Failure: ping successful

Fedora / Netatalk / OS X Lion / TimeMachine

2012-01-27T09:55:00.003+01:00

Being the cheapskate that I am, I'm not buying a shiny apple-branded time-capsule for backups when I have a perfectly stylish NAS (since the pic was taken I'm using the via-eden board there's a 1.5TB HDD in the box)

I'd previously used netatalk with leopard under mythbuntu, but following a clean-up and migration to Fedora 16 (Verne) it needed reinstalling (esp as we upgraded to Lion on some of the macs)

So, a HOWTO if anyone is hunting for this and some notes

You don't need avahi separately anymore - new netatalk includes it
You need to allow tcp/548 in your iptables rules (I added to /etc/sysconfig/iptables)
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 548 -j ACCEPT
SELinux. Yeah. probably needs fixing but 'setenforce permissive' worked :-/
I'm not convinced you need the 'defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1' anymore.

Here's what I did

1) Create a separate disk partition for time machine and mount it (I'm using LVM and XFS)

$> grep time /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv /export/timemachine xfs defaults 1 2
$> df -h /export/timemachine
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv 200G 6.0G 194G 3% /export/timemachine

2) create a separate user for the backups (not strictly needed but I chowned /export/rimemachine to that user to sort out permissions

#> useradd timelord
#> passwd timelord
#> chown timelord: /export/timemachine

3) Install and configure netatalk (although 2.2.0 is in Fedora 16, I decided to use the rawhide version of 2.2.2)

#> yum --enablerepo rawhide install netatalk

The config files are in /etc/netatalk and (see the gude at An Esurient Trollop ) you'll need to edit afpd.conf
(I added -mimicmodel Macmini and uams_guest.so to -uamlist: I have a ro media share)

- -tcp -noddp -mimicmodel Macmini -uamlist uams_guest.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword

and AppleVolumes.default

# Share out the Videos
/export/media/Video Videos options:ro,noadouble
#Time Machine
/export/timemachine TimeMachine options:tm

Startup netatalk

#> systemctl start netatalk.service
#> systemctl enable netatalk.service

So far so good -- assuming no failures you should see something like this in your logs

afpd[28742]: AFP/TCP started, advertising 192.168.1.251:548 (2.2.2)

Now, onto the mac -- I wasn't seeing the host automatically appear in the finder, but a simple command-k (connect to server) and typing the hostname worked (it expands to afp://hostname automatically), and was prompted for my (normal) username and password to connect to $HOME on the netatalk server.

In the time machine preferences I could then select the remote TimeMachine volume on the NAS, enter my 'timelord' username/password combo and it started to so a backup.

More news (and a rest restore) to follow...

Metering

2012-01-15T23:34:00.001+01:00

So I finally got round to wiring in the 'Teleinfo' shield into my EDF meter (see my earlier post for more info) and left it running while we're away. Hacked up an initial couple of graphs using trusty gnuplot: exhibits A and B -

It's rather easy to spot where the fridge-freezer kicks in, but more worrying is the fact that the baseline never dips below 170VA. The only things that should have been running in that time was my via-eden server, with one HDD, the livebox and samknows monitoring box. I suspect I need to investigate more.

Made a minor hack to the shield as digi-6 is used by the LED on a nanode - but digi-7 is free.
Details were tweeted over here. Next up is to get it sending the info out to main box (well, another nanode or my bifferboard) and spitting to pachube and / or a jeelabs display board.

Happy Birthday

2012-01-06T13:28:00.001+01:00

I finally got round to assembling my birthday present. Shiny toys FTW :-)

The Perils of CDNs

2011-12-13T16:19:00.000+01:00

So CERN have just held a popular webcast event to announce the latest results in the search for the Higgs. Many of the webcast viewers (no I don't have usage stats) were complaining that the stream was choppy. What I did notice on my laptop (couldn't get near the auditorium) was that the main libflashplayer traffic was inbound from 93.174.99.0/24 VELOCIX-EU - could this be the CDN used by Groovy Gecko?

Not having an onsite mirror though then meant that each member of staff watching was then pulling data *in* to site as the traffic graph shows:

I'm sure this can't be efficient... Ho Hum.

Another year of LHC Secrecy

2011-12-08T15:44:00.001+01:00

So, another year of LHC running comes to a successful close, Once again we've managed to keep the real facts hidden from everyone - Not the Higgs (as thats's being discussed next week) but more importantlt that the whole of the LHC is actually a spinoff from one of the major Data Centre companies who had outgrown their shed. The Proof? why - of course...

however, best to keep it a secret - its easier to get runding for a mythical 27km tunnel than a shed :-) Oh, and a lot less sexy in the books too...

Sniff...

2011-11-25T14:12:00.001+01:00

Updated to include the plots from monitoring box:

FTTH update

2011-11-24T11:55:00.001+01:00

So, I'm still (till I move flat) with k-net at the flat, and have a monitoring whitebox hanging off my router.

So Far, speed has been consistenly high - downloads in the 90Mb/s range. They are only (heh, 'only') seeing uploads of ~30Mb/s, but I know I can get higher than that using a box closer to the reso-lian network or to work.

Sniff, anyway thats only till the end of the month and then I'm back to orange.fr till May. Somehow I don't think I'll be getting this off my ADSL line...

PoE Network controlled signage

2011-09-28T23:00:00.000+02:00

I may have a requirement for several 'remote controlled' illuminated signs. (where remote could be network driven) - These aren't Scrolling LED 'calls in queue' type ones, but more the warning 'Laser on', 'Mic Live', 'Conveyor Running' type ones.

Normally these things seem to be driven directly from some local switchgear or output, but what if you want to gather status centrally , or illuminate the sign depending on some remote sensor (be it a web tsunami alert or the boss' car being picked up on the ANPR at the gate)

Cue a quick hacky prototype: Take one nanode and use the digital outputs to drive a mosfet to switch some cheap LED strips from IKEA. So far so good, but that requires a 12v (since thats what the strips use) supply. The nanode can take that on the screw inputs if you add a heatsink to the reguator, but I'd rather get rid of the PSU alltogether: cue a cheapo 802.3af PoE splitter from TP-Link, and I have the whole lot driveable off one RJ45 cable.

Onwards to software, and it looks like bitlash / restuino look useful (esp if I get the whole lot working with DHCP too).

Anyway, with a range of lighting areas possible (thanks to addressable outputs on the nanode) per display, the option to have a nice facia with multiple 'zones' illuminated is possible. Now to find a nice case...

puppet /. facter / v12n

2011-09-01T10:53:00.000+02:00

As I'm starting to get into puppet, especially when used with the foreman for dashboard display, I've started noticing a few (fixable) oddities

1st up ios that not all RHEL clones are treated equally -- some patches are just adding detection and flaggin, others go the full hog and make sure its in all the "constrain:" sections in facter too. I guess I need to do a code review and pull in the extras. Cue lots of different VMs
(the joys of a weeks home leave from work..)

secondly, virtualisation detection is 'flakey' -- some (vmware) are really well detected, but new kernels give false positives (see issue #7723) so I'm going to set about tidying these up and adding hyper-V detection properly

FTTH / Reso-LIAIN / K-Net

2011-08-25T01:01:00.000+02:00

Executive Summary:

I've had fibre installed to the flat. In this area it's all organised by Reso-LIAin who have 'local' ISPs who resell their network. Luckily for me one of the PoPs is located at work so I have nice small (<2ms) pings to site.

So what's involved? Choose your ISP from the shortlist (of about 5) -- all roughly the same prices, some offering more bundled stuff at cost. I ended up with 'k-net' (formerly known as kwaoo.com). They seem to be rather dependent on one supplier if you look at their AS24904. Contractors from reso-lian show up to pull the fibres into your property -- In my case they'd already run multicore into the building (1st and 3rd floors had breakout boxes installed) and I was the first to get it from there. They pull (through the france telecom duct -- which should be installed anyway) a 2-core fibre and terminate it at the CPE (which must be powered, so you have to define a location within reach of a wall-wart. They will put the CPE up to 5m from the france telecom entry point, in my case I asked for it in the walk in cupboard. Being an old flat, the duct was smaller than current Normes (building standards) and partially blocked. when they repulled the phone cable (in use for ADSL) they managed to snap it. It now leaves the duct at floor level rather than in the patress. Hmm.

The 4 ethernet ports are split from 2 vlans - ports one and two carry 'internet' traffic - you give the MAC address of your router (I purchased my own) and they put it in the DHCP server. (you get a static IPv4 address). Ports three and four are for the IPTV service. This is multicast and although they supply a set top box, I've not bothered renting one, as I'll just watch it with VLC instead. Status of the TV streams is available (from reso-liain) at http://81.18.191.108/tv/liste_tv.html (found via their forum).

Phone service is VoIP -- They will port your existing number (this is the only resason my freebox is still active - am waiting till thats done before cancelling service) and will sell or rent you an ATA. Since they send config details in the mail, I shall use my polycom and if brave the SPA3102.

Disadvantages: No IPv6 yet. boo. Especally as I was used to having it with free. Other than that? I've only mailed specific tech Questions at their helpdesk and theyve been OK (such as can you set reverse dns to ...... -- which they do :-)

Shuttle bus tracker

2011-08-03T09:54:00.000+02:00

Not that I tend to err, leave things till last possible minute or anything, but I'd really like to have a tracking system on the CERN shuttle busses, so that I can stay in the office until I know the bus is coming. (or, armed with a mobile device waiting at the stop, see where it is)

So - I was thinking something embedded ish that contained a cheapo GPS chipset (probably good enough signal on the dasboard, a 2 line LCD and a keypad

something UI ish for driver along the lines of 'select route:'
and then it'd show the route, upcoming timetabled stops

backhaul to site would be GSM (should be able to transmit a small UDP packet of transponder#,Route#,Position,timestamp) to a central server.

The folks over at rpi.edu (yes, they started concerto too) already have some code that looks interesting at https://github.com/wtg/shuttle_tracking/

Question is, would it be cost effective to roll our own, and if not, who's offering the best / cheapest (open) system out there?

nanode built!

2011-07-12T00:47:00.000+02:00

One successful evening of soldering, and lo, I have a working nanode. Started off nice n basic with the resistors, but overall a pretty simple pcb to assemble:

Plugged it in, and lo, blinky LED. Have since flashed with the EtherShield Drivers and its happily getting an IP address. now for some pachube / twitter / other integration...

Orange VoIP woes

2011-07-11T15:32:00.000+02:00

Our livebox2 repeatedly used to lose the VoIP service (somewhat annoying as we don't have a 'physical' pots line, just ADSL signal on the copper pair)

however there's now a subtle hint on the config pages NOT to change the DNS servers from the automatic setting (we used to use opendns for content filtering)

So, anyone know what hard-coded voodoo sagem/orange were up to?

Electronic components

2011-06-27T12:32:00.005+02:00

Vigilant readers (ha, who am I kidding) will have noticed I've been starting on some ATmega hackery, but I'd like to prototype up without needing to but an arduino (clone) card for each one. So, off to the electronics equivalent Laminated Book Of Dreams (ie, farnell) to stock up on core components.

Discussions have come up with something like the following list, but what else should be added?

* LEDs - Was going to get both a selection single and a couple of RGB ones
* pile of resistors
* capacitors - elecrolytic and ceramic
* Diodes - signal. power, zener
* Voltage regulators
* 2n7000 mosfets
* generic transistors
* couple of atmega chips, crystals etc (core componets of arduinos)
* battery holders
* reset switches
* hookup wire
* breadboard (one decent and one small)

More specific bits I also want are
* rf12 boards
* opto isolator for telemetry input
* moar jeenodes :-)

EDF metering and 'Tele-Info'

2011-06-21T23:03:00.002+02:00

Just discovered via some google-fu that we have a Sagem C1000 series meter in the house, which includes

* Interface de télé-information client permettant le raccordement à un système de gestion d'énergie

so, with a bit more googling I discovered that it's 1200 baud, 7 bits one stop. and lo - there's even an arduino shield already made for it!

--- update ---
Have discovered that there are many hacks around to parse this teleinfo - some of which need a licence fee (!!!) and do fancy things like export to bdpv.fr

Sample of the data stream is at http://www.planete-domotique.com/blog/2010/03/30/la-teleinformation-edf

Hardware Hackery

2011-06-16T09:43:00.000+02:00

I've just purchased a nanode to be the main part of the energy monitoring in the new house. More details about it are at http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/Project:Nanode - I plan to use the nanode as the head unit, perhaps with a somple lcd display, talking to slave nodes (jeenodes or emontx boards) which do the data logging.

more info and construction details when it arrives.

Nasa TV on PS3

2011-05-23T23:50:00.000+02:00

Since there's no european satellite stream of Nasa TV it means you have to watch a streamed version over here.

Also I'd like to watch it *on the TV* when there's something interesting, rather than a PC. so, with a bit of hackery http://smudge.elwell.org.uk/nasa.html contains just the swf embed object (no extra junk) scaled to 720p size.

Opening the link in the PS3 web browser and clicking the 'fullscreen' bottom RH corner means you get a nice fullscreen flash stream on your TV :-)

share and enjoy.

email clients

2011-05-09T14:10:00.000+02:00

Came across this posting recently. Oh that the following recommendations were actually implemented somewhere...

But let me suggest a few pop-up windows I would like to see
mail-programs implement whenever people send or reply to email
to the lists they want me to subscribe to:

 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand |
 | people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading |
 | it before they can decide if it is interesting.  At least  |
 | two man-weeks will be spent reading your email.  Many of   |
 | the recipients will have to pay to download your email.    |
 |                                                            |
 | Are you absolutely sure that your email is of sufficient   |
 | importance to bother all these people ?                    |
 |                                                            |
 |                  [YES]  [REVISE]  [CANCEL]                 |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+

 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Warning:  You have not read all emails in this thread yet. |
 | Somebody else may already have said what you are about to  |
 | say in your reply.  Please read the entire thread before   |
 | replying to any email in it.                               |
 |                                                            |
 |                         [CANCEL]                           |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+

 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Warning:  Your mail program have not even shown you the    |
 | entire message yet.  Logically it follows that you cannot  |
 | possibly have read it all and understood it.               |
 |                                                            |
 | It is not polite to reply to an email until you have       |
 | read it all and thought about it.                          |
 |                                                            |
 | A cool off timer for this thread will prevent you from     |
 | replying to any email in this thread for the next one hour |
 |                                                            |
 |                         [Cancel]                           |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+

 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 | You composed this email at a rate of more than N.NN cps    |
 | It is generally not possible to think and type at a rate   |
 | faster than A.AA cps, and therefore you reply is likely to |
 | incoherent, badly thought out and/or emotional.            |
 |                                                            |
 | A cool off timer will prevent you from sending any email   |
 | for the next one hour.                                     |
 |                                                            |
 |                         [Cancel]                           |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+

git import

2011-04-15T12:15:00.003+02:00

I had a set of old files with the correct timestamp on, relating to separate versions of a file, ie, foo_16.c, foo_17.c, ... foo_22.c which I wanted to import into a new git repo while preserving the author history

so, this little snippet of code worked - may be useful for others

 
$ git init
$ git add -N foo.c
$ for i in `seq 16 22` ; do
  cp -p hist/foo_$i.c foo.c; 
  GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="`date -R -r foo.c`" git commit \
     --author "Fred Bloggs <fred.bloggs@example.com>" \
     --date="`date -R -r foo.c`" -m "Version $i" foo.c
 done

which you can then branch and commit as normal with current changes

Yes I could probably have done GIT_AUTHOR_DATE=$GIT_COMMITTER_DATE but well, 2 calls to date wasn't that much of an overhead in this case.

anyway, for those that care, the result is up on github

Bash, PS1, PROMPT_COMMAND and other fun

2011-04-04T12:35:00.003+02:00

I've just spent 30 mins trying to understand the flow between the various files that set a bash prompt on fedora to do the following: (assumption is here that you're in a colour xterm)

I want:
* my username to change colour depending if I still have a valid kerberos token
* the hostname of the machine I'm on to be in RED if I'm root
* displayed path to be as simple as possible
* $ if I'm a minion, # if root as mormal
* command line editing to work sensibly, no wierdisms on wrapping long lines

so - I used to have on my machine something like the following:

if [ "$PS1" != "" ] ; then
 klist -s 
 if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
 PS1='\[\033[32m\]\u@\h\[\033[0m\]:\w\$ '
 else
 PS1='\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[32m\]@\h\[\033[0m\]:\w\$ '
 fi
fi

and something similar for root.

But on my laptop (F14) I wanted it system wide, so went down the approach of customising /etc/bashrc where you find calls to
PROMPT_COMMAND=/etc/sysconfig/bash-prompt-xterm

1) /etc/sysconfig/bash-prompt-* aren't included, so you're on your own
2) It must point to an executable script that is run every time before displaying the prompt
3) PS1 is still displayed *AND* if you use tab completion / ctrl-l, its *only* PS1 thats displayed on your screen, not the output from PROMPT_COMMAND

so: DON'T do the following:


cat /etc/sysconfig/bash-prompt-xterm 
#!/usr/bin/env bash 
# set green username if we have a valid kerberos token, else cyan
klist -s
if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
 K='[32m'
else
        K='[36m'
fi
# set hostname in red if we're root, green otherwise
if [ ${USER} = 'root' ] ; then
 U='[31m'
else
 U='[32m'
fi

printf "^[%s%s^[[37m@^[%s%s^[[0m:%s " ${K} ${USER} ${U} ${HOSTNAME%%.*} "${PWD/#$HOME/~}"
#echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}:${PWD/#$HOME/~}\007"

(where ^[ is 'ctrl-v, esc' in vim)
because you end up with stuff like

aelwell@pcitgtelwell:~[aelwell@pcitgtelwell ~]$

until you press ctrl-l and end up with just
[aelwell@pcitgtelwell ~]$ (ie, $PS1)

but *DO* make the call to see if you have a valid token and set the xterm titlebar in /etc/sysconfig/bash-prompt-xterm, but if you're altering PS1, then do so in the traditional places of /etc/bashrc and (as suggested in that file) a custom modification shell script in /etc/profile.d/ directory.

Ho Hum. Hope this clears up for anyone else trying to work out what the sysconfig/bash-prompt-* files do.

oh, and does anyone know a lighter call to see if a token is still valid than 'klist -s'?

Daily WTF Candiate

2011-04-01T14:51:00.003+02:00

(Credit for spotting this one goes over to the fine folks at scotgrid who were bitten by the fallout.

Anyway, Useless Use of Cat^H^H^HMore award goes to http://bit.ly/dI2W3c

Garbage in, Garbage out

2011-03-23T14:33:00.002+01:00

Why you should not accept data from users into a DB without checking it.

Exhibit A: "select manufacturer"

<OPTION value="FUJITSO">FUJITSO</OPTION>

<OPTION value="FUJITSU">FUJITSU</OPTION>

<OPTION value="FUJITSU SIEMENS">FUJITSU SIEMENS</OPTION>

<OPTION value="FUJITSU-SIEMEN">FUJITSU-SIEMEN</OPTION>

<OPTION value="FUJITSU-SIEMENES">FUJITSU-SIEMENES</OPTION>

<OPTION value="FUJITSU-SIEMENS">FUJITSU-SIEMENS</OPTION>

The saga of SAGA

2011-03-21T15:25:00.001+01:00

for anyone who wishes to install a glite-WN without the overhead of SAGA, the magic voodoo on the command line is

yum --enablerepo dag groupinstall glite-WN --exclude \*saga\*

Makefile Faffage

2011-03-18T11:40:00.003+01:00

I've inherited a piece of legacy code (an inirscript that needed bringing up to FHS and Fedora packaging guidelines) -- as part of the testing I realised I needed a noddy way to generate the tar.gz sources. There was already a Makefile in the package (for ETICS) but I hacked in the following to quickly build up a NVR-tarfile.

Not pretty, but if anyone fancies some Makefile golf, I'm open to suggestions:

dist:
echo ${package}-`sed \
-e '/^Version:/!d' \
-e 's/[^0-9.]*$[0-9.]*$.*/\1/' \
-e q \
${package}.spec` > .fname
-rm -rf `cat .fname`
cp -lvr src/ `cat .fname`
tar chzf `cat .fname`.tar.gz `cat .fname`
-rm -rf `cat .fname` .fname

and yes, it bears a striking resemblance to the GNU Complex Makefile Example

QSL Cards

2011-01-29T02:19:00.003+01:00

At the shack there are thousands of QSL cards stuffed into boxes. As an experiment I decided to see if there was a quick way of scanning these - so using a webcam to capture a still image, followed by a python script to stitch the 2 adjacent images together (as the front and back will be on 2 separate images) I managed 400 or so in a session.

stuffed up on flickr for now till I get round to finding a better place for em.

oh the script? it's my 1st adventure into the Python Imaging Library -- and its rather nice.

#!/usr/bin/python

# Script to generate a single image of a QSL card from 2 adjacent
# scanned images
#
# Andrew Elwell for F6KAR
# This script may be copied or modified under the terms of the GPL
#
# We assume that the cards are arranged with the following seq:
# [- 1F] [1R 2F] [2R 3F] .... where FR are Front and Rear of cards

from PIL import Image
import os

indir = "/home/aelwell/Downloads/qsl/batch2"
outdir = "out/"

#leftbox = (100,100,900,1200)
leftbox = (0,0,750,1000)
rightbox = (850,0,1600,1000)

#todo = os.listdir(indir)
#todo = list(todo)
#todo.sort()
#for i in todo:

for n in range(1,403):
i = "Image-" + str(n) + ".jpg"
image = Image.open(indir + "/" +i)
print i

merge = Image.new('RGB',(1000,1500),)

try:
merge.paste(front,(0,0,1000,750))
except:
print "should skip on 1st iteration"

rear = image.crop(leftbox)
rear = rear.rotate(90)

merge.paste(rear,(0,750,1000,1500))

front = image.crop(rightbox)
front = front.rotate(270)

merge.save(outdir + i,"JPEG")

2011-01-23T10:10:00.003+01:00

Yay. So tibbs has taken up the challenge and become my sponsor for Fedora. So far I've got libfap built in koji, just working out the ins and outs of Bodhi, and we're good for multiple platform / arch builds. Seems rather simple compared to some other buildsystems I'm using :-)

Anyway, lets see if planet.fp.o picks up on the Fedora tag correctly

dark clouds

2010-12-17T09:53:00.003+01:00

del.icio.us is closing. If you use it, you may want to head over to https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export and grab your bookmarks...

Fedora Packaging

2010-12-14T18:08:00.004+01:00

OK, so I needed to get my touchatag reader working under fedora, and RFIDIOt needs pyscard. Much yak-shaving later I've come up with a .spec file for pyscard, and its now ready for review.

spec file - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6594808/Fedora/pyscard.spec
src rpm - http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6594808/Fedora/pyscard-1.6.12-1.fc14.src.rpm

oh well, lets see who'll pick up my Review Request

ssh-copy-id

2010-10-07T11:58:00.003+02:00

I normally have my ~/.ssh/config so that it only uses my key or gssapi to login to other sites, however this poses a problem when reinstalling a server and don't yet have my key on it

ssh -F /dev/null root@hostname

works, but this wasn't working with ssh-copy-id.

Turns out that the ssh-copy-id script is braindead and only expects one or two (with the 1st beginning with -i) arguments.

lo and behold, some single quotes did the trick:

aelwell@pcitgtelwell:~$ ssh-copy-id '-F /dev/null root@concerto'
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
root@concerto's password:
Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh '-F /dev/null root@concerto'", and check in: ....

tada!

upgrade fail

2010-10-06T13:04:00.001+02:00

No I'm not hiring an expensive car, but I certianly won't be using carhire3000 if I do...

Dear McDondalds,.... [RANT]

2010-09-13T13:55:00.003+02:00

Dear McDonalds. If I wanted to wait over 15 minutes (from placing order to collection) for a simple meal (burger, drink and fries) I'd have gone to a REAL restaurant. Note, advertising your franchises as 'McDonalds Resturants' does not IMHO make it a real resturant. Oh, and teach your staff that >900 seconds on your timeclock is indeed 15 mins, so when I complain, point to said display (twas one of those place order and collect screens) and complain its been over 15 mins "No it isn't" is the Wrong Response. (see LART for possible reeducation tool)

Oh, and tell one of your other stores about NTP. Setting a computer clock is not difficult. Apparently I ordered at 12:39:40 in that store, but they managed to authorize a bank transaction at 12:32:16 (6 minutes before ordered. Impressive. Telepathic payments. Still, at least I got served at 12:33:20. again, before I'd ordered...

VoIP en France

2010-09-13T11:25:00.002+02:00

We've moved to France, with all the normal hassle over paperwork, etc. Done the signups for utilities, then had to choose a phone company.

France has the rough equivalent of a LLU line 'degroupe' [no I haven't got punctuation dorted yet] see Wikipedia. and many of the ADSL modem/router/wotsits include an ATA in them.

So - at home we went with Orange, cos like the incumbent should be fairly reliable right.... ha!. If the VOIP line dies (we don't have a 'real' POTS line) then you have to do a factory reset of the livebox2, re-add in all the login details and any other customisations, and wait.

Oh, and they don't publish the SIP info for the ATA, so I can't even use a hardware voip phone for those times when internet up but the livebox voip service is down.

I've gone with (hopefully - still waiting for the confirmation) free.fr for the flat. lets see if they're any better...

more data musings

2010-07-23T09:59:00.002+02:00

(the advantage of traveling by public transport once in a while is you can sit and faff on laptop)

More data musings

The only guarantee about user entered data is that, given enough entries it'll be inconsistent :-(

take for example an openstreetmap xapi query to pull out '/api/0.6/*[amenity=post_box]'

which is nice dataset of ~85k enties which I'll use for some simple analysis

So, the UK has ~40k postboxes, of which according to draco the breakdown of entries from the count are sources as follows:
13.5k - osm, 26.7k - website.

so of those 13504 UK postboxes in OSM, how many are royal mail run (hint - most of them!)
does the data match?


$ grep "operator" ~/Downloads/data.osm | sort | uniq -c | grep -i royal
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Post Office: Royal Mail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='royal mail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Royal mail'/>
   5065     <tag k='operator' v='Royal Mail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='RoyalMail'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Royal MAil'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Royal Mail Warwick'/>
      2     <tag k='operator' v='Royal York'/>

not bad - only a few CaSe sEnsiTive issues to sort out

What about other operators, say La Poste?


$ grep "operator" ~/Downloads/data.osm | sort | uniq -c | grep -i poste
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Bureau de poste'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='De Post  -  La Poste'/>
      7     <tag k='operator' v='la poste'/>
     21     <tag k='operator' v='la Poste'/>
     12     <tag k='operator' v='La poste'/>
    917     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste Belgique'/>
      6     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste - De Post'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='La Poste Suisse'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='Le Poste'/>
      1     <tag k='operator' v='poste'/>
      5     <tag k='operator' v='Poste'/>

again - it's the 'long tail' problem. So, out of the ~85k entries how many unique operators?
404 (how apt for a web service)

and of those how many are singles? 222 - OVER HALF!

m m m metadata!

2010-07-21T20:36:00.003+02:00

OK, in a semantic web kinda way, I've been looking at some of the clever machine tag integration that flickr are doing, and thinking about how these things *should* automatically link up.

Take for example http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/ and look at http://www.flickr.com/groups/postboxbypostcode/

There are many excellent postbox groups already but they all have, to my mind one problem - no structure enabling anyone to find anything. This group will only contain boxes which have their postcode in the title or tags, enabling easy searching.

if you can't find it, or reference it, it's useless.

I therefore propose to tag the postbox pics with 'ukpostbox:XXX_YYY where XXX is the 1st part of the postcode and YYY is the box ID

This means that 1) things like locating-postboxes could bring up a set of pics of the boxes, flickr could automatically link to posting times (uhm but that assumes the royal mail has an API ha ha ha ha ha). If people have followed the Tagging guidelines on openstreetmap, then you can even link them directly together.

Maybe sir Tims vision wasn't so bad after all :-)

WebDAV

2010-07-14T09:20:00.003+02:00

Here at CERN we use AFS for our home directories on Linux, but the windows stuff all uses DFS with https webdav voodoo.

Discovered on Ubuntu 10.04 that if I save a nautilus bookmark with:

davs://USERNAME@dfs.cern.ch/dfs/Users/U/USERNAME dfshome

it totally fails to connect. The correct syntax is simply:

davs://dfs.cern.ch/dfs/Users/U/USERNAME dfshome

and put in *both* your username and password when prompted.
Oh, and they're stored in ~/.gtk-bookmarks incase you need to edit them :-)

transmission + munin

2010-06-15T14:09:00.004+02:00

OK, so things like the Rocks Avalanche Installer (pdf) show how useful bittorrent can be for providing a scalable install service. How do you know the status of bittorrent installs though? transmission-remote -l is all well and good if you're on the console but what about long term graphing? Cue Munin and a quick bit of python:


#!/usr/bin/python
# Munin plugin for monitorring transmission bittorrent status
# Andrew Elwell 
# $Id: $
import sys, os

if len(sys.argv) == 2 and sys.argv[1] == "autoconf":
        print "yes"
elif len(sys.argv) == 2 and sys.argv[1] == "config":
        print 'graph_args --base 1000'
        print 'graph_title Transmission torrent status'
        print 'graph_vlabel Count'
        print 'graph_category Transmission'

        print 'Stopped.label Stopped'
        print 'Stopped.draw AREA'
        print 'Idle.label Idle'
        print 'Idle.draw STACK'
        print 'Seeding.label Seeding'
        print 'Seeding.draw STACK'
        print 'Up.label Up and Down'
        print 'Up.draw STACK'
        print 'Downloading.label Downloading'
        print 'Downloading.draw STACK'
        print 'Will.label Will Verify'
        print 'Will.draw STACK'
        print 'Verifying.label Verifying'
        print 'Verifying.draw STACK'

else:
 # OK we cheat - initialise ALL values to 0, then overwrite with 'real' ones, then spit out the whole dictionary.
 data = {'Stopped': 0, 'Seeding': 0, 'Idle': 0, 'Up': 0, 'Downloading':0, 'Will':0,'Verifying':0 }
 for state in os.popen("transmission-remote -l |sed 's/^\s\+//g' | sed 's/\s\{2,\}/~/g' | cut -d '~' -f8 | sort | uniq -c | grep -v '1 $' | grep -v '1 Status' | awk '{print $2, $1}'"):
  (s,c) = state.split()
  data[s] = c
 for k,v in data.iteritems():
  print k + '.value' ,v

EDIT: Suppose I should really find a nice template that copes with embedding code, but in the meantime thats what 'view source' is for...

Kerberos & SSH at CERN

2010-06-14T15:34:00.006+02:00

Quick blog posting to save me having to explain to people what's needed:

1) RTFM: http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/docs/kerberos-access.shtml -- thats where most of the good debugging tips are

2) to get it working between say your ubuntu laptop and cern hosts you'll need to append

allow_weak_crypto = true

to /etc/krb5.conf [libdefaults] section. (see bug)

3) make life easy and put a few things in your ~/.ssh/config


host *
        Protocol 2
        VerifyHostKeyDNS yes
        VisualHostKey yes
        GSSAPIAuthentication yes
        PreferredAuthentications gssapi-with-mic,publickey

host lxplus
        hostname lxplus.cern.ch
        ForwardAgent yes
        GSSAPIDelegateCredentials yes
        GSSAPITrustDNS yes

(despite what the man page says there are NO SPACES between the options in PreferredAuthentications (see SSH bug 1702)

killed

2010-05-25T15:30:00.003+02:00

I rarely have a need for bluetooth on my laptop, so mostly have it disabled. however when I was running Fedora 12. I had a nice option somewhere to leave bluetooth disabled and use the kill switch on my HP Compaq 8510p to purely turn off the wifi (advantage is that it also means the LED indicates wifi activity, not just always on)

However since migrating to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 I can't reenable the bluetooth. All I have in the gnome widget is 'Your computer does not have any Bluetooth adaptors plugged in.' Grrr. Time to boot off a CD methinks and fix this.

yes, Yes, YES!

2010-04-28T10:20:00.003+02:00

*something* at home on my linux box is doing alot of DNS lookups

grep 'yes.elwell.org.uk from 127.0.0.1' /var/log/daemon.log | wc -l
13284

and I have no idea what's responsible. (googling for yes and DNS is too vague)
Anyone any ideas?

Update Sussed it
smb.conf had "wins server = yes" not wins support....

concerto + twitter

2010-03-02T11:32:00.003+01:00

During the trials of concerto at CERN, I wanted to make the text fields a bit more dynamic like say following a specific twitter feed.

This would (ideally) simply consist of a DB entry with type=twitter, value=name of person. In the Real World however I got round this by hacking up a simple python script that connects to the DB and does a simple UPDATE of an existing text/plain entry via cron.

posted below incase others find it useful:


#!/usr/bin/python

# Script to pull twitter feeds for cern / lhcstatus
import twitter
import MySQLdb


conn = MySQLdb.connect (host = "...", user = "...", passwd = "...", db = "...")
api = twitter.Api()
feeds = { 'cern': 25, 'lhcstatus': 28 }
for f in feeds:
 tweets = api.GetUserTimeline(f,count=1)
 for tweet in tweets:
  sql = 'UPDATE content SET CONTENT = "%s" WHERE id = %s' % (tweet.GetText(),feeds[f])
  cursor = conn.cursor ()
  try:
   cursor.execute(sql)
   conn.commit()
  except:
   conn.rollback()
  cursor.close ()
conn.close ()

yes its hacky, but hey, called from cron regularly it works :-)

They're following me!

2010-03-01T09:07:00.003+01:00

As you know, I've been 'tweeting' the Status of the LHC from the 'Page1 comments' field. Decided to knock up a quick script to plot the number of followers over time, and lo:

Design vs Reality

2010-02-11T16:09:00.004+01:00

Decided to check that savannah was behaving as it should be. As with any good process we have a nice flowchart that depicts the allowed transition states.

ie:

however, thanks to a quick 'copy n paste' into graphviz it appears the reality is a little more complicated. Ho hum, cleanup time....

update: Just tidied up savannah and lo:

transmission

2010-01-20T07:19:00.001+01:00

Snippet to see how many chunks of a bittorrent file are still to be downloaded (ie, what does '84% complete *really* mean):

transmission-remote -t 2 -i | egrep "^ (0|1)"| grep -o 0 | wc -l

where -t 2 is the number of the torrent.

Twittering OCR

2009-11-23T11:56:00.004+01:00

'things that go bump in the tunnel'

As I've beem following the LHC restart I've written a parser for the vistar status feed to send it to twitter. The basic method is:

Grab URL (see image) then do some imagemagick hackery to cut out the corner. Resize larger (helps with the OCR) and save as tiff. Run the image through OCR software, compare the output to the last run, if different then upload to twitter.

ie

curl -o $IMG $SRC
convert $IMG +repage -crop 509x205+1+533 -resize 1000x -threshold 39000 $IMG
convert -monochrome $IMG $TIFF
mv $OUT.txt $OUT.old # make a backup of old
tesseract $TIFF $OUT

# Strip out ready for Twitter
DATE=`date +%d-%m-%Y`
sed -i "s/Comments $DATE /#LHC Status /" $OUT.txt

diff -q $OUT.txt $OUT.old
if [ $? -eq 1 ] ; then
# Post to Twitter.
curl --basic --user lhcstatus:password --data status="`cat $OUT.txt`" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
fi

and lo: http://twitter.com/lhcstatus

swisscom VDSL & dyndns

2009-10-05T20:03:00.005+02:00

Those of you who follow my twitter stream will have noticed that I managed to 'lose' my home machine today. It was online and active, I just didn't have its IP address (somwhere in the swisscom pool)

I thought I'd set up the embedded dynamic-dns client on my router, a Swisscom provided (motorola) netopia VDSL modem:


Terminal shell v1.0
Copyright ©2008 Motorola, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Netopia Model 7347-84 AnnexA VDSL Wireless Ethernet Switch, PBC
Running Netopia SOC OS version 7.8.2 (build r3)
VDSL Capable

Turns out that you have to save your username not your email address in the client, even though both are valid in the dyndns.com web login.

so the correct settings for those googling is:


Netopia-7000/XXXXXX> conf

Config Mode v1.3
Netopia-7000/XXXXXX (top)>> 
set dynamic-dns option dyndns.org
set dynamic-dns ddns-host-name "DYNHOSTNAME"
set dynamic-dns ddns-user-name "USERNAME"
set dynamic-dns ddns-user-password "PASSWORD"

subsitituting the things in caps for your own
then do a validate, save, restart and lo:

later on in 'view log' I see:


10/5/09 08:01:05 PM L3      DDNS: initializing service
10/5/09 08:01:23 PM L3      DDNS: Hostname updated. good

tada!

Studies on a hashtag

2009-09-21T11:24:00.002+02:00

I'm at the EGEE09 conference this week, and they're also plugging use of tagging in social networking such as the #egee hashtag in twitter and the 'egee09' tag in flickr. As a small experiment I created an IRC channel on freenode (#EGEE09) and announced it with a hashtag on twitter. Within 3 minutes there were an additional 3 users, only one of whom was in my normal twitter cloud, ie the other 2 came in purely from the hashtag (and one of those was under a minute later)

so, twitter is certainly becoming a respectable way of broadcasting announcements to an interested group of people who are subscribing to a hashtag.

oh and as an aside, the IRC channel paid off -- I discovered that GridPP had some nice laptop bags via it and secured one for myself during coffee.

Anyway, back to more important work -- listening to how the EU proposes to carve up the funding for call7

BeautifulSoup + savannah

2009-09-03T12:13:00.004+02:00

At work, we use savanne to power http://savannah.cern.ch where we keep track of all the glite-middleware (amongst other things)

However, one of the problems with savanne/savannah is that it doesn't have a nice machine readable API, but requires the user to click with a browser.

Cue Beautiful Soup and lo, the python SavannahCLI was born.

Well, in its early years it was unloved and handed round from developer to developer, until it arrived as a pedantic teenager to yours truly who decided to get rid of the horrible 'operation, item, name, value" syntax and replace with something more, um, fluid instead. (--patch 1234 --set foo=bar). It also had a huge set of hard coded lookup tables for converting select items to names and vice versa -- WHY?

thanks to some googling, I came across this which, with a little refinement gave me:


def enum_forms():
  # we search within the table tag so that we lose the LHS searchbox
  selects = soup.find('table').findAll('select')
  for sel in selects:
     sel_name = sel['name']
     print "SELECT NAME=%s" % sel_name 
     for o in sel.findAll('option'):
         print "  %s, %s" % (o['value'],o.renderContents())

hey, it's not finished yet, but sure saves a whole pile of hard-coded badness.

SPA3102 and Swisscom

2009-08-09T00:29:00.004+02:00

I've had a Linksys (nee sipura) spa3102 for a while (worked fine in the UK with sipgate) but havent got round to configuring it for switzerland yet.

Idiots guide seeing as I had trouble finding this on the net:

1) factory reset: ****, 73738#, 1#, hangup
2) make sure you have a computer in the NAT socket ('Ethernet') - I use mine bridged or into a main switch
3) http://192.168.0.1 and reset Router > WAN Setup > Enable WAN Web Server > YES
4) Router > LAN Setup > Networking Service > BRIDGE

http://www.3amsystems.com/wireline/daa-search.htm?country=Switzerland helps a little
as does http://switzernet.com/public/070723-config_UA/spa-3102.php

Things I've changed are
Voice > Regional > TimeZone > "GMT +1"
Voice > Regional > FXS Port Impedance > "270+750||150nF"
Voice > Regional > Caller ID Method > ETSI FSK
Voice > Line 1 > Dialplan > (<#:>xx.<:@gw1>|xx.<:@gw0>)

This dialplan is because I wish to use swisscom pstn most of the time, but prefix with # if I want the call to go over the VOIP service

Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie (a patch after midnight)

2009-07-03T15:18:00.002+02:00

...won't somebody help me chase those bad docs away.

As I recently mumbled on twitter (sorry, but 'tweet' is even naffer than the bad title of this post) I've started poking at Yum around the edges. Partially as I'm trying to find a 'Better Way' than the groupinstall we have to do for 64/32 bit package co-existence on the current middleware, but also as I'm narked off at the complete lack of manpages (on SL5) for yum-utils.

actually, thats a bit harsh - as of 1.1.16 (el5) there are minimal docs, including yaim-utils.1 but nothing for each individual utility (see also http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumUtils/RepoDiff). So, once again I'd ideally like something that can parse wiki markup and give me the output without having to keep pasting into a test page and hitting preview.

wikilint anyone?

Anyway, 1st patch sent off for approval, but my home server has dropped off the net so no more updates for the day.

[obligatory swiss status report]
Hot. :-) Sunflowers are blooming. nice n fresh in the evenings with thunderstorms. Sadly not had a chance to see if my shiny new camera can catch lightning, but I'm reasonably impressed with the highspeed capture. see sample

SVN Stats munging

2009-06-19T12:32:00.002+02:00

As an aside I recently looked at a piece of GPL'd software and analysed the subversion stats for it.
Each datapoint represents a checkin to the tree and I assigned a numerical ID to each ssh account. shows which developes 'stick' with a package and which abandon their updates.

Bonus points for working out what the code is :-)

In search of Feduntu

2009-06-12T16:01:00.003+02:00

I've been a happy Ubuntu user for a while on my HP Compaq 8510p laptop, but a few things recently really started annoying me.

1) regular ubuntu system upgrades don't include openafs-modules for that kernel, which means I have to recompile and install them before I can access cern.ch AFS space.

2) it *really* doesn't work well with the ATI chipset in my laptop - full screen of a video hangs the machine with fglrx (not checked launchpad for bug no)

3) since the last update it takes 2 *seconds* to minimise / maximise / alt-tab with windows. c'mon, this is a dual core machine..... (see bug #351186

4) The fingerprint reader didn't work.

5) ... neither did userfriendly xinerama.

OK, so most of these problems are caused by the video driver (closed source fglrx) but since Fedora 11 came out I thought I'd compare and see what the opposition had (especially useful since I use RHEL clones at work - scientific linux 5 or 4)

Installer -- worked wonderfully *once I'd managed to get the iso onto a USB stick -- I was using unetbootin (on Jaunty) but I hadn't formatted the stick as fat32 -- didn't work with an ext3 formatted stick. The LVM selection was a bit fiddly (I have /boot(sda1) and linuxvg(sda2) and within the VG I have homelv,rootlv and afscachelv (was ext2 as I used XFS for / and /home)

F11 wanted me to migrate from xfs to ext4 for / -- OK not an issue, but its SElinux policy seems screwy wrt the /home

I get home directory does not exist, logging in with HOME=/
but then can immeadiatly cd to $HOME. harumph.

also the Fan runs constantly, so battery life is low, Especially since it suspends as soon as *one* of the batteries goes flat (see bug 220962)

in short, Fedora 11 fixes some of my issues. looks really nice, but just doesn't do what I want (*decent* laptop distro that lets me work for a long time). So I'm afraid I shall revert to Ubuntu over the weekend - it's still buggy for me, but in less critical ways (hopefully a fresh install of 9.04 will blow away any issues of the video driver rather than the upgrades.

Maybe again in Fedora 11.1 ?
Why not windows? well, I *like* using the CLI for most of my work, Putty + gvim + development languages are good but I'd need a virtual machine to test any linux stuff out on laptop. I don't actually have a need of any windows-only software, so why pay the licence.

[OK - tomtom home is the only thing, but thats another story...]

twitter

2009-05-13T15:14:00.001+02:00

OK, so it's been a few weeks since I started using twitter. The best uses have been suitably demonstrated by those fine folks at b3ta but I thought I'd rant my findings so far.

In it's original use as some sort of "hello, I'm on the train" - it totally fails to impress me. Why bother? I'm following a few friends, and no offence to them, but the parts of their personal lives they choose to share are um, not gripping. If I want to know what X is doing, I'd rather a) phone em up or have some other realtime converation or 2) look for a longer than 140 characters blog posting.

However where I *do* find it useful is for a day to day scratchpad of stuff I've done to gather together for my weekly report. I'm sure the public at large don't give a monkeys what I'm up to, and my use of bug #1234 no doubt screws up hashtags something rotten, but hey, for me it works.

The alternative is some sort of cgi elog thing, but the advantage of twitter is the open API that other people have already spent time working with. Twitterfox 'just works' for me.

Ho Hum, there we go, somewhat over my 140 charaters, but if you're really sad you can follow me on http://twitter.com/elwell2000, or look over on the right of the page.

Scientific Sailing

2009-05-08T14:55:00.002+02:00

*why* can't the UK do something like this?

I remember years ago when Curly Mills kindly donated Alba Venturer to OYT Scotland we had a long discussion about how important teaching basic science / engineering was. Big plus points for the Italians for doing the Right Thing (TM).

bacula

2009-04-30T14:48:00.002+02:00

OK, so I work in IT. I *should* do regular backups. I know what happens when disks die. Finally (after aaaages of delaying) I set up my external USB HDD to work with Bacula. Not a moment to soon, 3 days in and I get asked do I have a copy of X file from the PC at home. clickity click, restore, find file, select restore to different machine, run. and lo...


  Job:                    RestoreFiles.2009-04-30_14.27.48.19
  Restore Client:         shinybox-fd
  Start time:             30-Apr-2009 14:27:50
  End time:               30-Apr-2009 14:28:06
  Files Expected:         1
  Files Restored:         1
  Bytes Restored:         42,212
  Rate:                   2.6 KB/s
  FD Errors:              0
  FD termination status:  OK
  SD termination status:  OK
  Termination:            Restore OK

tada! scp'd and mailed. :-)

No. Just 'NO' OK!

2009-04-22T13:33:00.002+02:00

I may be proved wrong on this, but why do a remake of *such* a classic, the Edge of Darkness. I mean, the late Bob Peck vs 'Mel Gibson ... a homicide detective for the Boston Police Department."

Ho Hum.
/OldFart

munin SNMP

2009-04-22T11:03:00.003+02:00

Blogging this as the munin docs suck a bit -- lovely and technical but no HOWTOs

anyway I have an out of the box debian munin install on my epia box (hostname mythic) and I wanted to also plot the network traffic on my swisscom VDSL router (which is SNMPable)

Magic incantation to /etc/munin/munin.conf is:

[mythic.localnet]
address 127.0.0.1
use_node_name yes

[router.localnet]
address 127.0.0.1
use_node_name no

(where I have a decent /etc/hosts for localnet) and then do

munin-node-configure-snmp router.localnet | sh

New title

2009-04-02T11:20:00.001+02:00

Decided to rename my blog in honour of Globus-gatekeeper

it's a grid thing....

X marks the spot

2009-03-31T16:26:00.001+02:00

Passed a google streetview car on the way home tonight - it was heading southbound on the A1 at ~15:28.
View Larger Map

Video killed the MSN star...

2009-03-19T20:57:00.002+01:00

Flippin closed protocols. Discovered that there's a sneaky tickbox in the account settings on the Acer Aspire one messenger client.

The Webcam features are disabled when you enable the "Use a Windows Messenger compatible service" in the settings.
If you go into the Account settings for your MSN account and make sure that isn't ticked, then reconnect and try again.

(thanks to an acer forum for that one.)

Virtualbox and KVM

2009-02-20T17:37:00.003+01:00

At the moment I'm using virtualbox on my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop for running windows (very occasionally) and some SLC test machines for work. Oh and a few other Linux Distros too. Anyway, much as I like the point n clickiness of virtualbox I thought I'd see what the 'built in' KVM could do, esp as libvirt looks like a nice abstraction layer.

However on starting virtualbox machines I get the error:

VirtualBox can't operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE).

well, thats not strictly necessary - a simple sudo rmmod kvm_intel kvm and relaunching the virtualbox guest.

Easy in Eze

2009-02-20T16:50:00.002+01:00

Went down to the coast last weekend for the Nice Carnival. Stayed in Eze - nice medievel town on the hill. Stitched a pile of images together to try and get the scale of the hills, but managed to leave a gap sadly.

koha!

2009-02-20T16:05:00.002+01:00

Spent a bit of time tinkering with koha in my spare time recently. Threw in a few trivial patches (once I'd got my head round git). However Some notes here for those installing on Debian Lenny (current 'testing'

1) Nearly all the required perl modules are available directly from the repos, the exception being SMS::Send (which needs Class::Adapter) -- Thise can be installed with the ever so handy dh-make-perl which converts your CPAN into .debs (sadly it still doesn't help with other conversion issues).

# dh-make-perl --build --cpan Class::Adapter ; dpkg -i libclass-adapter-perl_1.05-1_all.deb
# dh-make-perl --build --cpan SMS::Send ; dpkg -i libsms-send-perl_0.05-1_all.deb

2) I'll write up the rest as a HOWTO soon....

up up and away!

2009-01-25T22:01:00.002+01:00

Spent weekend up at Leysin and Chateau D'oex for the baloon festival. Sat was grey and snowy / windy so not much flying. Sunday was superb tho - pics on flickr

KITT updated?

2009-01-16T13:44:00.002+01:00

OK Wishlist time.

I'd like some sort of navigation system for the car. Yes I could buy a tomtom or suchlike, but whats the geek factor in that. Nope, what I'd really like is some sorta carpc. Now that Atom based motherboards are cheap, and SSD flash (certainly in the small storage capacity I'd need) are cheap(ish) this is becoming a sort of sketch plan. I'd still need to get a nice touchscreen and interface knocked up, and have a connection to the car amp (manufacturer fitted nice system)

So in no particular order:
* Touchscreen fitted 'neatly' in car
-- it needs to have big 'bloke sized' buttons on the screen for doing tasks, so I don't have to look away - do you look down at the car radio?
-- some sort of scriptable interface: eg 'upload all tracks since the last upload'
* GPS receiver
-- Datalogging for openstreetmap
-- Navigation (doh!)
-- Geofencing to allow comms when parked at home
* Wifi and or GPRS/HSDPA connectivity
-- limited storage in the car, download $music from home store - treat it as a small player rather than a full rsync copy.
-- kismet anyone?
-- remote upload of tracks
-- download of traffic reports
* OBD connection for datalogging.
-- correlate engine conditions to position - if you're revving the engine is that because you're going up a twisty hill or because you're a numpty.
* Accelerometer (wiimote velcro'd to dashboard?)
-- Get relative acceleration of car, not just position

Oh, and it should be cheap :-)

TODO: 2009

2009-01-07T17:53:00.002+01:00

Following mrbens posting, I thought I'd knock up a quickie list of my own for comparison next year

Learn French. This has to be a priority seeing as I wish to stay out here.

Get a more permanent job - EGEE funding only lasts till next May...

Get the mini-itx working in some media-server form

Do stuff with Asterisk

Improve Skiing

Do more mapping with OpenStreetMap around the area.

That should keep me occupied for a while :-)

money, money, money...

2008-12-31T00:21:00.002+01:00

Well, I can't live in Switzerland and not make some comment on financial matters. Anyway, emptying out my pockets this evening I looked at the pile of francs which included ones from 1965 to 2008. As much as I like the new british designs we just don't have this sense of continuum in the UK - decimalisation (hey, I've never faffed with these old systems), then the shrinking of the 10p etc. I just about remember pound notes (non scottish) but thats it. Is change always a good thing?

TZ=Europe/Zurich

2008-12-09T11:33:00.002+01:00

OK - So I've now been here (.ch) for a week. What's it like so far? well, cold. Snow on the ground all week at the house (900M ASL ~ somewhere between The Cobbler and Ben Lomond). Commute to work takes ~50 mins (after scraping any ice / snow off car) and is presently timed with the sun rising over the alps.

Work -- hectic. YAIM can only do so much. There's a big gap between a barebones install, getting the middleware installed and configured and being able to reliably run a test suite on machines.

Power Power Power

2008-11-25T01:21:00.001+01:00

'Dear Santa'

Please can you get someone to injection mould a bog standard 4-way british multiplug trailing socket wotsit with a built-in IEC power inlet?

Thus by downrating to say 10A (hey, this is for geek things not space heating) we can have a simple 'travel adaptor' for all those clunky power brick things that you can simply pick up a single cable for $foreign_locality to fit. (or. more usefully, stick inside a rack to handle any transformers)

I'd do some photoshoppage (sorry, Gimpage) but my photo-fu is weak

Sniff...

2008-09-10T22:56:00.002+02:00

Alas poor lex, I knew him well

My trusty Lex Light 500MHz fanless C3 has just died. Turned off power and its not coming back on. Sniff. Bulging capacitors on PSU part of motherboard - not looking good.

Ho Hum. Anyone got a 2.5" adapter cable for the disk?

gotta cut back...

2008-09-07T01:17:00.002+02:00

Still hacking at the currentcost - I've at least got a small python script that plugs the data straight into sqlite these days. I also did a quick distribution curve of the wattage - still can't get it under a really cr*p 240W

I've got the power

2008-09-05T00:08:00.004+02:00

... it's gettin' kinda heavy.

I've jumped on the latest Currentcost bandwagon with a serial cable connecting my meter to the mini-ITX box in the loft. For now I'm not doing 'proper' logging to sqlite / rrdtool as I intend to abtract this through monami - but for the first days run with some quick n dirty gnuplot work it looks OK.

Firefox3 / google / UK

2008-06-12T14:35:00.001+02:00

When I'm roaming I'm fed up with the default google search plugin redirecting me to google.ch at cern and thus providing me with german pages.

Simple enough fix on osx - vi /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml and change

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
into
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.co.uk/search">

Tada!

Fizzicists

2008-06-11T22:51:00.002+02:00

Y'know what worries me? I'm out in Geneva just now at CERN - sharing a flat used by the Glasgow ATLAS scientists. Supposedly a rather smart lot.

...except the batteries in the TV remote control were the wrong way round.

Nosh.

2007-06-07T01:03:00.000+02:00

Just thought I'd mention "L'Aviation" - Steak, Chips and Yummy sauce. All a mere spit from the number 9 bus stop too.

Furlong Floppies

2007-06-06T09:30:00.000+02:00

Tired of confusing Mega and Mibi bytes? Hard disk choices getting you in a spin? well, FEAR NOT - Sanity is at hand. Most old-timers like myself will remember the 3.5" floppy disk (yes, the thing that you kept all your hard work on, mistreated and then wondered why you couldn't print your assignment at the deadline). Each held 1.44Mb of data and so....

Stack em all up, and a furlong (220 yards, or 201.16m) of em would contain 87.782 GB.

I hereby propose that we all use the new SI measurement of "furlong floppies" to describe data.

Windows 0 : Linux 2

2007-02-24T23:21:00.000+01:00

I've just traded up an IBM P4 workstation to a brand shiny new Dell E520 Dual core goodness. Well. Semi goodness. According to Wikipedia I have a 915 chip and it's the 9x0 ones that support x86 virtualization. Boo Hiss.

Anyway, Threw in a ubuntu AMD64 install and it's up n running in 30 mins. (once I'd nuked the 'orribly nasty "Vista Home Basic 32bit" install off it. I was looking forwards to all the aqua toys but thats apparently an upgrade...

XP install not so smooth. Blue Screen complaining of "Stop 0x0000007B" - probably the SATA Raid card? Well dells website doesn't have any handy "Use this driver disk to install XP" links and following a v good scotlug virtualisation talk I decided to throw on QEMU following this guide

Videotastic

2007-02-06T20:31:00.000+01:00

No, not another youtube one, but a 1975 classic featuring touch screen menus, electric bikes, distributed monitoring, a gripping title sequence, and of course, facial hair. Intrigued? head over to SPS : the control system and enjoy :-)

Wireless hacking

2007-02-06T16:19:00.000+01:00

So my shiny macbook pro that I was promised with the new job turned into a battered R50e Thinkpad. Ho Hum. Still at least it has built in wireless.... hmmm. maybe not. Enter a Cheap n Cheerful Edimax EW-7108PCg PCMCIA card. Works fine under linux including kismet using ra0 - it's the rt2500 chipset driver.

However I'd like to make use of a decent external antenna for better range, so opened it up and discovered the antenna consisted of 2* 18mm tracks with no obvious points to solder in a pigtail.

"It's Big"

2007-01-25T17:18:00.000+01:00

Experiment visit to ATLAS today. Flip. Tis impressive.

On a more mundane note I discovered this snippet while trying to get our areca raid cards monitored with SNMP on the out of band management

Basically if you want to avoid errors such as
snmpwalk -v1 -c community_name -m ./compile/snmp/areca1.mib mgmtaddress Areca
Bad operator (_): At line 20 in ./compile/snmp/areca1.mib
Areca: Unknown Object Identifier (Sub-id not found: (top) -> Areca)

Then you need to add -Pu to your command line

bash: apt-get: command not found

2007-01-19T11:49:00.000+01:00

Minor Rant. There's nothing wrong with Redhat clones, and Scientific Linux is packaged nicely as the rest. However, running a 3.0.5 version on a Laptop, without any decent music (mp3) support when the latest is 4.4 is getting to me. Time... for a swift Ubuntu install.

Just another Perl Hacker^W^WBlogger

2007-01-10T16:00:00.000+01:00

Caught up on userfriendly and yesterdays seems remarkably apt...

Transfer tests

2007-01-08T22:42:00.000+01:00

OK, so discovered why the transfer tests were failing - I'd done the voms-proxy-init part but omitted the myproxy setup. Doh!

Finally got up n running, then discovered that one of the files was failing with a "550 - not a plain file" the helpful instructions here say

Although it appears in the DPM namespace, the file doesn't physically exist on disk anymore. You should un-register the file from the namespace, to avoid this inconsistency.

Well, that'd be good if they gave a hint as to how to do so. "dpns-rm" didn't seem to work as planned.

On the plus side, it appears our bandwith INTO glasgow is ~650Mb/s shame the outgoing peaked at ~250Mb/s though.

Scope Extension

2006-12-13T23:41:00.000+01:00

OK, so I set up my blog with blogger beta whereas the scotgrid blog is still the old one. Bah. Looking at the help on the subject it's coming Real Soon Now (tm). In the meantime apart from learning more voodoo for GridPP file transfers the vexed problem of Ticketing Systems.

At the moment there's a pile of disjointed mail aliases for scotgrid, research group, and possibly faculty support. Grand plan is to find a tracking system that fulfils the following:

Easy to install and administer
Uses central signon system / x509 certificates
Several Queues
Q-Specific "Munger" access
User "self service" visibility
Prio / update
Reporting tools

Hello World!

2006-12-05T09:11:00.000+01:00

Yep, it's that frost piste syndrome again. Apparently a .plan isn't consider Hip n Trendy enough these days. Us Ol' fogies are just not compatible with "leet 2.0"

Failure: ping successful

Fedora / Netatalk / OS X Lion / TimeMachine

Metering

Happy Birthday

The Perils of CDNs

Another year of LHC Secrecy

Sniff...

FTTH update

PoE Network controlled signage

puppet /. facter / v12n

FTTH / Reso-LIAIN / K-Net

Shuttle bus tracker

nanode built!

Orange VoIP woes

Electronic components

EDF metering and 'Tele-Info'

Hardware Hackery

Nasa TV on PS3

email clients

git import

Bash, PS1, PROMPT_COMMAND and other fun

Daily WTF Candiate

Garbage in, Garbage out

The saga of SAGA

Makefile Faffage

QSL Cards

Sponsored

dark clouds

Fedora Packaging

ssh-copy-id

upgrade fail

Dear McDondalds,.... [RANT]

VoIP en France

more data musings

m m m metadata!

WebDAV

transmission + munin

Kerberos & SSH at CERN

killed

yes, Yes, YES!

concerto + twitter

They're following me!

Design vs Reality

transmission

Twittering OCR

swisscom VDSL & dyndns

Studies on a hashtag

BeautifulSoup + savannah

SPA3102 and Swisscom

Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie (a patch after midnight)

SVN Stats munging

In search of Feduntu

twitter

Scientific Sailing

bacula

No. Just 'NO' OK!

munin SNMP

New title

X marks the spot

Video killed the MSN star...

Virtualbox and KVM

Easy in Eze

koha!

up up and away!

KITT updated?

TODO: 2009

money, money, money...

TZ=Europe/Zurich

Power Power Power

Sniff...

gotta cut back...

I've got the power

Firefox3 / google / UK

Fizzicists

Nosh.

Furlong Floppies

Windows 0 : Linux 2

Videotastic

Wireless hacking

"It's Big"