Whether I need to or not

Just having a whip round my bookmarks, and I realize that it's been exactly a year since my last post. Seems like something a guy should do at least annually, so let's do a review of 2013.

• Went to Spain
• Quit smoking. Again.
• Left my job at a game studio, invested in a new game studio. What the hell was I thinking?

There's probably some other major stuff, but it's a bit of a blur now. Other minor (but perhaps fun) things:

• Taught my sister's kids how to say "What's that do?" just like Gir
• Joined the 21st century and got a smart phone (albeit a crappy one)
• Started losing weight instead of gaining it for a change
• Finally set up an LDAP server successfully.
• Read a surprisingly large amount of surprisingly good sci-fi, both old and new

Is that enough? Can I go?

2 things...

#1: If you work a desk job, don't sprain your ankle. Sprained ankles hate desk jobs.

#2: If you sit under the AC vent at said desk job, don't get sunburned.

Just sayin.

TFD hits the nail on the head. Again.

First off, Drew read my mind regarding the entitled attitude of the 21st Century:


Secondly, holy shit, was 1981 really 30 years ago?

Sometimes the latest and greatest just isn't

Is it just me?

Thunderbird updated the other day, breaking yet another one of my plugins. I think they're all kaput now. Thanks, Mozilla. iOS 5 is coming out soon, which means we have to tear around and make all of our apps "compliant" or they'll get pulled from the AppStore. Thanks, Apple. We're mostly moved onto Blogger, and that's fine, but now my RSS feeds are all hosed (TBird thinks all the imported entries have the same date), and there's no option to have more than 25 items in the feed. Thanks, Google.

Everybody's in a hurry to update their software, but nobody gives a shit about what people already have in place. I'm all for progress to a point as long as it doesn't involve discarding everything I have right now. Everybody beat up Microsoft for years for doing this, yet for some reason we've all decided now that it's a perfectly acceptable practice.

Screw that. Stop breaking your software. You're not going to inspire much loyalty to your brand if moving to another system is just as easy as upgrading yours. And increasingly it is.

Quit screwing around... you screw around too much

A word of advice. Don't screw around with /etc/sudoers unless you have a root shell open. Shouldn't need to be said, but I just did it, so clearly somebody should have said it to me.

The best defense... is a good defense

We moved offices recently, and in every sense of the word it was a good move. The office is closer to the Skytrain (that's good and bad - sometimes I like the walk), the HVAC system is 100 times better, and we switched ISPs. This is all to the good.

One sort of bad thing came out of it: our trusty server box really didn't like being shut down. When we set it up at the new place, it didn't POST the first time we turned it on. But did we panic? We did not. Hit the reset button and try again. Ah there, it's fine. We shifted it a week later because its location was less than optimal, pretty much the same story. Again, we're not worry warts, we just hit reset until it booted.

That was stupid move #1.

Stupid move #2. The unit was giving off some sort of high-pitched whine - I have to take everybody's word for it, because I lost that range a long time ago. Anyhow, to combat the noise, we put the box in a cabinet. The cabinet isn't hermetically sealed or anything, but there was only about 5 or 6 inches of space at most around the unit, and I expect there wasn't a great deal of circulation happening in there.

Stupid move #3. SVN started acting funky. People would check stuff in, and the next time somebody updated, they'd get various error messages and the update invariably failed. Huh. So my partner in crime/sysadmin and I went to work on the SVN revisions with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. We restored what we could from the backups, and found some scripts that were known to fix symptoms of this kind for the newer revisions.

After 11 hours of this, we had a kernel oops. For those who have not yet experienced an oops, think of it as a not-quite-panic. The system definitely freaks out, but the kernel doesn't lock it up; it carries on and hopes for the best. The best was not our lot that evening, and a lot of zombie processes starting showing up. Fine. shutdown -r now. Except that didn't work either - shutdown was zombifying (if I may coin that term). Sigh. Hard boot.

Now. After 3 weeks of being cooped up in a hot cabinet, the system decided that I should serve as the example to others. Wouldn't POST. I thought perhaps if I could bring up the BIOS setup, maybe I could figure out what was up. The setup screen froze after about 10 seconds. 3 times in a row. Suck. So I waited 15 minutes and tried again. No dice. 30 minutes. Fuck you, Jack. Gave it an hour, the thing finally POSTs. I have 15 minutes to spare before I'd miss my last bus. Not happy, but at least everything's working and I can go home.

I vowed to get the boss to buy us new hardware the very next day. He wasn't planning on replacing it until the end of the year, but he's a technical person too, so he understands this needs to be done now. He commits to getting the hardware next week (this is now Friday) and starts speccing new gear. Great.

However, the cosmos had other plans for me. Over the long weekend, unbeknownst to me, the SVN is still acting up and the system gets 2 or 3 more hard reboots. I come in on Tuesday to find the RAID on which the repositories live is dead. D-E-A-D. As a fucking doornail. Neat.

I have a Linux box under my desk that I was using as a test bed for MySQL cluster. That testing's all done now, and except for the database, everything else is basically a stock install. I installed what I needed to get SVN working more or less as it did on the old box, and copied the (week-old) backups over. Took a little while because our repos are huge - well over half my day is eaten up by copying, exporting, reloading, verifying.

But now it's all done, and with a little care we managed to save all the history minus the past week, and no data was lost because of course everybody has the files they worked on still sitting on their own desktops.

So what's the moral of the story? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck - it's probably a duck. Pretending that a dying system isn't really dying is probably not the best strategy for data integrity.

Pay attention

I remember chatting with one of the engineers some years ago when I worked at the ferries. He was telling me a story about somebody who'd bumped into something and knocked off a bolt or some such, and caused a few thousand dollars worth of damage. The moral of the story was, "If you touch anything accidentally, look around and make sure you didn't fuck something up." Sage advice.

Fast forward to late 2008. I was editing my Samba configs, and was trying to figure something out, so I cranked up the logging to full debug (see where this is going yet?). Once I was satisfied, I closed smb.conf and walked away, leaving the log level at 9. Tsk.

This evening I was doing some PHP on the old box via Samba (why use vim when you have EditPlus). For some reason it was taking a long time - 2 or 3 seconds on occasion - to open the files. WTF. Top didn't show anything too untoward, except... hold on, the swapping daemon seemed to be working a lot harder than it should have been. What the hell is swapping? I restarted a few services, but nothing really made a difference.

I started poking through logs, and eventually found out the Samba logs were approaching 500MB in size. So of course Samba itself is the culprit, because not only is it logging like mad, it's appending that text onto the end of a HUGE file. So I cranked the logging level back down to 2, rotated the logs, and whaddaya know - files are opening quickly again.

Seriously - if you touch anything accidentally, look around and make sure you didn't fuck something up.

From the "How Not To" files...

I don't have anything particularly profound to say, more of an amusing anecdote. Turned 40 last weekend. It's fine. I figure my age will catch up with my looks eventually, but I'm not sure this is the decade. Perhaps in my 60's.

Anyhow, I started off my birthday by watching some nifty stuff on YouTube and eating half a box of Mini Wheats. YouTube good. Half a box of Mini Wheats... not so good. It's the sort of thing you get away with in your early 30's, but that ship sailed a while ago. Spent the latter half of the day in and out of the bathroom every hour or so.

So I implore you, don't do what I did. Maybe just take some nice heroin. It's easier on your system.

Why spam a blog?

This has to be the lowest bottom-feeding trick in the book. As soon as the URL for my blog shows up on a search engine, I get comment spam. Do these dickheads actually think we're going to follow their links and buy into their retarded, broken English pitches?

So, fine. I close off comments to everybody but registered users. "But you could use spam filters!". I could, and in different circumstances, I probably would. Let's jump to a different part of the story for a moment.

I still have the first email address I ever had; it's been something like a dozen years. Back in those days, it was perfectly reasonable to post your email address on your web site or in newsgroups. Sometime between then and now, the spammers figured out that web pages and newsgroups were a good source of email addresses, so we all removed our email links and started using fake addresses on the newsgroups. I expect I still get a spam now and again due to some spider hitting The Wayback Machine.

That probably wouldn't be so bad, but like an idiot, I used that address to sign up for an MSN account. What the hell was I thinking? Either Microsoft sold their list, or somebody managed to access it, because since then my rate of spam emails has skyrocketed. At last estimate, it's about 75 a day. Ack.

Sure, the junk filters work great, but it's an inexact science. Software has bugs and spammers change their tactics. So while 95% of the spam gets binned, I still have to mark a few "legitimate" emails as spam, and (rarely) I have to rescue a binned message and mark it as not spam. So the only real difference between using a spam filter and not, is that now I have to check all the messages in two folders instead of one. How is this saving me any time?

Back to the blog. The concept is exactly the same; I could use filters, but I still have to check every post, just in case something legitimate gets binned, or something illegitimate doesn't. I'm told that many Captcha implementations have been defeated, and with that kind of AI it's a good bet that any similar sort of scheme will be beaten quickly enough. Screw it, I have better things to do - I'll just lock them out and be done with it. Cracking long passwords is still out of the reach of mere mortals, and the spammers won't bother - there's still plenty of people out there so desperate for attention that they leave their blogs open.

Follow the money.