I haven’t posted in awhile.  In fact, I’ve again been considering taking down this blog and closing my twitter account (again).  Part of the problem is one of scope.  I keep thinking I should pretend I’m a corporate drone and try to hide that fact that I have opinions and a personality.  Other times, I think perhaps I should be myself and let the chips fall where they may.  If a future prospective employer doesn’t like something about me and is willing to act on it then perhaps it’s better to weed them out as early as possible.  I’ve been called idealistic before, obviously.  There are also questions to be asked about what the value of blogs, in general.

The truth is that I do a fairly good job of white-washing my identity.  I don’t share a lot of life details with others, even those I know in meatspace.  Why, then, blog and twitter?  I do not know.

Some days I feel like because I’m a librarian I’m supposed to be in love with every new website that comes down the pike.  Twine, brightkite, friendfeed, ad nauseum.  I think I offended some people by trash talking Facebook recently.

The interface makes me want to scream.  The applications make it difficult to find information in profiles.  Sending hugs and turning people into zombies is not a compelling use of my time.  In fact, I wonder what people are thinking when they engage in these activities.  I mean, these people are educated professionals with demanding jobs who find time and interest enough to pick out ‘gift’ images to embed in profiles of others.  Why?!

And so.  Now I’m trying to engage Facebook and find a way to integrate it into my life.  I do find it somewhat useful to reconnect with people I’ve not thought about for decades.  I haven’t decided that my life has improved as a result, though.  It is interesting to see what some people I only know professionally do in their real lives, but again, I’m not sure about added value.

Oddly, I really like twitter.  I like having an idea what friends and collegues are doing.  I’ve found points of collaboration and shared interests with others.  I’ve said and read some innappropriate stuff.  I like they way the UCSD/SDSC guys use it; they use twitter to meetup for drinks.

n.b.  If this post seems pointless it’s because I wrote it just to make Brandi happy.

Hardy smbfs is borked.  Actually, I understand that smbmount has been adandoned.  CIFS, the samba replacement in Hardy, is busted.  All hail Ubuntuforums.org!  Beta OS != perfect, right?

It seems there was a change in the Samba package between Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04.  I was getting an error while trying to connect to some Solaris shares.
$ smbclient -L //web -I 192.1.168.0 -U user%password
Server requested plaintext password but 'client use plaintext auth' is disabled

It seems that adding the following to your /etc/samba/smb.conf file solves the problem:

client plaintext auth = yes
client lanman auth = yes


It took awhile to realize that just setting plaintext auth to true wasn’t enough. lanman auth overrides it. Should have read the man page more closely, I guess.

Cristobal posted this on the Trilug Planet and I thought it would be interesting. Here’s my list of most oft used commands on my workstation.  Yes, I use nano.  I keep thinking about using Vim, but just don’t feel like I can build a good business case for it.

jjtuttle@dli-020102:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -nr|head
117 sudo
57 ls
49 clear
34 ssh
29 cd
27 nano
25 mount
21 exit
13 ps
11 rm


I’ve had a spare data cruncher (Dell Precision 479 Xeon 2.8) sitting under my desk for awhile. Not being terribly interested in OpenBSD that it came to me with (sorry Eric), I blew it away and installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron x86_64. It seems quite stable and is perhaps quicker than 7.10. That isn’t my point, though.

This weekend I installed the 32 bit version on a Dell Inspiron and it seemed to due the laptop good. Resume from sleep is definitely faster. Today I thought I’d take a real leap and upgrade in-place my 64 bit Thinkpad T60. I didn’t want to have to fool around with configuring LVM and associated encryption so I thought I’d just sudo update-manager -c -d to upgrade to the Hardy Heron Beta.  I’m happy to report that everything seems to work fine.  I was a little nervous on first reboot while waiting for a sign that dm-crypt was working.  After entering my dm-crypt password I noticed that there was a ext3 drive check in progress.  It was subtle compared to the same process in Gutsy since it didn’t drop out of the gui to do it.

Everything seems to work fine.  Audio, DVD, VPN, all work fine.  Sleep and resume seem considerably faster though on first resume my wireless card wasn’t found.  Hope that gets fixed.  Also, I’m happy that wake-on-lan works on all of the machines I’ve tested so far, which wasn’t the case in Gutsy.  Several machines would wake in Windows, but not in Linux, which was a bummer.  I don’t consider myself lazy, but wake-on-lan is awesome.  I hope that it works with dd-wrt so I can wake my home desktop remotely.

So, be it here known that it is possible to in-place upgrade an LVM/dm-crypt encrypted machine from 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon to 8.04 Hardy Heron.

I’ve been having some trouble lately with RoadRunner from Time Warner Cable.  Their DNS servers are ridiculously slow and I decided to take some action and switch to OpenDNS.  Details follow.

First, I configured my Buffalo router running DD-WRT to use OpenDNS and to update DynDNS of my dynamic IP address.  Then I  configured  dnsomatic to update OpenDNS  so that my custom network settings will follow my home network as the address changes.  Actually, my dynamic address at home hasn’t changed more than a couple of times in more than a year, but it’s nice to have a static domain name to use when connecting to my network from elsewhere.

I think my tubes are considerably faster and I’m not getting the flaky name resolution failures that I’ve been getting recently.  Plus, when I don’t have to support TWC in their ignorant and greedy bid to redirect DNS requests from nonexistent domains to their advertisements.

A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to retool some of the NCGDAP data processing tools I wrote when I started at NC State in 2005. For awhile I’d been using subversion, but fell out of the habit. I was pretty confused to find that I had at least 4 versions of everything I’d written and no idea which was latest, which features I’d already incorporated, or (embarrassingly) what everything did. I’d clearly been shirking some system administration duties.

After some time spent with diff and a text editor, I was down to one version of each application. I also spent some time trying to make sure I didn’t have to do it all again. I sometimes work on my Thinkpad at home, at conferences, and on the bus, which eliminates keeping things solely on a network somewhere. Knowing that I sometimes forget which files have been modified, I wrote a bi-directional rsync over ssh process to sync my Thinkpad with my desktop and can run it from an icon on my Gnome panel.

I also wrote a nightly cron job to backup my work desktop to a network drive. The NCGDAP applications reside on the data processing server so I Samba mount that directory at boot. I installed and configured network-manager-vnc finally. It was ridiculously easy compared to vpnc, which never worked correctly. At home, I configured sshfs mounting of my work desktop from my home desktop so I never have to make a local copy of anything to work on it.

Last by not least, I finally got around to installing Cygwin on Brandi’s Windows XP laptop. Now, she can click an icon in her start menu that starts an rsync over ssh backup job to my desktop. She had been copying her My Documents directory and pasting it into her home directory on my machine using Samba, which took eons. I also added it to Windows Task Scheduler, which is utter crap compared to cron. After the first 8 hour run (~80 GB of music), it takes seconds and I don’t have to wonder about compliance.

Here are links to some of the things I wrote:

Cygwin rsync script, backup batch file to run Cygwin script, laptop sync bash script, sshfs mount script, sshfs umount script

For the record, I’m neither a programmer nor a system administrator. I’m just a librarian.

I saw an interesting quote concerning Microsoft’s recent acquisition offer. Thanks to Peter for pointing out this article.

Google wants to use the Internet to build a huge business (and, in the process, kill Microsoft–a mission that may end up becoming an Ahab-like obsession). Microsoft wants to use the Internet to protect its already huge Windows and Office businesses.

One strategy is offensive, the other defensive. At Google, every exciting new idea that undermines Microsoft’s core business will be rushed into production. At Microsoft, every exciting new idea that undermines Microsoft’s core business will be killed (or, at least, delayed).

He also pointed out this excellent commentary in Forbes.