Cricalix.Net

Over the past few months, the Avatar code has been having a few crashes that leave no recognisable/usable stack for GDB to read.  It’s also been having a few hangs, with strace indicating futex_wait (in an application that doesn’t use threads), and gdb of the core (after killing the process) indicating __kernel_vsyscall.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a programmer/coder, so my efforts to track the cause down have probably been a bit haphazard.

The most annoying part so far is that yesterday we encountered the hang situation 4 times, so I enabled a strace against the binary, and channeled the output across the ‘net to my PC where I’ve got a rolling 40,000 line buffer.  24 hours later, at a constant 2 Mbit/s, and we still haven’t hung.

I call Heisenbug.

It’s interesting how a random act can make someone’s day better.  One of the ladies I work with remarked on Wednesday that I should make another batch of chocolate chip cookies and bring them to the office.  Unfortunately, I had already made up a batch on Monday, and had decided to keep them as a private stash for the week, and had no supplies to do another batch (and truth be told, the desire and energy - each batch takes several hours).

Thursday lunchtime, I cycled home for lunch, and picked up two of the batch I had made (coconut + chocolate chips + cocoa), wrapped them in foil and brought them in to work for her.  Turns out she was having a bad day (boo for customer facing jobs, especially in credit control), and the fact I had brought them in for her made the day for her.

That made me happy.

I have a pair of Motorola DECT phones hooked up to my Vonage account.  The battery life has got steadily worse, to the point where I only have about 90 minutes of talk time before they start beeping at me.  Here’s the odd bit - they beep a few times, showing 0% battery, then catch a second wind and keep going for another 30 minutes or so.  I have an athlete for a phone…

Encountered a rather annoying event yesterday.  One of the guys in my department mentioned that he couldn’t upload data into our purchase order area on Alfresco.  We’ve had a few interesting glitches with Alfresco before (primarily oriented around duplicate filenames in automation routines), but nothing that serious.

A review of the logs showed something about an invalid transaction state of MARKED_ROLLBACK, so off to the Great Google I went, hoping the Oracle could provide me with an answer or three.  The only reference I found initially was something about 32K directories, and strangely enough the Lucene index area had 32,000 directories in a single directory.  Now, 32,000 is not 32K to a computer, but it was close enough for me to blow away the indexes and restart Alfresco so that it would re-index the data. (more…)

One of the recent fun challenges at work has been to get the developer R61i laptops running CentOS 5.1 to talk to our wireless AP (or their home AP). I’ve gone through 3 different drivers in an effort to get it working, and it’s come down to the one I really didn’t want to use - NDISwrapper. Unfortunately, even NDISwrapper doesn’t work properly.

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One of my long-term tickets at work is to provide LDAP or Kerberos integration for our servers at a minimum, and all Linux workstations and laptops if possible.  I poked it a bit today, and made a disappointing discovery.  Unlike Windows, a CentOS machine running LDAP as the primary authentication method is unable to cache the password hash.  So, if I enable it on a laptop, then disconnect that laptop from the network, I am unable to log in as any user that has previously logged in with LDAP credentials.

Bummer.

I doubt Kerberos is going to solve this either, as the caching is performed by nscd, and it’s nscd that doesn’t cache the hashes.  I suppose I could work on a custom PAM module that hooks in to pam_ldap, and on successful authentication, stores a new MD5 password for the account in /etc/passwd.  This way, a machine going off-line would have accurate local password hashes, and authentication would still work.

That sounds like way too much work though, and outside the scope of my job.

Years ago, when I worked for Sunbeach, one of the guys had a top-end Pentium system with full surround sound in a dark office. On this system, he played MechWarrior, and I was blown away by the soundtrack and the game itself.

Today, I managed to re-find the full soundtrack from MechWarrior 2. I am indescribably happy at this, as I love this soundtrack.