I finally enabled https on my webserver. Now i don’t have to fear that someone tries to sniff the password for my blog, when i am on a public WLAN :).
I have not switched the default of this blog, because i am not sure if every RSS-Feedreader on the planet supports https and i am also not sure how my slow EPIA system any my slow ADSL line performs.
Author: arved
Out of PRs
There are currently only 650 open Problem Reports in the ports/ category. Less than 100 are unassigned. This is the lowest number since 2001. And the next portsfreeze is more than a month away, so there is a realistic chance to further decrease it (555 should be doable). At the moment even unsexy PRs get handled in a short time.
Unfortunately at the same time the kern/ category has reached an alltime high of more than 1500 open bug reports, so i am trying to cleanup some cruft there. I really need an src commit bit.
Reference: FreeBSD PR stats
The cat
This cat has been in my garden for a few hours now.
Update: The cat belongs to my neighbors and unlike their old cat, the young one is able to jump over to fence.
Another level
..of advertising.
Cisco announced the “Cisco Expo Austria”.
Customers are invited to pay 450 EUR (excl. taxes) to listen to Cisco Marketing talks.
After I didn’t register immediately upon receiving the invitation via Email and didn’t register after receiving a second invitation via Snailmail, last week someone from Cisco Austria phoned me and asked me if i wanted to register. I told him that i am not really interested in this kind of events.
Today I got another email from our key account Manager, offering an Education discount. Now i have the chance to listen to Cisco Marketing talks for only 150 EUR (excl. taxes) if i manage to persuade nine university members to join me.
Looks like they have a problem persuading enough victims.
Migrating to PF
So Teemu has been nagging me for some time. And Darren seems to have no time to fix ipfilter.
So today i migrated to pf. It was quite straight forward, although not as easy as the ipfw -> ipfilter Migration a few years ago, which worked surprisingly on my first try.
This time i needed three tries, first i added the wrong pass rules for the redirect rules (In ipfilter the nat is done after filtering, in PF before the filtering), than i confused $int_if:network with $internal_net (no they are not identical in my case), and the last error was, i was blocking RFC1918 nets although i was using one 🙂 (the cause of this error is similar to the first error).
I still don’t quite understand my ruleset (especially, why outgoing ntp packets get blocked although i have allowed all tcp udp outgoing).
But the essential parts seem to work, I can IRC and i can receive emails and you can read my blog.
I will try to fix the cornercases over the next week and try to look at the more sophisticated rules, like spamd, altq, carp, etc.
What i really like about PF is the pflog0 device, it makes it really easy to analyze errors in the ruleset.
Choclate penguin
Hm, the second penguin article this week, maybe i need a penguin category.
Today i touched a Fedora system for the first time. I installed a Linksys WLAN card via ndiswrapper, which was straight forwad and to my surprise seems to work, without recompiling a vanilla Linux kernel and stuff.
But then i tried to configure WEP: iwconfig crashed and on the second try the whole system got sluggish and failed to shutdown.
What really scared me was the graphical startup, which disallowed terminating hanging daemons by CTRL+C. Is there no other way to boot in case of DNS failure, but to run the interactive startup mode? (and Fedora starts a lot of strange daemons..)
And why don’t the startup scripts print out what they are going to launch, _before_ trying to start the hanging service? And why isn’t the hostname from /etc/sysconfig/network added to /etc/hosts?
I am now a much happier BSD user than before i touched the penguin.
Post Linuxwochen Hardware needs
After geek-meetups I can add new items on my hardware wishlist.
This time i want an iSight Cam for my Laptop, so i can chat with iChat.
Another item i need after carrying my 17″ Display trough Vienna is a smaller display. Unfortunately it appears to be difficult to get something smaller than 15″.
Mozilla is a mess
I am currently trying to get GNOME running on FreeBSD-powerpc, the first big problem is mozilla, which is required for yelp, the GNOME online help browser.
It uses NSPR “Netscape Portable Runtime” which uses headerfiles to define the architecture feature like size of specific types etc of known Architecture/Operating System combinations. Additional is uses a GNU autoconf like configure script and there is a architecture dependant file called xptcinvoke_$ARCH_$OS.cpp *Argh* A portability nightmare.
I expect KDE to have a lot less problems.
Kismac in passive mode
Finally i managed to get Kismac working in with my MA111, thanks to this page. The USB WLAN works in passive mode which should work a lot better than the active mode of the Airport extreme.
Throwing stuff away
Today I was looking for the manual of my 17″ monitor because I wanted to know the sync ranges, but i could not find it, althouth i bought the monitor only 5 years ago.
But i stumbled over several pieces of obsolete Hardware, that was hidden in some corner. I am always having a hard time to throw away things, unless I am moving. When I am dying my flat will probably turned into a museum.
Today I finally decided to throw away a “Chello User Manual” from 2000.
I could not throw away two orginal Microsoft two button serial mice and I also kept the Parallel-Port Switch for four printers. I have also various ISDN Hardware which I will probably never use again, like an AVM A1 ISA ISDN Card, an ELSA USB ISDN Adapter and a Typhon PCMCIA ISDN Adapter and of course two Monitors (14″ and 15″).
Another item in my collection is a 250MB Streamer. And does anybody still need BNC Cables today? Does anybody remember the Iomega 100MB ZIP Drives?