Aigarius Blog

This is highly unofficial, but if you want to upload your World of Warcraft statistics to WoWHead in Linux, then you might be able to do so by using the following script. You will need curl and wget installed.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Please help set a world record of most downloads in 24 hours by downloading a copy of Firefox 3.0 in the next 24 hours starting at 18:00 GMT today. Download yourself and get all your friends to do so as well. Only one download per computer is counted towards the record. More info on the record attempt.

Firefox 3.0 Download record countdown timers.

P.S. The SpreadFirefox web page is down at the moment. Overloaded less than 2 hours before the go time.

Popularity: 25% [?]

http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571

Īsumā - visas pēdējos divos gados uz Debian sistēmām (ieskaitot Ubuntu, Knoppix, …) ģenerētās SSH atslēgas, SSH serveru sertifikāti, SSL sertifikāti, x509 sertifikāti, OpenVPN atslēgas un DNSSEC atslēgas ir uzskatāmas par nedrošām. Nekavējoties atjaunojiet libssl-dev, libssl0.9.8-dbg, openssl un libssl0.9.8 pakas uz jaunākajām versijām un uzģenerējat jaunas atslēgas.

Sīkāk:

• http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys
• http://www.debian.org/security/key-rollover/

Serveru administrātoru darāmais:

• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
• Servera SSH atslēgas pārģenerācija:
  sudo rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server
• Lietotāju atslēgu dzēšana:sudo rm /home/*/.ssh/authorized_keys
• Informēt SSH lietotājus par nepieciešamību atjaunot viņu sistēmas un tikai tad uzģenerēt jaunu atslēgu un augšupielādēt to
• Dabūt jaunu SSL sertifikātu HTTPS darbībai
• Uzlikt jaunās ‘open*-blacklist’ pakas, kas neļaus pieslēgties izmantojot nedrošas atslēgas

Popularity: 20% [?]

I am having a problem of my tiny Fonera router restart on me endlessly whenever I have two laptops with Azureus running connect to the network, so I started to investigate. I could not get any meaningful error messages from the router before it reboots and the only weird thing I could find in the statistics was the huge number of active connections. When I have one laptop with Skype running, Firefox browsing a few pages and Internet radio playing the number of active connections was around 200. Starting Liferea for RSS bumps that to 300. Nothing serious. However, as soon as I start Azureus (with no active downloads!) the number of active connections jumps by 400-500, starting one download adds another 300 connections. That is despite setting a maximum global limit of active connections to 100 in Azureus preferences. After 5-10 minutes the number of connections goes down to 500 (with one download active), but with two laptops with Azureus in the same wireless network the initial spike is high enough to kill the router in 2-3 minutes, force it to reboot and then do it all over again, and again, and again …

No I am thinking whether to spend around 50€ for another router or try to work with Azureus folks to try to fix this.

Popularity: 33% [?]

There is one particular aspect of Microsoft’s document format going through ISO process that I had a hard time to find a counter-argument against: “Well it is better to have multiple open formats, isn’t it?”. Last night when I was presenting in a Document Freedom Day event, I finally got one. When multiple standards exist in the same area, two options can exist:

1. Cooperative standards - providing similar functionality in different ways that can coexist in the same medium without a significant overhead. An example of this are the credit cards - they have multiple ways that the card information can be transferred to the bank: visual writing down of the data, imprint, magnetic strip and the chip. Any of these ways can be used and all of the are equally valid;
2. Conflicting standards - providing the same functionality in incompatible ways. The example here is the power adaptors - the form of the power plug is an open and public standard (AFAIK), but so many of them exist in different places that it creates all sorts of problems both for companies producing electronic equipment and for frequent travellers.

What Microsoft proposes is much worse than the power plug mess, because the power plug standards are at least restricted by region. But imagine going to another country and having to be ready that you hotel could have any one of 8 power plug types at random. And while electricity is rather easy to convert looselesly, complex documents are far more .. complex. It is like having to buy 8 different power bricks for each of your electrical devices to be prepared for all possible voltages, frequencies, waveforms, polarities and whatnot.

Having more than one ISO document standard in a horrifying idea for any programmer that will have to ever work on software that will need to support both of them - twice the work for no etra benefit whatsoever.

If Microsoft can prove (in technical terms) that their file formats present capabilities that Open Document can not, then the only sane way to implement those in the ISO format is to add those capabilities as an extension of the existing Open Document format and not to reinvent the wheel.

Microsoft also has a habit of pointing to JPEG and PNG being “competing”. Well, they are not - those are complimentary standards, because JPEG is designed for compression of photographic details while PNG is designed for the compression of bitmapped vector images. Something like DejaVu could be seen as a superset of the two formats.

So, if you ever need an argument against more standards - remember about the power plugs.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I was consulting a small company with a couple Debian servers the other day and I found that they did not have some packages that I expected to be there. Now thinking about it on every server that I install or take over the first thing I do is install a bunch of packages, such as: sudo, mc, wajig, localepurge and a bunch of others that I can’t remember at the first moment, but that I re-discover each time I find them missing. I assume that other people have discovered other great non-standard tools that I am missing out on.

What software do other people consider standard on their servers?

Popularity: 19% [?]

A few days ago I got myself an Asus EEEPC to experiment with it being in a role of a small server and a tiny internet kiosk. I installed Debian on it, but the process was not for the feint of heart, that’s for sure. First of all the d-i font was messed up and all the menus overflowed the screen making it very hard to select anything. Additionally it seems very strange to me that there was a special d-i image made for EEEPC, but that image did not include built-in support for the computers wired or wireless network interfaces. That made my day highly problematic as I do not have an easy way to get to the Internet via a wired connection and the provided d-i image did not have enough files on it to finish the base install without networking.
This again made me think that the approach Ubuntu took is more favorable in most situations - have the install image boot a mostly functional system (it does not have to be X even) and then install from there. It actually feels more flexible than using the highly restricted d-i environment.
I will be looking to make a Debian rescue image designed for the EEEPC that you could dd onto a USB key, boot from and have a minimal Debian system with working ethernet, wifi and some basic rescue tools and a way to install a basic Debian system as well. That should make it much easier for people to get Debian onto their EEE PCs. I do hope that the Debian EEEPC project will improve as well.

Popularity: 26% [?]

I’ve been there before, but somehow I hoped that HP has come to its senses, so when my girlfriend got a HP Compaq 6715b laptop with a Broadcom wifi card that does not work with the open source driver and randomly crashes under load with ndiswrapper driver, I said - “well, I’ll just get an Intel mini-PCIe wifi card and plug it in”. I should have know better.

While there is no obvious impenetrable error message like on NX6110, the 6715b simply ignores any non-HP wireless cards. They do not show up in lspci and don’t even appear in Vista. I have all the latest drivers and latest BIOS.

I will look a bit for a workaround, possibly along the same lines as before (make a non-HP wifi card look like a HP wifi card), but I really must say - despite all the support for Debian HP has on the server side, I will have to recommend everyone I know to never, ever buy any HP laptops! By having an easy access latch to the WiFi slot they seem to embrace user choice, but in the confines of their BIOS they just cut through the heart of it by only allowing their own cards to be installed and used.

Note: it is possible that the card itself is non-functional, but given the previous experience and some similar messages on the forums about all kinds of other HP laptops .. I wouldn’t bet on that.

I would love to be proven wrong on this or shown a way to either make the non-HP IPW3945 card work or how to make the original Broadcom wifi card work in a stable manner. Currently it causes 4-8 hard lockups a day if the laptop is left acting as a bittorrent seed for a few thousand clients. Now i am just too tired to deal with this reasonably and should rather head for bed.

Popularity: 30% [?]

If you want to use encfs module from FUSE to encrypt some of your files and do not want to go into the command line to mount and unmount that encrypted folder, here is what you do:

Add a line such as this to your /etc/fstab:


encfs#/home/aigarius/.crypt/ /home/aigarius/crypt fuse rw,user,noauto 0 0


Where ‘/home/aigarius/.crypt’ is the folder where you have created an encrypted folder (with “encfs /home/aigarius/.crypt /home/aigarius/crypt” command) and ‘/home/aigarius/crypt’ being the place where you want to mount to see the decrypted files.

After you boot into Gnome, you go to Places->Computer, right-click on ‘crypt’ drive icon and select “Mount”. It will prompt you for the passwrd and mount the folder. Unmounting will disconnect it. Enjoy.

Popularity: 20% [?]

My girlfriend is annoyed with USA timekeeping. More particularly with the way Sunday is the first day of the week in the Gnome calendar applet that shows up when you click on the time applet. After some searching I am unable to find how to change that short of changing the source code.

Help me, lazyweb!

Edit: yes it was meant to be Sunday and not Saturday.

Popularity: 23% [?]