mikas blog

You still don’t have a computer on your toilet? Well, make a hardcopy then. ;-)
My prefered way of making sourcecode more readable:

$ which makereadable
  makereadable() {
     output=$1
     shift
     a2ps --medium A4dj -E -o $output $*
     ps2pdf $output
  }

Together with my a2psrc it provides a readable output. Take a look at my pdf-files of the zsh-source as an example.

Opensource-CD is a german project which provides several open source programs for windows. Version 1.1 provides 70 up2date programs. I just downloaded the ISO and took a look at it. I think I don’t have to build my own ISOs anymore, because most programs I usually need when sitting in front of a windows box are provided by the Opensource-CD. What’s missing are the putty-tools and the unxutils. I just made a feature-request, let’s look whether they add it to the program-selection.

At the end of december I would like to release grml version 0.2. Many new packages will be available, some more scripts which should make life easier and a first public version of grml2hd by Jimmy should be available too. Today I installed grml to harddisk with a first version of grml2hd:

grml@grml ~ $ uname -a
Linux grml 2.6.7 #2 SMP Wed Jul 28 04:25:36 CEST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
grml@grml ~ $ grml-version 
0.1-4 Release Codename Niki [2004-12-06]
grml@grml ~ $

Works fine so far – good work, Jimmy. :-) Current devel-version of grml supports postfix with TLS (I wrote a small shellscript called grml-postfix which should make it easy to set it up). Sorry for my low-traffic-blog, but I’m busy working on remov^Wshortening the todo-list. ;-)

I used a self compiled version of mutt for a long time with a lot of patches. Debian’s mutt-package includes also some useful patches so I wanted to switch to debian’s version.

First of all I installed the latest version of debian’s mutt. And it sucked. Debians /etc/Muttrc unsets the variable ‘use_from’! :-( That’s awfull because the manual says that this variable is set to ‘yes’ by default, and of course the mutt-package does not adjust this in the manual. Changing default values by distributors can be useful, but please take a note in the docs! I found a bugreport on this topic but I think I’ll report it again (mentioning the docs).

Then I took a look at the patches I think are useful for mutt and sent a wishlist-report to add patch patch-1.5.4.aw.listreply.1 to debian package of mutt.

I’m using a light-color setup within mutt (white background instead of the default black one). mutt adds a strange black line within the pager-screen by default, I fixed that some time ago. Compare the unpatched mutt and my patched version. I sent a mail to mutt-dev which still did not arrive yet. *dang*

Another thing I did not like was the behaviour of some mbox-files. I’m using a maildir-setup but still have a few mbox-files left in my ~/mail (especially the ones from mailinglist-archives). But I did not see new mails in the mbox-files in the folder-overview. Huh?! Finally I found out that mutt requires folders in a single list. Adding ‘xargs’ as an argument in the mailboxes-command fixed that problem in my setup (‘echo’ would do the trick also):

$ tail -10 ~/.mutt/folders
mailboxes ! 
[...]
`find ~/mail -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs`

Now I updated the mutt-package to latest cvs-sources and applied the patches I usually need. Works like a charme now. If someone wants to use my debian-package of mutt, you can find it in the grml-repos: mutt 1.5.6+20041127i.deb.

Update: I got a very friendly and helpful reply (not!). *d’oh* :-( Ok, I definitely decided to work on my own debian package of mutt. I installed it also in the devel-version of grml. Some people are using my package already, please let me know if you have any wishes/feedback/bugreports.

netsh is available on Windows systems since Windows 2000. I noticed that even many windows-sysadmins don’t know of it’s existence. ;-( But netsh is really useful if you have to debug network problems on windows boxes or want to set up network without clicking through lots of menus. Using netsh you can configure and display settings of interfaces, RAS, routing, firewall,… and even use it on remote computers via “Remote Desktop Connection”.

What I especially like at netsh is it’s capability of saving the current network configuration:

netsh dump > net_config 

It’s also possible to save just special settings:

netsh interface dump > net_config_int

Or do you want to dump just the ipv6-part?

netsh interface ipv6 dump > net_config_ipv6

Now you have a script which let’s you restore your network settings via:

netsh exec net_config

And check some general settings via:

netsh int ip show config

Explore the power of netsh via running ‘netsh’ and navigate through help via pressing ‘?’ or using the ‘help’-command.

My blog looked like dead in the last few days, I know. Sorry for that, but my load was and still is quite high again. ;-(

In the last few days I set up my own rootserver. Apache, Apache-SSL, MySQL, Courier and Postfix are doing their job now. If you can read this message it seems to work for you. ;-)

I really like postfix and did an extented RTFM on the weekend. Besides reading the postfix book I found the following two webpages very useful and interesting:

* Postfix-Webpage by Ralf Hildebrandt
* Tutorial: ISP-style Email Service with Debian-Woody and Postfix (1.x)

Add-ons to postfix I like are:

pflogsumm: pflogsumm.pl is designed to provide an over-view of postfix activity, with just enough detail to give the administrator a “heads up” for potential trouble spots.

and

queuegraph: Queuegraph is a very simple mail statistics RRDtool frontend for Postfix that produces daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs of Postfix’s active, deferred, incoming and bounce queues.

What I did not expect while setting up postfix was how much spam I could avoid with just the following options in postfix-config:

smtpd_helo_required = yes
strict_rfc821_envelopes = yes
disable_vrfy_command = yes

Lots of spam and viruses just don’t pass the mailserver, of course I’m doing some additional checks on headers and bodies.

I also set up a gateway with the WRTG54 for WLAN, but I had no time to set up openwrt so I had to put it on my ToDo-list.

Yesterday I received the book on zsh. AFAICS it’s a great book, a more detailed review will follow in the next few days/weeks.

Besides that I’m still working for the next release of grml. We will release grml 0.2 at the end of december.

amaroK seems to rock. I don’t like xmms because it’s just a very bad winamp-clone without an useful file-dialog. xmms is useful for me when I want to use a static playlist and jump to a specific file via ‘j’, but that’s it.

A few days ago I tried Muine because Thomas Themel mentioned it in his blog. But Muine just didn’t work with my /data/Sound-directory (containing all my music-files) and I wasn’t in the mood to debug it -> apt-get –purge remove…

While being on KDE Community World Summit 2004 “aKademy” I noticed the discussions about the interface of amaroK. Some people mentioned that the interface is “uncommon”. Anyway, today I installed amaroK.

amaroK’s interface is different. But I think I’ll get used to it. ;-) Integration into KDE is great, it provides OSD (on screen display), you can burn CDs via menu, you get an applet in controlpane,… And I really like the filter-dialog (see the line containing ‘metheny group’ in the screenshot) which I usually use at itunes. For me amaroK seems to rock. :-)

But: I’m still searching for a good music player for console. I’ve tried several (including mpg321, moc, mp3blaster,…) but I could not find a rocking[tm] one. Damn…. :-(

Together with jimmy I ordered a Linksys WRT54G router, and got it yesterday . Why I bought the WRT54G is the fact that it’s quite cheap (~70 Euro), you can get the firmware’s sourcecode and it’s running on Linux:

$ telnet 192.168.1.1 5431
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.

help

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
DATE: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:08:15 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
Server: LINUX/2.4 UPnP/1.0 BRCM400/1.0
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"
EXT:

I’ll set up a gateway and will take a closer look at the wrt54g-linux-project and the german webpage on Linksys WRT54G as soon as I’ve some free time.

Yesterday the admins of the mailserver in VC-Graz activated authentication. I was using exim because setting it up via debian’s eximconfig using a smarthost was quite trivial. Now it was time for changing to Postfix. Setting up postfix was done in a few minutes and I wrote down the required steps.

Since a few weeks ago I’m owner of the german version of the Postfix book by Kyle Dent (ISBN://3897213729). (I assume there’s no difference to the english edition [ISBN://0596002122].)

I like the book. It’s easy to read (and understand ;-)), covers many interesting topics like SASL, MySQL and LDAP and the index seems to be really helpful. If you are searching for german/english offline-documentation on Postfix I can recommend this book.

BTW: If you don’t want to use a “real mailserver” setup but need TLS-authentication anyway you can use for example msmtp (which works fine with mutt), just adjust your ~/.msmtprc:

host mail.vc-graz.ac.at
from your_account@sbox.tugraz.at
user account_number
password your_password
tls
tls_nocertcheck

Is anyone out there who has not installed Ubuntu yet? Ok, one person less out there because I installed it on my workstation at work. :-)

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should “Just Work”, TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release. Ubuntu ships with the latest Gnome release as well as a selection of server and desktop software that makes for a comfortable desktop experience off a single installation CD. — www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/

Now I’m running a Gnome 2.8.1 desktop and a 2.6.8.1-3-386 kernel at work. As you maybe know I’m not a real friend of the Gnome desktop, but to be able to flamdiscuss about it I have to know it better. So I’ll use Gnome in the next few days at work.

DeMuDi is part of AGNULA:

AGNULA (acronym for «A GNU/Linux Audio distribution», pronounced with a strong g) is the name of a project funded by the European Commission (number of contract: IST-2001-34879; key action IV.3.3, Free Software: towards the critical mass).

After the end of the funded period, AGNULA is continuing as a volunteer based project, aiming to spread Libre Software in the professional audio/video arena.

AGNULA’s main task is the development of two reference distributions for the GNU/Linux operating system completely based on Free Software (i.e. under a FSF approved Free Software license) and completely devoted to professional and consumer audio applications and multimedia development. One distribution will be Debian-based (DeMuDi) and the other will be Red Hat-based (ReHMuDi).

I tried to install DeMuDi last week on the student computer at work and chose the kernel 2.6 option. But it just sucfailed – I think because of using an older version of d-i. Today I gave it another try with the default option using kernel 2.4. And it worked. I found many applications I’ve never heard of and found some apps I wanted to try but never had the possibility to. What I don’t like at DeMuDi is the look’n’feel of Gnome (I do know that it’s possible to switch to fluxbox). ;-) I personally never use a display manager like GDM or KDM but for people on my institute it’s a ‘must have feature’. The usability of GDM sucks IMO and setting it up to allow everyone to reboot the machine via GDM menu was pain for me (correlation of menu and gdm.conf did not work as I expected it to) . KDM wasn’t better: setting it up was much easier but it regularly crashed without any reasons. ;-)

No, that’s not a joke. Using the file dsl-embedded-0.8.3.zip from the DSL-project (Damn Small Linux) let’s you run Linux on your Windows box:

It’s running via qemu (QEMU CPU Emulator):

START qemu.exe -L . -m 128 -hda harddisk -cdrom dsl.iso -boot d -enable-audio -user-net -localtime

It’s not very fast (because of running in an emulation) and needs about 75MB of RAM but seems to work fine for giving it short try. See www.tuxs.org/dslwin.htm for more details.

I just discovered another useful feature of convert (part of imagemagick). Run:

$ convert 'vid:*.jpg' thumbnails.jpg

.. and you’ll get an overview of your jpgs in the file thumbnails.jpg. Also take a look at the examples-section of the convert manual page.

Happy birthday to my blog. One year of blogging is 250 postings (~0.68/day) and 127 comments by 39 different nicknames. The most commented posting was grml (6 comments). Most comments (besides myself ;-)) have been written by mp (16 comments) and ak (15 comments).

Quoting ak writing about his blog’s birthday: “(mostly) useless information that still a few people seem to be interested in.” – thanks for attending and I hope you enjoy my blog also for the next 365 days.

I’m at home in Klagenfurt for the weekend. I haven’t been here for about one and a half month because I had too much to do. I’m enjoying these days a lot because it’s not everyday’s life.

In the mornings I’m working on grml. In the afternoons I’m playing with my brothers. They have Windows with some nice games on their computers. Especially some very small games took my attention, I think I’ll have to copy them to my usb-stick and test them at work. ;-) Because I didn’t want to stop playing on the computer of my brother I gave my laptop to him and started grml with moagg. About six hours my four brothers didn’t stop playing it. 8-)

Just in these seconds Thomas Volcan noticed me of the game supertux. I installed it on my laptop and gave it a try. Great! I think I know what my brothers will do in the afternoon. 8-)

I just installed kcheckgmail. kcheckgmail is a KDE systray application to check GMail accounts. It’s useful for me because I don’t check my gmail-account that often due to it doesn’t work neither with opera nor with konqueror. A nice KDE-addon. :-)

Today it was time to implement an automatic backup solution at work. I was searching for the right tool quite long but there were several problems. First of all I don’t like commercial software on my systems. I also don’t like bloat software which requires as much or even more harddisc space than my whole woody-system. Finally I like solutions which are extensible without having to learn another programing language. ;-)

grml provides the tool backup-manager by Alexis Sukrieh. It’s small and fits my needs perfectly. I added some stuff to backup-manager which I do need for the backup system at work and send a patch to Alexis. Alexis already applied my patch, he just released version 0.4.0 and set up a website for backup-manager. If you are a Debian developer and are interested in sponsoring Alexis and backup-manager please contact me or Alexis. Till now Alexis hasn’t had that much luck but I’d really like to see backup-manager as part of main debian pool because it’s easy to set up and works like a charme.

Together with samba and rsync/ssh backup-manager will do the job.[tm]

OS04 has been done.[tm] IMO it was an great event. I met many friends and could talk to interesting people. The talks I’ve seen were great too. My pics are available online. Now I’m trying to catch up >2700 unread rss-feed entries. Reading >100 feeds is quite hard if you can’t read them every single day. ;-)

Feedback on grml is great, not a single flame-mail. ;-) Downloads of the grml os04 release produced a traffic of >68GB within one day on the main mirror. And grml can be found in the press:

* pro-linux.de
* symlink.ch

Update:
grml produced a traffic of >112 GB on the main mirror till now.
grml in the press can be found on grml.org/press/.

People writing about OS04/grml in their blogs:
* alfie (@debian)
* dkg
* jimmy
* niko

Yesterday evening I had lunch with John “maddogâ€� Hall. Today I’ll meet many other nice guys at OS04 too. Hurray!

I’m that happy. Many weeks with lots of work but now it’s done: grml 0.1 is finished.

I burnt the master CD in the morning and brought it to the producer who will create 100 copies which will be available at OS04. I went there by bike and there does not exist a Triesterstraße only in Graz but also in Feldkirchen near Graz. More than one hour of riding by bike in the morning with a bike with little air in it’s wheels and on a bumpy street with cars driving with 70km/h. *d’oh*

BTW: Alfie (Gerfried Fuchs) just joined the grml-team and made Hackergotchis for us. :)

Now I’m veeery tired and nearly fall asleep while sitting at work. ;-(