1 year Last.fm subscriber

Yesterday i noticed that my Last.fm subscription expired. The banner advertising reappeared. I immediately renewed my subscription, although i don’t listen to the radio station that often since i switched jobs.
Of course at the moment they are offline, but most of the time it has been working fine. (And since the last update the last.fm player even works in the tuwien Internetrooms.)

blogging break…

Three weeks without a blog entry. That is quite a record for this blog.
Busy times. I went to Germany on Christmas and back. I was ill again after that, so no big end-of-the-year party for me.
Now i am busy at work, i should be busy at university and i spend my freetime reading the books i got for christmas (Currently the new Terry Pratchett, “Thud”) and listening to new cds i bought in Hamburg.

Trusting PGP..

After a thread on freebsd-security@ PGP seems to be en vogue again. (Hm, there hasn’t been an official key signing at EuroBSDCon this year..*sigh* But i had forgotten my keyprintouts anyway).
I noticed that my that my key is slightly out of date, so i removed my ex-jobs non-working emailaddress and added my new one. I noticed that this year i only gained one signature (which was actually a leftover from 2004), so i have fallen down to over 600+ in the keyanalyzereports.
So if anybody visiting Vienna this year (or Bad Segeberg over X-Mas) is interested, please speak up 🙂

Apache 2.2

Yesterday I updated to Apache 2.2. Unfortunately additional to adjusting the config file clement changed the default data directory, so I had to adjust all absolute paths. A lot of stuff on this site is still broken, the transition from 1.3 to 2.0 was a lot easier. And i am tempted to rollback and install the backup.

Dear 62.99.151.224

If you would actually read this blog, you would notice, that it rarely happens that i will write more than one blog entry per day. It is not necessary to fetch my Feed every minute.
So please consider increasing the fetch-interval to at least 30 minutes, or I must consider blocking you.

62.99.151.224 - - [05/Dec/2005:15:09:41 +0100] "GET /weblog/index.rdf HTTP/1.1"200 20036 "-" "Akregator/1.2; librss/remnants"
62.99.151.224 - - [05/Dec/2005:15:10:41 +0100] "GET /weblog/index.rdf HTTP/1.1"200 20036 "-" "Akregator/1.2; librss/remnants"
62.99.151.224 - - [05/Dec/2005:15:11:41 +0100] "GET /weblog/index.rdf HTTP/1.1"200 20036 "-" "Akregator/1.2; librss/remnants"

New Firewall

Ryan McBride gave an impressing presentation about building a redundant Firewall with PF and CARP using two Soekris boxes at EuroBSDcon.
I had to buy a Soekris box immediately and today I put it into production replacing my old EPIA based Firewall.
This went well, all i had to do was replacing the vr-interfaces of the EPIA with the sis interfaces of the Soekis in /etc/pf.conf.
I have not played around with CARP and PFSYNC yet, because all Howtos and Manpages are based on an OpenBSD configuration (yes even the FreeBSD manpages), so they are a bit difficult to read.
My main problem is, that my Firewall also terminates my IPv6 tunnel, and i am not sure i can use the gif interface as a carp interface. I probably have to ask for help on freebsd-pf.
But first i have to finish my work for this terms university courses…..

Creative Vista Webcam

I wrote before, that i wanted a webcam, that is supported by BSD.
A few weeks ago i bought a Creative Vista without checking if it was supported by FreeBSD, because it was really cheap (IIRC ca. 16 EUR).
Today I finally tried to get it working. It is supported by the graphics/spcaview port.
Here is one of the first pictures:
webcam.png
Yes the quality is quite bad, but what would you expect from a cheap camera.
Checkout this page for a recent page.

EuroBSDcon day 2

On Sunday it was naturally hard to get up early to arrive at roberto’s talk in time. I must admit i still don’t see the need for a Distributed Sourcecodemangementsystem especially with todays ubitous Internet access.
Afterwards i listened to Andre’s talks on FreeBSDs TCP/IP stack. The first one didn’t contain much news for people following the FreeBSD Mailinglists but the second was quite interesting but unfortunately he ran out of time.
After lunch at the university mensa i listened to Riondas talk about jails. Although i am using FreeBSD jails for a few months now “in production” i learned something new.
The mystery session was a bit poor, although the panel did a good job it ended up in a bikeshed, because everyone wanted to tell his opinion about BSDs PR whithout listening to the previous comments.
After the end we went to a strange Kitsch-pub to drink a few beers because we had a few hours until our train to Vienna left in the evening. While changing trains at Zürich main station we met Rionda for his train back to Italy.
Now i need to catch up sleep and other stuff…

EuroBSDcon day 1 part 2

Later I went to silby’s TCP/IP talk, which had some quite interesting graphs how broken Linux is and how many differences there are between the different BSDs.
After lunch was the X session. Matthias Hopf of SUSE showed some nice 3D effects and Matthieu Herrb announced the death of imake with Xorg 7.0. Next i went to Emmanuel Dreyfus’ talk about IPSEC, where he tried to explain the whole mess of IPSec extensions and implementations.
In the OpenBSD Firewall talk Ryan McBride demonstrated redundant firewalls and used an axe to hack a Twistedpair cable, good show. Finally Ed Maste talked about locking of FreeBSD network stack, he did a good job as rwatson incarnation of the day.
The social event was in a nice cellar. There were ugly beers from all over Europe (yes we made the mistake of trying most of them) and a spicy gulasch to make the people thirsty. There was a drinking contest of the various Operating Systems teams. Of course FreeBSD went ahead of the other projects fast because most of the attendees were FreeBSD people and we wondered what happend if the beer glass stats that show the consumed beers overflows.
But later a lot of FreeBSD people left being sure they will win the contest. Now the OpenBSD people took over by confusing the Barkeepers with singing Humpa songs and giving OpenBSD shirts to them.
I think we left around 1:30, so i am not sure if they managed to take over the lead.