Older blog entries for Physicman (starting at number 42)

Hmm it has been some time.

Not much to mention. I've been somewhat ill these last weeks. I've continued to build Debian packages for the Hurd.

I also saw someone using my DCC client for exim. I probably should do something about it... At least, make a better documentation.

I should also start building a new wireless access point at home. I need more time and motivation for this...

Let's go back to work. I'll probably start learning Ruby for we use it quite often here. Will probably be interesting...

Work

I'm finalising the setup of our internal Jabber server. I've finally found out how to create permanent conference rooms. So now it needs some more test users before being 'official'.

I need to find a willing windows beta-tester to find out wich Jabber client we're going to recommend to our users.

And of course, we'll see if it's really going to be used... :-/

FOSDEM

Apparently the problems we encountered this week-end with the server were related to vulnerable awstat.pl scripts. The chroot system prevented the script to do any harm (or at least none I could find); but wasted *lots* of memory with the unfortunate result of having the OOM Killer killing apache and ssh and thus render the server somewhat useless...

I'll try to find some time to investigate ways of limiting access to physical memory from the chroots to avoid these kind of problems in the future...

Post FOSDEM 2005

Pictures from the event are coming in from all places ;)

Here a number of pics from the Hurd people:

Here are those of Michael Banck, here those of Ognyan Kulev (I think) and here are those of Barry de Freese.

And here and here are a couple of the #linuxbe people.

Again, it was really nice to be able to put faces on people's (nick)names :)

WORK

I was finally able to migrate to our new newsreader server. So far it has been much smoother than I expected. Hmm... something must be wrong ;) Well, maybe this is just the consequence of fewer residential customers... All the better for those still bearing with us ;)

On another note, my collegue Laurent is now father for the second time. Congratulations pal :)

I'm testing this application I found in the menu with is simply called "Blog entry poster". If this works well, I may be posting more often than usual ;)

Well see...

As usual, the FOSDEM has been great and very interesting.

It has been a good opportunity to finally put some faces on names or nicknames. :)

The saturday afternoon I hang out around the Hurd developers' room and listen to the talks of Neal Walfield and Marcus Brinkmann which were both way beyond my understanding, but, nevertheless, it was interesting to see some problems and solutions that one can encounter while working on the Hurd.

I also went to see the Free Software Award that has been given this year to Theo de Raadt.

On Sunday, I unfortunately missed both Hurd conferences in the Debian developers' room. :(

I went to see Alan Cox talking on how to get a stable (Linux) kernel. It was quite general and thus accessible to most of us I guess. Nothing really new, but an interesting point of view on how the linux kernel development works (or not) and what problems can arise when trying to keep a stable tree stable ;)

Then I attended the talks on Linux-HA and OpenGFS which were both interesting for my job.

The Linux-HA project seems already very useable (and I know it's being used ;) and some of the extensions of version 2 seem much interesting. I'm probably going to dig in more and maybe try to do some implementation at work. The GFS talk was also interesting, but the project doesn't sound as mature as the Linux-HA one. However, the idea behind it is very attractive, especially when one consider building something redundant over different sites. So, I guess I'll try to do some reading about it.

This edition of the FOSDEM ended on a talk on how to enforce the GPL by Harald Welte and I take the opportunity to advertise the website he made about those issues: http://www.gpl-violations.org/.

I now eagerly await the next year's edition. :)

Cool, I've seen some interest in my exim local_scan. Gives me some motivation to continue work on it...

Good to see that Advogato is back :)

I've also been playing around with Orkut and it's rather nice, although far from perfect...

More later...

Ode finally got a job! I'm so glad she eventually found something she likes and with a correct salary. She really deserves it...

Been fighting the enormous amount of traffic generated by mydoom and others...

What a waste of time and resources...

Well, not a lot of new things... I'm still trying to find a good way to build a dns blacklist...