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.

I came across 6 snakes last night while I was raking.  Actually, I was collecting large chunks of bark remaining from our recently removed sycamore.  Surrounding the stump is a large swath of English Ivy known for harboring wildlife.  They were all juveniles, the largest measuring roughly 5 inches in length, and were likely from the same brood.  This breaks my streak of complaining about the lack of snakes (or any reptiles) in my yard.  I was quite pleased.  I’d really like to move ahead with a small pond in the backyard to attract more wildlife.  We have the room.

Back to the snakes! Rough Earth Snakes:

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


Here are a couple of pictures. First, this is the car we bought:

Second, here is photo of the side curtain airbags deployed. A comparable picture of our Kia would have shown razor blades being deployed probably.

And finally, we just liked the feel.

We bought a 2008 Honda Civic EX (5-speed Auto) in Durham recently and I thought others might be interested in the numbers. We wanted to trade in our 2005 Kia Spectra 5 for something safer and more economical. We orginally thought about used Hondas, but the price difference between a new Civic and a 2 year old Civic was pretty minimal especially considering the warranty.

We did a lot of online shopping with the usual suspects including Edmonds.com, Yahoo Autos, and Consumer Reports. We also got quotes from the car buying services at the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union and USAA. We got internet quotes from local 4 local dealerships including Leith Honda and Crown Honda.

NCSECU Car Buying Service actually got us the lowest price, but we didn’t buy with them. Car buying services rock, though. Call them up, tell them what you want, they call the regional sales office for the best price, and call you back. They’ll even pick it up and deliver it to you. The USAA Car Buying Service just sent us an email to take to the dealership instructing them to give us $300 above invoice.

We ended up buying from Leith Honda. We did all of the negotiating via email. I negotiated Crown Honda down, sent that information to Leith, they offered to beat it, I sent that back to Crown, Crown declined to negotiate further. No sales people!

Here’s the information our credit union provided us with about the cost of the car from chromecarbook.com:

Information from USAA:

Crown told us the MSRP was $20,145. They also added mudflaps for $199. They offered us the car for $19,293 and offered us $5,500 for our Kia. Ouch!
According to Consumer Reports, a good price to aim for is 4% to 8% above dealer their bottom line price, which is Dealer Invoice Price minus Dealer Incentives and Dealer Holdback. Here’s their information:

We ended up buying the car from Leith for $18,455 and getting $6,500 for our car. We got the promoted 2.9% interest rate, which is nice. We also paid the Documentation Fee of $398 and Sales Tax of $358.65.
We love the car and feel like we got a decent deal. Unfortunately, while we were at Leith closing the deal, our salesman from Crown called me and browbeat me on the phone. He yelled that we had a deal and how could I do that to him. I’ll never go there for service even though it’s closer to our house. No thanks.
Really, though, the car is fantastic. It’s much, much quicker than the Kia, more comfortable, quieter, and more economical. We get about 32 MPG city/highway (hard to differentiate since we drive both equally each week). The entire cockpit becomes an airbag and it has 4 wheel disk brakes. I wish it had traction control, but that’s life. It’s a great car and, although I couldn’t care less about cars, I’ve always wanted a Honda.

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.

We finally had the 110′ American Sycamore taken out today. We solicited bids from about 6 companies ranging from $800 to $3000. We went with JB Tree Service, (919) 918-6017, and we’re really happy. They had great insurance, were prompt, quick, and did great work. JB was awesome and we’d highly recommend them in the future. Thanks for recommending them James. For $1350 this is what we got.

flickr photo set

Here is a matrix showing prices and insurance.

I got to Portland for Code4Lib early today and had a chance to explore the city with some of the usual suspects (UCSD and UNT Denton).  I learned a couple of things.  First, Rogue chocolate stout is awesome.  Second, I should replace the mess of php and javascript at work with Django.  As a bonus, I learned that packing a few terabytes of data into the trunk of a state car and driving it to DC isn’t necesarily a bad idea.