MacOS in a VM

A history of my personal computing hardware

I had a series of desktops and laptops between 1997 and 2005. I borrowed a Sony Vaio laptop for a while from a good friend, then purchased some older used ThinkPad, then a new Asus latop where I ran Linux. I made the …

Setup Samba on ZFS for MacOS Time Machine

Notes on setup

This should be rewritten in Ansible, but for now these are the commands.

Create a zpool. I named mine backups. Disable access-times and enable the SMB share.

zfs set atime=off tanker/backups
zfs set sharesmb=on tanker/backups

Install Samba if you have not already. apt-get …

Upgrading OpenBSD 5.5 to 5.6

I will not be covering the installation of OpenBSD on the the PC Engines device today. Maybe at a later date. It wasn't that difficult after flashing the BIOS with a more recent ROM.

If you are attempting to follow this as a 'how-to' guide, please see the upgrade guide …

DIY Concrete Countertops: part 2 - Mix and Slurry

The Mix
I mixed batches of two 80lb. bags of Sakrete mix, and one 5lb. box of pigment.

• 16lbs. Sakrete 5000 PSI (Blue stripe) = 1.60 is 1%
• 5lbs. Sakrete Charcoal pigment = 3%
• 1.5 gallons of water
• 8oz of powder RapidSet water reducer
• .5 oz. of fibers added in …

DIY Concrete Countertops: part 1

In December 2011 I demolished my funky cabin kitchen, and set out to build a more modern kitchen that will last. We spent time over a few days to pack up the kitchen items, move appliances, and general preparations for not having a real kitchen for a while.

Bill of …

Google's Python Style Guide

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.html

Yet another new VPS

I had to move to yet another VPS because the last one became severely unstable. I am now on a Frantech VPS which is proven to be far more stable. Better support and response from the owner as well.

Back Online!

I found a new VPS provider, SpotVPS.com owned by parent company Comforthost.net. So far i'm happy. Setup was instant after payment and nothing has broke so far!

Site and Server Going down

My hosting provider has decided to get out of the VPS business and focus purely on datacenter and servers. I have not found on a new provider yet to migrate to. I want to find a provider in CA, preferably the Bay Area. If the price is right then i'll …

ZFS is Still Rad

I have a small file server at home running OpenIndian to store various media libraries and local backups. This machine is a SuperMicro X7SPA-H with a dual core Intel Atom D525 and 2GB of laptop memory from an old MacBook Pro. The 5 disk JBOD is made up of 4 …

No brainer idea to make credit card skimming harder for crooks

Credit/debit card skimming has become insanely cheap, and easy to do in recent years. Check out this article from ArsTechnica on the most common skimmers being used.

What if companies like Diebold that build and sell ATM machines were to use transparent plastic on the face of the machines …

De-crypting another user's FileVault on Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6)

For my day to day work and browsing I run as a non-privileged account on my macbook. I keep an admin account with Admin access for tasks like system updates. This is just one of the many things you can do as an internet user to keep your system safe …

Associative Arrays in BASH (how to do key:value pairing without Python)

Unfortunately this only works in BASH 4.x, which is a damn shame. Older RHEL installations don't have the latest, greatest version of BASH installed. If you're an admin of RHEL4/5 machines, this might be worth trying to update, otherwise just write your automation in Python. :)

[sourcecode language="bash …

Trolling the Trolls

I love The Oatmeal. The site only has self promoting ads for the Oatmeal store. The author & artist, Matt Inman, is genuinely a funny guy with a sense of humor that really is the core of man.

Some jerks at funnyjunk.com who repost other's work on their ad ridden …

Sites for Learning

This one is great for everything from home schooling to college. http://www.khanacademy.org

i'm going to try keeping up with the Algorithms class starting June 11th. - https://www.coursera.org

And for the experienced script writer or coder, Code Golf - http://codegolf.stackexchange.com

Neat CSS Textbox highlighting

Thought this was a pretty looking effect. will have to play with it.

http://jsfiddle.net/chriscoyier/X79M8/

Trimming strings in BASH

I recently needed to trim the last N characters from a string in shell. I wrote this little function to handle the task.
This requires a newer distro that has updated coreutils that includes the 'fold' command (Feb 2010).

#!/bin/bash  
function trimChars() {  
    if [ $2 ]; then  
        TRIM_LAST=$2  
    elif …

I just *want* to be a programmer

stumbled across the FizzBuzz quest thanks to fellow dad Jeff Atwood.

I spent about 8 minutes on this mainly because I always forget / vs %, and iteration through if blocks. Here is my fizzbuzz in Python.

for i in range(0,100):  
    j = i % 3  
    k = i % 5  
    if j == 0 …

finally back up

my SSL cert expired with godaddy and my "wonderful" VPS hosting provider knocked my vm offline, again. the joys of cheap hosting.

i'm doin it...

What is "it"? switching from GoDaddy.com to Namecheap for domain registration. I refuse to support a business that WANTS to oppress the internet and its users, consumers, and creators.

fuck you, Godaddy, and your elephant hunting (ex-)CEO.

tiny buddha - tips to balanace work/life...

http://tinybuddha.com/blog/6-tips-work-life-balance-for-people-with-big-dreams-2/

setting JAVA_HOME in Snow Leopard

I had to google this myself but am posting here in case the few people reading this blog might use it.

One interesting thing I didn't realize is that Apple includes a bunch of the older JDKs for backwards compatibility I guess.

me@mylaptop$ ls /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework …

Back to sysadmin fun...

going to try and start attending the SF Bay Area Large Scale Production Engineering meetup. we'll see how things go. :)

Thank you Mr. Jobs.

Like the rest of the world I am deeply saddened by the loss of life that was Steve Jobs. While not a shock considering his health issues, it is very sad for many reasons that hit close to home for me. He has children and wife that are still alive …

finally back...

After a long outage that started out initially by my hosting provider, we are back online.

We are patched up to the latest Ubuntu 10.x, and now running on the latest Nginx instead of the RAM hog, Apache.

CrashPlan and my crappy VPS are what triggered me to switch …

Dell H700 Administration Tool

it took me a few google searches to find it but I eventually found what I was looking over at ServerFault.Com.
Unfortunately the Dell OMSA Linux package only includes the .so libraries needed to query the LSI MegaSAS controller (aka, Dell H700) but no MegaCli binary. boooo.
Lucky for …

Linux Tuning Reference Site

while looking for some network tuning info I used frequently on servers at my previous employer, I found fasterdata.es.net.

great site for quick kernel tuning reference.

bash testing with if

I always seem to forget these and are oh so useful.

Expressions used with if

Framing Questions...

Listening to the 2008 (Is innovation withering on the vine?) talk from Judy Estrin she made a very interesting point my none managing brain never thought of.

when you ask a question judgmentally you will get a different answer than when you ask it openly. Example: "When will XYZ be …

learning about business models and customer development

I still need to read through this again but am very impressed so far.
This businessmodelalchemist.com article talks about creating and vetting a business model using proven successful methods in the entrepreneurial context.

Links: My findings on the net

TheNerdary - web developers blog.
KodApp - A programmers editor for OS X.
SimpleDesktops - I love these desktop backgrounds. Simple, fun, hipster.
Exuberant CTags - Generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in srouce files that allow these items to be quickly and easily located by a text editor.

And …

OSX: Under the covers with "defaults write" tweaks

I recently bought a new quad-core i7 MacBook Pro for personal/work use and needed to bring over some "useful" tweaks I've found over time.
These are some changes I always make to a new OSX Install. All commands are run via shell.

Prevent Creation of .DS_Store files on …

Sony PSP Phone: Experia Play - Really, Sony?

Sony is late maybe too late, to the realm of mobile gaming. The new Experia Play from Sony Ericsson is "sporting" what is now considered old mobile tech. There are dual-core ARM SOCs out now, but Sony Ericsson decided a 1GHz Snapdragon SOC, also found in the HTC Incredible (among …

New Goal: Learn new shit!

I stumbled across this recent posting by one of the etsy.com engineers. I am like "WOW!". I am jumping on the web 3.0 bandwagon.
Gotta learn me some nodeJS, graphite, and of course more python, and some Django for good measure.

Words of Wisdom from Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora...

I listened to this podcast tonight on the way home. Very inspiring. these ETL talks always seem to get my mental juices flowing. Makes me miss working with Luke Lonergan and Scott Yara back at Greenplum.
A Pandora's Box of Start-up Expertise.

good local food sources in Santa Cruz...

while browsing El Salchichero's website in anticipation of their grand opening this Friday, I noticed these two local sources for veggies and spices:

• DirtyGirlProduce.Com - Dirty Girl Produce.
• Lindencroft.com - Lindencroft Farms.

Both these places provide awesome quality produce/veggies/spices.
i'm looking forward to checking out all of the …

podcast on How Ideas Take Flight

A great podcast on How Ideas Take Flight by Jennifer Aaker at Stanford.

I found it really interesting that she talks a lot about happiness and what we all find happiness to be.

Teenagers idea of happiness is different from someone in their 20's or 30's or 40's. We have …

Python: ‘==’ not the same as ‘is’

my good friend Chris P. was helping me with some python debugging and he pointed this thread out to me on the python Tutor list.

Thank you Chris for your patience and Python guru help. :)

HAProxy - A Free Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

while catching up on a bit of sysadmin reading I came across this post from Matt Simmons.

When the time comes i'm going to spend some time setting up HAProxy. :)

vSphere ESXi 4.x wows..

There is this great post over at the Lone Sysadmin answering some of the common questions cheap-o's like myself have with ESXi/vSphere.

re-inspiring...

I found this blog recently [ http://lincgeek.org/blog/ ] that contains a ton of posts that are right up my alley!
Historically, i've not been the blogger type or much of a writer but lately i've been feeling the urge to just write. I know some of that inspiration is …

Troubleshooting IPSec on OpenBSD 4.5

saving a copy of this here since things on the interweb tend to disappear.

There is some very good info here specifically, I found the following hints helpful:

isakmpd -d
Start isakmpd with isakmpd -d. Isakmpd will output things like wrong file permissions and typos in the configuration file. On …

python stuff

from vegaseat at DaniWeb.Com.

Python Code Snippet (Toggle Plain Text) # handling date/time data # Python23 tested vegaseat 3/6/2005

import time

print "List the functions within module time:"
for funk in dir(time):
print funk

print time.time(), "seconds since 1/1/1970 00:00:00"
print time …

Programmers 10 Commandments

taken from: Dirk's Junk Box.

The Programmer's 10 commandments
Tue, 03/04/2008 - 22:49 — Dirk
After more than a decade in the IT Industry, I have found, that few junior programmers make a success of their careers. Below I list what I consider the 10 commandments of a programmer …

my .vimrc

syntax on set nocompatible set autoindent set smartindent set tabstop=4 set shiftwidth=4 set expandtab set showmatch

# map F2 key to toggle auto indent while pasting indented code.
nnoremap :set invpaste paste?
set pastetoggle=
set showmode

never forget *NIX tools...

*NIX Commands. These are endlessly useful.

EOP

VIM info

I was setting up nagios at a new job, and found myself in a position where all I have is vim to select, copy, and paste text(don't ask, I use evilwm). I came across this useful bit of info from This page on creating splits or multi-file editing in …

commanding windows...

In my new job i've been tasked with something ugly. webifying a windows CLI command. in my venture to find a way for PHP to spawn an interactive shell I came across this site: CommandWindows.Com.

Yes, yes, yes... windows sucks and we all know it.
It turn's out good'ol …

horrible, ugly, bad BASH string operations...

I do and do not recommend learning this.

Advanced BASH Programming - String Operations

They certainly can come in handy though if you don't want to do some basic grep/awk work.

little example:

$ foo="my words" $ echo ${foo#my} words $ echo ${foo:1} y words $ echo ${foo:2} words $ echo …

I shamefully admit... i've never setup WOL.

One of the features I've seen on network cards for as long as I can remember is Wake On LAN. I've known what the feature is and how it works in principal but never taken the time to set it up.
Yesterday I took the time to google around and …

adding VDPAU support to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and SqueezeBox server

I had been running the 180 nvidia drivers from another PPA a while then vdpau stopped working, turns out the PPA moved here.

Add these two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list, then apt-get remove mplayer && aopt-get install mplayer

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu karmic main …

MySQL password recovery

I always forgot the procedure for mysql pw recovery so i'm posting it to my blog.
This is a re-post from DebianAdmin.com.

By default, MySQL Server will be installed with root superuser without any password. You can connect to MySQL server as root without requiring password or by keying …

the ultimate screen setup

my buddy Josh shared his screenrc config recently. it is the ultimate configuration for one of my favorite time saving apps, screen.

cat ~/.screenrc vbell off # # Change this to the character you wish to use with ctrl instead of 'A' # # i.e. escape "``" means ctrl-` ` # escape ^zz scrollback 10000 hardstatus …

*NIX dump/restore command primer...

my old pal David sent this to me. he is a super old school lovin unix guy. He has an original Next cube.

dump 0uaf usr.dump /usr mkdir /tmp/restore cd /tmp/restore restore if /path/to/usr.dump (interactive) restore rf /path/to/usr.dump (restore everything) cd …

FreeCiv on Sun X4540 ILOM....

Just doing some friendly nmap scans on an internal network and found this.

Interesting ports on 192.168.200.253: Not shown: 995 closed ports PORT     STATE SERVICE 22/tcp   open  ssh 80/tcp   open  http 443/tcp  open  https 5120/tcp open  unknown 5555/tcp open  freeciv MAC Address …

New job and server moved...

Tomorrow is my last day as a sysadmin for Greenplum. It's been an awesome ride and I am thankful for the opportunity the company has given me. Next week I begin a new role at Xilinx working with a couple of great friends supporting a large and growing team of …

I'll do anything! Absolutely anything! - mckeay.net blog post

I was reading this blog post by Matt Simmons (a stand alone sysadmin like myself) he linked to a great security blog mckeay.net where I read this post. I found it oh so amusing as I've seen the same sort of thing at work.

Hopefully nobody from work reads …

very sad me...

Apple has decided that ZFS on OSX will never be.

http://zfs.macosforge.org

[caption id="attachment_102" align="aligncenter" width="1024" caption="ZFS on Mac OS is no more."][/caption]

nice blog post by Ted Dziuba...

I am beginning to agree with this man's philosophy.

Solaris 10 update 7 - Replacing a mirrored SVM disk on a Sun x4500

First I deleted the SVM submirrors and cleared them from the meta db replicas.

metadetach -f d30 d31 metadetach -f d20 d21 metadetach -f d10 d11 metaclear d31 metaclear d21 metaclear d11

checked out the current replica db, then removed the db for the disk we removed and verified.
metadb …

which wordpress plugins to add....

interesting list. I had no idea. :)

20 WordPress Security Plugins, plus Tips and Tricks.

Update@2014/10/25 - WordPress, you suck. You're a glutten for spying on the internet, and your frequent security issues make you a terrible date.

weird ZFS/Solaris bug

Came across this issue today at work on Solaris 10 Update 7, Sun XFire 4150.

http://probably.co.uk/rm-rf-on-solaris-zfs-filesystem-doesnt-remove-directories.html/comment-page-1#comment-1944

Too busy for life's own good...

getting ready to move back to Santa Cruz after five and a half years in the Silicon Valley. Work is as crazy as ever being mostly a one man show. Always playing catch up, and trying to make sure everyone is happy.

Right now my RSS reader shows 772 unread …

remapping PC keyboards to work happily on a mac...

i've not had a chance to fully vet this process but will hopefully soon. At work I have a daskeyboard that I love very much, but there is no function key for things like forward delete(FN+backspace), and some of the function key mappings.
Here are a few pages …

IPSec notes...

Updates to OpenBSD's IPSec support back in 2007. very kick ass.

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon07-ipsec/index.html

This is a nice easy reference for 2 OpenBSD peers creating an IPSec VPN:

http://www.packetmischief.ca/openbsd/doc/ipsec.html

And the short version of the above:

http://m4dsk1llz …

scammers bringin s3xy b4ck? come on....

come on people, who believes this?!?!?!!

From SGT. Vaja U. Mailier sgt.vaja.uta@mailier.com reply-to: sgt.vaja_uta@mailier.com to: date Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 11:07 PM subject: Greetings! Good day and compliments, I know this letter will definitely come to you as a huge …

geektool 3, BIND 9 vulnerability and down time...

I started using Geektool 3 a month or so ago when I caught wind of the rewrite. Yann Bizeul(the author) has significant improvements over the 2.x versions and new builds have been rolling out nightly for up to RC3(current).
As a UNIX/Linux System/Network/Security administrator …

apple fails again with 2 minute iphone pwn... DD-WRT gets CSRF pwn...

Both articles posted via /..

Apple's iPhone 3Gs encryption sucks.

My (once) favorite OSS broadband router firmware gets a nasty.

Botnet sound scary? It is. ;)

be careful of what sites you browse to, what files you download, and take caution if your windows PC starts acting funny.

This article titled "America's 10 Most wanted Botnets" shares with readers what some of the nasty things these virus/malware/blah blah blah(it's all bad stuff!) are …

useful sed one liner in bash

I was about to upload some documents to my company's wiki that someone else wrote. Upload failed! For some odd reason they chose to use a '+' instead of a space or under bar in the filename. Here is how I fixed it.

for i in `ls -1`; do 
    old=${i …

pwning the iphone even more...

Apple, we love your beautiful OS and amazing hardware designs. They are among the best. But seriously you need to take some lessons from the security crowd or the insane security guys @OpenBSD.

Today's post on /..
This will be covered at blackhat and likely covered at DC17(see you there …

iphone 3g & 3GS

I don't know if it works but there is a way to unlock tethering on AT&T in the US and other countries.

clickity with your iph0ne.

I see this as a big security issue with iphone/safari software. sure there is an "install warning" when you open the file …

Summer BBQ dry rub 2009 - Attempt #1

trying this out tomorrow night. 5 pounds of pork spare ribs for from PW Market, fresh spices from the herb room(Santa cruz), and a gambing obsession with BBQ ribs.

1/2 cup chilli powder
3 tbl spoons garlic powder
2 tbl spoons cayenne
1 tbl spoon paprika
1 tbl …

wow I suck at math. Let me count the ways...

For the longest time(my career as a sysadmin) if I would see a byte count in gigabyte/terabyte length, I would whip out `bc -l` in a terminal and run /1024/1024/1024. I do this because long'ish strings(to me) mess up my brain and can't decipher the …

bit in the ass by the seagate bug...(or not)

Stupid seagate firmware bug that causes data loss. fail for my PVR! time to backup what I can and re-install KnoppMyth/LinHES.

update: My xorg.conf got replaced some how? weird. maybe the recent apt-get update. not sure. fixed xorg.conf by setting the correct screen resolutions and driver. PVR …

first day back at work...vacationing is bliss

Today I'm back at work! It felt great to get some time away from the chaos but am kind of glad to be back. I really need to do the "take time off and not check email" thing more often. Makes me love my job again.

Here is a random …

OpenSolaris sporting COMSTAR pimpness!

I wish I had more time & money to play with HBA storage. For now check out Matty's post on setting up COMSTAR

IPSec site-to-site VPN using OpenBSD 4.3+

I found this nice article on security focus covering step by step instructions for creating a site to site IPSec tunnel.

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1859

Using this as a reference I've been setting up LAN-to-LAN IPSec VPNs for work. Works great with Cisco VPN Concentrators and Nokia IPSO …

Adding Software RAID-1 Swap in Solaris 10

This morning I was tasked with adding an additional 32GB of swap space to a cluster of ten Sun X4540(thor) systems at work. Doing this by hand can take a while to be absolutely sure not to break anything accidentally.
I triple checked the slice mapping on all ten …

delicious dessert !

I made this tonight for me and the wife. http://www.instructables.com/id/5-minute-Ice-Cream/

The only downside to raspberries is the seeds, but is otherwise DELICIOUS!

setting up Nagios on Ubuntu 8.10 server part 1/3

Building Nagios and configure checks via NRPE on Ubuntu 8.10-Server.
Start with a fresh installation of Ubuntu Server v8.10 i386 or amd64. You can add LAMP services using the next commands

apt-get packages.
Install supporting packages for running apache+php5, postfix, build tools and libraries for compiling plugins …