More weather station pain
Writing yesterday's article on my weather program, I checked the current status. Nothing! It seems that it had stopped logging at 17:30 or so yesterday afternoon. Checking came up with a continual stream of May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[111]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[110]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[116]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[115]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) May 5 07:00:08 tiwi wh1080[119]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) What went wrong there?
More Hugin strangenesses
It was house photo day yesterday. And once again I had issues with the newer version of Hugin that I have on hydra (2023.0.0.d88dc56ded0e) while the older version on eureka (2018.0.0) worked fine. I use a script that creates the project files (.pto) and then stitches them. Yesterday's panoramas had a number of problems, the most extreme of which was this one (first 2023 Hugin, then 2018: What causes that? The project file is the same in each case, and so is the invocation to build the panorama, in essence hugin_executor --stitching laundry-door.pto Could it have something to do with masks?
Ramen for breakfast?
I've been thinking of various ways to eat Ramen noodles for breakfast. One of the more interesting facts is that they really come from China, and the kind I have come from Shandong. I've played around a couple of times, but how about asking an artificially intelligent expert? To my surprise, Google Gemini came up with a recipe that doesn't look bad. The interesting idea was to fry the noodles until crisp. That didn't work for me, and in general the experiment wasn't very successful. In particular, I didn't know that the Miso was salty, so the overall dish was just barely edible.
More ldconfig strangeness
Rebooting tiwi meant that my weather program didn't get restarted. Once again I had this issue with libmysql.so.18. I suspected that that was due to the fact that the directory usr/local/lib/mysql was a symlink to the directory on eureka. OK, copy the files over and run ldconfig on them. It still didn't work! I was in the parent directory, so I simply wrote ldconfig -m mysql. And it seems that it doesn't like that. ldconfig -m /usr/local/lib/mysql/ did the trick.
The night when time stood still
Woke up at 5:15 this morning. What's that light outside? It was almost as bright as day. But the sun doesn't rise for another 2 hours. Turned around, went back to sleep and woke at 7:15, but couldn't get back to sleep. OK, get up. Looked at my watch. 8:42! My bedside clock was fully 1 hour, 37 minutes slow! How could that happen? The clock is electronic and synchronizes to mains frequency (which is somewhat fast). It doesn't seem likely that it would fail like that. And then I asked Yvonne. Yes, her clock stopped altogether round 1:15. She looked back quite some time later and it was showing the same time, so she reset it.
Web site overload: recovery
Once again this morning the web server error log was full of error messages from ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu. But finally it seems to be over. All that remains is this strange error message [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628 OK, I've blown away that file, but I have a local copy. Works perfectly. Copy it back to www. No photos found! Potentially that was the reason for the negative index.
Android strangeness
Downloading some files from hirse, my mobile phone, was particularly slow today. Why? === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~ 4 -> ping hirse PING hirse.lemis.com (192.109.197.228): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=4432.006 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4491.037 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=4636.822 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=4777.693 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4885.086 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3869.501 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=2954.141 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1959.271 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=967.665 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=4.943 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=1.908 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=1.314 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=2.119 ms It came good by itself.
Web site attack
Sometime in the early evening it occurred to me that I hadn't received any external mail in over an hour. Problems on the external server? Yes. The file system was full. This morning there were something like 13 GB free, but now it was at 108% with -3.5 GB. Something had eaten up over 16 GB in a few hours. I knew where to look. The web server error log was full with messages like [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628 [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457785 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628 [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457812 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in ...
www: no swap!
A few months back I ran into memory pressure on www.lemis.com, my remote virtual server. OK, add a ?memory disk?. And that worked. # dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1m count=4096 # mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /var/swapfile md0 # swapon /dev/md0 Until Vultr decided to reboot my machine. And then the md device was gone. It wasn't until today that I noticed. How do you ensure that they're recreated after reboot?
Cracking the fvwm2 to fvwm3 transition
I've been dragging my feet on updating hydra's window manager, mainly because I don't know where to start. I wrote the configuration files nearly 30 years ago, and I have long forgotten the details, in particular what I changed relative to the defaults: this was before I religiously ran version control. One of the big issues, though, was that fvwm3 no longer issues error messages! So I don't know what it doesn't like. After RTFM I discovered that I can get it to output messages to a log file, apparently with a predetermined name ~/. ~/.fvwm/fvwm3-output.log. That's particularly irritating in my situation, where I don't have a directory ~/.fvwm.
Academia nonsense of the day
After being asked if I wrote ?Treasurer? and co-authored a paper with PO Box, today I got another one: 21 N 01-05-2024 To groggyhimsel ( 901) Mentioned by rm rf N ?Greg Lehey? cited by ?rm rf? Is this Artificial Intelligence at its finest?
NBN outage!
Early this morning, while I was reading news on hirse, my mobile phone, an app failed to resolve a host name. Bloody Android apps! It wasn't until later that I discovered that that was the beginning of a 30 minute network outage. OK, what's my MyAussie app for? Fired it up and discovered that it wanted a password. My passwords don't cater for mobile phones: this one was 31 characters long, sprinkled with special characters that are a particular pain to enter on a mobile phone (is that why so many password restrictors demand them?) , and Aussie is too secure to display more than one character at a time when you enter a password.
NetBSD again
I have a bug report on makefs, a program ported to FreeBSD from NetBSD. It works under NetBSD, but the FreeBSD version creates invalid file systems under some circumstances. OK, let's compare what FreeBSD and NetBSD do. For that I need a NetBSD system, and the last one I had (a virtual machine) is ancient. OK, install a new virtual machine. How hard can it be? The biggest problem was getting installation media. For some reason, both firefox and fetch failed early in the download. In the end I downloaded it to my external server and then copied it from there.
Security, 2024 style
Mail from eBay today. I have a second account that I set up for some purpose, and they've noticed that I don't use it. Can they shut it down? No, I think not. I don't know what I might need it for, but it's convenient. All I need to do is log in. I failed. Password wrong. No worries: they'll send me a reset link. Got that, went to the login page. Enter user ID. OK. Enter new password. It's not strong enough! Must contain at least one digit and one special character to make it easier to crack. I tried, in sequence, No security!