Planet Randomness

Delicious/rjw1: New Solaris features: How to monitor SMF services via mail? - c0t0d0s0.org

2010-11-20T16:56:49Z

Delicious/rjw1: KVM Create Guests - Community Ubuntu Documentation

2010-11-19T23:20:31Z

Twitter / rjw1: rjw1: @richardclamp ive eaten it all so no you cant :)

2010-11-19T14:35:39Z

rjw1: @richardclamp ive eaten it all so no you cant :)

Twitter / rjw1: rjw1: RT @voretaq7: . @rjw1 but NFS is the answer! The question was "How do I take down a whole environment by unplugging one server?"

2010-11-19T14:35:12Z

rjw1: RT @voretaq7: . @rjw1 but NFS is the answer! The question was "How do I take down a whole environment by unplugging one server?"

Twitter / rjw1: rjw1: so in fact it covers all the food groups apart from beer but that was handled by the pint of @kernelbrewery pale ale

2010-11-19T14:34:37Z

rjw1: so in fact it covers all the food groups apart from beer but that was handled by the pint of @kernelbrewery pale ale

Twitter / rjw1: rjw1: for those who care the menu describes it as "chefs burger with chefs chilli sauce, pickled scotch bonnet,bacon.blue cheese & fried egg"

2010-11-19T14:34:05Z

rjw1: for those who care the menu describes it as "chefs burger with chefs chilli sauce, pickled scotch bonnet,bacon.blue cheese & fried egg"

Twitter / rjw1: rjw1: @thrustvector theres chilli sauce under it.

2010-11-19T14:32:10Z

rjw1: @thrustvector theres chilli sauce under it.

Uploads from rjw1: 1666 burger @ dean swift

2010-11-19T13:09:01Z

rjw1 posted a photo:

£13.50

Uploads from rjw1: 20101119_001.jpg

2010-11-19T12:56:23Z

rjw1 posted a photo:

Delicious/rjw1: aggregate_examples - Munin - Trac

2010-11-19T10:31:59Z

Delicious/rjw1: stack_examples - Munin - Trac

2010-11-19T10:31:48Z

Delicious/rjw1: A few rake tips | R.I.Pienaar

2010-11-18T11:53:13Z

Uploads from rjw1: 20101106_001.jpg

2010-11-07T14:48:26Z

rjw1 posted a photo:

Uploads from rjw1: 20101104_002.jpg

2010-11-04T12:56:58Z

rjw1 posted a photo:

Uploads from rjw1: wild boar sausages and mash @ bermondsey kitchen

2010-11-04T12:44:17Z

rjw1 posted a photo:

bob's ramblings: beer! cider! perry! this week

2010-10-25T14:26:36Z

This week im going to yet another beer festival. The wandsworth beer festival at le gothique. I shall be there on Thursday.

You may also wish to know what the Bricklayer's in Putney is having a Herefordshire Cider and Perry Festival.

bob's ramblings: I seem to be older now...

2010-10-22T09:55:53Z

... no wiser though.

Anyway today is my birthday. The hangover from last nights drinking at the Hope has faded. So I can now contemplate more drinking. Kake and I are off to Viajante for lunch.

Then this evening you are all welcome to join me at the Dog & Bell in Deptford. Ive not booked anything and ill be quite happy to drink tasty beer on my own so dont feel you have to come. Deptford is a long way away for some people. ~~I expect to be at the pub no later than 17:00.~~ Hmm that sentence was a bit odd. I will be at the pub from 17:00 if not earlier and staying till they chuck me out or something like that.

bob's ramblings: im fully connected again.

2010-10-16T21:05:36Z

RGL is back as is my email and other things. So yeah if you mailed me anything important recently it may have bounced if it did you can mail me again now :)

also dont forget im having birthday drinks on friday. This has been you week before reminder :)

bob's ramblings: eeeek! no email.

2010-10-06T23:00:12Z

My colo box went boom yesterday. Therefore I have no email currently. If you need to contact me sms is probably best currently.

The colo box obviously knew we were planning to replace it with a redundant pair so got its attack in first.

bob's ramblings: cider festival!

2010-09-24T12:11:22Z

While drinking tasty beer at the bricklayer's last night it was brought to my attention that they are having a Herefordshire Cider and Perry Festival between the 28th and 31st of October. I thought several of you might want to know that. So there you go.

Is it pie?: First Pie?

2010-07-19T23:00:00+01:00

First pie?

Yes, this is pie. It is entirely encased in pastry.

bob's rugby world cup: Rugby World Cup 2011 here I come

2010-07-03T23:37:00+01:00

On the 1st of July I got confirmation that my application for tickets for the rugby world cup in New Zealand was successful. I have tickets for all the England games, all pool games in Christchurch, the Christchurch quarter finals and the bronze final. Tickets for the semis and the final are by ballot nearer the time.

Now that I have the match tickets its time to start planning the rest of the trip. My dad has probably already found us accommodation near Christchurch for the duration of the tournament. All I need to start looking for is round the world plane tickets. I intend to make a tour of it. If nothing else I have plans to be at the Reno Worldcon.

bob's tech ramblings: Generating a SSL certificate with Capistrano

2009-08-30T16:18:17Z

Capistrano is useful for deploying ruby applications. It can also be used to help with configuration and setup of things related to the applications

Such as creating the ssl keys and certificates for the demo and staging sites. I've always used an openssl one liner to do this but I still needed to fill in the details for the certificate. Which is less that ideal if you want to automate the creation of the keys and certificates. So I dug around and found the right incantation to pass the certificate details to openssl. I then made this into a capistrano recipe.

namespace :sslcert do

  desc "create a self signed ssl cert"
  task :create, :roles => :web do
    sudo "openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /etc/ssl/private/#{application}.key -out /etc/ssl/certs/#{application}.crt  -days 9999 -nodes -subj \"/C=GB/ST=England/L=London/O=#{application}/OU=IT/CN=#{servername}\""
  end
end

As you can see the magic happens with the -subj option.

This recipe puts the ssl certificate and key in the default location for them on debian. You could of course change this and then not need to use sudo. In my actual work version I also make sure this recipe doesn't run on production deployments since they should be using real ssl certificates.

bob's tech ramblings: An Apache holding page with mod_rewrite

2009-08-16T16:18:17Z

On Thursday the Randomness Guide to London was probably the target of a ddos attack. The machine it was hosted on went to load of about 60. Which is fine since its solaris. The main problem was when the machine exhausted its memory and started to swap the machine would become unresponive.. To mitigate this I dropped the number of concurrent connections apache allowed. The machine suffered less but the website was still unusable because you were fighting to get one of the limited number of available connections.

Since I was in the pub the other administrator of the Randomness Guide to London was renaming the CGIs so that load would drop and she could get on to it. When I got back I whipped up some mod_rewrite rules such that we could see the site but everyone else got a holding page. 10 minutes after this the ddos stopped. So it was a bit late. However a holding page is still a useful thing to have.

The next morning I refined it a bit to be more intelligent and return a 503 which is the correct status code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/holding.html -f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/holding.enable -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !holding.html
RewriteRule ^.*$ /holding.html [R=503,L]
ErrorDocument 503 /holding.html

First turn on the rewrite engine. Then the conditions for which the RewriteRule applies

Don't match an IP address. So you can see the site.
Make sure holding.html exists
Check for the existence of a file called holding.enable. This is the means by which you turn holding page on and off.
Don't apply the rule when serving holding.html

Then the rule itself. Which basically redirects anything to the 503 error page. Which you then set as holding.html

That's all you really need although at work I add an extra line to help stupid web caches not keep on showing the error page after the site is back.

Header Set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-store"

bob's tech ramblings: Testing perl 5.10.1-RC1

2009-08-10T16:18:17Z

The first perl 5.10.1 release candidate was released the other day. As mst says if you don't test it now and it breaks for you when its released its your fault. As a good cpan tester I've added it to my testing setup.

Since I care about OpenGuides for the Randomness Guide to London I made sure to submit a test report for it.

While I was doing this I also added perl 5.8.9 to my setup. I also changed my setup slightly by pre-installing Moose and Catalyst since thats what all the cool perl programmers are using these days. Since installing and testing their dependency chains was burning a lot of cpu, time and bandwidth every time a new module based on them was updated or added to CPAN

bob's tech ramblings: Setting up a Signed apt repo

2009-08-07T16:18:17Z

So you've set up a apt repository following dean's excellant instructions and youve tried to install a package and got the following warning

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!

At this point you have several choices:-

press yes and carry on.(not that useful if youre using puppet to install stuff)
echo "APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1;" >> /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99unauth
Set up a secure repository

Lets go with setting up a secure repository.

Make yourself a gpg key - gpg --gen-key
Export your public key to a file - gpg --armor --export $keyid >public.key. You will need this later
Create an apt-release.conf containing APT::FTPArchive::Release::Suite "etch";(Im behind and should have written this post a year ago) in your repository base.
Generate a release file - apt-ftparchive -c apt-release.conf release dists/etch/ > dists/etch/Release
Create a signed version - gpg --sign -ba -o dists/etch/Release.gpg dists/etch/Release

Your repository is now secure. Now you need to tell your machines about your key or apt-get will emit

W: GPG error: http://debianrepo etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY $KEYID

To do this manually you can take the public.key you generated earlier and copy it to your machines and then run apt-key add public.key

Of course in this day and age doing things like that for all your machines would be tedious so I use puppet with a class something like the following.

class aptkey {

  file { "/etc/apt/public.key":
    mode   => 440,
    owner  => root,
    group  => root,
    source => [
        "puppet://puppet/host/public.key",
        "puppet://puppet/files/public.key"
        ],
  }
  exec { "install-key":
     command => "/usr/bin/apt-key add /etc/apt/public.key",
     require => File["/etc/apt/public.key"],
     unless  => "/usr/bin/apt-key list | /bin/grep -q 'firstname.lastname'";
  }
  exec { "key-update":
     command => "/usr/bin/apt-get update",
     require => Exec["install-key"],
  }
}

bob's tech ramblings: Dean's Cron Commandments

2008-08-04T16:18:17Z

Dean wrote his Cron Commandments a while back but they got some link loving from Simon Willison relatively recently. The one he misses though is Thou shall not rewrite cron. Im looking at you backgroundrb and rufus-scheduler.

bob's rugby world cup: Result: South Africa 15 - England 6

2007-10-20T21:53:42+01:00

Bugger! well at least we lost our title in the final. South Africa have looked like champs all the way through. I dont think it was a try either.

bob's rugby world cup: Half-time: South Africa 9 - England 3

2007-10-20T20:48:58+01:00

Close, very close. South Africa were unlucky to not score a try at the end there. England certainly look a lot better than they did in the pool game. We still might do it.

bob's rugby world cup: Prediction: England v South Africa. The Final

2007-10-20T19:49:41+01:00

So somehow England have made it to the final. South Africa have looked good all tournament. This wont be the beating we got in the pool matches but I still think were going to lose. It will be close though. I think South Africa by 5.

Although ideally our forwards step up again and we win by 3 points or so. :)