MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

iMac single user mode networking

2019-01-22T08:00:00+10:00

From https://superuser.com/questions/442841/enable-ssh-on-a-mac-in-single-user-mode:

Go in single user mode (Command-S):

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.kextd.plist

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.notifyd.plist

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.configd.plist

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemon/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist

Hook up other computer.

ifconfig en0 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

iOS simulator carplay

2018-02-25T08:00:00+10:00

From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37469175/is-there-carplay-simulator-in-xcode:

Actually there is a CarPlay "External Display" that can be enabled, for it to show up you simply need to type in this command in a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.iphonesimulator CarPlay -bool YES

Then shutdown and restart the Simulator. Enjoy!

Book: Troubleshooting Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimizers

2014-05-20T08:00:00+10:00

My first book, named Troubleshooting Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimizers, has been published officially. Well, made available to Riverbed customers with access to the Riverbed Support website. It has been a multi-year effort and as usual the most difficult part was to get approval for external publishing.

The things that went smooth were the editing and the publishing: That approach was taken more or less from how the FreeBSD Project makes their documentation: The source is based on DocBook XML (Was DocBook SGML when I started) which compiles it into various formats like HTML, PDF and ePub. This makes sure you have the style and the content separated, so that even if you make certain style changes afterwards you just do it in the style sheets and it automatically propagates through the whole output without the fear of missing a part somewhere in the text.

But after two chapters of that SGML/XML, I had enough of the excess of markup tags like and which presence made my automatic reformatting habbit spending more time on the smoothness of the tags than on the content. Time for a different approach!

In the past I have worked with HTML, various *roff formatters and Perl's perldoc and ended up with a mixture of things: Use the *roff .-prefix to initiate a command, use the HTML h1-h5 and i/tt/b kind of tags for the commands and use the automatic approach of perldoc to know where the paragraphs end. And then you end up with something like:

.h2 Steelhead xx20 series models
 
The xx20 series models consist of a set of desktop models, 1RU
rack models and 3RU rack models. To upgrade between models, except
[...]
 
.h3 No route to host
 
A
.i No route to host
error is shown when the remote host does not exist and the router
on that subnet sends back an ICMP Host Unreachable message or when

After that a convertor changes it into a real DocBook XML document:

Steelhead xx20 series models
The xx20 series models consist of a set of desktop models, 1RU
rack models and 3RU rack models. To upgrade between models, except
[...]
Telnet failure scenarios
No route to host
A
No route to host
error is shown when the remote host does not exist and the router
on that subnet sends back an ICMP Host Unreachable message or when

which then gets converted into HTML or PDF.

Easy editing, easy markup, easy publishing. That worked fine. The book was used internally at Riverbed for training the new TAC engineers and everybody was very excited about it.

What didn't go smooth was to get the approval to publish it to customers. Everybody saw the value in the book, realized that education at this part could help releasing pressure on the TAC engineers and improve the customers Steelhead experience.

But nobody knew how to take up the book and help to get approval to make it available for the outside world. People who promised to help me moved outside Support or outside Riverbed, I was pushed around by various departments to the same various departments which already told me earlier that I should talk to the people who just send them back to me. It shouldn't be so difficult, the TAC does have access to the full contents of their own website and the TAC does publish KB articles of various quality levels without going through proper review before they get published.

So after three years of editing and publishing internally and trying to get it to the outside world, it has finally been done: My first book named Troubleshooting Riverbed(r) Steelhead(r) WAN Optimizers is available for the Riverbed customers. You can download it at http://rvbd.ly/1p5MMgu or http://supportkb.riverbed.com/support/index?page=content&id=S24051.

How I killed 13 500 000 pages in the Google search engine

2014-04-04T08:00:00+10:00

Talk about a loaded title, en par with the quality (or lack there of) of the various click bait titles on the postings I see on Facebook and friends...

I was told by my hosting provider that my index to the FreeBSD mailinglists at http://www.mavetju.org/mail/ was using more bandwidth alone than all of their public websites together. Now this is not much of a record, since they have only low-bandwidth websites, but still...

Looking through the logs, I saw that the Googlebot and the Bingbot and some bot from China were happily fighting over CPU and bandwidth to index all of the files. Going at it on a speed of about 50 requests per seconds for 24 hours per day.

So what could I do? Checking in Google for site:mavetju.org/mail/, I saw that there were about 13 500 000 pages indexed. For what goal? Not much anymore, I have stopped following all except the FreeBSD Announcement mailinglists a couple of years ago. I still use it on my laptops, but that is all.

So... That mailinglist archive has been shut down. You can still find the cached version of it in Google by using the above search terms, but that will disappear too.

And that is the story on how I killed 13 500 000 pages in Google. I wonder how much many computers in their data center that frees up for other things. Probably none...

Political spam

2013-08-28T18:00:00+10:00

Over the years, I have published various email addresses from the @mavetju.org domain in my weblog. They have been harvested by spammers. In this article, I published a From and a Reply-To field which don't exist as an email address: ryopdx@mavetju.org. It also published a Message-id: UHUh4a7dWj6_CpI3ZmfY@mavetju.org.

Imagine my surprise when I found two emails from Clive Palmer, the head of the Palmer United Party, in my mailbox:

From: clive.palmer@news1.palmerunitednews.com.au Subject: A Message From Clive Palmer To: ryopdx@mavetju.org

and:

From: clive.palmer@news1.palmerunitednews.com.au Subject: A Message From Clive Palmer To: uhuh4a7dwj6_cpi3zmfy@mavetju.org

Looks like he got his list of email addresses from a dubious source!

Organising a bridge tournament in a minefield

2013-08-10T18:00:00+10:00

Earlier this year Naomi obtained her bridge director status and is involved in the New South Wales Bridge Assocation. She is also directing at the Southside Bridge Centre and plays at the Port Hacking club. As they say, never a dull moment!

One of her ideals is to organise a bridge tournament in Southern Sydney and now that she is involved in the NSWBA this is something which might actually run! It's called the Inaugural Sydney South Trophy Day and if it's up to her, it will be the first of a yearly event. However, doing this without stepping on anybodies toes seems to be impossible.

Issue 1: The location. Naomi wants to run it at the Southside Bridge Centre because they can provide the room, cards, accessories for a price much lower than the rate at a commercial event venue company. Sounds reasonable... Well, not if you consider that a lot of owners of other bridge clubs wouldn't mind to have it at their place too. And if it is not at their place, preferable not at anybody elses bridge club. Seeing as if this might going to be a yearly event and thus the location might be somewhere else next year, that doesn't really come up in their minds.

Issue 2: The date. Naomi wants to run it on the Labour Day public holiday on Monday 7 October. That is the day that the Hurstville Bridge club normally runs. So the Hurstville Bridge club is angry because this is going to cut in their number of people coming.

The bridge community in South Sydney consists in general of old people: In the Port Hacking, Hurstville and St George clubs Naomi is the youngest by far, and no new blood is coming in. It is just a matter of time before they are gone. However, in the Southside, Ingleburn and St George Budapest bridge clubs are actively promoting bridge and get new people involved.

So... On 7 October there will be a bridge tournament, most likely visited by people who want to promote the game of bridge and see it continue in a healthy way!

Different kind of networking people

2013-08-09T18:00:00+10:00

In the first thirteen years of my working life I have encountered a lot of different people in the field of networking. And for some reason they were all skilled, experienced and willing to learn. They understood their stuff, in case of issues a pointer to the right direction was enough to help them out.

In my experience at the Riverbed TAC I have encountered several new kind of networking people, although I wouldn't call them all "networking" people.

You have the ones described above: Call in with an issue and just need a clue on where to start looking. They know their network and they know how the WAN optimization works. When looking at packets together and explaining what can be seen, they already know where to look before I can ask them "Is there anything in the network which would strip these TCP options?".
Outsourced network manager and network architects: Oh how do I pity you. Your company got this multi-million dollar contract for the network, but WAN optimization is more than the network. It is the servers and the clients too, but because you only got the network you are not allowed to talk to the company which is managing the servers and the company which is managing the end-user support. The company which is managing the servers will not tell you that they upgraded to a newer version of whatever application and blame the fact that half of the company can't retrieve their email anymore on you! You will never be able to optimize encrypted MAPI traffic because the team of the other company which manages Active Directory doesn't want your Steelhead appliance to be able to perform delegation, let alone be configured as a read-only Domain Controller...
You have people who have inherited a network and just found out that besides routers, switches and firewalls you have another kind of network equipment and they have no idea what... These are people who can be saved, if introduced properly. Explain what WAN optimization is, give them documentation, explain what the issue is and follow up a week later. If it works out, they will end up as the first group. If not, they will end up as the next group...
Outsourced NOCs. They seem to look at a screen and when there is a different colour than green they will identify the brand of the device and call the TAC. They refuse to do basic troubleshooting themselves nor learn from previous cases opened and need to be asked for the system dump every time they open a case. You will get emails from them every eight hours with the request for an update because that is when they handover their cases but don't bother to forward the next steps to the original customers because they are not online yet... Getting information from the device in question goes most of the time without a problem. However getting more information about the issue will have to go through the NOC, who rephrases it and forwards it to the user, who answers the wrong question and sends it to the NOC and who forwards it back to you...

Did I miss a category? Most likely because I have repressed them, very deep...

Some kind of image viewer...

2013-07-15T08:00:00+10:00

I am looking for some kind of image viewer... Wow, great description :-)

The background is that I need a way to collect and manipulate various images, screenshots of graphs of other applications like Wireshark and various other graphers, and then be able to easily resize these images (so the size of the data matches the size of the data of the other images) and move them around on the area.

So I need an infinite zoomable canvas with on it freely resizeable and freely moveable image objects.

If you know anything like this, and preferably cross-platform, please let me know!

Scared!

2013-07-11T08:00:00+10:00

The website reddit.com, self-proclaimed "Front page of the Internet", has one section which I like to visit while bringing my kids to bed: The [[//www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/][Ask Reddit] section, in which people post their comments on a certain subject. There are a lot of shitty questions which you can ask, but due to the moderation system I only get served the highly rated ones, plus if the subject of the question doesn't interest me I don't bother to read it.

Yesterday the one I read was "What's a story that you've heard that still gives you chills to this day?". Most of them are real-life stories and some made-up-to-scary-teenagers ones. This one particularly stuck with me, but didn't scare me when I was reading it last night:

A kid is playing in his room, when he hears his mother call him from the kitchen. He puts down his toys and walks down the stairs, when suddenly upstairs he sees his mother who says "Don't go there, I heard that voice as well."

Typical sitting-around-the-fire-and-scaring-each-other-story and it didn't bother me last night.

This early morning at 06:00, still dark, while hanging up the washing, I hear a sound behind the bins which are standing in the dark corner of the garden about three meters away from me. And the only thought that my scumbag brain could come up with was "I heard that sound as well."... Needless to say that I wasn't feeling happy anymore.

I got a medal!

2013-07-10T08:01:00+10:00

Last night the Safe Sets team finished as second in the Miranda Indoor Sports Center after two sets of 21-25 and 19-25. Team Cannonfodder became first and got a trophy, we got medal.

First medal after nearly three years of playing. Yay me! :-)