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Well, I am conveniently positioned between Houston and Oregon... 

As for IPv6... if/when softlayer (the datacenter I'm hosted with) provides it for free, I'll support it.

Tell 'em Duke is coming...  





(And if we see the release of Duke Nukem Forever and widespread IPv6 adoption this year, what will geeks use as a metaphor for things that are never going to happen?)

So, an amateur treasure hunter with a metal detector goes walking in his friend's field, and turns up this: http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/artefacts/




1500 pieces of 7th-century gold and silver, the largest cache of Anglo-Saxon metalwork found in England. 

Wow...

Hmmmm, I found the SMF manual and it looks like only the site admin can ban a user or change their profile information.  It'll have to wait until Xepher gets back...

Turns out Xepher made me a forum mod before he left town, and forgot to tell me about it.  >:-)

or rather than the same ol' D&D puns you could call it a "Perception Check" and make fun of Warhammer for once. 

Too late.  In 4th edition D&D they're combined spot and listen into one perception roll...

Yeah, it normally does that (ask for a password after a key fails) but this is a particular case where a very specifically borked authorized_keys file causes it to actually die on the server side. Basically, it's seeing a proper "ssh-rsa" keyword, then a newline. If I just fill the file with gibberish, it falls back to password, and if the file doesn't exist or can't be opened, it goes to password. It's just this rare case that causes a glitch.

Ooooh, that sounds like a failure to sanitize user input in OpenBSD code (assuming you use openssh), I thought they were smarter than that.  Somebody call slashdot.

Actually, if you still have the original password for the account, you can't lock yourself out using an rsa key. It will fail and request standard login, or should provided that the ssh server is set up correctly.

Ssh *should* ask for the password, but instead it just closes the connection.  Unfortunately, that was empirically verified the other day.

Fortunately, it's fixed now.   

[ALSO]

So, as some of you probably know ssh supports this neat thing called public key authentication that lets you log into servers (like xepher.net) without having to type your password every time.  This provides handy four-keystroke ("!ss enter", assuming you haven't been sshing anywhere else lately) login.  It also prevents people from stealing your password with a key logger or by watching you type it.

It ALSO happens a good way to lock yourself out!  What you do is create a file called .ssh/authorized_keys (so far, so good), and open it in nano.  Then, copy your public key (from your home machine) into that file.  Obviously the fastest way to do that is copy and paste!  Open up a terminal on your Mac/*nix machine (Windows users are on your own, sorry), type "cat .ssh/id_dsa.pub", command-C, tab over to the window where you've got the authorized_keys file on xepher.net open, command-V, ctrl-X, save the file, and logout.  That's it, you're done, and you ain't getting back in until xepher fixes your account for you!  See, ssh expects expects one key in authorized_keys to be on one line, and the cut-and-paste job introduces a line break.  Ssh fails miserably trying to read your key, freaks out, and closes the connection.  As an added bonus, sftp uses ssh in the background, so if you break ssh, you can't even get in and delete the offending file via sftp!

If you've followed these instructions, congratulations, you're now in the same boat I am: unable to do anything (except write tongue-in-cheek tech support posts in the forum) until xepher logs into AIM and/or checks his mail.

   grumble 

... the site earns it's domain name! Worse than failure indeed! :-P

It was even better as "The Daily WTF?".  They retconned it to "Worse Than Failure" when someone noticed the canonical expansion of WTF is NSFW.

I've left my friend Will (Willsan on the forums) in charge while I'm gone.

MUAHAHAHahahahahahahahahaahaaha 

Err, I mean, at your service!   

Someone's gotta mention Mechwarrior 2 here, so I will.  And I agree that Wind Waker had some great music.  (As did Super Mario World, I still love the treetop level music.)


As I sidenote, when I have a computer in my car, the startup sound *will* be the MW2 mech startup voiceover "Reactor, online.  Sensors, online.  Weapons, online.  All systems nominal."   

You know you're in a sci-fi rich environment when it's "Luc Besson, the same guy that made The Fifth Element." and not "Luc Besson, the same guy that made Leon The Professional."   

Also I have to nominate "Moulin Rouge" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" for the don't-watch-them-drunk category.

Very cool. I actually took my headphones off when I heard the phone ring. 

Oooh, shiny.  I was half expecting them to announce World of Starcraft.

I'm still REALLY looking forward to Spore.

Same here.  The top games I'm really looking forward to are Spore, Fallout 3, the rumored FF7 remake for Playstation 2 PS3, and Duke Nukem Forever...   

@ Will Wright and EA management