January 11th, 2010 
opensolaris, software 
ian 
no comments
I’ve been running an ntpd server as part of the UK pool since 2007 but since upgrading from OpenSolaris 2009.06 to snv_129, I’ve had a very poor score. So poor, that for more than a few weeks I’ve been dropped from the uk.pool.ntp.org CNAME 
The problem (after I fixed the missing ptys) manifest itself as a series of entries in /var/adm/messages with varying IP addresses but all of the form:
sendto(1.2.3.4) (fd=53): Not owner
and a random delay (or packet drop) to the time responses that meant I was deemed to be unreliable.
I spent a long time with truss and Google and didn’t come up with anything useful, but narrowed the behaviour down to something peculiar with my routing – I have three NICs in my OpenSolaris box: one of them with a public IP and one with a NATed one, although both end up at the same router (no – best you don’t ask why). To prevent NTP requests arriving on my public IP and then departing by the default route (via the NAT) I have used an odd looking IPFilter rule for Transparent Routing, which enables packets matching a rule to be sent to a specific NIC – in this case, all packets with a From address matching my public IP were being forced back out of the public NIC regardless of the routing table entries. This had worked for months on 2009.06, and after a lot of poking, appeared to be doing the right thing on snv_129 as well.
Most of the Google comments suggested that it’s perfectly acceptable to ignore sendto errors in most cases, but I couldn’t figure out where they were being sent from until I started poking around with ndd (in a failed attempt to find source based routing for UDP packets), and tucked away in the /dev/udp collection was exactly the setting I needed, so after issuing:
pfexec ndd -set /dev/udp udp_sendto_ignerr 1
The time started to flow again, and so far over 12 monitoring periods the step has generally been under 0.005 – with a nice stable ADSL line overnight I should be back in the UK pool by morning 
I’m not sure what changed in the network as I haven’t gone back to my 2009.06 BE to take a look at the original ndd settings, but I was never as happy with my ntp score on OpenSolaris as I had been with my Qube 2 so this could have been the reason all along.
August 29th, 2009 aperture, photography, software ian no comments
Tweak the Info.plist if required in order to remove or reduce the CPU MHz limit, and then open up /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture file in 0xED and jump to the offset 0x6f9a80 and change the text in right hand pane from performRequirementsCheck to performLicenceCheck and then add five hex 0x00 in the left hand pane to make the strings equal length.
August 12th, 2009 general ian 2 comments
Oh dear.
“You have failed the practice citizenship test.
Questions answered correctly: 13 out of 24 (54%)
Time taken: 02 minutes 46 seconds “
Life in the United Kingdom – The Official Practice Citizenship Test does say it should take up to 45 minutes, but it’s flawed in so many ways it’s a joke. There were about 5 questions that were on subjects that I would want applicants to know something about and the rest were culled from the reject pile of I Want To Be A Millionaire.
(via Scaryduck)
June 15th, 2009 opensolaris, software ian no comments
After getting so excited about figuring out what was up with the upgrade to 2009.06 I ran into another, more sticky problem. I rushed into reattaching the zones I’d had to detach to get beadm working by using:
zoneadm -z zonename attach -F
Oh dear: that was a bad idea. The zone appeared to attach but zoneadm -z zonename boot failed and then I discovered it was impossible to delete, rename or reconfigure the zone.
After a few attempts to recover things, the correct answer turns out to be to manually edit /etc/zones/index to change the state of the zone to read configured, and then it’s trivial to reattach the zone with:
zoneadm -z zonename attach -u -d path/to/zonename/ROOT/zbe
at which point it automatically upgrades the zone to 2009.06.
June 11th, 2009 opensolaris, software ian no comments
New OpenSolaris release: Yay !
Updater fails on beadm create, and manual attempts also fail: Boo !
After a lot of grumbling Googling down plenty of dead-ends it appears that beadm in 2008.11 gets very upset when there are Zones attached. A set of zoneadm detach commands later and the updater completed without any problems at all.
May 1st, 2009 general ian 3 comments
A friend at work has recently moved to Cambridge, and given that the weather has been improving a bit I put together a few things that might be interesting, and then realised that it wasn’t really specific to his needs and thought others might like to know too.
So first up, Cambridge Botanic Gardens. I should note that the only entrance I’ve ever known to be open is the one at the far end of Bateman Street near Trumpington Road (on their map).
The Fitzwilliam is the largest museum in Cambridge, but you will need to leave your bags at the desk when you arrive and I think they don’t allow photography. The Sedgewick is smaller and used to allow non-flash photography. Plenty of museum info all in one place.
If you walk along the river bank from Jesus Green (where they often have open-air Jazz in the Summer), past Midsummer Common (often full of cows, as it is Common Land and also where the November fireworks and various Fairs (and Fayres) are held) and up to Coldhams Common where you can cross the foot and cycle bridge to the Green Dragon which serves food and has a garden next to the footbridge, or you can carry on over the grass up to the High Street in Fen Ditton.
One note: in the UK if it really is an active Common then that means grazing is permitted (well, probably city residents: I’m not sure on the full bye-laws), so if you’re not on one of the paths don’t expect the grass to be mown, and do watch out for animal droppings (as it’s mainly cows grazing in Cambridge, they’re not that small…)
Fen Ditton has two pubs that I’ve been to, one is the Ancient Shepherds which is indeed in an old building (the original cottages date from around 1540 AD) but it’s not open all day, and the other – The Plough – has recently been turned into a Gastropub (more Restaurant than Pub); they will take you without a reservation if they have space, but might be worth calling ahead if you are certain you want to eat there.
If you just can’t stop walking, then you can go up the riverbank to Clayhithe (on the edge of Waterbeach) and stop off at The Bridge which is a Pub that concentrates on food. Can be busy at peak times, but more of a Pub vibe than The Plough. If you carry on up the road into Waterbeach then just as you get to the village (0.25 miles or so from the pub) you come to the railway station and can catch a train back to Cambridge (journey time 3 to 6 minutes – waiting for a train, well, urm, check an online guide for weekend train frequency !). They also have an instant ticket machine on the platform.
Also note that the footpath along the river switches sides using the footbridge by the Green Dragon, so if you want to go to Fen Ditton then that’s fine – you can say on the same side as you did on the way from Jesus Green, but if you decide to go for Clayhithe then you’ll need to cross the river before you get to Fen Ditton. After crossing the bridge by the Green Dragon turn right and keep walking past the end of the road, staying on the right. Rejoin the river a little further along.
If you’re staying in town, then although it’s a boring walk up a busy road (although you can get there from the far West edge of Midsummer Common on quiet backroads), then The Wrestlers on Newmarket Road does excellent Thai food (the Green Chicken Curry can be challengingly hot for a wimpy Brit like me, but I keep coming back for more !), and the last time I went The Hopbine (close to Midsummer Common and the Grafton Centre) also had nice Thai, although they do serve more English food than Thai.
April 27th, 2009 site, software, web design, wordpress ian no comments
I’m a huge fan of CSS and intelligent use of it such as removing images, background colours and scaling down font sizes for print, but some things need more work. If you’re looking at this site from an iPod Touch, iPhone or Android device, you should now get a much more compact ‘just-the-facts’ style view, courtesy of WPTouch. If you have any problems, or think the layout could still stand to be improved, do let me know in the comments.
