Category: Rant

Another fun day

My colo facility contacted me on Wednesday to say that this weekend they’d be moving my machine to a new rack, and also that they’d gotten a new IP range and I had to switch over to the new range soon, but they’d let me have both IPs for the switch over.

So today my system suddenly went off the air. I was sort of expecting it, but I didn’t see any shutdown messages because they just three-finger-saluted it. After a couple of hours, I phoned for an update, and was told that they’d just powered it up. But it still wasn’t responding to pings, until I mentioned to them that eth0 and eth1 are in the opposite order than what you’d expect.

Once it came up, I tried to configure an eth0:1 using the new IP. That actually seemed to work on the dom0, so then I tried to do it on my domU. That seemed to work too. I was able to ssh into both ips on both the dom0 and the domU. So I thought I’d swap the domU ips around, so the new one was eth0, and the old one was eth0:1, which would make it easier to get rid of the old one when I don’t need it any more. So I changed it in /etc/network/interfaces and rebooted.

But then suddenly things started going pear shaped. The domU was refusing to boot with an error about being unable to find /dev/hda1. On the dom0, “ifconfig” would just hang. And then it stopped responding at all. Now I was in full panic mode. I called Annexa and Dave called the guys who were doing the rack move and convinced them to go back to the facility. I met them there, and found that my poor box wasn’t even responding on the KVM. We power cycled it, and found that it wasn’t starting the domUs, and also that while it started up eth0 and eth0:1, it didn’t start the virtual bridge interfaces (peth0, vif0.0, vif7.0, vif8.0, vif9.0, xenbr0). That’s not good. It appears that Xen doesn’t like the extra interface or something. So I got rid of eth0:1, changed eth0 to the new IP, and rebooted. This time, it started up and so did the domUs.

I was still having a bit of problem with my personal domU – it didn’t want to resolve. Evidently somewhere along the way I’d decided to remove this program “resolvconf” that is supposed to maintain your name resolution for you, and when I did it had replaced my resolv.conf with one that looks like it was copied from my home machine. So I fixed that and things sort of worked, but in spite of the fact that I had the old IP on eth0:1 it wasn’t answering on it.

So it looks like I’m up and running, but I can’t use the old IPs. So you’re not going to see this until your DNS cache updates and you see the updates I made over at zoneedit.com.

USB speed confusion

Every time my external USB disk disconnects itself (like it did after a short power glitch on Wednesday), I have to google the kernel message to see if it remounted with USB 2.0 speed or the slower USB 1.1 speed. I just can’t seem to keep straight in my head whether “USB full speed” or “USB high speed” is the good one.

Note to self: it’s “USB high speed”.

I think.

Dear GoDaddy

I set up “automatic domain renewal” so that I wouldn’t have to take any action, or indeed have to think about it, when one of my domains comes up for renewal. So why do you send me four identical emails within 10 minutes telling me that one of my domains is coming up for renewal? I don’t need to know, that’s why I told you to take care of it! Even one message would have been more than sufficient. But do you really need to blast one to the technical contact, one to the billing contact, one to the registrant and one to the email address on the account? What the fuck is the purpose of having a separate “billing contact” if you’re going to write every email possibly associated with the account about a billing issue. It’s called “billing contact” for a reason, fuckwads.

What were they thinking?

Update:Added the “Where is this body you want disposed of” picture.

We had a Energy Star energy audit of our house recently. One of the things the audit mentioned that there was some asbestos on one of the vent pipes in the basement, and that would have to be “abated” before they could work. Today I decided to take care of it. The pipe in question goes through “the scary room”, one of two dirt floored areas of the basement. Until today, I’ve never set foot in either one of them. There is no apparent reason why this particular pipe has been wrapped in asbestos – the portion of the pipe that is wrapped isn’t close to the furnace so it’s not very hot, nor is it in contact with insulation or something flammable. The register it serves is in the “breakfast nook”, which we suspect wasn’t part of the original build of the house.

I got advice from experts in the field who assured me that the sort of asbestos that forms into sheets isn’t the dangerous kind, but I should still take some precautions.

So armed with a tyvec painter’s coverall, dust mask, googles and rubber gloves, I entered the scary room to do battle with the evil asbestos. And that’s when I discovered that the asbestos wrap evidently held condensation or external water against the bottom of the vent, and now the vent pipe has rusted completely away on the bottom. But it’s fine at the top, which means there is a part between the bottom and the top where there are sharp edges and flakes of rust. So instead of just removing the asbestos wrapping, I ended up hacking out the whole rusty pipe, and stomping it flat to throw it away. And the sharp edges cut my gloves to ribbons, but at least I didn’t get any visible cuts in my skin. Unfortunately the unwrapped part of the pipe only had one hangar on the whole length, so it fell down without the added support on one end. And the “box” where it went into the register in the breakfast nook was also wrapped and rusty so I had to remove it as well.

It wasn’t until after I was done that I noticed the notice on the air mask that said it’s not for asbestos. Sigh.

Well, the whole thing is down now. Hopefully I didn’t do myself any damage doing it.

If your VCR is flashing 12:00…

I saw (and stole) a sig quote once that said “If your VCR is flashing 12:00, then maybe Linux isn’t the OS for you”. Today I had a similar experience.

I host a bunch of mailing lists on Mailman at my domain list.xcski.com. Some of them I run, and some, like the ones for the Linux Users Group of Rochester (LUGOR), I just host and let somebody else run. One of the things that Mailman does is automatically send out a monthly ‘password reminder’ – as well as reminding people that they belong to one or more mailing lists and giving them the password and url they need to know if they need to make changes to their subscription, it’s also a good way for Mailman to test if the address is still valid so it can unsubscribe invalid addresses automatically.

The monthly mailing list reminder looks like:


This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your list.xcski.com
mailing list memberships. It includes your subscription info and how
to use it to change it or unsubscribe from a list.

You can visit the URLs to change your membership status or
configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery
or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

In addition to the URL interfaces, you can also use email to make such
changes. For more info, send a message to the '-request' address of
the list (for example, mailman-request@DOMAINNAME) containing just
the word 'help' in the message body, and an email message will be sent
to you with instructions.

If you have questions, problems, comments, etc, send them to
mailman-owner@DOMAINNAME. Thanks!

Passwords for YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS:

List Password // URL
---- --------

followed by the name of each list you subscribe to, the password you use for that list, and the url to change your user options (or unsubscribe) for that list.

Frequently on the first of the month, I get an email or two from people who see these emails and rather than following the instructions and doing their own list maintenance, write to me and say “please unsubscribe me” or “please change my address to foo” or whatever, and I have a form letter that basically says “read the instructions and do it yourself”. But today I got a new variation:

It seems I have been added to this list by mistake. It looks as though this
address was found from the lugor mailing list. Please remove me from the
xcski mailing list.

My response was along the lines of “If you can’t tell the difference between a domain name and a list name, maybe Linux isn’t the OS for you.” Harsh, maybe, but hey, it amuses me and I get so few pleasures from mailing list hosting.