mikas blog

Yes, no joke. I was offline and did not touch computers for 7 days – whooo! :-) I was on holidays: skiing at Nassfeld (Carinthia/Austria) with my girlfriend and her family. Weather was perfect (expect for half a day on wednesday), ski piste and snow were great. We went skiing for about 6 hours a day, starting at about 8:45pm and going home at about 4am. Some pics of my holiday are available online.

BTW: Sorry for downtime of my server’s database (including my blog) but a spammer attacked my server excactly one day after I went on holidays. Thanks go to Jimmy who checked my server for the important services for several domains. Expect the database stuff everything should have worked during my holidays (my full++ mailbox says ‘yes’ too ;-)).

I just arrived at home in Klagenfurt and try to clean up my mailbox, check news & CO. Now I’ve to prepare my grml-workshop for Linuxday Klagenfurt on 22nd of february. I’m back at work. :-)

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced hotplug-ng which replaces the existing linux-hotplug package with very tiny, compiled executable programs, instead of the existing bash scripts. Great news IMO!

Marco d’Itri will probably maintain this package in debian (see his ITP). Marco is also maintainer of the udev-package so I’m expecting good integration.

I’m using the pgp-autosign-feature of mutt since ages. I usually disabled it in the pgp-menu (via pressing ‘p+f’) when writing with users of Microsoft Outlook Express (AKA OjE). Now I improved my mutt(-ng) setup so I don’t lose the autosign-feature but don’t have to disable it manually when mailing with OjE-users:

message-hook ~A "set pgp_autosign"
message-hook "~h 'X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express'" "set nopgp_autosign"

Works wonderful. :-)

Sometimes sysadmins have to debug a computer running with (too) high load. I usually used free(1), cat /proc/interrupts, vmstat(8) [-s, -m,…] and top(1) to debug such situations. Today I stumbled upon ‘dstat’. It produces some important stats in realtime with (IMO) readable output. Check it out! And please let me know if you know of any other tools like this one. :-)

As usual I’m busy working on grml. ;-) udev is already part of the current grml-devel-iso. I was interested in the xorg xserver because according to many people it should be faster than the xfree86 xserver. xorg-packages for debian should be available as soon as sarge is released *harhar* so I decided to take the debian packages of ubuntu and give it a try.

If you are using a grml-system the following steps should work for you (it might work on pure debian systems as well but I haven’t tried yet):

# add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hoary main restricted universe multiverse
# edit /etc/apt/apt.conf:
APT::Default-Release "Hoary"; 
# now install the packages:
apt-get update && apt-get install xserver-xorg xorg-common
mv /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /etc/X11/xorg.conf
rm /etc/X11/X
ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg /etc/X11/X

Then uncomment the APT::Default-Release-line in /etc/apt/apt.conf, run apt-get update again and now ‘grml-x wmi’ should work:

grml@grml ~ % xdpyinfo | head -4
name of display:    :0.0
version number:    11.0
vendor string:    The X.Org Foundation
vendor release number:    60801099
grml@grml ~ %

The xorg xserver is veeeery fast on my box (much faster than xfree86) and now I’m thinking of integrating xorg-xserver into grml.

Update: If you get the error:

E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Error occured while processing wmkbd (NewVersion1)
[...]

while running apt-get update just increase the cache-limit in /etc/apt/apt.conf (‘APT::Cache-Limit 100000000;’). Yes, that’s FAQ. ;-)

Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account.
[…]
Enjoy your trip back to the golden age of Usenet.

— www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.htm

My grml talk has been accepted for Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2005. Now I’ve to check out how to drive to Chemnitz. ;-)

According to the (yet unofficial) program I’ll meet maaaany people who I can meet only on such events. ;-) I’ll even meet one of the grml developers for the first time in real life (hello Nico! ). ;-) Jimmy and Daniel will be also in Chemnitz. Greaaaaat! :-)

Update: the program is available online.

QEMU is an emulator for various CPUs. It works on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

Inspired by user feedback I tried to run grml via QEMU on a windows box today. Worked like a charme, except that running it via emulation is much slower than running it in native mode. ;-)

Free Software Magazine is a free magazine for the free software world, available on paper and in electronic format.

(pointer by Emanuele Rocca)

I just found out that “Linux Treiber entwickeln – Eine systematische Einführung in Gerätetreiber für den Kernel 2.6” by Jürgen Quade and Eva-Katharina Kunst (ISBN://3-89864-238-0) is available online. You might know parts of it from the german version of Linux Magazin. Have fun and enjoy reading it! :-)

Kriminalität: Prokop will Sicherheitsprogramm

— Headline at orf.at (article) [english: crime: Prokop wants a security tool^Wprogram]

Hey, I just released grml! 8-)

(pointer by Martin)

grml 0.2 – Codename Satura is available. The new release brings 455 new packages and many new features like an updated hardware detection, new bootparameters and a kernel 2.6.9 including several patches.

For details take a look at the release announcement and the grml website.

$ apt-get install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2
Reading Package Lists... Error!
E: Unable to parse package file /var/lib/dpkg/status (1)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

WTF? I did nothing since last time I used apt-get. Oh, not true. I updated grml-scripts and grml-etc. Let’s take a look at /var/lib/dpkg/status. Ah, 567 files marked as configfiles in grml-etc. Let’s remove some lines for fun, :wq and run apt-get again. Works. *d’oh*

Yesterday I’ve been at the cinema. My girlfriend and me were watching the german version of ‘The phantom of the Opera’. The pictures are impressive, the sound is great. What we didn’t like was the voice of Uwe Kröger for the phantom because the actor of the phantom didn’t look like Uwe. ;-)

Conclusion: A beautiful movie for watching with a girl. :-)

Today I discovered the useful tool tcprobe. Till today I used mplayer and GNU strings for getting details on movie files. tcprobe is part of the transcode package and provides detailed information on files:

$ tcprobe -i test.avi 
[tcprobe] RIFF data, AVI video
[avilib] V: 25.002 fps, codec=DX50, frames=1597, width=352, height=288
[avilib] A: 32000 Hz, format=0x55, bits=0, channels=1, bitrate=56 kbps,
[avilib]    1586 chunks, 447131 bytes, CBR
[tcprobe] summary for test.avi, (*) = not default, 0 = not detected
import frame size: -g 352x288 [720x576] (*)
       frame rate: -f 25.002 [25.000] frc=0 (*)
      audio track: -a 0 [0] -e 32000,0,1 [48000,16,2] -n 0x55 [0x2000] (*)
                   bitrate=56 kbps
           length: 1597 frames, frame_time=39 msec, duration=0:01:03.875

Linux Server Hacks by Rob Flickenger (ISBN: 0-596-00461-3) is a collection of 100 tips and tricks for servers running linux.

I read the german version (ISBN: 3897213613) and enjoyed it. First of all I like the short “stories” because it’s possible to savour the book when you’ve just a few minutes of spare time. About 30% of the tips are really interesting, especially the chapters ‘Information Servers’ and ‘Monitoring’ are helpful IMO.

echo 'Du gruenst nicht nur zur Sommers zeit, 
nein auch im Winter, wenn es schne it. O 
Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind 
deeeeine Blaetter' | festival --tts

While preparing and testing the Linux kernel 2.6.9 for the grml-system I noticed problems with loading the reiser4-module:

# modprobe reiser4
FATAL: Error inserting reiser4 (/lib/modules/2.6.9-grml/kernel/fs/reiser4/reiser4.ko):
Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)
# dmesg | tail -1
reiser4: Unknown symbol find_get_pages_tag

Google does not know the problem (yet ;-)) and taking a closer look at the reiser4-patch shows that the problem seems to be located in merging together all the patches I applied for the grml-kernel. But I’m still interested in getting a working module so I tried to fix the problem on my own (being not a kernelhacker).

First of all let’s see whether System.map knows something about find_get_pages_tag:

$ strings /boot/System.map-2.6.9-grml| grep find_get_pages_tag 
c013a994 T find_get_pages_tag

Ok, now we check out where find_get_pages_tag should be defined:

/path/to/kernelsource $ grep -rH 'find_get_pages_tag(' .

Now let’s take a look at the file where the function is defined (in this case mm/filemap.c):

unsigned find_get_pages_tag(struct address_space *mapping, pgoff_t *index,                                       
»·······»·······»·······int tag, unsigned int nr_pages, struct page **pages)
{
[...]
}

Ok, it seems that there’s missing an EXPORT_SYMBOL, so let’s add it:

EXPORT_SYMBOL(find_get_pages_tag);

Recompile the kernel and now let’s try to load the module again:

# modprobe reiser4
# lsmod | grep reiser
reiser4               392180  0
#

Works! :-)

While checking for new magazines at the bookstore I discovered Software 2.0 Extra. The magazine is published by Software Wydawnictwo. That’s the company you might know from their other magazines like Linux+, Hakin9 or PHP Solutions.

AFAICS there have been already two releases of the german version of “Software 2.0 Extra”, the current one covers C/C++. John Maddock wrote an article about the boost-library, Konstantin Klyagin (author of centericq) wrote about using OpenSSL and other topics are SSWF, Qt, wxWidgets, cZUI, Allegro and SQLite.

The next release of Software 2.0 Magazine will cover the topic game development, then kryptography, Perl and Delphi will follow according to the preview.

As you can see in the screenshot I’m using 2.6.9 for the current devel-release of grml. It was hard work to set it up due to problems with cloop in the initrd (thanks to Worf for his help!) but now it works like a charme on my laptop. Now I’ve to add some more modules (especially the wlan-stuff) and do some more testing with the kernel.

I also improved the zsh-configuration – at the right bottom of the screenshot you can see another example of zsh’s great completition system.

The todo-list is long enough to work 24/7 ;-) but I’m looking forward to the upcoming release. Stay tuned. :-)