My first place to look was in the mail logs for the SMTP server and other associated daemons. However, I saw nothing in the maillogs which was not a very comforting thought.

After more investigation I would notice empty files like this every once in awhile…

~/Maildir)  ls -la new/
total 4
drwx------   2 al  al   512 Jun  8 00:25 .
drwx------  69 al  al  2048 Jun  8 00:25 ..
-rw-------   1 al  al     0 Jun  8 00:22 1244388142.30600_.myserver.net

This gave me more clues on where to look next. So next I looked in my Procmail logs for this particular mail id and noticed the process handling this message was killed by SIGPIPE

procmail: Executing "/usr/local/bin/spamassassin"
[84028] warn: spamassassin: killed by SIGPIPE
procmail: [84026] Tue Apr 14 21:45:26 2009

Googling dug up the following links that explain it all:

 http://www.nabble.com/Zero-exit-code-aft…
 https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/s…

Verdict:
Upgrade Spamassassin

Since I have upgraded Spamassassin, the zero byte email mystery has resolved itself.

However, one issue that cropped up during an IRB session was I could not copy and paste Japanese characters into the IRB repl. This is very very painful for my day to day use with Ruby (Imagine not being able to use the ‘|’ character while writing UNIX pipelines).

Below is an example of me trying to enter the character あ into IRB and watching it fail.

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> ab = "?"    <---- Tried entering the character あ
SyntaxError: (irb):1: invalid multibyte char (UTF-8)
(irb):1: unterminated string meets end of file
from /usr/local/bin/irb19:12:in `'

After a lot of head scritching I was able to narrow it down to something with readline:

$ irb --noreadline
irb(main):002:0> ab = "あ"
=> "あ"
irb(main):003:0>

After some more digging into the issue. The root cause seems to be the lack of GNU readline. By default, Ruby will link in the system installed readline library on OS X which is called editline [4]. Unfortunately, editline does not support UTF8 or multi-byte character sets which makes this a no-go for daily usage.

Most of the other references suggest downloading readline from source and installing into /usr/local however I believe this defeats the purpose of using something like MacPorts. After a bit of finagling I found that this is the invocation to get things working.

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/rub...
tar xvzf ruby-1.9.1-p243.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.1-p243
# Don't trust MacPorts version of autoconf because it somehow nuked the
# --with-readline-dir option
/usr/bin/autoconf
./configure --with-readline-dir=/opt/local --enable-shared --program-suffix=19 --enable-pthread
make
sudo make install

I have it wrapped up in a script which you can see here.

References

[1] http://wonko.com/post/how-to-compile-rub…
[2] http://frozenplague.net/2009/01/ruby-191…
[3] http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/
[4] http://thrysoee.dk/editline/

$  hg commit --help
 -d --date       record datecode as commit date

Too bad the help is too sparse to explain the commit date format. Luckily I found a good explanation at the URL below.

Thanks!
http://blog.littleimpact.de/index.php/2009/03/03/usage-of-hg-commit-date-mercurial/

The Capify.org website helps for remembering the ’simple’ details on what Capistrano can do. But where I waste a lot of my time is asking questions like, “How do I set the Capistano SSH gateway to a non-standard port?”. Luckily, Capistrano is written in Ruby so it is easy enough to glance through the code and finally find out where it is but this is why good tech docs exist. To give enough context to answer those questions.

To answer my own question, below is a snippet you can add to your capfile to use a non-standard port if you need to deploy through a SSH gateway that lives on a non-standard port

# Add this to your Capfile
# This sets the SSH gateway to a machine called mysshgateway.com on port 22222
set :gateway, ‘mysshgateway.com:22222′

My overall goals were the following:

• Have each zone configured with its own virtual NIC (Crossbow)
• Allow easy creation of zones without having to type zonecfg crap over and over again
• Make it a stepping stone to automatically creating zones
• See how well ipkg branded Zones work
• Allow a Zone to get its IP and DNS configuration from DHCP

I had tried going through tutorials that I found on the web (See references below) for setting up Zones but sadly none of them worked to my frustration. After a lot of experimentation I finally pieced together a way to create zones quickly and (almost) automatically for simple configurations.

Howto

1. Create a template zone that will be used as the main clone Zone
2. Download setup-zone-exclusive.sh and modify lines 34-35 to match the name of your template zone and the real interface you want the zones to bind to
3. Download the DHCP event hook script from here and name it dhcp-client-event.sh if you want DHCP configuration
4. Run setup-zone-exclusive with the zonename and the virtual nic interface that you want

In more detail here are the steps below

First create a template zone (I call it barebones here)

# Create /zones as its own ZFS filesystem
$ pfexec zfs create rpool/zones
$ pfexec zfs set mountpoint=/zones rpool/zones
$ pfexec zfs create rpool/zones/barebones
$ pfexec chmod 0700 /zones/barebones
$ pfexec dladm create-vnic -l $REAL_IF vnic0
$ pfexec zonecfg -z barebones
barebones: No such zone configured
Use ‘create’ to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:barebones> create
zonecfg:barebones> set zonepath=/zones/barebones
zonecfg:barebones> set ip-type=exclusive
zonecfg:barebones> add net
zonecfg:barebones:net> set physical=vnic0
zonecfg:barebones:net> end
zonecfg:barebones> exit

$ pfexec zoneadm -z barebones install

Get the script

I would suggest you create a project directory to hold things such as zonecreations.

Download from Github gists here. Name it setup-zone-exclusive.sh. Don’t forget to chmod +x the file so you can execute it

Download the DHCP event hook script

You can get that here. Make sure this script is in the same directory as wherever you saved setup-zone-exclusive.sh

Create a zone

You can now create zones like this:

cd zonecreations
pfexec ./setup-zone-exclusive.sh mycoolnewzone virtualnic1

Have fun!

Update: Fixed an error in the example for using dladm. It should be correct now. Thanks!

References

Downloads

http://gist.github.com/122220 (setup-zone-exclusive.sh)
A DHCP event script to make sure DNS is configured when DHCP acquires an IP

Older docs on setting up Zones on Solaris

How to use sysidcfg file in OpenSolaris 2008.11
Internal Zone Configuration docs
Performing the Initial Zone configuration
Preconfiguring with sysidcfg file
OpenSolaris FAQ on sysidcfg
Ben Rockwood’s blogpost on Zone creation
About /etc/.UNCONFIGURED

Helpful for understanding Zones and Crossbow

Crossbow on vnics

Finding out that there is a change in policy for setting root_password in sysidcfg files

PASSREQ is enforced
zlogin failure after zone setup

The following helped in understanding the role of IPS and ipkg inside a non-global Zone

Updating Zones in OpenSolaris 2008.x
A field guide to Zones in OpenSolaris 2008.05
OpenSolaris forum on sysidcfg and Zones

Being a Solaris newbie I was curious to see why this entry was there. A quick Google brought up this nice discussion:
 http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?…

Summary, don’t delete it.

Edit the file /etc/nsswitch.conf and make sure that the line that begins with

hosts:

contains the following

hosts: files dns mdns

Then you should be able to ping any machine that uses Bonjour. For example, if you have a Mac that is named mycoolmac then you should be able to ping mycoolmac.local

References

• Heads-up Multicast DNS and discovery

One challenge for the cowboy sys admin is on how to keep oneself engaged while making their job basically… a walk in the park.

One thing I have found helpful in creating lists is to be dogmatic about writing docs as you are doing something somewhere, anywhere and collect all of this later. (You are writing documentation as you do your job, aren’t you?)

Read More

Ultimately, I took a different path than becoming a game developer. After reading Kill Ten Rat’s blog post on Game developers I am glad about my choices. I have pretty much erased almost any regrets on not taking that path in life. Although I AM sad to read such a story in 2009 because the decisions I made were over a decade ago and it is disappointing to hear the state of the game industry for a game programmer as a whole seems so soul crushing.

While, I don’t think god sucks I definitely don’t endorse it. At this point I would only use it under the following conditions:

• Need for a process monitor tool with more dynamic configuration setups. This is where god really shines against monit’s simpler understanding of what process management is about.
• The host that needs monitoring can easily spare at least 16MB for a monitoring process. See below on why.
• I really want an all Ruby solution for all the tools in a system

In general, I am into the whole ‘It is Open Source. If you’re having issues, fix it’ deal so I am not nearly as angry sounding as Brad is about god. However, after having issues with god, I switched to monit for simple process monitoring and restarting. I had far less troubles and got on with other tasks that I considered more important than perfection in a process monitoring system.

For those that are curious here are the issues that I ran into with god:

• Daemonized Ruby took at least 8MB of RAM for the monitoring process. With RAM the way it is, this is not as big a deal. However, if you are trying to get by on a 128MB VPS host every kilobyte counts.
• God itself had issues just randomly dying after some time. Tom promptly fixed it after it was reported and that was great. However, it was a little disappointing that a monitoring process just died.
• Sparse documentation compared to monit’s. Then again this is typical from many Ruby projects and luckily Ruby code is readable enough
• Digging up known issues for god required noodling through groups, forums, and blog posts. Would have been nice to just have a friggin’ FAQ like other sys admin-targeted software I have seen.

I also DO agree as has been said in the comments on Brad’s post that it is the responsibility of the deployer of software to handle the issues with whatever they deploy and just deal with it. The reason I say this is because I fell for the hyped up description of god in the beginning and ultimately paid the price when it sucked up my time. I dealt with it but definitely am less impressed with overhyped marketing descriptions of software these days. Personally, I am not a fan of that type of marketing for software since it seems a little disingenuous to me. But that is just me.

On reflection, this makes sense. When I have pair programmed, I have usually been supportive of the idea and want to share my thoughts and ideas with the person that I pair with. However, communication of thoughts and motives is at best an imprecise art. From what I have seen, pair programming can have issues at the ground level under the following circumstances:

• If one person in a pair is not willing to communicate with the other person
• If one person cannot express intentions well to the other person
• One person is moving too quickly and will not slow down enough for the other person to keep up (This is not fun at all)

I cannot imagine an environment where pair programming was taken so seriously that is has been codified as a law but if they do exist then Forced Pair Programming is definitely something to watch out for. However, I do believe that pair programming is an effective strategy for getting multiple developers up to speed on any codebase and avoids the Only One Developer Understands this Code syndrome.

To insert the current filename. In Insert Mode, type CTRL-r % and it will insert the current filename.

Thanks to blog post for the tip!

Thanks Pink Tentacle

However, one choice quote I really like is:

The reality is that leaders are held responsible for the hazards of change as well as for the benefits.

References

Speaking of Twitter stuff… I found an interesting ‘conversation’ [1] between Tim OReilly and Mark Littlewood on a BBC article summarizing a report on how inattentive parents are causing more difficulties for present day children.

While it would be nice to believe that parenting can become the mark of a civilized society, it would be interesting to see some more specifics. From what I see at the ground level it is not that easy to achieve. As a parent you only have a limited control of the overall environment a child grows up in. Some of the suggestions by the report are good though. Having more ‘family-oriented’ spaces is a good thing. I am not sure about other countries but in the U.S. and Japan it can be non-trivial to find family-oriented spaces in urban environments. Finding ways to make these available and more accessible to busy parents is overall a good thing.

Some things I could think of off the top of my head that might be nice:

• More restaurants that are suited to family where parents don’t have to be embarrassed if their children decide to cause a scene
• Try to be more understanding of the parent with the kid that is causing a scene at the you name it area (grocery store, department store, etc). In general kids, cry for a reason (not always the greatest ones). While jamming a pacifier works as a stopgap. Better solutions revolve around trying to understand the root cause. This of course takes time.

Footnotes

[1] I guess these are conversations in Twitter parlance but it seems more like drive-by thought blurb and commenting to me. Either way some of them can be interesting depending on who is talking

References

Read the BBC article

1. Come in
2. Kick serious ass
3. Go home

For some reason steps 2 and 3 can be quite troublesome… luckily today was one of those days that the checklist went well!

[The creators] have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years… they understand the user problem so deeply that they can blend the advantages of each new platform with ‘document authoring problem’ to really build a platform-native solution, not a clone of someone else’s work.

Read more

However, not all government projects are pork-barrel political showcases (I hope). One interesting project located in Yokohama is called Zoorasia. Zoorasia is a large zoo with a multitude of animals from around the planet. The Zoo itself is divided into 7 areas at present that match certain geographic areas of the world. In each area are a set of representative animals from that region. For example there is an Oceanian Grassland area and one of the prominent animals there are kangaroos.

The zoo is run by the Yokohama Greenery Foundation which was established as far back in the mid 70s. Back then it originally called itself the (sorry if I mistranslate here…) The Yokohama City Park Foundation (Nin-idantai Yokohama-shi Kouen Kyoukai – 任意団体横浜市公園協会) however renamed itself to the Yokohama Greenery Foundation in 1984.

The zoo itself is a little inconvenient to reach by public transportation (aka it takes awhile by bus and train). But from what I have seen the park is extremely nice with a very reasonable entrance fee (600Y). One thing I do wonder is whether Zoorasia can support itself in the long run since it is a great resource for families around the area. It would be a shame if maintaining such a nice zoo is actually not sustainable with the budget that they have. But it does seem that Zoorasia’s parent organization has some backing by the Yokohama government which I hope is a good thing. (At least I can feel some of the tax I pay is going to something interesting)

References (In Japanese)

• Zoorasia’s website (English available!)
• Some words on the philosophy of Zoorasia from the Zoorasia President
• Japanese Wikipedia Page on Zoorasia
• The Yokohama Greenery Foundation

1. Shows a concrete example of how to use a not so trivia tool
2. Works within constraints (in this example, playing with a subversion checkout)
3. Fills a need (Managing non-trivial changes to a centralized SCM model without sending tons of commits)

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One thing that is interesting is the origin of place name Akihabara. A friend of mine has an excellent post here

Read more!