Miscellaneous

I just disabled trackbacks for articles older than one month in this blog (they just get rejected instead moderated), after I received 41 trackback spams last night. Maybe there are better ways to handle trackback spam in Serendipity, but I don't think trackbacks for older articles are so important that it's worth to spend my time on it.

Last week the Berkeley DB used by the Jabber server of our local linux user group crashed again. It was the second database crash in six months. But this time even db_recover was unable to repair the database, so I did what I had on my TODO list since the first crash: Migrate to ejabberd, which I was already using on two other Jabber servers.

Meanwhile the service and all transports are back up again. There's only one visible change compared with the old setup, for security reasons connecting through port 5222 now requires starttls.

I was looking for a XMPP/Jabber implementation for Python since a while, but wasn't happy with the available libraries. Yesterday in the evening I stumbled across xmpp4r, a XMPP/Jabber librabry for Ruby, which looked like it has everything I need. And indeed, after a few hours playing around with xmpp4r, I decided to use Ruby for this special project.

While talking about the ICQ transport on jabber.lusc.de... if you're still using ICQ, please take a look at their Acceptable Use Policy, it contains an important clause:

You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it.

I don't think it's necessary to comment this.

During the last two weeks I spent some time to add a few new features to jabber.lusc.de, the Jabber server of our local Linux User Group. The new features are ICQ, AIM, MSN and IRC transports and a file transfer proxy. Just use the discover service function of your Jabber client to use them.

Still on my TODO list are pubsub, pyrss, a user directory and multi user chats.

If you upgraded to slrn 0.9.8.1pl1-22 or newer and now realize that you see question marks instead diacritical chars (e.g. german umlauts) in the subject and/or in the authors name when looking at the article overview, please read #406210 before filing yet another bugreport. This is not a bug in slrn, but a bug in the newsreader which was used to write the corresponding article.

Update: 0.9.8.1pl1-25 contains a workaround for this problem, see NEWS.Debian.gz for details.

Using SLES10 as a mailserver is a bad idea, especially when you want to use virtual users and domains with postfix, courier and mysql. Why? SLES10 ships neither a courier-authlib-mysql package, nor a postfix-mysql package, nor a maildrop package. I really wonder what the 'E' in SLES stands for...

Thanks to my new employer (for those who didn't notice, I left Teamix and work for IP Exchange since September), this server has a native IPv6 connection since I moved it to it's new colocation about two weeks ago.

Why does SuSE still ship configuration files in /usr/lib? Here is the answer.

Yesterday evening, shortly after I fired up a build of gcc-4.1 on one of my alphas to test a patch from Falk Hueffner, the filesystem was mounted read-only and the kernel barfed:

scsi(0): Resetting Cmnd=0xfffffc000b449b80, Handle=0x0000000000000202, action=0x2
scsi(0:0:0:0): Queueing device reset command.

Looks like either the harddisk or the SCSI controller is dying... :-/


ipx12345:~ # time rug install mutt
Waking up ZMD...
ERROR: 'mutt' is not available, or is fully up-to-date.

real    9m35.167s
user    0m10.013s
sys     0m0.540s



ipx12345:~ # time rug install screen
Resolving Dependencies...

The following packages will be installed:
  screen 4.0.2-60 (http://mirror/ftp.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/suse/)

Transaction...
                                                                                             100%
Transaction Finished

real    3m32.491s
user    0m5.116s
sys     0m0.144s


Last week Thomas Schultz added a patch from Felix Schueller which adds iconv support for incoming and outgoing postings to the slrn cvs repository. I already prepared an updated package for experimental and uploaded it. Use it with care, there are known bugs.

And I thought, using an editor as IRC client is strange... but this is even more strange.


tretkowski@kyllikki:~/repos/pkg-ion3% darcs pull
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Pulling from "rollcage.inittab.de:repos/pkg-ion3"...
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Fri Jan 27 13:50:07 CET 2006 Norbert Tretkowski <norbert@tretkowski.de>
* Copy ion3-dev lintian override file.
Shall I pull this patch? (1/1) [ynWvpxqadjk], or ? for help: y
Finished pulling and applying.