wiredfool

We’ve been reading the book Zen Shorts to the kids, and in it, there are three classic Zen stories that are told for kids. One of them, involving a robber and the gift of a robe, seems to have played itself out in real life recently, when a Social Worker gave his mugger his coat, then took him to dinner. And in the process, got his wallet back so that it was his treat. Link: A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

The upgrade instructions for this version are pretty much the same as any other version.

So, what that means is that you install it, then wait 1-4 days, then install an urgent security patch?

I’m probably going to give it a shot tonight. Dunno if i’ll regret it in the morning though.

We’ve got a small forest on the land here, and it’s a little over grown. Just a little, probably 2-3 times as many trees as the land can support. The arborist agreed, and pointed out the little trees that can go, and some of the medium sized ones that are split, twisted, or are missing tops. 10 years ago would have been a good time to thin this out.

I’ve been cleaning up the forest a little bit, cutting up the trees that fell this winter, clearing some deadwood, and have noticed that the smaller trees are really on the losing end of the growth lottery. This one is one of the more successful ones, as it was still mostly alive. It had 10 years of good growth, then 16 years of increasingly bad growth.

One of the dead ones that fell was more like 10 good years, 10 bad years, and 10 years of rings so tightly packed I could barely make them out. It died due to lack of light, or lack of root space. But mainly, it just didn’t grow fast enough.

I halfway suspect that all but the biggest trees here are all the same age, some are winners, and some just aren’t.

Yet another camera that’s found a home here. This is not so much a working camera, but I’m pondering pulling the lens and trying to fit a bellows to the dslr.

I had the need to check a debian install for corruption recently when a newly installed and configured server started crashing under heavy IO activity. These days, when debian stable is kicking out kernel oopses, it’s most likely bad hardware, and if random wierd stuff is happening, look at the memory first. And surely enough, they found bad memory in the server. Since bad memory can hose a lot of things, I wanted to check the installed packages to make sure that there wasn’t any latent corruption.

I’d done this before on RedHat systems with a rpm command (rpm -Va verifies all installed packages against the manifest md5 sums), but dpkg doesn’t have an equivalent command.

But there is a package, debsums, that does exactly what I needed.

sudo apt-get install debsums
sudo debsums -l

Should show a listing of all the packages where there’s no hash on file.

debsums −−generate=nocheck −sp /var/cache/apt/archives Generates sums from the installed packages that are still in the cache.

Run sudo debsums -l again, This shouldn’t list any packages this time — if there are still some, you may need to redownload some with the command: sudo apt−get −−reinstall −d install `debsums −l`.

Then: sudo debsums −ca should give a listing of all the binaries that are different from the installed versions.

** Warning, as the man page notes, this is more a check for corruption and not a substitute for a malicious activity checker like tripwire.

As amazing as it sounds, I think that the next thing to to in the garden is hang around and wait for a couple of weeks to plant some more stuff. The March salad bed is in, the March potatoes are in, and the beds for the next batch of planting are in pretty good shape. I may throw out some cover crop to crowd out the weeds germination, but there’s just not that much more heavy lifting that needs to happen for the near future.

Also: take pictures. Been too busy working to take pics of the garden.