duh :)

March 9th, 2010 by Merlijn

Someone on chat asked me what switches he had to use to execute php on the command-line. He tried to execute a php script, and all the command returned was the contents of the script, instead of executing it.

At least… that was what he claimed. I don’t use php on the cli a lot, so just to be sure i wrote a quick test script, which executed flawless.

So I took a look at the script he tried to execute:

echo html_entitties_decode(file_get_contents($argv[0]));

So the script did exactly what was asked ;) outputting the content of the script itself, instead of outputting the content of the file given as 1st argument to the script.

hi hi.
He overlooked the fact that the 0-key of the argv array holds the name of the script itself, instead of the 1st argument given on the cli :)

Mysterious crashes of netatalk on freeBSD 8

February 14th, 2010 by Merlijn

I experienced mysterious crashes of the netatalk daemon installed on a freeBSD8 box. The apfd was advertised with mdnsresponder, but at the moment I tried connecting to the shares, the afpd crashed. Nothing showed in the usual logs. I tried several debugging modes, but nothing seemed to give any clue where I had to find the cause of the crashes.
I took another look the /var/log directory, wondering which logfile could provide me with any clue.

Turned out that auth.log was giving information:

Feb 14 08:35:06 zaphod afpd[9740]: twist Erlkoenig.gargleblaster.org to /bin/echo "You are not welcome to use afpd from Erlkoenig.gargleblaster.org."

Aha! this ringed a bell! I recently installed denyhosts, which uses hosts.allow.

A quick look in hosts.allow gave :


# The rest of the daemons are protected.
ALL : ALL \
: severity auth.info \
: twist /bin/echo "You are not welcome to use %d from %h."

So adding:

#netatalk
afpd: ALL: allow

Did the trick… netatalk is working as expected again.

What really happened…

January 2nd, 2010 by Merlijn

what really happened

The answer is yes

November 29th, 2009 by Merlijn

Ask Slashdot: Do You Hate Being Called an “IT Guy?”

69.69.69.69

November 13th, 2009 by Merlijn


merlijn@nietzsche 4 ~$ nslookup 69.69.69.69
Server: 10.1.2.5
Address: 10.1.2.5#53

Non-authoritative answer:
69.69.69.69.in-addr.arpa name = the-coolest-ip-on-the-net.com.

Authoritative answers can be found from:
arpa nameserver = I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
arpa nameserver = L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.