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Stop telling me about bum_tnoo7@hotmail.com

Please people, stop telling me that bum_tnoo7@hotmail.com (or bu_tnoo7) is a hacker and I shouldn’t add him to my facebook account.

It’s already wasted far too much bandwidth, the message itself that is forwarded is technically rubbish, and you yourself are being used by the “virus” as the propagation mechanism.

Oh, and before I get a load of comments on “how do you know”, “what makes you an expert” – I teach a course on hacking to the Masters courses, and if you don’t believe me, then do some research yourself – http://www.sophos.com/security/hoaxes/facebook_hacker.html

Important

If you receive this or a similar message, please do not forward it to your friends and colleagues. Forwarding unsolicited chain letters wastes time and bandwidth.

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Grr grr grrr

Hmm, where does this start…

My fileserver used to run Ubuntu Dapper Drake Server.

I was trying out icecast to send a music stream to all the Xboxes and other machines in the house… so I installed a few packages to try and do that, and found that I really ought to be updating the system. Lets upgrade to Feisty Fawn thought I, and having done an dist-upgrade in the past without a problem thought that it’d be straightforward. How wrong could I be?

Alter sources.list, apt-get update, deep breath – apt-get dist-upgrade…

Something breaks – it’s complaining about /usr/X11R6/bin not being a symlink – please fix and try again… odd

Ok I try changing it into a symbolic link, and try again, fails again, differently, now complaining that rdesktop has a clash with something else…

After fighting with it for a couple of hours, I give up – the installation process has completely borked the underlying installation, and the system won’t even boot now.

Booting off a live CD at least allows me to back up /etc onto one of the other spindles – at least I won’t lose all my configuration even if it all goes titsup.

Now I look around and find that I’ve got a Feisty install CD, so I pop that in, and it seems to go ok – I install over the top of the old installation – yes it moans that something might get broken, but I’m willling to take the chance before re-formatting the disk. It appears to go ok, but when I come to boot – nada, well, not quite it reports “Cannot write to disk”. Is my hard disk dead? After about half an hour of chasing false leads about dual boot systems, it appears that there is a problem in the Grub menu. The last line has “savedefault” on it. Now my guess is that it’s trying to save to the hard disk, but as that was mounted read-only, it failed to write anything and stopped booting. Comment out that line and things progress normally again.

Of course, I had to change out the hard disk first as I thought that the drive might be on the way out (it was a 10 year old 4.3G drive)

Once I had done a clean install, at least the system booted, and I’ve got my /home disk mounted in the right place, but now my RAID card doesn’t want to start:

dmesg relevant lines:
pata_sil680 0000:00:09.0: version 0.4.6
PCI: Unable to reserve I/O region #1:8@de00 for device 0000:00:09.0
pata_sil680: probe of 0000:00:09.0 failed with error -16


lspci relevant lines:
00:09.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Silicon Image, Inc. Winic W-680 (Silicon Image 680 based)
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 11
I/O ports at de00 [size=8]
I/O ports at dc00 [size=4]
I/O ports at da00 [size=8]
I/O ports at d800 [size=4]
I/O ports at d600 [size=16]
Memory at efffff00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
Expansion ROM at eff00000 [disabled] [size=512K]
Capabilities:


lsmod reports:
pata_sil680 10884 0

I tried all the standard things of turning off acpi and PnP stuff at boot and in the bios, and still no joy – I finally gave up at gone midnight.

So currently I’m stuck with the file server not able to access four of it’s drives (over a Terabyte of storage) until I work out why I can’t access the raid card.
Of course it’s probably going to come down to reflashing the BIOS on the motherboard, so I’ll probably look into that tonight.

Grr grr grrr

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Always know where your towel is!

I’m currently writing a “must bring these things” letter for our new intake, so that they can bring along the right stuff on the Outward bound weekend, and found myself including the phrase “Always know where your towel is!” Then I started thinking that a lot of these undergrads will not even understand where the phrase comes from, so in the hope of educating the next generation I am posting this here:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value— you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence, a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”

And I did actually use a HHGTTG quote on my data structures and algorithms exam this year too.

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Laptop for Lowri – update

Well, I met Lowri over lunch at The Anchor Inn, Oldbury-on-Severn. In about a week, Lowri is off on the Four Borders Expedition, which is the British Universities Kayak Expedition 2007.
A couple of months ago, I had a desperate plea from Lowri, informing me that she’d killed her laptop, and was going to need one for the expedition… could I find a way to provide one.

So last weekend I finally was able to deliver a refurbished Panasonic Toughbook CF-28, which I bought from Icex. When I first asked my Head of Department if he could provide money for a machine – he said no, as he thought it was going to be fairly expensive, but after I did some desperate searching around, I found this one at a price which he could afford.

Hopefully, she’ll find it difficult to destroy this machine, and we’ll get some really good reports back about this once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Best of luck Lowri, and come back in one piece.

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What does Physics teach you about the construction of the dermis?

Apparently, according to the AQA examination board, you should learn about the dead outer layers of skin protecting the living layers underneath, in order to answer the question on a GCSE Physics examination paper.

There’s a story on The Register about this here – be sure to read the comments, there’s an especially good one suggesting answers to the mentioned questions.

Wellington Grey’s Open Letter

And we wonder why we’re having to do so much remedial teaching to our first year entrants.

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How has the user experience changed in 20 years?

Reading Risks Digest this morning I came across a link to an article comparing a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core. The question posed was how has the massive increase in computing power has changed the speed at which the most commonly performed tasks are performed.

“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry…”– Henry Petroski

Of course, some of you might already have guessed the outcome, and some might not agree with the tests as presented, but the fact is that the tests actually look pretty fair when you consider what most office workers do with their PCs.

Anyway you can read the article for yourself here on hubpages

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CS259 students read this!

I’ve been beating CS259 about this sort of thing for more years than I care to remember, but it’s always good to have someone else putting it all so succinctly.

Take it away Josiah Cole

(thanks Claire)

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Laptop for Lowri

I’m on the lookout for a laptop for Lowri Davies at the moment. She is a student here, currently on industrial year, and a Kayaker -she’s not bad at it either – European womens freestyle champion as well as being British champion. She’s been selected for the British Universities Expedition this year, which is to the Altai Mountains – called the Four Borders Expedition

Lowri has asked me if I can provide a laptop for them to blog whilst on expedition, as their last one died whilst she was in Uganda, and they’ve gone and spent all the money already.

I’ve managed to scrounge a palmtop machine which could be used for blogging as long as they provide memory cards, and can find ways to connect it to upload the data on a regular basis, but it would be really nice to be able to provide her with some form of Panasonic Toughbook, as those things are supposed to be indestructible.

Is anyone out there willing to chip in a tenner or more towards one of these refurbished models? (I’m looking at the CF27 of £200 at the moment, plus a wireless network card and some more RAM) At the very least it’ll enable us to jealously watch her progress as they work their way around the rivers of Mongolia and the surrounding region.
Toughbook at SterlingXS

If there is enough interest I’ll put up a paypal address for you to contribute to, and we’ll buy one for her.