BenV's notes

Windows and Ninite

So after the Adobe Cancer experience yesterday I still had to install a bunch of other things for the helpless windows user.
After I was done with most of that (of course, the good stuff always comes too late) I ran into this tool: Ninite.
They call it “The easiest way to get apps”. Well, from the screenshots it certainly looks that way. No cruft like toolbars and updaters and junk installed, just the application. (continue reading…)

They’ve managed to piss me off once more.
I had to do a windows reinstall (XP of course) for some idiots that fubar-ed their machine, so after the usual install, 5 million windows updates, service packs, reboots and firefox install I figured I should probably install flash for them.
How hard can it be to install Adobe Flash? (continue reading…)

How incredibly stupid can they possibly get… like a dumb user that keeps running virus infected “naked hot girls!!!” screensavers, they keep adding DRM.
And now we’ve reached the point where they expect you to stay connected constantly to play a single player game.
Aahahahaha. Bye bye Ubisoft, may the pirates laugh at you and dance on your grave.
Alas for Settlers 7.. could have been an interesting game.

However, I expect them to revert their plans when enough badmouthing hits the news and make them “only” half as bad as they currently are.
We’ll see.

So every once in a while you have to mess around a bit with new stuff. Window managers for example.
I’m quite happy with Fluxbox (been using it since I started with linux), but it’s nice to see something new once in a while. Especially since development on Fluxbox is kind of …. dead. Well, not completely, but there’s just not much to be added without totally changing the thing.
My brother mentioned Awesome a few weeks ago, and during HAR last year it was also mentioned as something that I might like.
Which means it’s time to check it out! (continue reading…)

I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine why anyone would use cmake as an autoconf alternative. (continue reading…)

Yesterday Slackware64-current gave me Firefox 3.6. So far I’m happy to note that this broke more than half my addons, but that’s to be expected with that addon-hell.
Wonder when they clean up that act and start including required stuff like firebug. Anyway, a while ago I built google gears for firefox 3.5. Since Google is too incompetent to provide a 64 bit linux version, you have to do it yourself, which I did. However, with the Firefox 3.6 upgrade this addon also broke. (continue reading…)

After a few days of waiting on a reply on the forums I got tired of waiting. So my possible solutions: Either switch to a newer glibc (which probably comes down to upgrading to slackware 13, not in the mood for that) or move the teamspeak server to a new domU. Since it couldn’t possible *cough* be kernel related, I figured the problem had to be in glibc somewhere. (continue reading…)

A week or two ago I installed the latest teamspeak 3 beta on our server to check out how well it works these days.
I was impressed by how far they have come. Back when I still played WoW we always used Ventrilo version 2. We never ugpraded to the new 3 version (even though thats illegal according to them….) because version 3 had a 10 slot limitation on the free server version. Of course they don’t tell you how much a license for version 3 costs, unless you want to host more than 1000 slots. Paying for Ventrilo would be fine, but paying for 1000 slots? Ha. And yeah, there are hosts that specialize in that (and make you pay through the nose for it), but we wanted to host it ourselves.

Anyway, Teamspeak 3 has a much better view of the world. They offer a -free- personal (that means non commercial!) non-profit license. This means if you’re a guild you can obtain a license
from them for free over here which allows you to host your own Teamspeak 3 server with 10 virtual servers and 512 slots. That’s more like it!
And if you ARE commercial, their licenses are well defined and very affordable. For instance a 1 year license for 25 slots is only $25. Compare that to Ventrilo 2 providers that ask you E10,- per month. Ha.
Oh, did I mention that they DO have a linux client? And windows and mac of course…. including the 64 bit versions. Lovely

However, as it’s still in beta I run into some problems every now and then. Today I was asked to upgade the b12 server to the latest. So I tried.
Result:

…. welcome back my friend…. BOOST …. always the fucking same with that piece of rubbish.
However, to be fair this could very well be a “learn to code” problem by teamspeak, but still… it’s always boost the brings the curses.
So what is it complaining now? I don’t have epoll? Seriously? Let’s see about that.

So that’s not it.
The forum has this thread suggesting it might be glibc that’s too old.
However, this particular slackware 11 server has glibc version 2.3.6, which should be old enough (according to that forum thread at least). Just in case it’s not I’ll try upgrading that later.
In the meanwhile I created a thread on this problem on the forums, let’s see what they suggest. I’ll put updates here.

Today I was scripting up some commandline tools and found myself in need of doing some MySQL commands on the commandline.
Or to be more specific: I wanted to create a database and grant some permissions. So I figured “Admin stuff… let’s try mysqladmin“. (continue reading…)

A few weeks ago I implemented a FastCGI setup for a magento website. (details Here). That site also runs google analytics.
Here’s what analytics had to show about the speed of the site:

FastCGI speedup graph

Google analytics also notes that “this site is faster than 83% of the sites”, whatever that means. Oh well, we’re happy.

This morning I noticed my torrent daemon (aka Deluge) was down. (continue reading…)

As I love to tinker around with apache/php installations to get them to work as fast as possible while still keeping some security in tact, I found myself messing around with FastCGI today. But why?! Here’s why:
On this machine I previously installed suPhP to get php scripts to run as a normal unix user instead of user apache (so users have the ability to completely lock out their database settings etc for other users on that machine). However, to speed stuff up on a magento webshop I wanted to have a PHP opcode cache running (I tried out APC). (continue reading…)

Here we go again, wordpress has an update to version 2.9 this time.

New features include “automatic database optimization support”, which you can enable by putting define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true); in your wp-config.php file.
The rest you’ll run into yourself, it’s a ton of new stuff and fixes but some cool stuff like a built-in image editor and easier embedding of your favorite youtube junk.

Needless to say the automatic upgrade failed AGAIN for me:

Fortunately, my previous patch still works. Get it here if you want.

After patching that single line the automagic upgrade ended with: WordPress upgraded successfully. Jeeeej.
However, they still left the timeout at 60 seconds in the newer version

Failers. They deserve a 56k6 modem for their servers so they can find out about these issues themselves

Don’t ask me why, but for some greasemonkey script that I wanted to run in Firefox I needed Google Gears.
So I went to the gears site with Firefox, and it told me that it needed to install some plugin. Yeah, whatever.
I hit the big Install Gears button, completely ignoring the tiny and almost invisible for my eyes 32-bit OS (64-bit not supported) notice below it.
Needless to say it went on to download a 3.5Mb package, started some popups and other junk after which it notified me of my grave mistake.
Aha. So for some reason Google is too incompetent to work with 64 bits software…. even microsoft can deal with that these days guys, geesh. (continue reading…)

Time to continue our adventure into Sieve land from yesterday.

Yesterday the result was that Sieve scripts could be put in place by the system administrator and they work. Needless to say that’s cumbersome and we want users to handle it themselves.
To avoid all possible issues with opening up FTP / DAV / whatever, the clowns at Dovecot and the ietf have decided to create a new protocol for it. Currently still a draft, but it will be an official protocol called ManageSieve. (continue reading…)

Let’s start with a problem description. We start out with a -working- mailer:
A pretty simple qmail/vpopmail installation with Courier IMAP and the pop3d that comes with qmail. This is administered by users with the qmailadmin frontend and allows for creation of mailboxes and forwards by postmasters. Together with spamdyke and spamassassin it works pretty well. So why change it?

The problem: First of all, Courier is a piece of shit. The various parts of it have broken in various ways over the years (authd hanging for no apparent reason or suddenly eating a ton of memory, stuff like that). Not only that, but they decided that vpopmail wasn’t worth supporting anymore, so their latest release of courier-authlib simply doesn’t handle vpopmail anymore. (don’t ask me why, can’t find any details on it).
Second of all, it would be cool to give our users the ability to create their own custom mail filters on our server. Stuff that you can do in thunderbird or through webmail, so they can setup their mailbox filters and vacation messages and whatever without me having to help them. (well…. we’ll see about that). Needless to say we could do that by giving them access to the .qmail files, but those are way out of their league. Not only that, it would be a security nightmare. So to solve that, we’re trying the Sieve disaster. I mean language… or something. (continue reading…)

So with all the hype around google’s upcoming Chrome OS, I was getting curious what it was all about.
Linux based web stuff, open source… yeah, that’s all cute, but just words. So today the option arrived to see what we’re dealing with. These clowns have a download page where you can download a virtual machine image to check out a snapshot of Chrome OS. (continue reading…)

A while ago a friend hinted me of this printer. We were both looking for a somewhat affordable network laser printer, color preferred. However, I was wondering if this thing would work properly under linux. (continue reading…)

This game has been released a couple of days ago, and if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate and such games (like Neverwinter Nights) I’m sure you’ll like this game. So when we heard it was released we immediately moved our computers together so we could play a game just like how we spent countless hours playing Baldur’s Gate. (continue reading…)

Every now and then I like to leech something, and it happens to be that using bittorrent has a lot to offer in terms of availability and usability. However, as usual I have my demands. My demands for a torrent program are basically:

• It has to run on Slackware
• It has to run as a daemon (in daemontools if possible)
• There has to be an easy way to control and view the status, like a web based GUI.

(continue reading…)

Yesterday evening I was curiously looking at some tcpdump traffic that went through our dom0 of Xenbro. There seemed to be a ton of weird DNS requests. And with weird I mean spamlike domains, like familiesfirstmedical.com. After wondering for a bit I realized they were coming from our service domU that runs mail for the junerules.com domain. (continue reading…)

That IS what it stands for, right?
Or maybe the last P is for Programs….. oh no, silly me. It’s for PEOPLE. Now I get it.
Anyway, the quote of the day:

configure: error: There is something wrong. Please check config.log for more information.

(continue reading…)

Yeah, I bet you didn’t know that. You’re so stupid. (continue reading…)

Especially force, that’s what we need.
Because somehow Opera still hasn’t bothered to implement SOCKS proxy support. And if you would like to use… oh I don’t know… tor… or maybe simple ssh proxying support to test stuff from an external IP instead of from inside your local network, or for whatever your reason might be (working around your corperate firewall? )…. you have to use Firefox. Because they DO have SOCKS support. Strange. A case to bash Opera (continue reading…)

Version 2.8.5 is here! Some important security hardening going on, fixing a trackback DoS attack (or so they claim). Some more details over here. As usualy the automatic update failed for me, so once again the fix for this error:

Either patch it manually:

• Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
• The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.