!

Regardless, here’s the bottom line. Paying customers of Aperture deserved to know the future of the software, and Apple just told us.

All the cool people had already long jumped ship to Lightroom, but I’m hesitant to ever let Adobe software near my machine for fear of all the crapware their stuff always installs. Perhaps it’s worth revisiting, in a VM to start.

Some testing this morning required accessing a server without my private key. Here it is:

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=keyboard-interactive 
    -o PubkeyAuthentication=no user@host

While testing some FreeBSD package management goodness, I wondered what it would take to host a pkgng mirror.

For those unversed, pkgng is FreeBSD’s new binary package manager, designed to replace pkg_add and other such tools. I blogged with excitement about the system; along with NetBSD’s pkgin; at the time they were announced.

I haven’t got far in finding out what you need to do to register yourself as a mirror, though I did copy and paste the web package table for FreeBSD 10 x86_64 into LibreOffice. Which gave me a spinning cursor then crashed after twenty minutes.

So I copied the table into Gnumeric, which accepted the tabular data in about five seconds.

According to a simple sum, you’d be looking at 40.25GiB, or 43,219,644,432 bytes to host a pkgng mirror, assuming the x86_64 architecture.

The more you know.

A task today was performing some ServerBear benchmarks on VMs. ServerBear is a comparison site for cloud, VPS and other platform infrastructure providers that displays the results of user run benchmark scripts.

Running on an instance, without publishing the results:

wget -N https://raw.github.com/Crowd9/Benchmark/master/sb.sh && 
bash sb.sh '[Server name]' '[Server plan]' '[email]' '[price]' private

Running it on stock Debian without sudo, the script failed. sudo either needs to be installed and enabled for the current user, or you can just run as root.

It also takes the liberty of updating apt-get, then installing the following if they’re not found:

• build-essential
• libaio-dev
• curl

I’ll admit, that was a little unsettling. For further tests, I’ll be installing these myself first.

Outside the package manager, it downloads:

• FIO
• IOPing
• UnixBench

The reported steps:

Running dd I/O benchmark...
Running IOPing I/O benchmark...
Running FIO benchmark...
Running bandwidth benchmark...
Running traceroute...
Running ping benchmark...
Running UnixBench benchmark...	

Be prepared to wait an hour or so, depending on the performance of the infrastructure. When complete, check your inbox shortly after for the results.

I haven’t used Slackware in a long time, but I was tasked with getting it working in a Xen VM. The details of PV versus HVM are for another post; suffice to say I was taken aback that even 14.1 still uses LILO. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell we need GRUB for PV.

Rather than using the menu installer like an “expert”, I prefer installing the minimum required, then building it up after the fact. Perhaps its a vestige of borking installs, so I was always quick to get something booting to test. It also gives me a chance to script.

After installing and booting, mount the install DVD/CD and go to the packages folder:

# mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /hdc
# cd /dev/cdrom/slackware64

For applications:

# cd ap
# installpkg groff*txz man-pages*txz man*txz vim*txz

For networking:

# cd ../n
# installpkg curl*txz dhcpcd*txz htdig*txz iftop*txz iptables*txz 
  iputils*txz lynx*txz mtr*txz ncftp*txz net-tools*txz nmap*txz 
  network-scripts*txz openssh*txz rsync*txz tcpdump*txz wget*txz

The iputils package provides arping, clockdiff, ninfod, ping, rarpd, rdisc, tracepath, and traceroute.

I couldn’t remember the Unicode encoding for hyphens (‐), so I searched for it. I misspelled it, and accidentally learned about moss:

L’Hypne cyprès ou Hypnum cupressiforme est une mousse. C’est la plus répandue sur Terre, en effet, elle pousse sur toutes sortes de surfaces comme des troncs d’arbres, des murs ou des rochers. Son nom vient de la forme de ses feuilles qui ressemblent à des branches de cyprès.

Omlette du fromage, indeed! What did the next search result show?

Hypnum cupressiforme (cypress-leaved plait-moss or hypnum moss) is a common and widespread species of moss belonging to the genus Hypnum. It is found in all continents except Antarctica and occurs in a wide variety of habitats and climatic zones.

Moss is like my blog, it grows on you.

Beautiful photo by Aconcagua on Wikimedia Commons.