Scratching My Needs

What's worth - Week 24

2013-06-18T12:55:00.000+08:00

This blog hasn't been updated as ofter as it should. That doesn't mean I'm abandoning. I'm still lurking on the internet, poking my nose around here and there.

I routinely read Justin's Dragonfly BSD Digest and particularly fond of "Lazy Reading" weekly post. He'll talk about the list of interesting stuff he finds on the internet and share it with the readers. I'm copying his idea to fuel my updating of this blog.

For what's worth, here it goes:

EuroBSDCon 2013 - Over submission of papers for this year's European BSD Conference. This year, EuroBSDCon is held at the beautiful Malta.
CFH - Bob Beck of OpenBSD Foundation is calling for hardware sponsor. Do consider sponsoring if you or your company have spare of these.
DDG - XMPP services from Duckduckgo with "anonymous" objective, similar to it's search engine objective.
Misc - A rant from mst (of Perl) on "brogrammer".
Perl - Got this from clearing my ultra mountain high reading list, interesting read on debugging
OpenBSD - Breuil presentation of Mozilla software on OpenBSD during the 10th BSDCan, 2013.
FreeBSD - Sad to read this on FreeBSD documentation mailing list. Some people just don't realized there's "tone" in email writing. Glen's reply makes my day.
Code - got reference on how to read code, "Code Reading - The Open Source Perspective". Code reading can be fun!
Life - is bad, but true.

That's all for now.

Ciao !!!

Book review - DNSSEC Mastery

2013-05-17T18:13:00.001+08:00

For the past few days, I've spent most of my reading time with a new book titled DNSSEC Mastery. The author of the book is Michael W. Lucas, again (from my not too long ago book review blog post, Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition). He's now one of my favorite tech book author, upgraded from "favorite blog author". The "upgrade" was done after reading another of his new book published by No Starch Press, Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition. This review is the result of my reading of DNSSEC Mastery. It may not be the whole truth, but at least this is what I've understand from it.

Here it goes:Read more »

Book review - Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition

2013-04-26T18:24:00.000+08:00

If you're following BSD related news, you probably would have know about Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition. The author is Michael W. Lucas, well known for fantastic technical books (Absolute FreeBSD, Network Flow Analysis, SSH Mastery, DNSSEC Mastery & others ). A while ago, I got hold of this book, Absolute OpenBSD 2nd Edition (in short, AO2E), and spent some time on it. These are my findings, it may not be the whole truth but it is definitely how I understand it. Read more »

Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition - Book auctioning

2013-04-14T01:03:00.000+08:00

By now, everyone living in the BSD world would have known that Michael W. Lucas new book on OpenBSD is going to be release soon. By soon, I mean there's a couple of weeks more to go. If you have been following Michael's blog or read his technical books, you would probably have a taste of his writing style. Which suits my taste a lot.

Michael is auctioning "a" copy of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition book, with all proceedings going to OpenBSD Foundation. The OpenBSD Foundation pay bills so that the project continue to shine.

If you have a few spare zeroes in your bank account and really want,

- the very first copy of Michael's book, with all the proofs
- or, to show how much love you have for OpenBSD
- or, to redeem the guilt of ripping off OpenBSD for all these happy years of using it

move your mouse over to "Place bid" and press it at the auctioning page. The money you pay for the "clicks" & the book, will go into funding of making OpenBSD better. Not to forget the bragging rights of owning the very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd Edition) with "Certificate of Authenticity" that Michael promised to put on it.

Okay, if you don't have that much zeroes in your bank account and would really like to have a copy of the book (not the shiny first copy though), you can still do a bit for the OpenBSD project. Get the book from OpenBSD website and some of the money will go into making OpenBSD better.

Au revoir !!!

vim - improving vim skill by breaking arrow keys

2013-03-04T15:40:00.001+08:00

Improving vim skill have a new way, "breaking" the arrow keys on the keyboard.

No No, not literally! Just disable them by assigning "no operation" to the arrow keys stroke. This will render your arrow keys useless when you're inside vim editor, thus forcing you to stick to h, j, k & l key to move around.

Put these into ~/.vimrc:

noremap <Up> <NOP>
noremap <Down> <NOP>
noremap <Left> <NOP>
noremap <Right> <NOP>

If this is not dramatic enough, I foresee I'll put these in as well:

noremap h <NOP>
noremap j <NOP>
noremap k <NOP>
noremap l <NOP>

further forcing myself to use keys like "w", "b", "e", "ge", "W", "B", "E", "gE", "f", "F", "t", "T", ";" & ",". To decrypt those characters, check out ":help word" in vim editor.

Via here then here.

Adios!

FreeBSD Foundation - 2012 Year-End Fundraising Campaign

2012-12-28T23:17:00.001+08:00

Just did a quick check on the targeted $500k donations and FreeBSD Foundation have made it!
As of this post, FreeBSD Foundation have managed to surpass it's 2012 fund raising goal by $184 905, at the total of $684 905.

This is no doubt a great news to the end 2012 and I look forward to see more of these contribution towards FreeBSD Foundation, funding my favorite operating system FreeBSD.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year !!!

AboutBSD.net - outage

2012-12-28T19:28:00.000+08:00

This is all purely my fault as I was updating mysql-[server|client] then detach tmux, and forgot about it. I definitely need nagios to monitor AboutBSD.net. Sorry for all the inconvenience caused.

Scratch of the day - PHP Warning: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings

2012-08-10T09:46:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, I noticed one of my Apache server's error log is growing like 1.1 gb in 12 hours. The log is full of these : Read more »

AboutBSD.net - Layout changes

2012-07-27T08:30:00.001+08:00

Just did a wordpress theme change for a facelift to http://aboutbsd.net.
Probably there will be a few change on the background & header.
Do let me know if you have any suggestion.

Scratch of the day - How to disable mouse gesture in Firefox on OS X

2012-07-20T14:05:00.000+08:00

Starting from OS X snow leopard (10.6) to Lion (10.7), Firefox have a mouse gesture of swiping 2 fingers left as go back a page in history & swiping to the right as go forward a page in history. Some times it is too sensitive as I scroll up & down in text reading would also trigger this behavior. Then I need reload the page again to get back where am I.

Search in Google & Duckduckgo doesn't yield much useful instructions. But out of a sudden a bulb lights up, this could be due to the mouse gestures that is being mischievous all these times!

It turns out that turning off the "Swipe between pages" in Mouse -> More Gestures does disable this mischievous behavior. :)

Arrivederci !!!

Scratch of the day - php throwing stricts error on browser

2012-07-13T14:28:00.000+08:00

Today, I had to setup a Postgresql database server with phpPgAdmin web interface. While visiting the web interface for the first time, this error message appears on the top :

Strict Standards: Only variables should be assigned by reference in 
/usr/local/www/phpPgAdmin/classes/database/Connection.php on line 23

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by 
(output started at /usr/local/www/phpPgAdmin/classes/database/Connection.php:23) 
in /usr/local/www/phpPgAdmin/classes/Misc.php on line 540

Seems like php 5.4.4 imposed some extra measure as best practice.

Although phpPgAdmin works as usual, the error message is annoying. Plus, it is kind of bad to show what potentially can be exploit.

To turn off these error messages, just tweak the below parameter in /usr/local/etc/php.ini :Read more »

Scratch of the day - ssh transfer from server to server

2012-05-16T07:34:00.000+08:00

There's 2 servers which configured only my workstation is able to login using ssh keys. But I need to transfer files between these 2 servers. Downloading from server A to my workstation then upload the files to server B seems to be way. It would be good if I can combine the 2 operations into 1 single execution.

With shell's pipe, cat & ssh, this is what I've come up with :

ssh bob@server-A.example.com "cat /source/file-or-directory.txt" | \
ssh bob@server-B.example.com "cat > /destination/file-or-directory.txt"

Shalom !!!

Scratch of the day - exclude logging to /var/log/messages

2012-05-11T14:06:00.000+08:00

After telling dhcpd to log messages to local7 of syslogd, "uid lease" messages are still being log in /var/log/messages. This is because by default, syslogd logs "notice" level and above to /var/log/messages.

If you don't wanna see these messages in /var/log/messages, which it has already log to /var/log/dhcpd.log, include the log level "none" that tells syslogd logs to /var/log/messages. This assumed that dhcpd is configured to use log facility "local7" in it's config file, that output all messages to /var/log/dhcpd.log.

Example :
(in /etc/syslog.conf)

----- snip -----
*.notice;authpriv.none;kern.debug;lpr.info;mail.crit;news.err;local7.none   /var/log/messages
----- snip ----

Reload syslogd and monitor /var/log/messages & /var/log/dhcpd.log :

/etc/rc.d/syslogd reload

Namaste !!!

Scratch of the day - ISC dhcpd is complaining about subnet declaration

2012-04-13T15:23:00.000+08:00

Just now, restarting the ISC DHCP server, after adding new subnet, spill out some error messages :

No subnet declaration for gem0 (192.168.168.168).
** Ignoring requests on gem0.  If this is not what
   you want, please write a subnet declaration
   in your dhcpd.conf file for the network segment
   to which interface gem0 is attached. **

Sending on   Socket/fallback/fallback-net

This is because the DHCP server doesn't find any "subnet" declaration on the IP used on interface gem0. Tell DHCP server to listen on the intended interface by putting the below line in /etc/rc.conf :

dhcpd_ifaces="gem1"

This will make DHCP server listen on "gem1" and ignore listening on "gem0".

Adios !!!

Scratch of the day - arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo

2012-04-09T20:34:00.000+08:00

Today, one of the server was uncontactable after a network switch flood incident. All other servers are working fine except this one. Log into this server through the console, reveals :
- ping to gateway is fine
- ping to a host outside this network failed
- ssh connection to same segment is fine but not beyond gateway

/var/log/messages has a dozens of dozens of these :

Apr  9 00:30:01 hostname kernel: arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 10.0.0.1
Apr  9 00:31:00 hostname kernel: arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 10.0.0.1
Apr  9 00:32:00 hostname last message repeated 15 times

It looks like connection from this server to machines within it's own segment is fine but other then that, all are unavailable. Another thing, machines connected before initiated from this server to it, is fine. Connections from other server within own segment to this server (if NOT initiated by this server before) still failed.

After some googling, it seems like a patch is needed to fix this error :
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2011-August/029687.html

Since the arp cache might be leaking and causes the table to be corrupted, a reboot is needed for the network stack to work. After reboot, the usual patching applies.

The moral of the story, updating FreeBSD is as important upgrading ports. :p

Ciao !!!

Scratch of the day - dmesg log is not at /var/log

2012-02-15T10:00:00.000+08:00

dmesg log is the place where system information are written to it, similar to /var/log/messages. It is particularly useful to get information of Hardware details. But after some time, the information in /var/log/dmesg.today & /var/log/dmesg.yesterday are replaced with system messages where by boot messages are replaced.

Fortunately, a copy of boot messages in dmesg are still available in :

/var/run/dmesg.boot

Au revoir !!!

FreeBSD - Running Puppet on FreeBSD

2012-01-25T09:22:00.000+08:00

The latest issue of BSD Magazine is out and guess what? It has an article that I've wrote on running Puppet on FreeBSD!

BSD Magazine is a free to download magazine that focus on BSD, be it FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, PC-BSD and others. From BSDMag.org website :

"We decided to create a magazine for BSD users, enthusiasts and communitites. There were lots of Linux magazines and none devoted to BSD systems. Does that mean Linux is better than BSD? Not at all!"

To download a copy of the BSD Magazine, just register your email address with BSD Magazine and the download will be available. Spread the news, this magazine is full of BSD related news, tutorials, tips & tricks.

The BSD community needs more of these valuable resource!

Ciao !!!

Scratch of the day - Real time network statistic, like top

2012-01-09T16:00:00.000+08:00

There's a sudden surge of network traffic in one of the servers and I need to find out what causes it. Roaming around ports show up this :

/usr/ports/net-mgmt/iftop

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage ...

(via)

To start monitoring :
Read more »

Scratch of the day - Back dated date

2011-12-30T10:04:00.003+08:00

Did some sysctl tuning and need to monitor the log file every "yesterday". This is what I've managed to split out from "strftime" manual (via "date") :

# date
Fri Dec 30 09:59:27 MYT 2011

# date -v -1d +%b\ %Oe
Dec 29

With this, make cron send me an email with filtered entries of /var/log/messages :

1 1 * * * grep "`date -v -1d +\%b\ \%Oe`" /var/log/messages | mail -s "Yesterday ..." root@example.com

See ya !!!

FreeBSD Foundation - 2011 Year End Fundraising Campaign

2011-12-06T12:11:00.001+08:00

Another year is passing and the season of giving is coming !!!

This year, the FreeBSD Foundation is targeting to raise 400k. These funds will be put into the good use of FreeBSD related activities :

sponsor BSD conferences & events
sponsor developers to attend these conferences
protect the intellectual property of the FreeBSD project
marketing of FreeBSD project
hardware procurement for FreeBSD infrastructure
R & D to enhance the FreeBSD OS

(via here)

If you find that using FreeBSD is fun & useful, please donate to the foundation. Donating to the FreeBSD Foundation is the most effective way to promote & sponsor this wonderful OS. Plus, having your name on the donation list does draw some "feel good" feeling. :)

By the way, all it takes for your name to appear in the donation list is just mere USD 5. Click on this link to DONATE.

Adios !!!

FreeBSD - HP DL 120 G7 hardware

2011-11-19T23:01:00.000+08:00

Recently, I had a chance to test the compatibility of installing FreeBSD on an HP server. This are the specs of the server :

HP DL 120 G7 E3-1240
- 16gb DDR 3 ram
- dual nic port (HP NC112i 1-Port Ethernet Server Adapter (x2))
- Array Card (HP Smart Array P212/256MB Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/5+0))

The NICs, Smart Array & hard disk all work fine.

Except this server came connected with the SATA hdd to the Smart Array. I've always skeptical about RAID cards, especially if the RAID card is faulty, we'll need to get the same RAID card in order for the data to be recognize. That sucks big time.

End up, I bypass the SATA hdd from Smart Array to the on-board connector. Now, ZFS is just ready to rock. :)

Ciao !!!

FreeBSD - Mounting NFS share gives error "timed out"

2011-10-30T16:09:00.000+08:00

Connecting to a NFS server from a FreeBSD installation hit an error. The command executed was :

mount -t nfs nfs.example.com:/vol/some/nfs/share /mnt/mount/point

The error :

[tcp] nfs.example.com:/vol/some/nfs/share: RPCMNT: clnt_create: RPC: Remote system error - Operation timed out

The firewall has open port 111 (portmapper) & 2049 (mountd), so that should clear some of the permission. But still no luck.

Checking network connections doesn't seems to show anything interesting, particularly in ESTABLISHED & LISTEN state connections.
E.g.

netstat -an

But checking the NFS server info from the NFS client do reveal some interesting info :

# rpcinfo nfs.example.com
   program version netid     address                service    owner
    100024    1    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.207         status     unknown
    100024    1    udp       0.0.0.0.15.207         status     unknown
    100011    1    udp       0.0.0.0.15.209         rquotad    unknown
    100021    4    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.205         nlockmgr   unknown
    100021    3    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.205         nlockmgr   unknown
    100021    1    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.205         nlockmgr   unknown
    100021    4    udp       0.0.0.0.15.205         nlockmgr   unknown
    100021    3    udp       0.0.0.0.15.205         nlockmgr   unknown
    100021    1    udp       0.0.0.0.15.205         nlockmgr   unknown
    100005    3    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.206         mountd     unknown
    100005    2    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.206         mountd     unknown
    100005    1    tcp       0.0.0.0.15.206         mountd     unknown
    100005    3    udp       0.0.0.0.15.206         mountd     unknown
    100005    2    udp       0.0.0.0.15.206         mountd     unknown
    100005    1    udp       0.0.0.0.15.206         mountd     unknown
    100003    3    tcp       0.0.0.0.8.1            nfs        unknown
    100003    2    tcp       0.0.0.0.8.1            nfs        unknown
    100003    3    udp       0.0.0.0.8.1            nfs        unknown
    100003    2    udp       0.0.0.0.8.1            nfs        unknown
    100000    2    tcp       0.0.0.0.0.111          rpcbind    unknown
    100000    2    udp       0.0.0.0.0.111          rpcbind    unknown

Seems like these services "mountd", "nlockmgr", "rquotad" & "status" are needed. Those services translate to port no. 4045, 4046, 4047 & 4049.

After opening these ports in firewall, the NFS share mount finally works.

Voilla !!!

Cross cable color code

2011-10-22T22:12:00.000+08:00

A note for myself. This is the cable code to crimp cross cable, to be use for PC to PC connectivity (without switch in between)

First end
1.w-gr
2. gr
3.w-or
4. bl
5.w-bl
6. or
7.w-br
8. br

The other end
1.w-or
2. or
3.w-gr
4. bl
5.w-bl
6. gr
7.w-br
8. br

or = orang
gr = green
bl = blue
br = brown
w = white

When using cable testing device, the LED should blink crossing :

1 -> 3
2 -> 6
3 -> 1
6 -> 2

Ciao !!!

FreeBSD - Logos & images

2011-10-15T11:04:00.002+08:00

Stumble upon the FreeBSD logo page while reading the mailing list.

Take a look here.

Namaste !!!

Perl - Modern Perl

2011-10-10T07:33:00.000+08:00

Modern::Perl perl module automatically loads :

use warnings;
use strict;
use 5.010;

These are essential stuff to load and "use Modern::Perl;" (17 characters) loads it all. This saves typing and now, more reason to use "strict", "warnings" with "modern" perl features. :)

Adios !!!

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