The Lone Sysadmin

It’s a rare day when I get to see operating systems fail in ways I’ve never seen before.

I’ve been having the strangest problems with a virtual machine I’m trying to deploy. It boots but won’t come up properly on the network. Services will start but complain about the network, or just be unresponsive. I can’t ping it, either. I’ve deployed several other virtual machines today from this same image, so it isn’t the image. Regardless, I redeployed it. Still messed up. I double-checked the network settings, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, gateway devices, netstat, route, everything. Nothing is wrong. I changed the IP address to something else, and it works great. I checked with my NOC to see if the IP I’d been using is firewalled, blackholed, or otherwise administratively unusable. Nope. I switch back, and it goes back to failing. OMFGWTFBBQIAMSOFRUSTRATEDWTF.

Turns out my hostmaster had set the A record to 192.168.77.74, rather than 192.168.74.74. Not surprisingly, a lot of stuff seems to care about that. The IP looked right, though, so I didn’t notice it until after a few hours. A few hours of my life I’ll never get back, that is.

Popularity: 6% [?]

In hindsight this seems obvious, but several Google searches did not reveal the answer so I am documenting it now in the hopes that others who are stymied by this can do something about it, too. As always if there’s a better way to do this leave me a comment. Thanks!

I was being annoyed by Windows importing and tagging the photos on my iPhone, often several times per sync. I want to be able to plug my iPhone in, have it sync, and then leave. Instead I’d get “No new pictures or videos were found on this device” dialogs, requiring that I click OK. If I didn’t click OK fast enough I’d get “This device is already being used by ‘Windows’” as it tried syncing a second time:

Turns out the fix is easy. With your phone connected to the PC go into Control Panel, then into AutoPlay. Scroll down to the bottom, under Devices, and change the action from “Import pictures using Windows” to “Take no action” (or whatever you want it to do). Then click Save:

That’s it. Like I said, easy to do once you know where to look.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Gentoo Linux Cancels Distribution:

Instead, Gentoo developers said they are pushing a new model for their distribution — one that eschews the conventional release wisdom used by Red Hat, Novell, Debian and others. Instead of fixed releases, Gentoo is promoting its vision of a live, continuously updating distribution. In practice, that effort revolves around its weekly minimal images, which are then supplemented with customized installed packages.

Continuous OS releases are an interesting idea. One of the annoying aspects of OSes is that every few years you have to go through a big upgrade cycle, as a vendor stops support for version X and forces you to version X+2. For my organization these upgrades haven’t been a problem because you can do the OS upgrades with the normal hardware replacement cycle, every three years or so as leases run out, etc. Now that virtualization is taking over we won’t have the same chance to replace the OS, though. Being able to upgrade the OS more easily and often sounds like a great idea.

The problems with continuous OS releases, though, are numerous. First, application developers are going to hate this. They don’t want the underlying OS to change, ever, and to have it changing constantly means a lot of trouble to them. Time spent testing against new OS releases is time not spent making their software better. That goes double for vendors who have to support things running on these OSes. How do they test & certify their software, hardware, and/or procedures against a constantly changing OS? It would be hard, especially since open source projects already have a terrible time with compatibility issues & QA. Last, all these issues apply to system administrators, too. Instead of having two or three operating environments to track you have the possibility of an infinite number of them. Admins will need to superimpose the old system of releases on top of these continuous release models in order to get any testing done, just like we do now with patch management.

Instead of continuous releases, perhaps a better solution is to make the upgrade process between releases much easier, cleaner, and seamless. It would also help some vendors to do more frequent releases (five years between Windows releases is a long time, for example). Red Hat releases new Enterprise Linux versions every two years or so, and supports them for seven years. Two years is a nice interval, and offers a controlled, regular opportunity to add new technology. If they’d make the upgrade from RHEL 5 to 6 (or 7, or 8) seamless we would get all the benefits of continuous OS releases without all the support problems.

That’s the sort of upgrade feature I’m hoping for, something as easy as a “svn sw” command for my OS.

Popularity: 4% [?]

$700 dollars? Wow, I could bail a bank out myself (from CNN):

Popularity: 3% [?]

• Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-09-24 | By Paul Krill
  Frankly it's getting hard to find a workload that Linux can't handle.
• ChangeThis :: Presenting to Small Audiences: Turn Off the Projector!
  "There is ample research evidence that projecting lots of text and speaking at the same time is so distracting to your audience that it is less effective than projecting your slides and asking your audience to read them while you remain silent, or speaking with no slides at all!"
• How Much Does Lying On MySpace Cost? $320,000
  Hmm, turns out the OK Tax Commission knows how to use the Internet. DOH.
• Service Untitled » Offering to follow up with (additional) answers. – customer service and customer service experience blog
  "Any employee who says “I don’t know” and leaves it at that is actually an employee who does not care." Agreed. However, a lot of people can't seem to say "I don't know" and instead make something up, which is even worse. The whole "I'll find out for you" is the way to go.
• TuxArea: Easily Enable Syntax Highlighting in Nano Editor
  Vim is great but for people who just need to do some simple to medium-intensity editing Nano works just fine, without all the arcane commands and hours of explanations & support from me. I hadn't seen that it does syntax highlighting, this is pretty cool.
• funniest pie chart ever – data visualization & visual design – information aesthetics
  Heh, nice.
• Carrington : WordPress : Crowd Favorite
  "Carrington was built for the entire WordPress community, both developers and end-users alike. Some people will appreciate the unlimited potential the new theme organization offers. Others will love the way AJAX optionally loads the comments right on the homepage. In any case, we’re confident that this new framework is the best thing since the wheel and sliced bread." This is really cool, props to the Crowd Favorite guys for doing this.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I had a very Matrix-esque moment with my iPhone yesterday:

“Hey, do you know what time sunrise is tomorrow?”

“Not yet.”

Still quite a ways from being able to download the know-how for flying a helicopter, though. Luckily Apple does let copious numbers of weather apps into the App Store, despite duplicating existing functionality.

Popularity: 3% [?]

• High Performance Enabled SSH/SCP [PSC]
  "SCP and the underlying SSH2 protocol implementation in OpenSSH is network performance limited by statically defined internal flow control buffers. These buffers often end up acting as a bottleneck for network throughput of SCP, especially on long and high bandwith network links."

Popularity: 3% [?]

• DailyTech – Hackers Run Off With Data on 8 Million Best Western Customers
  "In what some are calling the biggest information heist in recent history, identity thieves managed to acquire a treasure chest of personal information on more than 8 million of hotel chain Best Western’s customers." Wonderful, this includes me.
• Hank Paulson's bailout 419 letter – Boing Boing
  "I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you." LOL.

Popularity: 3% [?]