I’m rebuilding my RAID1 array, so everything is a bit slow at the moment.

I’ve always kept my first Linux CDs as a reminder of that great time when I was first exploring this unexplored territory. These are two (bad) shots of the actual CD, maybe I should put the content of them online again? Kernel version 1.2.8, gcc version old, non working X on the default install, that kind of stuff… I was hooked forever to this stuff. 1995!

I’ve never like (Open)Solaris. Maybe the kernel rules, but the userland completely sucks, something like apt should have been implemented in (Open)Solaris years ago. Now that Oracle owns SUN and thus Solaris they should rebrand it. Maybe OpenSoracle or even OpenSorry.

Found this very nice howto, which I almost followed to the letter, except I did it in Ubuntu and currently more stuff is working out of the box, so you don’t need to do all the steps. I’m working on an USB stick which is /dev/sdb1 in my system. Steps I did take: apt-get install cryptsetup hashalot cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb1 cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 funnydiskname mkfs.ext4 -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/mapper/funnydiskname cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/funnydiskname Now pull out your disk and re-insert.

In kernel version 2.6.29.1: # /bin/echo -n 40000 > /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max /bin/echo: write error: Invalid argument In one older kernel I tried it still worked, so I’ve submitted a bug.

OpenLDAP uses a cn=config DIT to configure the server since version 2.4. I’m always into new stuff, but I must admit that I rather liked editing /etc/ldap/slapd.conf to configure the server. Anyhow being able to store ACLs in the tree is a big plus, but for configuring minor stuff (like indexes) it makes live more difficult. The following site was an excellent tool in helping me configure OpenLDAP. For a list of current attributes names, see for instance here

Well, today I was looking into using LVM snapshots to allow a client OCN use Linux as a Netapp replacement…. Boy was I in for a disappointment. LVM an sich is working great, but the moment you turn on snapshots the (in this case) write performance goes to hell. Using LVM is easy enough. The system I was on has 32 GB ram and 2 disk arrays with hardware RAID.

See this? bond0: Warning: failed to get speed and duplix from eth* Do this: insmod bonding miimon=100 why? When using Linux network bonding the kernel may be to quick to enslave the interfaces. When an interface is too slow to report it capabilities it will be set to 100Mbit and Full Duplex. Which is a bit sad when you have 6 Gigabit network cards…

For a few weeks months now I’m learnings how to use VIM text-objects. There is an extended help wth help text-objects in VIM. I’m trying to condense the VIM help in a smaller blog entry here. What are a text-objects in vim? Text-objects are things like a ‘paragraph’ or the text between braces or something like a word. Text-objects can be used with the normal vim commands y, d and c.

As I’m on an upgrade roll I decided to upgrade my new server too. It is configured with kerberos and ldap… and this is were the trouble. ldap When a service is upgraded in Ubuntu/Debian it is first stopped and than later restarted when the new files are there. When all your user information is kept in ldap, the following sucks: Preparing to replace slapd 2.4.11-0ubuntu6.1 (using .../slapd_2.4.15-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ... Stopping OpenLDAP: slapd.

A short guide on how to build the new notification system, which is scheduled for Jaunty, for Intrepid. First download the source packages from: http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/jaunty/notify-osd You will need the .dsc and the .tar.gz files, then you need to follow the Debian way of building the package. dpkg-source -x notify-osd_0.9ubuntu2.dsc cd notify-osd-0.9ubuntu2/ One important tweak, otherwise it will not install in Intrepid and will complain about an human-icon-theme that is tool old

I’ve used the Debian xfce pkg stuff to build Ubuntu packages of xfce 4.6. The … release … rocks :) You can find the debs in files/xfce/. Be my guest…

Today if removed two annoyances I had with VIM. Command mistyping I often mistype the following: :w! becomes :W! or :q! becomes :Q! Which is annoying because W and Q do not mean anything, and I don’t write or VIM does not quit. VIM has a nifty feature called commands which you can (re)define or add new commands. Lets try some to fix this, in a running vi: :com -bang W write!

The following might be helpful to others too. I was trying to setup a new raid1 device from two partitions /dev/sda4 and /dev/sdb4. I wanted to do this the “right way” and use UUID everywhere, i.e. in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf and in /etc/fstab. I hit a few snags along the way. create the array # mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md6 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 \ /dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4 Get the uuid mdadm uses: # mdadm --detail /dev/md6 | grep UUID UUID : dc9aba5e:ed1a70d4:770765d8:b0f56d86 (local to host elektron2) Check.

In bash (and other shells) you can use the [[ construct From the bash manpage: [[ expression ]] Return a status of 0 or 1 depending on the evaluation of the conditional expression expression. Expressions are composed of the primaries described below under CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS. Word splitting and pathname expansion are not performed on the words between the [[ and ]]; tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, command substitution, process substitution, and quote removal are performed.

Re-selection of a visual When you use control-v or shift-v in vim to do a visual selection and then use (for instance) y to copy the selected text, you loose the selection. More often than not you want to do another thing with the selection you just had. How? gv Copy to clipboard Make a selection and use "*yy Now the selection is ‘under your mouse’. If think I’m going to bind this sequence to something more easy, like *Y.

You are using the ControlMaster feature of ssh and you are having problems remembering which shell is the master? That’s why I’ve made zsh display this in the prompt. You get a m@ when a connection is a master connection and an @ if it is a slave. setting up The check if we are a master works by creating a file which has $SSH_CLIENT as the name, as the following snippet shows.

The script in using git and vi together was a little bit borked, as too many git repo’s were created. Hence a new and improved version. This one will look up the directory tree to spot an existing git repository - is nothing found a new one will be created in $PWD. code #!/bin/zsh # a wrapper around git and vi # expands $Hash$ to $Hash: file short_hash epoch committer $ # git checkout HEAD $file?

A long while back I used vi together with rcs to manage files in /etc. This worked, but I found rcs to be clunky. So welcome to the 21st century and my git + vi script. It is a wrapper around git, which will create a new git repository, add the file and commit it when changed. The script will also expand $Hash$ to $Hash: basename-of-file short-commit-hash epoch committer` a typical example is

Ok, so far I’ve created a cfengine setup that works. On my main host ’elektron’ I’ve created a /export/nfsroot/x86 directory. This holds the general files for the x86 Ubuntu lazy clients. With 2 scripts (see below) I can easily create a whole new x86 from scratch. Bringing up new lazy clients is even more easy, once the groundwork is there. I only need to do three things: fix the DNS (forward and reverse) fix the DHCP and add an ip address.

In my ongoing effort to make my lazy client work I’ve embarked on the next phase of the project: Making a client boot from a generic NFS mounted root partition and then giving it its own /etc on a ramdisk. This way I’m saving disk space and administration overhead on my server. The virtual /etc is provisioned by cfengine. This allows for small changes between the lazy clients while they still share the bulk of the rest of the files.

while playing with cfengine I kept seeing these messages: Cfengine input file had no explicit version string Well, I greped in the source of cfengine and this has helped me find the solution, in the file install.c we have the following: 3359 void VersionAuditFile() 3360 3361 { char *sp; 3362 3363 if (sp = GetMacroValue(CONTEXTID,"cfinputs_version")) 3364 { 3365 AUDITPTR->version = strdup(sp); 3366 } 3367 else 3368 { 3369 Verbose("Cfengine input file had no explicit version string\n"); 3370 } 3371 } (Line numbers are from VIM).

I want to quiet, full blown PC, without fans nor a harddisk in my living room. See my other blog about this subject Currently I’m thinking about the following setup: NFS4 root some sort of configuration management I wanted to use puppet, but after seeing it use more than 30% of my main memory – This is on a AMD64 Ubuntu server – I was ready to ditch it. I’ve also have experience with cfengine, so I’m going to use that.

Google is always helpful of course, so I’ve found this blog entry on how to set the background in xfce. It boils down to setting a jpg in XFCE’s backdrops.list and then reloading xfdesktop. Crude, but it works. This can de done with the following command: cat <<EOF > ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/backdrops.list # xfce backdrop list background.jpg EOF And then xfdesktop --reload However when running from CRON it is more easy to do a killall -USR1 xfdesktop.

Working on backup programs for almost a decade now, I’ve had plenty of time to think about file system wrt backups. Basically I want the following properties in a file system online snapshots in a .snapshots directory (for instance). the possibility to say the all those .snapshot directories must be mounted on a separate mount point. to ability so say the .snapshot directories should be encrypted and send to remote server.

After some switching I have now settled on XFCE. With Ubuntu XFCE sometimes does not start, this is a dbus issue in combination with gnome-screensaver (a race condition between the two). This sucks, but can be resolved easily with apt-get remove gnome-screensaver (There aren’t any interesting option anyway…) So my XFCE is now up and running, time for some tweaking. In the quest for precious vertical pixels (especially on the EeePC 701 I own) I decided I must remove those pesky title bars.

Grrrrr cd rm -rf Desktop mv Documents docs I don’t want desktop environments messing with MY home directory. Thank you.

I’ve battled with amavis too often and I started to dislike it a little. So when I wanted to configured my postfix setup to scan for viruses and spam and needed a solution which would work without amavis. This is what I came up with. debian administration was kind enough to do the hard work, but this is only the setup for clamav and I also want to spam scan.

I’m trying to move my noisy server to the cellar I’m left with the question how do I cater for my desktop computer needs. I would be nice to have a thin client, but then you have the problem that local devices do not work: because you are actually working on the server, it needs to “know” somehow that you have locally inserted an USB disk. This sucks. So how about a thick client, a client with enough power to run a full blown Linux distro.

Small script which display “teletekst” pages from the Dutch teletext (or the Belgium, but I’ve never used that). I’m not the original author, but feel free to grab your copy. #!/usr/bin/perl # # Dit scriptje laat de NOS teletext zien # # (c) 2001, 2002, 2003 by Bas Zoetekouw <bas@debian.org> # All rights reserved. # # Naar een idee van Wouter Bergmann-Tiest # # Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without # modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions # are met: # 1.