ulimit -n .... the saga continues

Man, I thought I had put the "ulimit -n issue" to bed once and for all with these configurations in CentOS. So, it was with great chagrin that I recently executed a "ulimit -n" and saw 1024.

Argghhh. Will this issue never end?

I've added "ulimit -n 100000" to my .bash_profile, and now I have confirmed that after logging into a new session, that the new ulimit of 100000 files is in effect.

I'm not happy with putting this in my .bash_profile, but the alternatives looked too dangerous and or flakey.

some recent tech photos

At deCarta I am building a new map tile system for our servers. Krish installed it on a floppy drive! That was pretty funny.Brent and I went to the Cloud Connect conference. We tried to pay attention but we were too busy hacking :-)
Panel discussion at Cloud Connect was lively to say the least. I thought the dude from Salesforce.com was going to smash a chair on someone. But seriously, he is a very sharp dude. Would not want to debate him.

Test reviews Widget

Please don't say "meme" with a straight face

It's early, I'm grouchy, and I've seen the word "meme" one too many times. People: please, please don't use the word "meme" to describe internet trends, or anything else for that matter. It's just silly. It's like putting plastic spinny rims on an '83 celica. It's basically gheto-bling.

The Wanderings of Oisin

I was trying to find an extant copy The Evergreen Periodical, when I came across this intersting read on the Celtic revival's influence on art nouveau, which in turn led me to The Wanderings of Oisin by Yeates.

"An old man stirs the fire to a blaze,
In the house of a child, of a friend, of a brother.
He has over-lingered his welcome; the days,
Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other;
He hears the storm in the chimney above,
And bends to the fire and shakes with the cold,
While his heart still dreams of battle and love,
And the cry of the hounds on the hills of old."

Hacking JS-Kit reviews widget

I just installed the JS-Kit reviews system on my blog below. I was amazed to find the following security holes:

1) no CAPTCHA protection on posts. This means you can flood the reviews with bogus reviews and spam. Want to bring down the reviews system? Just write a 4-line script to execute this URL in a loop:
http://js-kit.com/comment.put?ref=http://notskateboarding.blogspot.com%2F&permalink=http%3A%2F%2Fmysite.com%2Fpermanent%2Flink%2Fto%2Fpage.html&rvy=1&js-CmtName=reviewer04&js-CmtCity=san%20franciso%2C%20USA&js-CmtEmail=geoff.hendrey%40gmail.com&js-Cmtsubmit=Submit%20review&js-CmtsubmitOrig=Submit%20review&js-CmtsubmitReply=Submit%20comment&js-Cmtcancel=Cancel&js-CmtText=BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB&js-CmtRating=8&tid=jst-1

2) Email span the person who posted a comment you don't like! This one is really amazing! Want to send someone 1000 emails anonymously? Same technique as above, just make it a comment instead of a posting, and the person who made the original posting gets 1000 emails!

test a reviews widget

annoying CENTOS problems raising ulimit

My last attempt to raise the open file count on a CentOS server apparently failed. After much dicking around, here is a set of steps that I believe will successfully raise the limit (don't be fooled by whatever you try. If you do a 'ulimit -n' and the returned value is 1024, you have not succeeded in raising the limit).

I did a bunch of reading, and found two postings, that combined seem to have succeeded in upping the max files to 65535.

Mainly I am writing this down so we can remember what the hell I did. These are the two useful posts:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-increase-the-maximum-number-of-open-files/ http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?forum=1&topic_id=559&viewmode=flat

in summary:
1) edit /etc/sysctl.conf to add this line:
fs.file-max = 200000
2) sysctl -p
3)switch to /etc/security/limits.conf and add ther following lines

* soft nofiles 65535
* hard nofiles 65535
4)ulimit -n 65535

I think this worked this time because when I do 'ulimit -n' it returns 65535, whereas prior it always returned 1024. In our previous attempt we only did step 3.

The 200000 value is excessive, but who cares.
I am working on a widget for adding reviews to blogs and websites.

test review widget

I am working on a widget for adding reviews to blogs and websites.

Tahoe Trip