SAGE is "On Guard!"

I had need to research some historical information about IBM's SAGE system and stumbled on the video. Mundo retro! Unfortunately, I remember taking stuff like this out of service.

ESXi Clone Without vCenter

Tossed together a little script to clone VMs on an ESXi that is not vCenter managed. Rather than paste the whole thing into the blog, I've posted it over on the site:

http://dougbunger.com/scripts/esxiClone

Once the script executes, access the ESXi via vClient, and choose the Configuration tab. Select Storage, browse the share, navigate to the vmx file and Add to Inventory.

No, Mrs Frederick is not Lena

The SyFy channel reads my blog. Ok, not the channel itself, but surely the producers, director, writers, and starts of Warehouse 13. I know this because last night, Lena and Mrs Frederick were in the same room. This blows away my theory that they are the same person.

I'm guessing they read my blog entry and changed the story arch, just to throw me off track.

...And I don't want to hear anything about last night's show being recorded three months ago.

Clip Comments From httpd.conf

Just a little regex to clip comments from httpd.conf, but it would work with most config files.

grep "^[\s \t]*[A-Za-z\<]" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Its An Automobile, Not A Laptop

Let me see if understand this: Buick thinks I'll choose their car over a Lexus on the basis of the amount of RAM allocated to the navigation system? They think I don't care about milage or performance or ride quality? No wonder they're backrupt.

Is Mrs Frederick Lena?

Its taken nearly a decade for the network formally known as SciFi to reach its full potential. The change started with their take on The Invisible Man, but it was Battlestar Galactica that put them over the top and Eureka that proved BSG wasn't a fluke. Now they've got Warehouse 13, which is to the Secret Service, what the X-files was to the FBI.

But with less shark jumping...

Let me qualify: W13 is not a serious show. Its just for fun, and succeeds. But below the surface, there is a story arch.

Part of the story line is the enigmatic character, Mrs Frederick, a stately black women who cruises around DC in a limo driven by an Odd Job like chauffeur, ordering senior government men to do her bidding. She was in last night's episode, but I missed the significance of the dialog, until I heard it the second time tonight, while my son was time shifting the episode.

Arty was talking to Lena, the young black inn keeper, and stepped into the other room for a doughnut. When he returns, Lena is gone, and Mrs Frederick is waiting for him. Arty jerks back in surprise and says: "Mrs Frederick! What did you do with Lena?"

You know-- We've never seen Lena and Mrs Frederick in the same room.

Finally: VMware for Executives

Executive: I'm not satisfied with performance.
IT Puppet: With VMware, computers work better, and save money.

Too bad most of the information is only marginally accurate, but what do you expect when your primary data source is a sock puppet.

Chinatown Arch-- All Done!

They got the scaffold down. All cleaned up, new paint. Your stimulus dollars at work.

HowTo stunnel, Pt 2

In my example config, I specified:

syslog=yes
debug=7
output=/opt/stunnel/stunnel.log

First, the entry syslog=yes writes to the /var/log/secure, which renders stunnel.log to be redundant.

Second, the debug of 7 is more than we need for production. Under normal load, does not log anything, including a restart of the service. Debug 5 gets the starts and stops, but logs three lines per transaction. It's a thin line to tread, but looks like I'm going to use 5.

Next problem is the fact that, as presented, the server will accept connections from anyone. The client's PEM was unused. We need to tell the server force clients authenticate. We'll do this with key exchange. Add two lines to the server's config file:

CAfile=/etc/stunnel/server.ca
verify=2

We won't really have a CA, but it will be close enough. Copy the server.pem to server.ca, which we modify in a few minutes.

On the client:

echo "-----`hostname`-----" > `hostname -s`.crt
sed -ne '/BEGIN CERT/,/END CERT/p' \
    <server.pem   >>`hostname -s`.crt

Ship this off to the server.

On the server, we will add the CRT we just transferred from the client to the CA we created a few moments ago:

cat clientfile.crt   >> server.ca

Restart stunnel on both ends. Unless a client's CRT has been added to the server's CA, they can't get in.

Chinatown Arch: Almost Done

They unveiled the DC Chinatown Arch. Still have some of the scaffold left. Newly refurbished, nice and pretty. I'm covering for a coworker on the morning shift, so the sun is at the wrong angle. I'll have to get a better picture next week.