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OpenVZ can have various heinous problems with udev. Most often, you cannot enter the VZ from the admin, and you cannot connnect via SSH.

beast / # vzenter 51
enter into VE 51 failed
Unable to open pty: No such file or directory

In Fedora you can make a simple change to /etc/udev/makedev.d/50-udev.nodes

--- 50-udev.nodes~      2008-01-10 16:00:08.000000000 +0000
+++ 50-udev.nodes       2008-07-30 15:44:07.223092644 +0000
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 # These device have to be created manually
+ptmx
 tty1
 tty2
 tty3

e.g. Simply just add ‘ptmx’ to the file someplace. This is fairly simple and seems to work very well.

Most people think that bash.org is just a collection of useless quotes. IRC is a seething underbelly of stupidity and intellectual mayhem. However, it appears that that the vacant stares actually assist in the discovery of blinding insights.

Clintons

McCain (only one)

Republicans in general

Democrats Candidates in general

America in general

There are more Bush related quotes than can be read in a single day. (Finding them is the difficult part, bash.org people have lots to say about ‘bush’ as opposed to Bush.) Cheney quotes are fairly prolific as well. However, I think that this quote really sums up the feelings of the community and the moderators for the current administration.

In short, according to Bash.org: Democrats are racists or sexists, Republicans aren’t smart, (as Bush would put it:) “the current administrations is idiots”, oh, and we’re all doomed.

Why is it that normal people don’t run more successful projects? See this ticket regarding Paludis. Paludis is a C++ replacement for Portage. Portage is a squirrels nest and even though the ebuild system is pretty nice, portage itself is pretty lame.

Disclosure

In the interest of fairness, I would point out: The Paludis site flatly refuses to say anything about the project. Therefore being run by a complete asshole isn’t contradictory to any previous statements.

Summary

The gist of the ticket is that Paludis doesn’t support certain types of parallelism and the developer(s) refuse to do anything sane in order to prevent, notify or clearly document the danger of it. This danger is apparently readily realized by users.

Examples of sanity might be:

• Warn people it’s not supported.
• Make some sort of method for restricting parallel execution.
• ADD A NOTE TO A FAQ

Evidence

What does the Paludis think of a notice about the dangers of parallel runs of the software they publish:

chaoflow: “What about preventing parallel paludis runs or at least a FAQ or some other way of explicitly telling people, that parallel paludis operations are not supported?”
ciaranm: “Preventing parallel runs is a security hole. And an FAQ entry is pointless – parallel executions are fine so long as they stick to certain operations.”
chaoflow: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have documented, which operations are fine for parallel execution?”
ciaranm: “Not really. If you don’t already know, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

Very Dense

This is clearly beyond the scope of Paludis. See this conversation:

chaoflow: “What about preventing parallel paludis runs?”
ciaranm: “Preventing parallel runs is a security hole.”
chaoflow: “Could you elaborate on that?”
ciaranm: “It’s an inversion. A non-root user can obtain the locks and prevent root from being able to do anything for an arbitrarily long time.”

This stunning display of logic and intellect is what passes for success over at Paludis. Even I can think of a few methods to help prevent this:

• Make an override mechanism. Easy enough, right?
• Enable super-users to kill the offending process.
• Put the lockfile in a secured-location.
• Use shared memory, and make use of ipcrm to kill rogue locks.
• Observe that a security /hole/ involves some sort of exploitation of a system. A DoS involves prevention of normal operation. This doesn’t even make a legitimate DoS.

Blackhole

The stupidity doesn’t end there:

chaoflow: “And way way better would be some simple locking inside of paludis preventing bad things from happening.”
ciaranm: Paludis is not there to protect you from yourself.

ciaranm must see this as an incredibly clever way of saying “go f* yourself.”. ciaranm seems to be an incredibly dense idiot. Why is an f’d up system preferable to some logic which may lead to the inconvenience of cleaning up a rogue lock?

Paludis IS a security hole - It just might fuck up your system, if you run it in parallel with itself, but it certainly won’t try to tell you that. I am guilty too.

In order to get Ahsay working behind and SSL proxy which passes traffic to port 80, you have to modify your conf/server.xml and set a few settings on ol’ Nginx.

Add to your server.xml, non-SSL connector declaration

scheme="https" secure="false" proxyPort="443" redirectPort="443"

nginx config section

    proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:9080;
    proxy_redirect  http://archive.myisteam.com      https://archive.myisteam.com;
    proxy_redirect  http://archive.myisteam.com:80   https://archive.myisteam.com;
    proxy_redirect  https://archive.myisteam.com:80  https://archive.myisteam.com;

.....

Apart from that, it’s perfectly normal

Special thanks to Cliff Wells. For Tireless effort in the face of java.

Thanks as well to the Apache Documentation efforts. Tomcat Connector Docs

There are a number of articles on removing Symantec AntiVirus silently. There is a link to thread on avoiding MSI uninstall reboots. There are good suggestions and some bad. Mostly it’s simple. Cleaning up SAV w/o a prompt, password, or user-required action is a little non-trivial.

Someone else did the heavy lifting. You must instruct Symantec to ignore the uninstall password, and that is easily accomplished via a reg-hack. However, reghack via GPO is a PITA. Google turned up: Policy Maker (Registry Extension). This is not news. NEWS is that it farking crashes as soon as you try to use it. Well, it crashed if you have IE7 installed.

Ironically, perhaps, you must update the registry to make this work. Specifically you must disable object caching in IE7 for mmc.exe. (This is too precious). Microsoft Article (which OUGHT to be LINKED from the Webpage of the tool, or included in the installer, given how long IE7 has been out) #938611 - GP Snapin Crash fix.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_OBJECT_CACHING]
@=""
"mmc.exe"=dword:00000000

.. or how to share folders from Windows 2003 with Macs via AFP/MacFile/File Services for Machintosh

I don’t know what I missed, but this is the one type of sharing that requires using Computer Management.

Right-Click My Computer, Click Manage. Click on Shared Folders. From there you can right-click white space and use New Share to create new shares. The third screen in the dialog allows you to pick Windows, Mac or both.

I have a Novatel EX720 Merlin EV-DO RevA PC-Express wireless card. It is actually a USB device that attaches via the PC slot. I use it with my MacBook Pro. When I purchased it, activation was unavailable from OS X. However, I was able to activate using Parallels. I booted Windows XP, clicked to attach the USB device and then installed the Connection Manager Software.

After install, everything worked great, it activated and things were good. The firmware update failed, it kept complaining about raw-device access errors. Later, while attempting to find a Windows Laptop with PC Express Support, I discovered an important fact about Dell PC owners: They don’t know that they have a PC Express Slot, even when they do!

So, after numerous assurances from Dell-using friends and the abject SHOCK at the lack of said PC Express slot, I wrested my friends Dell Latitude away from him. In 30 seconds I learned what he didn’t: it DOES have one. And people say that Mac Users are idiots. A short while (and significant chiding) later, I had the firmware updated and the card has worked well. Well, until today.

Today I plugged the card into my port and the Connection didn’t come up. I tried again. Nothing. I used Quicksilver, loaded Console.app and watched the system.log.

Oct  9 21:08:40 Tulkas kernel[0]: USBF: 21191.524   [0x4d8fe00] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in.  It will keep retrying.  (Port 1 of hub @ location: 0x5d000000)
Oct  9 21:08:47 Tulkas kernel[0]: USBF: 21198.964   [0x4d8fe00] The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.

Oh… Discordia. After a short call w/ Sprint the operator preferred that I go borrow a Windows PC to troubleshoot. I told him that if he had a firm conviction that some firmware/driver/whatever hack would return this to functionality, I would do it. He finally just said, “Sir, it’s really your choice”. So I offered to try it, provided that he got the RMA rolling.

Congratz Sprint! Better customer service that I expected, and better service than most of my friends have ever had.

There is a far and wide search for media players under linux is difficult. Cliff found Exaile, something that people have been raving about since January. Give it a try. It’s Cliff’s flavor of the week.

I found a neat recipe for forwarding TCP ports under python. It’s so short and succinct that I had to post about it. Also, I may never find it again.

ASPN Recipe

I wrote a little blurb on my experience converting from Tapes to MP3s.Cassette Tapes to MP3 and CD