Advogato blog for rvdm

2 Aug 2001

Thu, 2 Aug 2001 15:14:35 GMT

Wow. Two entries in two days! :)
Worked at home. <insert rant about dutch train transport company here> Sucks.

Made some specifications for a cybercafe-setup for a customer (work), wrote specifications and requirements for the new 'hosting system' (work), and played tetrinet.
Cleaned and updated my zone files; the move to bind9 demanded more about them than i thought. Experimented a bit with IN KEY records and DNSSEC, concluded that i need it for the VPN's, but it's not secure enough due to absence of root name servers supporting it. (yes, i know alternate root servers exist, but i don't want to use them)

Got very annoyed about some loser with the sircam virus; this person has arrived at a grand total of 30Mb of virusmail+attachments and doesn't reply on complaints. Neither does his ISP.

Analysed the code red traffic to my webservers and laughed at it.

1 Aug 2001

Wed, 1 Aug 2001 14:34:30 GMT

Ok, time for a new one ;)

Not that much changes since the last entry, actually. I should try and keep this up on a daily basis; but knowing myself that'll probably never happen.
Some events worth mentioning:

Recieved an IA64 workstation and a HPPA server from HP, which we're going to host for the Debian project. If everything goes fine, they should be running the non-US build daemons sometimes soon.. The IA64 is much slower than i thought, but it looks cool; blue and purplish.
Started building a 'private' build farm here; reserved a 19" rack thing, and started filling it up with 'spare' machines. The IA64 and HPPA box are going to be in it too. Scavenged a 40 and an 80Gb disk for them, and a small switch. We now have all architectures that run Debian, excluding M68k and Powerpc. After everything's installed and stable, and we get our second ADSL uplink, we will make the buildfarm public, giving out accounts on request.
Got accepted in the Debian security team, and brought out my first DSA (on apache/apache-ssl). Bugged wichert a lot about that :)
Bought tickets for HAL2001. I was too late for the 'regular' payment scheme, so i had to pay by credit card. to 2600. (eeks). Anyone know of a place in holland where i can rent a camper for 3 days, _cheap_ ? :)
The tickets for my trip to the states have been reserved; i'm going to do a talk on the LinuxWorld conference in SF, together with wichert. (about debian package development & stuff)
Took over the 'sed', 'grep' and 'acpid' Debian packaging
Uploaded new lvm packages, sistina-style this time.

14 Apr 2001

Sat, 14 Apr 2001 21:02:48 GMT

I seem to be too busy for an advogato account.

Things since my last posting:
Brought the ftp.debian.nl mirror up. It has been running for a while now, and has been used quite intensively. Added some extra stuff to the mirror (security.debian.org mirror, some driver sources), and enabled people to apt trough www.debian.nl as well.
Alan Cox started referencing www.bzimage.org in each -ac kernel patch, so the site is starting to get a bit more popular ;) - now we need to keep the stuff up-to-date even more.. bandwith peaks in the days after new -ac kernel releases come out, but the link is big enough.
Did an NMU on the 'lvm' debian package, mailed the maintainer a couple of times, and started the process of taking the package over.
Added mysql logging support to the 'snort' debian package, and some preliminary work on splitting it up in a 'snort', 'snort-mysql', 'snort-postgresql' and 'snort-patterns' - it'll be clogging up the Packages files a bit, but it's worth it, i hope ;)
Started work on packaging 'little brother' - a network monitoring system that seems to do the job.

2 Mar 2001

Fri, 2 Mar 2001 23:08:08 GMT

*not chronological, summary of events since my last posting*

Did a lot of work on the 'snort' debian package today.
If I counted correctly, i actually fixed 12 bugs in a single upload! :) - i hope the reporting-thing works better now, i almost completely reworked it (fixed some timeouts in the mailer-pipe, did some cosmetic changes).
It should also be possible to use it for dialup users now - good!

Worked a bit more on some LDAP stuff at work. My python scripts now know what 'users' are, and can differentiate between them. Adding and deleting works too. Worked it into the frontend as well.

Fixed DNS stuff. reverse works fine now. got a new block of IP's, transitioned to those. Waiting for the TTL to pass, so i can actually remove the old ones (12 IP adresses on a single interface looks, erm. 'messy'.).
Got myself a nice reverse for IRC.
<plug>
Whipped up some HTML and perlscripts for http://www.bzimage.org. We're publishing 'incremental kernel patches' there, so people can patch their (linux) kernel from say ac7 to ac8 without having to apply the patch to a stock 2.4.2 kernel. It's actually working quite well, people on the LKM (linux kernel mailing list) are positive about it, and we're getting quite a lot of hits. Cool!
</plug>
Been looking for a good _anonymous_ way to do news-posting. There's lots of anonimizers out there, but no nice and easy way to allow me to do some posting with 'tin'. The link between anonymous posters and spam is quickly made, so i guess it's good that you need to go trough so much trouble. On the other hand it's a pity that the internet needs anti-spam measurements - in particular the anonimity can be great...

19 Feb 2001

Mon, 19 Feb 2001 13:33:43 GMT

Ok, i'm at home, feeling crappy.
Uploaded the first version of the unofficial yopy faq yesterday night, got some ok responses.
The next steps will be finishing it off, completing it, and building the rest of the site around it :)

I did some steps to reconstruct my /home filesystem, so i can get back to real work, like fixing the bugs in my Debian packages ;)
Took a long, good, look at subversion too. Pity it's still CVS-only, or i would've started packaging it.
It looks really cool, and i can't wait to see the first real release - might want to switch from CVS to subversion at the office, to give it a test drive for a while.

18 Feb 2001

Sun, 18 Feb 2001 19:23:14 GMT

Slept a lot.

Woody is frozen since last friday, so i feel responsible to fix a lot of bugs, to get stuff cleaned up before the real release.
There's some bugs in the 'snort' package that annoy me, and i want to fix those.
I'm thinking about implementing a new configuration thing for it, to allow people to use database logging instead of just file logging trough syslog.

17 Feb 2001

Sat, 17 Feb 2001 02:04:11 GMT

Hmm.
Some time between my first and second post, but hey - i'm busy!

Hacked on the rtl8139too driver a bit, and got it to work with cardbus. I need to submit a tiny patch to the pcmcia-cs people, so i don't have to change stuff next time i want to use it ;)

Also started more work on the tiny-debian stuff - somebody muttered that i'm re-inventing the wheel by building 'another distribution for ARM based handhelds like the IPAQ'. I disagree totally. There is no distribution for handhelds that's upgradable, and that offers real package management, and a balanced list of applications.
Ah well, i think it's useful, and it's fun to work on.

9 Feb 2001

Fri, 9 Feb 2001 20:57:36 GMT

Did some work on the 'snort' .deb today. It was ridden with bugs (some of which i introduced myself, by a somewhat optimistic new upload ;) ) - dialup users had some problem with the package not really working at all, wich is bad. Also closed some ancient bugs that weren't even present anymore.
Started hacking on Debian-for-yopy (probably just 'yopy-linux', based on Debian ;) ).
I want a tiny dpkg, tiny apt, and some wrappers that do stuff like installing packages, and keeping the cache directories clean.