Older blog entries for skx (starting at number 10)

Yesterday I recieved a "cease and desist" notice from O'Reilly. My first one ever.

It appears that somebody had submitted an article to my site which was a copy of an O'Reilly owned article.

*sigh*

Still they were understanding, and once I'd removed the offending article (replacing it with an explaination of why it had been pulled) they were satisfied.

I guess this means that I'm going to have to vet submissions a lot more thoroughly - probably not a big deal since I don't get many :(

Advogato

I think that now my diary has ten entries (once this one is posted) that my RSS feed will work.

I've spent a while reading through the code trying to trace this down - just put it down to another Advogato weakness.

Bitter much? Me? ;)

Debian

Seems like the security upload I made the other day was incorrect, it should have gone to another queue.

Here's the dupload settings I've got now, which appear to work:

$cfg{'security'} = {
        fqdn          => "klecker.debian.org",
        incoming      => "pub/SecurityUploadQueue",
        dinstall_runs => 1,
};

I shall add this to my documentation. (I'm trying to document how things work in the background as I come across interesting things. Nothing finished yet though).

Assuming this upload was correct then I can start making others.

If this entry does indeed trip the magic which allows my rss feed to work I'll add myself back to Planet Debian.

blank.

In the past 24 hours I have:

• Installed Ubuntu Liux
• Installed Gentoo Linux
• Installed Debian Sarge

One installation of each distribution upon a Dell Dimension L800R, with 128Mb of memory and a 20Gb drive.

The order above is the order I did the installs - I knew I wanted to end up with Debian "proper", but thought it was worth exploring the alternatives to see where we are let down.

Gentoo .. I didn't like, although I can see that it's a seductive system. The flexability really is present, and the machine did a suprisingly good job of installing software from source. (I admit I didn't do a full system rebuild, nor did I get as far as starting the X11 Window system).

Ubuntu was very pretty, although the system was sluggish with Gnome installed I can't fault the distribution for that.

After all the past controvosy I was disappointed to find a lack of semi-naked people on my desktop when the installation had finished - guess I'm just a pervert ;)

(OT: Correlation between BDSM + Geek? Seems high, perhaps I really am just a pervert :)

Sarge's daily netinstaller worked well on the machine, the configuring gave me a working system in a minimal amount of time. I think that the Ubuntu installation was marginally ahead - because the install CD-ROM I burnt only had two options on tasksel "Mail server" and .. something else.

Once I'd fixed up the sources.list file I had more tasks and all was well.

Oh, almost forgot. I wrote a small introduction to running mod-security on Debian, including installation notes for Woody.

Thanks to Salmoni for commenting on my invisibility.

Previously my diaries weren't rated as low as 1 - although previously I was certified as a Master which was probably unfair.

Mostly I've only written about Debian work for the past few months since my diary was being carried by Planet Debian, and that seemed to stimulate my Debian writing.

I removed myself from there when my main account disappeared - I did add this persona in as a replacement, but it seems to have a broken rss feed. I wonder if that's because I have less than N entries Advogato tries to generate?

That's the main reason I'm writing entries, to see if it will start working when I get enough written.

Still if people wish to certify me, and improve my diary rating it would be appreciated - my old diaries are still available - even though my account is gone.

Almost enough to make me sad ..

I made a couple of updates today, including my first upload to woody - to fix the issue with nasm.

Setting up the environment for that was fun, I wasn't sure whether to use a nice UML setup or a chroot.

In the end I followed the documentation I'd written last time and setup a new UML environment.

My Debian Administration website got a massive facelift yesterday, moving to a CSS based layout.

Any feedback is welcome.

Now I need to write more articles. I was amazed to see that already 60 pieces have been posted.

Google seems to like it a lot too :)

Advogato is conspiring to make my diary entries unviewable.

First we lose the main account, and create a new one.

Then the new one has a feed which is unviewable - gives a zero-sized-reply.

Well it's been a nice few years, but I guess Advogato and me are just gonna have to part ways.

Happy Holidays everybody!

With the recent advogato troubles causing me to be unable to use my Stevey account I'm going to be using the skx journal exclusively now.

Debian Work

I've been fairly busy recently looking over the security holes posted by DJB and trying to patch them.

Most of them have been done now, but we're still pending an upload for PHP and a couple of other things.

Misc Debian

It looks like my update to late made it into the archive recently - splitting the data out into its own package.

That and the recent fixes for dsniff and libnids1 are what I've been doing for my packages recently.

Apache

Trying to keep my webserver running I put together a quick package of mod_dosevasive for Woody - available here.

Seems to work OK, only minimal hacking required to make the package, and to get it working on the site.

Other than that I've been working with a lot of Apache code recently, updating some of my inhouse modules and updating mod_curb for machinima.com.

I'm still unable to login as my main ego, which is frustrating.

Still I guess it gives me a chance to look over the glory days when I was hacker of the month!

Debian work is continuing nicely, with a few good bugs squished over the past week.

I've also written a few more articles on the Debian Admin site. Via the RSS feeds it's getting a lot of traffic - but few comments from users. (This is what led to the adverts going on the articles page not the index incidently. If people follow the RSS feeds they tend to just read an article which catches their eye and not explore. If you're logged into the site you see no adverts ever, if you're an anonymous visitor then you get one per article)

I suspect it's either going to tail off or increase steadily until a critical mass is reached when more people start writing and posting comments.

It's a little disappointing that the feedback has been so minimal, but I guess I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I set it up and it is still fun.

This isn't the account youi're looking for...

For the past few days I haven't been able to login to Advogato as Stevey. The login page tells me the account doesn't exist, and points me to the account creation page.

When I use the account creation page to "recreate" my account I see an error telling me that the account already exists.

I know my username and password are correct, other people seem to be logging in and updating their diaries - so is something just broken for me? Or is the site having problems?

Interesting Diagnostics:

Two interesting links:

• Personal page for user Stevey - gives error "Account doesn't exist.
• Diary page for user Steve - Shows my previous diary entries - so clearly the account exists/existed.

If I'd ever seen an account deletion link I might imagine that somebody had compromised my account and deleted it, but given there is no such link I've seen .. wtf?