Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 379)

Today was a bit of poking around day. Tried to setup PXE booting from my FreeBSD 8. Didn't get it working using the guides (1, and 2 were particularly helpful) until I understood that the host setting (with MAC address) is really, really required. You can't have a setup where a PXE client boots something default.

After some playing was also able to get linux booting to work. Now installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a Dell PowerEdge R210 using my new PXE boot capabilities.

Lot of changes to my network recently. The old PIII-800MHz became a pfSense router for a friend, and the server is the Intel Core2 4400 at 2GHz, so quite a step up. But getting it all configured was major pain.

After putting the new motherboard into the case, the system sort-of booted, but not really. Couldn't find the kernel. As this was the server, my network was down, so not easy to download a bootable cd, which I should have prepared actually. Somehow I had a FreeBSD 8.0 disk, so was able to boot with that in the end and poke around. It appears the kernel was ad4, instead of ad0 ??? Still don't understand it. The disk was ATA, but I also put in a SATA disk which became ad6. And the MBR was corrupt or perhaps the next boot loader was corrupt. Had to reinstall to boot and set it up to load the kernel from ad4.

Putting the old motherboard in another case went wrong too as the PSU (Zalman ZM460B-APS) died in the process.

Got another Zalman ZM460b-APS power supply die on me. The quality of these units is just very poor. Yes, they're very quiet, but they die way too soon.

Just released new beta for xplain2sql, version 4.1.0.


No new major functionality as this is a very stable tool, but important performance improvements for mysql and postgresql. And bug fixes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.