What criteria determine a valid username for the top web mail providers? This seems like it would be useful for filtering that list of a couple hundred thousand e-mail addresses we’ve all got lying around. Yahoo! Mail Basic Restrictions (yahoo.com, ymail.com, rocketmail.com) 4 to 32 characters Starts with a letter Letters, numbers, underscores and one period (.) No consecutive underscores or period, or combination of the two ([_.]{2} Cannot end with underscore or period Regex for invalid username:…

Sometime around duplicity 0.6.15 (ish) I started running into OSError exceptions that I just didn’t have time to track down. I’ve finally made time, though, and it wasn’t too hard to track down the culprit. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this only affects non-privileged users running duplicity. tl;dr choose a different TMPDIR.…

I’m creating a new virtual server, and I need a MAC address to assign to it. (My provisioning/build system requires pre-allocated MACs.) Instead of pulling one out of thin air, I thought I’d look up what address range I should be using. It seems surprisingly difficult to find a straight answer on this one, though. Locally Administered Addresses It looks like the 802 standard includes provisions for locally administered addresses versus universally administered addresses.…

Contrary to what Softlayer sales would have me believe, Softlayer’s CloudLayer service does, in fact, provide console access. It’s provided via a java VNC applet accessible from https://manage.softlayer.com. I use Linux on the desktop, though, so anything involving the words “java” and “applet” seems destined for failure. Fortunately, Softlayer is stand-up enough to provide the VNC connection information on the same page, so I thought I might fire up PPtP and give it a shot.…

With their 5.1 release, OpenBSD has added support for placing the root filesystem on a softraid(4) device for the i386 and amd64 architectures. Additionally, the amd64 port supports booting the system from a kernel on the softraid device. Previously, the way to provide system redundancy using software RAID was to use softraid for all of your filesystems except the root filesystem. The root filesystem would be copied to an identically sized partition on the second disk every night by the /etc/daily script.…

At SuperMicro’s Support site you can download a new version of your AMI BIOS to update your mainboard. They recommend you not do this unless you’re experience problems. I was experiencing problems, and – after trying and failing to locate a change log – I thought I’d give it a try anyway. So my options are: Download a Windows executable that will write a bootable floppy disk. Wait, what? Download a zip file containing a binary blob and a DOS executable to flash the BIOS.…

The excellent flashrd project makes easy work of installing OpenBSD as an embedded platform.  I had an excellent experience installing OpenBSD 5.0 on a PCEngines ALIX 2d13 using a 4GB CF.  A rough outline of the steps follows.…

I like a lot of windows.  A lot of them.  Today I bumped into a default limit on OpenBSD 4.8 and tmux(1) started returning “No such file or directory” when I attempted to create a new window.  This turned out to be a simple thing to solve, though.…

This is a step-by-step guide for how I remotely installed OpenBSD 5.0 to my SuperMicro X8SIE-LN4F based server.  This includes setting up IPMI and remote serial console.…

As I was futzing around trying to get OpenBSD 5.0 (amd64) to play well with the SOL provided by the BMC on my new SuperMicro server, I noticed something unexpected about the amd64 GENERIC kernel. I really want a reliable console on these new servers, and I’m pretty sure that if any OS is going to manage decent serial support, it’s going to be OpenBSD. Getting OpenBSD to use a serial console is well documented and pretty easy, but installing via serial console is a little more difficult.…