Renovation: Weeks 3 – 5

House Renovation

Well, it’s been a few weeks since my last update, but I was still out there once a week taking pictures. The changes have been less dramatic — but then it’s hard to get as dramatic as tearing off the kitchen and pulling off a chunk of a house.

So check out the week 3-5 photos. Note there are two pages of photos.

The lath and plaster is all down. So it looks really empty inside.

The foundation work starts Thursday and continues for about 2 weeks. Then the reconstruction will begin.

Here’s this week’s highlight:

It’s an old wagon that was in the chicken house. Because of the pickup that was in there, I had never been able to get a good picture of it before.

Today’s Political Puzzler

Politics

So recently the prime minister of Iraq criticized Israel for a disproportionate response in their attacks against Lebanon. I don’t know his exact words, but in general, I agree with that sentiment.

It’s no big surprise that Bush and Republican leaders have all been rushing to support Israel and taking their sweet time before helping with a ceasefire, and taking plenty of time with that process, too.

So it’s also no big surprise that a number of Washington politicians mustered up a good deal of righteous-sounding moral indigniation at the Iraqi PM. There were some that boycotted his address to Congress today. Lots of fiery rhetoric.

But here’s the surprise: it was the Democrats doing this.

Huh?

The populist party, the one that’s supposed to be valuing life and perhaps has recently started to grow a backbone in opposing ever-broadening war, is now in support of Israel’s tactics?

I think it’s all politics. The Republicans don’t want to criticize the PM because he’s part of the process their party started. And the Democrats want to pander to their base and criticize anything related to an unpopular war.

I don’t think very many people in Washington from either party have genuine ethics these days. They just take whatever moral position they think will win votes.

Thoughs on cfengine, bcfg2, and puppet

Software,

Yesterday I posted about my first steps with cfengine. By the end of the day today, I had things far along that I can:

  • cdebootstrap a directory
  • Run a special cfengine script to get the base files like /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts set up
  • Bring it up in Xen, apt-get install cfengine2, and use cfagent to bring up the rest of the system and install the necessary base packages (like xfsprogs)

Very nice.

I’ve had a few annoyances with the cfengine packages support, which doesn’t quite seem to work as documented al the time.

I also took a look at bcfg2 thanks to a comment yesterday. It looks very interesting, but I have a few gripes about it. I find cfengine files easier to read. I can look at a file, having never used cfengine before, and have a reasonable idea of what is trying to be done and how it will be accomplished. I can’t say the same for bcfg2, plus bcfg2 uses XML config files (ick) and a bunch of small otherfiles. While the architecture as the authors have described it certainly sounds appealing, I’m not sure that bcfg2 is a simple as cfengine. I am a strong believer in the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. But THANKS to the person that left the comment, and I hope that bcfg2 continues to evolve and provide an alternative to cfengine.

I also looked at Puppet. This thing looks very slick. Seems to be cfengine with a nicer syntax. On the other hand, it’s not really clear that anybody is using it. That makes me nervous — this is the kind of thing that can seriously harm machines if it does something unexpected.

First steps with cfengine

Software

This afternoon I started looking at cfengine. In very little time, I’ve already set up rules that can bring a system from pretty much cdebootstrap state up to a minimal production system in our environment. I’ve still got a little ways to go, but it’s already hacking on /etc/hosts, hosts.deny, sources.list, installing appropriate Debian packages for our systems, etc.

It’s come a long way since I last looked at it six years ago.

One thing I can’t figure out…

I have a /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf file that contains, among other things, this:

Director {
  Name = backup-dir
  Password = "foo"
}

Director {
  Name = backup-mon
  Password = "bar"
  Monitor = yes
}

I can’t figure out how to make cfengine delete just that second section. I tried this:

       BeginGroupIfLineMatching "  name = .+-mon"
         IncrementPointer "-1"
         DeleteToLineMatching "\}"
         DeleteNLines "1"
       EndGroup

But it seems that the pointer is never actually being decremented, even when examined under verbose mode. That is, it leaves the leading “Director {” line in the file.

Something I can’t understand

Politics

I can’t understand Bush’s (and the typical Republican position in general) opinion on life issues. He recently said that it is wrong to “destroy life to save life” and that every being is a valuable person in the context of the stem cell debate. He also said last year that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the Iraq war.

So, here’s a Handy Chart:

Topic Bush Theory Bush Moral Judgement
Death penalty Kill known murderers so others won’t kill more people OK
Iraq war Kill 30,000 Iraqi civilians during operation to overthrow Iraqi government OK
Stem cell research A small minority could become babies if implanted Wrong
Abortion Killing an unborn person Wrong

I can’t figure out any possible way that the first two should be OK for someone that believes that the last two are wrong.

In fact, to me, the items in this list that most clearly are wrong are the first two. There is no question about whether life has begun with them. Treating 30,000 people as regrettable results of an operation is not treating them with full human dignity. 30,000 people were killed. That’s more than 10 times the number of deaths from Sept. 11.

RedHat Gripes

Linux

Lately we are looking at groupware options, and have been looking at Scalix and Zimbra. We may need the features in the proprietary versions of these products, unfortunately.

So I downloaded an evaluation copy of Scalix.

They say they support RedHat and SuSE. Fine, I think, I’ll just alien the RPMs to debs and be happy.

Not so fast. They have a whole proprietary install system. They check for /etc/redhat_release or /etc/SuSE_release (or something like that) and do different things depending on what is there. Ugh. Why can’t these proprietary vendors just target LSB? The differences seem mostly related to init anyway.

So I touch /etc/SuSE_release into existence, run the installer again. It complains that DISPLAY is not set. UGH. I log in with ssh forwarding, to root (sigh), and run it again.

Now it complains that the SuSE_release file doesn’t contain a valid release. I google a bit, but the file format doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. I extract it from an RPM somewhere, but no luck.

So, I figure at this point, let’s try an actual RPM distro. I’m running this in a Xen domain anyway, so it should be no big deal, right?

I think CentOS will be a good choice. It’s RHEL with the non-free stuff stripped out. And they support RHEL and don’t need any non-free stuff. I google, and find instructions for installing via rpmstrap for Xen uses.

Let me say, rpmstrap is not nearly the nice tool that cdebootstrap is. rpmstrap totally hosed the networking on the Xen host machine, requiring me to reboot to get it back to proper state. The resulting install wouldn’t boot, either — I later found out that, even though I listed explicit devices in /etc/fstab like usual, it requires labels on all my partitions to boot. Ugh. There are a host of other problems with the rpmstrap-installed chroot, and it’s broken beyond my ability to repair due to problems with the rpm database.

So then I downloaded the “Server” CD for CentOS, which is supposed to have just the stuff a person would need for a server, and leave off all the graphical tools, multimedia, etc. I fired up VMware and did an install. Then I booted Debian From Scratch in VMware and used tar and netcat to copy the installed image over to Xen.

I got it booting fairly easily. But now I start to remember why I had this instinctive gag reflex last time I used RHEL.

First off, the network configuration, by default, is tied to the MAC address of your ethernet card. So if you replace your Ethernet card, your network is broken by default.

Then, there’s the way the network is brought up. It uses arping as part of its procedure to bring up a NIC. If it sees a reply anywhere on the network with the IP you’re trying to assign, it leaves the NIC half-up — it’s been ifconfig’d up, but without an IP. So that’s right, if somebody happens to have a rogue device plugged in at the moment your server boots, your server will come up without a network configured. This is *Enterprise* Linux and it’s pulling this sort of thing. Terrible design.

Next, there’s the way the network is *configured*. There are commands such as system-config-network-tui, -gui, -cmd, -druid, etc. I go for -tui. to start with. It’s a dialog-like interface, and asks the basics like IP address, etc. It doesn’t have any way to configure more than one Ethernet card that I can tell. And some of the settings — like nameserver — apparently require you to press F12 to visit. But the program doesn’t recognize F12 as sent by an xterm, so it doesn’t work.

All the other options require X. So, I reluctantly ssh -X into it as root and run system-config-network-gui. It doesn’t work — complains it can’t find DISPLAY. Strange, I think; DISPLAY is set properly to localhost:whatever. It turns out that /etc/hosts is empty by default, so the thing can’t resolve localhost! Argh. I add a line to /etc/hosts and it fires up.

This tool works decently. I save, uncheck the tie to a MAC address box, and exit. I then think it might be good to fire it up again and see what it did. I try running it again, and get the same error about DISPLAY. The stupid tool blew away /etc/hosts and replaced it with an empty file! This is NOT what I would expect from an Enterprise Linux. You don’t blow away a config file the administrator touched without asking, EVER.

Next, I figure, let’s try installing the XFS tools so I can switch the root filesystem to xfs. I start with “yum update”, which doesn’t quite do what I expect. (It is more like apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade) So I hit Ctrl-C, but — surprise — IT DOESN’T WORK. I press it a few more times, and it seems to just make the downloader cycle through mirrors because of a “download error”. So I hit Ctrl-Z and kill %1. I have my prompt, but it’s STILL DOWNLOADING STUFF and spewing all over my console. Ugh.

I finally use ps and kill -9 and eventually get it killed off. Stupid thing.

I don’t understand why anybody would want to use RedHat Enterprise Linux in an enterprise. It seems more suited to a hobbyist system at home. From reading some forums, it seems there are quite a few people out there using Debian for enterprise systems for similar reasons.

So now, maybe I’ll have the chance to actually try Scalix.

(BTW, our intern got Zimbra installed on Debian just fine, so that’s a plus for it.)

Am I being scammed?

tc1100 tablet, , , ,

So today my auction for the tc1100 tablet PC ended. The winning bidder:

  • Is registered to eBay with a Malaysia address
  • Wants me to ship to a Nigeria address (I specifically said in the auction that I do ship internationally, but I ship only to PayPal verified addresses — and I doubt that anybody in Nigera has one)
  • Uses the name “Strong Buyer” in e-mail From line. (There was a real-sounding name in the message from eBay, and the person wants me to ship to a “stepson” in Nigera, also with a real-sounding name)
  • Only registered on eBay today
  • Asked me to send it via DHL, which costs about $250, compared to about $70 with USPS Global Express Mail to Nigeria
  • In the auction, I asked people to “ask the seller a question” to get shipping quotes to their country before placing a bid. This person didn’t (several others did).
  • Has a free throwaway email account (not as well known as hotmail, but the same sort of thing)

I replied to the buyer’s e-mail giving shipping prices to Nigeria and Malaysia, and restating my policy of shipping to only PayPal Verified Addresses.

So what do you all think? Is this a scam?

I was shocked at the amount of scams that sellers on eBay are exposed to these days. I’ve never seen this before, even just a few months ago when I sold my last item on eBay. But with this one, spammers and scammers are using the “ask seller a question” interface. One person tried to get me to use an eBay phishing clone site. Quite a few tried to get me to sell to them off eBay, to people in China, using a non-reputable billpay service. And there was just some generic spam.

So all that, plus the fact that they want me to ship to Nigeria, plus the fact that the person just registered on eBay today, is making me nervous.

So it seems odd, but I can’t quite work out how somebody would actually defraud me here. Also, I’m interested in what I should do if it is a scam.