Misadventures of a Celtic Geek

Just a quick link to a couple of xkcd webizodes…

Philippe, you were right, Python is the best thing since sliced bread!

And on a more sentimental note:

Dedicated to everyone who’re just to far away

I’ve just been testing an install CD for enkix, our custom Debian installer, to make sure it works next week when I re-install some servers in Paris.

The problem is that our datacenter lacks a dhcp server (everythings static), whereas I had never tested enkix using static IPs before (all installs were done at the office).

Vmware was my poison of choice for this task, since it offers sevral network parameters: Bridged networking using the offices DHCP, net using it’s own DHCP, and a host only network using…. it’s own DHCP. Hmm… and what happens if you just don’t like DHCP? What if you want everything static? Or if you prefer Avahi? Or, as is in my case, you’re testing for a DHCP-less environment and DHCP is the last thing you want?

After a few fruitless searches on the web, the solution was revealed by probing /etc/vmware. In the network sub directories (vmnet0-vmnet8), those which have a DHCP server have a dhcp sub directory, the others don’t.

Solution: Just create a natted vmnet, then pop into the corresponding directory, rm -rf dhcp and /etc/init.d/vmware restart, problem solved.

One last thing: if you do this, please make a note of the network parameters before hand, since it’s always some funny value like 192.168.28.x

A quick post to share a find someone sent me today on the necessity to go IPV6

And for those interested, I also managed to gat ahold of the lyrics:

A long long time ago
i can still remeber
when my labtop could connect elswhere
and i tell you all there was a day
the network card i threw away
had a purpose - and worked for you and me
But 18 years complety wasted

with each adress we´ve aggregated
the tables overflowing
the traffic just stopped flowing

And now we´re bearing all the scars
and all the traceroutes showing stars
the packets would travel faster in cars…
the day… the routers died

————-
Chorus ( ALL )
So bye bye , folks at RIPE 55
be persuaded zo upgrade it or your network will die

Ipv6 just makes me let out a sight
But i spose we´d better give it a try
I suppose we´d better give it a try

———

Now did you write an RFC
That dictated how we all should be
Did we listen like we should that day
Now were you back at RIPE fifty-four
Where we heard the same things month before
And people knew they´d have to change their ways…
And we - knew that all ISPs
Could be - future proof for centuries
But that was then not now
Spend too much time playing WOW
ooh there was time we sat on IRC
making jokes on how this day would be
Now there´s no more use for TCP
they day the routers died

————-
Chorus ( chime in now )
So bye bye , folks at RIPE 55
be persuaded zo upgrade it or your network will die
Ipv6 just makes me let out a sight
But i spose we´d better give it a try
I suppose we´d better give it a try

———

i remember those old days i mourn
Sitting in my room , downloading porn
Yeah that´s how it used to be…
When the packets flowed from A to B
via routers that could talk IP
there was data… that could be exchanged
between you and me…

Oh but- i could see you all ignore
The fact - we´d fill up IPv4
But we all lost the nerve
And we goz what we deserved !
And while… we threw our network kit away
And wished we´d heard the things they say
Put all our lives in disarray
the day … the routers died

————-
Chorus ( those silent will be shot )
So bye bye , folks at RIPE 55
be persuaded zo upgrade it or your network will die
Ipv6 just makes me let out a sight
But i spose we´d better give it a try
I suppose we´d better give it a try

———

Saw a man with whom i used to peer
Asked him to rescue my career
He just sighed and turned away
I went down to the net cafe
that I used to visit everyday
But the man there said i might as well just leave

And now we´ve all lost our purpose
my cisco shares completely worthless
No future meetings for me
At Hotel Krasnapolsky
and me that make us push and push
Like Geoff Huston and Rady Bush
Should´ve listened to what they told us….
The day… the routers. died

————-
Chorus ( time to loose your voice )
So bye bye , folks at RIPE 55
be persuaded zo upgrade it or your network will die
Ipv6 just makes me let out a sight
But i spose we´d better give it a try
I suppose we´d better give it a try

Finally, for those who want to know more:

Words and performance by Gary Feldman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0

seriouly its about this:

http://www.ripe.net/news/community-statement.html

Yesterday I received my very first piece of beta-hardware : the OpenGate (http://www.easyneuf.org).

It’s currently sitting on my desk at home waiting to be played with

I’ll be posting some updates and a review in the coming days.

Oh, and no, I don’t mean to go this long between blog posts again

David

Just a quick note to pass the word around that the BBC’s Alan Johnston is free after 16 weeks in captivity.

Like a lot of people, I enjoy putting my day to music with Internet radio.

Unfortunately, some people want to impose crippling charges on webcasters, infinitely more than their hertzien cousins who have much deeper pockets.

In order to protest, to day has been proclaimed a ‘Day of Silence’ when internet radio shuts off. If you care about internet broadcasters, please show your support on http://www.savenetradio.org/.

Thank you

Someone at work pointed this out to me today, so here it is for google’s benefit…

When coding php pages you often have to manipulate strings and print them, with select pieces of data, so that the user can see them.

There are 2 different ways to do this:

$var = 'This is a variable : '.$data;

and

$var = "This is a variable : $data";

In the first case, you just concat the 2 elements together, whereas in the second case, php does the substitutions by it’s self.

The interesting part is that the first construct is over 4 times faster than the second….

More info (in French) here

One thing that buggs me about Ubuntu Feisty (yes, some things do ) is that it didn’t recognise my cdroms (ide, secondary bus).

Apart from an inability to use the drives, and lshw that stalled when reading IDE, the only hint was a ‘hdc: lost interrupt’ that dmesg spewed after having correctly identified the drives. This particular bug also stopped the Feisty live CD from booting.

After much googleing and even more frustration, the solution seems to be to add ‘irqpoll’ to the default kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst. irqpoll seems to be a workaround for some bizarre kernel bugs, in any case for me it worked in fixing my install (I haven’t yet checked it on the live cd, so YMMV).

The bug itself seems to stem from the unified disk model present in the kernel 2.6.20 which handles scsi and sata a treat, but has some problems with legacy pata systems.

I can’t quite understand this.

In this day and age where pass by reference is the new black (ie, .net only passes by reference, java only passes base types by value), php has decided to be the black sheep (or not, depending on your point of view).

Using php 5, objects are passed by reference, always, which is logical, easier to manage and saves on stack space. OTOH arrays are passed by … value (unless forced with a &). Go figure.

Still trying to come to terms with this particular oddity.

Powered by ScribeFire.

… is something I don’t want to experience.

I’m currently in the final stages of preparing a switch-over from a standard mail server to a virtual user based one, the transfer will be at just after 20:00, or in slightly more than half an hour.

Wish me luck!