Two Ideas

Last week I returned from Hawaii, and into a whole lot of catch-up at work. I also had to clean up the blog site: although I’d upgraded to WordPress 2.5 already (2.5.1 now), before I’d done so, some nasty stuff had been inserted into one of my blog posts, getting my site branded as an attack site.

Now, that was probably the correct action to take, inasmuch as my site was an attack site during that period of time. But would have been too much to ask to send me mail identifying the problem — or, at least, when I submitted a review request on the site to identify the problem in advance, to avoid a back-and-forth where I fix one problem only to have another one identified before my site status can be returned?

Also, I discovered that my metablog had become stuck, due probably to a prior disk-full condition, and wasn’t posting all of my stuff. Further, del.icio.us changed the RSS feed address, and either I missed it or they didn’t bother to tell me, so that wasn’t showing up, either.

Now that it’s fixed, you can see that I’ve been identifying all of the Mac dive log software. I’ve become interested in getting an air-integrated computer (with hose and console, probably, rather than wireless, due to the substantial cost difference) and tracking my air consumption at depth. I figure that Laura wants to get Nitrox-certified, and as long as I’ll need a new dive computer for that (yes, I will, that’s how old my dive computer is), I might as well track air consumption too and upload log data.

Unfortunately, the list of air-integrated dive consoles that play well with Macs is fairly limited. Suunto and Uwatec would be my only choices. I like what I’ve read about Suunto (though it sounds like the original Cobra, otherwise my best choice, is perhaps overly conservative), but know next to nothing about the Uwatec Smart COM. Reviews and opinions welcome.

At work, I wanted to build a single Ubuntu image for VMWare, which I could then clone for virtual appliances.

I settled on 64-bit Gutsy Gibbon Server, as it was the latest and greatest. I built my generic image, which worked great. But then I built my clone.

The clone’s ethernet card never showed up. I used every tool; I could see it on the PCI bus, and I could examine it to my hearts’ content, but ifconfig just wouldn’t see eth0.

Finally, today, I found the culprit. I’d rebuilt the image again, cloned it, told the clone to create a new ID, and immediately the Ethernet interface disappeared.

The culprit? /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, which relies on the MAC address of the network card to assign ethernet devices. Changing the ID changes the MAC address, which breaks the existing rule.

Solution? Delete the rule for the old card, on eth0, and change the eth1 in the rule for the new MAC to eth0.

That’s it. Wish it hadn’t taken me days of messing around to figure that out. Makes me feel old and not very bright.