Older blog entries for Stevey (starting at number 169)

I've got an image that I'm happy with now, it's based upon the one I posted earlier but Smaugs body is now composed of Celtic knotwork.

He looks stunning and I'm very much looking forward to having him placed upon me.

I'm guessing it'll be a quick one, around two hours or so tops.

Debian General Resolutions

I hereby propose that all further GR's are handled Battle Royale style, instead of by voting. This will have three effects:

• Revenue Raising, via video sales.
• Ensure 100% voter tunrout.
• Remove some of the project deadwood.

Over the weekend I went to my favourite piercing store and picked up some new jewelry.

Mostly the rings and things that I wear are very static, I leave them all alone for months at a time, then I will change them for a bit of variety.

Now I've got two small spikes inside my each ear - in the center, just opposite the tragus, and a nice black shiny barbell through my right nipple.

For nipples I like the contrast of one ring and one bar, but after losing part of the bar a good few months ago I was reduced to two rings, which I'd not got round to fixing.

Tattoos

I've chosen my next tattoo design, a simplistic Smaug, from this cover of The Hobbit, with a few small tweaks.

I will be getting in touch with my tattoo artist to schedule some discussion and inking time...

It looks likely that I'll have a donated Dual PIII 750 machine, complete with 2Gb of RAM to use as Debian building machine by the end of the week.

This is fantastic, and means that I can finally both build SSP packages, and offer them to the world. I'm not sure how far to go, so far I can easily build all the "Section: Base", and "Priority: Required" packages - but more than that?

It's hard to know what to choose. Given that I do have limitted resources it seems best to do :

• All required / base packages
• All things in section net
• All things in section games

More than that will have to happen over time, I've got a pair of 200Gb drives on order - really the only thing that I'm looking for now is good connectivity.

My ideal would be a hosted machine remote where I could play on an unstable chroot - and have a lot of disk space, but I think I can get by dedicating this machine to constantly building, then uploaded the packages every couple of days. (I don't have a great uplink to the world, but I should be able to manage some uploads on a regular basis).

ISDN Modems

Now that I've got a Cisco #1603 dialling up properly I'm sat on a set of five identical Diva external ISDN modems / TA's.

Free to a good home if you're near Edinburgh.

(Unlikely I know, but I'll pimp them here, then offer them on ed.general after a few days if there's no interest.

I'm subscribed to several packages on Freshmeat, even though I don't download them - instead I get the new versions when the Debian packages are released.

Why do I do this?

The same reason that I rate projects on Freshmeat - so that the program author can see one more happy user. (Trust me if I'm unhappy I send mail to tell people. Actually to be fair I'll usually mail an author if they've done a great job too :)

I notice that with my listed projects I can have lots of users who are notified of new releases, but don't take the time to rate them.

Sure that makes sense, you see something nice. You download it play with it for a few minutes then subscribe for convienence - but you've not used it enough to know how well it works, or how broken it is.

But it's a shame.

Please if you're subscribed to any projects on Freshmeat run, don't walk, over there and rate all of the projects you're tracking. Make somebodies day with some positive feedback...

After playing around with pbuilder, sbuild, and some other scripts I couldn't find something that was simple to install and use for rebuilding Debian packages.

debian-builder was the result.

A few people have asked questions about how it works, so there are some answers here:

• Does it handle building all dependencies?
  • No, not alone. Instead there is a script which will build a package and it's required dependencies. I regard this as the job of a queuing deamon, not the builder itself.
  • (I do have a queuing deamon written, but it's not public yet)
• Why not use wanna-build et al?
  • Because documentation is confusing, and I couldn't get them working ..
• Apt-fu?
  • At the time I was looking at builders apt-fu seemed to have dropped from the face of the web.
• apt-build?
  • This one I didn't find in my searching. D'oh.

The end!

I still think it's a neat piece of self-contained code, and it is useful to me - but I'm not sure if I should upload it or not. Choice is good, but too much choice and division is bad.

I've been using it to rebuild my system with an SSP compiler ("Stack Smashing Protectin") and have successfully rebuilt most of my system.

Rebuilding libc6-dev, then running out of disk space after six hours is a very frustrating experience.

(P.S. My package has the best name, and that's important too, right? ;)

Advogato

Advogato is back up - so I can post to Debian Planet again, yay!

I've lost track of a number of posts that people had made that I wished to respond to here, (I did comment on some peoples livejournal. I hope nobody was feeling stalked!), so I'll just say this for the record:

Thanks to all the people that write and share such interesting entries, I love reading of other peoples work some of it is over my head, some of it is stuff I've done myself once upon a time, and others entries inspire me to try crazy things!

I love to see new pieces from lots of you. Although rationally I find it odd anticipating new entries from people I've never interacted with and probably have little in common with .. but you're all "faces" now.

:)

Two smilies in one post, that'll be the end then...

As predicted there were a few small problems with the site after the move.

The MySQL server setup was dying with too many connections, so that's been tuned. So has Apache and PHP now, so the site should stay up.

Fingers crossed ;)

mod_slashdot

This reminds me of the code that I was telling Hughe about yesterday - mod_slashdot.

A simple Apache 1.3.x module which keeps track of the previous fifty referrers to an Apache server, if more than half of them come from slashdot.org it blocks them.

This means I should still be able to have a .sig linking to my site from there, but a real submission (unlikely) would make my server go offline gracefully.

With a small bit of effort it could be tweaked to keep track of N referrers and drop connections if X% of them came from the same site - that would prevent overload from arbitary sites.

(Of course that would necessitate the changing of the modules name!

I spent around six hours today moving machinima.com over to a new host - and switching it from RedHat to Debian.

The setup was very straightforward. Mostly it was a matter of installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, Exim, and Mailman.

I'm still waiting for the DNS changes to propogate before the new home is live, but it looks like everything is good to go.

I like doing odd jobs like this for people, especially when I'm getting paid in DVDs! This job earnt me the DVD box sets of Buffy The Vampire Slayer series 5 and 6. (That works out at about ten pounds an hour).

I'll be on call for the next couple of days to make sure that nothing has broken and that the site is holding up well.

This makes the third server install/move/setup that I've done for Strange Company and one of the best so far. This time I went over to the owners house and did the magic whilst he watched and took notes.

Hopefully this will mean he'll feel comfortable making changes himself and can become self sufficient over time.

I updated a few packags last week during a lull and a day off work sick.

(Unable to talk I could type quite well, but then I ended up spending the rest of the day in bed sleeping badly).

The other day I also created my first webpage on the Debian.org website. I still need to move the stuff I have over to its new home, but it's happening slowly.

Via xbindkeys I have the buttons on my generic multimedia keyboard setup so they control xmms.

This works very well, I can skip to the next track when the "next" button is pressed by executing "xmms -fwd", etc.

One thing bugging me for a while is that the command line interface to xmms doesn't allow you to teak the volume, so I couldn't bnd the "++" and "--" keys to anything useful.

I wrote a quick patch to control the xmms volume from the command line, and mailed the -dev mailing list.

So far the consensus is that I should be mapping keys to the mixer instead - no positive feedback at all.

Oh well the patch is sufficiently trivial that I'll keep it for the time being - until the next Debian package is released and my installed copy gets overwritten I guess.

I've almost finished the first draft of the 'Source Code Auditing HOWTO', modelled upon the documentation already available in the Linux Documentation Project.

I'll be posting this in livejournal shellcode community in a day or two for comment.

Wargames

I've also put together a challenging wargame on a spare machine.

A user signs up for an account and recieves the password for the account 'level1' on my box.

Once they login a message is displayed, and they must exploit the '~/bin/level2' binary which is setuid(level2), this will enable them to read the password to level2, where the process repeats itself.

So far I have four levels put together of gradually increasing complexity.

I still have a couple of things to do, then we'll go live with some local people.

I'm not sure the box is restricted enough to open it to the world, although I'm looking forward to reading the syslog and captured information.