wg@wg-laptop:~$ host 69.69.69.69
69.69.69.69.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer the-coolest-ip-on-the-net.com.

I shouldn’t have asked :). It appears to be owned by “Embarq Services“. Perhaps equally as cool is 42.42.42.42, but that 42.0.0.0/8 seems to be reserved by IANA. Bummer.

It’s promising that after being live for less than a couple of hours, I’ve already spied several (at least 4) IPv6 hosts in the access logs

A Google search reveals that it seems to be a common problem. This post on the Cacti forums proposes a temporary fix, which I have implemented and seems to work without any problems. It may expose your cacti installation to security problems, but I haven’t looked in to this, and I suspect that most Cacti installations (like mine) are protected by htaccess authentication anyway.

The fix:

In the file /usr/local/share/cacti/includes/global.php, comment out (by prepending //), or delete line 113:

if (!((is_file($_SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"])) && (substr_count($_SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"], $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"])))) {

And replace it with this one:

if (!((is_file($_SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"])))) {

Hopefully a new version of Cacti is out soon that fixes this problem.

$ dmesg |grep "bsd:"
[   31.178307]  sda1: <bsd: >
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/ufsdisk
$ sudo mount -t ufs -r -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sda1 /mnt/ufsdisk
$

Check with mount to confirm that this has worked:

$ mount
[..]
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/backupdisk type ufs (ro,ufstype=ufs2)
$

All done.

(more…)

• Chris Siebenmann
• Dilbert
• Pantz.org
• The Lone Sysadmin
• The eternal fight between admins and computers
• iDogg

I was also highly amused by the following posts:

• Fixing a relatives computer: a flow chart
• and the inspiration for the above post: The Bacon Flow chart

Hope you all are having a great Holiday period. I know I’m certainly enjoying the time off work :-).

Update (30-Dec): Today, I also added the blog of Erik Dyskant to Planet SysAdmin

• Erek Dyskant

So I disabled this feature. Here’s how, running Ubuntu Linux:

(more…)

Beer/food/coffee/etc, any one?

(From the GNU su man page)

22.5.1 Why GNU su does not support the “wheel” group

(This section is by Richard Stallman.)

Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn’t know how to do that in Unix.)

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The “wheel group” feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I’m on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

Argh.

142,857 * 1
142,857 * 2
142,857 * 3
142,857 * 4
142,857 * 5
142,857 * 6
142,857 * 7

Well I thought it was neat anyway