Das Buch Wer mitmacht, hat Recht!

I just stumbled across an awful article about weaknesses in the Gnu/Linux operating system. It doesn’t start off that bad:

Since Microsoft has a huge chunk of the operating system’s market in the world, it is the first victim of hackers.

The above statement is not entirely wrong, it merely leaves things out. But then it tells a big fat ugly LIE:

...the Linux Operating System doesn’t receive the same level of support as Windows does. That means that updates and security packages are released with each new version of the Operating System (OS), but not as periodic updates…

I mean, while I was reading that concoction my Gnu/Linux operating system informed me of updates I should install. I did not have to wait for PDAY nor check a newsletter or website.

Too bad I can’t call upon the author, because there is none given. The website is dubious at best: spelling mistakes in the footer of the pages, no real names given anywhere, and after a few clicks the site broke for me and displayed only half a page…

Now, I am not disputing the fact about vulnerabilities in Linux, am disputing all allegations in that article because it does not cite one single source! There are no references IN the article – that’s not how you properly write about what you might perceive as facts. That’s how you try to get away with the shitting bull hoping nobody will smell the dung pile.

When writing programs on Windows that involve I/O operations using the serial port, one quickly ends up loving Sysinternals Portmon.

I just found myself in a situation where I needed the exact same functionality, but on Linux.
What I found was jpnevulator.
It’s plain, simple, and if you’re on Debian or Ubuntu, just apt-get install jpnevulator and you’re good to go.

If you want to know what goes in and out over your serial port (in my case ttyUSB0), just use the tool like this:
hikari:~$ jpnevulator --read --ascii --tty /dev/ttyUSB0
76 3F 0D 56 20 20 20 31 31 31 20 20 34 30 30 2E v?.V 111 400.
30 30 20 20 37 32 30 2E 30 30 20 35 31 35 39 31 00 720.00 51591
0D .

On a side note:
You can use it to write data to a serial port, too.
Or monitor/write to several ports at the same time.
Quite a nice tool!

—
Ubuntu package
Debian package
Official website

The SATA driver of my 2.6.23-gentoo kernel was ticking me off for some time now.
At some point in time, more or less random, it decided to start resetting ports.
Note: It’s not very nice if it resets the port your main harddrive is connected to…

The Problem

Ever found something like this in your syslog ?

ata8: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
ata8: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps
ata8: hard resetting port
ata8: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
ata8: reset failed, giving up
ata8: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4)
ata8: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x150000 action 0x2 frozen
ata8: hard resetting port
ata8: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0x80)

Well, I have, TONS of it.
Read on to see how I fixed it.

Who thought that the days of the command line have been counted, might be wrong.

In the days of iPhones pooping popping up on every website and impressing the crowd with an unique user interface, Alex Faaborg, who recently joined Mozilla as User Experience Designer, wrote some interesting things about it on the mozilla blog.
I use the Mac application Quicksilver myself a lot – the combination of command line (or as geeks refer to as “CLI” – go and look it up yourself) and GUI is the most powerfull I’ve experienced so far for the shorter commands. For longer commands I tend to go back to the terminal (started with quicksilver of course).

more…

A few minutes ago someone was very bitchy about ATI and how their linux driver uses mesa-gl.
Not necessarily a problem, unless you have a dual-head setup and want to use beryl.

The problem lies withing mesa’s config.h that has a certain, quite limiting, define:
#define MAX_TEXTURE_RECT_SIZE 2048 which limits you to textures 2048×2048 pixels big.
His dual 19” setup had a resolution of 2560×1024, buhhh…

Now, what do you do?
Change it? That’s quite simple.
But how do you install a new mesa version without breaking portage?

Here is how it’s done:

• Make sure portage is up to date (to what you want to do, atleast)
• Let emerge fetch the package you want to modify (for the sake of simplicity let’s call the package media-libs/somepack-1.0.0 )

• Move /usr/portage/disfiles/somepack-1.0.0.tar.bz2 (or similar) to some temporary folder
• Unpack it, modify the contents, and re-pack it
• Move the archive back to /usr/portage/distfiles
• Fix the fingerprints, after all the archive was modified

• Now you should mask out all other versions of the modified package so you’ll get a warning/reminder/block in case portage wants to update (downgrade) the package, possibly breaking your system by reverting your changes by doing so.

• Emerge the package (or whatever was pulling in the dependency)
• If the package was a library you might want to play it safe and re-emerge all dependencies

One last bit of info:
The second to last step does not block re-emerges of the same version.
Unless you delete the fetched files in /etc/portage/distfiles (including your modified package) you’re safe, but if (for whatever reason) the packages gets downloaded again, you’ll end up with a broken system.
The fingerprints/digests might prevent this, but on the other hand, emerge --sync might also revert the digest file to the original version.
Just be very cautious if you see a ‘digest failed’ error message.
Check twice it could be both, new archive or changed digest file!

Ok, this should work, as usual, no guarantees on anything. You might break something.
But at the end of the day this is the safest method of modifying the source of a certain package without (necessarily) breaking portage (AFAIK). If you happen to know a better way, please let me know.

I did not want to wait for bougyman much longer so I built my own debian package for lighttpd. There are instructions down at the “Debian” section.

Installing pcre took care of mod_redirect and mod_rewrite; and I thought gamin was also needed. Then I only had to figure out the exact formatting for the debian/changelog file: an extra space after the email address made dpkg-buildpackage graciuosly accept it.

drucken unter linux ist ja allgemein gesagt ein abenteuer.

vorallem wenn cups meint foomatic meinte der printjob sei erfolgreich gewesen…

...der drucker allerdings anderer meinung ist. denn blinkende LEDs allein qualifizieren eine aktion nicht als druck.. da sollte schon papier rauskommen…

One Unix to rule them all.
One Resolver to find them,
One IP to bring them all

and in the zone
bind them.

Nach zwei Tagen hab ich es hingekriegt, dass alle Mails die mein Server annimmt mittels eines SMTP-Proxies von Spamassassin (SA) nach Spam durchsucht werden. Ich habe mich an die Debian-Doku gehalten, was durchaus sinnvoll war; damit kam ich dann am zweiten Tag nämlich auch recht gut vorwärts.

Ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass die Mails gescannt werden. Aber genau sagen kann ich’s nicht. Ich weiß auch nicht, woher SA weiß, welche Mail Spam sein könnte und welche nicht. Hab jetzt mal das ~/.spamassassin-Verzeichnis von hadez übernommen, in der Hoffnung dass SA dieses nimmt um Mails an mich zu scannnen.

Man wird sehen…

i, once again, managed to end up on the console.
no windows, no clicking, and i can’t get mplayer to work with my framebuffer console either.

the next time i’m about to just do that reboot before watching the movie...
someone PLEASE STOP ME!