So \*that's\* how you run explorer with runas

I can't believe it's taken me three years to find this entry from Aaron Margosis' blog about how to run Windows or Internet Explorer as admin using runas. I've always cheated by running different .cpl files until I found something that'd launch IE, then forget what it was and curse myself for not writing it down. Anyhow, this allowed me to open up C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox for modification by selected users, which in turn allows FF's auto-update feature to work without me having to wake up.

Also: Can't believe I never knew about mutt's T command. Nice.

Tags: windows

Working from home

Now that Clara's heading back to work, my schedule has changed a bit: I'm staying at home on Wednesdays to take care of Arlo, and then working from home on Saturdays to make up the time. I'm grateful to my boss for letting me do this, and I'm hopeful it will work out.

My first Wednesday (July 4th) went pretty darned well, really. Arlo ate, he played, he got vaccinated (Chicken pox; I had no idea they vaccinated for it), he napped and then he played some more. I didn't drop him, he didn't freak out and it was a great deal of fun.

As it happens I got to take care of him on Friday, too; my mother-in-law, who's going to be taking care of him two days a week, had a sudden trip to the emergency room. She's okay, but wasn't able to take care of him that day. (She was mad about it, too...) I called into work and let them know I wouldn't be in, then went in anyway just to make sure a few things were okay. I've got some karma built up and a fistful of sick days I rarely take, so all was well.

And then yesterday I worked from home. And man o man, did I get stuff done. Not quite as much as I wanted; I was hoping to use flar to duplicate a Solaris machine so I could test it, and ran into a bug that took a while to figure out. (If the patch I applied fixes the problem, I'll write it up here since there was only one other reference I could find.) But it was lovely to work for, like, four hours in a row on something and not be interrupted. Plus, there's the skipping of the 90-minute commute to enjoy.

My fondness for trivial patches continues. You may envy me.

Tags: geekdad bsd

It's only documentation, so why would you want it?

I swear, Sympa has the worst fucking documentation of any goddamned software I've ever used. I'd rather view /dev/random with Internet Explorer then try to figure out what the hell this software does.

Example: List creation. Since Sympa is mailing list software, this would seem to be pretty basic. It is if you're using the web management feature, which they document. But if you're not? Well, now, why would you do such a thing? Are you a Communist or something?

Here's what I know: there's a Perl script here that creates the Sympa config files for various lists as needed. Then these lists magically show up. This appears to be related to the task manager portion of Sympa, which seems to create lists for the new config files. Or maybe Sympa checks the config files when incoming email comes in, and that's how it works. Either way, it sure as hell isn't documented anywhere; not for the older version we have, nor for the newer version (which seems to be a nothing more than a wiki dump, with all its attendant lack of organization).

God, this is irritating.

Tags: rant

Best_folk_band_name_ever

title: Best folk band name ever date: Mon Jul 2 00:13:24 EDT 2007

L'il Barley and the Wheat Germ.

That is all.

Tags:

I heart Debian

Yesterday I finally moved the monitoring machine at work from SuSE 9.1 to Debian Etch. It still amazes me how easy Debian makes it to install things like Nagios, Apache 2 and RT (!). I hadn't paid attention before to the way Debian handles loading websites and modules in Apache, and that's just elegant…the same mess o' symlinks that you use for /etc/rc?.d. Nice.

Of course, that didn't prevent some silly problems with Nagios from cropping up, but it was stricly PEBKAC. By the end of the day Nagios was watching everything again, RT was moved from my desktop machine (with tickets intact), and all was well.

Tags: debian

Some_good_reading_to_keep_me_humble

title: Some good reading to keep me humble date: Wed Jun 27 09:11:58 EDT 2007

A nice overview of system administration, and a thoughtful reply from Ben Rockwood. As always, I've got lots to learn.

Tags:

Hurray for old blog entries!

This entry, detailing the love that comes from XTerm's meta-sends-escape functionality, saved me from tearing my hair out today over why the Alt refused to send Meta to Emacs in a terminal. And hurray for this line in .Xresources:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true

Exciting times, I tell you.

Tags: emacs

I'm sorry, let's try that again

My wife was using her iBook tonight when alla sudden Apple Mail said the Inbox was read-only. Wha'? Couldn't remove or create files from the Terminal, and /var/log/system.log showed this message:

kernel: disk0s3: I/O error
kernel: jnl: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5

A lot of scary messages turned up in the search results about replacing hard drives, memory and mainboards, but I decided to try a fsck for the fun of it. Splat-s sent the Apple into single-user mode, and then fsck -f -y said the volume had been repaired successfully. Reboot and things look good: I can create and remove files, and Apple Mail is fine. Interestingly, the disk said it had an extra GB free compared to before the reboot.

The drive is old, and may still need replacing. Thankfully, I've set up a cron job on this thing to rsync the home directory daily to another machine.

Tags: hardware

So \*that's\* what's going on

For a while now I've been irritated with the behaviour of OpenRCS and Emacs on my OpenBSD machines: every time I try to check out a file kept in RCS, using C-x v v (vc-next-action), I still have to toggle read-only status on the file. Then, when I try to check it in, it asks if I want to steal the lock from myself, and never actually checks it in.

Finally had some time to track this down, and this bug appears to be the cause. I may have to play around with Emacs a bit to get it to ignore the permissions, or I may just use the OpenBSD package for GNU rcs instead.

Tags: emacs bsd

Memo_to_myself

title: Memo to myself II: date: Fri Jun 15 12:26:58 EDT 2007

There is always time to script something. (Well, nearly always.)

Tags:

My new wallpaper

...is this picture of Arlo and me:

My god, the kid's cute:

Tags: geekdad

Oh, \*that\* help

It astounds me that, until a couple of days ago, I did not know about Bash's help or declare functions.

Tags: scripting

\"Failed opcode was: 0xef\" considered harmless

This morning I noticed these entries in the logs of my monitoring machine at work:

hda: drive_cmd: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: drive_cmd: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: 0xef
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: 0xef

After a lot of Googling, I managed to find a few things that explained it:

• This bugzilla comment from Dave Jones explains "51/04 is the drive saying I don't know what that command means after being told to do something. It's not an error." The failed opcode — in this case, 0xef — is the operation that's being tried and confusing the HD.
• This page says "yep, that'll happen, all right" (no, not a direct quote) with SLES 9 and Seagate drives, and says you can ignore it. No explanation why.
• Finally, this post to the LKML says that opcode 0xef is telling the hard drive to keep its settings over a reset, and can be produced using hdparm -K 1 /dev/hda. Sure enough, running this produced the error in the logs, and this one on the screen:

setting drive keep features to 1 (on)
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(keepsettings) failed: Input/output error

This is a completely benign error, of course…I really don't care if we have to run hdparm with every boot. I had also tested the drive by booting into Knoppix and md5summing every file on the drive — no errors produced at all.

Don't know what's worse — wasting two hours on this, or not noticing it before now. At any rate, this failed opcode appears to be completely harmless.

Tags: hardware

Hell of a time for that to kick in...

All morning I've been hearing voices. I was beginning to think it was late-onset schizophrenia, but instead it was just my Ogg player; I'd put it in my pocket without locking it off, and it was stuck on repeat, playing a podcast. That was a bit of a scare.

Tags: imnotcrazyinstitution

Emacs, pkg-src, server room

New emacs, woo! I've downloaded it and compiled it already, 'cos I am that l33+, thank you. But one thing: the tarball is signed by Chong Yidong, pgp/gpg key #BC40251C. I could not find any indication anywhere that this is the right key, or what the right key might be. A quick search turned up lots of posts on the Emacs mailing lists, bugzilla entries and such from him, so I presume it's okay…but it would be nice to make this explicit. (Even a search for the key number turned up nothing.)

This article about updating pkg-src makes me even happier I went with Debian. That is all.

Yesterday I got a new switch in at work. Good god, the 10/100 Procurves are getting cheap — $600 w/academic discount for a 2626. I was just going to rack it, but as always I couldn't stop once I got going; that server room needs a lot of cleaning up. Three hours later I emerged, bloody but triumphant: the network cables were cleaned up considerably, I'd identified the last of the mystery boxes (step-down transformer, not a UPS like I thought), and I'd figured out that the big UPS was only one-third loaded — plenty o' room. Once I get all the cleaning done, I'll post before-and-after pix, 'cos that will be one chunk of work I'll be damned proud of.

Tags: packagemanagement network emacs

Obtypo

title: ObTypo date: Tue Jun 5 19:29:47 EDT 2007

A coworker misheard me today and stared at me. "Next beer in Jerusalem?"

I think that's gonna be my motto from now on.

Tags:

OpenBSD and Fast Data Access MMU Miss error

When trying to install OpenBSD to a Sun Ultra 1 workstation over the network, I got the Fast Data Access MMU Miss error when running boot net bsd.rd. Turned out I'd copied the wrong boot loader to the TFTP directory; copying ofwboot.net over it fixed the problem.

Tags: bsd

Say no to OOXML!

Just a heads-up for anyone in Canada: the Standards Council of Canada is taking comments on adopting Microsoft's Office Open XML as "an international open standard". Take a moment and add your voice to the 215 comments, nearly all of which are against this proposal.

Tags: politics

Well, that's just cool

While trying to figure out how to get a colour printer to print colour (HP: why the hell would you turn off colour in the PPD for your colour printer? Huh?), I came across this very cool post from Martin Paul, the guy who wrote pca, the best damn Sun patching tool I've come across.

Turns out you can take a new version of printer firmware for your HP printer and print the damned thing to your printer to update it. In particular, he mentions the 79.00FE problem that has plagued me for a while; I'll have to give it a try.

Oh, and the PPD thing -- for the record, there's a new HP 4700dn in town. I'm adding it to Solaris 10, which once you figure out how to do it is relatively simple:

lpadmin -p NewPrinter -p /dev/null -m netstandard_foomatic
lpadmin -p NewPrinter -I PostScript -n /path/to/ppdfile
lpadmin -p NewPrinter -D "HP 666 in Room 212"
lpadmin -p NewPrinter -o dest=newprinter:9100 -o protocol=tcp -o timeout=5
cd /etc/lp/fd
for i in *fd ; do name=`basename $i .fd` ; lpfilter -f NewPrinter -F
$i ; done
accept NewPrinter
enable NewPrinter

Simple, that is, if HP haven't gone and stuck a stanza like this into the PPD on the CD:

*%
*% Print Color as Gray
*% Chose NOT to use Adobe's *ColorModel keyword because color on or
off is simpler
*%

*OpenUI *ColorModel/Print Color as Gray:  Boolean
*OrderDependency: 20 AnySetup *ColorModel
*DefaultColorModel: CMYK
*ColorModel CMYK/Off: "<</ProcessColorModel /DeviceCMYK>> setpagedevice"
*ColorModel Gray/On: "<</ProcessColorModel /DeviceGray>> setpagedevice"
*?ColorModel: "
  save
```
currentpagedevice /ProcessColorModel get
  /DeviceGray eq {(True)}{(False)}ifelse = flush
```

  restore
"
*End
*CloseUI: *ColorModel

Took a while to track that down. Yes, I could've used one of the other PPDs on the machine — pretty generic colour Postscript, really — but then they didn't know about the duplexer. And I have to admit this makes it easy to set up a b&w-only queue.

Tags: solaris

Again with the Bash I need to learn

Wout's back! This time, he's got an entry about running functions under sudo. Not only is this going into my .bashrc, but I've got some reading to do about command and Bash's getopts. (I had looked at getopts in Bash before, but I remember the example code being pretty Byzantine; it was enough to put me off using getopts in Bash at all. This looks much more reasonable.)

Incidentally, I'm writing this on the Linode node/machine/whatever, and there's noticeable lag. The CPU graph on the member's page says there's medium load; web server performance seems to be quite fine, so I'm not sure it's bandwidth. I mention it because this is the first time that's happened; so far, I've been very happy with Linode performance.

Tags: scripting