JDPFu.com 2010

A quick script to change a capital I (eye) in the middle of a word into a lowercase l (el). If you like Asian films, you understand why I wrote this script. I had an itch. It needed to be scratched. This is useful for .srt files used in movie subtites.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Perl script to change every 'I' into an 'l' in the middle of a word
# input is stdin and output is to stdout; redirection is your friend
my $line;
while(<>){
 chomp;
 $line=$_;
 $_=$line;
# Match lines with non-whitespace characters leading a capital I 
  if ( m/[\S]I/ ){
     $line =~ tr/I/l/;
  }
  print "$line\n";
}

It is very common for subtitle files, SRT format, to have a capital I in the middle of words since bitmap patterns are used to create the files. For native speakers of English, this is HIGHLY distracting – to the point that the subtitles must be fixed before a movie can be enjoyed.

I tried a few other methods, before determining this simple character translation was needed.

1. ispell – There were too many words that were not in the dictionary and spacing of words often groups them in strange ways.
2. replacement dictionary – I created a hundred word dictionary replacement sed script. There were always new words that needed to be added for every SRT file.
3. Manual editing – yep, I spent a few hours manually editing files. This wasn’t very efficient and ruined the movie plot since I’d already read it before viewing it.

Some combination of methods will probably be necessary. I intend to merge them into a single perl script and perform them in the most efficient order. It will begin with the I—>l translation.

I’m easily amused. You know that by now.

In a quest for great homemade curry recipes without too much difficulty, I’ve tried a few. Yesterday, I found the best mix.

The key was the curry – Kitchens of India is imported from, er, India. It is a curry paste and comes in a sealed foil package. A 6 pack runs $12 from amazon – ouch. It is worth it.

Follow the last curry chicken crock pot recipe I posted here, just use the Kitchens of India curry instead. Here’s the result

Yum.

So, Adito/VPN doesn’t really like Linux. The installation goes better than expected on 32-bit Linux, but if you change any of the configuration settings, then have the admin web page reset the server, the system won’t come back up. This happens on both 64-bit and 32-bit Ubuntu 8.04.x in my experience.

Initially, I installed Adito on a 64-bit Ubuntu Server, but problems with the startup scripts and/or wrapper, prevented it from working as far as I can tell. I never, never, never got the Adito to work after a reboot on 64-bit Linux. I ended up installing a 32-bit VM under ESXi 4 and loading Adito there. Comments below is for 32-bit Linux, since it was clear that the 64-bit startup scripts/wrapper was beyond my ability to solve.

Even on the32-bit Adito install, the system has never come back up after changing settings that require a reboot for me. NEVER without doing some extra work. After making any reboot-required changes, only the method outlined below has gotten a running Adito system again.

The Fix

I’ve tried a few methods (UTF-8 settings, hacked startup files, hacked config files, swapped versions of libwrapper crap), only the following has actually worked. As root:

1. cd /opt/adito (or whatever directory you used)
2. Delete the conf/webserver.properties
3. ant install
4. Login through the web interface at http://host:28080
5. Step through the install process keeping all the defaults from before. Only the SSL certificate/key will need to be reinstalled.
6. Reboot and all is well.

I’ve not lost userIDs or policies or tunnel settings doing this.

At some point, I’ll need to figure out how to backup just the settings and DB, without grabbing the entire server image.

What’s the issue?

I can only guess, but I believe it is too much of a mix of java and supporting java tools. According to the blueprint going forward, they plan to swap ant for some other tool and remove libwrapper. Ant is used by all java development teams, so I doubt that really is the issue. libwrapper appears to be a lazy way to set configurations for java web applications. There seem to be incompatible versions shipped with Adito as well. The startup process is overly complex too.

/etc/init.d/adito points to /opt/adito/install/platforms/linux/adito which is overly complex and reads a config file /opt/adito/conf/wrapper.conf which figures out which specific version of wrapper to call in /opt/adito/install/platforms/linux/x86-64/wrapper with the appropriate options (more than 3 options for some reason)

/opt/adito/conf/wrapper.conf is rewritten with every run of ant, which means any time you have to modify it to make it work (UTF-8 character sets), then any use of ant will overwrite those settings. CRAP. There are ways to reset everything with ant or just reset parts. The problem is these resets aren’t explicit in the build.xml file – they are implicit. More crap.

Anyway, the levels of indirection are too complex and just make something that should be

java /opt/adito/lib/adito.war

into something really complex. Yes, I know it isn’t that simple, but it should be. That’s the point.

Update a few weeks later

So we’ve been using the VPN for a few weeks and everything is working well. Performance is good. There are a few things lacking that we’d really like to have, but they are beyond our expertise. Since I’m protecting internal web sites, we didn’t want to leverage LDAP authentication. We really want RADIUS authentication with x.509 certificate exchange. That isn’t a built-in option, so I’ve force really, really long and complex passwords and don’t allow users to change their passwords to get into the VPN. Their LDAP passwords are still known only to them, it is just the VPN access which I demand use 60+ characters. I deliver the password to each of them in a KeePass database, further insisting they follow good password management and protection methods.

Deployment to the entire company happened a few months ago. We’ve had no issues and have placed all our applications behind this VPN.

Help Make This Data Better

As I review this post, I can see where it could be confusing. It isn’t particularly well written. Please let me know which parts are too confusing to be useful. Oddly, this is one of the most popular posts on this site.

Last week, I setup and configured a special desktop for the accounting system for the company. Basically, it is a Windows7 Pro desktop running under ESXi 4 that the folks responsible for accounting remote (RDP) into after connecting via VPN to the special network for it. We’re small and only a few people even need access – never more than 1 at a time.

It was fairly painless to setup, install Accounting, load Payroll CD, then validate remote VPN access (which is never trivial), then setup daily backup jobs. Of course, AV, automatic patchs and nasty IE settings were configured too. Each daily backup set is about 250MB, which isn’t too bad, but more than I would have thought given the machine is idle most of the time and won’t be used more than 3 days a month. These backups are Microsoft VHD files using the built-in backup, which could be useful, but I’d rather have a complete VDMK, VDI, or Xen img file to restore.

Of course, it isn’t possible to connect to this VM without going through our VPN.

Next I need to perform a test restore to another machine under some virtualization tool that we use. Yeah, I know with the VHD, I can perform a restore someplace else, but with the VM-image file, I just point a hypervisor at it and go. Now that VirtualBox supports VMware, vdmk, files, this test really should be trivial. If it goes well, I’ll take my WinXP (MS-Office, Visio and other WinXP-only tools VM) and put it under a server-based VM too. It will be better to not travel with that stuff on my laptop anyway.

Linux compared to the Maytag Repairman

In summary, IT consultants don’t deploy Linux because deploying Windows gets them more customers and repeat business. Windows requires more IT support than Linux.

If you are a Linux consultant, you must have many more clients to make a living, which means more effort acquiring the clients.

With Linux systems, once they are deployed, they just work and continue to work. For many systems, even patches are handled automatically with no need for onsite support. The only reason to call your Linux consultant is to upgrade a system to a new release OR for a hardware failure.

I don’t know whether any of these statements are completely true, but there is some fact in each of them.