New FreeBSD site

The first Google SoC Project was integrated into CVS. FreeBSD now has a new website, the first major redesign since nearly a decade.
Of course now many people complain that it does not render in their favorite browser with their favorite font settings or that it is more difficult to navigate, because there are no longer hundreds of links on the frontpage.
I will wait at least a week before i will make up my own opinion of the new website but from first glance it does look nearly as good as the old one.

Failed IMAP Server upgrade

Today i tried to update my Mailserver from dovecot 0.99.x to 1.0alpha3. Unfortunately the update requires several changes to the config file. And after i modified my config file i noticed that the new version has a bug.

Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: imap-login: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=213.225.30.218, lip=213.9.70.77, TLS
Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: imap(arved): file istream-raw-mbox.c: line 450 (istream_raw_mbox_get_body_size): assertion failed: (rstream->mail_size != (uoff_t)-1)
Oct  2 20:40:51 knut dovecot: child 98776 (imap) killed with signal 6

Luckily i had a backup and i am now happily running 0.99 again. Let’s see if someone on the dovecot Mailinglist can help me with this problem.

BitTorrent and FreeSoftware

Lioux launched a BitTorrent campaign.
He persuaded me to install the bittorrent port on jim, and donate 6KB/s (ca. 40% of my upstream bandwith) to his project. Additional i have set a limit of 6 connections, calculating that each connection should get 1KB.
After running one night, on next morning my nagios was crying because “the Internet is slow”. I checked with Hendriks excellent slurm program and noticed that my upstream was blowing out full speed (16KB/s, yes my ADSL line is slow).
I checked with tcpdump what caused this traffic and immediately noticed several wellknown hosts as primary offenders:

10:49:17.908038 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.53481 > g164193.upc-g.chello.nl.acmsoda: F 1347279866:1347279866(0) ack 1734755715 win 33304 
...
10:50:05.497482 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.52573 > panda.droso.net.6881: P 1:49(48) ack 1 win 33304 
10:50:05.545402 IP 200-140-3-148.bsace703.dsl.brasiltelecom.net.br.54871 > 21322530218.direct.eti.at.7241: R 3804027892:3804027892(0) win 0
10:50:05.606741 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.7241 > creme-brulee.marcuscom.com.51748: FP 0:7(7) ack 1 win 33304 
0:50:05.607486 IP 21322530218.direct.eti.at.54575 > foo.lovett.com.7241: . ack 1 win 33304

. Obviously lioux persuaded some other fellow commiters (kwm, marcus, erwin and ade) to run BT as well and now we exchange our distfiles via BT (hooray!).
It looks like the traffic shaping algorithm is far from optimal and according to netstat the maximum connection number was also violated. And why is so much traffic required to coordinate the peers, as we all have the relevant files and don’t download anything?
My conclusion, currently bittorrent can’t compete with fetch(1), ftp(1) and an established mirror hierachy when it comes to distributing free software.

MT 3.2

Since today is the last weekend before university starts again, i took the time to upgrade to the latest MovableType version.
My Killer Feature is the Trackback moderation and the SpamLookup Plugin. Let’s see if how they work.
The upgrade went flawless except for my inability to type URLs and paths correct, which resulted in hangs of the Database conversion script and the problem that the mt-upgrade script uses JavaScript which does not work in Konqueror
I will upgrade the FreeBSD port this time, since MT2.x isn’t available anymore.

Sharing an ical Caldendar

One of the reasons my personal calendar is still on dead wood is, that if it was electronic, I need to access it from several machines, my Desktop@home, my Desktop@work, my Laptop.
Since my Laptop is a Mac and one of my Desktops too, i tried to use ical. Setting up WebDAV was not as complicated as i imagined, and configuring ical to publish a calendar was easy too.
Editing with Mozilla Sunbird and Korganizer worked without a problem.
But i was not able to tell ical that the subscribed calendar is editable. *grr*

More photos, switched to swiggle

Today i wanted to upload some more pictures to thegallery, but gallery-remote failed with a mysterious error. Updating to gallery2 was not an option, as it requires MySQL.
So i continued my crusade against ugly php apps and switched to swiggle.
I have made a small modification to swiggle, the description can now be displayed on the index page. Grab the patch from here.

Back from holidays

I am finally back in Vienna after struggling with Deutsche Bahn. The only way to get back to Vienna was by paying extra for travelling in a stone old “Schlafwagen”, all other seats were already booked out.
In Vienna i had to turn on the heating because it is so cold….
I am now catching up with Email, uploading pictures etc.

Danish Internet

Unfortunately there is no Internet access at our holidayhouse like advertised. Only on weekends a friendly neighbor plugs in his open WLAN Accesspoint.
A few days ago a technician put this socket into the wall, but i have no idea how to use this for internet access.
DSCN4544.JPG
Chris guessed that it is a danish telephone socket, so a DSL Modem is still missing.