Oh no! I guess it was a matter of time before it happened. I just got an email from LinkedIn where someone is asking for investment opportunities around the globe.
I guess this will lead to LinkedIn offering a service to verify users. For a fee of course.
OK. I admit it. I am an Apple fanboy. I feel like a burden has been lifted now that I got that off my chest.
While I am talking about my deep dark secrets, I have another thing I want to get off my chest. I use Apple's MobileMe service for my family's personal email. Yep, you heard that right. It's not something that I wanted to talk about openly until today. Why today you ask? Thanks for asking and a picture is worth a thousand words... so they say.
MobileMe at it's finest
If this were a one time occurrence, I would just shrug it off. No big deal right? It happens almost daily and before you ask wise guy, no it is not my network.
Unless something shapes up with MobileMe, I will have to ship out when my renewal comes up. This happens far to often for a paid service. Maybe they should reevaluate their relationship with Google and outsource the web infrastructure and email to them.
Update 10/28/09: I noticed that you can cancel your MobileMe subscription within 45 days of the purchase or renewal, so I went ahead and canceled for a full refund to my CC
This is a really easy fix to permanently add a reply-to to Apple's mail.app. Open a terminal and adjust the following by inserting the email address that you want recipients to reply to.
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To"="tracy.phillips@example.com";}'
If you later decide that is not for you, then you can get back to the default by issuing
defaults delete com.apple.mail UserHeaders
A week or so ago after I mentioned on Facebook that nothing was better than fresh homemade guacamole, I got several requests for my recipe and I thought I would share it by posting it on the ole’ blog.
It just so happens that we live only a few miles down the road from Fallbrook, California, the self proclaimed avocado capitol of the world. We have (really, really) fresh avocados most of the year.
Here is what you will need:
Take the avocado flesh out of it’s skin but cutting the avocado length-wise and twist the two halves to separate. Take the blade of your knife and kind of chop it down into the seed and twist it to extract the seed. Scoop out the flesh with a spoon. Put it into a bowl and mash it with a fork until it is at the desired consistency for you.
Take the rest of the ingredients above, dump them into your bowl and mix everything together.
I usually try to let it sit in the fridge for about 30 minutes so the flavors of the ingredients will mix. I say try because sometimes we just like to dive right in.
Tip: To keep your guac from browning, throw in a few avocado seeds into the bowl after you have everything mixed up.
While in a CentOS OpenVZ virtual machine the other day, I had setup sudo to root and encountered the following message:
[server][user][~]$ sudo su - Password: audit_log_user_command(): Connection refused
No harm in that, but it was unpleasant to look at none the less.
It finally got the better of me and I finally decided to go about fixing it.
This bug is in Redhat’s bugzilla located here. The fix is to patch your current version of sudo or use a newer version of sudo than sudo-1.6.9.p13. I opted to install the latest version of sudo as of t his writing, sudo 1.7.
This was a fresh install, so I needed to install a few rpm’s with yum.
[server][root][~]# yum install gcc pam-devel make
Then I did the build
[server][root][~]# wget http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/dist/sudo-1.7.0.tar.gz [server][root][~]# tar xzvf sudo-1.7.0.tar.gz [server][root][~]# cd sudo-1.7.0 [server][root][~]# ./configure [server][root][~]# make [server][root][~]# make install
That's all there was to it. Now you can sudo til’ your hearts content without that annoying little message.
Now I can finally get ready for the Super Bowl party
Have you ever seen this in your logs:
10:55:18 [server] nfslock: rpc.statd startup failed
If you have, you might want to check and make sure that you have portmap running
[server][root][~]# service portmap status portmap is stopped
Oppps. Portmap is not running. Let's check and see if portmap is configured to start at boot?
[server][root][~]# chkconfig --list portmap portmap 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off
And if it’s not (as is our case), configure it to start at boot:
[server][root][~]# chkconfig portmap on
Ahhhhh, thats more like it. This is how it should look:
[server][root][~]# chkconfig --list portmap portmap 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
And crank it up
[server][root][~]# service portmap start Starting portmap: [ OK ]
Now you can make sure it is running
[server][root][~]# service portmap status portmap (pid 15384) is running...
Just the other day I was moving /home out of the / partition and in doing so I wanted to record all of the actions and output so that I could save them for later user… or to blog about ;)
There are a couple of ways to go about saving all of that output.
The easiest way is to do this is to run the script command
[server][root][~]# script
By default, this creates the output as typescript
If you wanted to change the name of the output file, you would invoke it as
[server][root][~]# script output.txt
or any other file of your choosing.
That starts a recording session that will record what goes on during your terminal session.
If you want to record users shell session from login to exit
In the user’s .bash_profile, put something like
exec /path/to/ttyrec session-log-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M)
That will create a log file in the form of session-log-YYYYMMDD-HHMM
Pretty nifty stuff.
On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, LVM2 can be configured via the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file to exclude devices that the volume manager is not allowed to access. To exclude a list of devices, use the filter keyword to specify a list of accessible devices.
An example of the filter keyword is shown below:
[server][root][~]# grep filter /etc/lvm/lvm.conf filter =[ "a|loop|", "r|/dev/hdc|", "a|/dev/ide|", "r|.*|" ]
Pattern matching is based on the following logic:
NOTE: Be sure to only specify one filter line in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf since only one filter pattern is expected.
After changes are made to the lvm configuration file, it will be necessary to run the command vgscan in order for the changes to become active. Shown below is an example of running vgscan in extended debug output mode to activate the changes in the configuration file.
[server][root][~]# vgscan -vvvv
Have you been getting the following error in your log files?
Jan 7 14:10:30 [server] sendmail[2822]: sql_select option missing Jan 7 14:10:30 [server] sendmail[2822]: auxpropfunc error no mechanism available Jan 7 14:10:30 [server] sendmail: sendmail startup succeeded Jan 7 14:10:30 [server] sendmail: sm-client startup succeeded
The reason is that if the plug-in is installed, SASL tries to load and initialize all plug-ins that it finds. When the SQL plug-in is initialized, it needs a valid sql_engine (which defaults to ‘mysql’) and sql_select options.
So what is the solution? If you do not need the cyrus-sasl-sql rpm, then you can remove it like so:
[server][root][~]# rpm -e cyrus-sasl-sql
You could also do the following instead:
[server][root][~]# rm /usr/lib/sasl2/libsql.*
Renee and I thought we would try something different this year for our New Years Dinner. I had been wanting to try a recipe from my favorite cookbook, “Joy of Cooking”, for quite some time, so we decided to make U.S. Senate Bean Soup.
There is good reason this soup has been on the menu in the U.S. Senate’s restaurant every day since 1901. There are several stories about the origin of that mandate, but none has been corroborated.
According to one story, the Senate’s bean soup tradition began early in the 20th-century at the request of Senator Fred Dubois of Idaho. Another story attributes the request to Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota, who expressed his fondness for the soup in 1903.
Here is what you will need for about 6 cups of soup:
1 1/4 cups dried white beans
1 small ham hock
7 cups cold water
Bring the water to a boil, reduce and simmer until the beans are tender, about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Remove the ham hock, discard the bone, skin and fat; dice the meat and return it to the pot.
Add:
1 large onion diced
3 medium celery ribs chopped
1 large potato, peeled and finely diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
Simmer until the potato pieces are tender, which will take from 20 to 30 minutes.
The recipe in “Joy of Cooking” recommends that you take a potato masher and mash until the soup is creamy, we didn’t do that step.
That’s all there is to it and the results were yummmmy. This one is a keeper.