Welcome to boredom...

Friday, August 4, 2017

Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart - lyrics to the second verse

The complete lyrics to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" are nowhere to be found on the internet! They are all missing the second verse. I think this is it (transcribed by me)

Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit reckless
and I dream of something wild
Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit helpless
and I'm lying like a child in your arms
Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit angry
and I know I've got to get out and cry
Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit terrified
but then I see the look in your eyes
Turnaround bright eyes, every now and then I fall apart
Turnaround bright eyes, every now and then I fall apart

Thursday, May 5, 2016

get vCenter Server or Replication appliance update URL from command line using xmllint

My vCenter appliances (Server and Replication) are on an internal network and cannot get to the outside world. To update them, I mirror the update repositories on an internal web server, using the script from http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2013/05/how-to-create-offline-update-repository.html

The script requires the update URL, which is easy to get manually from the appliance web interface, but I want to automate the update.

I found that the default update URL is stored in

/opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-deploy.xml

and the user-entered update URL is stored in

/opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-runtime.xml

The appliances come with some command-line tools to parse XML; I'm using xmllint:

echo 'cat //property[@name="repositoryAddress"]/@value' | \
xmllint --shell /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/provider/provider-deploy.xml | \
grep https

The output:

value="https://vapp-updates.vmware.com/vai-catalog/valm/vmw/05d561bc-f3c8-4115-bd9d-22baf13f7178/5.8.1.12927.latest"

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Fark Lite tampermonkey script updates

Updated Fark Lite to work with the current version of Fark.com (as of 2015-08-27)

download here

/*
 Fark Lite
 Copyright (c) 2005, Rick Fletcher 
 Released under the GPL license
 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 This is a Greasemonkey user script.

 To install, you need Greasemonkey: http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
 Then restart Firefox and revisit this script.
 Under Tools, there will be a new menu item to "Install User Script".
 Accept the default configuration and install.

 To uninstall, go to Tools/Manage User Scripts,
 select "Fark Lite", and click Uninstall.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 Changelog

 0.3 2015-08-27 RCJ 
        update for Fark changes
 0.2.2  2005/10/08
  bug: no longer hiding the "view voting results" link on the comments page
 0.2.1  2005/10/03
  bug: updated to work with updated fark.com source
 0.2    2005/10/02
  new: refactored to use XPath
 0.1    2005/07/20
  initial release
*/

// ==UserScript==
// @name          Fark Lite
// @version       0.3
// @namespace     http://flet.ch/things/greasemonkey/
// @description   Strips fark.com down to just the links.  Hides links from categories you don't want to see.
// @include       http://*.fark.com/*
// @include       http://fark.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

(function () {

 var farklite = {

  config: {
   hide_search: true,           // remove the google search form at the top of the page
   hide_side_columns: true,     // remove the columns on either side of the page
   fix_link_target: true,       // make links open in the current window
   strip_passthru_script: true, // make links direct (instead of passing through the go.fark.com script)
   unwanted_categories:         // links that are in these categories will be removed
    [ "weeners", "satire", "video edit" ],
  },

  //fark_passthru_script_regex: /^http:\/\/\w+\.fark\.com.*l=([^&]+)/i,
  fark_passthru_script_regex: /^http:\/\/\w+\.fark\.com\/goto\/[0-9]+\/(.*)/i,

  // link_container_xpath: "//table[@class='nilink']/descendant::tr/td[position() = 1]/a",
  link_container_xpath: "//a[@class='outbound_link']",

  addCSS: function( css ) {
   var head = window.document.getElementsByTagName( "head" )[0];
   var style = window.document.createElement( "style" );
   style.setAttribute( "type", "text/css" );
   style.innerHTML = css;
   head.appendChild( style );
  },

  fixLinks: function() {
   var links = document.evaluate( this.link_container_xpath, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null );
   for( var link = null, i = 0; ( link = links.snapshotItem( i ) ); i++ ) {
    this.config.fix_link_target       && link.setAttribute( "target", "" );
    this.config.strip_passthru_script && link.setAttribute( "href", unescape( link.getAttribute( "href" ).replace( this.fark_passthru_script_regex, "http://$1" ) ) );
    this.config.strip_passthru_script && link.setAttribute( "onmouseover", "" );
    this.config.strip_passthru_script && link.setAttribute( "onmouseout", "" );
   }
  },


  removeUnwanted: function() {
   for( var i = 0; i < this.config.unwanted_categories.length; i++ ) {
    this.config.unwanted_categories[i] = this.config.unwanted_categories[i].toLowerCase().replace( /[^a-z]/, "" );
   }

   var link_category_xpath = "//tr[@class='headlineRow']/descendant::img[translate(@alt,'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')='" + this.config.unwanted_categories.join( "' or translate(@alt,'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ','abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz')='" ) + "']/parent::*";
   var links = document.evaluate( link_category_xpath, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null );
   for( var link = null, i = 0; ( link = links.snapshotItem( i ) ); i++ ) {
    link.parentNode.parentNode.removeChild( link.parentNode );
   }
  },
 }

 farklite.addCSS( "td.howto, form div.howto:first-child, .banhead div, div.footnote { display: none; }" );
 farklite.config.hide_search       && farklite.addCSS( ".banhead form { display: none; }" );
 farklite.config.hide_side_columns && farklite.addCSS( ".newtoolbar, .entirelefttoolbar, .entirerighttoolbar { display: none; }" );
 
 farklite.removeUnwanted();
 farklite.fixLinks();
 farklite.fixLinks2();

})();

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Juniper Network Connect and Crashplan use the same network ports

I actually found this problem months ago. Today I decided I needed to blog it mostly as a reminder to myself.

After upgrading CrashPlan on my computer, I found that the service would not start. The tray icon reported "unable to connect to the backup engine".

CrashPlan has a good article on the problem and how to fix it.

A solution not listed -- uninstall Juniper Network Connect! (I didn't need it any more)

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Open a console to a virtual guest on ESXi or vSphere cluster

This entry ties in nicely with a previous entry I made about creating SSH tunnels for vSphere.

Unfortunately, when you setup SSH tunnels for the Windows vSphere client (or even for the vSphere web client), you cannot open console windows to the guests using the normal methods -- they will always fail to connect.

To workaround this, use VMware's "Remote Console" program to connect through the tunnel to the host. Note that the tunnel must go to the host on which the guest is running.

Steps:

Install VMware Remote Console (in Vmware downloads, vsphere 5.5, "Drivers & Tools" tab)
find out the VMID of the desired guest using the ESXi cmd line:
```
    vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
```
open url (assuming host tunnel is 127.0.0.4):
```
   vmrc://root@127.0.0.4/?moid=vmid
```
where vmid is the id you found; e.g. if the ID is 29:
```
   vmrc://root@127.0.0.4/?moid=29
```

In case it is not obvious, you open the URL from the command prompt:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Remote Console
vmrc.exe vmrc://root@127.0.0.4/?moid=29

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Use imagemagick to apply a GIMP gradient colormap (.ggr file)

I love using JHelioviewer to create amazing videos of the Sun using pictures from SDO (the Solar Dynamics Observatory).

However, jHelioviewer has a maximum of 1000 frames -- which is about 3 or 4 hours of SDO images (if you use every image taken). Another problem is that is nearly impossible in jHelioviewer to crop the frame in an exact way.

I already knew how to create a movie from a sequence of images using ffmpeg. However, the AIA images you download from SDO JSOC are grayscale; i.e. they don't have the standard SDO color maps.

JHelioviewer applies the SDO color maps using these GIMP gradient files, but I didn't know how to use imagemagick to apply GIMP gradient color maps.

ImageMagick can apply color maps, but they must be in the form of a color lookup table (CLUT) image. But how does one convert a ggr file (a text file!) to a CLUT image? I found a lot of examples on the web on how to convert a CLUT to a GGR, but not the other way around.

According to this jHelioviewer wiki page, you can export the color tables from jHelioviewer using exportColorTables.java somehow, but I didn't feel like figuring out how to compile it -- and also I didn't want to install the JDK.

So I posted a question on the imagemagick forums. You can go read the forum if you like, but I've summarized it here:

Create a standard hald clut image using the imagemagick program "convert" from the command line:

convert hald:8 hald.png

Install GIMP

Install ggr files in your GIMP configuration directory (on Windows 7 this is %USERPROFILE%\.gimp-2.8\gradients)

Start GIMP and open hald.png
Select All
In the Layers Dialog, select the Gradient Tool, then select the desired gradient
Apply the gradient by selecting Colors -> Map -> Gradient Map
Export the file by selecting File -> Export As ... (save it as a PNG or BMP)

The resulting hald CLUT images are here:

Now, to apply any of the above color maps to a grayscale image, you do, e.g.:

convert gray-image.jp2 sdo-aia-171-colormap.png -hald-clut color-output.jpg

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Symantec 12.1.5 on Linux LiveUpdate failures -- BouncyCastleProvider

TL;DR version: To fix this, temporarily remove the "noexec" mount option from /tmp and run the install.sh program again.

We recently started using Symantec 12.1.5 on our Linux systems at work. I installed the client on a test system and immediately had issues with LiveUpdate:

/opt/Symantec/symantec_antivirus/sav liveupdate -u Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: Command failed: Problem with LiveUpdate. Check that java directory is in PATH Unable to perform update

In liveupdt.log:

Apr 1, 2015 11:32:26 AM There was a failure in reading the settings from the .conf file. Apr 1, 2015 11:32:26 AM org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider Apr 1, 2015 11:32:26 AM JLU received a DeleteSetting command.

Running Liveupdate in debug mode:

java -cp /opt/Symantec/LiveUpdate/jlu.jar com.symantec.liveupdate.LiveUpdate -d Using character set UTF-8 Command-line Product Selections to update: (ProdName, Version, Lang, ItemSeqName, SeqNum) Debug - output[nIdx] = uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) context=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_java_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 Adding JLU to the current command line JLU Linux, 3.10, English, LiveUpdateSeq, 26 Trying to load jar file from /opt/Symantec/LiveUpdate/bcprov-jdk15on-148.jar Trying to load jar file from current directory or mentioned in classpath JLUException [ Nested Exception is: [ java.lang.ClassNotFoundException ] org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source) [...]

I will leave out the frustrating troubleshooting my coworker and I did and give you the reason: Our security configuration specifies that we set the "noexec" mount option on /tmp.

Unfortunately, the Symantec install script requires exec on /tmp to install correctly. Specifically, it creates some temporary scripts in /tmp and runs them to install the BC (bouncycastle) provider. Here's an excerpt from the sepjlu-install.log:

Java LiveUpdate version 3.10 Build 26. Extracted out unixinstall.sh to /tmp/1427202521861/unixinstall.sh. Extracted out unixuninstall.sh to /tmp/1427202521861/unixuninstall.sh. Extracted out liveupdate.conf to /tmp/1427202521861/liveupdate.conf. Extracted out bcprov-jdk15on-148.jar to /tmp/1427202521861/bcprov-jdk15on-148.jar. Copied /opt/Symantec/LiveUpdate/jlu.jar to /tmp/1427202521861/jlu-3.10.0.26.jar. Error running /tmp/1427202521861/unixinstall.sh with reason: java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/tmp/1427202521861/unixinstall.sh": error=13, Permission denied.

The script is supposed to copy bcprov-jdk15on-148.jar into $SYMROOT/LiveUpdate/, but obviously because "noexec" was set on /tmp, it couldn't run.

So in full, the solution is:

mount -o remount,exec /tmp $INSTALLER_DIR/install.sh -i mount -o remount,noexec /tmp