Skip to content

Entries tagged "fail".

Spotify, Spotify...

Today I wanted to give Spotify a try as I have heard they released an alpha native version for linux.
However when I went to their site to download the client I got this:
So how do you get it? We’ve packaged the first release as a Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package.
Wait, what?
Since they don't release any source code you'd think they could at least release some generic unpack & run packages so everyone can use it...
Spotify, If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well!
Anyway, I converted those deb packages to RPM using alien and you can download them from here:
http://dl.nux.ro/spotify/
I installed them with the following command:
#rpm -ivh spotify-client-qt-0.4.7.132.g9df34c0-2.i386.rpm spotify-client-gnome-support-0.4.7.132.g9df34c0-2.noarch.rpm --nodeps
They appear to install and run, however I cannot login (maybe because I use the free version of the account[1]):
$ spotify 
04:15:40.619 I [offline_authorizer.cpp:156] Unable to login offline: no such user
04:15:42.801 I [ap:1387] Connecting to AP B2.spotify.com:4070
04:15:42.829 I [ap:937] Connected to AP: 78.31.8.17:4070
04:15:42.894 E [ap:3285] Connection error:  406
04:16:04.565 I [offline_authorizer.cpp:156] Unable to login offline: no such user
04:16:05.492 I [ap:1387] Connecting to AP b1.spotify.com:4070
04:16:05.506 I [ap:937] Connected to AP: 78.31.8.15:4070
04:16:05.586 E [ap:3285] Connection error:  406

[1] - Yes, their offer is very good and affordable for most people and many dickheads in the music and film industry should learn from them, however they have no excuse for not releasing a decent linux client. The day they do that I'll seriously consider to pay.

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo mail = fail. Can't wait for this shit service to just die.
Their web interface is horrific, their anti-spam engine misses too much stuff and some times my emails don't reach their recipients (false positives on their part probably) or they hit the inbox severely delayed (I noticed sometimes it can take up to 24h, even more).
Whoever reads this message and is using Yahoo email service: STOP. IT'S JUST NOT RELIABLE.

How to pronounce linux

Apparently some people[1] don't know how to pronounce "Linux".
Here's Linus pronouncing it:
http://dl.nux.ro/audio/linus-says-linux.oga

[1] - http://www.sys-con.com/node/1523620
"What is Linux? Linux (pronounced “Line-ooks”) is a computer Operating System kernel developed by Linus Torvalds."

Listing your own customers in Spamhaus RBL

Recently I had problems with a web server denying connections (HTTP error 406) from a certain IP address.
At first I thought it was because of some wacky firewall or tcpwrapper rule.
I couldn't be more wrong - It was mod_security verifying the remote IP against Spamhaus RBL...
While it may seem like a good idea at first, turns out it is not:
1. Because it slows down the request (as Apache has to lookup IPs against the RBL all the time).
2. Some IPs are in a RBL for the wrong reason.

As it turns out that particular IP belongs to BT,
and BT in their infinite wisdom decided to list in Spamhaus a good part of their IP space... Cool, huh?
More info here (and a screenshot for posterity here).
You got to love the corporations!

Rubygems is a mess

The gem system is a mess.

Someone has seen the light - coming back to Vim

Why would you want to ditch textmate for Vim?
Well, we all know Vim is the mother of all editors, but here's the story for those who don't:
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/

The distros killed Python

Have the distros killed python?
Distros keep python alive in the "real" world where you need stuff running reliably and securely for many years!

Not only that, distros will keep any language alive, as long as there is some sort of initiative from its devs to make it available for longer terms (to hell with rubygems since we're at it!).

MPAA & AiPlex websites attacked from low orbit

Is it the Klingons? No. Is it the Wraith? No. It's the P2P "pirates"!
Last week the good people at MPAA and AiPlex got themselves an early Christmas present and got attacked by the "anonymous internet". I cannot but grin, as in (a very satisfied) GRIN :-D
Yeah, I know it's childish and all but still...

:-D

More details here.

Ubuntu + Empathy + Intl = fail

.

What's with TurkTelecom and gays?

Huh?

Useless sysadmining

Stuff every sysadmin should read:
http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html

This is fuckin big: Sunde working on an alternative to ICANN

This has definitely made my day, no - my week, actually this makes the whole year look better:
A small tweet turned into a lot of interest.

We haven’t organized yet, but trying to. The background for this project is that we want the internet to be uncensored! Having a centralised system thatcontrols our information flow is not acceptable.

By using existing technology for de-centralisation together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away. We’re not going to re-invent the wheel, we’re going to build on existing technology as much as possible.

There will be a press release shortly with more details.

If you’re interested in talking to us, we’re at the IRC channel #dns-p2p on EfNet.

http://p2pdns.baywords.com/2010/11/30/hello-world/
http://www.osnews.com/story/24079/Sunde_To_Launch_Open_Distributed_Alternative_to_ICANN
Good luck, Sunde!

Free software banned from Microsoft Marketplace

Apparently Microsoft has banned free software from Microsoft Phone Marketplace.
Does this mean that the new Nokia phones bundled with M$ software won't run free software out of the box?
Thanks! Now fsck off and die!
I hope Android eats you alive.

I'm a PC

Hi! I'm a PC!
Hi! I'm a MAC! - No, you are not! You are also a _PC_!
I kindly ask all people with little or no computer skills (especially some of the idiots in advertising) to read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer:
A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price 
make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no
intervening computer operator.
....

RSA recommends to turn off Selinux

From Dan Walsh's blog I got the LOLWTFFAIL of the day: famous security company RSA recommends to have Selinux turned off in order to use their product.
Really? Really??! Yup, really.
Let's not forget RSA and fuck-ups can go well together. Take this for example: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/052611-lockheed-martin-outage.html

Oh, and they still use "netstat" to generate entropy for their crap products... years after we've had /dev/urandom ... By now even the chickens are laughing.

Enjoy: http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/48571.html

Stop using Godaddy

There's more and more bad stuff I keep hearing about Godaddy. So please please take my advice and stop using them. Here's some reasons why:
- They're Microsoft arse lickers: link.
- The owner is an elephant MURDERER: link.
- They support SOPA, the infamous piece of legislature that's going to fuck up the Internet, at least a good part of it: link.

There's also a heated Reddit debate about Godaddy and Sopa: link.

If you're looking for an "honest" registrar, I've had a pleasant experience with Gandi.

Later edit - Here's a tutorial on how to move from Godaddy: http://blog.jeffepstein.me/post/14629857835/a-step-by-step-guide-to-transfer-domains-out-of-godaddy. This tutorial shows how to move to Namecheap - which oppose SOPA, but under the circumstances I'd really try not to host anything in the USA.

EL6 deps for Oracle11g

The pile of shit called Oracle data base (11g) needs a crapload of deps. This is for 64 bit OS:
yum install libgcc.i686 nss-softokn-freebl.i686 glibc.i686 libaio.i686 libstdc++.i686 ncurses-libs.i686 readline.i686 libICE.i686 libtool-ltdl.i686 libSM.i686 libuuid.i686 unixODBC.i686 libXau.i686 libX11.i686 libxcb.i686 libXext.i686 libXi.i686 compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libXt.i686 libXtst.i686 libaio-devel.i686 unixODBC-devel.i686 glibc-devel.i686 kernel-headers libstdc++-devel elfutils-libelf-devel mpfr libXmu libXxf86misc glibc-headers libXxf86vm xorg-x11-xauth cpp libtool-ltdl unixODBC cloog-ppl ppl libmcpp mcpp xorg-x11-server-utils compat-db42 compat-db43 libdmx libXxf86dga libIDL ORBit2 GConf2 libbonobo gtk2-engines shared-mime-info libdaemon avahi avahi-glib gnome-vfs2 xorg-x11-utils compat-libstdc++-33 celt051 libXp ConsoleKit-x11 xorg-x11-xinit glibc-devel gcc compat-gcc-34 ncurses-devel gcc-c++ libgnome readline-devel compat-db libaio-devel unixODBC-devel compat-gcc-34-c++ libgcc nss-softokn-freebl glibc libaio libstdc++ ncurses-libs readline libICE libtool-ltdl libSM libuuid unixODBC libXau libX11 libxcb libXext libXi compat-libstdc++-33 libXt libXtst libaio-devel unixODBC-devel glibc-devel

This video is not available in your country

Today I was browsing "The big bang theory" IMDB page to see if there are any new episodes. And there were.
I noticed on some of the episodes you have a link: Watch on Amazon. Great, I said, but then, bam: "This video is not available in your country" (I'm in UK now).





Question: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY COUNTRY?


Anyway, they're bloody liars, the video is available in my country and any other country, cheers TPB for treating people equally and not being xenophobic or racist!

It's just that maybe they don't like my money, who knows.




I should also post about how random Youtube videos are not available in my country, lol. THIS WORLD IS RUN BY FUCKING RETARDS, I'm telling you - and we're letting them!

Cheerio

How about making it work first?

I stumbled upon this recently: http://doublespeed.virginmedia.com:

All I have to say about it is:

WHAT A FUCKING PILE OF MARKETING DONKEY DUNG!

Hey Rich, since you're so willing and able, how about making my lousy 10 Mbps Virginmedia pipe stay at 10 Mbps and not go down at 2 Mbps whenever I download something for more than 20 minutes?


And since you're at it PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE LATENCY AND THE PACKET LOSS 'CAUSE EVERYTHING'S FUCKING BUFFERING!

Kthxbye

Disable DNS caching in Firefox

Many times I have noticed Firefox spends quite a while "looking up" stuff when on the same system other programs are a lot faster to resolve.
Now I think I have found the culprit, actually Manu has found it:
Firefox seems to mantain its own DNS cache which apparently, contrary to its purpose, can slow things down if your ISP provides fast resolving server or if you run your own locally.
Anyway, this is the case for me so I followed Manu's advice and disabled DNS caching in Firefox and as a result average browsing experience does seem faster. How about that ...

The Linux desktop is just fine

<< Today I read this rant about how the Linux desktop is not free enough. I almost stopped at the first sentence but still read on. I have to comment on a few things, but of course I don't have a google+ account, it's not free enough.

Desktop Linux Owns Too Many Apps

Ingo Molnar says: Desktop Linux distributions are trying to "own" 20 thousand application packages consisting of over a billion lines of code and have created parallel, mostly closed ecosystems around them. Not really, distributions maintain packages and you are always free to join discussions with most package maintainers/distributions, it's often easier than you think (mailing, IRC, etc) and mostly doesn't require creating an account with google. If your distribution isn't open enough, change. >>

The rest here.

Paris - Spring 2012

So I'm back from a week in Paris. A few thoughts about it, with good and bads.
Bad news first:
- I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of immigrants, while not much more than in London these ones seemed more out of control[1].
- Quite an aggressive city, many people looked like about to burst, particularly some of the above. At times I was really afraid/nervous. I also witnessed for the first time a theft (in the Metro).
- Serious lack of green. Hardly any grass anywhere, even in the parks; the few green patches were fenced or guarded by "Keep off the grass" or similar signs.
- Traffic is crazy and the air is polluted. In some parks and other areas there's a very fine white dust which in combination with wind made walking around quite annoying.
- Lots of beggars and many streets and Metro stations were just _stinking_ of urine - including some higher profiles places; perhaps Paris needs more public toilets.

And some good things:
- The architecture of the buildings, whether new or old, is very nice. I was particularly impressed with the massive style of older royal/imperial buildings like the Louvre.
- The food.. Well, you can tell this nation has a cult for food. Lots of nice and various dishes, tons of cheese, sea food, bread, you name it - the French have it and it's Good. Probably the best in Europe.
- I want proper Boulangeries and Patisseries in London!
- A LOT less FAT people when compared to London, especially women. It's a bit ironic that for a nation with a passion for eating they're in such a good shape.
- Very FEW McDonalds, KFCs and so on. I don't know if I've seen more than 2-3 McDonalds the whole time I was there. That was quite nice.
- I loved their habit of taking a break at noon and go eat & drink in restaurants. This is obviously being done in many cities/countries, but in Paris is done at a very massive and visible scale. It was nice to witness and be part of it.
- Paris is a city with a high density and it's easy to cover good parts of it by foot; otherwise the Metro stations/stops are quite frequent and ticket fares are significantly lower than in London making it an efficient system to go around.
- The old cemeteries are very very nice, quiet, beautiful architecture and big names to visit around.

- To top it off, our hosts were fantastic! The weather, too, around or over 20 degrees the whole time we were there. No clouds!




[1] - Please don't label me a racist or xenophobe, I myself am a immigrant. I do believe all men & women are born equal, it's just that I don't condone certain behaviour that seems to be more frequent in certain circles or communities, that's all.

Please die, SURBL

Thank you, SURBL for sending me A ZILLION REPORTS FOR 1 SINGLE ISSUE, thank you very much, you are worse than the spammers.
Also thank you for having no phone number, no contact email address, no functional mailing lists where I can report this shit.

Please either implement some counters so you don't end up ABUSING abuse addresses or just do the world a favour and FSCK OFF AND DIE!

O'Reilly on DRM

"DRM seems a bit like a Neanderthal dragging its knuckles rather than using its larger brain and brawn to move forward and past stuff that did not help the species evolve. As an industry we need to evolve past the archaic DRM that's retarding growth and innovation in our industry. New DRM technologies are not innovation, they are a Neanderthal-like reaction. We need distribution innovation. We need learning science innovation. We need total immersion with content innovation."

Liked that? More here.

Are your politicians for sale? (I know mine are)


Story here.

ntop: service not configured, run ntop manually

So today after creating an ntop rpm package for EL6 I wanted to test this program.

After "yum install" I naturally tried "service ntop start" but only to get this:
Starting ntop: service not configured, run ntop manually


Of course, the service was not "configured" - by this ntop means that there is no admin password set for the web interface. To set a password you only need to do this:
ntop --set-admin-password=reallyBadpassword


After this ntop will start just fine. Enjoy!

Some webmasters are idiots

Kindly notice that not only he includes crap from half the internet, but he also managed to trigger Noscript's XSS alerts. Thanks Firefox and Giorgio Maone for protecting me from the retardedness of the web; this is by no means a rare case unfortunately.

Run your own realhostip

Realhostip.com is a DNS (and SSL) service run by Citrix to provide certain SSL functionality. To quote from the Cloudstack wiki:

Periodically we get questions asking about what realhostip DNS name is exactly doing in CloudStack. Realhostip.com domain exists to make HTTPS work across all CloudStack installations in different customer sites, without administrators to worry about how to load a SSL certificate due to deployment environment changes. SSL certificates are used in CloudStack system VMs to host HTTPS connections, for example, console proxy VM and Secondary storage VM, both uses it in its HTTP server. Realhostip.com SSL certificate is signed with wild-match addresses, all DNS names under *.realhostip.com are qualified to use the certificate. Because of the fact that every CloudStack customer has its own environment, every each one has their own sets of system VMs in their installations and each system VM instance has their own sets of IP addresses. To use ONE certificate to apply for all these instances among different customers, we came out with a solution by providing dynamic DNS service hosted by CloudStack, the DDNS service basically translates following form of DNS names to IP addresses xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.realhostip.com to IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx CloudStack has control of IP address in each installation, so whenever we need a SSL certificate, does not matter which customer is running the installation, with such DDNS service is available, we can always assign it a suffix under realhostip.com domain on top of ever-changing IP addresses, this is the trick we play to make ONE SSL certificate applicable universally among all CloudStack installations. In most of these cases, the ugly formed DNS name is not visible to end users, since its main purpose is to help establish secure communication channel (not truly to certify a site), however, there are cases that customer may do care, therefore, Console proxy VM does provide customizable way for users to use their own SSL certificates
Realhostip will disappear from future versions of Cloudstack as it adds extra complexity and makes the setup dependent on a 3rd party service, not to mention it requires one to have a working connection to the Internet which is not always the case with private cloud deployments.

With the introduction out of the way, let's proceed to the actual steps required to run such a service yourself. You will need 3 things mainly:
- the software who runs the wildcard DNS service
- a domain name
- a wildcard certificate for this domain name (can be self-signed if you don't mind the browser complaints)

Tip: You can also have a look at this if you don't want to run this DNS software: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX133468
In my setup I have dedicated a virtual machine with CentOS 6.5 64bit and a public IP address to run both the cloudstack management server and the "realhostip" DNS service. Read below how to install it (copy/paste style):
# get all the prerequisites
yum -y install git java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel
cd /usr/local
git clone https://github.com/ke4qqq/RHIP
cd RHIP
# RHIP was built with java 1.5 originally, we need to modify the build script to use 1.7
sed -i s/1.5/1.7/g build.sh
# build it
./build.sh
# build the zone file for your domain
cp named.realhostip.com named.mydomain.tld
sed -i s/realhostip.com/mydomain.tld/g named.mydomain.tld
# open named.mydomain.tld in your favourite editor and update it with your own details, the ns A entries should point to the local machine
vi named.mydomain.tld
# make sure there is no DNS server running on this machine already
# launch the program, it requires the following 4 parameters: domain name, zone file, port and log configuration file
# add the line below to /etc/rc.local if you want it to start at boot
cd /usr/local/RHIP/; setsid ./run.sh mydomain.tld named.mydomain.tld 53 log4j.properties
If at the registrar of your domain name you have pointed the nameserver to the box running RHIP then you should be able to already get some DNS records:
host 1-2-3-8.mydomain.tld
1-2-3-8.mydomain.tld has address 1.2.3.8


The software is installed, configured and running, now we need to configure the Cloudstack part of things.
Login as admin in the UI, go to Infrastructure, click on SSL Certificate (upper right), in the Certificate box paste the contents of your certificate (PEM/Apache2 format is ok), in the PKCS#8 Private Key field paste the contents of your key and in the DNS Domain Suffix field put your own domain, e.g. mydomain.tld.
After you click OK Cloudstack will restart the system VMs so they load the new certificate and next time you open a console you will be using your own service instead of realhostip.com

We are almost done. In many cases the certificate comes with an intermediare CA certificate. In my case I ended up with a PossitiveSSL wildcard cert from Comodo (the cheapest I could find), so when they sent me the certificate they also sent an intermediate one... The problem is the intermediate CA cert cannot be added from the web interface. What I did is to install phpMyAdmin on the virtual machine and add it manually from there. Here's how:
- install and login in phpMyAdmin
- select the "cloud" database and click on the "keystore" table
- you should see a row with your certificate from the previous step and one for realhostip.com, delete the realhostip.com one
- insert a new row, id can be anything, 2, 3, etc; name can be anything; in the "certificate" text box add your CA intermediate, key can be "null" so tick the null check box, domain_suffix is mydomain.tld
- the "seq" field is important, the intermediate seq number needs to be smaller, ie use 1 for it and 2 for the existing row, like here


Good luck!

"Fixing" Firefox

For quite some time now Firefox has a shitty behaviour regarding the address bar, which may be OK for grandma, but it gets in the way of power users.
I was too lazy to do anything about it until now, but it's 2015, I am getting old and less tolerant, so here are my pet peeves:
A - modify urls that do not look like traditional addresses and add a www prefix and .com suffix
B - send a single word address to a google search instead of opening it (kills internal addresses such as "http://wiki")
C - the protocol gets hidden, but when you copy/paste the url from the address bar it gets included, e.g. I copy "www.nux.ro", but when I paste it in an editor it actually comes up as "http://www.nux.ro"


So here's how to fix it - open a new tab, go to "about:config" and:
- to fix A search for "browser.fixup.alternate.enabled" and double click it so the value changes to "false"
- to fix B search for "keyword.enabled" and double click it so the value changes to "false"
- to fic C search for "browser.urlbar.trimURLs" and double click it so the value changes to "false"


That's it. Now you can enjoy a better browsing experience! ;-)