Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/09/install-redhat-serial-console/
This is an easy problem, but Googling the answer didn’t immediately return a great solution.
I want to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux via serial console. How to set that up? Red Hat says how. Hook up a keyboard / monitor, and at the boot prompt, enter:
linux text console=ttyS0 (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/08/slash-initrd/
Do not taunt Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
Finally, one more directory worth noting is the
/initrd/directory. It is empty, but is used as a critical mount point during the boot process.Warning Warning
Do not remove the
/initrd/directory for any reason. Removing this directory causes the system to fail to boot with a kernel panic error message.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/20/shrink-ntfs-knoppix/
It took a few days of struggle, but ultimately I found a great way to shrink an NTFS partition on a notebook computer to make room for a Linux-Windows dual-boot.
Although I am trying out Fedora Core 4 . . . just to, you know, learn Red Hat? Well, if you download the Knoppix CD, you can boot into a KDE environment which makes available a vaguely intuitive point-and-click interface to ntfsresize called QTParted. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/20/sysadmin-solves-perl-mystery/
The developers came. “We have a mystery wrapped inside an enigma?”
I told them if it was further wrapped in bacon, they had my interest.
Perl:
my $foo = sprintf("sseq_%012d_%012d",2153059002,2153059068);
print STDERR "$foo\n";
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/12/notes-on-medieval-agriculture/
Okay . . . so, a long-term maybe-goal of mine would be to build and enjoy playing a massively-multiplayer online “God Game” . . . somewhere, I think, between SimCity and Civilization, with a bit of Trade Wars / Railroad Tycoon thrown in. I have been thinking that if I ever were to pull this off, it would need to be focused, quite a bit, on something simpler than modern times . . . and I’ve been thinking a good place to go would be the medieval period. Feudalism especially could be an important part of the game play . . . you develop small regions, that trade together, you can build a modest army and send them off to attack things, and a lot of the time you’d probably be swearing allegiance to the greater lord / king, sending in, or receiving tributes to keep the peace. Feudalism had its run from 1066, with the Norman Conquest of England, until 1789, when it was formally abolished. The stretch in there was fairly static, up until about the enlightenment, which followed the printing press about halfway through. Figure about 500 years of fairly “stable” technology, a great place to have a long-running, persistent, online god game!
Anyway, what interests me is, collaborative / combative politics, supply-chain and market aspects of economy, trade, and, well, the whole enchantment of maps, and moving things around . . . assigning lands to vassals, I suppose, sinking wells, founding / razing towns . . . feedback loops . . . noticing patterns and anticipating changes, and dealing with disasters like bad harvests, invasion, and plague. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/10/carp-goldfish-lunch/
It is the little things . . . like goldfish!
So, that is a good checkpoint for my morning’s work. Time to eat . . .
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/07/negative-reader-feedback/
(I tried Google Reader today. It sucked. Then I went back to my other “Google Reader” and saw they had posted about Reader to the blog . . . I tried to keep it civil . . . but I failed.) (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/06/xfig-export-error/
I have been frustrated lately by an inability to export my XFig diagrams. I kept running portupdate in hopes that it was a recently-updated dependency that would be fixed, but finally, I took this error code shopping on the Google:
Unrecoverable error: limitcheck in .putdeviceprops (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/04/shaddup-firefox/
If you’re like me, you run Firefox on FreeBSD, or maybe Linux. And you use a classy nice window environment like fvwm2. And every time you start Firefox it asks can it be the default browser, and you say yes … like you use anything else? (MSIE4-Solaris, anyone?) And every time you start, it asks again . . . stupid!
I just saw this solution posted to FreeBSD-questions: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/03/ups-heat-dissipation/
Last Thursday I was picking up Yayoi when I got a page from one of my UPSes that it had switched to battery power. That’s never a page you want to get, unless there is shortly afterward a subsequent page about switching back to AC. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/09/01/new-orleans-livejournal/
Pointed to a fascinating blog from someone who is manning a Data Center in New Orleans. I haven’t been preoccupied with the disaster, and pretty good about focusing on work, but this is really interesting stuff.
Highlights:
Why are these people so uptight about staying online? Well, apparently the guy works for “Directnic” and the “NIC” implies that they control WHOIS and DNS information for a lot of domains that may have nothing to do with New Orleans. So, it is pretty critical that they stay online, if possible.
I saw some other chatter on IRC that national fuel rationing may come within a month due to the refining capacity that we have lost in the Gulf of Mexico. I take that with a grain of salt, but it is an interesting possibility. It sounds as if a lot of the nation’s oil is offloaded and then refined down there, and then transported throughout the Midwest and East . . . so, that doesn’t trouble me so much in California, but that doesn’t sound so great as you move East.
Update: “THE REAL MILITARY IS NOW FLOWING IN. National Guard is being replaced before our eyes. Watch the feed. Word is that the Marines are at 1515 Poydras where our OC4s are. I think we’re coming back online in force shortly.”
Also, BBC has some excellent coverage, particularly pictures. I find this one especially moving, whereas this guy ought to be target practice.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/08/05/blog-to-nntp/
So, I’m not alone in this crazy fantasy . . .
I have been thinking that I’d like a web-based aggregator that doesn’t suck. Bloglines is all about the frames, Rojo is all about not actually working right, and Yahoo! and Google “ig” are just little sticky-notes-in-a-portal . . .
And I was thinking about back-end storage of data. Multi-master replication? BAH! And then I said, well, there’s always NNTP. NNTP is a system of multi-master replication for the ancestors of blog posts . . .
So, you’d need: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/23/wordpress-comment-spam/
If you have a blog, you will get comment spam. Comment spam is like fax spam or e-mail spam except its people trying to sell stuff by posting advertising in comments to your blog.
There’s all sorts of crazy solutions you can try. A version or so back I put in one nice little plugin that simply required the web browser to do some math in JavaScript, and comments would only be posted if the math was done right.
A lot of the more complicated solutions sound a little half-baked, annoying, too much work, or just plain insane. I absolutely hate some of the “type in the word that appears in this image” because half the time I can barely make it out with my feeble HUMAN eyes … argh!
Well, I just read an even simpler solution, and since I was working on my comments.php I thought I’d give it a shot. It basically boils down to: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/22/wordpress-backslash-literal-entities/
WordPress rocks. It is blog software that drives much of this web site. WordPress rocks, it does, except for a few things it sucks at, like printing backslashes.
They’re taken care of the BR-in-PRE stuff, but I still have trouble with backslashes. They don’t get displayed unless you type two backslashes, but there seems to be another preprocessor that sucks out backslashes when you edit the post, and typing \\ into the web just seems so wrong.
But you can use HTML entity references. These are HTML escape codes for character literals. Here are a few potentially handy ones: (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/21/shell-variable-unique-elements/
If you are a seasoned Unix admin, you’ve been doing stuff like this for years:
cat $file | sort | uniq
Which is a handy way to eliminate duplicate lines in a file, or a collection of files. The uniq -c will even tell you how many duplicated lines there are, and you might even do:
cat $file | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
For example, you could run a command like this to see who is receiving the most mail on your system:
awk ’{print $7}’ < /var/log/maillog | grep ^to= | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
Anyway, even if you are a seasoned Unix admin, you probably aren’t a big expert on shell scripting. (more…)
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