August 2005 Archives

Yesterday was Guertelnightwalk time. In the previous years I was never able to get anywhere near the rhiz-Stage because it was too crowded. So this year i was at the rhiz from the beginning (20.00).
The first band was dotmatrix, four geeks making music with their Nintendo Gameboys.
Some of the tunes were quite good, but it is not really music for an OpenAir concert, more for getting drunk in a bar. The guys on stage were only staring at the displays of their instruments ignoring the audience completely. At most they were nodding with their heads to the beat.
The Headliner of the evening, I-Wolf started at 21.00. At that time it was already nearly impossible to leave, because it was so crowded. But luckily there was no need to, as the concert was quite good. His band consisted of a DJ, a drummer, a bass player and a vocalist. And unlike his predecessors he was able to control his electronic equipment and control the audience and his co-musicians.

Next week I will be on holidays for two weeks. My girlfriend and I will travel to Denmark (this house in Marielyst, Falster to be exact). This will be the first time since nearly 10 years that I will spend my holidays with my family.
I don't expect to have Internet Connection over there, so not many blog entries in the first two weeks of September.
I hope the weather will be nice and the temperature in the Baltic sea is not too cold.

Since I am setting up my new Mailserver next, i am evaluating webmail applications. My requirements:
Communication between Webfrontend and Mailserver via IMAPS, no extra database server required.
IMP/Horde looks like overkill, i am looking for something more simple.

As now the most important Server is no longer in my flat, i needed to setup a monitoring service.
Nagios is the first choice. Unfortunately the docu lacks examples and an introduction for beginners. With special help from remko, who let me sneak at his config, and this tutorial i am now monitoring 25 services on my LAN and on my Server.
I really like it, when everything is green.

Congratulations, you have found the new URL of this Blog.
With this move you will get:

• More Bandwith, the blog is no longer hosted on my ADSL line.


• New MovableType version, with new page Layout. Sixapart did a good job by maintaining backward compatibility with the old version, all my hacks and plugins still work.

If you are missing something, please report.

The only thing missing so far, i have not read through all the old entries and moved the images to the new server, so images of old entries are still loaded from my ADSL line.

I finally got my own 1337 r00t Server. After a hint from Daniel Seuffert, that Elkhouse offers cheap FreeBSD root servers, i decided to get one, so that I will be able to use more of my ADSL bandwith for myself.
I will migrate content on this site step by step to Rollo, so expect some disruptions :-).
While doing the migration i decided to implement several improvements. First the apache runs now in a jail, second I have upgraded to php5 and third i intend to evaluate MT3.
The only thing that hasn't been solved to my satisfaction yet is rollo's reverse lookup, because I lack clue for configuring BIND in combination with CIDR (but "DNS & BIND" is on its way to me) and i have not yet moved one of my domains to Elkhouse.

I am currently downloading Acrobat reader. Recently the native MacOS PDF Preview fails to print a lot of PDFs and only prints:

ERROR: undefinedresult

OFFENDING COMMAND: div

STACK: --dict--,Ls, 116, 0.0, 0.

Can you say Bloat?

Few days ago i spent 7.99 EUR on a Portishead CD.
The money was well spent, i have been listening to my favorite tracks "Numb" and "Roads" for several hours now...

You have probably noticed, that last.fm updated their website. Now a special player is required. Unfortunately it took some time until Mac binaries where uploaded, so i could not listen to last.fm for a few days at work or university.
But since yesterday I'm again fully last.fm enabled.
Special thanks to lofi, who posted a FreeBSD amd64 package to his last.fm Journal
Now I can spend this rainy day listening to music.

Yesterday a car from Agadir, Morocco was parking in our street. What confused me, on the car plate next to the moroccian flag was the EU flag.

Did I miss something? Since when is Morocco part of the EU? Or do they have special plates for driving in the EU?

Today I installed IPv6 for the first time on the Windows XP of my girlfriends laptop. I have to admit that it was easier than on my iBook, where all browsers prefer IPv4 over IPv6.

Here is an example output of "tracert6"

C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\arved>tracert6 www.kame.net

Routenverfolgung zu www.kame.net [2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085]
von 2001:5c0:89f0:2:cd4a:75f6:28fa:e92b �ber eine maximale Anzahl von 30 Hops:

  1        6 MSek     6 MSek     5 MSek  defgw6-3.arved.priv.at [2001:5c0:89f0:2::]
  2        4 MSek     3 MSek     6 MSek  defgw6-1.arved.priv.at [2001:5c0:89f0::1]
  3      459 MSek   469 MSek   476 MSek  2001:5c0:8fff:fffe::267a
  4      549 MSek   552 MSek   459 MSek  ipv6.hexago.com [2001:5c0:0:2::18]
  5      555 MSek   501 MSek     *     sl-bb1v6-nyc-t-23.sprintv6.net [3ffe:2900:2001:5::1]
  6      532 MSek   545 MSek   664 MSek  sl-bb1v6-rly-t-1003.sprintv6.net [2001:440:1239:100a::2]
  7      746 MSek   740 MSek   642 MSek  3ffe:2900:b:e::2
  8      712 MSek   708 MSek   700 MSek  plt001ix06.IIJ.Net [2001:240:bb62:8000::4001]
  9      731 MSek   831 MSek   741 MSek  otm6-bb1.IIJ.Net [2001:240:bb20:f001::2]
 10      752 MSek   773 MSek   885 MSek  tky001ix06.IIJ.Net [2001:240:100:1::30]

 11      760 MSek   775 MSek   685 MSek  hitachi1.otemachi.wide.ad.jp [2001:200:0:1800::9c4:2]
 12      719 MSek   742 MSek   759 MSek  pc3.yagami.wide.ad.jp [2001:200:0:1c04::1000:2000]
 13      774 MSek   820 MSek   731 MSek  gr2000.k2.wide.ad.jp [2001:200:0:4819::2000:1]
 14      775 MSek   778 MSek   782 MSek  orange.kame.net [2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085]

While waiting for mchammer recompiling all his ports after the shared library bump, i finally took the courage to talk to an old friend of mine on ICQ, whom i have not talked to for more than three years.
We chatted for nearly an hour, and now i am fully awake without consuming any caffeine.

There are not many IT books i read front to back, usually i just use them as Reference Manuals, or read the interesting chapters.
I bought "Doraswamy/Harkins - IPSec", which gives a very good Overview over the topic. The only aspect that missed out was the use of PKI with IPSec.
Unfortunately most books about IPSec are from around 2001, when VPN where the hot topic.
So I am now looking over a good overview over recent developments regarding PKI, X509v3, CMP etc.