You're not too technical, just ugly, gross ugly

Well a brief post about what I've been up to over the past few days.

An alioth project was created for the maintainance of the bash-completion package. I spent about 40 minutes yesterday committing fixes to some of the low-lying fruit.

I suspect I'll do a little more of that, and then back off. I only started looking at the package because there was a request-for-help bug filed against it. It works well enough for me with some small local additions

The big decision for the bash-completion project is how to go forwards from the current situation where the project is basically a large monolithic script. Ideally the openssh-client package should contain the completion for ssh, scp, etc..

Making that transition will be hard. But interesting.

In other news I submitted a couple of "make-work" patches to the QPSMTPD SMTP proxy - just tidying up a minor cosmetic issues. I'm starting to get to the point where I understand the internals pretty well now, which is a good thing!

I love working on QPSMTPD. It rocks. It is basically the core of my antispam service and a real delight to code for. I cannot overemphasise that enough - some projects are just so obviously coded properly. Hard to replicate, easy to recognise...

I've been working on my own pre-connection system which is a little more specialied; making use of the Class::Pluggable library - packaged for Debian by Sarah.

(The world -> Pre-Connection/Load-Balancing Proxy -> QPSMTPD -> Exim4. No fragility there then ;)

Finally I made a tweak to the Debian Planet configuration. If you have Javascript disabled you'll no longer see the "Show Author"/"Hide Author" links. This is great for people who use Lynx, Links, or other minimal browsers.

TODO:

I'm still waiting for the creation of the javascript project to be setup so that I can work on importing my jQuery package.

I still need to sit down and work through the Apache2 bugs I identified as being simple to fix. I've got it building from SVN now though; so progress is being made!

Finally this weekend I need to sit down and find the time to answer Steve's "Team Questionnaire". Leave it any longer and it'll never get answered. Sigh.

ObQuote: Shooting Fish

Syndicated 2008-05-07 13:02:04 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Only after disaster can we be resurrected

I leave my main desktop logged in for months a time; as demonstrated by my previous bug with the keyboard transition for xorg.

The screen is setup to lock after 5 minutes of idle, so there's no real security issue, and it is extremely convenient.

Every few weeks though my desktop gets into a funny state where no new windows may be opened.. Existing applications continue running without any problems, but no new windows/shells/whatever may be opened.

Tonight it happened again.

And the lightbulb went on in my head: My flat uses CFEngine to manage itself. (Two physical servers here, with 5-10 Xen guests, and a number of remote servers.)

One of the things that CFengine is configued to do is to tidy directories of files which are older than 30 days. Including /tmp.

So that explains that.

Every month the magic cookie in $TMP would be nuked, and X would disallow new connections.

I guess the next time this happens I should look at using Xauth to fix the issue, but generally I just logout, make coffee, smoke a cigarette, and login again.

In conclusion: I'm a stupid-head.

ObQuote: Fight Club

Syndicated 2008-05-06 19:25:13 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Please don't let them be as boring as Brian's friends

I made an emergency release of the chronicle blog compiler yesterday, after noticing that it was truncating titles containing periods.

That was a bit of a mea-culpea moment, but I guess mistakes happen.

The new release is in perfect shape for Lenny, and now includes two new scripts installed into the examples/ directory:

• The RSS-feed importer I mentioned prviously.
• A quick hack to detect duplicate post/entry titles.

The latter was applied to my own blog, and I discovered several duplicates. I guess my film quotes having only a limited source collection to work from could also include duplicates - so I've updated my Makefile to only build and rysnc my blog if there are none detected.

(In many ways that films site is the precursor to this blog; it uses a collection of text files, one per film, and generates a cross-linked HTML output of film entries. Sadly it is out of date, because entering titles is a real pain..) Chronicle Comments

I'm pleased with the comment process now though, the CGI comment submission script simply archives each submitted comment into a "comments/" directory on the webserver.

There a cron-job passes each one through a bayasian filter and moves the file(s) to either "comments/good/", "comments/bad/" or "comments/unsure/".

When I come to rebuild the blog I rsync the "comments/good" directory to my local machine, rebuild and then rsync the output back to my remote webserver.

(On a single machine this would be much simpler process!)

I've imported my blog source into a mercurial repository, so the client-side is consistent. I have a bad habit of making new postings from wherever I happen to be and having a central repository will make that less prone to diaster.

Just running "make steve" against the Makefile is sufficient to rebuild everything and sync it to my live system.

ObQuote: Kalifornia

Syndicated 2008-05-03 14:41:36 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Fight in the shade

Tonight I'm going to enjoy a nice long sleep after attending The Beltane Fire Festival yesterday evening.

I did manage to sort out an SSL certificate yesterday, before I went out. A lengthier process than expected because the SSL-registrar was annoying and mailed the admin address listed in whois for my domain; rather than an address upon the domain itself.

I guess they can't be blamed for that, and the registrar did forward on the request when begged, so it wasn't the end of the world. For reference I used godaddy.com; who sold me a 3 year SSL certificate for about £25.

Today I've been mostly catatonic because I had only two hours sleep last night. But one good piece of news was receiving a (postal) mail from Runa in response to the letter I had sent her some time ago.

ObQuote: 300

Syndicated 2008-05-01 20:22:51 from Steve Kemp's Blog

Offer me everything I ask for

I installed Debian upon a new desktop machine yesterday, via a PXE network boot.

It was painless.

Getting xen up and running, with a 32-bit guest and a 64-bit guest each running XDMCP & VNC was also pretty straightforward.

There is a minor outstanding problem with the 32-bit xen guest though; connecting to it from dom0, via XDMCP, I see only a blank window - no login manager running.

GDM appears painlessly when I connect via VNC.

The relevent configuration file looks like this:

# /etc/gdm/gdm.conf
[security]
AllowRoot=true
AllowRemoteRoot=true

[xdmcp]
Enable=true

The same configuration on the 64-bit guest works OK for both cases.

(I like to use XDMCP for accessing the desktop of Xen guests, since it means that I get it all full-screen, and don't have to worry about shortcuts affecting the host system and not the guest - as is the case if you're connecting via VNC, etc).

Weirdness. Help welcome; I'm not 100% sure where to look </blockquote>

Anyway, once again, a huge thank you to the Debian Developers, bug submitters, and anybody else involved peripherally (such as myself!) with Debian!

I love it when a plan comes together.

SSL

ObRandom: Where is the cheapest place to get an SSL certificate, for two years, which will work with my shiny Apache2 install?

Somebody, rightly, called me for not having SSL available as an option on my mail filtering website.

I've installed a self-signed certificate just now, but I will need to pay the money and buy a "real" one shortly.

So far completessl.com seems to be high in the running:

• 1 year - £26
• 2 years - £49

For double-bonus points they accept Paypal which most of my customers pay with ..

ObQuote: The Princess Bride

Syndicated 2008-04-29 22:37:50 from Steve Kemp's Blog