I’ve been driving an EV car all week. Fun! Now I don’t tend think much of stock car stereos. Often when I bought a new car, replacing the stock radio was something I did on the way home before the car even got to my house. But I was, frankly, blown away with how good the stereo in the Chevy Spark EV was. HD FM radio? Check. Tightly integrated Sirius radio? Check. Bluetooth audio streaming? Check. Best display for interacting with my iPod I’ve ever seen. How, like, I would keep this!

When Chevy told me that the navigation system in the car worked with an app on my phone, I was very excited. “Someone finally got the right idea!” No more horrible built in Navigation. No more multi-hundred dollar map updates. I was so happy, I had such high hopes. I immediately downloaded the BringGo application and…

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You can read the original article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2015/06/bringgo-review-right-idea-worst-possible-implementation/. Comments are welcome here or there as you please.

Today I received a spam that the headers clearly showed was generated within Yahoo and went directly from their mail system to mine. So I reported it to their published Abuse address, so that Yahoo would know their user is spamming. I received back the following e-mail:

This is an automated response; please do not reply to this email as replies will not be answered.

To report spam, security, or abuse-related issues involving Yahoo!'s services, please go to http://abuse.yahoo.com.

Thank you,

Yahoo! Customer Care

Fail #1: They are required to accept abuse reports at their published Abuse address.

Fail #2: Going to this address gets redirected to http://help.yahoo.com/abuse/ which has hundreds of different links, but after spending 30 minutes looking through every single one of them not a single one provides a place to report a spam sent by Yahoo.

Result: Yahoo no longer accepts spam reports. I am therefore blocking Yahoo on every mail gateway for which I have control, and listing them in the Pink Providers blacklist effective immediately.

You can read the original article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2014/08/yahoo-no-longer-accepts-abuse-reports/. Comments are welcome here or there as you please.

As previously reported in my ActiveMQ 5.9.1 RPM post, I’ve created an RPM for Active 5.9.1 on RHEL/CentOS that matches the one published on the Puppet Labs EL6 dependencies repository.

I discovered last night that I hadn’t included the new REST apis in the image. So there is now a new version. I’ve bumped the release version so that you can upgrade if you installed the previous version.

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You can read the original article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2014/06/updated-activemq-5-9-1-2-rpm-with-rest-apis/. Comments are welcome here or there as you please.

Learning MCollective is now available in Early Release.

This has pretty much every chapter and subchapter we expect to have in the final book, but my editor and I are still polishing some rough edges. As O’Reilly says on their website:

You’ll receive updates when content is added, as well as the completed ebooks. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats, and free updates.

You can read the original article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2014/03/learning-mcollective-available-in-early-release/. Comments are welcome here or there as you please.

If you like reading books which are content complete but unedited, or if you really just want to get your hands on this book, Learning MCollective is now available in Early Release.

Note that this has pretty much every chapter and subchapter we expect to have in the final book, but my editor hasn’t read it yet nor have I had a chance to step back away from it long enough to re-read it with a clear head. But as O’Reilly says on their website:

You’ll receive updates when content is added, as well as the completed ebooks. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats, and free updates.

You can read the original article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2014/03/learning-mcollective-available-in-early-release/. Comments are welcome here or there as you please.

So I’ve recently been moving a bunch of hand-built RRD queries into Cacti for a customer. One of the problems I had was that none of the published templates for the ITWatchdogs Goose units worked, either due to missing XML files, old OIDs, or just plain incorrect setup in the template.

I’ve built a new template by hand and it now finds internal sensors, external temp sensors, and external airflow sensors for you. If you examine the XML files included and compare to the MIB you could easily add more of the sensors.

Installation is easy: (obviously replace /usr/share/cacti with your installation directory)

wget http://www.netconsonance.com/downloads/itwatchdogs-goose-cacti-template.tgz
tar xvzf itwatchdogs-goose-cacti-template.tgz
mv *.xml /usr/share/cacti/resources/snmp_queries/

Then Import the template into Cacti, and start defining your devices!

http://www.netconsonance.com/2013/09/cacti-template-for-itwatchdogs-goose-products/. Comments are welcome here or there as you please.

I ran into a weird problem where postfix suddenly started segfaulting on me just after upgrading it to the latest version.

Jan 15 03:28:41 geode kernel: smtpd[8569]: segfault at c9 ip 00007fcff5fa8469 sp 00007fffe88163d0 error 4 in libcrypto.so.1.0.0[7fcff5ec8000+174000]

Debugging with strace showed me that the segfault happened just after attempting a MySQL query. Google tells me that people are having the same problem with Percona libraries too, although they didn’t figure out the answer. I’ll save you the story of all the debugging, but it turns out that if you install MariaDB-devel, then you must also install MariaDB-shared or programs that you compile will segfault. It is likely the same answer for Percona.

No, I don’t know why. It’s a bit late for debugging.

$ sudo yum install MariaDB-shared --enablerepo=mariadb
....
Running Transaction
  Installing : MariaDB-shared-5.5.28a-1.x86_64                                                       1/1 
  Verifying  : MariaDB-shared-5.5.28a-1.x86_64                                                       1/1 

Installed:
  MariaDB-shared.x86_64 0:5.5.28a-1                                                                                                                 

Complete!

This has been cut for brevity to my livejournal friends. You can read the entire article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2013/01/segfaults-when-using-postfix-with-mariadb-or-percona/.

Apache has started including a specfile in their builds, such that you should be able to just invoke rpmbuild against it. If you’ve tried it, you’ve probably bumped into a distcache dependency.

$ rpmbuild -tb httpd-2.4.3.tar.bz2 
error: Failed build dependencies:
	distcache-devel is needed by httpd-2.4.3-1.x86_64

If you google around you’ll notice that there’s no distcache library easily available for EL6 systems. If you solve that problem, you’ll slam into a very weird dependency problem with an undefined/unused Epoch in the specfile.

ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
httpd = %{epoch}:2.4.3-1 is needed by mod_ssl-2.4.3-1.x86_64
httpd = %{epoch}:2.4.3-1 is needed by httpd-devel-2.4.3-1.x86_64

I’ve created a patch for httpd on rhel6 / centos 6 systems. It disables the (totally unnecessary) socache_distcache plugin, and fixes the use of the undefined epoch in the specfile. Apply it like this:

$ tar xjf httpd-2.4.3.tar.bz2 
$ patch -p0 < httpd-2.4.3.rhel6.patch
$ tar cjf httpd-2.4.3.rhel6.tbz2 httpd-2.4.3
$ rpmbuild -tb httpd-2.4.3.rhel6.tbz2

This has been cut for brevity to my livejournal friends. You can read the entire article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2013/01/howto-build-apache-2-4-for-centos-6-or-rhel6-patch/.

All machines and services in the netconsonance.com domain are now available over IPv6. Completely, fully, unabridged in any manner. DNS, E-Mail and HTTP.

This has been cut for brevity to my livejournal friends. You can read the entire article at http://www.netconsonance.com/2012/10/fully-ipv6-enabled/.