Linux on Steve Wilson

Using AI to help do things

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 22:18:19 +0100

I’ve been using AI more and more, but not really in the way the breathless articles tend to describe it. I don’t ask it to go away and magically solve my life. Most of the time it’s more like having a technical assistant sat next to me who is very fast at reading, reasonably good at pattern matching, and occasionally far too confident.

The pattern is usually the same. I provide the actual situation: logs, screenshots, code, command output, measurements, photos or whatever constraints apply. It suggests likely causes or next things to try. I test those on the real system, or against the thing I’m physically working on, then feed the result back. After a few rounds the conversation is no longer generic advice, it’s about the specific problem in front of me.

Firewalling lists of compromised hosts

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 21:01:28 +0000

For a few days, on and off my mail server has been alerting with connection issues. Digging deeper I found that one of the blocklists I use to prevent compromised hosts connecting was having issues via DNS.

Eventually I managed to get on to their website but didn’t see any mention of a problem, however I did notice they provided downloads for their lists. Initially I was considering using their rbldns zone files to create my own RBL service but a bit of research pointed me towards ipset to use a list of CIDR ranges in iptables.

mythtv to sickrage/sickbeard

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 16:12:53 +0000

As the better half was recording far too many of her lovely soap operas and filling up space on the provider’s DVR I’ve had to come up with a solution.

Having a digital TV tuner card and a Linux computer that’s always on I configured MythTV to record various things, this dumps them to disk and I then use some magic scripts to process them for sickrage to then manage. Playback is done via Plex on the smart TV.

grub2 embedding is not possible

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 18:13:10 +0000

Well it seems it’s finally time to move my gentoo machine away from “grub legacy” and over to grub2.

All was going well following the official instructions until after reboot and running the install to replace the MBR.

grub2-install /dev/sda

At which point it spat out the error below.

/usr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: warning: your core.img is unusually large.  It won't fit in the embedding area.
/usr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install.

It turns out this is because the disk partion was created when it started at the 63rd sector, recently limitations were found with this and it’s increased to 2048 in most distros.

Nagios mysql connection count plugin.

Sat, 14 May 2011 16:45:24 +0000

Lastnight I switched apache from MPM-prefork to MPM-worker, all worked well.

It wasn’t actually all well, I discovered that some 3rd party php code was using mysql_pconnect which wasn’t disconnecting from the server, so a couple of tweaks to my.cnf and all was looking good again. This left me with a problem, was it really OK and will it remain so?

Thus I decided that I should monitor the connections via nagios. Great I found a perl script over here and gave it the once over. One surprise was that rather than using perl to connect to sql and get the connections it was actually dropping to shell and then parsing the output, had this being pure perl and not dropping to shell I might have left it there, however this is me and not having written a plugin I thought it was about time.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW) “infostring” Problem

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:24:18 +0000

OK so I’ve been helping out for a while with a few wolf (RTCW) servers and the odd Enemy Territory (ET) one.

As these servers are monitored and statistics etc. produced regularly I started receiving alert emails that there were problems, not with just one but all of them.

Log investigation kept coming up with:

Info string length exceeded

It seems we’d a script kiddie playing with q3infoboom or similar, there’s only one way to deal with these kids and that’s to swat them like flies.