Chris’ Blog

Dreamhosts DNS servers are being really slow, and unpredictable! So what I say!? I just moved away from them. Using this free service with along with this and this to serve all my DNS needs. For a total of separate DNS servers, I updated the whois records and all should be rotating around.

I found this nice guide on getting the most out of your bash shell history. I am going to be adding some of the suggestions, the comments are also a good read.

(19:15:48) Me: dude
(19:16:18) Dave: lol
(19:16:28) Me:
(19:17:05) Dave: sup?
(19:17:22) Me: nowt
(19:19:56) Dave: not out 2nite?
(19:20:04) Me: yeah
(19:20:09) Me: currently sat at the bar
(19:20:22) Dave: and on msn.. geek
(19:20:25) Me: </sarcasm>
(19:20:51) Dave:
(19:22:19) Me: What would you say if I was listening to linkin park?
(19:23:17) Dave: id have to crit atk u with a rusty spoon… (has +10 to linkin park listeners)
(19:23:52) Me: don’t look at my last.fm
(19:23:56) Dave: oh i will
(19:24:00) Dave: linky plz?
(19:24:13) Me: joo think I am stoopid
(19:24:28) Dave: i think no such thing!
(19:24:37) Dave: i simiply wish to erm, inspect ^_^
(19:24:43) Dave: check there is no Eminem or some shit on it
(19:25:02) Me: You can find it on mah blogage
(19:25:38) Dave: linky
(19:25:42) Me: ffs
(19:25:48) Me: www.cs278.org/blog/
(19:25:58) Dave: oh ye lol
(19:27:59) Dave: hang ye head in shame
(19:28:18) Dave: moof
(19:28:23) Me: ?
(19:28:37) Dave: anyhooo, im gonna go fly to the moon on a fortune cookie
(19:28:46) Me: right…
(19:28:54) Me: back in reality?
(19:29:02) Dave: *sighs*
(19:29:15) Dave: sanity is for the weak
(19:30:13) Me: only an insane person would think so
(19:30:21) Dave: u mean ur sane now??? WTF!
(19:30:29) Me: no
(19:30:48) Me: I am just so cookoo I couldn’t give a crap >.<
(19:30:48) Dave: thank god!
(19:30:53) Dave: me 2
(19:31:21) Me: reality is a good concept to grasp though
(19:31:26) Dave: no it isnt
(19:31:34) Dave: azeroth is better
(19:31:40) Me: falling through imaginary creators and dieing is kinda unhelful
(19:31:46) Me: *helpful
(19:31:57) Dave: trying to fly on fortune cookies is fun tho
(19:32:13) Me: until somebody eats the fortune cooky?
(19:32:41) Dave: damn!
(19:32:43) Dave: NO!
(19:32:47) Dave:
(19:32:55) Me: mmm cookies ^_^
(19:32:58) Dave: ruined my fantasy… except the ears part.. but we will ignore that
(19:33:15) Dave: cider
(19:33:19) Me: idd
(19:33:27) Dave: ah bless
(19:33:30) Dave: i need to go get drunk
(19:33:31) Dave: cya l8r
(19:33:40) Me: the sign of an alcy
(19:33:47) Me: fortune cookies and frol
(19:33:49) Dave: lol ofc
(19:33:57) Me: =_*
(19:34:00) Dave: that was jo anyeway
(19:34:06) Dave: ^_^
(19:34:08) Me: what was?
(19:34:15) Dave: dunno lol, i was asleep
(19:34:17) Dave: anyhow
(19:34:18) Dave: ttyl
(19:34:21) Me: wtf?!?

… a return of randomness me thinks. hmmz

I have missed thee.

You see I have had no ResNet (the network connection in my room) access today, from 11am till ~5:20pm, rising time till end of Blue Peter. The problem effected our block only and was quite severe, no contact with anything at all! More annoyingly I set aside today to do work I needed to catch up on which required network access. So I had to trek to the, with its crap Dell keyboards and Windows, and program on them. *sigh*

In other news … went to the Cinema and saw Hot Fuzz amazing film, stupidly comical and outrageously well written. Loved it.

Sweet Mother of all semi-conductors! Linky … RRP?

Recently I acquired a NSLU2 and have Debianised it, it is now serving inside the airing cupboard at home. I am using it has an SMTP gateway and DNS/DHCP server, I have configured it to forward all mail on to my main mail server (sandman) and dnsmasq is now serving DNS/DHCP rather than the bloated ISC BIND9 and DHCP3 setup I was running before.

My favourite bit is the name for my new server — beast!

I found some really useful pages on the web when I was doing this:

• http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_spam_filter_mail_gateway
• http://chxo.com/be2/20040511_5667.html
• http://www.postfix.org/STANDARD_CONFIGURATION_README.html#firewall
• http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/postfix

I found a really useful tool for doing manufacturer lookups on MAC addresses. Linky

The ash shell doesn’t appear to support setting the PROMPT_COMMAND variable which sets the window title in xterm and companions. I found a workaround to this, by including it in the PS1 variable.

I put this in my /etc/profile:

export PS1='\[\e]0;\h:\w\a\]\[\e[0;32m\]\h\[\e[0m\]:\w\$'

The \[\e]0;\h:\w\a\] is for the windows title. Essentially, \h hostname and \w current directory are bound by esc (\e) zero and bell (\a).

The second part \[\e[0;32m\]\h\[\e[0m\]:\w\$ is for the prompt, which is the same as above but the prompt is colored green.

supernaut at OpenWRT Forums
<http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=18521>

It worked perfectly

I struggled a little to find out how to get the SSH fingerprint of an SSH key earlier so, I thought I would preserve how for ever more. The snippet below will return the SSH fingerprint for the machines public RSA key (under Debian derived distributions at least.)

$ ssh-keygen -lf /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
2048 d6:59:bc:0b:18:ba:17:15:41:fc:d0:2a:60:f4:7e:e8 /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub

I used to have Firefox to use Google’s Browse by Name feature, but since I reinstalled my box I never got around to reconfiguring it. To do so yourself follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to about:config in Firefox.
2. Use the filter feature to find keyword.url.
3. Modify the preference and replace the default value with http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Thanks to the Ubuntu Blog for this!

Anyway after configuring it I found a bug #84242, how cool is that bug number?