Tag Archives: Technical Notes

A little something from page 89 of the Apple Xserve User Guide:

Be sure that you always do the following:

• Keep your server away from sources of liquids, such as washbasins, bathtubs, showerstalls, and so on.

Seriously, why do they even say this? Did they get a lot of service calls from people who’d set up a server farm in their bathtub?

Yesterday I spent some time setting up the xServe at the new office… It’s a very nice server. It’s going to be replacing a blue & white G3 for our file serving duties. It’s a bit of a step up. There was one minor problem while setting it up, so pardon me while I geek out a bit and post the solution here:

Read the manual.

By which I mean read the big annoying sixty page PDF manual, not the simple eight page one.
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I’m writing this blog entry on my Wife’s PC upstairs. Sort of. I’m actually sitting in an office in downtown Ann Arbor, remotely controlling the upstairs PC from my powerbook. I’m using a combination of Secure Shell, port forwarding, and VNC.

All of which seems a bit like overkill just to let me play Civ while at work.
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Ok, it looks like the little kill script isn’t 100% effective at stopping posts. On the other hand, it does seem to have kept the kruft down to about 150 entries over the last few days. Still, I’m going to be going through the old posts and closing off comments on older entries.

Sorry readers, but it’s time to close off the comments. Spam has gotten to be enough of a problem that it’s slowing down a server we use for work. MT-Blacklist isn’t taking care of that part of the problem, so I’ve had to add a bit of fun to the server itself. Basically, every five minutes, the server looks for the mt-comments.cgi script and kills off the multiple copies of perl that it’s spawned.

Here’s the command, just in case anyone else needs it:
ps -ax | grep mt-comments.cgi | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

Put that in Root’s crontab with a 5 minute refresh and watch all your load problems fade away…

This will make no sense unless you’re having the exact same problem I was, in which case this will be the solution that saves you hours of experimentation:

An open A6 card is almost the same size as a C5 envelope. It’s close enough to fool the printer at any rate. Just remember, outside down, cover first, and open the back panel on the printer to save wear and tear.

No need to thank me. It’s all part of the service I provide here…

The server burp that was scheduled for Friday night wound up getting re-scheduled for today… Um.. Actually for about two hours ago. The fact that you’re reading this (and that I’m writing it instead of writhing under several hundred pounds of computer equipment while being alternately dissolved and electrified by the leaking batteries of six uninterruptible power supplies) is greatly attributable to the help of Badmovie who thought we were just coming in for a bit of weekend Smithee editing, but who wasn’t adverse to passing me the odd cable and holding the doors while I wheeled the server rack from our old office to the new one.
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Things may be a bit glitchy for a while. I’m going through some of my old entries from two years ago and closing the comments for entries that haven’t been commented on yet. Hopefully, it’ll cut down on the spam posts that I need to delete every morning. Besides, I figure if nobody has said anything for a year, then nothing more needs to be said.
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If you’re using Safari and have nothing better to do than compare tiny details of layout between one day and the next, you may have noticed a slew of drop shadows popping up on the site. Not to worry, I haven’t gone Photoshop-mad. I just ran into a neat article on MacWorld about some stuff in CSS that Safari will render that other browsers don’t, yet…

Um. If you’re not using Safari, you probably haven’t noticed anything odd and have no idea what I’m talking about. Nothing to see here then. Move along…
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Should I be worried that most of my comment spam from the last few days seems to be coming from machines in the .mil domain? I can’t think of any valid reason that someone in the armed forces would want me to go to some of the sites that I’ve blacklisted, but I guess it could be a very strange recruitment program…
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