Author Archives: xaminmo

Emotions, actions, identity

Posted by xaminmo

Re-analyzing and re-processing emotions is necessary for self awareness because we remember the processing result, but we exist as the current emotions which are always changing.

External identity is who we are and how we present to others, and internal identity is who we think we are based on our last self-analysis.

Resistance to being self aware of a piece happens due to fear, self judgment, trauma responses, or a larger gap in feelings/behavior than our internal model predicts.

Self control or discipline comes into play when we force ourselves to match a desired identity when we find our default behaviors or motivations don’t match expectations. This happens maybe for a goal, obligation, self protection, or similar rehabituation.

Processing any of this with or without someone else is scary, because it deals with identity. Identity processing can trigger existential crisis, defenses, etc.


Dream fragment

Posted by xaminmo

Just woke from a dream where I had to travel to Japan.

Lots of being lost in airports, and one was back home, combination airport, noodle shop, and high school where the kids went.

Kept missing everyone. Erica and one of her friends knew the way to find where I’d come out.

Visual and auditory details were very high. Lots of escalators, stairs, people, etc.


Radiation Bond dream

Posted by xaminmo

Dream during wake-up at 3:30am (too early! Why am I awake & churning?)

Bond car left on our property that was found to have an abandoned, very hot radiation source. Lots of townspeople angry at us, and crazy car chases trying to dispose of it instead of continually be exposed from across the property. Hot as in picking it up was scary, but not barf and slough. Transporting it was multiple lifetime doses, not instant death sentence.


Underestimated

Posted by xaminmo

I like this short story text:

" I think we underestimated the size of the human species by eight or nine orders of magnitude.”
by u/InBabylonTheyWept in HFY

or narrated:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8JJv8Rp/

From /u/InBabylonTheyWept in /r/HFY a year ago.

” I think we underestimated the size of the human species by eight or nine orders of magnitude.”

The war room was reeling. The human population had been estimated in the mere hundred billion range. They should barely have had enough of an economy to field two light cruisers, least of all the goddamn armada that was ravaging the inner worlds. After the alpha strike, the human flotilla should’ve been completely crippled. Instead the number of ships they were fielding kept growing.

Tan-Hauser was the first target struck by a human attack, and they reported seventeen craft before they lost comms. Attican was hit just three days after that, but their reports already showed numbers above ninety. Any doubts that the fleet was growing were eliminated when Outpost Batan reported 1,217 FTL pings two days before the loss of Kira.

The number reported was so big it was written off as a sensor malfunction. Twenty-five billion souls lost, all because nobody in the war room could face reality.

They were going to face it now. The Kirarian in front of them was the primary sensor engineer for the Batan outpost, a specialist with more expertise in analyzing space lanes than warships. He’d been up for at least the last two days, poring over the sensor data, and only now was ready to begin to share his findings.

From the pain in his multifaceted eyes, it was clear he was still reeling from the loss of his homeworld.

Seeing that he had the room’s attention, he began to speak. The translation units each member of the war council had implanted experienced a moment of lag as they struggled to convert the almost musical tonal humming of the Kirarian tongue to more common galactic speech.

“The simplest data that can be analyzed from an FTL ping is the distance that the ship traveled before dropping to sublight. The contracted space in front of the craft traps small particles, even light itself for a short period, compressing its wavelength and then releasing it when the field disengages.”

The war room nodded along. The explanation was mildly technical, but anyone that had traveled on an FTL shuttle before knew the hazards of exiting FTL directly in front of your home destination. Blasting your home station with a wave of alpha, beta, and ultraviolet rays was hardly a warm welcome.

The engineer continued.

“The… issue with this is that we’re used to the majority of the ping being in the UV spectrum. We aren’t entirely sure what the spectrum of the signals we got from the ships were because Batan station can only detect up into the low gamma range, but that’s still what the majority of the human’s FTL pings were detected in. That’s at least ten billion times the frequency that we’re used to. Since the frequency of the burst can be roughly modeled by multiplying the mean radiation per unit distance by the length of the path, that implied one of two things: That the human ships were either traveling through areas with ten billion times the standard background flux, or that they were traveling extragalactic distances.”

The engineer paused for a few seconds at that statement. The pain of loss still shone in his gemstone eyes, but something more immediate was beginning to take center stage: Fear.

“Because the craft is essentially throwing… well, normally it would be the next three or four days worth of cosmic background radiation at you. In our case it’s more like several decades. But because it’s just giving you an advance on your normal cosmic background radiation, you can track the void in the next several days’ worth of background noise to determine the ship’s approach vector. The 1,217 crafts that arrived weren’t coming from the same spot. There were actually hundreds of converging vectors, but more importantly…”

He trailed off, a small 3D model of the local space appearing in the center of the holo table. A spiked ball of vectors protruded from the galactic disk, each piercing cleanly through his former homeworld.

His voice cracked a little, the hum turning into a hiss. The translator tech paused a moment too, struggling to convey the subtle emotional cues into the message.

“They’re all coming off the galactic disk. That doesn’t just mean that we’re surrounded, that doesn’t just mean that we’re outnumbered… It means that each attack that we’ve seen up to this point is from an entirely separate group. What we’ve been mistaking for fleets, I believe, are simply the beginning trickles of their exploratory forces. Each of the sites that they’ve targeted hasn’t been of significant strategic importance, they’ve just been sites with unusually strong output signals. I think they’re just using our transmission stations as makeshift beacons for their FTL jumps. I think we underestimated the size of the human species by eight or nine orders of magnitude.”

There was a heavy silence in the war room as that last sentence was processed. The engineer was already out the door before he heard the panic begin to set in.

Part of him felt a little guilty. It would’ve probably been kinder for them to go out not knowing what was about to hit them. Still, it wasn’t often you could force people with this much power to realize that they’d just lost everything.

There was a bitter satisfaction in that.

-–

To anyone that made it this far, thank you for your patience. It’s been a hot minute since I had the time to submit anything here, but with my senior year of engineering behind me, and a new job already lined up, this should become a much more common event.

Thank you. <3


EB Elevator Dream

Posted by xaminmo

In my dream, EB fell into an empty elevator shaft from two floors up because the stairs/elevator on that side of a concrete apt building had never been built.

By the time I got to her, she was already up and moving, but looked ROUGH. I could not convince her to go to the hospital. Kids who lived there could not even get me to look over the edge.


Joke: A well in the woods

Posted by xaminmo

I was walking through some woods and came across a clearing where there was a well.

I dropped some pebbles and then some rocks to try to figure out how deep it was, but I didn’t hear them hit the bottom.

So I looked for something bigger. I found a railroad tie. I struggled to get it to the well and then angled it on the edge to finally get it to slip down the well.
When it fell, I was listening to hear it hit the bottom. All the sudden a goat came running from the woods and jumped straight into the well.
I was so distracted that I didn’t hear anything hit the bottom…
As I was standing there trying to think through what happened, a guy came out of the woods and asked me if I’d seen his goat.
I said, a goat just came running out of the woods and jumped down this well!!

He said, that couldn’t have been his… His was tied to a railroad tie.


Joke: Three Warring Kingdoms

Posted by xaminmo

Once upon a time, there was a triangular lake, who’s three shorelines each formed the border of one of three neighboring kingdoms, their histories steeped in bitter intertwined rivalry.

The first kingdom was rich and powerful, filled with wealthy, prosperous people.

The second was humbler, but still held its fair share of wealth and power.

The third kingdom was struggling and poor. It barely had an army to rally, after years of being on the back foot in comparison.

During a particularly tense political conflict, the kingdoms eventually dissolved their longstanding treaty that prevented any kingdom from claiming the lake for themselves, and went to war over control of the lake, which would grant the victor a significant strategic advantage, not to mention a valuable source of resources through which to prosper.

The first kingdom sent 100 of its finest knights, clad in the best armour, each with their own personal squire.

The second kingdom sent 50 knights, with fine leather armour, and a few dozen squires of their own.

The third kingdom sent their one and only knight, an elderly warrior who had long since passed his prime, with his own personal squire.

The night before the big battle, the knights in the first kingdom drank decadent imported liquors, and partied into the late hours of the night.

The knights in the second kingdom weren’t as well off, but had brought an ample supply of their kingdom’s renowned locally brewed mead, which also afforded them the opportunity to drink well into the night.

In the third camp, there was no such revelry. With just two members in their “army”, they had been forced to only bring the essentials, having to carry everything themselves, not that the kingdom had much in the way of decent alcohol to offer their hero’s in the first place. Stoicly, the faithful squire unwound a rope and swung it over the branch of a tall tree, making a noose, from which he hung a pot. He diligently filled the pot with the scraps of food they had brought, preparing a simple stew, before dishing it up and serving the old knight, then sitting down to join him for a humble dinner. Neither said it out loud, but both knew this was almost certainly their last meal.

The next morning, the knights in the first two kingdoms were hungover and unable to fight, while the elderly, frail knight in the third kingdom had suffered the cold winds blowing in from the lake. Weary, his joints aching, he was unable to stand, and despite his best efforts, the squire was unable to improve the knights condition by the time the horn bellowed, signifying the start of the battle.

In place of the knights, the squires from all three kingdoms picked up their weapons and began to fight.

The battle lasted long into the night, but by the time the dust settled, only one squire was left standing – the squire from the third kingdom.

And it just goes to show you that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.


Pride Month 2023

Posted by xaminmo

Pride month angers or scares a lot of “I’m not a bigot” people. It also pressures a lot of people who cannot be “out”, because of history, lack of safety, etc. My state is one of the ones trying to forcibly push everyone back into the closet through a lot of lies and propaganda. “Freedom for me, but not for thee.”

So, not just for the people who are safe and supported enough to publicly be themselves, but for all of you who cannot be, or were conditioned not to be, or those of you bulied for not being active enough, gay enough, too gay, confused, and everyone else with more to themselves than what the majority populations understand or want.

You are awesome, even the parts you hide, the parts you forget sometimes because of how good you’ve gotten at playing whatever part society defines for you.

You are loved, even if you don’t know it. Be proud of yourself. Be more caring, compassionate, and accepting of yourself (and others) than you have been treated. Be tolerant of mistakes or confusion, but not of willful mistreatment.

Give no quarter to those who say that being different in yourself is oppressive to their claims of control over how you express yourself, and who would promulgate lies to convince others to oppress you.

Be strong in defense of those being oppressed, even if it’s only you being oppressed. You are as important as the people you love and care about. Do not give in to hate. Do not let it control you from others nor from yourself. Ask for help from others who carry love and acceptance with them. We are stronger together.

No one knows you like you know yourself, maybe even you don’t know all of yourself. But there are people who know enough of what it is to be like some of your pieces to find a little home for part of your heart. May you find more of those people this month to be a part of your personal community.

I’m sure there is more to say, and better, more concise ways to say it. I’m not an orator. I’m just someone with love to give. It’s not enough, but the love is yours if you want it.


IT42905 TSM / Spectrum Protect SSL cert expiration

Posted by xaminmo

TSM 7.1.8 / Spectrum Protect 8.1.2 and later create SSL certs with a 10 year expiration.

IBM reference: https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/IT42905

The fix is:

Delete the instance keystore (cert.kdb)
Set all clients, admins, servers to SESSIONSECURITY=TRANSITIONAL
HALT the server and restart it – this will make a NEW key.
FORCESYNC for server connections.
Delete the client keystore (dsmcert.idx)
Restart the client and make sure it connects for the new key.

If you don’t wipe the client keystore:

ANS1695E The certificate is not valid.
ANS8023E Unable to establish session with server.
ANS8002I Highest return code was -370.

From the actlog/SERVER_CONSOLE

ANR8599W The connection with someserver:port failed due to an untrusted server certificate. An attempt to reconnect and establish certificate trust might follow.

IBM is considering automating this.

There is no automation yet as of 8.1.18.0 in 2023-03, and once the key expires, you’re stuck doing it manually.
You may be able to use DEFINE CLIENTACTION to delete the keystores on the clients if you use dsmcad.


0x8007003B timeout copying large file to Samba server

Posted by xaminmo

PROBLEM: 0x8007003B timeout copying large file to Samba server

SOLUTION: This is an SMB.CONF issue, solved / fixed with this line:

strict allocate = no

DESCRIPTION: I had this issue for a long time, and mostly the web mocks people, tells them to do stupid things, or generally is unhelpful.  Lots of 2GB, or “your network” or “your firewall” or “turn off DPI” or whatever, none of it applicable to me.  I just accepted it, but decided to dig a little deeper today.

The exact amount of data written before it fails would vary, but the size from LS would always be the full file size.  Higher performance filesystems such as XFS, EXT4, JFS, all of them on NVMe arrays, I found I could get about 55GB allocated before timeout.  On spinning disk, it was much less, which is probably why many people fell down the rabbit hole of claiming 2GB limits, etc.

Strict Allocate = YES tells it to allocate the whole file upon request, which is what Windows does.  Samba says “OK, hold on”, and then times out.  Some people used powershell on a client to change the smbclient timeout to 600 seconds, or whatever, but that’s not really ideal, since it does not scale.

Strict Allocate = NO says to use normal UNIX semantics, where the file has no pre-allocated blocks, and allocates blocks only as the data comes in.  This starts with a fully sparse file, and data copy status on the windows client shows it processing immediately.  This is what we want for large files.  If it was only small files, then we don’t care.

I made this a global change.  I don’t need fully pre-allocated, non-sparse files on my file server.  It’s possible someone writing databases might need this, and you’d want to make sure you didn’t feed data faster than the kernel can allocate blocks.  Another one of those multiple filesystems kind of solutions.

When you play with tunables, you run into things that people don’t really know how to troubleshoot.  That’s what this is for, just so it shows up in web searches.