ring ring goes my (private) mobile phone.

me: hello, alex speaking.

her: hi it's <female, australian> with telstra, how are you?

me: fine, thanks. (that's a polite lie: i hate the telco monopolist and avoid them wherever i can. they shouldn't have this number, btw.)

her: that's great. please note that this call may be recorded or monitored for training and quality assurance purposes. are you ok with that?

me: no, i'm not. i do not want this call to be recorded.

her: brief pause while some thoughts scramble through her hamster brain, which is obviously completely lost when things leave the crib sheet path oh, but why do you not want that call recorded?

me: i do not want this call to be recorded.

her: but what's the problem?

me: i do not want this call to be recorded.

her: ok, i won't be able to continue this call then. have a good day. click

me: happy

Next time I think I'll ask for extra anchovies with my pizza (if male sales weasel) or request some telephone sex (if female).

See also: It's Lenny, a recent development by an Australian BOFH with my kind of humour. VOIP rocks :-)

Looks like some of my students think I'm a reincarnation of Werner Kuich - not because of any brilliance on my side but because of his really special first lectures which scared off a good number of prospective students (the subsequent lectures were then held at a quite humane speed and pretty good IMHO).

So a number of the more unwilling members of my flock decided to bail out early - which is of course their call (at the ork place they can switch subjects until end of week 2) - but it still rankles to have this kind of desertion just because you a) expect them to start working in week 1 (duh!), b) don't dumb down the content to the level of 'reading for dummies' and c) require that they allocate a few working brain cells to this here university education thing.

once more i got nice feedback from somebody out there who benefits from my tinkering - it's very nice to see that one's efforts aren't totally wasted.

here is the original post about pam_recent for context; the newest version (with documentation) is here.

lorenco catucci suggested that pam_recent works better for rate limiting services that don't terminate the network connection on a failed login if it offered handlers for the other pam phases too, most importantly auth.

that way, one can use pam_recent to record that somebody attempts access in an iptables' recent list, and clear the record if and only if the connection gets to the account or session stage. in this setup pam is providing the control and iptables recent match just enforces the limits.

nice idea, just a few simple changes required and the result is better and more useful than before.

..of those high-energy photons, please! Ahem. On Monday the sparkies performed the solar installation on my roof (6 big panels for a nominal 1.5kW of lovely solar electricity).

We'll see how much of my energy needs that will take care of (it won't be all for sure; I usually need about 11kW/day and a 1.5kW installation won't provide more than 60% of that) - but the feed in tariffs for exporting energy to the grid are good (so far): you get quite a bit more for your exported kW than you pay for consumption.

Now I just need to wire up the inverter's serial port and start logging performance with rrdtool...