yaleman.org

All the tube!

Heathrow Express to Paddington station, what a lightning run. A lovely transit system that whisks you away from the airport to the city at great speed, depositing you at a central hub of transit. In this case, Paddington station, which allowed us to navigate our way through the myriad tunnels, all alike, to London Victoria Station via the tube.

We found the location of our first night’s stay after doing a lap and a half of Victoria station (I had forgotten that Google Maps works offline on my phone :)) The Holly House Hotel is an adorable converted walk-up with 26 cosy rooms. Ours had two double beds and a king single along with an ensuite, which for 50 quid a night was amazingly good value. The four floors of stairs was a test of my knee joints which I would have rapidly failed had we stayed much longer. The included continental breakfast made the start of the day much easier as well.

I’m travelling with AuntyMary to London for nearly a week, then heading to Turkey for the balance of a month. This’d be a lot easier if it weren’t for a few niggling issues:

• I live in Australia, so it’s taking us at least 25 hours and change to get there.
• I’m a freakishly tall biped with a busted knee.
• I can’t afford business class flights.

The first flight was pretty good, a 3/3/3 layout Boeing 777 with a spare seat between us for stretching out. The second flight’s been a little squishy, packed into a 3/4/3 layout Airbus A380, completely filled to the gills. It’s a lovely quiet plane, something I couldn’t say for the 777, and well fitted out for all and sundry. It’s just not made for giants with shoulders that hang over the arm rests and poke people in the ears. :(

Not much to talk about in this post as you’d imagine, I’m still sitting in the airport waiting to leave.

On our final itinerary check a couple of days ago, we realised that somehow I’d completely messed up the time zones of the flights about four months ago, booking one less night of accommodation than we actually need! Bookings.com to the rescue, and we have found a “cosy” little place near London Victoria Station which is cheap, if nothing else :)

Editing backups isn’t possible on VSX clusters, which is ridiculous, and checking their full config isn’t possible from any of the GUIs, so it’s shell time.

SSH to the appliance you’re trying to deal with, and run show configuration backup-scheduled from clish. This’ll show you both the specific backup configuration and the schedule as well.

Here’s an example of a backup that SCPs to a remote host, twice a week at 0130.

Just for future reference, to update the management certificate…

• You’ll need to upload the cert/key as a PKCS12 file, with a password. Given it’s a single password per file, put the same thing in both the fields.
• To find the “alias” run keytool -list -storetype pkcs12 -keystore <filename> and look for the line ending with PrivateKeyEntry
• You have to edit manager-web.cfg in the installation directory to reflect the new key name, the field is https.key and the value is the key name you gave it when uploading.
• Once you’ve done that, restart the JSCAPE MFT Server service.

Go find some cute puppy pictures to look at, you’ll need them to feel better about yourself. :)

Sunday, rest day. A day to find peaceful ways to explore culture and ourselves. Thus, we had everyone over for bacon and eggs with all the trimmings. :)

The National Library of Australia has an exhibition entitled “Melodrama in Meiji Japan” all about the last years of the original use of traditional woodcuts, through the eyes of a collection curated by a UNSW professor over many years, recently donated to the LIbrary.

Yesterday we didn’t have any particular plans, just to meet up with people and do all the things, then go to a few get-togethers at night.

We pottered around for the morning and found carb-heavy fuel at Hungry Jack’s to start the day (me being hangry helps nobody!). Meeting up with the Canberra Pokémon crew, we did two Articuno raids and one Lugia. I only caught the Lugia, and it wasn’t particularly special - but who’s to complain I guess? :)

Transit day, going to CBR for a weekend of hanging out with friends. For the first time ever it was cheap enough to make going to Sydney first, then to Canberra worth it (or so we thought).

The first flight wasn’t too bad, somehow QANTAS ignored our seat allocations and split us up, probably due to the fact that we were listed as two independent travellers, not a pair. One day, airline booking systems will make sense - and be usable - their website shows a clear mess of technical debt.

“Grow” the array down to two devices:

$ sudo mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --raid-devices=2 --backup-file /tmp/mdadmbackup
raid_disks for /dev/md1 set to 2

Show the new status:

/dev/md1:
        Version : 1.2
  Creation Time : Fri Sep 16 22:38:10 2011
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 1953510841 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 1953510841 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB)
   Raid Devices : 2
  Total Devices : 2
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Tue Jul  4 18:27:02 2017
          State : clean 
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0

           Name : microserver:1  (local to host microserver)
           UUID : e19da472:04736a59:6c1e25ec:c4a60ebe
         Events : 20513

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       3       8       49        0      active sync   /dev/sdd1
       2       8       17        1      active sync   /dev/sdb1

References:

At work we run proxies for filtering malicious traffic and restricting access to unsavoury content - be it pornography or other things outside policy. For a while now we have had an issue where certain Yahoo-run systems will send continual 301 redirects until the browser gives up with an error.

It’s been really annoying to troubleshoot, as it wasn’t quite clear what would trigger it. The normal things like SSL inspection or broken cookies weren’t the cause, and it didn’t seem to be routing or anything else like that. The main time we had seen it was when a user with an iPad tried to access the Yahoo weather app and it wouldn’t work.