Older blog entries for Thias (starting at number 7)

One whole day!

OK, Christmas is over... I survived thanks to my laptop, but I did manage to spend a whole day without touching it! My entire family was stunned... needless to say this hadn't happend since this summer :-)
Of course, Santa had brought me the Silver Champion Lego Technic car, which explains I was able to let go of my computer... and yes, I'm still a child when it comes to Christmas and Lego at the same time... my parents love it! ;-)

I also had fun messing up with ircd and eggdrops, which ended in the creation of two new RedHat 7.0 RPMs. The ircd is chrooted, and the eggrop RPM is meant to be able tu run many bots by just having a config file and using the same binary/libraries/scripts.

Merry Christmas!

Well, updated a few RPMs, finished what I had going with the RIPE and started messing around with BGP4 (yes, it's dangerous, I know that ;-)

I'm going to see my family this evening, and I won't get back until tuesday evening! I'll survive, I've got a laptop :-) I loaded it with lots of things I wanted to test/read since a long time ago, too!

Well, until then, merry christmas to all you geeks out there!

Custom RedHat 7 update

So, for today... I've started stting up multihoming with BGP4 (real fun!) and reverse delegation with the RIPE (real pain).

I've also spent most of the day updating the custom RedHat 7.0 distro I've made here at work. The official glibc and gcc updates were included, and I tweaked the install and a few RPMs too, mostly for fun :-)

I went on IRC today for the first time in months... It was really a drug at one time, but I think I'm over it now ;-)

Routing and more RPMS

Well, I've spent the whole day preparing the change of a whole /24 IP class to a new one... I'll be really happy when I'll be finished!

I'va also built another RPM for RedHat 7.0 of the neat OpenGL game Tuxracer. The original site still didn't have any RPMs, so I built my own as usual :-)
I don't understand why, but the game works fine on my home PC (GeForce 2 MX with NVidia official binary drivers) but on my work PC, eveything seems fine until the race starts and the display gets too bright, almost white... (ATI Rage 128 with agpgart and XFree4 DRI) go figure!

Right now, I'm going shopping to go get a Christmas present for my dad, and maybe another one for my beloved girlfriend ;-) I still can't figure out how I can still have a life with all the work I'm doing... I suppose that's part of the "Geek power" some of "us" (computer freaks) have ;-p

RIpe NCC and me...

Well, I've always got what we french call "poisse" (sticky bad luck!). Here's my Ripe ticket's status :

Processing Information
This ticket is in the Wait Queue and has not been given to a Hostmaster yet.
This ticket is 8 days old and the oldest ticket in the Wait Queue is 11 days old.

How am I supposed to work?... :-/

Update! (at last)

I got an answer... and everything is OK now! I suspect they have some sort of robot that raises the priority of the ticket depending on the number of times the customer checked it's status :-)
Who knows...

RPMs and more RPMs...

Well, I've spent all day building more and more RedHat RPMs! With Christmas arriving, it should slow down soon though :-)
For work, I've built an "oracle-skel" RPM that allows an easy install-remove of Oracle 8.1.6 on our custom RH7 distro. Quite fun! I've also made RPMs of our php "sqlb" module, and our "sqlb" daemon. For those who are interested, "sqlb" stands for SQL Load Balancer; it's a daemon that some collegues wrote that allows persistent load-balanced connections to an oracle/pgsql/mysql database (any of the three at the same time!). It was fun, the RPMs now support upgrading without everything getting screwed up anymore (heh!).
Some other RPMs too : root-portal and dsniff.

I'm also thinking of making an "unofficial" sort of RPM repository... not like rpmfind that simply indexes lots of existing RPMs, more something like a "request it and we'll build it" site where programmers can ask for help on RPM building and so on with tutorials and stuff.
We could build useful-not-yet-included-in-any-disto RPMs... I'm gonna try to find some persons interested in doing this with me :-)

Apart from that, it was my girlfriend's very firt day of work! It went fine, she's now officially become a programmer. The only thing I really regret is that it's in a company where they only use Microsoft products, what a pity! ;-)

RPMs for RedHat 7.0 again - DVDs at last

Today, I've spent time building some more RedHat 7.0 RPMs :

• xine 0.3.2 with DeCSS code :-)
• root-tail 0.0.9 that I usually quickly recompiled when needed
• gtktalog 0.7.1

As usual, the spec files are the simplest possible... and of course as clean as possible! I love work when it's well done, so I do my best with other people's best ;-)
All those RPMS can be found here : http://www.aldil.org/ftp/
Since I never had the chance to mention here all the older ones I've made nor the very older ones for RedHat 6, here is a complete list :

• galeon (but there's an official RH7 RPM now, so mine is old)
• gkrellm (official, see http://www.gkrellm.net/)
• imp (webmail)
• iplog (great used with root-tail!)
• ipmasqadm
• lame
• lbreakout (official RH7 RPM, see http://lgames.sourceforge.net/)
• mailman
• nessus (because the official RPMs aren't "RH7-friendly")
• pptp-alcatel (for ADSL here in France)
• proftpd (CVS versions)
• quake3 (install, copy the big pak and voilà!)
• root-portal
• sftp
• xawtv
• xmms-kj (the neat K-Jofol plugin)
• xmms-liveice

For those of you that don't understand why I do all this instead of a simple "./configure ; make ; make install", It's because I prefer having everything "cleanly" installed on my computers, and I often need the same program on my home computer, my work computer and my laptop :-)
I also like to make other's lives easier too ;-)

Now, back to my Monty Python DVDs... running in 100% software mode under Linux at last!
This is an important day, since I'm now ready to remove my last Windows at home for good!

PHP - PostgreSQL

Today, I've made my most complicated up-to-now php/pgsql script. It simply displays photos with a database index and comments. Anyone can see it in action here.
I'm sure people would laugh if they saw the code knowing it took me just about the entire day to make it! :-)

Oh, well... I'm learning, it's enough for me!