Tag Archives: apache

Home again, Home again

I’m a little grumbly here, because I was almost done writing this posting when Firefox crashed. Bah.

Anyways, as I was saying …

I am pleased to announce, after extensive testing, the results of my survey. Nobody in the world makes coffee as good as I can make it right here at home. Except, just maybe, my dad. I’m not sure what’s so hard about grinding up a few beans and pouring water over them, but every time I travel, I’m better off just foregoing the coffee, since everything I get served is swill fit only for watering the daisys. Poor daisys.

It is really good to be home.

I still enjoy travelling. (Ok, I have come to hate the actual travelling part. Thanks, TSA.) I like being other places and seeing new things. But, increasingly, I just want to get back home, after a few days away. I suppose I’m just getting old and settled, and, I think, that’s probably OK with me. (Inner voice: OLD MAN! OLD MAN!)

So, it was a week of Apache training. I learned quite a few things, and have a lot of changes that I need to make to my class notes and to my book. I wonder if I will be able to keep up the drive to do so this time. Generally, the urge dies out after a few days. I’ll try harder.

The network at the training site was somewhat restrictive, so I was off IRC for almost the whole week. On Friday, Eddie reminded me how to tunnel IRC (or anything, I suppose) over an ssh connection to anywhere. You open an ssh connection to wherever you can ssh to, and then you can tunnel any other protocol over the top of that, so that you can use your preferred IRC client (xchat, or whatever) to connect over that tunnel to anywhere else. I suppose it’s just as well that I didn’t remember earlier in the week.

ssh -C rbowen@wooga.frumble.com -L 8081:irc.freenode.org:6667

Then point your IRC client at localhost, port 8081.

Most evenings while on my trip, I went out somewhere, saw a thing or two, but was back in my room by 7 or 8. I read a lot of stuff during those 2 or 3 hours before going to bed. Here’s some of it.

In the Presence of Fear by Wendell Berry. Avoid this book if you are content to be fat, happy, and complacent in your current view of your consumer life. This is a collection of essays about how the world has changed in the last several presidential administrations, and, particularly, how it has changed since the incident in 2001 when we realized that we didn’t live in an isolated bubble. Very good stuff. Whatever your political leanings tend to be, Berry gives a lot of plain common sense to some issues that we tend to over-politicize.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. A murder mystery of sorts. Written from the perspective of a young autistic man who finds a dead dog in his neighbor’s (I suppose I should say neighbour’s. He’s british.) yard, and who sets out to find out how it died. Funny, sad, and eye-opening. Highly recommended. It was recommended to me by someone in blog-space. I don’t rember who. Get this book.

The Gift Moves by Steve Lyon. Steve is the organist/pianist at my church. He’s also the husband of the well-known children’s author George Ella Lyon. The book was shelved (mistakenly, I think) in the children’s section of the book store. Yes, it’s a book about some kids. Sort of. It’s also a book about a culture (seems post-apocalyptic, but hard to say) where the economy is based on gifts, rather than on money or barter. It’s about how we relate to one another. Or, I suppose, you could read it as a shiny happy kid’s story. Presumably that’s where the store thought it would sell better. After all, who wants to think? Recommended. Frankly, I didn’t expect to enjoy it, largely because of where it was shelved. But I like to read books by people I know, and I was pleasantly surprised.

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. I keep thinking that the Discworld books will get tired and boring. And perhaps that’s happening just a little bit. But this book was funny I suppose it gets a “2” on the measure on the “laughed out loud in public” scale. The story was good, the characters were interesting, and the conclusion was unexpected. I recommend this if you’ve read any of the other Discworld books. If you haven’t, I recommend that you read The Colour of Magic first. Try to get a British edition of you can find it. Apparently they tried to Americanize it for the US printing, whatever that means. Silly publishers. And if you’re in this area, I’m sure that Ken would be willing to loan you a copy. I don’t seem to have a copy any more.

And I suppose I should mention that I picked up a new printing of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. This is a Barnes&Noble printing. A little pocket-sized edition of ACC as well as The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth. Nice binding and size, so I could hardly pass it up, now, could I?

Oh, and one more thing. While in Palm Beach I ate at a place called City Cellar. Twice, in fact. I had two of the best meals I’ve had so far this year. The first night, I had crab-encrusted chilean sea bass. It was positively heavenly. The next night I had mahi in a tamarind sauce, which was almost as good. It was … *ahem* … somewhat pricey. The bass, at least, was worth every penny. The mahi was more expensive and less wonderful, but only marginally so.

Ok, there. Finished with no crashes, and crammed more topics into a single post than is my usual habit. Deal with it. I write for me and not for you anyway. 🙂

Apache training ending

Today’s the last day of Apache training. It’s been a pretty good week, with most of the usual annoyances, and a few more, but overall a good class.

Unfortunately, most of the students were not actually released from their work duties when they were sent to training, so they wandered in and out all week, missing an hour here, a half day there, and, in several cases, an entire day or two. Employers, don’t do this. You’re wasting your money, and your productivity, when you send a student to training and then don’t actually allow them to attend it. In several cases, folks missed the things that they were most interested in hearing about. because the were called to a meeting at just that moment.

I tried to go geocaching a few times, and I actually found one cache, but for the most part I just didn’t seem to have the passion for it. I went to one cache which looked kinda interesting, but when I got there, it turned out to be a multi, and I just couldn’t work up the interest to do the whole thing. Kinda pathetic, I suppose.

I’ve been driving a Pontiac Sunfire, and I really miss my Jeep. The first morning when I pulled into the parking garage, it took me a moment to figure out how to open the window. I reached back for the zipper, and there wasn’t one! Also, the car doesn’t have a clutch, which is a bit disconcerting.

I’m *so* ready to go home.

Oh, yeah, and last night I went to the party on Clematis street. Every Thursday evening they block off a few streets and have live music and food stalls, and vendors. It was kinda nice. One of the vendors was from Kenya, and had a bunch of Kenya art and carvings. It was nice to talk to them, although they didn’t really want to talk for some reason. Oh, well.

Painted Horse

Monday night I ate at the Painted Horse Cafe, recommended to me by the folks at the Biba. I ordered the special – veal – without asking what the cost was. Yowzers. I don’t think I’ve spent that much on a meal so far this year. But, I suppose it’s ok to splurge a little bit. This is a great training class, and a little celebration is in order.

West Palm, day one

First, the hotel. Oh, my. What can I say? It is certainly not without its charms. The little courtyards are nice. And the formed platic rocking chairs … well, you don’t see those every day. Anyways, it wasn’t quite what I expected. But, I don’t require much of a hotel – just a place to keep me out of the rain while I sleep – so it’s not too much of a disappointment.

Photos

This morning, I headed the wrong direction down Olive for about 8 miles, and so arrived at class at about 9:02. The students arrived over the next 30 minutes. Apparently, few people in the facility were aware that a training would be taking place, so a number of people were led astray.

Day one went well, except for the usual day one glitches with networking and missing software. But on the whole, pretty good.

I attempted some geocaching in the evening, but didn’t find anything. So I went down to the beach and put my toes in the ocean.

There’s still quite a bit of damage from the hurricane, but really only if you know to look for it. They’ve done a good job of cleaning up. A lot of road signs are still missing, though, and this made navigation a little tricky Sunday night.

Ohio LinuxFest

One more note before I head out to do some stuff. I will be speaking at Ohio LinuxFest next Saturday in Columbus. I encourage you to come if you’re in the area. There will be some interesting people there. And I’ll be there too. It would be great to meet up, chat, sign PGP keys, and generally geek out.

Registration is recommended, if you’re planning to drop by.

Another book

Going against all good sense and prior experience, I have today submitted a proposal for another book that I want to write. As though I don’t have enough to do already. But the idea seems very appealing, and I have a reasonably good idea of how I want to handle various topics.

More details as I have them. But I expect that things like rewrite.drbacchus.com will feature in the book, and I expect that I will rely pretty heavily on IRC conversations for inspiration for the content of the book.

It always seems to me that commercial entities want to keep things secret, and I want to just tell everybody about things. I’ve already discussed the idea for the book with a number of people, and gotten some good feedback that has influenced how I wrote the proposal. Feedback that can be best summarized as “Don’t write about things that 1) other people have done a way better job than you ever can or 2) you’re just completely ignorant about.” Sage advice. On the other hand, there seem to be certain people who are reticent to write about certain topics, even when I know they would do an exceptional job.

Apache Cookbook, Italian

The Italian edition of Apache Cookbook is now available, and I have a copy sitting next to me as I write. The title is “Apache Cookbook”, which struck me as a little odd. There seems to be a significant mix of English in the book. I’m not sure where you can get a copy, since the ISBN doesn’t seem to show up in Pricescan or Amazon, and there doesn’t seem to be an amazon.co.it

IIS SEARCH worm – Seen on IRC

<Curtman> Whats all this “SEARCH /x90x02xb1 …” stuff going on lately? New worm, or just script kiddies?
<DrBacchus> Curtman: It’s a worm. Couple months old.
<DrBacchus> fajita: SEARCH?
<fajita> rumour has it SEARCH is not a valid HTTP method, so disabling it becomes difficult. or https://drbacchus.com/recipes/SEARCH2.txt
<DrBacchus> Curtman: What fajita said.
<Curtman> DrBacchus: Yikes. It’s getting more and more frequent it seems. I’ve got 26 of them in the past 24 hours.
<DrBacchus> Curtman: It comes and goes. Depends on the concentration of IIS machines in your part of the IP-space.
<Curtman> DrBacchus: But its safe to assume they are coming from compromised boxen right? I’ve been trying to alert them as they come in.
<DrBacchus> Curtman: Yes, that is coming from a compromised IIS.
<DrBacchus> Curtman: I had an automated notification thingy going for a while. A hacked-upon version of Apache::CodeRed
<Curtman> DrBacchus: I’ve just been using smbclient to connect to them, and printing a warning on their printers. 😉

Yikes.

Frances

I was supposed to be leaving on Sunday for a week of training in West Palm Beach Florida. Turns out that Hurricane Francis anhiliated the facility in which I was to be doing the training. So, I’m out the $100 for changing air tickets, as well as indefinitely delaying the expected income from the training. But Sarah really didn’t want me to go anyway, so I suppose it balances out.

Oh. I need to remember to cancel the text book shipment. Oy. Almost forgot.