A few days ago I received advertising from Amazon offering an interesting
kitchen utensil for the special sale price of only $19 or so: a cutter for automatically
making Julienne strips.
OK, Amazon, I don't really trust you. What does eBay have to offer? A very similar device for only $7.99:
OK, that was worth the try. It took its time to come, and I've been playing with it for a
few days. It has two sides, for very fine and medium coarse. “Very fine” didn't work at
all for me on the carrot that I tried: it only scraped off the surface. The other side did
up to a point:
But that photo also shows the parts of the carrot that it couldn't cut, and the slices
aren't as uniform as I had hoped. And it left the cutter very clogged:
That's almost acceptable. That's what I did with a knife. Unless I'm missing something
important, the cutter isn't worth it. It wasn't until checking this article that I noticed
that the device in the advertisement is different from what I got. Does that make a
difference?
For some reason Yvonne found her trigger finger splint uncomfortable.
Instead she found a piece of plastic water hose:
Now why didn't I think of that? Why, didn't I think of that? It was my first suggestion
when her current problems started. Now to see whether a slightly larger diameter might not be
better.
And that downloads most, if not all, of the episodes on the page. It takes a while, because
it's sequential, but I have time.
But today I took a look and found that it loaded even more than that. I don't know how, but
it had downloaded several years' worth, a total of over 500 GB! I don't think I have ever
seen as much data go across the net. 35 years ago, if it had been technically possible, it
would have cost me in the order of $17,500,000. Now it's included in my monthly fee.
Once again problems with named on lax.lemis.com. Why do I have so much
trouble? I got it working again, but in the meantime there were significant delays. Should
I use something else? Off to ask the twins, which came up with suggestions, depending
on whether I wanted an authoritative or a recursive name server.
Huh? Both. Or do I? Basically it should be authoritative, but will that serve my network?
More to think about.
System down, won't come up, customer screaming for blood
At Tandem, we had three categories of support requests (“User perceived severity”): 1 was
the least serious, 3 the most. Internally we had descriptions, most of which I have
forgotten. But 3 was “System down, won't come up, customer screaming for blood”.
Today I had this as a customer. Vultr had a service incident in their Los Angeles centre which required
modifying their host software, and so all guests had to be rebooted,
including lax.lemis.com. I didn't notice until I found it was down. What went
wrong this time? Off to take a look. Oh:
I've seen that before. In fact, the images are from last month, but the boot stopped in
exactly the same place. We're dead in the water!
Sent off a fault report to Vultr, of course, and then considered: fra can take much
of the web load, but all my mail goes via lax (calling itself mail.lemis.com
or mx1.lemis.com in this connection). OK, let's open the firewall and
let eureka (mx0.lemis.com) receive the mail directly.
ipfw add 11 allow ip from any to eureka dst-port 25
But it didn't work. Why? Try allowing to any system. Still nothing. Do some network
tracing. Nothing obvious. nmap? Something obvious: hydra (from which I was
doing the testing) spontaneously rebooted! Horror!
When hydra came back, it was not good. No network connectivity. I didn't save the
changes I made last month, so it was trying to access the net via eureka rather than
interface re1. Run dhclient against re1 and I had a connection,
but no routing: default gateway was still eureka. Remove that. Where do I point it?
The answer in such a case is simple, as I now know: remove the default interface
and then start dhclient, which will set the correct default route.
Things weren't over yet. Once again I had this horrible window manager restart
syndrome, which I must finally fixed. But only on server 0. Server 1 worked normally, and
I was able to establish that eureka still has a firewall, and it allowed mail only
from lax. Change that and all was well.
That's enough for one day. The shock was palpable: I was trembling from the stress.
Mañana.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
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