six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2020-06-07

Content Security Policy for Question2Answer

The trickiest part of setting up my Q&A site (running on Question2Answer) was getting the content security policy right. I started with this basic policy:

default-src 'self';
script-src 'self';
style-src 'self';
img-src *;
object-src: 'none';
form-action: 'self';
frame-ancestors: 'self';

but quickly realized that it prevented some page elements from showing.

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Posted 13:16 [permalink]

2019-11-22

Good Riddance Stack Overflow

A while ago Stack Overflow updated their Code of Conduct to mandate the use of user-specified pronouns. To which I had this to say:

Should I ever get suspended over something stupid like using the "wrong" pronoun nobody needs to bother re-enabling my account. I will be gone permanently.

I don't have a problem using gender-neutral language. However, I will not look up someone's "pronoun du jour" just so that I may address them "correctly", and I absolutely refuse to use "neopronouns". How anyone can look at this and not realize the lunacy in it is beyond me. The attempt to enforce the use of made-up pronouns has nothing to do with being inclusive or respectful. It's a power-trip for some social justice warriors that doesn't have any merits at all, and it will be weaponized.

These neopronoun shenanigans are pure unbridled insanity, and future generations will look back and ask "What on Earth were they thinking?"

Today my Meta Stack Exchange account got suspended over my stance on the use of neopronouns. In addition to that the statement cited above was removed from all of my network profiles for the second time, in direct contradiction to what used to be the policy (at least as far as I'm aware).

So, as promised, I'm terminating all of my activity on Stack Overflow and all other Stack Exchange network sites effective immediately. Stack Overflow (the company) seems to be of the mind that they can survive on questions and social justice alone these days. I guess we'll find out how well that's going to work for them.

Goodbye.

Posted 17:56 [permalink]

2017-04-01

Reset VSS Writers

VSS writers are application-specific components for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service, which ensure the consistency of application data when a shadow copy is created. That's quite useful for creating consistent backups of a system. However, some of these writers go into error states more or less frequently. And Microsoft did not deem it necessary to document how to reset writers without rebooting the entire system (or at least I didn't manage to find that piece of information).

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Posted 16:19 [permalink]

2015-06-14

Querying DB2 Backups in TSM Fails with Return Code 106

On one of my servers a query for DB2 backups in TSM (db2adutl query full db DBNAME) failed with the following error:

Error: Initialize environment failed with TSM return code 106

As per dsmrc.h return code 106 indicates a permission problem:

#define DSM_RC_ACCESS_DENIED       106 /* denied due to improper permission */

which was weird, since the user in question is a member of the DB2ADMNS group that is supposed to have all required permissions.

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Posted 23:39 [permalink]

2015-02-22

NTP "Leap not in sync"

Today I had a rather curious problem on my fileserver. I noticed that its system time was behind the clock, but when I tried to manually synchronize it with my timeserver, ntpdate failed with the error message "Leap not in sync".

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Posted 21:40 [permalink]

2015-01-05

PowerShell Execution Policy Scopes

Sometimes when you try to change the PowerShell execution policy you'll get an error message that the setting was applied, but will be overridden by a setting in another scope:

Set-ExecutionPolicy : Windows PowerShell updated your execution policy successfully, but the setting is overridden by a policy defined at a more specific scope. Due to the override, your shell will retain its current effective execution policy of XXX. …

Execution policies can be defined in five different scopes, from LocalMachine (least specific) to MachinePolicy (most specific), where settings in more specific scopes take precedence over settings in less specific scopes. Use Get-ExecutionPolicy -List to see which scope has which setting.

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Posted 22:46 [permalink]

2012-11-17

Importing VMs From external Hyper-V Hosts

I've been working on a project where I needed to migrate (clone actually, in order to maintain a fallback scenario) virtual machines from external (standalone) Hyper-V hosts to a Hyper-V cluster. The external hypervisors were not members of the same domain as the cluster nodes. The networks were separated by a firewall. A trust relationship between the domains was not desired.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) supports this scenario, but there are several steps that must be performed to prepare for the migration.

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Posted 20:03 [permalink]