Advogato blog for pa

27 Dec 2000

Wed, 27 Dec 2000 23:11:16 GMT

Whee, found the CVS repository with the code from db.debian.org. The scripts are somewhat helpful.

My little LDAP web-interface is progressing slowly, I'm trying to get the system to use auth-tokens from HordeSession, so that our IMP users won't have to reauthenticate themselves. It's quite disturbing that Horde stores the username/password in cleartext-equivalent format to the SQL database. Maybe I could hack it to use IPC shared memory segments that would be tied to the parent apache process. I have to do some studying to understand SQL better too.

Hmm, I really should be reading to my final exams instead of doing all this. Oh well ...

16 Dec 2000

Sat, 16 Dec 2000 16:48:46 GMT

Had a 'small christmas' (as we call them in finland) with the other guys from our small firm, BOFH Networks. Looks like we might get a real job from the city instead of this 'semi-volunteer' stuff :-)

Uploaded new spong-packages, which got installed a bit before I noticed that I had forgot to close a quote in spong-server's postinst. Otherwise they seem to work fine.

I started working on a web-interface for our users to change their passwords and other informations. db.debian.org includes such functionality and seems to work great, but their CGI-code isn't publicly available (to my knowledge).

9 Dec 2000

Sat, 9 Dec 2000 13:59:49 GMT

Quite a silent week on my behalf. I had an interesting struggle with one of our terminal servers; some processes on it went into 'uninterruptible sleep' while waiting for I/O from NFS, and never woke up, elevating the loadavg of the machine to ~15. Signals didn't help, and I didn't want to boot the box, so I had to play around in kernel space (modify task_struct) to get rid of them. I enjoy this sort of challenges alot, since you always learn something from them.

I was happy to find some bug reports on my new spong Debian packages and spent some time on them. I am trying to get the spong-server and client to run as a non-root user, but am not very confident that the upgrade from older packages will go smoothly once I do this change.

1 Dec 2000

Fri, 1 Dec 2000 22:33:22 GMT

I figured I might actually write something here :-)

Today I was supposed to work on user expiration on our network's user database (we are using RFC 2039, LDAP) but that is kind of boring so I spent the evening working on SILC Debian packages. SILC is a potential project for a secure IRC-like network.

The packages can be found at:

deb http://master.debian.org/~pa/silc/ / deb-src http://master.debian.org/~pa/silc/ /