SysAdmin Blog

Fine, so the iBook has bluetooth and WLAN and all, but my access point is with my girlfriend, and I don't have any bluetooth hardware yet (mobile phone just has IRDA and serial, and bluetooth mice and keyboards are a bit expensive right now). There now is an USB serial dongle (btw., look at the ProlificUsbSerial page if you're looking for an MacOS X driver), an USB soapbox to connect PS/2 keyboard and mouse (and all sorts of other USB stuff, like the Quickcam and the digicam and the external harddisk). Probably until I have upgraded all that stuff, bluetooth is obsolete again...

The iBook arrived on thursday... Quite fun, started by reinstalling the whole system and repartitioning the harddisk into several slices. Putting the home directories to another partition doesn't work yet, though - somehow the preferences don't get saved when I change the home dir in the Netinfo Manager.

Anyway, good place to start the AlexHardwareList.

Well, some Win2k source code fragments have been leaked (cache) a few days ago, and while I haven't made any efforts to retrieve a copy until now (IOS 12.x sources, anyone?), i thought this article (cache) on Kuro5hin to be interesting.

brought SendMail to the current release, 8.12.11, and upgraded MilterSender, MilterDate, and MilterSpamc to their current versions (also released a few days ago). Wasn't shure if it's a problem to run milters linked against the previous sendmail's libmilter, but it seems as if that's no problem right now (still haven't updated SmtpVilter...).

Also upgraded Sendmail on the FreiNet MXen yesterday, and I'm eagerly awaiting the new version of milter-ahead with the additional option I proposed to the author - to accept mail unconditionally if the destination mailserver is unreachable (otherwise, backup-MX don't make much sense).

Hm, still can't find out why scaled images in the Galleries don't work. All this php madness in the TikiWiki code doesn't make it easier, but it seems as if the view galleries script expects to find pre-generated scaled images in the database which the upload script doesn't create. Can't even seem to find the code where that should be done :(
I also noticed SIGSEVs from the httpd, but it doesn't log what it was working on at the time.

Had some AutoconfFun today while trying to install TurckMmCache...

Been running a pre-release beta of MilterSender since saturday. No problems until now (specially compiled a debug version of BerkeleyDB and milter-sender with gdb attached, because I constantly had crashes with the previous release). Nice for the author, but somehow I would have liked to find out what the problem really was in the old version :)
Might as well be a heisenbug (cache), will see with a normal build in the coming week.

as everyone else, I've been wading through mimail.r (or, als ClamAV calls it, Worm.SCO.A) alerts in the logfiles. A few dozen on this box (which is also primary MX for INFRa, and over on 1000 at work (cache).

I only hope that some da someone writes a worm that's comparably effective in spreading through the Windows world and does some real damage to the infected machines. I'm fed up with this virus spreading monoculture, and I'm fed up with wasting time on supporting this crap.

Ordered an Apple iBook (cache) today.
My old notebook is a noname Celeron 300 subnotebook (ok, in fact it's a Uniwill 290i2 (cache)), which is really quite nice (no such small Wintel notebooks were built in the last years until Intel came up with the Centrino stuff), but starts to get a little wearisome. Display problems, small broken casing parts, no internal CDROM drive, just one USB port, power management is a pain, be it with Windows 98SE (2K/XP have problems with PCMCIA support on this machine), or with Linux (suspend to disk is possible, but the system is dead slow after resuming). No fun. And the CPU is too slow for DIVX.

So, now, an 12" iBook with everything (Bluetooth, Airport, max. RAM & HDD), and a Keynote (cache) license - but no Apple Care (just too expensive, about 20% of the hardware price). Will need a few weeks to arrive, though.

Other Mac software on my to-buy list is OmniGraffle pro (cache) and Papyrus (cache). I didn't write any major document since my diploma thesis (which was done with Papyrus for OS/2), but I just want to own the software. You never know.

Great. Just searched for about 4 days why Apache/mod_ssl dumped core on me after recompiling all the stuff with gcc-3.3.2... Until I noticed that I had an error in the Apache configure script command line which resulted in mod_ssl being linked statically into the httpd - and there was also still an old libssl.so in Apache's libexec dir, and I had the corresponding Loadmodule directive in the config.

Seems I shouldn't be surprised that there were problems...

Alex.