getting connected

Since I’ll be internetless for the next 4 days, I’ve done some research on how to connect to the net with my sony ericsson t300 through the laptop. Found out that I have to install some windows drivers and a special application from the sony ericsson site. Well, couple of hours later and some calls with the clueless t-mobile customer hotline I got it to work. There is a great connectivity guide available which describes the different possibilities. Apparently this is quite pricy because if you don’t have a special deal you have to pay for the transmitted volume.

“infinite possibilities and all we can do is whine”

Just finished watching the final episode of Six Feet Under, season 4. And wow, it really ended with a bang. Good, that they finally resolved some loose ends. I don’t think that season 4 was a disappointment, on the contrary, it had some really powerful episodes, e.g. 401 and 405.

SFU has truely acclaimed a place on my personal got-to-see tv show list.

ten packages of tempos and still counting

Looks like i am still in sync with my sickness prediction. My sore throat is getting better and my nose is running like crazy now. I have a trashcan full of tempos. Found out that tempos are not that resistant when you blow really hard into them. So, another myth from commercials dismantled. I’ll spare you the pictures, though. Did not sleep well during the last two nights, so was tired during the day and did not get a lot done.

caught a cold

Great, I was feeling perfectly fine on Sunday afternoon. Called my mom who told me that she was sick during last week and two hours later I get a sore throat, which is usually an indication that I’ll be sick for a week. If it is one of my normal chills, I will have a sore throat for 2 days, a cold for 2-3 days and if it is not too bad I’ll be coughing for two more days.

X X X

Three small crosses - this is the amount of democracy I could excercise for our communal elections today. I even cared to read the programs of the candidates. But in the end it is all about compromises, so I have chosen the party that reflected most of my views.

The polling booths are located right across the street, in my old primary school. Oddly enough they are also in my old classroom where I had most of my courses during fifth and sixth grade. So a trip to the polling booth is always a trip back in history, to my old english classes with Mr. Rebing, math classes with Mrs. Burkhardt and german classes with Mr. Cramer that I had 15 years ago. They have redone the floor and painted the walls, but the rest is pretty much the same. I think, even the chairs have not changed.

It looks like there won’t be a lot of change, we will have a social democrat as city major, the christian democrats had a great loss (13%) but will still be the biggest party in our city council.

Of course, there are the usual political statements, amazingly everyone declared themselves a winner.

OSCommerce under control

Decided that it is probably easier to manage the geekladen webshop with a version control tool. So, started from scratch again and installed oscommerce and all the nifty extensions in a more controlled manner. I hope that it is easier now to remove a certain extensionby generating a simple diff.

spam is getting more weird

Got spam that offered access to a database with hobby hookers… bizarre.

burn baby burn

We had to burn 170 copies of the knoppix cd. Luckily there is a lab in uni that has 12 computers with cd writers. Unfortunately most of them had windows (without a proper burning program). I had burned over 20 copies already, so we utilized k3b on those knoppix cd and directly burnt the copies. Cool.
Unfortunately, k3b occasionally crashed with a rather bizarre error message: “The alarm clock rang.” Maybe the author had to leave his computer when he was programming and did not have time to implement proper error handling.

Went to the local metro shopping market with Waldemar and finally got my own metro card. Bought a funky new 256 MB USB 2.0 flash drive and some filing trays. Resisted the urge to buy more useful and even more useless stuff.

Another geekladen meeting. Talked about the webshop, our next order and general world domination plans.

LUUSA meeting in the evening with a presentation about our university wlan project and the shortcomings of ipsec. Got korean food once again.

Oh, and this blog is no longer secret - not that it was well hidden before.

antispam congress

Had to get up at a ridiculous hour, 7:00am, and went to cologne by train to the second antispam congress. I remembered to look up the train schedule to avoid the usual late trains in the morning. Surprisingly this even worked out and I arrived on time in Cologne. The congress and fair took place at the cologne chamber of industry and commerce, surprisingly the congress and fair took place in the same room. The congress was quite full, some people even had to stand during the first 1,5 hour. It also received a lot of media attention. There were some good talks during the morning, I found the talk about the legal issues really interesting. The talk of Mr. Romeo from web.de was also interesting, he gave a small insight into web.de’s antispam measures and delivered some figures about their daily spam and virus amount. During noon it got noisier and more uninteresting, so I decided to head back and catch up on sleep. Of course, trains were all late then.

Took a short 2 hour nap in the afternoon and finalized the knoppix cd for our freshmen in the evening. I even managed to get a working copy of freedos on the cd. So you have the choice of knoppix, the debian sarge installer and freedos.

Tomorow we have to duplicate this cd 170 times, which will be fun.

another one…

Nils had his colloquium today. He passed with 1.0 and received another 1.0 for his thesis. So, congratulations to him. Consequently celebrated with another 10l beer barrel.

There is a traditional hang out with our freshmen on their first day at a local pub. A discussion was started to meet at a different location and someone came up with another pub which is nearby the old location, so we decided to check it out during the evening. It is a bit pricy, the service is not that great - not that it was better at the other place in my opinion - but it is quite roomy, so we should all fit in there.

Spent the rest of the night at the BillaBonn and found out that they have Carlton Bottles.

UML with debian sarge filesystem

Another day with UML. I had to update Matt’s filesystem image from woody to sarge because I depend on a newer version of iptables and keepalived. It took me a while to establish the network from inside the uml and send and receive packets. I’ve chosen the tun/tap approach which worked quite well, once you remember to turn on ip packet forwarding, which kind of makes sense.

Updated the filesystem to sarge and hit a strange bug: getty was no longer functioning. Did an strace on getty and found a problem with an ioctl. This seems to be a specific problem with uml, because getty works fine on a plain debian sarge installation. Replaced the version with the one from woody and all was working again.

Mars, Dark Matter and ET

Today was a nationwide event called “Nacht der Sterne” (Night of stars). Observatories and museums were open till late night. I went to the German Museum Bonn, which is only a few hundred meters away from my flat to listen to three different talks. The first one was about the mars mission and the geolocial aspects of it. The speaker presented some interesting insight into the latest findings and the existance of water on mars. The interesting fact was that they found traces of water where they did not expect them and they did not find traces where they had predicted them. It amazes me, that we are able to send probes millions of kilometers away from earth and learn about the history of the universe and planets. The second talk was about the dark side of the universe. I have to admit that I hardly understood something from this talk. But I good a better understanding of how people have to feel if geeks meet and talk about computer stuff. The last talk was about the existance of extraterrestrial life, like what factors have to be present so that life can exist, the probability of life on other planets in our universe and so on. It was quite interesting and I stayed till 0:30am. Felt brave and took the shortcut back through the cemetry. Quite scary when it is completely dark and I suddenly heard a dripping noise. Realized that it had started to rain and consequently walked faster.

UML

From Kristan’s slides I got the idea to create a complex network scenario with user mode linux. So I’ve downloaded the latest 2.4.26 kernel patch and created my first user mode linux environment. I’ve chosen the debian woody filesystem from Matt. I guess that updating it to sarge will be easy. One major problem that I had, was that the kernel always stopped at a certain point and it seemed as if it had crashed. I later found out, that user mode linux opens a virtual console, so you need to grant X access to the user/process. Oh, and if you want to emulate two different clients, you should create two seperate filesystems.

Kind of cool to start linux in linux.

Cables

My order from Monday arrived. Apparently the German Post has done some outsourcing. The packets were delivered by a different company and at an unusal hour, 7:30pm. Realized that the 0,5m cables are probably way too short for my setup. Luckily I’ve also ordered 15m cables so they should fit.

It’s f***ing X-Tina.

There’s a new Mercedes A-class commercial. I somehow liked the music and thought that it was a new independent artist but no, it is Christina Aguilera. Actually I’d like to meet her because I am always curious, if she is really “toffee-nosed” (man, dict.leo.org rulez…). Well, dream on. At least you can download the song for free. Mercedes seems to invest a lot of money into this campaign. They had booked the entire “Maritim Hotel” - the most expensive hotel in Bonn - for a couple of months and trained their european personal there.

Besides that had sort of an unproductive day, found another presentation about the ct_sync implementation. Hopefully I can get a better understanding of the virtual router redundancy setup with that. I also tried to overcome my dislike of openbsd and installed mozilla and a better working X-Server on the Laptop, so that I have a graphical user interface to work with. So, I can surf and read my email now which is a good start.

results from the outage

Did a “top” in the morning on auriga and paused for a moment, since there was still a lot of free memory which is usually not the case. Looked at the total ram and… surprise, surprise, there are 512MB of ram now. So, it looks like Strato either switched the hardware yesterday or someone installed more ram:

Sep 14 02:39:20 auriga kernel: Memory: 386184k/393152k available (1502k kernel code, 6584k reserved, 324k data, 268k init, 0k highmem)

Sep 14 06:21:46 auriga kernel: Memory: 515844k/524224k available (1502k kernel code, 7996k reserved, 324k data, 268k init, 0k highmem)

The strange world of Strato. Actually this is great, since we had considered to order a new server already. But this is much better, since we can save the time and do not need to transfer data and adjust domainsettings for everyone now.

the outage

I should not stay up that late. Noticed that the silc network was restarted and shortly after that Marcus asked what was going on. Logged into the server and saw that the server was restarted. Not good, especially after we’ve upgraded to Apache2 just 24 hours before. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, my ssh connection died and connections were no longer possible. Even the fallback remote console was not responding. Logged into Strato’s config menu, the status of our server was “partially disabled”. What a strange message. Wrote an email to customer support to find out what was going on.
Checked the typical webpages but at 3am hardly anyone was awake. Strato’s webpage was down as well, so I figured it was a network outage. Went to bed and hoped that everything would start working after some hours of sleep.

Woke up at 10am and decided to check the server. Connections were possible again but the mail server was complaining. Traced the problem to a non-working ldap server. Apparently the ldap database had been damaged. Glad that we had cleartext backups, so restored a recent backup and ldap was happy again.

Got a reply from strato tech support in the afternoon, saying, that they had some unplanned maintenance and erroneously disabled our server. But thanks to their “tüv-geprüftes wiedereinschaltkonzept” (sorry, I have no idea how to translate that, heck, I don’t even know, what this means in german) everything was restored and working again.

Pützchens Markt

Verena had her colloquium today and passed - quite well. Went out to “Pützchens Markt”, one of the largest fairs in the region, to celebrate a bit. Lots of people, carnival rides and lots of beer stalls, of course. Resisted the urge to gamble for a plush nemo, though. Went home at around 11pm and caught a bus shortly after it began raining.

installed openbsd

At the moment my thesis plan consists of implementing and comparing two high-availabilty firewall solutions. The first one will be linux, the second one will probably be openbsd. Grabbed one of the free Lehmans all-bsd-on-one-dvds and… it did not boot. Reverted back to net installation. I really dislike the installation process of openbsd, if you make a critical mistake you are forced to reboot and repeat all over. Did a minimal installation. I now have 4 operating systems on one single harddrive - Win98, WinXP, Linux and OpenBSD. Cool.

Besides that I compiled the ct_sync framework for this machine. It did not compile at first and needed some minor tweaks but I got a booting kernel eventually.

Also played with kde 3.3 and fixed my tpb issue. Problem was, that the xsession file was not executed anymore. Checking the Debian Bugtracking Database, revealed some hints, and implementing the workaround from bug #265865 fixed the issue.

suffering, watching, working

Had a bit of a restless night (Forgot, that my body does not like it, when I feed it too many mixed drinks).

Stayed in bed and watched Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. There are some brilliant ideas in his movie but I guess you should take his arguments with a grain of salt.

Decided to do something productive afterwards and started on a test setup for my thesis. This involved kernel patching, getting to know “quilt” and reading docs from the linux high-availabilty website. I need to replicate this setup on a client and try to figure out the heartbeat daemon. I also tried to come up with a basic table of contents.

We switched to apache2 today, the migration went fine with only some minor issues. I should have remembered, that php4-imap trouble are usually caused by a non-matching version of libc-client2002ddebian.