Some useful links and tidbits picked up during my research.

Some quick notes based on three days of playing with various ISOs and installer images. I need to install a working instance (i.e. not a “Live CD installer”) of OpenIndiana on a USB flash drive for my forthcoming NAS box; trickier than you might think. [Updated, 20110110]

There comes a time in every sysadmin’s life when he is overcome by a deep-seated, atavistic urge … to build his own home file server. And BB is there. Those digital photo archives, they don’t get smaller. And those MP3 collections, they’re easily grown. And then you start downloading video files…

Ten years of Big-Bubbles (no troubles) bloggery or, as seems more accurate lately, one new blog entry every ten years! (Here’s where we came in.)

Thank you, loyal reade… oh, that’s me.

July 1992. I was on the point of graduating from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth with a 2(i) in Computer Science. Three years earlier, I’d entered university studying Geology, with CompSci as an accessory or possibly a joint degree; I hadn’t been too sure. Geology was ostensibly what I’d been educated to A Level for (my school hadn’t offered Computer Science); computers were actually where my interest lay. It quickly turned out that Geology wasn’t. One of the first things you are taught is that everything you learnt at O and A Level was to be discarded and relearnt from scratch. You could not simply pick up a piece of granite and identify it as granite, even though you knew irrefutably it was granite the same as the blue stuff above you was “sky” - you had to go through the motions of analysing it first. Much as I had enjoyed A Level geology, I had not signed up to repeat it. More pressingly, the summer field trip was upcoming and, having already experienced one week of staring at wet rocks in the rain, I wasn’t keen for two weeks of the same while solo camping in the wild. So I applied to change my degree and, after a show of prevarication from the Geology department (along the lines of them not being seen to lose out while some other department gained), the switch duly occurred. Fortunately, one of my contemporaries in CompSci wanted to go the other way, so I think a straight swap was arranged (dawn in the Geography concourse; tense negotiations; the two captives each ordered to march towards the opposite side and not stop; etc). I like to think that CompSci got the better deal; the other guy was surely 2(ii) material…?

The problem: The Youtube app doesn’t work on the iPhone and iPod Touch when a proxy is configured in the wifi settings. There are various hints on the forums that a particular URL used by the app requires rewriting (as the request says one thing but the Host header says something else). However, no one AFAIK has provided actual code to fix this.

The solution: (Squid users only) the following script should be configured as a redirector in Squid (e.g. redirect_program /usr/local/bin/youtube_redirect):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$|=1;
while (<>) {
    s@http://iphone-wu.apple.com/feeds/api/@http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/@;
    s@http://iphone-wu.apple.com/feeds/videos/@http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos/@;
    print;
}

Also set url_rewrite_host_header off and reload your Squid config. This should fix the broken URLs generated by the Youtube app and still allow the proxy to work for all other requests.

Spent the last two weeks looking at Puppet and Cobbler. Still not up to speed on Puppet; the one useful document would be a comparative guide that translates common tasks in Cfengine to Puppet equivalents. As with Cfengine, the best adoption strategy appears to be automating trivial, harmless but useful actions first (e.g. keeping SSH running) and gradually widening the scope of the rules, particularly for fresh clients.

Another piece that accompanied a home-brewed compilation. This one contained noteworthy personal faves that were intended to be accessible without appearing too mainstream.

The following piece accompanied a CD compilation I put together for a select (unlucky) group of (former) friends during those early, heady days of Napster. If you wish to play along at home, most of these tracks should be available for download somewhere, but note that the version of the Medics’ “Burn” on iTunes certainly isn’t the single release I remember.

Debugging web apps with Curl

It’s the Swiss Army knife of web app debugging. It avoids wondering how much of what you’re seeing is current, and how much has been cached by the browser. It shows you all the gory details of HTTP requests and responses. It’s curl, and it’s solved more web application issues for me than whole departments full of developers, analysts and managers.