blog.sarlok.com

Well, been a while. Not a lot to say at the moment, but figured it was about time I shake the dust of the old blog.

Picked up an 1811 for the server, it will sometime soon (I hope) be taking the place of the WRAP currently sitting between this blog and the internets. Bit of tomfoolery to do with the vswitches in ESXi though, as I'll be moving the grey listing onto the mail VM proper and such.

The more perceptive of viewers may have noticed six new images in my gallery.
This is what happens when a small moose attacks a car that's already traveling ~110km/h.
Obviously, the car is a write-off. Not bad for my first road accident though.

For reasons I don't quite understand, I've acquired a new domain. Allow me to present:
http://www.issurroundedbyidiots.com/

Accompanied by it's .net, and .ca counterparts, but they don't really do anything at this point.
Not sure what to do with it yet aside from chuckle to myself at the thought.

Work to do, ta ta for now.

This, is by far, the best spam I have ever seen in my life. Buy 9 grams, get one free? Tomahawk rockets?
My favourite is the sequence of 1, 2, 4.

FREE HEROIN SHIPPING!

1. Heroin, in liquid and crystal form.
2. Rocket fuel and Tomohawk rockets (serious enquiries only).
4. New shipment of cocaine has arrived, buy 9 grams and get 10th for free.

Everebody welcome, but not US citizens, sorry.

ATTENTION. Clearance offer. Buy 30 grams of heroin, get 5 free.

Please contact: debbier16 (at) gmail dot com 

PHONE 0093(0)4765481
FAX 0093(0)4485291

Afghanistan

Body's e-mail address respectfully scrubbed. Though it wouldn't please me more than to flood that idiot's address with spam from more bots, it would be an un-necessarily pointless thing to do to gmail.

Another equally awesome Spam of late: on the cisco-nsp list over at puck.nether.net was offering me nuclear warheads and missiles at a discount rate. Too bad it appears to have been stripped from the archives.

Randomness!

Emille says:
 what the heck is a gaming tax refund, and why is MSN trying to make me click on it?
Co-worker says:
 Trying, like sent a burly guy in a suit to drag your arm and mouse to click on it?
Emille says:
 perhaps. I'd rather punch a monkey

Good song... seems short for almost 10 minutes. Just kinda works out that way I suppose.

Minecraft, it would seem, is terribly addictive.
It strikes me as an exceptional piece of work given it's many similarities to Dwarf Fortress.
I've built a little hideaway in the forest in close proximity to that of my buddies. Basically capped off the entrance to a natural cavern, lined the bottom with dirt for a small underground tree garden.
Shortly thereafter, I scout out, and tunnelled from the afore-mentioned house to the beach.
Nearly a full game-day's walk from site to site.
Greenhouse is built at said beach, and a new house has been mostly carved out of the side of a mountain overlooking the area.
Now though, I've taken to falling repeatedly into lava pits - or digging into one from underneath.
"Losing is fun!" springs to mind. :]
It really is too bad it's powered by java. Oh-well.

Random amusing conversations from last week:

You say: you know what would be awesome...
Coworker says: Snakes with wheels?
You say: Snakes with caterpillar treads is a highly amusing thought come to think of it...
but no, other than that...

I was actually thinking something that could poll various routers and such for MAC addresses and store them in a central database for if/when you need to find a specific MAC on your network somewhere. Along the lines of an IPAM system, but not as intense... just MAC accounting.
Anyone got any ideas? Preferably PHP and *SQL powered.

I also had an interesting conversation regarding second hand VM's, and their potential market value. I think they would be somewhat in-line with the DVD rewinder

Needs moar muzik... Let's see, this should suffice.

Random attack!
<--- I totally want one of those.

And equally random, I can relate - On babies

Yet, more random - I came across this book recently... I skimmed through it to see what it's like and one paragraph in particular left me somewhat dumbfounded...

I watched the man as he did the drawings, watched him as he regarded the models, drew a bit, erased and drew again, for about twenty minutes. During this time, he became restless and seemed tense and frustrated. Later he told me that he hated his drawings and that he hated drawing, period.
If we were to attach a label to this disability in the way that educators have attached the label dyslexia to reading problems, we might call the problem dyspictoria or dysartistica or some such term. But no one has done so because drawing is not a vital skill for survival in our culture, whereas speech and reading are.

I'm not entirely sure why, but I never thought about it before, but for some reason this struck me as quite profound. Possibly as I share a similar dislike for drawing. Not for any particular reason other than "It's too difficult... and my drawings suck...". All that aside, I am so far finding it to be quite an interesting book overall.

Keeping with the completely random theme of topics, I do believe Beatport is more dangerous than iTunes Genius.
Partly, because it's a lot faster than the iTunes store, and it's chock-full-o-exclusives.
Oh, you can listen to a lot more than a 30 second clip of a song also.
Did I mention it's fast? Like, really fast? Like, buffers an entire song in ~10 seconds fast? And won't cause your computer to shriek in pain as it tries to load pages?
And that's on my pokey 3... well, 2ish mbit ADSL.

Here's another song.

It's now officially known to me: It's not possible to terminate a pseudowire on a router subinterface. That is, at least - on a 7204VXR running advip 124-20.
<edit>Actually, it is, as I explain here.</edit>
Should someone be unfortunate enough to try this, you will encounter the following Optional Messages while watching 'debug vpdn l2x errors'. Best of all, they'll occur in a seemingly random order:

L2TP tnl 0219F:0000A30C: "No config found for remote peer R2, local/remote address 1.1.1.1,2.2.2.2"
L2TP tnl 020F6:0000A3CE: "No application/session timer expired"
L2TP 00005:020F7:0000631C: "No disconnect reason given"
L2TP 00005:020F7:0000631D: "Payload type mismatch"

You may also find your tunnel is sitting in an Est-No-User or No-Sessions-Left state.
If you see this going on, swing that xconnect over to a physical interface and BAM! Instant tunnel, quicker than you can say undebug all.
Of note, you CAN also terminate them on a vlan interface, and in turn terminate that vlan onto an access switchport. On an NM-16ESW or something for example.

Obviously, I didn't get quite as far in my testing as I had hoped having just isolated the cause for those not-so-helpful errors just now.

Also, today fscking sucked.

Huh. My kitty seems to have decided that it's petting time. I'd best do something about it.

<edit>Holy typo's batman. Fixed.</edit>

Got my little hard-drive rigged up to roll. I'm pleased with the results, even if a little incident between me and grub wasted an hour or so because I didn't read the man page sooner.
It seems grub has grown a boot-pile of more features since I last tried using it for any purpose.
The ability to ls a drive,partition is immensely awesome when trying to determine which one your other OS's are on according to it's equally awesome UUID support.
Suddenly adding/removing drives, or moving the drive to a different machine won't blow up what's where requiring a constant need to drop to it's command-line.
Anyway, that's enough rambling.

Completely random amusing link of the month:
Colors! I'm tempted to get this for my DS, as the thought of having something small and portable to scribble on strikes me as a strangely attractive prospect, and I just can't justify an iPhone for said convenience.
Having come to this realization, I see that the official site no-longer provides their app for the DS, though some kind chap over here provides a place to snag it from.
Win!

This article about Microsoft Exchange's little (little?) foibles is a really great read.
I can somewhat relate to a lot of these little issues as my workplace recently made the change to Exchange for corporate messaging and scheduling.
I say recently, but it's been about 8 months or so now I guess, and though it pains me to admit it - the shared calendar and scheduling Exchange can offer is pretty awesome.
E-Mail however... that's a different matter entirely. To say it was appalling would be an understatement me thinks.

No music today.

<edit>New title image. I love that face for some reason... it amuses me so.</edit>

<edit2>WHO IN GODS NAME INVENTED SENDMAIL!??!!? Geezus!

On the grounds that I'll never remember these steps in a hojillion fricking years; sendmail steps to emulate qmails control/smtproutes:

</edit2>

Holy good gravy. I was never expecting this to turn up in the iTunes store... but I'm not disappointed.

So I picked up a 500GB USB hard drive for various mobile data purposes. Anything not important, or not already on my IronKey will go on it.
I also have the intent to be able to boot into OpenBSD, or some flavor of Linux from it, use it to transfer source code, tarballs, Virtual Machines, etc al. to and from various devices for work and personal purposes also.
Now, the stage is set. This presented a bit of a problem owing to the platforms I deal with, some by choice, others on a because-I-have-to basis.

BSD, Linux, OS X, Windows, support FAT32, except it sucks
Linux, OS X, and Windows support exFAT, but not BSD
Linux, OS X (to some degree) and Windows support NTFS, <bias>except it sucks</bias>, and BSD doesn't
BSD, Linux, and OS X support FFS, but not Windows
Linux, OS X and Windows (the last two, only partly) support ext2/3/4, but not BSD
Linux (sortof), OS X, and Windows (sortof) support HFS Plus, but not BSD
I could go on... but long story short, there's no perfect fit.

Sooo... I wound up with:

• 200GB ext2 partition
• 100GB FFS partition
• 200GB FAT32 partition

That way I have at least some space for everyone to play nice to some degree, and still do what I intend.
I'm curious to know if anyone out there has any better ideas here.

This sums up my current mental-state quite well.

So much for that early night.

Happy Valentines Day.
...Granted I'm a day late, but meh... I'm exempt from the ritual anyway.

<edit>
Bunch of dead youtube links wuz here
</edit>

That is all.

NAT's a funny thing, as it turns out.
For the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed doing something at work...
One of our ongoing projects from last year gave me the opportunity to route a subnet to a customer whom was migrating from another service provider.
Having convinced the Senior IT staff of said customer that routing them their subnet was a good plan, I began setting it up in short order.
So, the end result was they get an extra IP address, and are running a routing protocol to advertise their shiny new subnet into our network.
But now there's a private IP range between said customer, and our Aggregation Routers over which public internets needs to be available.
It never occurred to me previously that because NAT just modifies the IP headers and creates a state, you can do something funny like NAT to an IP address that doesn't exist!
"Seriously... will this actually work?"
So....

• Translate packets to the non-existent IP, create a state
• Send translated packets towards the internet
• Replies are happily forwarded to the router advertising ownership of it's subnet.
• State table is referenced, NAT reversal happens, and life goes on.

Meanwhile, never-mind the fact that the IP address doesn't actually exist anywhere, except in the form of a promise that it might be somewhere in the subnet being advertised.
I found this whole experience preposterous, and yet strangely droll both at once.

Also, this is made of epic win. GNS3, in a Ubuntu Virtual Machine, ready to rock!

Hmm... I really, *really* need to do something about all these youtube videos...

So, it seems all this time I thought I setup spamd for greylisting, but was actually blacklist-only.
Words cannot emphasize how stupid I felt having discovered this.
Suffice to say, I have since remedied the situation.
Muahahahahahah!

*ahem*

Got to spend a couple days in Prince George this week for work related purposes. Naturally, being there the day after a snowfall, the streets were absolutely peachy.
Note: Though I'm aware that article is actually a year old, that doesn't excuse the fact that snow removal from Downtown, Central, and Northern Prince George is an absolute farce.
Oh-well... should be mostly cleaned up with any luck at all before my venture back up this coming Friday.

To switch gears rather randomly, It would seem my poor Blackberry Curve 2 seems to be becoming progressively more and more defective. It's recently begin the dreaded random reboots.
Only a couple of times a week, but it can only go downhill from here. I wouldn't otherwise mind, except it takes well over two minutes to start up.
I've given up on fixing not having a send option when composing or replying to e-mails.
Should anyone else have this problem, a 100% effective work-around, is to forward the message you wish to reply to. Or you could buy a Torch I guess.

Not much else to report of late. Slipped on some ice last weekend. I was lucky/unlucky enough to catch myself with me left elbow.
According to ye-olde doctors - somethings torn in the shoulder, but not serious owing to the lack of swelling. Hurts like an absolute bugger though if I pick up anything with much weight to it. One week of no-lifty-heavy-objects at least.

So, it seems Beardyman managed to have done a album. Wonder how long before it turns up on iTunes. Probably some time come to think of it, since you can but pre-order it from Amazon.co.uk, and it's not due 'till late March.

I also came across this rather well done short documentary by Brother of Beardyman. Aside from being well done, it's really quite interesting - or at least, I believe so. Watch it, it's only short.

Also, randomly found this amusing bug at work recently.

To the un-initiated, it seems that Cisco IOS creates the sub-interface for you when you hit '?' instead of enter to execute the command.
'?' is supposed to give context sensitive help, which to be fair, it does by saying Carriage Return (<cr>) is the only possible option, but still.
I found this highly amusing.