The Curry

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Here's the recipe for the awesome, tasty, blows your head clean off ILikeJam curry sauce.

Should be enough to put 4 idiots into respiratory arrest.

You'll need:

  • 80g ginger
  • 6 green chillies
  • 3 bird-eye chillies
  • 4 fat cloves of garlic
  • A tin of peeled plum tomatoes
  • A fat onion
  • 4 tbsp ground nut oil
  • 2 tsp cumin
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp chilli powder
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 2 tsp turmeric
  • 2 tsp garam masala
  • 1 1/2 tbsp tomato puree

Shove the ginger, all the chillies (seeds included - no messing about) and garlic in a blender and blend to a paste. Transfer that dangerous shit into a bowl before it dissolves the blender blades.
Drain the tinned tomatoes and stick them in the blender. Give the button a few hits - you want a bit of texture left. Put the resulting slop in the bowl with the previously blended stuff.
Chop your onion.
Grab a pot and throw in the chopped onion and oil. Fry those tasty bits of onion fairly slowly 'til they're soft. Chuck the cumin in and stir, then give it a bit more frying time.
Add the chillies/tomato/etc to the onion and stir until it's venting noxious fumes. Keep stirring and add the salt, chilli powder, cayenne, turmeric and garam masala, then the tomato puree.
Stir some more.
Turn the heat down and keep the concoction simmering until you get bored or the anti-terror squad come round looking for a chemical weapons factory - the longer it simmers the better it gets. Add water if/when it dries out.
Turn the heat off and let that nonsense chill out for a while. Once it's safe(r) to handle, spoon it into freezer bags and freeze it. You can use it straight away if you want, but it's maybe 20% more panic-inducing after it's been frozen. So do that.

To unleash the fear, defrost the sauce and chuck in some chunks of chicken breast. Simmer for 15 minutes or so. If you're feeling particularly hardcore, finely slice another couple of bird-eye chillies and throw those bad boys in there.
Serve with rice and a well rehearsed safety briefing.

Mini

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My ancient Thinkpad died a few days ago. A moment's silence, if you please.

...

Thank you.

Being largely skint, I grabbed myself the cheapest netbook going. A Dell Mini 10v. It's awesome. The screen's razor sharp, the keyboard's satisfyingly clacky, and it's really well put together.
Being of the RedHat persuasion, the installed Ubuntu OS survived exactly one boot before being replaced by the mighty Fedora.

An 8GB USB drive and these instructions got it up and running. The default Fedora Gnome desktop's surprisingly light on RAM and everything Just Works. A couple of tweaks, though, because that's the way I roll...

  • Get the binary WiFi drivers:
    $ su -
    # rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
    # yum -y update
    # yum -y install kmod-wl broadcom-wl
  • Tweak PulseAudio so it doesn't use so much CPU:
    $ su -
    # sed -i 's/; resample-method = speex-float-3/resample-method = speex-float-0/' /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

That's about it, really. Install Flash at your leisure and enjoy full-screen YouTube, iPlayer et al.

There's only one thing wrong with this netbook, and that's the touchpad. The buttons are under the pad, but the areas over the buttons are touch-sensitive, so you can't drag and drop without the pointer flying off in all directions. This isn't a problem that's particular to Linux - Windows 7 users (XP as well, I'd imagine) are reporting the same problem. If you run Linux, though, you get to talk to the developers and raise bug reports. So that's what I did. We'll see how it pans out.

Sign it

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LDAP Headfuck

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LDAP: Largely Dangerous And Painful. Let me describe why. (Normal people can give this one a miss. Fellow sysadmins can revel in the ridiculousness).

I'm in the middle of putting an LDAP infrastructure together, and rolling it out to 40-odd Solaris boxes for user authentication, NFS auto mounts, sudo and all that good stuff. Our consultant/contractor/architect worships at the alter of the Sun gods, so OpenDS 1.2.0 was his choice of LDAP server. Not a bad choice, to be honest - it's a piece of piss to set up and get multiple servers multi-master replicating, and it's Free.
All was tickety-boo until a week ago.

First up, all 4 replicating LDAP servers hung overnight. This locked out the admin team from half of our machines until I got into work and poked them back into life. No errors in the logs, nothing weird going on, just hung Java processes and no logins. Brought down 2 of the instances and upgraded the other two to OpenDS 2.0 so hopefully that should be the end of that. Hopefully. Maybe.

Then today, I'm happily LDAPing away when I ran an ldapmodify to change the UID of the user that runs out monitoring software. LDIF imported, no problem, except I'd run the ldapmodify binding as the user I was modifying, not the Directory Manager. Alarm bells went off in my head - users shouldn't be able to modify their own UID numbers. I tried it again, using 0 as the UID, and sure enough it turns out that anyone that could authenticate to LDAP could also change their UID so that they were running as root. Fuck me very hard indeed. A very swift google tipped up an ACL to add to stop this, as well as a whole load of other possible nightmares.

Next, while messing with the ACLs for the UID problem, it occurred to me that the 'proxy' user could see everyone's passwords in the directory. This is by design, since we're using proxy authentication on our Solaris hosts (which means user passwords aren't sent over the network in plaintext), but it also means that anyone logged into any LDAP-enabled Sun box can search for and list everyone in the directory's passwords with a simple 'ldaplist -l passwd'. The passwords are encrypted, but the old-skool Unix 'crypt' isn't exactly what you'd call military grade protection. Shit.
To get round this, I'm currently beating my head against the brick wall of TLS/SSL so we can remove the need for a proxy user. The tools supplied with OpenDS work fine, but the native Solaris stuff won't go near the self-signed certificates we're using (either that or I'm Doing It Wrong, I'm not entirely sure yet). I've given up for the night, but it looks like I'm going to have to generate CA certificates, then regenerate and sign all the certs for the LDAP servers, then import them, then import the CA and server certs into the LDAP config on the clients, then see if the native Solaris stuff works with them, then re-run ldapclient on all the clients. Arse.

I don't get paid enough for this.

Mandy

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Hey, Mandelson, could you perhaps fuck off please? Thanks.

While we're at it...
"...speaking at the government's C&binet conference..."
C&binet? Candbinet? What's a candbinet? Jesus. These idiots couldn't even come up with a name that makes sense, never mind some reasonable policies.

Hat-tip to an Anonymous Coward at Slashdot who simply posted: "Lord Fondlebum of Boy".

Ultimate Pizza

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Get yo' ass to dominos.co.uk, and construct yo' ass one of these:
- Regular base
- Pizza sauce
- Domino's Herbs
- Green Peppers
- Olives
- Roquito Sweet Chilli Peppers
- Tandoori Chicken
- Jalapeno Peppers
- Onions
- Pepperoni

Do it. Do it now. OM NOM NOM NOM.

And don't forget to tip your delivery guy.

Toof

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I had a tooth removed recently. Contrary to received wisdom*, the whole procedure was completely painless and largely unremarkable.

Things of note:
1) When your dentist goes "Hmmm." during a procedure, and invites one of his colleagues to join the ongoing mouth-party, this is not, I am told, cause for alarm. Contrary to the prevailing advice, I chose to become entirely (albeit very quietly) alarmed.
2) Your Dental Specialist may hide the various implements of healing behind his or her back until just before they are to be used. These implements may or may not include:
Large syringes
Well-worn pliars
Blood-filled suction tubes
I'm not entirely certain that this behaviour is normal, however. The furtive yet swift nature in which my dentists work leads me to believe that I've stumbled on a clique of ninja health professionals. I'm expecting a re-enactment of the Shimabara rebellion at the next check-up.
3) Rinsing the resulting casm in your jaw with salt-water according to instruction is entirely ineffective; expect to poke about in there with a toothpick to retrieve horrifying globs of matter, lest your breath become the subject of future Germanic fairy tales.

That's my experience anyway. Your milage may, as ever, vary.

While we're on the subject, check this out. Awesome.

* - Yeah, I'm fucking hilarious.

CC+02

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PROTIP:
Credit cards are self-extinguishing.

I don't know what they're made of, but they won't burn without continuous provocation. Sinister.

Emulex HBAs

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Let's say you've just added an Emulex FC HBA or two to your Solaris box. Let's also say that you booted the machine before you hooked up the fibre, zoned the switch and presented some storage.

Having trouble? Can't see your storage? Does your 'cfgadm -al' output look like this:

c11     fc-fabric    connected    unconfigured   unknown

Yeah, me too. Turns out the Emulex cards are a bit shy. You can poke them into life with the following:

luxadm -e forcelip /dev/cfg/c11

Change the c11 to whatever the device ID is for your card.

Tread carefully fellow admins - don't do this on an HBA that's already handling mounted storage - it resets all the ports on the loop, so you might lose sight of your storage for a second or two.

Never had to do any of this with QLogic cards...

FEMALE PREFERRED

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Just got a photocopied 1/4 A4 flyer through the door. It's got a staple at the top but it's only one page, so I'm going to assume there's something missing. Here's what the bit I got says:

FEMALE PREFERRED -
SHOULD BE TALL AND
VERY STRONG AS YOU
WILL HAVE TO CARRY
A SIZEABLE CASE - BUT
THAT IS 50% OF WHAT
I'M PAYING YOU FOR.

What's going on here? What's the other 50% of what (s)he's paying you for? What's in the case? Guesses in the comments, if you would.