“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

– Steve Jobs, June, 2005

So long Steve, you’ve been one of the worlds greatest innovators and influential beyond our time. You will be missed.

I’ve always enjoyed a good revenge thriller — you know, the movies about the cold hearted, introverted protagonist whose heart is won over by a small child or a beautiful woman, only to have them stolen away or killed. The protagonist is then sent on a violent rampage killing or injuring anyone tangentially involved. In the end, justice is served for those who deserve it and lots of blood has been spilled.

Below is a list of some of my favorite revenge thrillers in no particular order.

• 

  The Man From Nowhere

  A quiet pawnshop owner leads a sad and quiet life after the loss of his wife. A young girl who lives next door befriends him and brings a small ray of light into his life. When the girl’s mother steals from a powerful gang, both the girl and her mother are kidnapped. After finding the mother murdered, the man vows to save the girl with ruthless and bloody vengeance.

• 

  Man on Fire

  A former special ops assassin is thrown into the world of private security when he agrees to protect a wealthy family in Mexico City. The young daughter, Pita, slowly wins over the introverted and sour on the world Creasy before she’s violently snatched under his watch. Driven and out for blood, Creasy stops and nothing to save her and make those who kidnapped her pay with their lives.

• 

  Taken

  A naive teenager goes on a European getaway with her best friend. Shortly after landing, the two are snatched from the apartment where they’re staying. Listening in on the kidnapping is her father, a former spy, vows to use all of his talents and skills to save his daughter. Stolen away by human traffickers, the girl’s life hangs in the balance while her father races against the clock trying to find her before she disappears.

• 

  The Crow

  One year after he and his fiancee are brutally murdered by a ruthless gang, rock guitarist Eric Draven returns from the dead to exact his revenge. Made immortal for one night by a ethereal crow, Eric must seek justice before the end of Devil’s Night.

• 

  Hanna

  Hanna, a 16 year old girl, is chased across Europe by ruthless assassins. Having been trained by her father, and ex-CIA agent, to be the perfect killer, Hanna starts longing for a more normal life. Investigating her past and being pursued by a secret organization she begins to put together the pieces of her violent childhood.

• 

  Léon: The Professional

  Leon, a professional hitman, is neighbor to a young girl whose family is brutally murdered by a corrupt cop. Agreeing to teach Mathilda how to be a ‘cleaner’ so that she may exact revenge for her family, Leon comes out of his dark and foreboding shell. The two begin a friendship that both benefit from and which fuels their desires for revenge.

• 

  Oldboy

  After being drugged, imprisoned and tortured for 15 years, Oldboy is released without explanation. With his new found freedom, he must find his captors and exact his revenge before time runs out. While on the hunt, he learns the astonishing truth about why he was locked up.

• 

  The Horseman

  After learning of the suspicious circumstances surrounding his daughter’s death, a vengeful father sets out on a road trip across Queensland to seek his bloody revenge. While in pursuit of his daughter’s killers, he meets Alice, a wayward teen who connects with the man in his moment of rage and sorrow.

• 

  Mad Max

  Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Max, a quietly retired motorcycle cop is forced back into action after his family is brutally murdered. Setting out on the open road to find his family’s killers, Max rampages across The Outback slaughtering anyone involved.

• 

  Lady Vengeance

  After serving 13 years for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, Lee Guem-ja begins her life anew. Secretly, with the help of some of her fellow inmates, she also plans her revenge against the man who was really responsible for the murder of the boy.

I recently bought a blu-ray drive for my PC to be able to watch movies and burn blu-ray disks easily. Sadly, Apple doesn’t offer a Mac with a blu-ray drive nor have I found a blu-ray internal drive for Macbook Pros.

One thing that is available for Macs is called ‘DVD or CD Sharing’, also called ‘Remote Disk’. You can find the default instructions on how to set it up over at Apple’s support article. The instructions include how to install the DVD or CD Sharing client on a Windows PC for sharing to a Mac.

What isn’t included in those instructions is the fact that by default, only Macbook Airs and Mac Minis support Remote Disk out of the box. I guess this is because they are the only two Mac models that don’t have optical drives.

Once DVD or CD Sharing has been enabled on a remote system (and the firewalls between the two systems correctly configured), the following two lines will activate the ‘Remote Disk’ option in the Finder window. Run them in a terminal window, then restart your computer.

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

After boot, you should see the following options in your Finder.

Note: My PC has two disk drives shared in the above picture.

Augeas (from EPEL) doesn’t come with a default lens for the munin-node.conf files that control Munin Nodes. So I whipped one together.

(* Munin Node module for Augeas *)

module MuninNode =
  autoload xfm

  let record =
    let value = store /[^ \t\n]+([ \t]+[^ \t\n]+)*/ in
      [ key Rx.word . Sep.space . value . Util.eol ]

  let lns = (record | Util.comment | Util.empty) *

  let filter = incl "/etc/munin/munin-node.conf" . Util.stdexcl

  let xfm = transform lns filter

My attempts to migrate a physical CentOS installation to a Virtual machine were fraught with perils. First, I had to figure out how to actually transfer the data. There are many tools out there that say they can assist in a P2V conversion, but the simplest method is usually the easiest. I ended up going with a good old dd.

1. First, you’ll want to create the new VM that you’ll be migrating to; we’ll call this the DestinationVM. Just configure the hardware — don’t install an OS.
2. Next, boot the VM from the CentOS installation disk and enter rescue mode. At the prompt, type

   linux rescue

3. Configure the network interfaces and when it asks to search for installations, allow it to initialize the disks in the VM. There isn’t an install present, but we need to setup the disks to perform the copy.
4. When the VM has booted run

   nc -l -p 6501 | dd of=/dev/sda

   This will start the nc daemon and output the data to the /dev/sda disk. Make sure to change the destination disk if it is different than /dev/sda.

5. On the physical machine run

   dd if=/dev/sda | nc <ip-of-VM> 6501

   Tip: Start the command in a screen session if you might be disconnected from the server during the transfer. It may take a while.

6. You won’t see anything until the transfer completes. It took 6 hours for a 250GB drive to copy for me. YMMV
7. Once the transfer is complete, reboot the VM and you should be good to go!

Sadly, when I rebooted the VM, I encountered the following error:

  Reading all physical volumes. This may take awhile...
  Volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

This error likely means that the kernel copied from the old physical system doesn’t have drivers to support the disk hardware in the virtual machine. Because of this, the LVM configuration isn’t loading properly. The easiest way to resolve this is to reinstall the kernel using yum.

1. Boot the VM into the CentOS install CD and at the prompt, type

   linux rescue

2. Enable and configure networking and allow the mounting of the local installation. Make sure to mount is as read/write — we’ll be making changes to it.

3. chroot /mnt/sysconfig
   yum remove kernel
   yum install kernel
   exit
   exit

   Note, it’s OK to remove all versions of the kernel. Just make sure you install one before you reboot.

4. The system will reboot, once it does, let it load into the OS. If everything went OK, your new system will be up and running!

I spent a while looking for information about how to resize an LVM within CentOS 5.6. After adding additional space to the Virtual disk through the vSphere¹, CentOS doesn’t automatically utilize that space. To be able to make use of the extra space, you’ll have to do the following:
Note: These initial steps are required when expanding the size of the root partition. A non-system partition can be expanded without having to restart.

1. Boot into a CentOS 5 installation disk. At the prompt, type:

   linux rescue

2. Type the following commands at the prompt. The following assume you have a standard CentOS LVM configuration.

3. # Create new partition from free space
   fdisk /dev/sda
   p  # Print partition table
   n  # New partition
   p  # Primary partition
   3  # ID = 3
   t  # Change partition type
   3  # Change partition 3
   8e # Type = Linux LVM
   p  # Print partition table
   w  # Write partition table
   
   # Create a new LVM physical volume from the new partition
   lvm pvcreate /dev/sda3
   lvm pvdisplay
   
   # Extend the volume group with the new physical volume
   lvm vgextend /dev/VolGroup00 /dev/sda3
   
   # Extend the logical volume to include 100% of the free space on the volume group.
   lvm lvextend -l+100%FREE /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
   
   # Mount the volume group
   lvm vgscan
   lvm vgchange -ay
   
   # Resize the filesystem on the volume group to match the total size of the drive.
   resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
   

As always, have a backup of your data.

¹ Learn about how to resize the virtual disk in VMWare KB Article 1004047.