Category: Computers & Networks

I have been annoyed for a long time, that I had to adjust my From: address manually. Today I took the time to google, and found the command I needed to add to my .muttrc, set reverse_name. This automatically sets my From: address if i reply to someone. I had to replace my_hdr From: with set hostname to make this work. So far it seems to work.
Now if i could tell mutt to display a slrn-like folder overview window, mutt would be my only MUA.
Another note: Don’t put auto_view text/plain into your .muttrc or you will not be able to read normal emails because mutt will tell you that “text/plain is not supported”.

Today, I finally reorganized my network and put via.arved.de into “production”.
via is running 5.2.1-RELEASE-p3, and it already needed a reboot once, after the following messages appeared on the console, and it stopped routing.

Mar 28 04:55:59 via kernel: arplookup 127.0.0.1 failed: could not allocate llinfo
Mar 28 04:56:00 via kernel: arpresolve: can't allocate llinfo for 127.0.0.1rt

According to the arp(4) this happens when the routing table is misconfigured, so hopefully this was a transient failure.

Continue reading “Network Reorganization”

The topic of #freebsd-gnome on Freenode pointed to this rant about button order. Did you ever reason about the button order on your screen?
I am using KDE on my Desktop, and MacOS X on my iBook. I also mix KDE and GNOME Applications, but i never noticed the different button order. BTW Movable Type uses a Macstyle button order.
There are good arguments for both, but does it really matter?

After the recent OpenSSL Advisory, I upgraded Riccardo, Sauna and Via this weekend. McHammer also got a new world, because Peter fixed several problems with the AMD64 RTLD, which made it necessary to recompile all shared libaries.
I also tried to upgrade Olga, my NetBSD box, that I have not used for half a year, but it is still compiling, poor P200.

For this weeks exercises I needed to compute a lot of binomial coefficients. The “extended” Calculator for Mac OS X has a lot of prestorred Formulas nobody needs, but no key for this terms most needed formula. So I evaluated several Freeware Calculators. I really wonder, why Calculator programmers try to imitate ordinary calculators whith their multiple assignments. The desktop is large enough, why do they add “Shift”, “Inverse” and “Option” Keys to their Calculator programs, when it costs nothing to add another button? If I install a scientific Calculator, I am not afraid of many buttons.

For quite some time, I considered replacing huckfinn, my Gateway/Firewall/Router with something more silent. This old K6-200 system is now running nearly continously for seven years and has survived five relocations including the one from Germany to Austria in 2000. The fans are rattling and although it is currently located in my hall, I can hear it when I am lying in my bed trying to fall asleep.
One option would be an old Laptop, but there are not many laptops that I can plug three NICs into. Recently I have seen the VIA Epia Systems in action, and was quite impressed. Today I decided to order one. Nothing fancy, I don’t need a Hi-fi-look-alike for my living room. Just something small, that hopefully fits onto the window-sill (to improve WLAN performance in the garden).
This is also an excellent opportunity to upgrade my No.1 production system to FreeBSD-5.x.
Of course, instead of planning mprovments my Computer network i should think about the limits of n-dimensional functions, but that isn’t fun, and I have nearly three days to solve my assignments.

I have a Kensington Combination Lock for my Laptop. I have not used it for two months, and when I wanted to use it yesterday, i couldn’t remember the combination. While I was travelling on the Subway or listening to boring courses on university I tried a Brute Force Attack, since the lock was too expensive to throw it away. At around 7:55am this morning i found the right combination after having tried more than 900 of the 1000 possible combinations.
Brute Force Attacks are boring but effective :).

Today my external Harddisk arrived from its journey to Wels. This time Medion exchanged the power supply. Now it finally works. I just tested the Firewire connection to my iBook. I am considering buying a Firewire controller for huckfinn or sauna, because huckfin has no USB controller and sauna has only an USB 1 controller.

Today I got a complaint from my gf, “Since you installed XFree86 on FreeBSD, my Touchpad doesn’t work anymore in XP”. Hm…Well I was quite sure that this wasn’t the real cause, so installed half a dozen different drivers. Downgraded the last Windows Hotfixes, digged through the registry. But nothing happend, in FreeBSD the Touchpad works fine, in Windows XP it stops working a few seconds after login. Well, after a few hours digging through Google, the Acer and the Synaptics homepage, while the Laptop was performing it’s 100. restart, I suddenly saw the magic key. Fn + F7. A green message appeared: “Touchpad activated”. And everything worked. I must have pressed this key in FreeBSD, where no green Message appears on the screen (Fn + F6 and Fn + F5 are controlling the LCD screen) and nothing happens, because FreeBSD doesn’t use the proprietary Synaptics driver. To my defense I can say that the Touchpad control program doesn’t tell me if the touchpad is activated or not. But i am still angry about wasting half of the Saturday with Windows XP.

I don’t really know who Johannes Specht is, neither do I know his emailaddress. But he and Luc Verhaegen are the heros of the day, because they found and fixed the Problem with the VIA KM400 Chipset. Now riccardo.arved.de finally has a running XFree86.
Grab the patch from here
Update 2003-02-20: David Dawes claimed that he committed the patch, but i can’t find it, neither in anoncvs nor in cvsweb. XFree86 is still a mystery to me..