Preferring IPv4 over IPv6.

As more and more hosts are moving over to IPv6, you might encounter DNS A records with IPv6 entries.
That's all fine and dandy and I do realize the need for an extended IP address pool, but if it's starting to affect performance I say fuck IPv6.
Sadly, modern GNU/Linux systems prefer IPv6 addresses over IPv4 when being presented with a choice. I honestly don't see why the fuck IPv6 should be preferred right now as it's bound to be a lot slower on a lot of networks, for the time being at least.
Case in point: Debian's apt-get update over IPv4 and IPv6:

root@box:~# host security.debian.org
security.debian.org has address 195.20.242.89
security.debian.org has address 212.211.132.32
security.debian.org has address 212.211.132.250
security.debian.org has IPv6 address 2001:a78:5:1:216:35ff:fe7f:6ceb
security.debian.org has IPv6 address 2001:8d8:580:400:6564:a62:0:2
security.debian.org has IPv6 address 2001:a78:5:0:216:35ff:fe7f:be4f
security.debian.org mail is handled by 10 chopin.debian.org.

IPv6:

root@box:~# time apt-get update
[...]
real    1m18.222s
user    0m7.472s
sys     0m6.948s

IPv4:

root@box:~# time apt-get update
[...]
real    0m13.481s
user    0m7.728s
sys     0m5.332s

We could just add static ipv4 lines in /etc/hosts, but that's kinda defeating the purpose as we don't want to disable IPv6 altogether.

So, how do we tell the system to prefer IPv4 addresses over IPv6?

It's rather simple, actually: we need to have a look at getaddrinfo(3)'s configuration file; /etc/gai.conf.
Locate this line and uncomment it:

#precedence ::ffff:0:0/96  100

There ya go, IPv4 is preferred now.

This works as that's the special address range to help in the transition from 4 to 6; every IPv4 address can be written as an IPv6 one using that form.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses for more info on that one.)

Anyways, the format is ::ffff:0:0/96 which means that the ipv4 ip address 192.168.18.234/32 will be written as 0:0:ffff:192.168.18.234/128 and will match that line in gai.conf.

About Jeff Hanneman's signature guitars.

Usually I'm not really one to get on the barricades to fight for political correctness but Hanneman's ESP signatures have always made me fucking sick.

Allow me to elaborate:
The dude likes to put Nazi symbols on his guitars and ESP guitars actually built and sold those in the past.
Example:

Please notice the 'SS' logo:

And the skull of course:

Next guitar:

Think the daggered H has something to do with this last name? Nope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_SS_Panzer_Division_Hohenstaufen

Next:

How cute... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_SS_Panzer_Division_Hitlerjugend

Nazi symbolism on a fucking guitar makes me sick, but I kinda get it... the dude likes Nazi shit for some reason.

What I don't get is your average (US?) Slayer fan boy defending Hanneman and collecting these guitars, I saw it happen again recently on the ESP bbs. 

Here's a list of dumbass arguments I've seen people use:

• He's just into WWII memorabilia (right, but for some reason he only puts Nazi stuff on his guitars...)
• His grandfather fought in WWII.
• It's just art.
• He can't be a Nazi, Slayer's singer isn't even "white".

Fucking morons...seriously.

That's all.

Edit (3/6/2013): Hutchinson Guitars did a custom guitar called the 'Kriegsadler' and advertised it on Facebook...
I'm posting the pictures here in case the link goes down:

Ubuntu to Debian

It happened again today and I hate it when it happens:
Ubuntu on a server...sigh
"But Ubuntu is Debian and you love Debian, why do you hate Ubuntu so much then?"
No it's not Debian, it's Ubuntu. (Oh and btw: OSX isn't BSD, Darwin is BSD... sort of.)
"But Ubuntu is so much easier than Debian..."
Yeh well, Hitler thought exterminating an entire group of people was easier than just dealing with them.
"Ubuntu LTS has long time support and is commercially supported..."
Get away from me, suit, go hug an SLA or something.
Ubuntu is bloated and I don't want it anywhere near my servers... and upstart is evil.
Not the cool evil like Behemoth, more like the bad evil like Codemasters.
So I guess I overreacted a bit and converted the Crabuntu into Debian, I've done that a couple times before and it works fine but every time I do it something unexpected happens so don't take this guide too literal.


Disclaimer: but of course I am fully responsible for what you do to you system, this won't hurt your system at all and nothing stated in this disclaimer is a lie...

First I'm going to delete everything:

dpkg -l | awk '{print $2}' | xargs --replace dpkg --purge {}

We can totally do this as the most important stuff will refuse to purge. Next, let's make apt decide what the system can do without:

apt-get autoremove

Now purge every package which only has configuration files on the system:

dpkg -l | grep ^rc | awk '{print $2}' | xargs --replace dpkg --purge {}

Good, not too much is left on the system. Let's upgrade those packages to their Debian counterparts:

echo "deb ftp.de.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get update

Install the Debian version of apt-utils as we're going to need it:

apt-get install apt-utils

Upgrade everything:

dpkg -l | awk -F' ' '{print $2}' | xargs --replace apt-get install -y --force-yes {}

Remove those pieces of shit:

dpkg --purge --force-all upstart
dpkg --purge --force-all mountall
dpkg --purge --force-all plymouth

Install something decent:

apt-get install sysvinit

Reinstall grub (not so important I think)

apt-get install grub2

Reinstall a kernel, might be useful sometimes:

apt-get install linux-base  linux-image-amd64

Throw away everything else Ubuntu related:

dpkg -l | grep ubuntu | awk '{print $2}' | xargs --replace apt-get remove --purge {} -y

I like openssh:

apt-get install openssh-server

If it's good enough for Linus, it's good enough for me:

sync
sync
sync

Reboot right the fuck now:

reboot -fn

TADA.... and gone is the Ubuntu crap.

imapsync

Today I found out the immensely useful tool imapsync isn't free anymore.
A bit of browsing around and I found the source on github, I'm going to assume that being the last free version.

apt-get install libmail-imapclient-perl
apt-get install libterm-readkey-perl
apt-get install libauthen-ntlm-perl
git clone https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync.git
cd imapsync
make
./imapsync

There.

Now, the license file literally says to do whatever the fuck you want to do with it, so I'm going to do just that.
Stay tuned.

edit: imapsync .deb package

Lemon oil

My Gibson's rosewood fret board was getting as dry as a dead dingo's donger.

Last week I restrung it with some nice coated EB slinkys but as the board was so dry they felt like rusted barbed wire.

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating just a tiny bit here but it got to a point where it just didn't feel right anymore.

I've been reading about oiling fret boards with all kinds of stuff: 'lemon oil', 'mineral oil', olive oil (yes, olive oil), etc but the most common advice was getting some lemon oil.

I'm not big into DIY stuff and had no idea what lemon oil actually is so I went to a DIY store.

People working there had absolutely no idea what I was on about and as I didn't know what it actually was I wasn't going to buy just anything.

Instead of going on a rant about inaccurate and incomplete advice given out on message boards on the intertubes I turned to my local music store's website and there I saw some Dunlop 65 ultimate lemon oil.

That's right, ultimate lemon oil, not just regular lemon oil, _ultimate_ lemon oil; the only thing missing is a '2000' or '5000' at the end of that name.

Again, a long story short: I bought some, applied it to the fret board and these are my findings:

Pro:

* It's easy to use and dose because of the applicator.

* It cleans the grime and grease pretty well.

* The wood got (what I assume is) its natural color back.

* Fret board feels much smoother and is much more enjoyable to play on.

Con:

* It smells funny.

* It's like everything smells like funny at least 2 hours after using it.

* My guitar's fret board now (the day after) smells funny.

* I don't want my guitars to smell funny.

Did I mention yet it smells funny? No? Well, it does; smells funny, that is.

The reason I'm going on about this is that I don't even think there's actual lemon extract in it, it smells nothing like the lemon extract bottle I keep in the fridge.

It smells like Cymbopogon, the Citronella stuff my mom soaked me in with 25 years ago when I was little right before bed time during summers.

I never really liked the smell of it and it didn't keep mosquitoes at bay at all but to be honest, my mom couldn't have known because it was only in 2002 a study (8th paragraph in the article) concluded the stuff is effective for about 20 minutes.

Anyways, one night the bottle started to leak in the drawer of the end table next to my bed so that drawer reeked for years to come.

Smell memories are funny that way, cleaning a fret board took me back 25 years; another smell that really fucks me up is cherry blossoms but that's another story and totally irrelevant now.

But yeh, the fret board: it's stunning now and I took a before and after shot for your amusement.

Gibson V-Factor X Flying V

There are some subtle differences between Gibson's Flying V model over the years.
It's particularly nasty when trying to verify whether a certain model is most likely to be a real Gibson only having access to pictures of said guitar.
So I've been trying to find information on the intertubez on a particular V from 2008 (according to the serial number), it looks genuine enough but there's something strange about it: the head stock looks different from the V pictured on gibson.com.
So, is it real? Refinished? Maybe a rebranded Epiphone / Chibson ... ?

Here's a picture of the guitar:

This is a regular Flying V:

Same head stock as the one I've been trying to find info on:

You'll notice the head stock on the 2nd one is sharper.
Problem solved, right? Nope, because the guitar's finish is ebony.
The red one is a 'faded cherry' finish, which basically is Gibson selling a genuine Gibson for the price of a decent Epiphone as far as I can see.
Anyways, could it be a refinished one?
Doesn't look like it plus the guitar comes with a hard case, while the faded cherry ones come with a gigbag.

It does bear an uncanny resemblance with the Epiphone version of the '69 V though, but the tuners are genuine Gibson and the nut is different as well.

A couple Google searches later and I found this jem:

(Source: http://axestaticprocess.com/2011/09/19/get-monte-pittmans-flying-v/)

Exactly like the one I'm researching except for the hardware and pickups.
The site says they owned changed it, so fine but I still didn't quite know which guitar this is.

The mystery V was advertised as being a 2008 '68 flying V re-issue but all the images on Google show a regular V, not the pointy head stock one.

Anyways, long story short: the pointy ebony one is a Gibson V-Factor X Flying V.
Yes, seriously.
Gibson apparently tried to 1337-en up their guitars, so they briefly named the Flying V the V-Factor X and the Explorer the X-Plorer.
This is what Gibson have to say about it:

"The neck on Gibson’s V-Factor X has the best of both worlds—it is a hybrid between the ’50s rounded contour and the ’60s slim-taper profile."
"Whether it’s the regular Flying V, or the Gibson V-Factor X, the solid mahogany body provides tone, sustain, and performance."
"On the flipside, warm up the cutting tone of the bridge P-90 on your SG Specialby using a more rounded pick, or take some of the aggression out of the high-gain pickups of your V-Factor X by using a thinner pick for a smoother, more compressed rhythm tone."

So nothing really usable, no archive product pages, no nothing.

Attempts to look at how gibson.com looked like in 2007 through archive.org simply fail as Gibson has a robots.txt in place. Thanks Gibson!

No product catalogs to be found either so I decided trying to find the same guitar on a webshop somewhere to verify there was, in fact, a time where the standard Flying V's had that type of head stock.

After a bit (hah!) of Googl'ing I found these:

(source: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/DSVREBCH)

That's the one! Finally a shop which took the effort of actually taking a picture of the instrument they're selling instead of just using the same one over and over again.

Right, so now we know it at least exists and isn't a fake (although there's always the possibility a store is selling an obvious fake, but let's assume they're legit).

A bit more Googl'ing resulted in 2 NGD's on random forums and a couple more links:

Google Cache for GAK UK - V-Factor X

http://www.in2guitar.com/flyingv.html: Nice picture of the pointyness

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q53/joolzriff/SuperHawk002-1.jpg (from http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=250162)
http://www.musicradar.com/gallery/reviews/v-factor-x-157224/1: "The classic arrowhead headstock remains" - No, not really.

So although I haven't been able to find pictures of that actual model on a page hosted on gibson.com, I'm pretty confident it's, in fact, real.

Now if only Gibson would provide archives of their site (ESP does) or answer email ...

Edit: some picture links were dead, fixed that.

On local name resolving on Linux

Local name resolving in Linux distros can get confusing.
Case in point: man hostname(1)

Anyways, our fictional situation for today is this:

hostname: what you've named your machine
domainname: which domain you're on.
FDQN: hostname+domainname
You've probably named your machine something but didn't include the record into the domain's DNS.

Then you're trying to use hostname -a or hostname -f and get this error:

hostname: Name or service not known

You need to check 2 files if that happens: /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts.
This is what you should have (provided, of course, you're not running a NIS/YP and you're using a hostname which isn't configured domain's DNS):

/etc/hostname should contain 1 line: the hostname of the host.
If you do write the FDQN in there, no problem, it gets parsed anyhow.
I found out about this just about half an hour ago when looking into a problem together with a colleague.
/etc/hosts should contain at least 1 line with:

127.0.0.1   FQDN hostname

The order is /etc/hosts is important.
 The hostname in /etc/hosts and the hostname in /etc/hostname must be identical.