Author: arved

Prepared for the bird flu

Today my “e-card”, the new austrian health insurance smartcard, finally arrived. Since beginning of this month it replaces the old health insurance certificates.
Wiener GKK, my health insurance managed to send the card to an old address, where i have been living 6 years ago. I have switched my employer two times since then, so they should have an uptodate address.

Scaring of tourists

*grr* When i tried to go to work this morning, ÖBB decided to cancel the 9.25 S7 from Wien-Mitte because of construction works somewhere else (Florisdorf?).
But why can’t they just tell the potential passengers. There was zero announcement neither via the display nor via the speakers.
Especially the tourists that wanted to leave via the Airport were very confused and had to switch to the expensive CAT train or take a taxi.
I decided not to wait 30 minutes for the next S7 to arrive at 9:55 and went to university instead.

post.at sucks

* Because the postmen refuse to carry parcels (nothing heavy or voluminous just books or cds from amazon) to the customers. Instead, if they have a package to deliver, they just write a note to the addresse, that they were unable to deliver it, and that the addressee should fetch it from the next post office. They don’t even try to put the parcel into the post box, or ring at my door to test if i’m at home.
* Sometimes they don’t even write a note and send the parcel back to the sender.
* At my next post office there is only one employee that receives and passes out parcels for half of the district, so i have to wait at least 10minutes for my parcel.

EuroBSDCon

I nearly forgot registering for EuroBSDCon, yesterday was the last day of the early-bird discount.
I still need to book a Hotel today, probably Hotel Europe.

One year on Last.fm

Just noticed that i have been using Last.fm for one year now. I played ca. 6800 tracks, around 18 tracks a day.
I am still waiting for an Audioscrobblerplugin for my HiFi-CD Player and there is still not enough of my favorite music on Last.fm, so the local mp3 collection is still not obsolete.

New FreeBSD site

The first Google SoC Project was integrated into CVS. FreeBSD now has a new website, the first major redesign since nearly a decade.
Of course now many people complain that it does not render in their favorite browser with their favorite font settings or that it is more difficult to navigate, because there are no longer hundreds of links on the frontpage.
I will wait at least a week before i will make up my own opinion of the new website but from first glance it does look nearly as good as the old one.

Failed IMAP Server upgrade

Today i tried to update my Mailserver from dovecot 0.99.x to 1.0alpha3. Unfortunately the update requires several changes to the config file. And after i modified my config file i noticed that the new version has a bug.

Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=213.225.30.218, lip=213.9.70.77, TLS
Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: imap(arved): file istream-raw-mbox.c: line 450 (istream_raw_mbox_get_body_size): assertion failed: (rstream->mail_size != (uoff_t)-1)
Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: child 98776 (imap) killed with signal 6

Luckily i had a backup and i am now happily running 0.99 again. Let’s see if someone on the dovecot Mailinglist can help me with this problem.

BitTorrent and FreeSoftware

Lioux launched a BitTorrent campaign.
He persuaded me to install the bittorrent port on jim, and donate 6KB/s (ca. 40% of my upstream bandwith) to his project. Additional i have set a limit of 6 connections, calculating that each connection should get 1KB.
After running one night, on next morning my nagios was crying because “the Internet is slow”. I checked with Hendriks excellent slurm program and noticed that my upstream was blowing out full speed (16KB/s, yes my ADSL line is slow).
I checked with tcpdump what caused this traffic and immediately noticed several wellknown hosts as primary offenders:

10:49:17.908038 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.53481 > g164193.upc-g.chello.nl.acmsoda: F 1347279866:1347279866(0) ack 1734755715 win 33304 
...
10:50:05.497482 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.52573 > panda.droso.net.6881: P 1:49(48) ack 1 win 33304 
10:50:05.545402 IP 200-140-3-148.bsace703.dsl.brasiltelecom.net.br.54871 > 21322530218.direct.eti.at.7241: R 3804027892:3804027892(0) win 0
10:50:05.606741 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.7241 > creme-brulee.marcuscom.com.51748: FP 0:7(7) ack 1 win 33304 
0:50:05.607486 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.54575 > foo.lovett.com.7241: . ack 1 win 33304

. Obviously lioux persuaded some other fellow commiters (kwm, marcus, erwin and ade) to run BT as well and now we exchange our distfiles via BT (hooray!).
It looks like the traffic shaping algorithm is far from optimal and according to netstat the maximum connection number was also violated. And why is so much traffic required to coordinate the peers, as we all have the relevant files and don’t download anything?
My conclusion, currently bittorrent can’t compete with fetch(1), ftp(1) and an established mirror hierachy when it comes to distributing free software.

MT 3.2

Since today is the last weekend before university starts again, i took the time to upgrade to the latest MovableType version.
My Killer Feature is the Trackback moderation and the SpamLookup Plugin. Let’s see if how they work.
The upgrade went flawless except for my inability to type URLs and paths correct, which resulted in hangs of the Database conversion script and the problem that the mt-upgrade script uses JavaScript which does not work in Konqueror
I will upgrade the FreeBSD port this time, since MT2.x isn’t available anymore.