Category: Computers & Networks

I have updated the INN Howto to reflect my move to CNFS, added a procmail example and some general overhaul.

Since yesterday arved.free-bsd.org is dead. The DynamicDNS provider decided that he needs to earn money. This is second time this happened to me, I really need a better solution.
Several service of mine are affected like:

• The hostname is the primary MX for arved.de. It will probably take until Monday until this gets fixed. Please use other emailadresses instead like arved@FreeBSD.org
• This weblog. I am currently grep’ing through /usr/local/www to find all places where MT hardcoded the link in. A Rebuild unfortunately didn’t change everything
• Links from third party sites, like Google, so probably at the moment no one will read this entry 🙂

On Saturday I introduced a bug into my .procmailrc which resulted in all my mails being stored in a Folder called “Sender: ” (exercise to the reader: What did I wrong). This is interesting, because I can now say how many emails I get (including spam and mailinglists). The number is impressive: ca. 20/hour. I can easily spent the whole day reading email if I read everything I receive :-).

Why are people allowed to complain about spam, that can’t read Email headers 🙁
Link

I have added two events to .
I will visit 20C3 at least one day, while travelling back from Germany to Vienna.
In February I plan to visit FOSDEM, because I have never been in Brussel.
In January I already planned to visit NordU. They now have the program online. 2 Full days FreeBSD 5.x tutorial with Kirk McKusick sounds interesting. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any information about how to pay.

Today I cleaned my CD boxes. Now my garbage can contains two dozen CDs with various magazin CDs with Shareware Collections, Internet browsers and of course Linuxdistributions like DLD 6, Debian 2.2, Mandrake 8, RedHat 7.1, SuSE 7, NetBSD 1.5, a BeOS 4 demo and so on.
I kept the more interesting ones like a SCO Unixware demo, a BeOS 5, and a FreeBSD 3.1 from 1999 (which I probably never installed, since the first one I can remember was 4.0). I have also kept the payware CDs like my “NT Workstation 4.0”.

Last week I dropped my Laptop from a table. Of course it fell on the WLAN card and the WLAN card nuked the PCMCIA Socket from the Mainboard. Luckily everything else still works. Now I can only communicate via the USB port.
So i bought an USB Ethernet adapter and an Wireless LAN adapter from Netgear. The Ethernet works with the FreeBSD axe(4) driver. To try Stuart Walshes atwi(4) driver with the WLAN adapter, I updated to CURRENT, which went suprisingly smooth. Unfortunately the Netgear MA111 doesn’t contain an Atmel Chipset like the MA101, so it doesn’t work. According to Google it uses a Intersil Prism chipset, so it should be possible to write a driver based on the wi(4) driver. Unfortunately I am bit short on time… (and lack any driver programming fu)

My main Workstation sauna crashed several times. Sometimes It just reboots, sometimes it hangs. There are several suspects. The Harddrive, because sometimes before it freezes, there are some messages, that the Harddisk timed out. The RAM, because it was the last piece that changed and the electrolytic capacitors, since i read an article in this weeks c’t magazine and the symptoms look similar. I started debugging by removing 512MB of RAM.
After several commits from S�ren to the new ATA driver I rebuilt world on my CURRENT box polly. The Kernel now detected my Harddrives but paniced seconds later while loading the vlan-module. But during reboot there were again strange error messages from the ata subsystem and after the BIOS reinitialized, it didn’t found the bootloader *grrrrrrr*. Today I have to look for floppies to reinstall the bootloader.

Just a minute ago the CfP for Asiabsdcon arrived in my inbox. Looks interesting and not so expensive. Unfortunately its just after Summer term started at university :-(.
Other conferences I plan to attend 2004 are Linuxtag, EuroBSDcon and NordU, so my timetable is already quite filled.

Today I started to process the results of the N7Y Keysigning party.
Before, i did a gpg –refresh-keys which ended in the following result:

gpg: Total number processed: 830
gpg:       skipped new keys: 1
gpg:              unchanged: 537
gpg:           new user IDs: 29
gpg:            new subkeys: 1
gpg:         new signatures: 20095