Rubenerd

When we moved to Singapore from Australia, there was a lot for my child brain to absorb and process. I had to get used to going to Cold Storage instead of Woolworths, using rapid transit trains instead of nothing, and getting burns when asking for water!

(Photo by me of Saber wielding a water bottle, along with a piping hot mug of water and various cold remedies, all of which didn’t work as well as the aforementioned mug of hot water or Saber’s bottle of water).

Culture burn?

It first happened when I got my hair cut. Sitting down at the lovely hair dresser's in Lucky Plaza, I was asked in the customary way whether I wanted something to drink. Talk about service, I thought to myself! I pondered my options for a few moments, and asked for some water.

Living in a hot country such as Singapore, I was expecting to be given ice water, or the very least room–temperature. Instead, I nearly scalded my tongue off as I took a giant swig of what was clearly boiling water! The steam gushing from the top of the mug should have been a giveaway, but I suppose I was young and silly. Good thing I'm still one of those things.

Needless to say, I was far too shy of a primary school kid to ask if they'd got my request wrong, so I sat there sipping the hot water and not making a sound. The same thing happened on my next visit, and the visit after that.

After I'd establish a rapport and a routine with my new favourite hair dresser, I finally worked up the courage to ask why she was giving me hot water. She smiled, clearly thinking "what a naive little white boy!" though she was far too polite or nice to say it. She replied that hot water was the most healthy way to drink it, and that it was perfectly normal to give it to people.

She was right; whether I was going to local friends' places or other businesses, Singaporeans were always giving me hot water to drink. I got used to it, and even enjoy it in lieu of tea sometimes.

A veritable pain in the throat

Dial forward a decade, and I'm sitting here in summer Sydney with a painfully sore throat. I'd tried cold drinks, throat lozenges and ice cream to no avail. On a hunch, I decided to try some hot water; all it took was a few mugs of the stuff and my throat felt calm enough to eat food and swallow with again. Inhaling the steam worked wonders for my sinuses too.

If you find yourself with a sore throat, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. They were really onto something :).

(This post and accompanying photo took over four hours of on–and–off writing to compose in my dazed state, but I got it done eventually, damn it)!

Due to a respiratory infection which has knocked me out like a bad coffee, I’m publishing this draft post from December 2012 2013. In light of Naoki Hiroshima’s Twitter extortion, it seemed prescient. Photo of everyone’s favourite rebel by me.

I take no joy in reporting that Switch Fusion appears to be no more. As of today, the Singaporean webhost didn't even renew their domain name.

Switch Fusion were my first paid webhost. In 2001, I registered the Rubenerd.com domain with them and went on their 2GB plan. Their uptime, performance and general reliability appeared solid, though today I recognise taking two days to enable a vanilla cPanel account for me was a bit silly.

When they own your domain

After three years of service, my burgeoning podcast was testing the limits of my hosting plan. Rather than upgrade, I decided to move shop. I was about to learn the lesson of not trusting suspiciously affordable sites with unlimited bandwidth or storage claims, but that's for another post.

When I first requested the domain to be transferred to my new hosting company, I heard back nothing. Months before my Switch Fusion account was due to expire, I lodged support tickets, emailed and called without success. The situation got critical, and I had to register the interim RubenerdShow.com domain to use with my new host while I worked out the domain ownership. Switch Fusion cancelled my account, and kept my domain.

Eventually, I got an email back from an alleged representative of Switch Fusion with an Indonesian email address. They informed me they could transfer my domain under my name for US$200.00. Initially I thought it was a scam, but further investigation showed it to be legitimate. Switch Fusion's domain broker wanted US$200 to transfer ownership of the domain to me.

I baulked, and walked away

After rejecting their offer, I was certain my beloved old domain would fall into the hands of a squatter, and sure enough it eventually did. I did a whois and marked on my calendar when the domain was to expire, and in 2009 I pounced. I got extremely lucky, and regained ownership of my original domain which you're now reading from.

Lesson learned, don't trust a webhost with domain registration. Use a reputable third party like Hover, for example. Which reminds me, if you use this referral link, I get a couple of bucks off my next registration :).

As for Switch Fusion, I'm thankful for all the help they gave a young high school student starting out on the web, but what they ended up doing to me (and others) lacked class. I like to think it was their legal and financial department letting down an otherwise nice IT team.

% ssh username@server -p 222222
=> Bad port '222222'
=> Exit 255

No, you’re a bad port! Oh wait, it’s a typo. Glad nobody was around to hear me say that. Where’s my Vixen Haler?

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

So many Beach Queen Sabers, and a few imposters! And yet, only one classic one piece mizugi, what a travesty of justice! Go water bottle! ^_^

Photo by Agon on MyFigureCollection

When you buy external desktop hard drives, you make several assumptions.

For one, you'll need more power boards, cables and desk space than you think. They multiply, and when they do, you'll wish you had a NAS or a proper tower for them. You may even persist on showing the same photo from 2009 because it illustrates your point so well.

Secondly, unless they specifically mention otherwise, the manufacturer's premier drives aren't going to be appearing in them. They won't be the fastest, most reliable, have the highest amount of cache, or come with the most unicorn dust. With the exception of the latter, these won't entirely be an issue given your biggest bottleneck will probably be the interconnect, and not the speed of the drive (at least, for now).

Because the enclosures often outlive the drives

And finally, if you purchased your drive a few years ago, chances are you'll never know what the internal connection is short of ripping them apart yourself. Unfortunately, most drive manufacturers don't list whether a drive was built to accommodate IDE, SATA, SATAII, etc. This is perhaps to be expected; these drives were not designed to be user serviceable.

There is one way out; other people online may have posted images or a video on disassembling a unit the same as yours. For some frustrating reason though, many of these videos and photos are careful never to show the side of the drive with the interface, nor the ATA ribbon or narrow SATA cables. On my more cynical days, I feel as though everyone does this on purpose just to torment us!

That was a perfectly good enclosure

I belabour all this given I've spent the better part of two hours searching online for any detail at all on several older, perfectly good enclosures I have. Clara is running out of space, and I'm chomping at the bit to swap out their internal drives with others that I've replaced from my Mac Pro. Enclosures are notoriously difficult to open, and I'd hate to get all the way there and realise the connectors aren't compatible.

Along with the mystical opening hours that restaurants never put on their websites, I wish I could somehow find a resource that had model numbers and specific technical details for drive enclosures, beyond the general specifications given to consumers like "USB 3.0" or "Designed for Windows XP".

But trust me, on the sunscreen.

As a few keen readers have already observed, I've decided to do Post A Day again this year. I did it in 2011 to prove I could, but this year its all about keeping my stockpile of drafts down!

Last year, I noticed that many of my posts were being written, but never published. For some, it was due to a lack of accompanying art or diagrams that I insist on having. Others just lacked links, or introductions, or appropriate metadata.

Regardless of the reason, many ended up losing their timliness in the draft stack. There's a title for a potential Back To Work episode if ever I've heard one! Dan, Merlin, let me know when you can get back to me about a cut of the next episode's revenue.

But anyway, recognising this trend in myself made me want to do something about it. I'm not sure if posting daily will help to regularly clear my draft folders, but so far it seems to have worked. More of my words in 2014 are seeing the light of day, which feels great.

As for whether blogging about posting daily should really count as a post itself, I leave that as a pedantic thought exercise for the reader. Personally, I've been hit with the manflu again these last couple of days, and today was particularly hard. If there were a degree of slack to be cut, I feel at least a little could be spared.

If you'd like to give it a try while the year is still young, the Daily Post team at WordPress have a great supportive blog full of ideas.

Skimming the Herald a few days ago, I flicked past an article stating that Sydney would be ripping up their streets for trams.

Having lived in Singapore with its MRT (and to a lesser extent Kuala Lumpur with its LRT), I've come to think of Australian trams as a symbol of short term thinking. When Sydney desperately needs a high capacity metro system that even cities half its size have, we're apparently getting more low capacity, light rail. It's a missed opportunity.

For an otherwise staunch supporter of public transport, my newfound opposition to trams may seem strange. Surely a cleaner, smoother, higher capacity version of smelly buses would be great?

See, here's the thing

Trams marry the weaknesses of rail and bus transport, with few of their benefits. Like trains, they require dedicated infrastructure, such as tracks and ugly street wiring. Like buses, they have to stop for lights and share already congested streets. Ask any long suffering Melbournite; when a tram breaks down the entire street grinds to a halt.

For smaller cities such as Adelaide, I'd argue trams make more sense. Sydney, on the other hand, needs nothing short of a complete rethink of its entire public transport system. Otherwise comfortable rolling stock and generally friendly staff are let down by unreliability, poor frequencies and a thorough lack of long term planning.

I still maintain we should disconnect and expand the neglected City Circle into a proper rapid transit metro line, then form the others into proper suburban lines. Dozens of cities around the world long figured this out, and its time Sydney did.

I really, truly believe high quality public transport is the answer to so many problems, from health to economics, sociological to environmental. If I weren't in IT, I would dedicate my life to it. As Australia's largest city, Sydney really needs better.

Photo by Hpeterswald on Wikimedia Commons.

Serendipidous art seems to be a theme for Rubenerd this month! We've had accidental JPEG wiphalas, then accidental JPEG artefacts, then we had this draft post you're reading right now that I never got around to posting.

For you see, after reading technical documents all day, the last thing I want to read—and the last thing the web needs—is another dry website with no images. Thus, since I first started this site almost a decade ago, I've endeavored to include them in posts. Even if said images had as much point as a round room, or the pencil at the end of my desk that's staring at me, judging me. It's just another service I provide to you, dear reader, because I respect your time and attention.

For an accompanying image to my rumination regarding a lack of ATM PIN mindfulness, I hit up Konachan.net and typed “ATM”. Without any results, the site suggested that I meant “beatmania”, and showed this.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for bows! But we digress. Which is to say, I digress.

Having reached this dead end, I typed “cash” instead. The site suggested I meant “whiscash”, and showed the image below. Admittedly that is closer to the original title than “Beatmania”.

Clearly, next time I need more epic desktop background material, I should type seemingly random strings into image boards.

Alas, I can't find the source for either of these artists; it seems their Pixiv pages have long since been deleted. Once I know who, I'll link to them here.

FreeNAS has run flawlessly on any vanilla hardware I've thrown at it over the years. With the release of FreeBSD 10 however, I decided it might be fun to build a NAS from scratch. FreeBSD includes the new pkg manager by default and its ZFS support is rock solid; it's a great time to be a FreeBSD fan.

Deciding on a sharing protocol

What sharing protocol mix you choose to employ will obviously depend on the clients you're intending to access it with. For my household, we predominately run a mixture of Mac OS X Lion and Mavericks.

Samba arguably would make sense given Apple even uses it to carry AFP on Mavericks. We don't have Windows production machines outside of VMs here, but it would be nice to have the ability to talk to potential ones in the future. Unfortunately, my venerable Mac Pro only runs Lion, and its spotty SMB support is the stuff of legend. It was therefore quickly ruled out.

The next choice was NFS. Plenty of people I know use this in home environments, but I've always been wary of its security issues related to user IDs. The latest release seemingly resolves many of these problems, but unfortunately we're back to Lion compatibility issues. I could dive into FUSE, but would rather not.

The solution therefore was falling back to AFP.

Netatalk 3

Netatalk is a free and open source implementation of Apple's AFP. Frustratingly, nearly all the online examples and documentation I searched for discusses Netatalk 2. Netacad 3 is very different in many ways, with all the new AFP features and a simplified configuration file.

By default on FreeBSD 10, we install it thusly:

# pkg update
# pkg install netatalk3

The configuration file is beautifully simple, and now resides in the following location:

# vi /usr/local/etc/afp.conf

The file is split into Global, Homes and Shares. The default configuration shows you what to do, but here are the sections from mine:

[Global]
  hosts allow = 10.0.1.0/24
  mimic model = Xserve

Here we define which hosts we want to access. We can use CIDR notation for the subnet mask, which is rather nice. Alternatively, you can specific specific hosts. Mimic model determins which icon to show in the Finder when you connect to it; Xserve looks swish.

; [Homes]
  ; basedir regex = /xxxx

Here we can define a default share based on the username of the client accessing. I can see it being a cool feature, but not one I'll be using so I've left it commented out.

[MediaDrive]
  path = /pool/media
  valid users = shimapan sukumizu kiri

And here we define all the shares we want. Initially I was confused and thought we somehow had to define all our paths and users here. We can have multiple ones, with the name to appear in the Finder in the square brackets.

For my use case, I defined several new users in FreeBSD for each family member, then used their respective names in the “valid users” option for different shares shares. That way, everyone can read and write to what they need to when backing up data or reading common files. I like how that works.

/etc/rc.conf

Now that we’ve configured it, we enable it for boot in the venerable rc.conf:

netatalk_enable="YES"
afpd_enable="YES"
cnid_metad_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"

And we're done! I didn't need/want autodiscovery, but if you want your FreeBSD VPS appearing in the Finder automatically, you'll want to enable Avahi next.

Useful posts elsewhere

• Netatalk 3 Manual
• FreeBSD file server for Mac clients, by Josh Beard
• Setting up FreeBSD as a fileserver and Time Machine on Mac OS X, by taliz

So there I was, looking into PPPoE authentication, pinging servers, making sure I had all of the millions of ADSL settings correct in the router and modem. In a story that would be even too cliché to render as a Big Bang Theory episode, it turns out our internet was down due to a chewed phone cable.

Our current house is pretty old, so we route a phone cable under it to reach the room with the computers. Above the house, the plugs all looked fine, but below an animal had clearly developed a taste for plastic! There are some pretty mean looking lizards around here that we've already caught chewing strange things, this could be the latest.

Basic, obvious, head–against–the–wall stupid lesson learned: if your internet is down, check all of your wiring, not just the wiring you can see!

I'd also like to thank TPG email support for their prompt responses and patience in light of a client who had issues that were clearly out of their control. They were a class act, and I appreciate it :).