Running is therapy

John and I met up today to run the Double Creek 5K. What a great time.

The course was tough. Lots of hills. My first goal was to break 36 Minutes, which I did at 33:58. However my hope for 30 minutes, died a horrible death on the hot exposed country road in the last mile. We took off at around 9:45 this morning. It was pretty hot and there was very little shade along the 3.1 mile out and back course. John’s wife Jaime, had walked up the road a little before the start and came back and proclaimed the course “hilly”. She wasn’t kidding.

John and I kept pace together for about 100 yards and then he pulled ahead to run his own race. I figured I wouldn’t see him until the finish. However after another 100 yards, with him about 10 seconds ahead of me, I decided to let him pull me along and hoped for a 10 minute 1st mile. I thought I might be in trouble at the mile marker when they announced I had done it in 9:41. But I was feeling pretty good and decided to keep going. I let John drag me to the turn around. Still about 10-15 seconds behind him as we rounded the corner, I grabbed some water from a little guy, couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old.

I hit the 2nd mile marker at 21:09…I had managed to blow the 20 seconds I had from the first mile…and was starting to feel pretty crappy. The sun and the hills, along with my initial pace were wearing on me. A couple times in that last mile I had to fight to not walk. After what seemed like an eternity, I descended into a small valley between hills and some much needed shade. I prepared for the death slog up the hill. However, after only running for a little bit up that hill, I realized it was the last one…I was only hundreds of yards from the finish. I pushed it up a notch and was probably at about an 11 minute mile pace for 2 to 300 hundred yards.

The last 100, I could see out ahead of me some dude on a unicycle that had passed me a little while back. There wasn’t a chance in hell that dude was going to beat me. I started my kick and flew past him and the finish line just under the 34 minute mark. Tired, hot and pretty happy I never gave up, even if I didn’t do what I had really wanted, which was to hit 30 minutes, John, Jaime and I grabbed some shade and watched the other people come in.

According to the board I finished in 98th place…and about 17 minutes after the first person. As far as I am concerned there was no shame in that time, I really thought it was a tough course. I need to do some hill work I believe.

**EDIT, don’t use this :) I am pretty sure it’s not working properly, see previous edit, I am running out of time today to fix it. If I don’t get it right soon, I am going to take this down till I do get it working right**
**EDIT: I am not convinced the auth takes place before the rewrite to SSL, I am looking at that now **

So…you want to use PAM to do authentication for Cacti over SSL? Sweet, here is how. (These directions are for Ubuntu, but could probably be extrapolated to other distros).

First, install mod_ssl (This is something separate that I am not going over here, it’s pretty straight forward).

Now, install mod_auth_pam

  apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-pam

And add the apache user to the shadow group

  usermod -G shadow www-data


At this point, www-data can talk to PAM for authentication.

Now we need to force SSL so that our communication with the server is encrypted:

  vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Adding this to the file (in the < virtualhost *:80> section):

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/cacti\/.*
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}$1 [L,R=301]

Now, reload Apache

  /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

There, now visit http://yoursite.com/cacti. It should reroute you to https, and the login page of Cacti. Login, and go to settings (in the lower left hand corner). Then click the ‘authentication’ tab. The first config param should be a checkbox with ‘ Use Cacti’s Builtin Authentication’ checked. Uncheck that. Now, anyone can get into your Cacti install! Wooo! Actually, let’s fix that.

Open the apache conf file for cacti:

  vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/cacti.conf

And add these lines (after the Alias directive):

<location />
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Cacti"
    Require valid-user
< /location>

Reload apache, and go back to the url. It should prompt you for your username/password (this will be your system username/password).

That is all.

(note, in < /location> and < virtualhost> there is a space after the < symbol…wordpress keeps doing weird things. Take that space out)

I think I may have been allowing myself to get dehydrated. I never really took in a lot of water. I don’t often get super thirsty, even since I started running again. However, A few days ago I was complaining to Lon (a favored pass time of mine) that I was tired all the time even though I was getting plenty of rest. He suggested I might be dehydrated. Since then I have made it a point to drink more water. And you know, I do feel better. I felt better while I was running, and I feel less tired through the day. Now, this could be psychosomatic, perhaps so, but I’ll take feeling better any way I can get it.

Ran for the 2nd time this week today; preparing for the Double Creek 5K this Saturday morning. Should be fun. I am trying for sub 36 minutes. We’ll see…I should be able to do that without too much trouble, but one never knows how these things will go.

This site is awesome IMO. Read some of the sentences. Some suck, but overall they are good.

Similar to twitter, except that it gets rid of the cruft. Just leaves us with that one sentence that we find funny, sad, amusing, hopeful, depressing…etc. It’s a roller coaster.

http://ust.ac.kr/~jjj/www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscrcmd=_login-run/update.php

**Edit**
I would hope that everyone visiting here could tell that that is a phishing site, if you can’t…it is…please only fill with bogus info :)

Just reposting this to boost it’s googleness

In my Quote of the Day rss feed, I came across this:

"Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead." 
~ Erma Bombeck

Funny, but she happens to be currently brain dead…as well as dead in other ways too.

Bob and Sun picked up some new kayaks at Wildware yesterday, and today we took them up to Opossum Lake to make sure they were sea worthy. Boy were they! We had a great time.

When we found the place (I hadn’t been there in years) I noticed that the water was REALLY low. After almost a complete circumnavigation of the lake I could see the water line was 10 to 15 feet lower than normal. This cut off a lot of the little coves and nooks that were always fun to explore up, and made paddling the length of the lake a pretty easy task.

While Sun and Bob were enjoying a good float, I decided to pop out for a bit and take a walk along a bunch of the shore line. I asked a fisher person why the lake was so low, and he said there was trouble with the dam. He also mentioned that “they” were trying to get together money to fix it but they didn’t know when that would be.

The Sentinel had an article from 2005 that hints at the problems. At least reading that you get the idea. The spillway was allowing seepage through, and the damn is only rated for 15 inches of rain in 24 hours (apparently the fed requires it be rated for 25″). Also it mentions that there would be a lot of damage if the damn fails. They have drained the lake down to below the spillway, and are (or were in that article) trying to see how much work it will take to rectify the situation.

It’s a shame, I was looking at some pics on line of Opossum Lake and it was much nicer when it had water in it.

Just finished Flesh And Blood. This book is part of a series. The main character is Alex Delaware, a psychologist that consults with LAPD. This book delivered more of the same murder mystery formula that anyone who has read an Alex Delaware novel has come to expect. However, while good, it was a little flat compared to some of the others in the series. However if you like the characters (Alex, Milo, Robin) you’ll be happy to get to spend a few hours with them again.

I am a couple behind, but I plan to catch up on them as well as get back to the Sword of Truth stuff in the coming months.