Dear LJ,

I know we've been together a long time. But I realize we have not talked in a long time. I might as well tell you I've been seeing another social networking site. I don't think I need to tell you which one it is. You shouldn't feel bad about it though, because I'm sure I'll leave that one too when another one gets popular.

You're just a little too constricting, you are a little archaic, and I feel I've grown as a person. Plus, you make it hard to deal with complicated friendships, especially ones where I don't want to hear 30 updates a day on how aliens have been talking to them. I know you have all the 15 year olds in the world that have finally left myspace, but I'm almost 35 now, I suppose I should grow up as well.

Anyway, here is hoping that the people I like to read, destruct and voidness for instance, get with the program and join me in leaving you. If they drop me a mail at my username at gmail.com, I'll be happy to help them. And I'll always keep my permanent account of course, and we'll always have Paris.

Goodbye.

Love,
...gonzo out

(2001-03-22 to 2009-03-20, signing off)

Okay, someone explain this to me.

http://www.eveonline.com/careerguide/

Why am I in here. Seriously. I know I'm good at what I do, but why am I in here?!? I'm not eve famous like many of the others in here. And in the combat section, no less. heh Wacky stuff.

So, the cat is out of the bag. The DNS theoretical flaw is now real, with exploit code written. It currently takes a couple minutes, but it can be changed to take a few seconds. It has to do with sloppy reception of RR records really. I wrote a bit of code today to try to get it accept an alternate address, and I came pretty close. But not bad for 5 minutes in perl. Just had to get the tuning a little tigheter. And that was just based off what leaked earlier today. Some guy broke it wide open though.

Anyway, long and short: Patch. If you have updates on desktops, install them. If you have updates on your NAT device, install them. If you have updates on your servers, get them in. DNS is the start of trust within some parts of the modern web, and with the right ripple attack, we're looking at a worm that could exploit the crap out of a ton of machines. Convince a bunch of machines they're microsoft.com, push some code automatically, wheeeeee...

INSTALL YOUR UPDATES!

So, I've been battling Jumpstart. It's Solaris' method of installing a mass group of clients. I found out the low level problem, and I'm sure there's a high level solution, but here is my low level solution. I'll update it if someone can give me a better solution rather than hacking the packages themselves. Sorry if I go into technical detail here, Google do your magic and help some other poor soul.

Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) aka Solstice Disk Suite wasn't getting installed right. It was relatively easy to fix, sure, but goddamn is it annoying to have your machine's default boot state to be 'Enter your root password:' to fsck the disk instead of coming up right. So you had to connect a console to fix it, every jumpstart. So I wanted it fixed, permanently. I had problems with other things in it, like it going interactive, which is annoying and ended up removing /sbin/suninstall to fix (DON'T ASK!). Also, I thought it was the noaccess user screwing me over (pkgadd runs as that), but that was a red herring that took me 4 some hours to figure out. Then I found out the real problem.

Anyway, it turns out that for some reason, in my version of Jumpstart and JET (my jumpstart assist tool), with Solaris 9 9/05, << wasn't working right. Normally, that's the pipe character to say 'until you see the next word, add all this text to whatever program.' So, you'd see:

cat >$1 <<THEEND
CLASS="${CLASS}"
SOLARIS="${ANNOYING}"
THEEND

Which can easily be done instead as: (This is what I actually pasted in instead of the << crap)

echo "CLASSES=\"${CLASSES}\"">$1
echo "IS_AN_UPGRADE=\"${IS_AN_UPGRADE}\"">>$1
echo "RELEASE=\"${RELEASE}\"">>$1
echo "COPY_CONFIG=\"${COPY_CONFIG}\"">>$1

When you try to install SUNWmdr and SUNWmdu, the SVM packages, it would bomb out with messages like:
/tmp/installuRa4Dw/checkinstallwRa4Dw: /tmp/sh115060: cannot create
pkgadd: ERROR: checkinstall script did not complete successfully

This was because the << above was causing the 'cannot create' when it ran. After 3 fucking days of fighting jumpstart, I finally find the real problems. This is new to 9 9/05 as well, cause it worked fine in our old 9/04 (I think that was our version). All cause I got a new server that is a different architecture.

Anyway, Solutions! That's what I'm all about. Here was the final plan:

[ gonzo@machine ] $ cd  /jumpstart/OS/Sol9/Solaris_9/Product/SUNWmdr
[ gonzo@machine ] $ sudo vi  install/checkinstall
# Find the << lines and change it to the above format, with echo's instead.  The one above is the SUNWmdr one.
[ gonzo@machine ] $ wc -c install/checkinstall ; sum install/checkinstall
# Use the character count (first line) and the sum line (second line, first number)   This is my SUNWmdr one, post-hacking.
    2680 install/checkinstall
16216 6 install/checkinstall
[ gonzo@machine ] $ sudo vi pkgmap
# replace the numbers in pkgmap for checkinstall so the package is still valid.
[ gonzo@machine ] $ cd  /jumpstart/OS/Sol9/Solaris_9/Product/SUNWmdu
# Same thing all over again, with the single line of 'CLASS' instead. goddamnit.

I didn't sleep last night. It's 11:52 pm. 20-30 some jumpstarts later. I'm going to fucking bed as soon as jumpstart finishes, which takes about an hour and a half every cycle, so you can imagine how painful this was to fix. So fuck jumpstart, right the ear. And in fact, the package went in successfully, so I'm going to goddamn bed. heh Update1: It worked, the machine is up, and now I just need to get a storage device that I've never used before to work. By tonig.. oh wait. doh. `8r/