Practical Jokes

Practical Jokes - all the fun of mean tricks with none of the guilt.

Ever have trouble coming up with a mean trick that is appropriate to the
situation and also compliant with your nice personality? Of course you
have!

Practical Jokes have none of these problems, and are often expected to
be in bad taste. What's more you'll gain the reputation of being fun to
be with.

Stop your individualistic and crass cheap bullying and buy our practical
jokes today! People will like you for it!

Wild virtues

While reading Daniel Hannan's "If you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people" blog post, I came across this lovely quote from G. K. Chesterton:

"When a religious scheme is shattered, it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity is often untruthful." - GK Chesterton

Auto-mount of windows shares on Ubuntu login

Based on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently and updated:

$ sudo apt-get install libpam-mount smbfs
$ echo "@include common-pammount" | sudo tee -a /etc/pam.d/gdm
$ echo "@include common-pammount" | sudo tee -a /etc/pam.d/login

fix up server= and mountpoint= below

$ sed -i -e '/<!-- Volume definitions -->/a<volume user="*" fstype="cifs" server="10.42.0.1" path="users/%(USER)" mountpoint="/home/%(USER)/ntfs" options="uid=%(USERUID),gid=%(USERGID),iocharset=utf8,fmask=0770,dmask=0770" />' /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml

Make sure unix password is same as windows password and unix username same as windows username unless we use ldap in nis, but thats another story…

MS PPTP VPN server with linux

I've been tearing my hair out for the last 8 working hours trying to get my Ubuntu Hardy VPN helper to connect me to a Windows 2003 PPTP service.

A windows PC would connect fine, but my linux clients would all fail, generating this message in the Windows server Event log: "You do not have permission to connect using the selected authentication protocol."

I'd done what I could to make sure my RAS policies specified MSCHAP, MSCHAPv2 and had EAP disabled (I had no certs and was fed up of RAS failing for lack of them). My linux clients were also selected to use only MSCHAP and MSCHAPv2 - but still no joy!

The final missing tip was the last post at: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/Windows2000ras_routing/Jan2006/post25331080.asp
where it seemed that I had to make sure the RAS servers own authentication methods matched (or probably were a superset of) the authentication methods of the policy. Once that was fixed, it all worked fine.

While I was there I also set the correct adaptor for use by DHCP/DNS/WINS as I only have one active adaptor anyway!

USB-B3G on Asterisk

I got a couple of the yealink USB-B3G from Maplin Electronics at £3 each, meaning to get them to work with asterisk.

By being busy I get last-movers advantage and find it all works from years of other people doing it for me:

1. The kernel already has the USB drivers installed.
2. USB2KAPI provides a libusb style daemon to control the device, available from http://kb2kskype.sourceforge.net/
3. The asterisk driver for that is written at http://www.artaylor.co.uk/usbb2k.html

nice!

Debugging Makefiles

Debugging makefiles is hard work, and makefiles that make extensive use of @ to hide invoked commands make it hard to see what command failed.

Dr Dobbs has some useful tips http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/197003338 from which I derive the simple solution to my problem, to use /bin/sh -x as SHELL; i.e.

make SHELL='/bin/sh -x'

then the shell will print out the invoked commands, even if make won't!

Sins of the children? Israeli war machine copies Nazi war machine

Sometimes the children pay for the sins of the fathers.

It seems like the Israeli war machine (which is opposed by many Israeli citizens) is committing the sins that their fathers paid for.

Look at this side-by-side picture selection - it’s only the newer colour images and better quality photographs that distinguish the Jews as victims Jews as aggressors.

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2510