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Man,

I haven’t posted anything on here in a long time.  Between twitter (im @pandemicsyn) and all other crap don’t really care to any more.  However,  I know this blog is important to people (Hey mom), i’ll sum up the last 6 months:

• Moved to racklabs to be a clould monkey on the CloudFiles team
• Moved into new house
• Purchased Sig 556
• Got a dog (a Blond German Shepard named summer), she knows how to open locks/levers, dig under gates, eat through gates,  and requires that phasers (electrical fence) be set to 5 (uberstun) so that she doesn’t escape while I’m at work.
• Everyone came to my house for X-Mas this year (the *WHOLE* family)
• started http://www.sig556reviews.com to try and collect ShotSHOW info and news for the Sig Arms 556
• Updated this blog

And thats alll for now and a good while im guessing (sorry mom).

Florian

So,

The other day I was happily coding along in AptanaStudio when I go to create an .css file and the whole thing bomb’s with this error:

[syn@localhost aptana]$ ./AptanaStudio -vm /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/bin/java
2008-07-28 14:41:27.178::INFO: Logging to STDERR via org.mortbay.log.StdErrLog
2008-07-28 14:41:27.237::INFO: jetty-6.1.4
2008-07-28 14:41:27.358::INFO: Started SocketConnector@127.0.0.1:8001
/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_03/jre/bin/java: symbol lookup error: /home/syn/software/aptana/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/99/1/.cp/libswt-mozilla-gtk-3236.so: undefined symbol: _ZN4nsID5ParseEPKc

After checking bug STU-1899 which seemed spot on to what was happening to me, someone pointed out that it was probably the firefox version that I was using (3.0, the default that ships with FC9).  I did some more digging and came across a few post’s on the eclipse forum’s where other people using Fedora  Core 9 we’re getting similar crashes using Eclipse.  To finally fix it I grabbed an older non 3.0 build of Firefox and pointed the environmental variable MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME to the path to the other firefox install, just use this little wrapper script to start it up now:

#!/bin/sh
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/home/syn/software/mozilla/
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME
cd /home/syn/software/aptana
./AptanaStudio > aptana.log
exit 0

Worked like a champ.

Florian

So it turn’s out that Portugal’s coach (Luiz Felipe Scolari) hence forth known as “Coach douche” can’t see or predict the future. On Wednesday the day before the Germany game he loudly predicted that Portugal would win with ease. Not so fast there Mr. Scolari! Germany wins 3-2 … Mr. Scolari I do believe your full of it Ronaldo couldn’t save you this time…

Well we made it to the final 8 in the Euro cup by beating Austria 1-0 thanks to a goal by Ballack from a free kick. It wasn’t without drama though as both the German coach and Austrian coach where sent to the stand for “excessive bickering”:

The ref was an idiot, he was super picky and thanks to him theres a small chance that Joachim Löw is gonna have to sit out our next game. I can’t really see the FA board doing that, it would be going way over board.  Thats gonna be a tough game and Germany still doesn’t look as precise and efficient as we usually do. Hopefully they will pull out Gomez and put Bastian Sweinsteiger in the line up. With Schweinsteiger, Podolski, and Ballack we should do ok. German efficiency versus Portuguese flair…I can’t wait.

Florian

A One-match ban for Schweinsteiger for unsporting conduct…up until then we had a shot at coming back to tie it up with Croatia.

Why ? Why must you always do these things Bastian ?

~Florian

So I recently had to mount and old drive on my laptop because I thought I had a drive failure (turns out it was actually the mobo). So bought a 14$ USB drive enclosure from Newegg and proceeded to try to mount the old drive on my laptop. The problem I ran into was that both the old drive and the drive in my laptop where using LVM and both Volume groups had the same name of VolGroup00. This of course meant that I couldn’t easily mount the new drive (/dev/sdb). However, we can just rename the old drives Volume group. The first step is to grab the UUID of the second group:

[root@localhost /]# vgscan
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while…
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup00: Existing 3eRTge-6Qdv-Uc3N-n7rT-HtpD-juW5-fsVna0 (created here) takes precedence over E54jfp-1X0X-qCwZ-SrAS-VYit-bXcM-a8lmtx
Found volume group “VolGroup00″ using metadata type lvm2
Found volume group “VolGroup00″ using metadata type lvm2

The UUID in this case is E54jfp-1X0X-qCwZ-SrAS-VYit-bXcM-a8lmtx so next we rename it with vgrename:

[root@localhost /]# vgrename E54jfp-1X0X-qCwZ-SrAS-VYit-bXcM-a8lmtx Whoami00
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup00: Existing 3eRTge-6Qdv-Uc3N-n7rT-HtpD-juW5-fsVna0 (created here) takes precedence over E54jfp-1X0X-qCwZ-SrAS-VYit-bXcM-a8lmtx
Volume group “VolGroup00″ successfully renamed to “Whoami00″

After this I rebooted because Fedora 9 kept insisting that Whoami00 was actually still my primary drive. The reboot fixed that.

So after doing that we’re good to go almost, but the Volume group is still marked as unavailable:

[root@localhost ~]# lvdisplay
— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/Whoami00/LogVol00
VG Name Whoami00
LV UUID uL2cZp-35jq-qp5H-U1In-2XgT-kYdG-274lq6
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status NOT available
LV Size 73.41 GB
Current LE 2349
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto

— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/Whoami00/LogVol01
VG Name Whoami00
LV UUID BmLtSv-AYqb-Hjpn-mTc2-NoIn-4mp2-cPGsL4
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status NOT available
LV Size 1.00 GB
Current LE 32
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto

To fix that we simply run vgchange again to mark this volume as active:

[root@localhost ~]# vgchange -a y Whoami00
2 logical volume(s) in volume group “Whoami00″ now active
[root@localhost ~]# lvdisplay
— Logical volume —
LV Name /dev/Whoami00/LogVol00
VG Name Whoami00
LV UUID uL2cZp-35jq-qp5H-U1In-2XgT-kYdG-274lq6
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 73.41 GB
Current LE 2349
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 253:2

After that you can go ahead and mount the volume and your good to go:

[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/Whoami00/LogVol00 /mnt/
[root@localhost ~]# cd /mnt/
[root@localhost mnt]# ls
backup dev lib misc opt proc selinux sys var
bin etc lost+found mnt opt.tar.gz root srv tmp
boot home media net poweroff sbin swapfile usr

Florian

One more quick thing, I wrote a script to check a RSA Key, x509 cert, pem file, or remote HTTPS host against the released SSL blacklists.  You can grab it here.

Usage is really straight forward:

chkssl rsa /path/to/rsa.key     #Will check at RSA Private Key
chkssl pem /path/to/cert.pem     #Will check a PEM file
chkssl x509 /path/to/certificate.crt     #Will check a standard x509 cert
chkssl remote mydomain.com     #Will check a remote host

It will tell you whether or not the cert/key/etc is blacklisted or in the clear. In case you’ve had your head in the sand this is thanks to http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571. I won’t get into details but lets just say some bright developer broke a little something to make some Valgrind error’s go away.  The bugzilla entries are out there if you wanna take a look. (Hmmm i need a random number…4 sounds pretty random).

Florian

Just got back from the Parallels Summit yesterday.  It was very interesting, I think Parallels are definitely on the right track.  First off, Virtuozzo v4 and OpenVZ rock, I think Virtuozzo is going to take over as my new favorite Virtualization technology.  Deploying containers is very easy, and management of the infrastructure via the interface is a piece of cake.  I’m going to look into some open source/free frontends for OpenVZ so we’ll see how that goes.  However, if your going to be doing VPS hosting or anything on a larger scale I would definitely recommend you take a look at Virtuozzo, I think you will be pleasently surprised.

There’s also some new stuff on the horizon for Plesk, in version 9 we’ve got Postfix as an option, we’re getting graylisting, and best of all Plesk after 8 years is finally getting a reseller account level. In 8.4 we’re also finally get DomainKeys and IPv6 support.  Further down the road upgrades should become a lot easier, we might be getting automatic roll back’s in the case of failures, and upgrade certification.

All that stuff is cool, but I think one of the most interesting thing to come out is that Parallels is looking into doing a SMB Plesk edition.  It will be targeted at customers with 1 or 2 domains  that just want to administer  their box , their website, and their email accounts.  That would make an awsome replacement for Webmin and while it may not be a big dollar item for them could make them a fair amount of change.

The conference itself was alright, it was fairly small compared to something like LISA or Blackhat, the tech track’s where not really technical more like Technology previews.  The venue was nice (The D.C. Omni), and they certainly wined us and dinned us (Dinner cruise, and a Nationals Baseball game).  I’ve got a ton of pictures so I’ll post those as soon as I get some time.

I think I under estimated Parallels, they know whats important (the customer), and they’ve got some smart people, and a lot of cool stuff in the works.  Nice job Parallels!

Florian

Andrea and I signed up for Krav Maga classes last week (its a whole package not just the fighting stuff, you get Cardio, Cycling, Weight Training, Ground Fighting, etc)…and DAMN…I’m outta shape. They don’t fuck around, no practicing motions or Kata’s its straight to the nitty gritty. Today I basically spent  30 minutes kicking and punching the crap out of another guy holding a little pad, then another 30 minutes getting pounded on. It was a hell of a lot of fun, I’m tired as shit but it definitely does get the stress out. One tip though…definitely always wear hand wrap’s or MMA gloves….I didn’t today and my knuckles are gonna hurt tomorrow

So back in February me and Andrea decided to take the plunge a buy a house.  And wouldn’t you know it they’ve already started and the completion date is set for August 11th (assuming it doesn’t slip…which it will).  I can’t wait to get in there and move out off this POS that we’re renting.  I’ll post more as the house goes along, and the first in the series is of the foundation.  They should have poured the slab today but when we took these pictures on Sunday all they had was the trenches and the plumbing was “roughed in”.  You can see the full size images HERE.