Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 384)

Had an absolutely weird case where FireFox and Chrome wait spin for over a minute, when all the data had already been received.

Narrowed it down to this only happening when accessing over https, and it also didn't happen when I turned off gzip compression. I compress most of my output automatically using Apache's deflate module.

In the end it appeared that my Eiffel FastCGI program send a Content-Length for the uncompressed content. And that was returned to the browser. The solution was not to put in a Content-Length, so the web server will put one in for the compressed size.

PS: the reason why this worked in http mode might be because I was accessing the app through a Squid 3 proxy, and that might actually be doing the right thing. Too lazy to test this now.

Replaced my RTA1320E with a Draytek Vigor 120. The RTA1320 are nice modems because you can put them in half-bridge mode, but they just keep locking up for me. And I got a bit sick of replacing them every 6 months or. They used to be really reliable for me, but somehow are no longer. Perhaps it's a bit warmer in our home now we've installed an HRV system?

The modem is setup with protocol PPPoA with PPPoE Pass-through checked. I can now configure my ppp on FreeBSD with this:

vodafone:

  set device PPPoE:fxp0

  set server 30001 mypassword

  set authname isp_login

  set authkey isp_password

  set dial

  set login

  add default HISADDR

  disable ipv6cp

  disable mppe

  enable lqr echo

  accept lqr

  deny mppe

  set log +lqm

and use -ddial mode to have it connected. Still need to test if lqr works fine, so link is brought up after some failure.

I've made a change to my firewall script as well: now using built-in nat with ipfw, so goodby nat daemon. Was actually trivial to do, should have done that earlier.

Another Zalmon ZM460 bites the dust. This one probably because the load on the server is more than 460 watts I expect. Put in a Cooler Master Silent PRO 800. And it is silent. Probably will stick with Cooler Masters for now.

Frequently get this:

$ evince

Maximum number of clients reachedCannot parse arguments: Cannot open display:

Why does Google not have an answer?

Flew to Melbourne today, for a few holidays + the Drupal Down Under. Had a problem with my K3805-Z stick, wasn't recognised anymore on this machine. Perhaps the Oneiric upgrade? According to syslog usb-modeswitch crashed when inserting the stick. The solution was to get the 1.21 usb_modeswitch, compile and install it, and that fixed the problem.

Good for performance as the always reliable K3565 Vodem worked, but is feeling a bit slow these days.

The only problem I still have is that Ubuntu itself doesn't pickup on the USB sticks anymore. It used to that, perhaps my playing around a year ago to get the K3805-Z working killed things. So need the latest vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux to connect me.

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.