Frankfurt

[ehowton]

The last time I was in Frankfurt I was awaiting a flight back to my home at Langley, Virginia. I was recently returned from a tour in Saudi Arabia where I'd simply gotten off the plane in Frankfurt to spend a week with friends in Germany, after which I had 3 days to kill awaiting the next military flight out.

I considered spending my days on the walkplatz shopping and people watching. I considered exploring parts of Frankfurt I had never before been. But would those have been the best use of what was probably going to be my last trip to Germany in a long while?

I settled on buying three cases of Schöfferhofer kristallweizen and locking myself in my room not unlike Captain Willard from Apocolypse Now. Looking back, that was a fantastic use of my time in Frankfurt and I have no regrets. That was in 1995.

Fast forward to The Year of Our Lord Twenty-Thirteen and no stateside vps is offering the month-old openSUSE 12.3 Dartmouth. So once again I turn to our Deutsch friends; the birthplace of SUSE. Sure enough, 64-bit 12.3 vps with half a gig of RAM and a 25GB slice of disk for $5/mo and I am cresting the green wave! (Although it was humorous putting a .us domain in Frankfurt after agreeing to that citizenship affidavit.)

It wasn't until I went to install MySQL that I noticed further repercussions of Oracle's asininity - MariaDB. Distros are dropping MySQL as default (much as we now have LibraOffice to replace Oracle's unholy dismemberment of OpenOffice). It supposed to be a "drop-in" replacement for MySQL (Maria is the daughter of the original MySQL delveloper or somesuch) but my favorite forum software, smf would not load. A fantastic (and uber-prolific) support engineer codenamed, "Arantor" (who bemusingly reminded me of our own swashbuckler332) deftly sorted me out with the following code, only AFTER reminding me that just because you may be 3rd level support for your specific and narrow area of expertise, doesn't mean you make a good end user to other 3rd level support personnel :D

MariaDB [smf]> UPDATE smf_settings SET value = 0 WHERE variable = `databaseSession_enable` ;

Then there were the Indian script-kiddies polling my new server for vulnerabilities from none other than Kansan News Private Limited - a North India media initiative. What the hell? So I found them on Facebook and asked them to stop trying to hack my site and sent them the relevant portions of my log file.

And installed blockhost to pwn them.