#!/bin/bash
#
#--------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Written 2008-10-01 by mike@diehn.net.
#
# Demonstrates a technique for acquiring the full pathname of a
# script from within the script itself, using only shell
# features. I also show how to get just the parent directory
# name from that result, again using only shell features.
#
# $0 contains the name of the script as it was invoked.
#
# $PWD always contains the full pathname of the current
# working directory. What you get if you typed "pwd"
# and pressed at the command line.
#
# When a bash script is invoked, these are the possible formats
# for the contents of $0:
#
# /full/path/to/scriptname
# relative/path/to/scriptname
# ./rel/path/to/scriptname
# ./scriptname
# scriptname
#
#--------------------------------------------------------------------------

date
echo $MyFullPathName
echo $MyDir
echo $MyName


The layers (big pic) are a mix-mash of cool breeds. We have an Ameraucana, a Barred Rock, a New Hampshire and a Silver Laced Wyandotte. They’re all normal sized for ten weeks but next to the meat birds, they looked pretty small.

I built them all a wee coop (big pic) to live in. Actually, just to sleep in. They all run about free range – truly free range – during the day and then they come home to roost at dusk.

This past Sunday, the 21st of September, my neighbor Brent and I killed the four meat birds. Andi, Tallis and Luca documented it as best as they could. Barnaby distracted them as often as he could.

Quite a process, but nowhere near as unpleasant or messy as you’d believe reading most of the accounts I found on the blogs around the ‘net.

The boys were rather upset about the killing, Tallis more than Luca. Luca was contemplative mostly. A bit sad and quiet, but mostly seemed ok with it. They went through grieving the birds’ death really fast, though. Tallis was inside with Andi and Luca for a while, crying really hard. I went in before we did number four (the last) and asked if he wanted to be there for that one and he did. From then on he was in engaged, interested and involved. Andi gave him her camera to work with and had him document and much as he could. That helped a lot, I think. He was solemn – so was Luca and the rest of us, for that mater – but he was upset anymore.

I took a hit to the heart too, actually. This was my first killing of really anything except fish. And road-kill. I was there when each of my two dogs were put down, but I wasn’t doing it myself, you know? So, this grief was wan and shallow and came on stealthily. When it was all done and the carcasses were icing down, I noticed I felt down and grey and letharigic. Took a few hours of sunshine and calmness to come around fully. I expect next time it’ll be a lot easier.

The best help I found on the web is Chicken Processing by Kimberly Bobrow, at her family blog. Her detailed narrative from the perspective of a first-time chicken processor was right on the money. Our experience followed theirs nearly identically, though I didn’t find the plucking or disembowling as difficult or unpleasent as Kimberly reports they did.

We were careful to measure the scalding temperature (140F/60C) and did the scalding for 75 seconds – or as close to that as we could. We found the first and fourth birds easiest to pluck – for both of them, the water was 140F/60C. We numbers one, two and three right together. For numbers two and three, the water cooled slightly, about five degrees F for each bird, to 135F and 130F. And it made a difference. I had a tough time getting the wing feathers out of number three. We let the water heat up again for number four and again, the plucking was easy.

So, the scalding process is important. Most of our time we spend on plucking and if we’d hosed the scalding it would have taken a *lot* longer.

Sharp knives are also very important. So much so that I even stopped to hone one of mine while I was working and found it’d gotten dulled. The first leg I cut off I did wrong and hacked around the bone quite a bit before I figured it out. Soft steel, hard bone, dull knife….

What else? Oh yes, cut the neck out before you try to remove the entrails! Wow. That would have been a lot easier. As I did it, I had two hands buried in the bird each time, trying to cut the off esophagus, just below the neck from inside. Paring knife in one hand, the other wrapped around the guts, fishing for the stringy bits up top. Had to move very slowly and carefully. Still sliced my hands a few times.

So, do the neck bit first. Then cut around the vent (anus) and remove the entrails. And don’t forget the oil gland in the tail.

The gall bladder is delicate. More delicate than you’d expect after you learn how tough everything else is. Just be carefull when you’re seperating it from the liver. Best do that in a large pan so if you spill it, the bile won’t contaminate your table and get all over the meat.

For now, suffice it to say it was a bit unsettling for all of us and about as messy as cleaning a mess of fish. Smells about the same, too. OK, not so fishy, you know, but the guts and stuff smelled the same. Hmmm… so did the horse, come to think of it. I guess everything smells that way when it’s dead and gutted.

Turns out, by the way, that packing tape alone makes a fine killing cone. Don’t even need plastic bags or anything – just wrap the tape around their bodies, pinning their wings down. I tried a bag with the first bird and she just blew out of it like a rocket. I realized that, hey, when it’s time to take this tape off, she’ll be dead. So we just taped her wings down and that worked great. Tape came right off afterwards, too.

We have lots of pictures and when I remember to suck them off the camera, I’ll post some here with some more narrative of the process.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I was hyperactive. Very. My mother had me on a diet that apparently helped – no artificial colors or flavors is what we recall about it. But, as I grew older into my later teenage years and even more so when I left home, my parents influence waned and I forgot the diet. I lost track of the idea that I was a hyperactive person. I guess I assumed that was a childhood thing that I’d grown out of. But it wasn’t.

?I’m 41 now and have fought with depression, shame, and many other emotional problems all my life. I’ve always changed jobs every 18 months or so – except for a five year, hellish stint in the US Navy. I’ve left a long trail of large piles of half-finished projects, systems and tasks in my wake. My relationships – until I met my wife – have always been fractious. I don’t have friends easily – probably because I can’t sit still with them for more than a few minutes.

?Just as Robert Cimera related, it never occurred to me that I was any different, really. I just thought that I wasn’t as good at life as you all are.

I resist my diagnosis. I haven’t really accepted it yet. I don’t want to be that person that makes excuses for everything they say they can’t do because they have this disorder or that disorder. I know that’s nuts. I know it, but I can’t really get past it yet.

I know a bit about how PAM based authentication works but when I looked at /etc/pam.d I found it’s way different in RHEL 4 AS than it is in Ubuntu and openSUSE. In /etc/pam.d/{something} I found a note saying not to edit the file because authconfig would overwrite any changes I made. The authconfig man page is hoary, but here’s what you need to know:

• authconfig is a curses menu program that offers checkboxes and forms to guide you through setting up various authentication methods.
• Use “authconfig –test” to play arround – it will pretend to be doing at real reconfiguration but won’t change anything. You can use it to see what you’ll need to know to configure, say, LDAP-base auth.
• Plain authconfig will bring up the menu in live mode.
• There are command-line switched to do everything you can in the menu – use those for scripted changes.

That’s it. Enjoy.

If you want to ping across an Infiniband network, like we use ping to test other networks, you could use ibping. Pick a system to be the destination of the ping and then go find out it’s Port GUID and start a ibping server on it:

Set one system as the “server” thus:


autosup25:~ # ibstat
CA 'mthca0'
CA type: MT25204
Number of ports: 1
Firmware version: 1.2.0
Hardware version: a0
Node GUID: 0x00066a00980095d7
System image GUID: 0x00066a00980095d7
Port 1:
State: Active
Physical state: LinkUp
Rate: 10
Base lid: 3
LMC: 0
SM lid: 1
Capability mask: 0x02510a68
Port GUID:
autosup25:~ # ibping -v -S
ibwarn: [11498] ibping_serv: starting to serve...


So, the port guid on this machine is 0x00066a00980095d7. We’ll need that on the other end. So, now pick the server from which you want to start the ping – this feels backwards doesn’t it? – and do this:


autosup30:~ # ibping -G 0x00066a00a00095d7
Pong from autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3): time 0.157 ms
Pong from autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3): time 0.100 ms
Pong from autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3): time 0.091 ms
Pong from autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3): time 0.121 ms
Pong from autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3): time 0.090 ms
Pong from autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3): time 0.092 ms

--- autosup25.mi.fluent.com (Lid 3) ibping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% packet loss, time 5799 ms
rtt min/avg/max = 0.090/0.108/0.157 ms


Now, I just move from system to system pinging that server to make sure all my servers are able to talk over the Infiniband link. Vary this a bit and you could use it in Nagios or something to monitor the IB network in a compute cluster.

That’s it. All done. Except, don’t forget to go kill the ping server on your target.

mdiehn@imlcvs:~$ sudo aptitude updateGet:1 http://security.debian.org etch/updates Release.gpg [189B]   ...W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org etch/updates Release: The followingsignatures were invalid: BADSIG A70DAF536070D3A1 Debian Archive AutomaticSigning Key (4.0/etch) <ftpmaster@debian.org>

W: Couldn't stat source package list http://security.debian.orgetch/updates/main Packages(/var/lib/apt/lists/security.debian.org_dists_etch_updates_main_binary-i386_Packages)- stat (2 No such file or directory)

W: Couldn't stat source package list http://security.debian.orgetch/updates/main Packages(/var/lib/apt/lists/security.debian.org_dists_etch_updates_main_binary-i386_Packages)- stat (2 No such file or directory)

W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

So, I went googling and found not too much. I did find two posts (see below) suggesting that I install a package named debian-archive-keyring. It was already on the system and I wondered if maybe it’d been corrupted somehow. So I reinstalled it and that seems to have solved the problem. Here’s what I used to do the reinstallation:

sudo apt-get install debian-archive-keyring --reinstall

Seems to have worked. Now, if only I can get through the congestion on our network here so I can download the new kernel and samba packages….

Here are those two posts I referenced above:

1. http://changelog.complete.org/posts/496-How-to-solve-The-following-packages-cannot-be-authenticated.html
2. http://www.debianhelp.org/node/6150

The second was the real help as it describe troubles closest to my symptoms.

Since I’m the sysadmin, I was tasked with setting up the fifteen systems to be used in the demo and discussions – I did it, but had some trouble at one point and called loudly for help. I didn’t hear anything for a long time, went looking, found nearly everyone had gone home and so I resolved to go home to visit my family before I went back later to finish up. I called the woman managing the conference to ask when it would start in the morning and wondered if there was any flexibility in the schedule. There wasn’t so I let her know I’d be heading back in later in the evening.

So, quite a few key people knew at about 6:00 PM that I hadn’t gotten the systems ready yet and needed some help. Apparently, no everyone got the word that I’d be going back in later to work on the systems.

So, I went in at 9:00, figured out the problem by 9:15 (with some clues from colleagues) and by 9:30 was well on my way to finishing up. A colleague came in to help with the repetitive work and we eventually got the systems working, tested and ready.

But then, and here’s the boneheadedness, we just went home. Nope, I didn’t email the staff list, I didn’t call the coordinator or the presenter or our admin or anyone. I didn’t tell anyone that the trouble was resolved and the systems were ready.

So, in come the rest of the staff at 8:05 in the morning having last heard that the machines weren’t ready and that I’d just gone home and left it all broken. To their credit, no-one paniced – they just showed up ready to move very quickly. Good thing, too, because there had been changes to the program over night and out boss made a few last minutes adjustments to the setups (and one last few seconds change) and we four were all scrambling as it was. Very efficiently scrambling, but scrambling.

Lesson learned:

Somehow, anyhow, always remember to communicate your successes as well as your failures and KEEP YOUR TEAM IN THE LOOP!

I really like Ubuntu. Everything, and I mean everything worked right “out of the box.” I was amazed. Windows can’t do that. There’s usually at least a dozen reboots involved in getting a new Windows XP installation up to ready-for-use. There were only two reboots for installing Ubuntu – one to get started and one to finish.

In addition, everything I needed for general office work plus a lot of graphics and entertainment was already installed and working. Open Office 2.2, Gimp, A slew of other apps. And how much did I pay for all this?

Nothing.

That’s right – no money down, no payments for the first… oh, ten thousand years. Or so. No, really – every piece of software on my laptop is free and open source. And what price do I pay for this if not in money?

Well, it did take me a few hours to get the system installed. But that was mostly because I took lunch halfway through. In another town. While the system finished installing.

Now, 7.04 is new, new, new and I wouldn’t put it on a clients machine – it’s a little shaky for an Ubuntu version: but hey! It’s an ALPHA release – there are hundreds of updates a day in this branch and everyone that uses it knows what to expect. Still, it’s more stable than XP was – no kidding.

And here’s a real kicker for you, this entire installation, with all the software I installed, and it’s pretty plush right now, takes a very mere six GB – yep, that’s a single digit less than seven. Hell, when I’d completely stripped my old Windows XP installation to the very barest of bare OS, minus all of my own data, it was still over 35 GB.

OH, YES! I almost forgot – Startup, shutdown, sleep, resume, login, logout: those onerous tasks? Only onerous in Windows – in Ubuntu they all take about two to three seconds. Yes, seconds.

You wanna try it out? Download their LiveCD and stick it in the drive and boot the system. You’ll be running a full OS off the CD so it’ll be a little slow – like my LiveCD ran at about 1/4 speed of what I’m seeing now. And it was still impressive.

Enjoy.