What i wanted to do was allow any users on host A be able to ssh to host B using ssh v2 and be automatically logged in. So, these are the steps i took:

1. On A, i added the following to /etc/ssh/ssh_config:
   Host *
  EnableSSHKeysign yes
Host B.example.com
  HostbasedAuthentication yes

2. Also on A, I made sure that ssh-keysign was installed and suid root
   -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 131640 2006-10-31 23:03 /usr/lib/ssh-keysign

3. On B, i set the following config options in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
   IgnoreRhosts yes
HostbasedAuthentication yes
Remember to reload the sshd config after editing
4. On B, i added the fqdn of A to /etc/ssh/shosts.equiv:
   A.exmaple.com
5. On B, i used the following to add the public RSA key of A to ssh_known_hosts:
   ssh-keyscan -vt dsa A.example.com >> /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts

Note: the fqdn of A used above has to be the same as the result of a reverse dns lookup on it’s IP.

And that’s all folks.

Went out on friday night with folks to celebrate sith’s birthday. We ate in Moll Darby’s (wow what an annoying website). The food, oh the food. Let me illustrate: molc ordered a fillet steak with pepper sauce. After a few bites, he decided that this was the best steak he’d ever had, and he’s quite a steak fan. Me, i ordered some roast lamb. I offered to swap molc some of my lamb for my steak. He refused saying he was too busy enjoying his. Later however he changed his mind. When he took a bite of the lamb, he turned back to me and announced that he had ordered the wrong dish.

And while the lamb was good, it wasn’t the best part of the dish. It came with what the menu described as ‘a wild Mushroom Croute’, whatever that means. In reality, it was a pastry item containing mushrooms and sauce. Best thing i’ve ever eaten. It was so good i was close to tears. Ask anyone else who was there. Just.. wow. Conal ordered a penne dish with mixed seafood in sauce. Next time i’ll be ordering that. It was also just that good. *drool*. It’s a pricey enough place, ~€38 for a starter and main course, but i’ll definetely be returning a few times before i flee this city -)

On saturday, my last day in the Wild Onion, noirin came down and joined me for lunch in the WO (followed by her joining donal and sonia for lunch 2.0 in the WO -). When i was leaving work ruth gave me my usual wages, and said “That’s not all you’re getting, but you won’t find that out till later”. I had no idea what that meant, decided that i was unlikely to figure out whatever scheme ruth had planned anyway. That evening myself and noirin went out for food in San Lorenzo, which though not as good as Moll Darby’s, was very tasty. I did manage to spill a glass of water over an unfortunate fellow customer, but they were very gracious about it (anyone else reminded of this?). At the end of the meal noirin revealed that ruth was in fact paying for the dinner. How very cunning and sweet of her -)

On sunday i went up to dublin to visit diane who was over on buisness. We ended up sitting in st stephen’s green (yes, the actual green. no, not the shopping centre.) chatting for about 4-5 hours. I’m very surprised i escaped un-sunburnt. It was really good to see her. There was some kind of crossword/treasure hunt event going on, we had multiple groups of young people running up to our bench asking if we’d mind moving so they could search the inscription for certain words. I was tempted to try insert some disinformation into the game, but i ran out of motivation. Maybe next time -)

Afterwards we met up with niall and maeve whom i went with for sushi in aya. I made a rather big miscalculation however. Niall and maeve had to leave in 45 mins, as she was catching a train back to galway. I therefore decided there was no point in going for sushi 55 (all-you-can-eat sushi for 55 minutes). The alternative was to pay-per-plate. That was fine, i wasn’t planning on eating that much anyway. Mistake. Sushi 55 costs €27.50. On the other hand, this much sushi at these prices adds up to €44. Doh.

Other photos uploaded today are:

• The sheared steering column from the breakins.
• The horror that is Linda’s (diane’s little sister) new vehicle.

On the subject of photos, my post about spiders got some truly terrifying stories in response.

It turns out i was wrong about having broken my record on thursday. I spent some time on friday noting down all the information from here on my cycles and graphed the result. Yes, i know it’s not very pretty, haven’t been able to figure out a useful way of displaying the data yet. In the process i found this which shows the max i’ve managed is actually 27.9kmph. Annoyingly, i went out tonight to try and beat that, and with about 1km to go i was averaging about 28.06, and then i got a major cramp in my left calf and had to pull back to walking speed -/ Even so i managed 25km @ 27.69kmph, which is pretty good, just not high enough for my goals. Next time.

Over the last 3-4 weeks, the irc daemon for skynet has been having many ‘issues’. There’s been a long-running file descriptor leak, which meant we had to restart it every few months. It’s a pain in the ass, but not the end of the world. However, recently the ircd started crashing, randomly. Strace and gdb turned up nothing useful. Eventually i spotted debian bug #300638. The description didn’t quite match up with our situation (the bug only talks about ppc and amd64), but it was the same area of the code that our ircd was crashing in, so i decided to apply the patch and see.

Patch applied, updated package rolled, .deb installed. The crashing stopped, so it looks fairly clear that the patch fixed that (though we still have no idea why it worked without crashing for 6-8 months before starting to crash every few hours). However, the file descriptor leak became much much worse. Before the patch, it could take a few months for the process to run out of fds. After the patch, it would lose one fd per connection. At that rate it could fall over in days, if not hours.

I spent a fair chunk of thursday night trying to debug the fd leak. Looked through the relevant parts of openssl, the pam auth patch we’ve applied to the ircd, some of the pam libraries that were handling the auth etc. Disabling pam auth stopped the fd leak completely, so it was clear that the issue was being caused by that patch. Having gone over the patch with a fine-tooth comb multiple times, i came to the conclusion that it was actually a pam bug we were triggering due to the way the auth patch worked. So, i re-wrote the pam invocation code so that it would only call pam_start()/pam_end() once, and have the original handle persist, and voila, fd leak is no longer triggered. It’s such a relief to have a reliable service again after so many weeks of random outages.

http://diamond.nonado.net/misc/pics/skynet%20racked/

So, we’re awaiting the replacement of the ~€1k of rack that was somewhat ‘adjusted’ in transit.

*sigh*

1. What does PERL stand for?
   Practical Extraction and Report Language [1]
2. What year was linux 1.0 released in?
   1994 (13th of march to be precise -)
3. What does CIDR stand for?
   Classless Inter-Domain Routing
4. Which company does Linus Torvalds work for?
   Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) (as of june ‘03)
5. Which language does Alan Cox write his diary in?
   Welsh
6. What does the 206 status code mean in http 1.1?
   Partial Content
7. What is the reverse dns zone for ul’s class-b ip allocation?
   201.136.in-addr.arpa. (exactness required)
8. What is the prefix of link-local in ipv6?
   fe80::
9. What does MIME stand for?
   Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
10. Name the most common metasyntactic variable.
    foo
11. Assuming no ls, how would you list the contents of the current directory in unix? Bonus points for any answer in a compiled language.
    echo * (diamond judges this one)
12. Bonus question: Best Text Editor: Vim or Emacs?
    Vim. We want a text editor, not an os.

[1] PERL did not initially stand for anything, the above is a bacronym, but taken from the PERL man page and i count it as official.

So.. seeing as some people did make attempts at answering the quiz, i’ll score their attempts here:

• reilly: 1.5 (half a point for question 1).
• dredg: 11 (bonus points for: (a) his first comment, and (b) his answer to question 11, which was better than the official one).
• davisc: 0.

So, there you have it. No-one resorted to calling me names either, so no points for that. Ah well.

In completely unrelated news, my dual-core intel mac mini arrived yesterday. So far it’s been wiped twice, but is generally behaving itself. And, still unrelated, some random cycling over the last few weeks:

• wednesday 2006/03/22 with dan: 21.5km @ 23.83kmph. lap of ~9:20
• saturday 2006/03/25 with mark: 20.4km @ 26.88kmph.
• sunday 2006/04/02 with dan: 35.8km @ 23.9kmph
• wednesday 2006/04/05 on own: 20.5km @ 26.26kmph

*Update*
My bad. Reilly did indeed include profanity directed at me. As such i am retroactively upping her score to 2.5.

1. What does PERL stand for?
2. What year was linux 1.0 released in?
3. What does CIDR stand for?
4. Which company does Linus Torvalds work for?
5. Which language does Alan Cox write his diary in?
6. What does the 206 status code mean in http 1.1?
7. What is the reverse dns zone for ul’s class-b ip allocation?
8. What is the prefix of link-local in ipv6?
9. What does MIME stand for?
10. Name the most common metasyntactic variable
11. Assuming no ls, how would you list the contents of the current directory in unix? Bonus points for any answer in a compiled language
12. Bonus question: Best Text Editor: Vim or Emacs?

You should bear in mind that most of the people who attended the table quiz hadn’t heard of linux. In the end we awarded bonus points to those teams which cursed me particularly fluently on their answer sheet. Good times, good times. -)

Feel free to answer in comments. I’ll post my answers (from the same file) in a few days.

*Update*
Fixed typo – thanks niall -)

• HEAnet (who a few years ago politely declined my suggestion to rebrand to hea.NET)
• Google (who allowed me to go on their segway)
• Canonical (the guys behind ubuntu and who gave me a free laptop)

After the tour, i called into the main office area and chatted to davew and ann. Dave was furiously scribbling some network topology diagrams. I remarked that i’d seen a flash game on the net recently that looked very similar, but neither of them had seen it. A mail i sent them earlier:

Subject: important network planning tool we were discussing today
http://www.planarity.net/

Expect the productivity of heanet to take a slight nosedive (i wonder if that’ll show up in mrtg..).

I also had the opportunity to do some guitar-browsing in Music Maker. Noirin was with me, and when asked managed to suggest some truly awful guitars (though she will no doubt claim that they were just out of tune). At least she didn’t try to make me buy one of the bright pink flower-shaped ones. *shudder*. While there i decided to pick up a guitar stand. Having 3 guitars (2 in normal use) and one guitar stand isn’t a winning forumla. This is what i bought, the coolest guitar stand ever. You probably won’t appreciate it’s wonderfulness from that link, i’ve made a short video demonstrating it’s best feature.

I realised something about linguists today. I know three of them (that i can think of off the top of my head), and they’re 3 of my favourite people. I’m wondering is there some kind of correlation. Perhaps i should try and link a field-study on the subject into my masters…

I’ve been trying out gmail for the last few weeks (specifically, hosted gmail for nonado.net). I’m impressed at how well it’s coping with the amount of list mail i receive. From a quick check, i’ve gotten 1079 mails since march 6th, which is when i started using it. Once i set up the labels (17 currently) and filters (12 so far) i wanted, it’s been amazinly easy to keep up with all the mail. I’m really liking the way it does things, and it’s really hard to believe that it’s webmail a lot of the time because it’s faster than most email clients i’ve used. At this stage i’ve switched over to it for all my nonado mail. It’s a useful way to test it before i tackle the mammoth task that is taming my normal gmail account (which has had a copy of all my skynet mail for the last 2 years forwarded to it. that’d be 10932 so far).

And now this colourless green idea goes to bed to sleep furiously.

From there i walked over to google and lurked suspiciously for a while. I got to have (free! -) lunch (mmm, mexican), play foosball (oh so very badly), flump into a budda bag (massive happy comfy softness), shot by various nerf weaponage, visited the vaunted 4th floor (that of the sys admins and suspicious glances), feel oh-so-tiny in the presense of the people that work there, and have a go on a segway (no limbs were lost or damaged -). All in all, it was a very interesting visit. Really must polish up CV and submit.

After that i found myself a cheez again and we went and met up with a noirin for some pretty decent hot chocolate, and some amazingly large surprisingly good chocolate cake. The plan was to then head back into town for sushi with dredg ‘n toaster (yay!). It didn’t go _quite_ according to plan.

While killing some time in tower (i bought ‘the hours’ on dvd. yay), i received notice from pron that there were some assorted rack bits that he’d like to donate to skynet, if i happened to be around dublin city-centre at the time. I said ‘yay’. There were then various attempts at communication, which mostly failed. The end result was that myself ‘n cheez ‘n noirin ended up walking a considerable distance, half of which involved carrying some rather heavy metal bits. I had understood the parts were light. Pron had understood i was bringing a car. Neither were correct ,-) Doh. Apologies and much thanks to both cheez and noirin for the assistance.

Once we had finally delivered the items back to the car, it was time for sushi. Mmmmmm sushi -) Toaster was unable to make it (*cries*), but we had an aussie reaplcement, dim (no really. short for ‘dimitria’. she ruled). Sushi was really good, though sadly lacking in salmon slabs. *drools*. Hooray for all-you-can-eat-in-55-mins -) Noirin kept count, i managed to rack up about €45 worth of sushi, which is about €10 short of my record, but still quite respectable. Dredg has photo evidence which i hope to wrangle out of him.

I managed to make it home by 2am, after stopping at cheez’s house for a while to watch him play fable which he’s been raving about. I think i even managed to get to sleep for 3. Oh for the sweet sweet touch of slumber.

*Update*
Evidence has arrived.

Kidnapped them, took care of them for the evening, watched some Bill Bailey before the talks, went to Luigi Malone’s etc. Mild concern then arose as to the location of the google talker, but he did indeed turn up in the end, to my relief -) Both sets of talks were excellent. In my tortured mind, it was my two of my three most desirable-to-work-for companies (the other being canonical, the company behind ubuntu) vying for the top spot.

After the talks we all retired to the sports bar on campus and i had to drag thomas (of google) in particular out of there at the end of the night as he was quite committed to discussing various topics all night -) The heanet guys were getting the 9.25 train back to dubin this morning, and i toyed with the idea of providing liftage for such, but i eventually wimped out due to the late hour and the fact that i had work today from 10 till 5.

As it was, things worked out worse than i hoped (no, not for the heanet guys, they got home fine ,-). Got to bed around 2, tried to sleep. Couldn’t. Figured out around 6am that i’d forgotten myself, in the pub, and had drank 2 glasses of coke -/ Caffiene is a bad idea when you’re trying to sleep at the best of times, and has extra unwanted sideeffects for me related to my existing non-sleeping condition. Finally conked out around 6:30, giving me a little under 3 hours sleep. Not good for someone who has to get up and wash dishes for 7 hours.

Survived surprisingly well in work, had my lunch break around 10:30 which gave me some much needed fuel for the rest of the day. Afterwards, myself and dan went for a cycle. Took a bit of convincing dan to get him to go as he hadn’t slept well last night either, and was feeling stiff tired and sore after work. The plan had been to cycle out to daly’s cross (a 21.3km round-trip), which would be the furthest we’d done together. Instead, we were feeling much better than we expected when we got to daly’s cross, so we continued on to birdhill and back. 35.8km @ 24.7kmph. We’re both delighted at the progress. This is only the 2nd cycle we’ve done togther over 10km in length. Hoping to do the same again tomorrow (birdhill and back). Woo to progress -) Seriously considering buying a decent racing bike in 2 weeks time (when i get paid basically). There’s a very very nice one in town for €750, including carbon-fibre forks. Mmmm tastylicious.

There was an secondary motivation for me for the cycle today. Yesterday i ate more food than i think i’ve ever eaten in one day. For breakfast yesterday (around 2.30pm) i ate half a box of Kellogs Start (i’d eaten the first half the previous night while watching The Exorcist), and was stuffed. About an hour later, molc cooked a pasta bake (the dish holds enough food for 4 decent meals) of which i ate 2/3rds, and was stuffed. Then, the heanet guys were hungry, so i went with them to Luigi Malones for company and decided i’d have the nachos grande to nibble on, of which i ate about 2/3rds, and was stuffed (yes, i did actually leave food behind -P). Then, after the skynet talks, we got served 2 massive platters of food in the pub, of which i ate a small mountain’s worth, and was stuffed. I weighed myself yesterday morning (before breakfast, before getting dressed): 76.6kg. Weighed myself this morning (same deal): 78.6kg. Oops. I should really stop doing that.

Mini-poll: are my blog posts too long? I seem to write these really rambly ones that go on for ever. I’m wondering if people even read this far before getting bored. Comment welcome ,-)

• Go cycling every couple of days
• Update here on the same days

I’m hoping a bit of mental association can be built up so the two activties mutually encourage each other ,-)

Went for a cycle today, first time in about 2 weeks, did 22.5km at an average speed of 21kmph, which i’m quite happy with. If i manage to keep this up regularly for a couple of months, i’ll probably reward myself with a racer. No point in buying it now before i know i’m going to stick it though. Made that mistake far too many times in the past. Any bets as to how long this will last? -)

Got back from athlone yesterday, will probably go back to work on monday. Things are mostly fine, though i did get stressed yesterday while rushing to get the bus, and started shaking all over, which is somewhat concerning.

So much skynet stuff to catch up on. There’s been a couple of database admin requests sitting in my inbox for the last 2 weeks, just didn’t have the time to deal with them, which is a bit bad from a service point of view. Hopefully i can figure out a solution to both tonight, and reply with an apology for the delay.

And that’s all. I should say something here about not taking care of myself to see if i can get another comment from ducky berating me ,-) But i’ll be good. For once.

Addendum: removing pedals from a bike is surprisingly challenging. Managed to break a spanner attempting it last night. A higher quality one purchased today, plus a lot of brute force, with the help of cheez, sorted them out today. Thanks mark! -)