Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

Yesterday, I spend half of my day at the university researching on the topics of Quality Management Systems. Seems that everything is concentrated around the ISO9000 and it's variances and a really very basic fundamental model which 2/3 of the TOP 500 Fortune use is a Quality Management System called Six Sigma. We walked with Christine (an indonesian girl which happens to be in my group) to the dorm. On my way back we went to Albertheijn cause I had to take a margarine and wanted to buy a package of lentil. Unfortunately it seems here in most Dutch shops they don't sell a dry packaged lentil just like we usually do in Bulgaria, this so delicious food could only be bought from the Turkish shop and since that shop is quite a lot away from where I live. I decided to go to Aldi which is located 3 minutes from the dormitory I am. Again I looked for packages full of lentil but I wasn't able to find one, so I ended up buying some packaged (Thai) rise, some notched vegetables, bread and some carrots. I went back home. Where I had to work on configuring a new server which will serve as a backup server for 2 websites, I still haven't completely configured everything on it but I'm on my way. I felt really overstrained so I decided to lay and have some rest on my bed. It seemed I've napped I woke up an hour and a half later around 20:00 p.m. . It was cooking time so I went to the kitchen on the 3rd floor to prepare a meal of rise with vegetables. Maria (another Bulgarian inhabitant) of the dorm where I'm helped me with the cooking. Since iI was not completely sure how to prepare the the rise. The recipe happened to be the following: 1st we've got to fry a bit of onions in a little amount of oil, then you put the rise after washing it on the tap, then you water and the notched vegetables, afterwards basicly what you do during the remaining cook time is you add periodically some amount of water to the boiling food stir what's in the pan. An hor later I put a cube of spice with vegetable flavour. The rise meal was rady in an 1.5 hour time and was quite delicision IMHO. Well afterwards I've got to wash the dishes and bowls the pan the spatula etc. Then I went back to my room to continue configuring the questionable backup server I mentioned about above. At a point I decided to make a routine inspection of how some of the servers I'm responsible for perform. One of the servers's ext3 journalling has crashed for some reason, so it's filesystem was mounted readonly, I was really lucky to find that (actually I happened to notice the problem after I tried to edit a script on the server who is responsible for routinely creation of backups). When I noticed the problem I tried to remounte the root partition in read write mode but since it didnt't worked the only left option was a server restart. I was quite a lot of scared since such a problem with the filesystem journalling could be an indicator that the server's HDD is damaged. I tried to reboot the server but it didn't came back. Oh God how embarassed I was then, next I reqeusted a server reboot through the Dedicated Server provider reboot request form and started waiting .. Officially the Dedicated hosting provider is obligied to reboot the server in 30 minutes but as quite often they did that in an hour and a half or so. At this time I tried to contact the tech support at the dedicated ISP through their skype contact a few times, all of them unsuccesfully. No option was left, I was again in a totally screwed up state aware of the fact that if the server HDD has failed then I'll be in a serious troubles. My only option was to pray to God that the server is OK and ask for his forgiveness and guidance, I gave my life again to Jesus Christ, I beged him fervently that he has a mercy over me the sinner. I was quite direct with God explained him about my physical infirmities I'm put into ( I have pain in my left knee when I'm on my knees for a prayer ... Since a week or so I also have that cold, I think it alsmost has passedbut still I have occasionally snivels. After I completed my prayers and supplications, I decided to write an email to the office explaining of the existence of the problem and had the intention to go to bed since was extremely tired. I was on my way writing the mail, when I decided to check if the server is up. And HalleluJah! The server was running agian! Glory be to God Almighty!! For granting my prayer! Glory be to the Father of Lights to The Son and Holy Spirit, Now and Forever and Ever Amen!

I just cleaned up the little script I wrote some time ago to make my life easier. At first I had to login manually to the Zywall Access Point that is here in the dorm where I live currently and that wasn't al I had to act even more sillier manually executing a script each time I went to the Arnhem Business School university. I was really pissed out of all this so an idea emerged my mind I was a sort of inspired it took me a week or so to clarify the whole script which does the "trick" for me. I ended up with the following script, I thought it's a good idea to share it on the Internet in hope that it might be beneficial for somebody. Here is a link to the script itself chk_net_connect.sh . Credits for writing this script fly out to The Lord God (The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit) who sustains me and keeps me and cares for me through the hard days I have being far away from my home in Bulgaria. I should note that I feel that script won't be a reality if God haven't inspired me to write it. So Glory be to God Almighty !

Another day has passed in which we have no scheduled lectures. Which is pretty cool. I can say the day went fine at a point I felt a little bit lost but then again I'm fine thanks to God's never falling love! Yesterday I met a guy from Germany who studies forestry :). I asked him where is he living and his answer was cite here "I'm homeless" :). The interesting thing about him was that he is a Linux fan. Using only Linux on his laptop. It seems he is moving every few weeks since he have no permanent living place. In the early afternoon I had a small walk, I have to move more since I'm most of the time immobilized (e.g. not move enough). When I came back home from the 20 or so minute walk and worked a bit I decided to watch one of the movies I have downloaded. It's in the list I found online named "The weirdest 23 movies of all times". The movie I watched is "Tetsuo - The Ironman" it's from the distant year 1989, basicly it's an unique industrial movie although sometimes specified as a cyberpunk movie, however in order to describe this one I have to note the movie is a complete madness it might be praised and honored for it's art value and it definetely has such from a secular perspective nevertheless from a Christian perspective it's a strongly satanic movie ! So beware even if you choose to watch it like me be aware of the satanic content and try to not gape too much at it. Here is what you could expect from the movie. Basicly it's about humans transforming to awful monsterous machines gradually, there is a sex and extreme violence in it ... just beware! Just during the movie I watched Adrian (one of the Bulgarians) at Honigkamp asked me for help to install Ubuntu on his laptop "Dell Studio". All worked like a charm except the wireless after a bit of poking around online I was able to make it work with the ndiswrapper as a transition layer and the windows driver on the other hand, after a bit more of poking I installed "envy" which basicly is automated way to install ATI or NVIDIA video drivers. Envy managed to install and configure all necessary to make the questionable radion video work perfectly. An annoying thing I should note in Ubuntu is that by default /etc/rc.local stop execution in case it encounters a command which returns an error in order to fix that it's necessary to remove the "-e" flag out of the shebang on top of the file. Right now I'm listening to "Necros". Necros and Skaven and a lot of other tracker musicians could be downloaded freely from Scene.org . I strongly recommend this website in addition it contains a lot of cool assembly demos which had probably fundamental impact on me during my puberty.

Well I haven't blog for a while so I decided to give a shot. And Glorify God! Again! At Monday I had my defense of the the Change Management project we handed in in Mr. Vinke's pigeon box. I trusted to God and prayed fervently. The Monday went just flawless Glory be to the Holy Trinity (The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit)! Amen! Everything went quite well during the Management Meeting. Each 3 who constructed my group were able to partake at the right moment. I was really calm and peaceful during the whole meeting! Cause of God's mercy and power who was helping me and helping us. Our teachers who pretended to be a Managers in a company gave their point on our Change Management Plan. They tried to squeeze us with unfortable questions. Happily we had a reasonable answers on most of them. What's left now is to fix few minor things about the plan and then hand it in to the teachers. Afterwards I hope if everything is ok, each one of 3 of us will receive an individual task and will start working on it. Am let me recall some memories from the day before. Max (a black guy), who happens to be my neighbor and a Christian also invited me to join his protestant presbetyrian Chuch he attend. I accepted since I feel a need to be in the Church and the Orthodox Church misses me so much.. Well we went to a building with a hall in which the protestant Church gathered together. The reason I accepted to join that Church was that they preach in English there. I was quite stunned when I found out that the pastor is actually a female (a black one). They started with a sort of entry speech or at least it looked like this to me. The service continued as the pastor went out preaching. Oh boy, Oh boy what a preach it was, I couldn't believe on my eyes. The pastor acted completely like a general she was screaming passages of the Holy Bible, stressing out on some of the things. Blaming the ppl that they fail to understand the Bible she asked them that the ppl ask God for enligthment on what this passages red. Then the service moved by as a few individuals were invited to share testimonies of what God has done for them during the week.. A little later there was a sort of prayer session where everybody was praying with different prayer, it was like an uncontrolled crowd in which each one of them acted completely different. Some of them were screaming hysterically at moments I was scared to be honest. Then the pastor took the bottle of oil and started laying hands upon some of the ppl of the Church, Oh God they were shaking falling down on the ground, screaming making grimaces, it was an awful things to see .. I was not aware if the people were pretending or this is real. The pastor was Chasing away demons out of the ppl, or at least she told me later that this is what she does. It was such bad place to be I was eagering to be out of this place as fast as possible as the ppl (Church) acted like a sect. The Pastor wanted to lay hands on me either but I rejected the proposition with the words, "No, No, I'm Orthodox". Later I tried to explain to some of the ppl my concerns about what is wrong in this church according to me. And a woman (a real piggy one), started arguing with me with the arguments that I quote her here "i'm God", was like shit this guys are even blasphemous. Luckily some of the other members of the Church corrected the questionable lady that she is wrong although she was unwilling to accept the fact. Later I had a little chat with the pastor and her husband plus one more lady. Let's say that their belief was closer to the Faith reality than the rest. But still I was really shocked from the experience ... I don't know if they're wrong or right all I know and want is that God have mercy over them and me and guide us to know his truth completely. About today: Well let's say a peaceful they it was, except the fact that one of the webservers had died. And was not acceptable for around an hour and a half. As soon as a colleague informed me I restarted the failed apache. I could say I haven't done much from midday till the early afternoon I spend in the University accompanied by Ina. We had few talks about stuff and so on and so on. When I came back "home" to the dorm. I worked a bit. I spend some time learning some english words in an effort to enrich my vocabulary. Since there is a Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux for already a few weeks. I decided to install it on my laptop. Well it took me some time until I installed it correctly. Now I have Adobe Flash 10 on my Debian machine! It seems this version of Flash includes a possibility to use cameras with flash. I was curious about how does this new release of flash performs comparing to the old Adobe Flash 9. According to a Benchmarking made on Linux and Mac it is said that Flash 10 tend to be less CPU hungry and in general peforms better than it's predecessor. The whole article could be red on the here . Let me conclude that post with a cool thing. A friend of mine has referred me to the following "Virtual Barbershop" check it out here link . Be sure that you listen it on headphones otherwise you won't be able to fully enjoy it!

I decided to make a whole post in concern with one of the articles I've red on LWN. This is quite intriguing one. Check it out:

--- CUT ---- 
The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of a study 
attempting to estimate the value of a Linux distribution. 
"Using 2008 salary figures, the tests published in the paper 
revealed that if developed today, the full set of Fedora 9 
distribution packages would cost $10.8 billion. 
The Fedora 9 distribution contains 204.5 million lines of code 
in 5547 application packages. The development effort estimate 
comes close to 60,000 Person-Years.

That's absolutely outstanding $10.8 billion! w0w that's a lot. I wonder what is the approximate estimated price of Microsoft's OSes. Right now I'm thinking it's a good idea to make a research on that subject. Apart from this let me share how my life is going recently. I am working most of the time on a project about Change Management the project should be completed until Friday Oct 22 (5 o'clock). I have to work in a group of 3 persons with an Indonesian girl and a guy from Netherlands. However what happens in reality is that I make the project on my own. The cool thing about the project although it's completely useless is that it requires some diagrams and stuff so I'm playing with the program "dia", gimp openoffice and "KPlato". I need Kplato in order to prepare "Critical Path Analysis". Kplato seems to be pretty cool Project Manager for Linux. I should investigate more closely on the project management and stuff. What really keeps me going is God's grace and support through the days without him I won't be able to do nothing, just like our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ said in the Gospel: "Without me you cannot do anything".

All day long I experiencethe loving kindess of God for which Glory be to The Father through the Son and The Spirit. Blessed be Oh Lord Holy of Israel! I'm trying to develop my vocabulary this days. Today we had an hour of HRE at the university, then I had group meeting with Christine and Matthijs, this time we did some work on the project which was pretty cool So will see what will happen if God is giving me from his loving grace continually just like today I won't be able to endure my living here in the Netherlands. Glory be To The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit! Now and Forever and Ever Amen!

I was fucking schizophrenicly feeling all day long. My damned Change Management project is going nowhere ... Life simply is a bunch of shits. I hate this fucking world ! I won't to escape. Oh wait there is no escape?!

Check this out this interesting film which tells a story of a hacker it's claimed that the film is based on a real story and I believe so although it's a bit exaggerated, still it's a must see movie the movie is called "23 - Nichts Ist So Wie Es Scheint" check it out. Apart from the film there is not much to say I went out for a shopping to Aldi, came back to Honigkamp. Worked, I had a lot of work today, then watched that movie. Basicly that's how the day passed .. Maybe it's a good idea to go out for a walk, because I don't move enough this day.. What's good today is that I've been spiritually and emotionally stable for the whole day for which I should give a million of thanks to God almighty!

This whole week is a holiday (a break as they call it). Here the semester is divided by two. The 1st part of the semester has passed, right after the break there is an exam session. Our stream is not going to have exams because we are loaded with few projects, so I have to use that break to work on the projects. Today it was a tough day, I haven't had almost anything to do except to read the HR Scorecard textbook. We had a group meeting with Christine (a girl from Indonesia) which is one of the group members, we discussed a bit about what are we going to do next on the project, it seems tomorrow we're not going to work on the project, so I have to work on it alone. One of the most serious burdens right now is my spiritual or emotional state. I experience deep grief all the time. Quite often I cannot concentrate at all ... terrible thing I don't know how long I'll be able to bear it .. Recently I come across a interesting lists of movies which are of the "Cyberpunk" genre. The two movies I watched are Johnny Mnemonic and Wargames (1983), both I should say are terrific movies. Johny Mnemonic has much to do with Cyberpunk than Wargames. In Johny Mnemonic the action happens in the near future in year 2020. People has started to take body implants on a mass scale. The main hero Keano Reeves is a data smuggler, he moves around smuggled data around citys through a chip which allows temporary the data to be stored on Johny's brain. Definitly the movie is a must see movie! So watch it. The other one wargames is about a young whizkid a primitive hacker who accidently breaks into a Government computer which was builded as a device to provide the USA government with a defence simulation of the possible attacks that russians may raise against the USA. The movie is another must see movie so I strongly recommend it, just see it. An interesting band I encountered on the TV is called "A tears for Fears". I came across the band accidently while being on the kitchen on the 3rd floor having dinner. A song of the band was played on TMF (the Netherlands Official Music TV). The song I encountered on TV and which totally obsessed me is the song which most of the ppl on my age has heard it's the hit song "Shout" :). I've checked in youtube about the band I found another really craze song called "Mad World". It seems the bands greetest and famoust album is called "Songs from the big Chair". Just to complete my post I have to say quite often I suffer physically, I won't enter into details ... Well it's not all black there is also good, The servers I administer are running fine. That's thanks to God of course. Here in the Netherlands I started eating a lot. I'm sort of starting to become a pig like, a consumer like most of the ppl around ... It's a hellish thing to be really. I'm constantly thinking what I want and I sometimes think what I really want is to have a real family good friends that I may share my free time with and a girl to love me (a job, food) the simple things, the other thing I really want is to know God and be really close to him and be perfect. I really don't want to see world's suffering and my suffering all the time .. Just to conclude all of aboveL "Oh Lord Jesus please have mercy over us the sinners!" :[

There is not much to say, Recently I'm experiencing mix of spiritual and emotional fluctuations ups and downs. I feel so alone quite often. There are not many valuable people (considering my interests). Day by day I'm asking myself the question "Hey man , why are you studying HRQM this stupid secreatary stuff." I'm confused quite a lot and in a state of a denial, or better to say I feel a kind of lost because I'm out of my confort zone .. The teachers here in the HRQM stream claim that when a man is frightened and out of his confort zone, then he is learning a lot. They might be true about that, I don't know. At Friday we had that Business Ethics test. Before the test we watched the movie "The Wizard of Oz" a movie from the distant year 1939. Right after the class was over I went home and laundered my clothes. Then we had a dinner. Today I woke up around 11:00, had my breakfast at around 13:00 and near 13:30 I went out for a walk. I went to the city center and walked around the river Netherlands Rijn. A little later I walked through the city center around the open market which was located right before The St. Eusibeus Chapel. I went through a waggon which sells bibles in different languages and tried to draw people back close to God and spoke for a while with one nice old man who said used to be a Christian for 40 years already. Then I went for shopping to the grocy stores Aldi and Albertheijn and went back "home" to Honigkamp... That's mostly how my day passed ... I should thank to God for still caring for me and providing me with all necessary for my daily living. Thanks Lord!

devoted my whole Sunday on researching how can I lower my laptop power consumption whenworking on battery. A really precious tool that helped me a lot is powertop . Powertop shows which application drains how much from your battery when your laptop moving on battery, it also gives suggestions for various optimizations that stretch the battery usage time. First I took the wrong direction trying to play with powersaved, powernowd. In case you're curious powernowd is good for controling your CPU speed and voltage whether powersaved is a power management daemon. After that I tried to follow some steps on the gentoo's website buit didn't worked, so I remembered that there was something about power saving on the thinkwiki's website. After reading a bunch of pages there and experimenting with acpi. I found out that it's quite easy to set scripts for execution with acpi, all I had to do was put the executed script within the appropriate acpi directory. Two directories were of an interest to me this are the directories /etc/acpi/battery.d and /etc/acpi/ac.d. The 1st one controls the events which happen in case laptop is running on battery the latter one did control what happens in case the laptop is running on AC power.
So as I said after reading suggested optimizations that could be made I ended with 2 little shell scripts which I'm gonna paste below, the 1st one should be putten in /etc/acpi/battery.d, the second one in the ac.d's dir, I personally did choose the name of the two shell cripts be power-save.sh you can name it whatever you like. Be sure to set the executable file on that scripts.
Here are the scripts themselves:

---- CUT HERE ---- /etc/acpi/battery.d
 !/bin/sh
 hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom
 echo 5 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/0000:03:00.0/power_level
 mount -o remount,noatime /
 echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
 echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
 echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_governor
 xbacklight -set 50
 hal-disable-polling --device /dev/hda
 echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
 # enable sound card power saving
 echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
 # mute microphone and Line
 ##amixer set Line mute nocap
 amixer set Mic mute nocap
 echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings
 for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend; do echo 1 > $i; done
 # those sysctl's are only available if you have an AHCI compatible SATA 
 # controler and use kernel > 2.6.24-rc2 (or use Kristen ALPM patchset) : 
 echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
 echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host1/link_power_management_policy
 # turn off the display after 5mn of idling
 xset +dpms
 xset dpms 0 0 300
 # disable tv output
 xrandr --output TV --off # for instance (if "xrandr" above listed a connected output named "TV" that you don't use)
 # disable CRT and DVI output
 echo crt_disable > /proc/acpi/ibm/video
 echo dvi_disable > /proc/acpi/ibm/video
 # disable wake-on-LAN
 ethtool -s eth0 wol d
 # force usage of 100Mbits on LAN card
 ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off speed 100
 # reduce display brightness
 xbacklight -set 50
 umount /mnt/C
 umount /mnt/D
 mount -t ntfs-3g -o noatime /dev/sda2 /mnt/C
 mount -t ntfs-3g -o noatime /dev/sda5 /mnt/D
 #disable uhci-hcd module
 rmmod uhci-hcd
 killall -9 gnome-power-manager
 ----------------------

 ------ CUT HERE ------ /etc/acpi/ac.d/restore.sh
 #!/bin/sh
 xbacklight -set 100
 ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off speed 1000
 mount -o remount,noatime /
 umount /mnt/C
 umount /mnt/D
 mount -t ntfs-3g -o atime /dev/sda2 /mnt/C
 mount -t ntfs-3g -o atime /dev/sda5 /mnt/D
 echo 6 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/0000:03:00.0/power_level
 hal-disable-polling --enable-polling --device /dev/cdrom
 echo max_performance > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
 echo max_performance > /sys/class/scsi_host/host1/link_power_management_policy
 echo 0 >/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
 amixer set Mic unmute cap
 echo 0 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save
 xset -dpms
 echo 500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
 echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog
 for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend; do echo 0 > $i; done
 xrandr --output TV --auto
 echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings
 modprobe uhci-hcd
 -----------------------

I'm not using the pcmci slot so I black listed it:

 echo pcmci >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
 echo yenta_socket >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
 

In /etc/modprobe.d/ create the file thinkpad_acpi.modprobe and put the following in it:
options thinkpad_acpi hotkey=enable,0xffffff experimental=1 fan_control=1
The above would enable experimental feature which controls the fan so when on battery the fan would turn on and off depending on the thermal indicators of the cpu.
Well that's mostly what I did the battery's estimated time increased to 3.2, 3.5 h before that it was somewhere around 2.5. This means a whole hour more for my Laptop on Linux! Hoora! In order for all this to work you should also read the thinkwiki's page on power saving you need to have custom hdapsd and custom kernel. Now Enjoy your prolonged battery time

The weekend passed really quickly. At Friday right after the Business Ethics classes I went home in the dormitory "Honigkamp" and laundered my clothes. Then at Saturday I used the heaters as a tool to quickly dry the still little wet clothes. At the afternoon I went shopping to Alberti Heijn and Supercoop I bought a chocolate, a pack of spicied crackers almonds, a bread and margarine. Then came back home. Heh now I realize I even cannot remember anymore what I did yesterday, anyways I went to bed again quite late (3 o'clock). I have to say I'm not completely healthy and I ask continuously questions why do I study here what I'm doing here. I'm starting to realize that my english level is not so good as I previously thought and I have to work heavily to improve it, also I have difficulties remembering things. The only thing that keeps me alive up and running is the divine grace of God. Since Wednesday I'm responsible (administer) one more server, which is a divine blessing by Our God (The Holy Trinity) because right at this moment I need money, I have to start collecting money for paying the tuition fee and the dormitory fee for the next semester (If of course God grants me to be there somewhere in the near future. Yesterday right after dinner I wrote some stuff on the assignment (homework) for Business Ethics. I had to create a sort of essay on the topic of "What is it like to be a bat?", there is I would say a schizophrenic article on that written by Thomas Nagel. For dinner we ate the macaroni that Ina has prepared. They included melted cheese + tuna. Later I remembered my laptop has a bluetooth device so I researched a bit on the topic of Bluetooth Hacking, there are quite interesting things out there on the topic, it's sad I don't have the time to play with it. Today after woking up around 12 and having my daily exercises and praying rule finished, I decided to try to tweaken my Thinkpad in order to stretch my laptop battery. Tweakening the different pieces which which actually stretched my battery became a whole adventure. I'll say more about this in the post above ...