Advogato blog for berend

3 Feb 2012

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 22:16:34 GMT

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.

30 Jan 2012

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:35:33 GMT

Frequently get this:



$ evince

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

Why does Google not have an answer?

11 Jan 2012

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:19:16 GMT

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.

7 Jan 2012

Sat, 7 Jan 2012 05:06:45 GMT

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.

7 Jan 2012

Sat, 7 Jan 2012 05:02:56 GMT

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.

29 Dec 2011

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:12:44 GMT

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.

19 Dec 2011

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:41:01 GMT

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.

13 Nov 2011

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:57:24 GMT

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

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:07:52 GMT

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

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:54:42 GMT

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...