blog.sarlok.com

Was bored during lunch. Linked random_kitties/* to the legacy random image loader.
Let the good times roll.

May do something constructive enough to blog about soon, like actually finishing off my backup server and get portcullis configured to retire zozu.
Or upgrading to Drupal6.
Or fix dspam.
Or upgrade my OpenBSD VM's to 5.2.

A co-worker told me about Evernote some time ago. The cost involved pushed it from my mind until recently. It's starred on the latest Macheist Bundle which makes it worth the price of admission.

Sank a couple of hours into Dwarf Fortress this weekend. Up to my usual standard of slaughtering dwarves en-masse. Weekend highlights:
Scaly, horned, forgotten beast that spits poisonous clouds broke into the colony from the network of underground caves I unearthed. 1 Casualty, 1 injury whom proceeded to spread miasma all over the colony for a few seasons.
Some 3 seasons later, a Giant Roc - the wings of death, 4 Casualties, 7 injuries
Just as my squads were regrouping from the Roc, a Goblin invasion force stormed through; 27 casualties, 12 injuries
One lone remaining goblin got 5 final kills in and several more maimings before eventually falling to a cage trap.
My once mighty military force and network of traps are all but depleted, by this point. But wait! There's more!
Queue Camoye Refearazi the mighty Minotaur! Finally taken down by my 2 remaining marksdwarves whom beat him to death with their crossbows. Casualties 3 military, 18 civilians, and a countless number of injuries.
These events have had a considerably detrimental effect on my colonies morale. Close to half of the remaining population take turns throwing tantrums.
The upshot is that I have some 12 captive goblin prisoners to throw into the arena... just need to build the damn thing now, heh.

In other news... Was setting up a test device to run bulk TCP transfers and such on at one of our remote sites, and found that MAC OSX sends TCP packets with a 1448byte payload.
Just one day prior, this was observed doing some other testing with an odd application-layer problem we've been running into. Didn't think about it too much at the time, but seeing it again while quickly testing ftp/http/sftp, etc, it got me thinking.
Not really going anywhere here, but I came across this article and found it to be fairly enlightening.

That said, hooray for sysctl, seems to take effect immediately.

I expect it won't persist across reboots.
<plug>Not as though that's a problem with OSX.</plug>

Augh. Monday tomorrow already. Not looking forward to the morning at all.
'Fixing' untested, un-engineered circuits after they've been sold and put into production, for the record - not awesome. Gettin' right back into the 'ol routine somethin' fierce.

No video today. Trying to cut back.
Here, have this instead: The White Mink, Electro Swing Speakeasy.

Raining. It's been a while... since the spring at least. Tin roof over the porch amplifies the sound quite nicely.

Slowly, but surely, things are getting back to normal at the office.
...who am I kidding, they never changed. Still, keeps my minds occupied at least, so that's something.

Ran into the could not open control socket problem I had with ftpd again recently. Found out what why it happens, but not why it happens.
Starting it with inetd. Seems it became unhappy when changing addresses or aliases on interfaces.

Killing/restarting and or sending inetd a SIGHUP doesn't seem to do the trick for whatever reason, but calling ftpd directly works.
Will have to poke around on 5.1 or something to see if it still happens, but either way - simple enough fix.

Wee... this X-Com remake is shaping up to be pretty epic. I've never been a fan of the glam-cam though.

And now for something completely different...

Outlook calendar events are neat. Especially when they're set for oh, Midnight or 4:00 AM with a 15 minute reminder.

In an odd kind of way, I missed Monday's like today. The sheer amount of fortuitous happenstance that the SMS made it to me, let alone that it woke me.
The entire hour I had to investigate the problems without any interruptions from the rampant panic that was about to unfold.
The barrage mixed messages and confusion that followed.
The blame storming for this one is bound to be epic. Damn, NDA's aside, I wonder how something like that would go down as a podcast...

That said, I'd like to talk about crypto maps, and how they are a lot more useful than I previously thought. Unfortunately my enthusiasm to go into any detail is quite low at the moment. ...That and it's kinda 1AM a bit. Probably best I not get started.

Hmm. Well, just in case I haven't spread this around already... (Source: http://thewebsiteisdown.com/)
Oh yeah. NSFW-ish.

Well over-due for a new entry I suppose.

Let's see... haven't post anything networky for a while. Found out how to abuse NVI's recently while trying to find a way to make NAT TCP hairpinning work - aka tromboning, aka RFC5382, sec 7.2 - on an IOS router. Read: NOT an ASA or Pix-based-hellbox.
After doing the standard Route-Map, NAT-via-loopback-ala-NAT-on-a-stick-based-thing, I found it's ridiculously easy to do if your router supports NAT Virtual Interfaces (NVI).
That said, I can't say I understand what's actually happening or why this works. Documentation on what happens when you use NVI in this sort of a scenario, sans-VRF, is quite slim.

The scenario:
PAT on 172.16.0.1 for some TCP ports - say 80, 110, 443 goto 192.168.0.250
192.168.0.10 needs to get to said TCP services at 192.168.0.250 via the external 172.16.0.1 address
NAT overload on fa0/0 for any other 192.168.0.0/24 hosts to the internets

Queue visual aid:

Queue pseudo code:

Bam, instant hairpinning. Still need to work out exactly what's going on behind the scenes here. It makes some modicum of sense visualizing the resulting NVI interface as a fancy loopback, but there's certainly more to it than that. Either way, I'm sure it can't be good for a busy production network, but the further R&D will have to wait.
However, if your router doesn't support NVI's... yeah.

Yay, networky stuff out of the way.

Context for the following conversation: Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Monitor. Atlas is the tool provided to create said maps.

Co-Worker says:
That's some pretty fancy shit for maps
You say:
eh?
Co-Worker says:
The BULK stuff that kinda looks like the visio diagrams
You say:
oh, yeah. makes it easier to follow if they're close to same-y
could be better, but Atlas is a peach.
Co-Worker says:
A peach?
You say:
top gear reference. supposedly albanian for a word that rhymes with blunt
more accurately... piçkë
kar would also suffice

Image courtesy CampinZz... Granted I was only shooting from just shy of 20 yards.

I both love and hate this song. Also, the video reminds me too much of Survivor which I despise.

Hmph.

Added close to two-dozen more piles of randomness to my collection of random images. Thank-you internets for a seemingly never ending supply of lunacy.

Waiting for some NIC's to arrive so I can build an Olive. The VM I have just isn't quite up to muster.
Setting up the VM however, I learned to truly appreciate the OpenBSD installer script (Read: No curses.h garbage or GUI of any sort, just yes, no, or <input>.).
Using it compared to the FreeBSD 4.x GUI thing was not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. This may be somewhat biased based on the fact that I *irrecoverably broke the install proccess* three times running by doubling back on myself / making adjusting things before committing, etc. The fourth attempt I learned my lesson, and still produced a bricked VM that wouldn't boot. Fun.

Moving on...
Q. Your router starts automatically learning static /32 routes for hosts that should be 'knwown via connected'. What do you do?
A. ???? PROFIT!
Truthfully, a problem which leaves me perplexed. May be symptomatic of using the int-loopback-foo-ip-ospf-1-area-0-on-a-loopback-with-ip-unnumbered-loopback-foo-to-advertise-a-/32-instead-of-the-/whatever-you-put-on-the-loopback trick. Added to the list of things to test further one day, but regardless... removing said ludicrosity and the problem persists.

Also, this sums up my thoughts on XML quite nicely...

Incidentally, I may have mentioned once or twice that given I am required to use Windows at the office, my work day lacks the untold joy that is Quicksilver
A number of Power Toys and Colibri almost replicate some of the functionality, but because you're relying on the Windows indexing mechanisms, it still provides a shite user experience. Recently however, I stumbled across this little gem:
http://lunarfrog.com/taggedfrog/
Basically, a tag cloud for files.
Typically my files are relatively well-sorted. At work though, holy geeze. My "To be filed" folder never gets filed, projects spawn child projects, and unrelated projects merge frequently to create further clutter and segregation of diagrams, design specs, etc, etc.
Haven't been using it long, but I don't think I'll ever do without it ever again. My only complaint is that there doesn't seem to be any equivilent that can replace windows explorer.

You say:
 It's been a while since I've had a coffee I would consider undrinkable.
Co-worker says:
 Oh, do tell
You say:
 Story's not particularly exciting, but it tasted not entirely unlike I
 imagine what juiced Brussel Sprouts (from concentrate) might be like.
Co-worker says:
 Wow

Also, on Catalyst 2950's:

You say:
 Huh. apparently you can put ip helper-address on a 2950 SVI.
 that's amusingly interesting
Co-worker says:
 But does it do anything?
You say:
 dunno, that's the amusing part.
 You can debug ip dhcp server packet...
You say:
 hmm, nope. doesn't look like
You say:
 uhhh

I couldn't resist the urge to test, and...

The opportunities for abuse are astounding!

In other news...
I've had this song by Grizzly Bear on my iPod for at least three years. It spun around on random the other day causing one of those "WTF is this?" moments. About two minutes in the acoustic guitar turns into an amazing riff. If it were a cassette tape, I'd have melted it by now by the number of repeat plays it's had.
Then, whilst looking for the video on youtube, the below song by Of Monsters and Men came up for some reason, which I've now purchased. Yay.

One Year already. Sounds so short - One Year. Two syllables, and poof, that's it.
There are some big numbers in one year, 525600 and 31536000 for example.
Hmm... those might come in handy.

Not too sure what to make of the last three or so months, aside from the fact that they've been... well, quite simply put - shit.
My two month obligation (if you can call it that) at work ended on Victoria Day at least. Next week should be interesting.

Huh. Had a lot more on my mind when I clicked on 'new entry'... Just can't seem to get it out of my head in any sort of coherent fashion.

She loved this song.

So... on Volvo XC70's - Two things I don't like so far:

1. There's no-where convenient for my iPod until I can find a 2' auxiliary cable
2. I occasionally bonk my head on the doorframe getting out because I sit higher up than I did in the Passat (though I've only done this twice, and that was during the first week I had it)

No complaints otherwise so far. Other than the fact that I bought it for all the wrong reasons in the first place, but oh-well.

Also, because I'm always forgetting how to enable and use the archive command on a LWAPP

Though that said, the version of IOS on my recently acquired LWAPP doesn't support debug lwapp console. Using the rename-your-ios-image-c1130-k9w7-tar.default-and-load-via-tftp method worked just fine in that case.

Hopefully my new Catalysts will arrive soon so I can start doing things labby again.

Yeah...

Outlook's crashed... waiting for it to re-open which is putting some strain on the poor Lenovo on my desk. Figured I'd spell-check this unpublished post and throw it up while i'm waiting.

I don't think I'll ever fly to Calgary again any time soon.
Though I must concede, having been there, I can see absolutely no reason for Albertans to be such mindless retards when it comes to driving. It's not like their roads are poorly designed, or there's inadequate signs... it's just that everyone does stupid things all the time. Bah. I dunno. Maybe the better part of a whole day wasn't enough time to see the real reason for it.
Overall the journey was worth it though I suppose. I know this is the 2012, but for all intensive purposes the '08 looks exactly the same. The one exception being that the interior of mine is a much more appealing black and has no TV screens, but otherwise...
Got about 8.7l/100 (or ~28 MPG) on the trip back through Banff. That accounts for the hour and a half crawling out of Calgary at ~40km/h. Not bad for two-and-a-bit tonnes of Swedish sensibleness with all-wheel-drive.

Also, have I ever mentioned how much I hate D-Link routers? I think that at this stage, the very process of their creation reduces the overall worth of their components. Gah.

I know I've said it before, but I really need to do something about these youtube videos.

Allergic to cats. Huh. Who saw that coming?

I think I quite seriously broke the Passat tonight.
To think, it made it to the top of the 8km mountain road no problem, but then I bin it into what was effectively a 2' berm.
Too dark to see what kind of damage I'd done by that point. Made it back down the mountain, but that feel of 'something very wrong' was there the whole way.
Not entirely certain what I was thinking - I saw the berm, but thought maybe going fast would be a good way to deal with the otherwise impossibility of making it over unimpeded. I'll blame the headache I've had since last night. Yeah... that'll work.
That said, perhaps it's poetic justice for laughing at the Jeep I passed that was getting a tow down from the peak.
Ohwell... Will know more come daylight, but I think it's well and truly Donald Ducked personally.

Ugh.

Well, added a new image. It's not particularly interesting, but may explain some things.

So here, have this: