rm-rf.ca

I have two systems on the open internet, firewalled and logging dropped packets. Every night for literally years I see something like this in my logwatch emails:

From 61.139.105.163 - 6 packets to tcp(2301,8085,8088,8089,9000,9415)

Each night this IP or one extremely similar to it hits both systems (which are not located together strangely enough). Geobytes.com tells me this originates in Beijing China.

Henceforth I am pleased to announce that I will not begin censoring search results to accommodate the Chinese in the first place.

In times where gamers have grown accustomed to enticing pre-release information, screenshots and trailers, one glowing example of the old ways remains. A shining beacon of silence, vagueness, contradictory statements, secrecy, confusion, and mistranslations, these are the apparent modus operandi for Polyphony Digital.

The last few years have been rough for the hardcore fans. GT4 came out about five years ago, we've had a new console since 2006, and those who've grown to love Gran Turismo are naturally dying to find out what Polyphony Digital can do with the technology. Indeed they provided us with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue in 2007, a title which is hard to know exactly what it means but you'll most often hear it referred to as a demo. I'm not sure if that's logical as demo's seldom pre-date the final version by three and a half years, but I digress.

Cobbler4j, a simple java wrapper for talking to Cobbler's XMLRPC interface, is now available in the JBoss Maven Repository.

Steve Salevan has also provided us with the start of a functional test suite, details can be found in apitests/README. Just a few tests there now but we're hoping to expand on it whenever possible. Quite pleased about this, coming into the code base fresh I've found making changes quite unnerving, without knowing what you might break and how to cover all the execution paths.

Just a quick note on installing Fedora 12 on the wife's new Inspiron 15. She's been a Ubuntu user on her previous laptop for a year or so now as suspend/wireless problems just continually popped up after Fedora updates or upgrades, but with new hardware I figured it was time for another go.

Once installed it was awesome, full resolution (Intel graphics), working sound, working wireless (I sprung for the upgrade to Intel wireless which IMO pays off for anyone planning to run Linux), working webcam, and most impressive of all beautifully working suspend, all without doing anything. Really working nicely for her.

Perhaps for the first time ever, I've managed to upgrade Fedora with preupgrade. This was relatively without incident, just one irritating bug with /boot running out of disk space as preupgrade tries to store the 120M install image here on a partition that by default, is only 200M. Relatively painless workaround documented here. Preupgrade itself was quite neat in that the upgrade appears to be completely automated, aside from selecting the grub boot entry and confirming network details as part of the above workaround, I think the whole thing would have run to completion and rebooted without me being there at all. (which is nice as the machine is in my basement)

Upon reboot Eclipse would crash with a permission denied error, appears the upgrade re-enabled selinux. Fixable with "setsebool -P allow_execstack 1", and I'm going to try to keep selinux enabled this time for as long as possible.

I've been doing some work recently on cobbler4j, a small Java library for interacting with Cobbler over XMLRPC based on the work done to integrate Cobbler into Spacewalk.

Right now the library basically allows you to open up a connection, and interact with the core object types (repos, distros, profiles, systems) as if they were actual Java objects. In the future this will likely grow to include other operations and background tasks. And as a required disclaimer, this is still very much a work in progress and should not be considered stable.

The cobbler4j wiki page covers most of the high level details on what it does and how to use it.

Here's a sample program:

import org.fedorahosted.cobbler.CobblerConnection;
import org.fedorahosted.cobbler.Finder;

It's doing most everything I want now, just need to clean up some rough edges (quite a few actually) and roll it up for a release.

Running basically the same thing since this weekend and loving it, it's also been pretty rock solid. In my opinion (DISCLAIMER: don't listen to me) the preview release is a great time to upgrade if you're anxious and a little bit savy. Release notes here, and you can get it here.

I couldn't stick with this setup for long but I had to take a photo before I scaled it back. The third display on the right was kinda hard on the neck, and two systems plus three LCDs generates a whole lot of heat in a very small office and summer is nearly here. (we hit 29 C here which is a good two if not three months ahead of schedule for Nova Scotia) I've now scaled back to just the two displays on the left hooked up to my desktop in a dual head configuration, and moved the workstation visible down to the basement.

While my initial attempt to get rolling with the Fedora 11 Beta was pretty rocky, one of the bugzilla's regarding Anaconda's inability to recognize my existing install for an upgrade got duped on another bug about an intermittent udev timeout. Indeed if at first Anaconda didn't realize it could upgrade my system, rebooting off the ISO corrected the problem, might take a few tries if you experience something similar.