Are you getting shafted by your ISP?
Why yes. You probably are.
Particularly injurious to me is that my ISP throttles encrypted traffic, which may explain why dialling into work is so painfully slow. What a bunch of arseholes.
I was DJing at John and Colin's party in Ad-Lib on Friday, which was nice. It's been years (literally) since I've played records in front of more people than the teddy bear that's jammed down the back of my wardrobe, so it was cool to break out some choons for folk to nod their heads to.
Unfortunately, most of my set was played with the mixer volume set waaaayyyy low and the sound system set waaaayyyy high, so it sounded crap until we got the barman to turn the amps down. Right at the end of my set. Never mind, at least I got The Resident out while it was sounding good.
Si brought his Traktor setup, since he's too lazy to use vinyl any more. Impressive stuff.
Equally impressive was the monitoring for the decks - a big fat PA speaker, hooked up to the booth output (yay!) on the DJM 500 (yay! we love the 500) for fingertip deafness control.
Unimpressive was the way that the bar sound system was louder than the dance floor system.
Anyway, this gets me to thinking - maybe a page on basements/bars you can hire out for wee DJ nights is in order. So far I can think of:
Ad-Lib
O'Henry's
The Rockgarden
McPhabbs
The Iron Horse (maybe not, though...)
Anyone got any more?
It's customary for Solaris admins to slag off the patch system, so I guess I'll have a go. For the sake of full disclosure: I used to be part of the 1st / 2nd line support team that does global support for smpatch / Sun Update Connection / Update Connection Enterprise. If you raised a Sun case on these products between November 2005 and April 2007, you very probably spoke to me at some point. That said, most of what I have to say is based on my experience working with Solaris, rather than supporting it...
smpatch is broken, but you already know that.
The dependency tree required for a working smpatch install is vast - so vast that Sun won't (didn't?) support anything less than a full end-user (SUNWCuser) install cluster for smpatch. Put together a minimal install for a boundary system and want to patch it? Get yo' Recommended Cluster on, dawg.
Any kind of slow-ish or intermittent Internet connection, and you'll have to supervise patch downloads, lest the 'Error: null' beast be awoken from its slumber (just re-run the 'smpatch download' - you'll usually get at least one more patch down before it errors out again). This is typical of the error messages from smpatch - largely useless, mostly misleading, occasionally deceitful.
Circular dependency in your smpatch database (recent kernel/zones patches, for example)? Ha ha haaaa, sucks to be you. smpatch can't figure it out, so you'll just get a load of patchadd failures during the smpatch run and subsequent shutdown. Re-running smpatch won't work, so don't bother. Time to hit SunSolve and work backwards down the dependency tree manually. You'd better hope SunSolve's feeling perky (gateway timeout anyone? Yeah, thought so), 'cause you're going to be there for a long time.
sconadm is as broken as smpatch, but with the added advantage of weird database issues at the Sun side which may stop you registering anything on your support contract. "Registration failed!" it will challenge. "What the fuck?" you will retort. Do not attempt to debug sconadm issues - your sanity is more valuable than your pride. Call Sun and get hold of SWUP_SUPPORT - they'll give you a script to run that will detail all the packages and patches missing from your system, including a Java update you can't install because your Oracle instance depends on a particular JDK version. But maybe that's just me.
Update Connection Proxy? Don't put yourself through the agony.
The enlightened (with similarly enlightened management) among us use PCA and avoid the smpatch/sconadm brain damage. I heartily recommend that you do too.
Giggle as your patches download without error. Rejoice in the HTML patch list output, with links to the READMEs for each patch. Bask in the glory of the caching PCA proxy.
Unfortunately though, the horror runs much deeper than just the automated patch tools...
The way patches are rolled is insane. Any one patch can update several packages, all-but-one of which may not be installed on your host at the time of patching. What happens if you install one of those not-installed packages after patching? That's right. The patch tools see all your applied patches, so won't recommend any of them again despite the just-installed, unpatched package on your system. Cue headaches trying to work out why you just got pwn3d by 1337 |-|4x0rz despite apparently being patched up to the eyeballs.
On no other Unix (that I've ever worked on at least) does a kernel patch clobber your sendmail config. This is a result of the way the patches are rolled, as above. You were told during the patchadd operation that the sendmail config had been moved, but you weren't expecting what was allegedly a driver update to affect userland apps, and you don't have the time to review 1000 lines of smpatch output for each of 30 odd machines at the end of a 12 hour shift caused by smpatch failing. to. download. every. second. patch, so you missed it. Say goodbye to the free space in /var as the mail spool fills up over the next few days. Say goodbye to your email-based system monitoring.
Ah well, I suppose it's a living. Say hi to SWUP_SUPPORT for me next time you raise an smpatch case. There's also a pretty good blog by one of the PST team at Sun which goes some way to explaining the madness: Patch Corner. Not pretty, is it?
Daddy's feeling linky.
Penny Arcade's one of only two webcomics that I visit on a daily basis (the other being XKCD). A lot of it's heavy gamer stuff, and not suitable for general consumption, but some is brilliant in its own right.
As is the latest.
Also, funky 3D puzzle action to slake your geekish thirst.
I think I'll start posting links to cool and/or interesting stuff I find on my travels through the Interwibble. Like a one-man Reddit, or something. Here goes.
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
An Organic Chemist's list of stuff he really doesn't want hanging around in his lab. Sounds a bit boring. Isn't.
I always disliked chemistry in school. Any subject that requires memorising a bunch of seemingly arbitrary facts isn't high on my list of things I'd like to make a career of. How ironic that Unix administration became my choice of 9-5.
Found on Dan's blog
Ralph Lawson's doing an all-nighter tomorrow at the Sub. I am positively wibbling in anticipation.
Me and Koof went to Leeds ages ago to see him at Basics, but didn't have the foresight to check whether or not he was actually playing that night. Needless to say he was, in fact, not.
I refuse to be disappointed twice.
If you need to find me, I'll be the guy in front of the DJ booth alternating between jumping around a lot and meerkating over the plexiglass to try to find out just where the fuck you get records like that.
I've sorted out the account signups for this here blog, so you should be able to sign in / retrieve passwords etc. now. See below if you're really interested in what the problem was. The blog software has also been upgraded to the latest stable release, but it shouldn't make any difference from where you're sitting. Anyway, normal people can stop reading.... now.
(I'm posting this, because I've seen a number of people on forums who've had the same issue I did, and none of the threads were answered. Hopefully Google will pick this post up.)
The main problem with the signups was that the return address hadn't been specified in MT, so the emails weren't being sent out to external addresses. Unfortunately, MT doesn't appear to email errors to the admin, so I didn't know about this until Koof pointed out that he couldn't sign up. Once that was fixed I created a new account with my work address as the email address, but the email bounced off the Exchange server with a 500 error for an invalid Return-Path.
MT (on Linux at least) sends mail through the sendmail utility (Postfix in my case) as the webserver user, so it wasn't setting the envelope address sensibly. This meant that everything appeared to be coming from the (unresolvable) local-network hostname, which was correctly rejected as invalid by the remote side. To fix this you can set up Postfix to re-write the envelope headers by editing /etc/postfix/generic, and adding, e.g.:
webserveruser@localhostname.localdomain webmaster@example.com
Then add:
smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/generic
to /etc/postfix/main.cf if it's not already there, then run:
postmap /etc/postfix/generic
and
killall -HUP master
to make the changes stick. Once that's done, mail from the webserver user will appear to come from webmaster@example.com and all should be well.
Dan of the legendary Dan's Data has got himself into an Internet fight with some idiots who really don't want you to see their marketing bumph. You can read about the whole amusing mess here, then here, and finally (for now) here.
Here at ILikeJam we like Dan, and so have heeded his request that the bumph be made available far and wide.
I give you the Firepower Pill marketing PDF. Long may the Streisand effect continue.
Holy Jesus, My ISP sucks. They were recently bought out by the dreaded Tiscali, and it's all gone down hill since then. I'm currently throttled down to ~70kB/s, which is a tenth of what I was getting before. That's when I'm connected at all, of course. The last two Sundays the router couldn't authenticate, so no Internub for me.
It's not all bad news, though. No Sir.
Turns out the exchange my phone line hangs off is available to Be, so I can get some obscenely fast ADSL on the go. According to my calculations, I should get around 14Mb/s downstream, with a following wind. That's about twice what I was getting before Pipex fell on its arse, and about twenty times what I'm getting right now.
In short, Pipex/Tiscali can bite the big one. I'm grabbing my MAC and putting my Nike Airs on.
For some reason I'd never actually watched a Woody Allen film, but I always found the quotes attributed to him deeply amusing so I got the DVD of Annie Hall.
I was expecting it to be a bit underwhelming - y'know, largely average with occasional moments of vague mirth. It's been described as a 'quintessential masterpiece' which, to be honest, makes me think of 3 hour Art House epics where no-one does anything, and the crescendo of the whole affair is a 2 second cut-away to a completely unrelated scene in a swimming pool*.
No chance. The man's a genius. I nearly laughed my ass clean off. Rent it, buy it, whatever. Seriously.
In other entertainment related happenings, I'm guilty of indulging in some pop-indie type music in the form of MGMT - Time to Pretend. I think it's the synth that's doing it for me.
To atone for my sins, I've signed up for Fabric First to get Fabric CDs delivered direct to my place of residence on a regular basis. Good Times.
* - Sorry. I used to watch a lot of obscure films at obscure times on obscure channels, drunk, changing phase from early to nigh shifts.
