What Have You Done For Me Lately

The title really doesn’t have much to do with anything except my like for randomly thinking about 80’s musical lyrics.

Ooh ooh ooh yeah

There isn’t much going on in my little world. I’ve been trying to climb out of this rut that I got myself into, only the harder I try the deeper I get. What I’m finding is that once you let negativity into your thought process it becomes a cancer and takes over. From that point on no matter how hard you try, the negativity will corner you in the shower and have it’s way with you. I refuse to let negativity corn hole me.

I’ve developed a nice little tool (Ha! little…tool) that helps me fight off the negative thoughts. When I feel them coming I stop what I’m doing and scream “I am no longer your bitch anymore. I…I say who gets to corn hole me. Not you, you bastard!”. This helps me push those feelings away and it invites the positive thoughts in.

Seriously, thanks to some medication I’m able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. To say it’s been a nice departure from the normal doom and gloom would be an understatement. With the fog lifting, I’ve been able to get an idea where I want to be in the grand scheme of things…professionally speaking (typing) that is. I won’t go into what I want to do right now. I tend to lose some steam on these types of things when I let them out of my head too soon. Hopefully, I will be able to stay focused on the goals and actually achieve them. Man, having a sense of achievement would be an awesome feeling, one that I haven’t felt in awhile. Bring it on!

There are some things I’ve been meaning to post about and I will get those done this week.

How to Rehab a Gas Tank

Encountering a rusty gas tank during a bike build can take the wind out of your sails in a heartbeat. Well maybe not for everyone, but for beginners it’s a huge obstacle. pipeworx over at the Jockey Journal forums has posted a great thread on a gas tank rehab.

Well, I have a client that is having me build them a motorcycle and I ran into some problems on the tank today. I thought that since I was having to repair the tank that I would share a little and possibly help someone else out. First, let me apologize for the blury pics as everything was taken with my cell phone. The tank is an old banana wassel. I do not know if they repop these but even if one could be found it would need to have the tunnel modified for the frame that is being used. Here is a pic of what I started with, looks like a clean vintage tank.

Check out the thread for more information and ton more pictures.

Scotty Dont’s 1980 Honda CM400E Build

As a fan of the Honda CM400 series, I’m frustrated by the lack of builds I come across on the web. I think it’s a great bike for people who haven’t chopped a bike before, and even people that have chopped before. They are super cheap and easy to find on craigslist.

If I had to guess why the lack of support for the bikes I would have to say, it’s the lack of factory and aftermarket parts. Lack of parts usually means fabrication is needed or shelling out cash for someone else to do the work.

The cool thing is, when you do find a CM build on the web, because of the lack of parts, these people are forced to use their imagination. They are forced to come up with their own solutions and not just opening a catalog and busting out the credit card. So when I come across a build I get pretty pumped and try to follow it from start to finish.

Scotty Dont’s CM400E build over at the MassDriven forums, is one of the build I’ve been following. He took a 1980 Honda CM400E and created a nice “Cafe/Bobber Bastard Child”.

Head over to the massdriven forums to check out the build from start to finish.

GLPCTL019E Error Running idsicrt

While trying to configure an ITDS instance and database, I ran into the generic GLPCTL019E error. The only thing I know from this error message is that there was a failure and not much else. In hopes of finding more information, I reviewed the ibmslapd.log, db2cli.log, and the others, still finding no hints as to why this problem occurred.

Here is the command I ran and the failure.

idsicrt -I idsinst -e password4seed -p 389 -s 636 -a 3538 -c 3539 -l /home/idsinst -t idsinst
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Tunnelling VNC Through SSH

In some lab environments it’s impossible to use VNC to access remote machines due to security practices(ports being blocked, BSOs, etc). If your job requires you to access those machines pretty frequently this can be a huge headache. Thankfully, we can work around this and tunnel VNC using SSH. In my experiences SSH is almost always available.

This process basically relies on port forwarding, so use good judgement and be careful of firewalls – they may impact your ability to do this successfully (although for me, Zonelabs Integrity Client did not have problems).

SSH can allow you to forward a local port to a destination port and vice versa. Since VNC generally uses the 5900 range (by default on Windows, and usually 5901, 5902, etc on *NIX), you can forward those ports to other ports locally. In my environment I have to go to a jump point server, and then from the jump point to my target server. For you in may not be this difficult.

I’m using a Windows XP machine with cygwin installed. I haven’t tried using putty, so I can vouch for it.

Open a command line terminal:

ssh -g -L 5902:donner:5900 -C administrator@robstestserver.com

Again, the trick in my environment is I have to jump from the target host to the jump point, and from the jump point to my local machine. The -g and the -L allow me to do this. The -C is for compression.

Now open up a VNC Viewer and enter the following and you should see the contents of your target system in the VNC window.:
localhost:5902

In the example I gave above, it tells SSH to connect with Compression to robstestserver.com (the jump point server) as administrator, and then once there forward port 5900 on machine donner (which is defined in robstestserver’s hosts file) to port 5902. Then the VNC viewer on your machine is opened to port 5902 and uses that for I/O to port 5900 on donner.

This is a pretty nifty little trick to getting around the sometimes painful lab security.

If you have any questions or problems post them in the comments.