Quiet FAIL

Here’s me thinking “quiet” means “just tell me what I want to know”:


dev1578 ~ % yumdownloader -q—urls—source tmux
Loading “fastestmirror” plugin
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

  • epel: yum.any
  • common: yum.any
  • base: yum.any
  • site-packages: yum.any
  • updates: yum.any
  • addons: yum.any
  • extras: yum.any
    Enabling site-packages-source repository
    No source RPM found for tmux – 1.2-1.x86_64
    http://yum.any/yum/centos/5_1/site-packages/SRPMS/tmux-1.2-2.src.rpm

Moving on…

After nearly 5 years, I’m finishing today my employment at BT Ireland. I couldn’t be more thankful to the people who gave me the opportunity to join the ISP Systems team (you know who you are Dave :-) ) I’ve had a lot of fun, met a lot of nice people and learnt a lot but it’s now time to start something else, something new.

I’ll be starting my employment at Facebook next Monday and I can’t wait to meet my new colleagues!

I’m also hoping the weather conditions improve because public transportation has been fairly limited as of late…

WordPress-MU and ReviewBoard migrated to new VM

I’ve just finished the migration of WordPress-MU and ReviewBoard over to the new VM (hosted by Your.org). Let me know if you notice anything that’s broken.

Thanks to Kevin Day for creating the VM!

PS: If you can’t reach either of blogs.freebsdish.org or reviews.freebsdish.org, then the old CNAME haven’t expired yet (TTL was set to 8 hours). Try again later.

Blogs/Planet down for maintainance

Tomorrow, I’ll be moving the blogs.freebsdish.org WordPress-MU install from my own server to a VM graciously hosted by Your.org.

The service will be down from about 10am to 5pm GMT (worse case scenario).

Cisco CSS and Tacacs+

Long time no blog, I figured I could write something useful for a change.

I noticed a while ago that my /var/log/daemon.log was getting filled by warnings like these:

Oct 20 16:07:12 entropy01 tac_plus[1301]: connect from x.x.x.x [x.x.x.x]
Oct 20 16:07:12 entropy01 tac_plus[1301]: x.x.x.x: exception on fd 2
Oct 20 16:07:12 entropy01 tac_plus[1301]: Read -1 bytes from x.x.x.x , expecting 12

Well, after a good 15 minutes (and no help from Google), I found that you need to disable Tacacs+ keep-alive on the CSS like so:

CSS11503(config)# tacacs-server y.y.y.y 49 frequency 0

You’re welcome.

PC-BSD Install backend committed to SVN

I had a nice surprise reading my Facebook timeline this morning: Matt Olander announcing that Warner Losh committed the PC-BSD installer backend to the FreeBSD SVN repository.

I didn’t know anything about it before BSDCan this year, so here’s a quick summary of what I remember (and is of interest, to me at least):

  • Can install either PC-BSD or vanilla FreeBSD

  • Supports ZFS and GELI partitions

  • The backend is all shell and quite easy to read/modify to suit your needs

  • There are at least two frontends: a QT one (default for PC-BSD) and a dialog/curses (not quite sure, fairly recent in any case) one that looks like it would be a good drop-in replacement for sysinstall.

  • It supports a configuration file that isn’t dissimilar to the one you can use with sysinstall at the moment: the frontend actually only generates a config file and the backend does the job without intervention.

So really, how is that for morning awesomeness?

BSDCan 2010 Report

First I’d like to start this post by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for funding my trip. I’ve been contemplating attending BSDCan for years and without their financial support I would have missed it this year again.

I’ve been a FreeBSD ports committer since 2006. In 2007, my commit privileges were extended to the src tree. In 2008, Pav approached me to become part of the Ports Management Team.

I’ve had the chance to meet up with a few people (Ed Maste, Garrett Cooper, Tim Kientzle) and discuss the coordination of the work that is being done and will be done on package tools as part of Google Summer of Code. During the developer summit, Mark Linimon, Erwin Lansing and myself held a discussion about the current state of packages and how to improve the user experience. A few people offered suggestions and portmgr took good note of them. I did take some time to go through the problem reports assigned to portmgr. I also attended a chat about FreeBSD mirrors along with some members of core, admins and portmgr.

There were a lot of interesting talks during the conference and obviously choices had to be made on which ones I would go see. I really enjoyed Will Backman’s keynote. The talk about the PCBSD installer was very interesting and it looked like there could be a drop-in replacement for sysinstall in the very near future. Lawrance Stewart’s talk was a good summary of what tools to use when doing FreeBSD developement work.

BSDCan 2010 was a great time, I really enjoyed it and I feel it was time spent in a productive fashion. I would like to thank the following people: Dan Langille and his volunteers for the brilliant conference they put together, Sam Leffler / Philip Paeps / Gavin Atkinson / Jonathan Anderson for sharing a room with me, Jordan Hubbard for a memorable meal in the Works Burger in Glebe and Kevin Van Vechten for the invaluable insight on American Sports and the FreeBSD Foundation, once again, for sponsoring my trip.

Attending conferences makes the difference between being a contributor and being part of a community. It is the perfect opportunity to meet new people with similar interests, meet people you’ve been exchanging emails with (putting a face on a name) and make sure you stay updated with the works in progress.

BSDCan and Planet FreeBSD TLC

I’ve had the chance to attend BSDCan this year (thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation) and while Day 0 had been packed full of fail (some of it being caused by a lack of preparation, some was out of my control), the following days definitely made up for it. I’ll write a proper summary when I come back home, this isn’t really the object of this post…

I just noticed BSDTalk wasn’t aggregated on planet, it was only in the sidebar as a simple link. This is now fixed and I’ve also added Dan’s “FreeBSD Diary” and Dru’s “A Year in the Life of a BSD Guru”.

I’d like to use the opportunity to ask what other blogs you think should be aggregated and/or listed, also how you think I can make the blogs.freebsdish.org service better.

iPhone, Twitter and Push Notifications

So, everybody’s raving about the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, me included, but that’s not what this post is about.

A few months ago I got tired of not having push notifications in Twittelator Pro and then I realized that since I had Prowl installed on my phone, there was absolutely nothing stopping me from pushing the notifications myself. After writing my own Twitter watch shell script and having used it for quite some time now, I present you: twatch.sh!

To use, just make sure you have prowl.pl and curl installed in /usr/local/bin (or adjust the paths) and create a ~/.twatch.rc containing login=”yourlogin” and password=”yourpass”. Also you need to have a ~/.prowl file containing your prowl API key.

The first time you use it will push the last few mentions. Now you just have to add it to your crontab. Tada!

Get your fingers out…

... and send your Google Summer of Code application.

Deadline is in 3 days. Kthxbye