Ruminations
Systemd conditional restart / reload
A company I contract for recently upgraded their servers to Centos 7, which means we’re now in the world of Systemd instead of SysVinit.
It turns out that Systemd doesn’t have facilities to handle conditional restarts of a service. Reloads can be made to work with multiple ExecReload commands.
I did a decent amount of digging and in all the threads I found one maintainer, in particular, was staunchly against adding the capability to Systemd. I can only posit he doesn’t do work in the real world where this is a necessity and not just a nice to have. But seriously, would it be that hard to ExecRestartPre?
A solution was needed and this is what I came up with. I’m putting it out there in case anyone else might find it useful.
Our needs were fairly … Read More »
Apache + SVN Access Restrictions
We had a situation where we needed to provide authenticated access to our SVN repo from most places, but needed anonymous read access from a select few IPs. Turns out this was harder to figure out than I expected. I thought this would have been a solved problem, but after a lot of Googling I couldn’t find any solutions. I’m documenting this here in case someone else runs up against this and needs a solution.
I initially tried using an Apache ‘If’ in the config to specify different SVN access files, but for some reason this didn’t work. I couldn’t get good information from debug, but it appeared the correct file was passed to AuthzSVN, however for the authenticated access we’d get a 403 Forbidden error after authenticating. Anonymous access worked. The two access files were the same except for one … Read More »
Smart(phone) Controls
I use my phone a lot in the car to listen to music and podcasts. With subsonic I have full access to my entire music catalog which makes it a no brainer to use instead of fooling with CDs. However I found myself really missing having physical buttons to control pause, play, and track skipping. Aside from the convenience, it was also a little dangerous for me to be messing with my phone while driving. Inevitably, I would end up hitting the wrong button, and that would be an even bigger distraction.
I knew headphones were sold that provided some external controls for phones so I did a little digging and came across this post where someone had already solved my problem.
I ordered the parts and when they came in I got my breadboard, alligator cables, etc. and brought it all to McDonald’s and spent … Read More »
Before Cloud Music Was Cool
Before cloud music was even a blip on the radar. I was frustrated with the state of the art: syncing music to my devices. I have a pretty big music catalog and it has never been possible to sync it all to a single device. When I was traveling I’d have to decide just what it was I thought I’d want to listen to. Inevitable, I’d want to hear something I didn’t bring along. That sent me in search of a solution, and that’s when I stumbled across subsonic. It’s a donationware application that allows for streaming music from your home network to the Internet. It has some cool features. It can convert any audio format (assuming you have the right libraries) to mp3 so you don’t have to worry about device compatibly. It can resample to lower bit rates … Read More »
Twelve Days, wtf?
On Sunday I was making cookies (Snickerdoodles) and Ali had put on some Christmas music. The Twelve Days Of Christmas, The Sinatra Christmas Album version, came on, and I said to her, “I’m confused by this song. What are the twelve days of Christmas?” I went through a couple of scenarios in my head, and I finally said, “How many days are in Hanukkah?” She said, “Seven? I think.” Me, “Huh. I really don’t understand this song, where do the twelve days come from?”
Today, I was poking around on the intertubes and came across this video. I thought it was pretty funny how much this mirrored my thought process …
Man In The Middle
I got pulled into a problem at work yesterday. The issue is that some people (randomly) begin experiencing one-way audio on a phone call that moments before had been working fine. Packet captures revealed that when the problem occurs the audio stream makes it all the way to the IP phone, but fails to be played on the user’s handset. A colleague had analyzed the data and found an anomaly around the time the audio stopped working; the RTP timestamp in the packet jumped significantly. The working theory was that maybe the phone was confused by the time jump which caused it to quit playing the audio. It felt like a plausible theory, but it also felt like it could be a red herring.
The obvious thing would be to reproduce in a controlled environment to … Read More »
Devil’s Path
David and I did our annual hiking trip back in September. It was absolutely the hardest terrain we’ve ever covered. We were hard pressed to do seven miles a day. I can only imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t made significant strides in reducing my pack weight.
In a previous post I wrote about my plans to reduce pack weight. I bought the do-it-yourself G4 pattern from Quest Outfitters. I think a sensible person would have just bought the pre-made pack from Gossamer Gear. The guys in the how-to lightweight backpack books talk about how great it is to make your own equipment, and I guess I drank the Kool-Aid. The problem was I had never sewn anything with a machine; for that matter I didn’t even own … Read More »
Photo Album Link Clearance
I used to try and write a blog entry per photo-album, but lately I’ve got lazy. So instead you get the photo-album link clearance blog entry.
Apple picking @ Hurd’s Orchard
Old Time Fiddler’s Convention in Athens, AL
Baltimore
Christmas @ Jen and Rob’s
I Often Misread Things
I often misread things … today I saw the headline
Practical Steps to Mitigate Virtualization Security Risks
I read it as
Practical Steps to Mitigate Virtual Security Risks
and I’m thinking to myself why would anyone be worried about “virtual” security risks?
You Have To Wait For It
I just ran across this video. There is a pretty funny bit just over two minutes in, but the best part is at the end.