Author: arved

Moving…

My neighbors are moving out of their flat, so there is now the opportunity for me to switch to a larger flat in November.
So there is a lot to do for me the next months.
* Cleanup and Paint the old flat
* paint and furnish the new flat
* Especially the move is a reason to switch to a cheaper/faster ISP. So the next steps are:
– Switch MX for arved.at which is currently handled only by my home server.
– Find a slave DNS Server for my domains, since the IP Address of my ADSL line will most likely change.
– Find a new Internet acess product that offers at least the same as my current ISP. (static IP Adress, at least 128kbps upstream, unlimited traffic, i18n(enbündelt) in the 17. district)
I will expect that i will have not much time for FreeBSD till end of the year, and i hope i can still finish this terms university courses as planned.
..and of course if anybody is interested to move into my old flat (~33m^2, ~330EUR/month) send me an email.

This Blog and IPv6

Unfortunately FreeBSD jails don’t yet support IPv6.
Because I wanted my site to be reachable from IPv6, I previously had a redirect on the AAAA arved.priv.at host redirecting to the IPv4 address of the jail.
But now i have finally configured a better solution, using the lighthttpd proxy module.


Snippet from the lighthttpd config:

server.modules              = (
"mod_proxy",
"mod_accesslog" )
server.use-ipv6 ="enable"
server.bind = "2001:6f8:13fb::1"
proxy.server    = ( "" =>
( "localhost" =>
(
"host" => "213.9.70.76",
"port" => 80
)
)
)

BTW, just in case you wondered, in the last year there have been nineteen unique IPv6 addresses from 5 networks (my netblock excluded) in the access.log. Most important one of the Planet FreeBSD aggregators is using IPv6.

Top Ten Shell Commands

A nice meme, seen here. But it is a bit difficult for me, because i tend to have dedicated machines for different tasks, so here are two examples from two environments of mine:
My Laptop:

 125 ssh
45 cd
41 sudo
33 telnet
27 ifconfig
26 ping
21 ls
14 svn
13 host
13 grep

My Workstation:

118 cd
68 make
64 svn
43 ls
40 vi
23 ssh
18 gvim
16 gcc
15 grep
11 su

test entry

Another test entry. MT now running at 3.32. Will commit port update after this post appears.
Only one port update left from my vacation….

Back…

I am back from my vacation. Nice Weather, Water 18°C and lots of sand on the beach.
I will post pictures later.
I am now catching up, read most of the several thousand emails (or at least marked most of them as read esp. the Lipstick thread :-), now appling the latest bind and openssl security patches.
Other items on the TODO list: kaffeine and graphting ports need updating, finance minister wants taxes and my university tuition fees.

holidays 06

From Tuesday I will be away, without Netconnectivity etc. I hope the Internet will survive without me for two weeks. This year i will be travelling to Amrum. I hope the weather will not be too cold.
Of course just on my last days at home my hosting company claimed they could not find my last payment and threaten me to shutdown the server. Hopefully i can resolve this till Thursday. Another last minute problem, some unknown person (Maybe Apple, see last posting?) tried to send me two parcels with ups and of course i missed the delivery service.
There has been a MovableType update, which fixes several bugs, but since the last update did not behave well, i will wait with the update until i am back.

I suck as a system administrator.

There have been some problems with my server recently. It has been running out of swap three or four times resulting in random processes being killed. Two times i had to reboot it, because i was not able to log in anymore, first time the named process was killed, second time the ssh process was killed.
Now i have added some kind of poor mans watchdog script to cron.

/etc/rc.d/sshd status > /dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
/etc/rc.d/sshd restart
fi

The cause of the problem is still unknown, the log only says that perl processes are stealing my memory, so suspects are SpamAssassin or a CGI.
I restored a backup from before the problem started (wow, my backups seem to actually work..) and started to experiment with RLimitMem.
Since i am going on holiday in September (two weeks without internet access), i hope the problems are solved now.
P.S. turbo23 pointed me to the work by Chris Jones for SoC06, which would have solved a lot of the problems. So i am looking forward to getting jail resource limits into the mainline.

surprise gift

Today the /usr partion on my server reached 100% again. While trying to find some stuff to delete i suddently noticed that all partions counted up to only 10G although the harddisk had 30G, so there were 20G of unused space on the harddisk *yay*.