Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

28Sep/143

Updating bash to patch Shellshock on discontinued CentOS 4.8

By now, this week's news of the Shellshock vulnerability has quieted to a bit of a rumble. What a mess, and to think that this exploit has been possible for such a long time...

What to do about old Linux distros, then? Yes, the rule of thumb is that if the distro is no longer widely supported, one should move off of it, or at least put it behind something more secure. But what if there is a single application which requires just that particular old distro, and will not play nicely with anything newer, and what if that particular app is proprietary, and no longer available?

4Feb/145

Archiving JFS service logs on OS/2

Quick refresher:

IBM ported JFS from AIX to OS/2 for release with Warp Server for e-Business in 1999 1, and it ultimately made its way into the Warp 4 client a few months later. Anecdotal evidence (read: my own personal conversations with people who know) says that the port was pretty rough around the edges, and much of the utilities were left in barely-usable condition (many people to this day shy away from defragfs on OS/2). The hope (or so I'm told) was that a third party 2 would develop a better set of tools at some point down the road.

  1. Wikipedia: JFS (file system)
  2. ISV, in IBM-speak, or Independent Software Vendor
27Aug/130

Enabling Extended Attribute support in a Thecus N2200-EVO

In a related post to my notes on enabling extended attribute support for the Synology DiskStation DS212j, I've managed to accomplish the same task somewhat more elegantly in the Thecus offering. As compared to the Synology 2-bay unit, the Thecus is about the same size and price and offers similar functionality, with the added benefit of hot-swappable drive bays (though the "hot-swappable" part remains something to be proven to me; let's jet say that they are front-accessible, without screws to remove to extricate the drive caddies from the chassis). Getting EA support was considerably easier than with the Synology, as well.

30Jun/130

Yet another method to grab download-disabled slideshows from SlideShare

Yes, I know. Horrible, horrible subject. The thought of stealing jpgs which are publicly viewable... Oh, well.

Standard disclaimer applies: Teaching someone how to steal a book does not make the teacher guilty of theft. If you get in trouble for following these directions, shame on you, not on me.

28Apr/130

A sincere apology to users of my YUM repo mirror

You see, it all started in January, when I decided to do a good deed (I should have known better). I set up a YUM repository mirror for Netlabs.org, as OS/2 now uses RPM and YUM for (some) package management (I have a post in draft on that whole issue). It turns out, however, that for reasons which I shall explain, the xml (and related) files in my mirror weren't getting updated, so while I was doing a great job of adding content, I wasn't updating the repo information, so subscribers had no idea.

So, for all of you out there who have come to rely over the past couple of months on my US mirror of the Netlabs YUM repository, I most humbly apologize for the inconvenience. It's fixed now, though.

21Oct/122

Enabling Extended Attribute support in a Synology DiskStation DS212j

As small NAS devices go, the Synology DiskStation offerings are quite good. On the bang-for-the-buck scale, they rank well near the top, offering a diskless, 2-drive-capacity enclosure for right around $200 street price. I won't go into a litany of features here, and truth be told, Rosenthal & Rosenthal is not a Synology business partner, so I have no great axe to grind insofar as additional sales of these units is concerned. Detailed information on the hardware and software may be found on the net in various places. The focus of this post, however, is on getting support for EAs (extended attributes) on this device.

26Jul/122

With the coming of Windows 8, there has never been a better time to switch platforms

Have you read the reviews of the "new" UI from Redmond? Have you had a chance to give it a test spin of your own?

I don't know that I will ever quite understand the need for developers to change things in such large steps. Of course, for me, the most comfortable and familiar desktop interface is eComStation's enhanced Workplace Shell, taken from IBM's OS/2 Warp 4. Elegantly object oriented and functional, while it's not without its own set of issues, it has remained relatively stable and unchanged for well over ten years. Objects behave as I expect them to behave, and I don't have to waste time trying to figure out where things have gone from version to version of the underlying OS, or how to accomplish simple tasks (it's a desktop, after all; at a physical desk, would I want to have to read a manual every time I needed to open a drawer or answer the telephone?).

20Apr/120

Running RConsoleJ on OS/2

This article of mine first appeared on the Novell Cool Solutions site in 2004. As Novell has migrated much of the original content to their newer wiki format, and has still left some behind, my own searching took me some time to find it. So, I am reprinting the article here, with a link to the original article (working as of today).

Consider this a .1 update to the original, with references to the excellent OpenJDK 1.6 port we now have available for OS/2.

15Apr/120

Why I still use OS/2 (eComStation)

As a consultant, I look at computers and operating systems from a "best tool for the job" perspective. Some systems are better suited to some things than others. I wouldn't expect to play modern computer games, written for Win32 or Win64 on Linux or OS/2, no matter how far advanced Wine or Odin was/were. Likewise, I wouldn't consider running a web server on the Win32 or Win64 platform vs Linux or OS/2.

Along with other suitability considerations, I factor in my own (or the client's own) comfortability factor with a particular environment. The Mac object oriented desktop is quite nice, though it's not my environment of choice. On Linux, I prefer KDE to Gnome, but neither of those nor the Mac desktop nor Windows Explorer approaches the level of comfort, familiarity, or ease-of-use which I experience using the Workplace Shell, which is - for me, at least - the main reason I stick with eCS.

Stability concerns? These affect all platforms at one time or another. Unless the problems are inherent to the overall system design (Windows' weak security model and the dangers of the single registry paradigm), such things need to be considered in the course of business. that is to say, they happen. Cars break down, too, but I'm not quite ready to go back to a horse and cart (and carts break - ever change a wagon wheel?).

8Dec/110

Configuring Squid Proxy on OS/2: Path adjustments

Following onto my post concerning web privacy, I wanted to produce some pointers concerning Squid configuration for web blocking. To do that, of course, I needed a working Squid configuration. Mine was sorely in need of an update. I'd been running 2.6 stable 14(?) for a long time, then upgraded to 3.0 stable 13. I recall that took me some time to get working, but still I suffered repeated crashes under heavy load, so as a result, I did what any other normal user would do: I turned it off.

Well, that's no solution, now is it? It's especially no solution if the goal is to be able to tell other people how to use it!Hit with Ball