Category: Computers & Networks

My current backup strategy is to upload some stuff on my shell accounts and copy other stuff on my external Firwire Harddisk.
Today I tried to do a backup from my Epia system, which has no firewire, so i connected the harddisk via USB. Did you remember that USB in FreeBSD sucks? Of course hotplugging didn’t work and results in bazillion messages on the console:

and hanging of every disk access. After the reboot the disk worked, I was able to dump the / filesystem. But when i tried to dump the /usr filesystem the box paniced.
Now I am looking for a better (reliable working) way to backup this system since Firewire is not an option.
Does anybody of you use tape backups? I got a DDS3-tape drive, but I never used it, as I need to get tapes somewhere. Should I try to install a professional backup solution like bacula? Or should I just use rsync to copy stuff from the Hard Disk to another machine.

Hendrik asked how i chose my hostnames.
When I switched from NT (yes, huckfinn ran NT from January 1998 until ca. May 1999) to Linux, the beauty of hostnames was new to me, so I named it uninspired “lxserver”.
IIRC I switched to huckfinn, when i installed FreeBSD in 2001. Since I bought this machine at H & K, it had an “H & K” sticker on it. The only name with H and K that was suggested on IRC was “Hackme”, which i didn’t like :-), so it became huckfinn. Two other machines are named after characters from Mark Twain books, the sucessor of huckfinn was named polly, because it was bought at PBB and the alpha is named becky (because beta was already taken by the FreeBSD.org alpha cluster).
My next computer, which will take over the services currently running on huckfinn (Mail + INN) so it’s name is already predefined as tomsawyer.
My other machines’ names: When I bought my Athlon 1400 the first attribute i noticed was the waste heat, so i named it sauna.
The Athlon64 machine needed a name with “hammer” and that reminded me of the 80s 90s popstar McHammer MC Hammer (“U can’t touch this”).
The namesearching for my Laptop is already documented in this blog.
My NetBSD/i386 box is called Olga, because when I bought it, I wanted to install OpenBSD, but because I am incompatible with the OpenBSD installer it is now running NetBSD 🙂
My sparc64 is named “fridge” because it looks like one.
And finally my Epia System has a really uninspired name, “via”. I am still looking for better names, as i can change the name easily when I update it to FreeBSD 5.3.

It is summer when I have to connect the second chassis fan on my AMD64.
Current CPU temperature: 45�C
Current Mainboard temperature: 34�C

A lot of people don’t copy images they write about to their own blogs. adamw got in trouble with his hoster, because one image consumed a lot of bandwith.
Read on, what happened to the bandwith thieves.
BTW the most popular image from my blog is this one:
It’s on the first page if you google for “last” at google images. Luckily my ADSL line is able to cope with the traffic.

I am currently trying to build a spamtrap with Spamassasin. The idea: I add
another emailaddress to my website. Every email to that address is piped to “sa-learn –spam”. My problem, sa-learn needs to save the gathered information somewhere, and i am not sure where. It looks like spamc stores the information from autolearning on the spamd-server, but sa-learn stores the information local. I don’t want to run a mailserver on the spamd-machine just for this task. Any ideas?

My university joined the AT43 project, which provides a VoIP infrastructure for Austria. In theory I am now reachable via my new telephonenumber sip:linneweh@at43.tuwien.ac.at or +43 (0) 59966-642055 from the normal telephone system.
I tested the two Softphone Applications that are available for FreeBSD. linphone is a GTK Application with a lot of Options, but an unusable GUI. kphone looks a bit oldfashioned, but the GUI is intuitive as it looks like an Instant Messanger and apart from some crashes it works.

Today was spring-cleaning day. I reorganized my “server room” and gained one square meter space for my hopefully soon arriving sparc64 machine. I will take a picture later.
As I had to move rfk’s DEC 3000 to the main room, I took the time to try booting the NetBSD/alpha ISO I burned a few weeks ago. Found out, that the Turbochannel-framebuffer is not supported. NetBSD immediately switched to serial console, which was a problem, because the alpha only has a DB25 serial port and i only have DB9 nullmodem cables. So I will have to search for an adapter at work tomorrow.

Yesterday RMS spoke about software patents at wko.
To my surprise RMS talk was rhetorical better than the one from the member of the european parliament before. RMS satisfied his geek-image by unpacking his Laptop on stage and started hacking.
After that a small demonstration marched to the european patent office. The picture below is the only picture i found so far, where you can guess where I am. I am behind the Pesthoernchen, if you have good imagination, you can see the Beastie on my Shirt.

© lynx of FFS

You can find more information on software patents on the FFII website.
More demo fotos from skunk, gst

On Wednesday Richard Stallmann will be in Vienna. The will talk at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber about Free Software and Software Patents. After the event a demonstation is planned. See [mond.at] for details.