Nothing to see here...

I found this article ( http://www.news.com/Democrats-Colleges-must-police-copyright%2C-or-else/2100-1028_3-6217943.html?tag=nefd.lede ) posted on slashdot ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/11/0342213 ) and it greatly upsets me. The article is best summarized by the first sentence of the slashdot post, "The MPAA is applauding top Democratic politicians for introducing an anti-piracy bill that threatens the nation's colleges with the loss of a $100B a year in federal financial aid should they fail to have a technology plan to combat illegal file sharing."

The beginning of the actual article states, "New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students."

This "proposal" is inside a bill. This could actually become a law. This law would be government sanctioned extortion of academic institutions by the MPAA and RIAA. "The prospect of losing a combined total of nearly $100 billion a year in federal financial aid, coupled with the possibility of overzealous copyright-bots limiting the sharing of legitimate content, has alarmed university officials." This alarms me as well. If the school doesn't filter content (censorship anyone?) and pay "subscription" fees to the MPAA/RIAA, they lose federal grants that go to provide scholarships and loans to students.

I suggest you all read the article about the two Democrat Representatives, George Miller from California and Ruben Hinojosa of Texas, and their proposal and if you are as outraged as I am, contact your Representatives and Senators and let them know.

The first stupid command:

mforde@tak:~> tar -xzf webbing.tar.gz

The second stupid command that didn't work:

mforde@tak:~> tar -tzf webbing.tar.gz | rm

The command I should have stopped with

mforde@tak:~> tar -tzf webbing.tar.gz | xargs rm

The stupid command that deleted public_html and all of its contents

mforde@tak:~> tar -tzf webbing.tar.gz | xargs rm -r



The commands that saved me:

mforde@tak:/mnt/s1> restore -i -h -v -f 2007_09_16-level0
mforde@tak:/mnt/s1> restore -i -h -v -f 2007_09_20-level4
mforde@tak:/mnt/s1> mkdir ~/public_html
mforde@tak:/mnt/s1> cd ./usr/home/mforde/public_html/
mforde@tak:/mnt/s1/usr/home/mforde/public_html/> pax -rwvpe . /usr/home/mforde/public_html/

From the man page for restore:

-i This mode allows interactive restoration of files from a dump.
After reading in the directory information from the dump, restore
provides a shell like interface that allows the user to move
around the directory tree selecting files to be extracted. The
available commands are given below; for those commands that
require an argument, the default is the current directory.

In interactive mode, the commands I found very useful were ls, cd, add, extract.
ls and cd do exactly what they do in a regular shell. add added its given argument to the list of files to be restored and extract starts the restore of those files.

I haven't slept much in the last few weeks as usual. Last night I slept for about 75 minutes. I've been awake since 11:15 last night.

Earlier this evening I unpackaged a tarball containing my public_html directory from Stevens. I did this in the wrong directory and it dumped its contents into my public_html here on this machine. I realized I was an idiot.

I had the brilliant idea of using the -t option of tar and piping that output to rm. I was puzzled at first and then I realized I was an idiot again and rm does not work that way. I'd like to remind everyone that I had less than an hour and a half of sleep and had been awake for more than 20 hours at this point. At 7:55 I had the brilliant idea of using xargs to take the output of tar and turn that into command line arguments for rm. This worked, but it left a bunch of empty directories behind. I didn't want to go though manually to look for the empty ones and delete them by hand. I had a brilliant idea. I'd just run the previous command with a -r option on rm. At 7:57 I realized I was an idiot. Again.

I quickly opened up the man page for restore(8) and prayed that dump(8) had actually worked for the nightly back ups. For months I have been using dump to back up the primary disk in the machine to a (hardware) RAID 1 on a weekly cycle of levels 0 through 6 starting on Sunday. I had never actually tried a restore until tonight. Yes I realized this also made me an idiot.
Long story short (too late) I was able to restore the data with the level 4 from last night and the level 0 from Sunday. I used pax to copy the data from the restore point back to where it belongs which preserved the file dates.

So, like most lessons dealing with computers, I learned something new today by breaking it first, then having to fix it.

Last night( 2007-08-24) I saw Dream Theater at the PNC Arts Center. I am not familiar with their catalog to the point where I recognize names of songs but that will most likely soon change. Looking around I've found what seems to be the setlist from last night. I'll update/correct this list as information becomes available to me.

If anyone comes across this and can point out any errors, please do so and I'll make the changes.

Constant Motion
Panic Attack
Blind Faith
Surrounded 2007
Endless Sacrifice
The Dark Eternal Night
I Walk Beside You
Another Day
In The Presence of Enemies
ENCORE MEDLY:
i. Trial of Tears
ii. Finally Free
iii. Learning to Live
iv. In the Name of God
v. Octavarium

Intel(R) Processor Identification Utility
Version: 3.6.20070606
Time Stamp: 2007/08/24 17:04:02
Number of processors in system: 1
Current processor: #1
Cores per processor: 4
Processor Name: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
Type: 0
Family: 6
Model: F
Stepping: 7
Revision: 66
L1 Instruction Cache: 4 x 32 KB
L1 Data Cache: 4 x 32 KB
L2 Cache: 2 x 4 MB
Packaging: LGA775
EIST: Yes
MMX(TM): Yes
SIMD: Yes
SIMD2: Yes
SIMD3: Yes
Enhanced Halt State: Yes
Execute Disable Bit: Yes
Hyper-Threading Technology: No
Intel(R) Extended Memory 64 Technology: Yes
Intel(R) Virtualization Technology: Yes
Expected Processor Frequency: 2.40 GHz
Reported Processor Frequency: 2.40 GHz
Expected System Bus Frequency: 1066 MHz
Reported System Bus Frequency: 1066 MHz
*************************************************************

So here I am, two weeks later. I had to do a clean install because Ghost 2003 locked up with the SATA controller and the re-named Ghost 10 (Norton Save and Restore) was lacking in that none of Ghost's imaging and/or cloning features were present. (Excellent idea Symantec.) None of the motherboard's three network interfaces (two GigE, one WiFi) are supported outside of Windows. And when the system goes into standby mode (in any OS) I have to unplug the computer, discharge the capacitors, and plug it back in to power on again. I'm going to try to RMA it for that reason, but I doubt they'll give me a credit-back. I'm going to get an Intel D975XBX2, which I should have purchased in the first place. Coupled with the issues on the Asus P4V8X-MX and the recent failure of an Asus P4P800, I am no longer going to puchase Asus products. MSI's motherboards have been fairly reliable and stable with the near hundreds deployed in my time at Stevens. From now on it's MSI or Intel.

Weird Al
August 12, 2007
PNC Arts Center
Holmdel, NJ

This is more or less the set list

Polkarama
Canadian Idiot
Close But No cigar
It's All About The Pentiums
You're Pitiful
Wanna B UR Lovr
Medley:
Couch Potato, Do I Creep You Out, Isle Thing, Headline News, Bedrock Anthem, Confessions Pt. III, Ebay, Ode To A Superhero, Pretty Fly For A Rabbi, Trapped In The Drive Thru, Gump, Eat It (May be missing a song or two from the Medley)
I'll Sue Ya
The Saga Begins
Yoda
Weasel Stomping Day (video)
Smells Like Nirvana
Amish Paradise
White & Nerdy
Fat
ENCORE:
We All Have Cell Phones, Come on, Let's Get Real
Albuquerque

Ghost 2003 (somewhere between versions 8 and 9) doesn't like the SATA controller on the Asus P5W DH. It locks up and sits there. So I went out and purchased a copy of Norton Save and Restore, which is supposedly a repackaged Ghost 10. Except all of Ghost's usefulness has been removed and replaced with GUIs for stupid users. And it refuses to open images made with previous versions of Ghost. Yeah.. .gotta love that.


dump(8) and restore(8) are looking better andf better all the time.

I have managed to work some voodoo to copy the files from the image to the new hard drive, while booting off the old hard drive. I'll probably have to do a repair install for windows to actually boot.

Yep... repair install is running now....

It seems Ghost's driver set does not recognize the second IDE controller. Because of this I cannot write the image files to the disk on that controller. I will have to make room for the image on the secondary disk on the on-board controller. Of course I'll have to run sysprep yet again...