I’ll create a theme for today by sharing another program that I love: Grand Perspective. This one is OS X freeware that uses a tree map for visualizing your disk usage. You really wouldn’t know it by the poor choice of screen shots on their site, but this program is incredibly useful for making obvious where all of my disk space went. Bigger files get correspondingly bigger rectangles, so it becomes immediately obvious where that huge but forgotten download is hiding or which VM needs a good shrinking.…

I had such high hopes for Rackspace. I’ve been hearing so many great things, I couldn’t help but get my hopes up. My experience with Rackspace was anything but good, however. It’s not like my request was complicated. I wanted about 10 servers in managed colocation on a private switch behind a pfsense firewall. Managed colocation means that I’ll do all the work of configuring them. All Rackspace has to do is stick some servers in a rack and connect them with cables.…

I think spacewalk is great. It’s a great product provided for free and sponsored by Red Hat. In fact, I think it’s so great that it’s going to keep RHEL-based distros relevant for non-enterprise users for the next 2-3 years. Of course, then someone will add support for debian/unbuntu, but that’s beside the point. I think spacewalk is great. I’ve been using it to good success for a little while now.…

So… I’m using a dangerously long audio cable to connect my computer. It’s always caused a buzzing sound when connected to the amp but not my computer. No surprise there. After a recent hardware refresh, though, it started buzzing while the computer is powered up and connected. It will start buzzing about 10 seconds after a sound is played and continue buzzing until another sound is played. This behavior immediately made me think of a Karmic release note about putting sound cards to sleep.…

Notice a hell of a lot fewer log messages being reported since you’ve upgraded to a modern syslog supporting RFC 3339-style high-precision timestamps? Yeah, me too. It seems as though logwatch doesn’t support these timestamps, so it silently filters out all messages recorded by my rsyslog daemons. What’s worse is that I can’t easily figure out a way to disable that behavior. It’s implemented using an executable filter, and – while there’s plenty of documentation about how to override configuration in /etc/logwatch – there’s no documentation about how to *remove* a filter.…

After extensively testing freeswitch in my dev environment – and really liking what I saw – I installed freeswitch 1.0.3 to my production server… and immediately got a seg fault on my first configuration change. This was a bit perplexing. Throughout my entire testing period I didn’t experience a single crash, and here was one 3 minutes into my first install. The core file illuminated the fact that the sofia library in freeswitch was attempting to dereference a null pointer (in an error handling routine of all places) caused by an empty DNS response.…

I was poking around at the 1.3-ALPHA-ALPHA pfSense, and it looks like slbd is going to be replaced with OpenBSD’s relayd! I can’t tell you how happy I am about this development. Not only will relayd increase pfSense’s feature set by some order of magnitude, I have hope that it will make pfSense a viable load balancer. Though pfSense has load balancing features right now, its limitations make it mostly unusable for my applications.…

I haven’t examined the source yet to make sure that I’m right, but imperical evidence leads me to believe that racoon is only recognizing the first IP field in an x509v3 subjectAltName extension. That is, for the following certificate: X509v3 Subject Alternative Name: DNS:arthur.example.org, IP Address:192.168.35.24, IP Address:10.14.82.152 It appears that only the 192.168.x.x address will be accepted as a valid ID by racoon. Requests with an ID of 10.14.82.152 will be discarded with the error message: ID mismatched with subjectAltName.…

As I was recently signing up for Sprint’s mobile broadband solution, I was presented with the choice between the Sierra Wireless USB 598 modem and the older Sierra Wireless Compass 597 USB. I couldn’t find any explanation of the differences between them, so here’s what I’ve found so far: The 598 is prettier with bright, attractive LEDs. The 598 supports higher capacity micro-SD cards The 598 comes with a longer USB extension cable and a laptop clip to attach the modem to the top of your laptop screen.…

The Linux kernel supports encrypted loop images via the cryptoloop driver, so you can use losetup(8) to create simple encrypted loop devices for those situation when cryptsetup/LUKS/device-mapper is unavailable or too complicated. You’ll need the following modules loaded (or compiled in): loop cryptoloop twofish (or whatever algorithm you prefer) First you’ll need to allocate the file: # dd if=/dev/zero of=<file> bs=1k count=<fs-size-in-kilobytes> After that, you can ask losetup to loop it to the first free loop device and report back which it chose:…