Yay!!! I get post yet another incredibly useful way of using ssh for something that most people would think was "stupid".

THE SCENARIO:
You're on a box with a much older version of NIX on it than you should be. In the middle of doing your work, you find the certain utilities are missing, or are old enough that they have some key features missing. What do you do? Tell your boss the box sucks, get a new one. Wipe the box and all the important data you're supposed to be working on with a new installation of some free *nix? Give up?

THE SOLUTION:
In most cases, if you're working on a box like this, it's likely that your dealing with text. That was what I was dealing with and the version of egrep was too old to parse the following:

egrep '(cn:|inetUserStatus:|mailUserStatus:)'

So what did I do? I took advantage of the newer egrep on my Linux workstation using ssh:

/opt/iplanet/server5/shared/bin/ldapsearch -D "cn=King of all Mail" -w iam1337d00dzg1v3m3w4r3z -b "o=peons.org, o=werule.org" "uid=*" | ssh eno2001@10.0.2.20 "egrep '(cn:|inetUserStatus:|mailUserStatus:)' -" | less

The end result is that the text stream from the old *nix box is sent via ssh to my workstation where I run the egrep using STDIO. Works like a charm! Hope this helps someone else.

Hmmm... this is interesting. Anyone else know anything about it? I love the concept. But can it work. I'm not talking about the financial aspect as that's less important. I'm talking about the claim that they can remain unbiased.

Even though my time lately has been quite limited both at work and at home, I just discovered something I do like about Multiply.com. I can compose a blog entry there, then switch to "edit HTML" and copy the HTML to here and quickly post without having to actually type out all the HTML. Pretty handy if I'm feeling in the mood to post to both locations.

So here I am minding my own business when a co-worker asks me to make sure that an important message comes through from a specific sender (cvent-planner.com). I figure... sure. Why not. I white list IP addresses for domains all the time when it comes to legit stuff. So I do a search in our spam filtering system and find the blocked message so I can force delivery to said co-worker. But then I notice that the reason it was blocked is that according to one of the blacklists that the filter uses (could be the spam filter vendor for all I know) cvent.com (AKA cvent-planner.com) is a known spammer.
 
So, to be sure I did a little googling and found a link to someones blog
  wherein he explains why he thinks they're a spammer. I tend to agree since any business that buys names and e-mail addresses from other sources to start sending out bulk mail to them, is by my own understanding a spammer. A little more looking around indicates that this company has no real "opt out" empowerment for the recipient of their crap. Even more digging indicates that the people who started getting messages from cvent.com never signed up for anything with them and that the companies that cvent claims to have legitimately acquired the addresses from know nothing about cvent.com. So either cvent is lying, or the companies that the recipients had previous business with are lying.
 
As a result, I removed the IP white list that I'd added only minutes earlier and suggested to my co-worker that I do a "per-user" white list for her and one other associate so they can get the cvnet.com stuff but not the rest of the organization. My main reason for posting this here is to get the blogger's site that I linked to above raised higher in the google page rankings. So one more time: Cvent is a spammer!!!!
 
I almost forgot to mention that cvent appears to be somewhat aware of their status. This is a modified version of the message they sent to the people they are attempting to spam:
 
**Attention [insert vendor] conference attendees**
The conference documentation links were sent out at the end of August and again in early September. If you have not received either of these emails, they may be getting blocked.
 
Please have your IT staff or email provider add the following domain to the allowed list:
  cvent-planner.com
 
Yeah. Right. Nice try.

Join in here for a discussion on religion, politics, genetics, playing god and war.

Join in here for doom and gloom, the space program, anti-capitalism, and OS wars all in one post.

Anyone else game?

RULES: These have to be things you can't do on other proprietary platforms easily (without being a programmer), at all, or without buying additional software, or pirating software. These don't have to be things that are necessarily special within the *nix world, just things that you know you can't do elsewhere. (ie. they can be commonplace *nix operations)

My list:

1. Logical Volume Manager: resizing an existing file system without the need for a restore. I have a USB hard drive for backing up my laptop. I'd originally "partitioned" it using LVM into two logical volumes that were each 50% of the total space. But I no longer needed the split and actually needed more space within one file system. So, I deleted the 'workstation' logical volume (kind of like a partition only WAY better for you non-*nix folks) that I didn't need anymore to free up space. Then I used 'lvextend' to grow the 'laptop' logical volume to include the newly freed up space. Then I used 'resize_reiserfs' to allow the existing file system in 'laptop' to become aware of and use the newly added space. Then I re-mounted /dev/backup/laptop and instead of 55 gigs, it was now 110 gigs.

2. Network Block Devices: exporting a DVD drive (not a share) from one system over the network so that it appears to be installed on another system. I've written a lot about this here and there on Slashdot as well as made a journal entry about it. Basically, by utilizing the network block device support in the Linux kernel and the 'nbd-server' and 'nbd-client' userspace apps, I was able to allow my Linux based media center to play back DVDs from my laptop's drive over WiFi (802.11g). I've also exported partitions, raw hard drives and logical volumes using NBD to remote systems. If you do this right, you can essentially make a "poor man's" SAN with a separate network for storage (which is why I have two cat 5e drops per location throughout the house)

3. Xine broadcast: Streaming DirecTV from my media center to any other PC or laptop in the house. By starting the 'xine' media player with the --broadcast-port=5555 option, other xine players on the network can use 'xine slave://ip_address:5555' to play back whatever is being played on the media center. My DirecTV playback consists of: 'cat /dev/video0 | xine --broadcast-port=5555 stdin:/'.

4. Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD): Utilizing the sound output on one machine for playback from another system over the network. Sure, Remote Desktop in Windows can do it, but not with the same level of flexibility. And, personally I think ESD sucks! I'm far more interested in Pulseaudio since it sounds MUCH more flexible than ESD and more robust. But that's an aside. Here's how I've used ESD to do something that you can't do on other platforms. My media center hardware is actually in the basement and the monitor and speakers are in the living room. The family laptop sits on the coffee table next to the couch. Since I have a toddler and don't want to wake her up while watching TV or movies, I set up a system where a double click on a media file gives me normal audio playback over the speakers. But what about headphones? The box is in the basement and an extension cable would be a bit much. So... in comes ESD. I set up Gnome so that a right click on the media file allows me to run my 'videoplay' script from a symlink called 'rvideoplay'. Within the script, the $0 argument is checked and if it is 'rvideoplay' instead of 'videoplay', then it runs an extra function within the script that launches an 'esd' server on the laptop and then has 'xine' run with an ESPEAKER variable that matches the laptop's IP and the esd TCP port number. So the sound plays over the laptop, which is where I plug the headphones in. So I can watch movies or TV with headphones on my large screen without bothering anyone in the house!

5. Old Hardware with Modern Software: The life of my PC hardware stays relevant MUCH longer than it would with Windows. I have a home server that is approaching ten years. It would never run Vista and could barely run XP Pro. But I can still run the latest apps on it from my chosen Linux distro with decent speed. It's a dual pentium II 450 Mhz with 768 megs of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 2 AGP card. (Yeah, it's THAT old clunker that I've been going on about for years here) It's running the latest Firefox, Thunderbird, Openoffice. I could probably even coax it to run Compiz if I wanted. There'd be no way to get IE7, or any of the latest MS Office stuff to run on it. And Aero Glass? Fuggitaboutit!

6. Xen: Hypervisor based full virtualization and paravirtualization. While you can virtualize on other platforms and Parallels introduced hypervisor full virtualization on the Mac when Apple went to x86, Linux was first on the scene with it via VMWare ESX. As far as I'm aware, when it comes to systems that the average person has at home, only Linux and some BSDs offer paravirtualization in Xen on that kind of hardware. I started about three years ago with paravirtualized Linux on top of Fedora Core 3. Just last year I made the move to an AMD 64 box to take advantage of Xen's hardware assisted full virtualization. So I have one box running nearly eight VMs that take the place of multiple systems right now. Not only that, but it's a desktop class machine from HP that I bought at Best Buy for about $800 and added RAM to. This kind of functionality is available to anyone who wants to spend the time to set it up and take advantage of it. It's the one place where I'm running Windows in my home. On a virtual machine...

7. Private VoIP over a darknet. Using a combination of OpenVPN to establish private networks between some of my friends and family, as well as the Asterisk PBX (running in a VM on the AMD 64) and some SIP softphones... I've established a private VoIP network that allows us to all communicate free of charge and with no eavesdropping (unless someone's really interested enough to snag all the encrypted packets and use huge machines to try and decrypt them ;) While this might be doable on other platforms, it's not been doable until relatively recently. It's been available a lot longer on the *nix side.

8. Rio Karma Digital Music Player: Using the USB interface on the player and Linux's ability to mount the device, I've been able to load up music from home while at work over a VPN connection with reasonable speed (thanks to the DSL line). My Karma thinks it's getting music from the local workstation, but it's coming via 'scp' from the file server at home over a VPN tunnel.

9. SSH: Tunneling VNC (bound to 127.0.0.1 so that no one can reach it via the WiFi without tunneling) and ESD traffic via WiFi to further obscure the data that traverses the WiFi (on top of the WEP encryption).

10.'rsync' + ssh + vpn + crontab = remote backups that are easy as hell and free. I have a server at my parent's house with plenty of disk space on it. Every fifteen minutes, it checks to see if there are new photos on my server at my house. If there are, it sucks them down so I have "offsite backup".

What about you? I also invite those who use other platforms to pull off their own Top 10 cool things that they can do that can't be done on *nix. Or... conversely, Top ten cool things I CAN'T do on *nix. Should be interesting.

For your viewing pleasure.

Because I have much more control and flexibility where electronic devices are concerned. Case in point:

1. A friend has a DVD that I'm interested in watching. So I rip it on his computer (Linux box) to an image using 'dd'
2. I have my Rio Karma with me and it has 17 gigs of free space. So I use the 'split' command to break the ~8 gig image into 7 files no larger than 1 gig and then save it to the Karma's "Taxi" file space.
3. I bring the Karma home intending to copy the files to my Linux based media center. It's in the basement (where it should be instead of looking ugly in the living room) and I'd rather not take the Karma down there. So...
4. I hook it up to my laptop and mount the Karma. The laptop only has 4 gigs free so I use 'cat' in combination with ssh to concatenate all the split files back into the single image over the WiFi onto the media center's HD.
5. I use 'xine dvd://movie.dvd' to play back the image as if it were the real DVD. Full menus and everything. :)

Can't do that anywhere else but *nix. Hence the love...

Finally. A "love machine" that is fit for the average Slashdot reader. Nay... the average Web user! I give you the (NSFW as if you had to ask) love lump. And it predates Fergie!!

(Damn. It's been almost two months since my last Journal. I've been TOO busy.)

My "vacation" from my job is over which means I should hopefully have a little more time to post again. What did I do on my "vacation": one month of hard, solid work in the attic in 90+ F heat. My body aches everywhere and that attic still isn't done. What is done: floor has been fixed, cat 5e for gig ethernet on second and third floors is in place with four drops per room, the entire house is insulated, the sealed off crawl spaces have been converted to storage with nice custom built (by me) insulated doors, a low ledge around the stairwell has been built up to three feet to be a bit safer than the original eighteen inches, removed the old nasty in wall gas heater and converted the exhaust port into a portable air conditioner vent, baseboards were removed for stripping in the garage to prevent lead paint dust from getting all over the place, just started patching and skim coating in order to get ready to prime and paint... I'm hoping to have the attic done by late Fall early Winter with only one day a week to work on it now.

Here at work, I've got lots in store for me. Plus I've decided to start taking on speaking engagements to evangelize free/open virtualization technologies to non-profits. So it'll be busy, but "good busy".

I haven't abandoned Slashdot for Multiply. There's still too many things I prefer about Slashdot over Multiply. I've just been way too busy at home and at work to post much of anything. The latest is that my MIDI keyboard of 21 years finally died. So I had to get a new one, which wound up being the Yamaha MM6 over the weekend. It's pretty decent. Not a total replacement for the Ensoniq Mirage, but it will hold me over until I can afford something better. Since I was keyboardless for a week and a half I turned my eyes to (repost from Multiply follows): ..polishing up my Photoshop skills. In GIMP, of course. ;P

So I've gone back to learning more about layer masks and channels. I found a few Photoshop tutorials and it's apparent to me now that if you really know the underlying concepts, it's not hard at all to duplicate the same kind of work in GIMP for most of the basic stuff. Photoshop has changed a lot, so I know there are some things beyond the well known professional print support that it can do that GIMP can't do in quite the same way. But this isn't meant to be a GIMP vs. Photoshop post so enough with that.

What I'm asking any of you Photoshop users out there:

Q. How do you edit a photo to remove stray hairs without making the subject's head look weird?

I'm hoping you can fill in the A. part of this. After some experimentation last night and little perusing of Photoshop tutorials on-line, Here's what I did:

I followed one tutorial's suggestion to go to the channels and look at each one individually for the channel that has the most contrast between the fly away hairs and the background. Once you find it, you duplicate it. You use the levels and other color correction tools to adjust the contrast to get the edges as well defined as you want them Then the painstaking part is where you use a mix of the lasso, fill, paint and erase tools to basically create a "mask". Hard black for the subject and white for the areas you want to cut out. You might need to re-adjust levels several times after you paint in/out the areas you do or don't want. Once your have just the silhouette of your subject, you can set the channel copy to a selection, then use that selection to delete (or fill depending on your goal) a layer mask in the layers pallet. I'd recommend using the feather command to soften your selection otherwise you end up with nasty jaggies that make the cut out object look very amateurish. It "sorta worked" for me. But it's still not quite right. So I'm wondering if any of your Photoshop pros out there have any suggestions as to what you do. (I'm specifically avoiding any mask plug-ins since I'm in GIMP and there is no such animal! :)

Anyone else doing this kind of thing in GIMP? If not, WHY (outside of professional print needs)? It's completely possible.

...you need serious help. Having grown up in a mixed catholic/fundamentalist christian home, I'm glad I escaped the lunacy that is modern fundamentalism (as well as the odious counterpart called Catholicism). Are there ANY religious people with common sense? Yes. I suspect there are. And if they exist, I suspect they find the site linked above both disturbing and darkly humorous. Unfortunately, those who believe in the notions that the site above espouses are also being armed to vote in 2008. We must stop them at all costs. They have no right to participate in the election unless they have two feet planted firmly on the ground and aren't dreaming of mansions in heaven.

Disclaimer: If you're religious and take offense to my JE, you might want to analyze why you take it so seriously. The Bible is only slightly historical and definitely not to be taken literally. Especially where future events are concerned. Because if you do take it literally and that seriously, then there is little difference between you and a follower of the writings of Nostradamus.

Thank you very much Justice Kennedy for taking the first step towards potentially endangering the lives of many young women, my daughter included, by upholding a federal ban on partial birth abortio(pba)n. Yes, pba is grotesque. Yes, it's a traumatic experience for the woman who may need to undergo it. But is it any more grotesque than what we do to innocent Iraqis? Is it any more traumatic than what our soldiers go through when they know they have to kill more innocent people, when they may not want to be in Iraq anymore? No. However, thanks to your swift thinking, you've now accomplished multiple goals. I can't credit you though. You're merely a simple pawn in what I guarantee will eventually become a real full blown war in America if your side doesn't change course.

Hey! Democrats!!! Look you gutless wonders... The Republicans just went nuclear for 2008! They have you checked an mated. You're fucked. Game over. 2008 is going to be the election that surrounds the issue of abortion. The Republicans are going to make it that. They know that their lunatic fringe voters will outnumber the pro-choice voters since most of America is too stupid to even think deeply about this. So if any of you run as being pro-choice, you're committing political suicide. And if you don't, then you risk not getting the support of one of your strongest bases: women. The same goes for ANY presidential candidate on the left with a history of supporting pro-choice. If you have any spine left in you, you NEED to find a way to simultaneously support choice and keep it OUT of the discussion for the 2008 presidential election. Sounds pretty impossible to me.

WARNING: Graphic stuff below. Skip this if you don't want to read my views on sex You have been warned..

On a personal note, since I have a daughter who will likely be affected by any future rulings against her own choices, I have every right to be even angrier than before. I'm going to say this to be completely clear... I believe in sex for pleasure. Pure pleasure. 99% free of the worries of pregnancy. That's the world my wife and I grew up in. I've been "screwing" happily since my mid teens. I want my daughter to enjoy that same privilege when she's ready too. Be that age 15, 17, or 21. But I want her to be able to enjoy it without having to worry that IF she gets pregnant, that she has to screw up the rest of her life by raising a child when she's NOT ready to do that. This is the simple and basic truth. We're ready to have sex and enjoy it, in many cases, long before we're ever ready to actually be parents. I spent over half my life having sex for pleasure and will continue to do so until I die. That is EVERY person's "right to life". And I sure as hell wasn't ready to be a parent until my mid thirties at the earliest. It looks like the kid's college fund may be redirected to the kid's escape fund from this shit hole of a country. Fuck you justice Kennedy. And fuck ANYONE who thinks this is a good move.

Nope. Nothing to do with the Circular Refuge. Just a reference to the fact that my link to this blog entry on my Multiply account is circular because there is a link there that points back to Slashdot. ;P

So if you're wondering what else I've been up to beyond the stuff I posted in my journal yesterday, there's the rest of it... Hopefully the Fall will see me having more time once again. Hopefully.

Gentoo Forums:

Weighing the benefits of LVM2 vs. RAID vs. EVMS

Setting up RAID10 on USB flash drives. Because I CAN...

Cross compiling on a virtual machine to get around the speed and limitation of my old laptop with 32 megs of RAM

QEMU Forums:

Helping people solve their /dev/kqemu problems...

Getting the 'seamless mouse' feature of QEMU to work with a Linux guest in Xorg 7.x

Sharing my experience with sound blocking applications that interfere with a QEMU guest's sound

Verifying that it is not possible to burn CDs from a QEMU guest (and therefore a Xen VM)

Unix.com Forums:

Reconfiguring my internal DNS on my darknet for better name resolution...

More to come later... Join in the fun!