Older blog entries for skx (starting at number 14)

Perl

Today I achived Sainthood.

That probably says more about my reading, voting, and posting skillz than about my perl competance, but I'm happy regardless.

Debian ~ Zeroconf

After my previous errors with libhowl0 I managed to get something working.

Hacking x11vnc to announce itself whenever it starts (with a nasty fork()/exec() combo).

Now when I launch xvncviewer I am presented with a list of hosts upon the LAN which have active VNC servers running.

Nifty :)

ZeroConf

So today I saw mention of ZeroConf with libhowl by Marco d'Itri.

Seemed like a nice idea and today is a slow day, so I installed it.

There's a server which is in charge of handling the services which are published and a couple of tools for publishing services and querying them.

All seemed good:

Install:

apt-get install libhowl0 howl-utils mdnsresponder

The service gets started and we can publish something:

skx@undecided:~$ mDNSPublish  gnump3d _http._tcp 8888

From the same machine we can then query:

skx@undecided:~$ mDNSResolve gnump3d http
resolve reply: 0x2 gnump3d http local. 192.168.1.50 8888

Looks good, I've "published" the existance of a service called GNUMP3d which is running on port 8888 and then queried it.

Lets try the same thing from another machine. Oh dear it all breaks.

When running the query on another machine I first see a "connection refused" message, so I realise that I have to start a deamon on that machine too.

Hmmm that seems weird I thought all the machines found out from the central server? OK install the mdnsresponder too, try again?

Nope. Since there is nothing registered on the local mdnsresponder no results come back.

I can't help hoping I've missed something obvious, because if so I could add zeroconf support to Jabber, but it looks like nothign is working across machines

3 Jan 2005 (updated 3 Jan 2005 at 14:22 UTC) »
Gaim GUI

A long time ago I wrote a simple plugin for the gaim instant messenger client, which would rework the GUI to my liking.

Rather than displaying contacts in a group of trees it would display them in a list control, with user editable fields.

I used to set mine to have three columns:

| Login  | Name | Location | Notes |

This made it much simpler to keep track of lots of people in different places.

Today whilst clearing up my home area I found the code, which was for gaim .7, and tried to build it against gaim 1.1. No joy.

Sadly most of the things that I learnt about gaim and gtk are both long since forgotten.

Still it was a fun discovery - just one of the things you stumble across when cleaning out ~/Programs I guess!

I still don't understand why so many IM clients group contacts in tree structures - to me it seems much more logical to have fields in a list control. I guess I"m alone.

Update - found the mention in my old diary. Code dates from September 2003.

Documentation?

A work-in-progress: Inside the Debian Security Team.

Copyright Infringement

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.

30 Dec 2004 (updated 30 Dec 2004 at 16:48 UTC) »

blank.

Install-fest

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.

28 Dec 2004 (updated 28 Dec 2004 at 18:23 UTC) »
Visibility

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 ..

Debian Updates

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.

D-A.org

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 :)

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