Computers

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I’ve had a lot of rolling about on [SAS] related business today, generally productive as far as the NCO and RSM matters go. I also posted a file with my ‘musings’ on a few tactical matters in an appropriate place. Not sure if it was a good idea to share my thoughts in this case but I’ve never really cared much about what others think of me, no point starting now 8=).

I’ve had some time to play with my little music management toy hehe. Basically the idea is to track filename changes in my music collection and then update my playlist files. It’s not meant to be pretty or optimal, just effective. If I ever get it finished I’ll probably leave it running on the file server so it can look after my music files. Every now and then I do like to rearrange files in ~/Music and it always breaks my playlists, and even when using Amarok for the excellent playlist editing… It kind of sucks to have to redo them manually through Amaroks collection browser, it’s a great system but my playlists can some times get quite large.

I’ve also managed to get my server and laptop set up to use NFS instead of SSHFS. Since it seems I can’t count on SSHFS, it has already incured a ‘price tag’. Samba’s mount_smbfs is to much bother on FreeBSD atm, the program that comes with the fusefs-smbnetfs port seems to be as good as KiA if you want to know any thing more about it beyond the sample config file and source code… That leaves NFS and AFS, not familiar very greatly with AFS but NFS a bit more so. The BSDs seem to do things a bit differently with the exports file then what I’ve encountered before, the fbsd handbook / obsd faq also leaves a little to be desired compared to some nice BNF notation ^_^. I might be able to do some thing with a SSH tunnel later, right now some thing that works is all that is important…

My allergies have been tremendous lately but it’s that time of year again. One thing I really did like about living in Fl. It was to damn hot for most of the stuff that makes me sneeze! It was kind of one of those places you are soaked to the bone just crossing the parking lot to get to the car lol.

Time to get some rest, tomorrows another day… Primary objectives for the near future are getting more work done on the SOP Rewrites and trying to fix my laptops problem with Linux GTK+ apps..grrr.

days rumble

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Well I’ve put a few thoughts through LaTeX and even discovered that at least the version in my MiKTeX install on WinXP, some times pdflatex.exe/latex.exe will have an endless loop rather then die with the normal error message if you accidentally delete the end{document} at the end of a doc ^_^

I think I’ll probably post the file tomorrow in the members forum, I zipped it with a simple password chosen at random. The question is will I remember what it is later rofl.

I like using tex/latex quite a lot so far, works much better then XHTML+CSS at giving decent output without *eventually* getting annoying to edit and maintain. I’ve been slowing building up a .sty file for things I use a lot so I don’t have to worry about finding the last document I did some thing to when I can’t remember a specific.

Probably will pass out in a few hours next to learning perl, glad I’m off work tomorrow… need some rest: Maybe I can even catch up with the 30++ messages in my in box haha!

I’ve done enough for the night, in the future Ineed to play around with the Linux ABI on my laptop and NFS. I have a FreeBSD 7 partition, I think I will see if I can use that to help fix the PC-BSD one… Either way it would probably take less then 2 hours to reinstall my laptop and restore files once I’ve got a set of PC-BSD v1.5 disks handy…Most of the time of course spent transferring and extracting files on low end hardware lool. NFS, I’ve always avoided and OpenBSD seems to use a different syntax for /etc/exports then I learned on Linux but as long as it works… SSHFS and SMB/CIFS seem to have failed me, the only remaining options I know available to me are NFS and AFS, nether of which I’ve had time to test fully yet. I guess that can wait for later.

*passes out*

A crashing BSD

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Ok, now I dunno what is worse that my very stable laptop has gone nuts or that I’m not surprised by it at all.

mentally back tracing events:

using urxvt with zsh
vim running in background during perl file editing session
linux-flock playing my favorite radio station via linux-mplayerplug-in and native mplayer
mv ./myfile.mp3 /tmp/ -> trying to move a file off a sshfs mount to /tmp
system locked up with sound stuck replaying a single note
tried to switch to vtty1
system auto-rebooted, never saw the vtty

On reboot I restarted flock and tried to move the file again, system locked up and rebooted when I tried to switch to vtty0…

Now linux-flock segfaults when I run it and the only other linux app I know that is handy, realplayer also segflauts. I ain’t seen any thing informative in /var/ yet either.

Now, my Windows XP machine Blue Screen of Deaths and occasionally Black Screens of Deaths! On me all the time when listing to music while using the server browser in Raven Shield, if I use any thing other then WMP: trying WinAmp == instanto death and often same with MPlayer using the usual DirectX related sound/video opts.

So why do I find it sad that for me it is not so much of a shocker that with a third party kernel module installed from pre-compiled binary (fuse) that was ported from another OS, moving data from a mounted network file system (sshfs) to the local hard drive through SSH and said driver, while running binary programs designed for an entirely different system (linux flock+mplayerplug-in), could possibly cause a system to crash?

At least it’s got a better damn reason then Windows XP has got looooool

I’ve tried fsck’ing the drive but the Linux ABI still seems FUBAR.. All things considered with SSHFS and SMB/CIFS, I am seriously considering putting both NFS and AFS into testing here to see if either will fill the gap.

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Some musings from ~/Music/Playlists/manager/ideas.outline. The file outlines a format for the stored records and as much of the scripts operation as my mind can think of right now, it is 0420 already…


tags file format
| every song listed as 'file := checksum'

daemon/script
| for all files in collection loop
| | if md5 == known then
| | | if filename == known then
| | | | continue
| | | else
| | | | if md5(filename) in file then
| | | | | generate new entry in file
| | | | else
| | | | | update file with new name
| | | | | update playlists with new name
| | | | end
| | | end
| | end
| done

I like to outline my ideas every now and then for later reference, especially when I’m very tired it helps me make sense of my notes next week.

There is a vim plugin for outlining but that is kind of over kill for me. Vim has a ‘listchars’ setting that alters from Vi’s behavior how and what it displays things when ‘list’ is set.

I have a function named My_OutlineMode() and an automcmd that calls the function whenever creating a new file or reading a new buffer with a file.outline

setl listchars =tab:| " Mark t's with |'s
setl list

That makes each level of indentation be highlighted and displays a pipe symbol ‘|’ at each tab stop (e.g. indentation level) without inserting it into the file. I find it a tad distracting while coding — indentation is used in programs for a reason after all! But for outlining ideas, I find it really helps to visually display the collation of ideas to indents. Maybe because I use blank lines and tabs to order thoughts in my outlines but what ever works hehe.

I remember I first learned about list/listchars when trying to help someone in #vim that wanted code to display each indent level with leading dots, kind of like how KATE can be set to show a ‘.’ at each tab stop. So I made a note of it in case I would want to do something like that myself later.

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After looking at Vim 7.x’s omni completion during a conversation in #vim on irc.freenode.net I got an inkling to try making Vim auto complete the end of HTML tags without pressing ctrl-x + ctrl-o each time.

I’m sorry to say, it only took about 3 minutes:

imap </ </<c-x><c-o>

which tells Vim to enter </, press control+x following by control+o which is the insert mapping vim uses by default to do auto completion.

Yes I’m that bored… Haha

Hmm, I did think of an interesting idea which would a ‘collection monitoring playlist updater’ that would use MD5 checksums (or a faster algorithm due to the size of some of Wiz’s mixes). The idea would be a sort of tags-file / flat-file database that maps MD5 checksums of all known files to current file names. If a file name of a checksumed file has changed, update all playlists with the ‘new’ file name.

An interesting idea, especially since I use a mixture of XMMS and MPlayer these days rather then ol’Amarok.

As it would probably take more then ~15 minutes to md5 1.9GB of music files over a sshfs mount on my laptop, it’ll have to wait for another night but what an interesting idea xD

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After having been wanting to for ages I have finally fixed up my OpenBSD machines partitions.

I had an 80GB hard drive formated (wd1a) and moved /usr/local/ on to it and put my SMB shares on it for the free space.

Since wd0 is a 8GB disk split into a, b, h, d, g, and e partitions the biggest is wd0g mounted on /usr with ~6GB free but I had almost 10GB of files on /usr/local (wd1a). So I had to copy my backups and videos to the windows machine via Samba/Network Neighborehood before I could move all of my files in /usr/local/srv to a temporary place in /usr and then archived the rest of the directory.

cd /usr
mkdir storage
mv local/srv storage
tar -cf /var/tmp/local.tar local

I had to relabel the disk and then format the partitions, I created wd1a and wd1d to use as /usr/local and /srv with ~15GB more free space in case I need it.

umount -f local
disklabel -E wd1
newfs wd1a
newfs wd1d

During the disk label I changed to ‘disk geometry’ (g d), deleted the a partition (d a) and created the a and d partitions (c a and c d) keeping with the prompts on it and specifying 12G and 45G for the partition sizes.

Fixed my fstab and then mounted the partitions

vi /etc/fstab
# 8GB Primary Master, PATA drive
# device        mount   type    opts            dump    fsck
/dev/wd0a       /       ffs     rw              1       1
/dev/wd0h       /home   ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2
/dev/wd0d       /tmp    ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2
/dev/wd0g       /usr    ffs     rw,nodev        1       2
/dev/wd0e       /var    ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2
# 80GB Primary Slave, PATA drive
# device        mount           type    opts    dump    fsck
/dev/wd1a       /usr/local      ffs     rw,nodev        1       2
/dev/wd1d       /srv            ffs     rw,nodev,nosuid 1       2

mount -o rw,nodev /dev/wd1a /usr/local
mount -o rw,nodev,nosuid /srv

I’m some what tempted to mark wd1d ‘noexec’ but I may wish to run scripts from there later if I ever move ~/code over. After that it was just a quick hop, skip, and jump to restore my files.

tar xpf /var/tmp/local.tar
mv storage/srv/smb /srv/
vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

I corrected all of my shares in smb.conf from command line mode:

:1,$s//usr/local/srv//srv/g

I could’ve used ex but I rather like paging up/down with ^U and ^D instead of using ‘addr1,addr2p’ in ex.

mount
/dev/wd0a on / type ffs (local)
/dev/wd0h on /home type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/wd0d on /tmp type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/wd0g on /usr type ffs (local, nodev)
/dev/wd0e on /var type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/wd1a on /usr/local type ffs (local, nodev)
/dev/wd1d on /srv type ffs (local, nodev, nosuid)
# df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      147M   30.4M    110M    22%    /
/dev/wd0h      393M   35.6M    337M    10%    /home
/dev/wd0d     98.3M    2.0K   93.4M     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0g      6.7G    398M    6.0G     6%    /usr
/dev/wd0e      148M   84.1M   56.2M    60%    /var
/dev/wd1a     11.8G   76.9M   11.1G     1%    /usr/local
/dev/wd1d     44.3G    5.1G   37.0G    12%    /srv

Windows wouldn’t see the file shares and sending the HUP signal to Samba to reread it’s conf file immediately didn’t help any. So I gave Vectra a reboot to double check my fstab entry (yes I am paranoid), I could’ve just killed the processes and reloaded them manually for the same effect.

# uptime
 9:14PM  up 19 days,  3:29, 1 user, load averages: 4.12, 4.16, 3.86
# reboot

I love OpenBSD đŸ™‚

EDIT:

To prevent some nasty time outs.

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
ClientAliveInterval 15
ClientAliveCountMax 45

vi ~/.ssh/config # or /etc/ssh/ssh_config for all clients
ServerAliveInterval 15
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This was a funky one, XMMS locked up on me and refused to play any files in my playlist, which I know usually means they either don’t exist or can’t be played but I also saw in mount that they should be there. I wish they’d add a pop up message about that but the auto-skip response to non existent files is actually one feature of XMMS I like.

Just trying to load a new playlist by pressing the lord list button in the playlist manager would cause it to lock up and I’d have to kill the process. So I figured I’d open another urxvt and leave mplayer running. Only thing odd was Music/Pl wouldn’t tab-complete to ~/Music/Playlists.

Terry@dixie$ ls Music                                                      3:45
ls: Music: Socket is not connected
Terry@dixie$ mount                                                         3:46
/dev/ad0s2a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/ad0s2e on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2g on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2h on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
linprocfs on /compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)
procfs on /proc (procfs, local)
/dev/fuse0 on /home/Terry/Documents (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse1 on /home/Terry/Music (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse2 on /home/Terry/Pictures (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse3 on /home/Terry/Videos (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
Terry@dixie$ ls Pictures                                                   3:46
ls: Pictures: Socket is not connected
Terry@dixie$ sshfs-mounter.sh -i ~/.ssh/vectra_rsa_key_nopw -u 1001 -g 1001
mount_fusefs: /dev/fuse5 on /home/Terry/Music: Operation not permitted
mount_fusefs: /dev/fuse6 on /home/Terry/Pictures: Operation not permitted
Terry@dixie$ ls Music                                                      3:47
ls: Music: Socket is not connected
Terry@dixie$ ls Videos                                                     3:47
   ... my video files

So I umount’d all of them and reran mounting script and all worked

Terry@dixie$ sshfs-mounter.sh -i ~/.ssh/vectra_rsa_key_nopw -u 1001 -g 1001
Terry@dixie$ mount                                                         3:48
/dev/ad0s2a on / (ufs, local, soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/ad0s2e on /home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2g on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/ad0s2h on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
linprocfs on /compat/linux/proc (linprocfs, local)
procfs on /proc (procfs, local)
/dev/fuse0 on /home/Terry/Documents (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse1 on /home/Terry/Music (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse2 on /home/Terry/Pictures (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
/dev/fuse3 on /home/Terry/Videos (fusefs, local, nosuid, synchronous, mounted by Terry)
Terry@dixie$ ls Pictures                                                   3:48
    ... the directories contents
Terry@dixie$                                                               3:48

After fixing that, XMMS worked great so I conclude that XMMS has a bit of a nasty issue if files it knows are there just ‘disappear’ on it, which is kind of strange. Whether it is a bug or not, I don’t have time to spend on multiple code-compile-debug cycles to try and fix it if there is a problem some where in the code or I would investigate it myself.

I would rather like to know what happened with the mount though because the only thing I’ve been fiddling with before it went was my firewall rules. Which amounts to enabling / disabling pf and reloading the rules out of /etc/pf.conf. I think I’ll keep a close eye on my mounts for awhile, XMMS will keep its eyes even closer on them I guess lol.

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Hahaha I think the Windows Recycle bin must have a size limit.

I’ve been cleaning and organising the files on my XP machines desktop, moving most to the recycle bin, \vectrabackups or other file shares on the OpenBSD box (Vectra).

What is probably several hundred files (recursively of course) and more then 5GB of crud later, there was only the last 3 files I deleted, and I have not emptied the thing in months either >_>

My Desktop is down to the shortcuts to my RvS and S4 installations, a folder for downloading files to, recyclebin, my computer. and flock icons.

My RocketDock on the other side though has a CPU monitor, My Computer, Network Places, Flock, GVim, Winamp, RvS, S4, TS, Pidgin, XFire, PuTTY, and Gimp shortcut in the doc. One thing I like about using a doc is Raven Shield doesn’t dis-sort them on me hehe.

Needless to say, cleaning up the Doc is the next phase loool.

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Been learning a lot about TeX and LaTeX lately, my brain is like a sponge…

Some how I don’t think I’ll ever use a word processor again, TeX/LaTeX beats XHTML/CSS for working on content without getting in the way, and imho it automates more of the menial tasks better. I couldn’t stand getting proper printout with all the cross-word processor + cross-pc issues involved… So I eventually took to using XHTML instead, I’m fluent after all. I have a large rĂ©pertoire of computer languages to choose from, I just hate PHP…

I need to take some time to generate a PBI of TeX Live 2007, not much left to do before then and most of that can probably be sped up by scripting. For deployment though I’d rather like to split it into two packages, if the compression ratio is similar, should result including a ~250MB and ~300MB tar.lzma file (1 in each pbi) rather then a huge ~500mb one. As far as the documentation goes, there is not to much net savings to strip out languages, unless it really strips down to just English and made an English and ‘multinational’ docs module. For me, it would make sense to keep the ‘big ones’, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, in a standard install and doing that would be no real saving so far as I can tell.

Got a start for trying to get organized with the SSMs, they are basically a week behind me as far as being able to get things in sync but that’s unavoidable.. In the mean time I guess I should concentrate on the Sgts. I’m glad we have Blade and Noer a foot again they’re both dedicated workers, Blade well better late then never hehe.

The recent unpleasantness with ]SD[ on our SWAT servers is annoying me. I honestly don’t care if we ban every last one of them or shake their hand, there’s more important business I need to look after. I just follow orders, no more, no less. From where I sit, it is a Majors department to deal with it not an RSMs so I’d rather like to stay out of the hub bub. I’d also not have to cram any more forum posts into RAM between working hours.

The SOP Rewrites, I don’t think are going to progress any this week with both SSMs largely out of the loop until next week. Another large section is ready for SNCO Review, in the mean time I can try and look over the other stuff… Just a matter of free time.

I’ve now transitioned almost 3GB in all from my home directory over to the OpenBSD system working as a file server here: effectively fulfilling it’s purpose of integrating my home directory across my desktop and laptop. With some time to test out the permission settings, I may soon move my code directory there as well. With luck maybe I’ll have some time to *finally* get the bloody printer setup rather then sitting there gathering dust, good thing I rarely print.

I still need to organise my music files and rebuild all of my playlists but hey, at least my music folder is neat again. Life really would be a bit easier if I didn’t have to have most of my files available on both systems, to avoid having to boot my laptop to get to stuff. I’m tired of having to choose between booting my laptop, taring the files, scp’ing them over, and having to switch from desktop to laptop. I get 90% of my work done from my PC-BSD laptop yeah, but I like to work on the system I’m in the mood to use, not play chair-jockey.

And to top it all off my brain has been wandering off drastically lately, I suppose it beats being miserable though. I don’t really want to think that much about it right now, I’d never get any sleep other wise…

Found a music video of one of the songs that was on the last CD I bought. Which shows where my minds been drifting off to lool. Is it a wonder some friends wonder if I ever loop up from a compiler?

Works got to get done… How that effects the rest of my life, well..

Writer’s Block: Gotcha.

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What is the best April Fools’ Day joke you’ve ever fallen victim to?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Haha, hands down it has got to be the FreeBSD and NetBSD’s pkgsrc: A strategic synergy for awesomeness posting on the FreeBSD Ports mailing list. I remember seeing it posted in the lounge on forums.pcbsd.org.

It took me a week to realize the original message had been posted April 1st đŸ™‚

Can you say, fooled “big time”?