Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 375)

My quest to get svnserve to work has succeeded. Went with saslauthd, so I can use pam authentication, and use stunnel to make sure plain text passwords can't be snooped. All getting pretty complex, but a lot faster than accessing svn over Apache.

12 Nov 2011 (updated 12 Nov 2011 at 04:47 UTC) »

Found out the reason why I must store plain text passwords. It's because of the sasl auxprop framework. That only works with plain text passwords, not encrypted ones. Subversion and sasl use the md5-digest method to communicate with the client, so that's covered. But having plain text passwords in the database, really, we can't get away with that these days.

Supposedly with saslauthd and the pam framework it might be possible to use encrypted passwords. So testing that now.

10 Nov 2011 (updated 10 Nov 2011 at 04:14 UTC) »

Hmmm, disappointed to conclude that even if you configure svnserve with DIGEST-MD5, it doesn't appear to work. Plain text password gets send over the wire, and digest calculation appears to happen at the svnserve side, not svn itself.

UPDATE: looking at the code, you would say that's not true. Need to insert some debug statements...

Just got this with svn:

Digest mutual authentication failure: client nonce mismatch


more people have seen this, no one knows what it means, in the sense of why it occurs.
3 Oct 2011 (updated 3 Oct 2011 at 00:20 UTC) »

Just connected a Windows PC to my FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE CUPS printer server. The PC was in the DMZ, so required a bit of firewall poking. The basic thing to do is create a class with CUPS.

I opened two ports in my ipfw firewall: 631 (ipp) and 515 (printer). I added the Window PC's ip address to /etc/hosts.allow:

cups-lpd : windows.example.com : allow


Had to change some settings in /usr/local/etc/cups/cupsd.conf as well: cups must listen on the network card for my DMZ obviously, as it didn't do that before. And in the section had to allow the subnet in the DMZ. I simply allowed the entire subnet as I will control individual access with the firewall.

Next I simply did "Add a printer", clicked on printer is not listed, and specified as name http://www.example.com:631/classes/pcl and that's it. Windows prompted me for a suitable driver, and done.
1 Oct 2011 (updated 1 Oct 2011 at 08:05 UTC) »

Very weird error with evince, and no real good answer if you Google. The error message is File type application/octet-stream type (application/octet-stream) is not supported.

What I did (perhaps some steps can be skipped):

rm ~/.local/share/mime/mime.cache
rm /usr/local/share/mime/mime.cache
update-mime-database /usr/share/mime


The last step fixed it for me, so not sure I needed the first two.

Got a new 3G stick, the K3805-Z, which supposedly gives broadband download speeds and better than broadband upload speeds (5.76MBit/s). Bit of a problem to get this working under Ubuntu Natty. Doesn't work out of the box.

Shows up in the Ubuntu network panel, and you can connect, but it doesn't.

Downloaded the latest Vodafone Mobile connect (2.25.01), and installed. Now the modem no longer shows up in the network panel, but I can use vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux to connect. Doesn't create any routing table I would recognise, but it somehow works. Beats me.

Download speed test wasn't very good, got only 1.7Mbs, but upload was 1.12Mbs, which is better than I get with my ADSL2 connection.

6 Aug 2011 (updated 6 Aug 2011 at 07:28 UTC) »

Bought an Asus Eee Pad transformer, magic machine. I didn't want tablets as I didn't see the point of them, but this tablet comes with a keyboard which also doubles as battery, so 16 hours of battery life!

Obviously I need to have the device rooted, as I need to install openvpn which I use on my network. That wasn't so easy it appears.

The first step is to install adb and make sure your device is recognised. I followed the steps to install adb, but only to there. No need to install USB tools on Linux, and to make sure my Transformer was recognised I simply followed Google's steps.

Finding the right and up-to-date info that is. But once I found rooting for Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a breeze.

The next is to be installing the tun device. Also straight-forward, once you're root that is.

Then it's supposedly following the steps to get openvpn in your system. But that failed. When I tried to install BusyBox it failed on download at step 30/100. Not sure what that was. The OpenVPN installer also failed. So I got the openvpn binary from somewhere else.

Installed that, and installed the OpenVPN settings, and created my openvpn.conf. That worked, but openvpn failed when running ifconfig. I suppose I need the ifconfig from BusyBox.

OK, retry. Don't pick the BusyBox installer, but the main BusyBox. That installed fine, but installed version 1.18. I picked 1.19 to install, and no problems now. Run the OpenVPN installer again, pointing out that my openvpn was in /system/xbin/ and my ifconfig/route in /system/xbin/bb as per the caveats here. Telling openvpn settings that they are in /system/xbin won't work.

I needed to run a script after route was up, as it appears, you can't do that in the .conf file, but must specify that in the settings.

6 Aug 2011 (updated 6 Aug 2011 at 03:54 UTC) »

Bought an Asus Eee Pad transformer, magic machine. I didn't want tablets as I didn't see the point of them, but this tablet comes with a keyboard which also doubles as battery, so 16 hours of battery life!

Obviously I need to have the device rooted, as I need to install openvpn which I use on my network. That wasn't so easy it appears.

Finding the right and up-to-date info that is. But once found rooting for Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a breeze.

The next step is supposed to be installing the tun device. Also straight-forward, once you're root that is.

Then it's

15 Jul 2011 (updated 15 Jul 2011 at 02:08 UTC) »

Unfortunately cmdbulkimp destroyed the KnowledgeTree database, existing documents were moved all over the place. So what now?

Maybe I'm a moron. It appears there is an upload from server link in the admin interface.

Too bad Google didn't return this as the top result.

366 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!