Well, apparently it’s almost impossible these days.
First I went to some site that needed flash, which I pretty much why I thought of it in the first place. Firefox asks “Hey man, you need a plugin for this page, want me to fix it?”.
So I told it “Amuse me”. Firefox responded with “I’m sorry, I automatically failed”. Nothing new there.
“Do you want to do a manual install?”. Sure thing.
So it sent me to the adobe flash installation page: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

The first big scary thing you see if the DEFAULT ENABLED Mcafee installation which most users will ignore.
So when you disable that checkbox and hit the “Agree to get abused and give all your children to Adobe as slaves” button, it gives you a big “THANK YOU!” page.
This gives you a nice pop-up in firefox, asking you to allow the installation of a an addon.
At first I was positive “Well, that’s easier than I expected”. How wrong I was.

The addon it tried to install was none other than “Adobe DLM”. Short for “Adobe Destroyer of Local Machine”. I DO NOT WANT THAT PIECE OF GARBAGE, I ONLY WANT THAT FSC!@#$(#4#%$
Needless to say I was very annoyed. Not only that, but on that page (including the previous) I couldn’t find a normal download link to the flash installer.
Fine fine, I’ll use the cancer DLM, after which I’ll uninstall it.

Next problem: the DLM can’t download files!
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but the only thing the DLM can get right is installing that fscking piece of rubbish from McafayeeEEEEEEE (never mind that I already have a decent FREE virus scanner). On the flash download it fails to check the integrity of the file. Repeatedly.

Adobe Cancer

For those of you in the same situation, there’s still a place to get the normal installer:
As described in this article from adobe, you can download it HERE (other browser flash installer for windows).

Now please die adobe. Take your habbrokrat reader with you, and your picture crap, and flash, and all the rubbish software you create these days. What’s next, Adobe Anti-virus? Just stick to photoshop, thanks.

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.

First stop: the installation on Slackware 64. (you may skip this if you run some flavor of Pokemon OS ).

As I mentioned in my previous rant, the developers of Awesome have decided that they’re complete and utter idiots. That is, they forced me through CMake, which usually fills me with anger. Fortunately they didn’t include Boost in the mix, so after some cursing it can be installed.
In order to get Awesome 3.4.3 installed, I needed to:

• Upgrade my xcb-proto to version 1.6 ** (source)
• Upgrade my libxcb to version 1.5 ** (source)
• Upgrade my xcb-util to version 0.3.6 ** (source)
• Install libstartup-notification version 0.10 or higher ** (source)
• Install libxdg-basedir version 1.0.2 or higher ** (source)
• Install libev ** (source)
• ** indicates that the whole ‘wget, tar, configure, make, makepkg’ riddle works fine with my slackbuild.pl script

That was pretty easy with slackbuild.pl. Note that you might have to recompile cairo to enable xcb support (it’s a configure flag that used to be disabled on Slackware). Mine didn’t need it though.
Next is building Awesome. If you don’t want Awesome scattered all over /usr/local/share you might want to give CMake some hints. See my previous rant about setting this permanently.
Today I used this:

After that, ‘make’ should compile it properly, and you can use slackbuild.pl to make a package out of it. (or make DESTDIR=bla, makepkg yadieyada).

Second stop: Testing Awesome

I still like to type startx every time I booted my machine, so for me the thing to change was the file ~/.xinitrc.
Something like:

Kill your X and startx, and voila! The first error.

Awesome's first error!

First impression: looks clean.
A tiny menu bar / panel / whatever you want to call it that shows the running programs and the date.
The default shortcut to do everything seems to be the windows button, or mod4. I’m not sure if I like this, since alt was already cramping my thumb every now and then
However, this can be changed, so no big deal. mod4-enter starts a console. Good. It’s fast too!
Hitting mod4-enter a few times looks like this:

Awesome after hitting mod4-enter a bunch of times

Needless to say there are tons of things to try out and customize, but you might want to check out this guide for starting out with awesome. I did

Maybe it will even replace Fluxbox…. we’ll see. Time to mess around with it some more.
Keep up the good work Awesome developers…. and switch to autoconf!

(put it in a file in /etc/profile.d to have it loaded all the time).
Unfortunately this won’t save you from all CMake builds. For instance I just tried to build Awesome (messing around with a new window manager can be fun sometimes) but when I saw that they use CMake I almost aborted instantly. To make the installation use proper paths you would have to add this to the CMAKE_ARGS for instance:

Ridiculous.

Anyhow, if I still feel like messing around it once it finally compiles I might talk about it later.

Did you know that CMake also fails to create an uninstall target…. gah.
Because oh dear, it might remove useful files from the system. NO SHIT SHERLOCK, WHY DO YOU THINK I WOULD WANT TO RUN AN UNINSTALL?!?!?!
Fortunately it does support DESTDIR, so we can handle the uninstall through our package managers. Phew.

Last time I explained in detail the steps needed to build it on slackware 64. So I’ll only summarize and tell you about the new problems I ran into.
First, install libnotify. The new xpcom stuff seems to require it.

How I love my slackbuild sometimes

Next, get the FF3.6 source and build the xpcom stuff:

Finally, symlink the newly built xpcom tools over the google provided ones and build gears. I assume you can check out the google gears sources yourself, otherwise see my previous rant on this.

If you’re wondering about the CPPFLAGS, if you skip this the thing will break down completely. THAT’s why intelligent people use a configure script for that shit. Too difficult for google I suppose.

Anyhow, now we still want a nice .xpi installer.

Which barfs because some slut thought it also needed ff3(1) junk. Which I don’t agree with. So note that this breaks the .xpi for firefox ancient edition.

Tada. Installer at bin-opt/installers/gears-linux-x86_64-opt-0.5.34.0.xpi.

So I wondered how to figure out the problem. Digging around in libc gave some insight:

Say what? Will always fail? That explains…. but why?!
Apparently there is another libc library that normally gets used that DOES have the proper epoll support, it is in /lib/tls . Weren’t it that the tls dir was renamed because Xen complained about it, so it doesn’t get used.

No warnings. However, a quick workaround to test this conclusion with LD_PRELOAD:

Ha, that’s more like it. Yeah, it fails to start because I still have the beta 12 running in another dir, but it doesn’t give the error anymore.

Googling a bit to find some details on Slackware 11 and glibc gave me a discussion somewhere on a mailinglist that mentioned that the glibc in /lib was compiled against
2.4 headers, while the /lib/tls version was compiled against 2.6 headers. That explains!
In other words, time to recompile glibc against the proper headers.
However, that task is a bit too cumbersome to post here. Long story short: it took me half the day to meddle with the glibc.Slackbuild script (and get the right kernel headers installed, etc) and I finally have a new glibc which works.

So, if you’re looking for a quick fix: use the LD_PRELOAD trick. For the more daring amongst you: upgrade your glibc — but beware that this is a DANGEROUS thing to do since it will break many things. Of course you could also upgrade to Slackware 13 and be done with it

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.

Anyway, I reminded myself of a way better tool for scripting around SQL. A friend of mine wrote this and he calls it dteq.
I’ve used it before and will probably do so again (not for grants though, mysql will do for that) in my scripts that do SQL stuff.
Why? Templates! Good for auto-generating a users/passwords file and stuff like that.

Very handy. Back to scripting.

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.

Interesting. Suddenly I reminded myself of some Slackware updates that probably installed a new version of boost yesterday, replacing my own version.

Oh well, since it seems to be the libtorrent part that’s bugging, I might as well upgrade it:

(or you could have used slackbuild.pl, it’s easier )

After upgrading the package, deluge starts again. Wheee.

First of all, the size. Obviously Internet exploder fails in epic ways regarding favicon.ico.
Basically, if it isn’t a microsoft ico format with a 16×16 (or maybe 32×32) icon in it, IE fails.
So what we do is create a nice ico file that contains all relevant sizes (which are 64×64, 48×48, 32×32 and 16×16).
Oh, let’s not forget about the color depth, this should be either 8-bit or 24-bit. (although it wouldn’t surprise me if 24 bits fails on IE).
Note that Firefox and Opera aren’t that picky, they even accept PNG and JPEG files these days. Even better, they claim to support APNG files… could be interesting.

Anyway, the creation. Gimp yourself a nice set of images for the specified format, or if you’re lazy simply create 1 image and convert it with imagemagick.
P.S. Details on convert can be found here, wonderful tool.

Now that we’ve got those images fixed, I usually use png2ico to convert the to the final ico file.

Obviously we first need to compile and install that tool. Skip this if you already have it

Now for the creation of the favicon.ico

Put it in your webroot and you can add a header tag to make it official (although most browsers request favicon.ico whether you specify it or not).

NOTE:
If you add the 16×16 icon, be aware that it might not look as fancy as you’d think. Most browsers will display this size by default though, so if your 16×16 version looks
like crap, simply don’t include it.

Anyway, suphp is still nice to have for simple sites that don’t get many hits or don’t need to be very fast. Therefore I wanted to have both options available. Here’s how.
I started out with the Slackware packages for php and apache, but soon found both to be inadequate. Php lacked some modules that some site wanted, and apache didn’t even bring suexec along.
However, the slackware layout is good enough so I altered the slackbuild script a bit and built my own apache. You might need to install some packages as dependencies though. For instance I didn’t have ‘expat’ and ‘db44′ installed.

Now edit the slackbuild file so it compiles with your compile flags. My changes were:
1. Changed VERSION to 2.2.14 (was 2.2.13)
2. Added these to the configure flags (to enable suexec) around line 103:

Compile and install it. Note that the suexec part requires root permissions, so I did this as root.

PHP and suPHP

Note that since php is a pleuris product it will ignore the DESTDIR variable that usually works for creating a package. If you want a nice package for php, consider using the slackware build script instead. (I was too lazy for it this time). Next suPHP:

That went smooth. PHP could learn something from this. Now we still need to configure suphp. To do this we create 2 files and alter httpd.conf a little.
First suphp.conf:

Personally I left most to default, but I did change the log path and the docroot.
Next we need to enable it in apache, but to keep module stuff in their own section we put this in mod_suphp.conf which we include in the httpd.conf.

That should be enough. Now for sites that you want to enable suphp, simply add a few lines to their vhost config like this:

Now you should have a working suPHP installation (provided that you restarted apache etc).
If something fails, check the logs, especially suphp.log and of course the apache error_log.

FastCGI

To get this running I loosely followed this blog post. It pretty much worked like Brandon explained, after I recompiled my apache for suexec support that is. Thus a summary:

Install FastCGI

Now for the magic part, enabling it in a vhost.
First we need a php wrapper script:

Note the -d apc.shm_size=64 option. This specific option is to set the cache size for APC, but this way you can give php custom settings per vhost. Neat huh? If you want to give this vhost its own php.ini you can add this to the script:

PHP will check for a php.ini in that dir. Make sure to check the permissions on these dirs though, especially on the wrapper script. Your users might do stuff you don’t want if you let them alter these things.
Finally to enable FastCGI per vhost, add something to the vhost configuration like this (make sure to disable suphp on that vhost!):

Restart apache and you should see stuff like this in the process list:

APC

Now for some speedup. Let’s see apachebench on that magento vhost without APC and FastCGI:

As you can see it takes more than a second to get the page to load. Well, 0.8s mean across all, but 2.5s per request.
Let’s install APC:

Restart apache and voila. Time for a new benchmark.

W000t…. that’s a lot quicker, almost 4 times as fast. Nice

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

So not wanting to give up immediately I decided to google for it a bit, and noticed that the Pokemon OS guys do have a gears version for their 64 bit Karmic and Lucid releases. Well, that must mean it’s possible! I took a quick look at their .deb file and didn’t see anything shocking, so I decided to try and build gears from svn.

Command not found? huh?

It’s right there…. ohhh, probably a 32 bit issue.

So maybe THAT’s why they’re incompetent (read: lazy). Let’s see if we can get xipdl in a way that doesn’t need ancient 32 bit rubbish
Mozilla has some stuff about that tool here. However, actually finding the download link for the source of that tool is challenging.
I’ll save you the trouble, you can get it here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/source/. Be aware, it’s a whopping 45MB download. That’s right, in the firefox sources.
Let’s see if it compiles:

After this we finally have a working xpidl executable that is actually 64 bits.

Back to GEARS! The easiest way I could determine to get it to work was replacing their xipdl with our new version. I’m sure there’s an easier way through setting an environment variable or something, but I got tired of their Makefile includes and third party libraries before I could work that out. The easy way:

Ghoooh, idiots. Maybe they should invest in a configure script or something. After messing with environment variables for a while, I decided that their Makefiles are about as kanker as their effort of giving us a 64 bit package in the first place. I would expect to be able to set CXXFLAGS="-include /usr/include/stdlib.h", but that was completely ignored. CPPFLAGS did seem to work however. Since another file missed another include, I added that as well.

RAAAH, this keeps getting better and better. This fix was simple enough, simply edit that header file and remove all occurances of ‘NS_OUTPARAM’, whatever the heck that might be:

Aha, they request warnings to be error by default. Seems like running it with MODE=opt fixes this issue.

GODQ@#($*@#*^%^& STUPID … *tries to contain the daemon within* … *RAAAGE*. Another missing include…. *sigh*

Needless to say building an optimized version goes to another directory, so now you need to do the above NS_OUTPARAM thing again on the interfaces.h file in the bin-opt dir.
Anyway, finally it compiled after messing with it for hours. Hopefully this log contains some useful info for you

Last but not least, we still need to make an installer for it:

Finally we end up with a bin-opt/installers/gears-linux-x86_64-opt-0.5.34.0.xpi that we can install in firefox. Phew.

Now what was I doing that needed gears anyway? … can’t remember. Feh.

Gears and Firefox 3.5.5 on Slackware 64

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.

For Dovecot 1.2 it is still required to patch dovecot and then install the managesieve service. Feeling adventurous I’m going for the bleeding edge version again
First the patch:

After upgrading to the new dovecot package we still have to put the managesieve service into place. Which we have to build first.

Install the package and we’re almost done. All that’s left now is some configuration and kicking of services.
As described here the biggest thing we need to do is add managesieve to the protocols line in /etc/dovecot.conf. Like this:

By default this will steal port 2000 for incoming managesieve connections, but you can change that and a few other things in the dovecot.conf file if you like. Just add a section like this:

And obviously you need to uncomment and change whatever you want to have broken . I decided to stick to the defaults except for the log string.
After these changes give a good hard kick to your dovecot daemon (since the binary changed with the patch I’m sure a HUP won’t cut it) and see what happens.
Don’t forget to open up the managesieve port (2000 by default) in your firewall!

Let’s see if it works:

Looks good! Time to let users have some fun with molesting their stuff through Sieve
A quick test with the thunderbird sieve addon:

Thunderbird Sieve Plugin 1

Thunderbird Sieve plugin - edit script

Works like a charm. And yeah, those warnings can be ignored, they’re there because of my meddling with scripts yesterday. How should I know it had to be a symlink :-p
(after this session it was indeed a symlink, hitting the ‘active’ button made it so).

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.

Getting rid of Courier is really simple. Simply pull the harddisk out of your server and shake it a few times, then step on it and throw it out of the window (while still standing on top of it of course). If you did it properly you should now be wondering why the hell you follow instructions without thinking. However, if you do have a brain, you might want to shutdown the courier-imap* and pop* services and remove them from your disk. Tada.
Personally I replaced the pop, imap and auth services with Dovecot. If you’re running qmail like you’re supposed to this is pretty easy. Check out this page by John Simpson for details on that. Instructions for vpopmail included. (thanks again John!)

Now for the interesting part. Getting Sieve to work. I decided to get the latest shiny version from their hg repository, but feel free to take the latest stable version instead.

Now we still need to enable it. Make sure your /etc/dovecot.conf has a section like this:

Easy. This should make the /usr/libexec/dovecot/deliver program able to verify the account information of a requested user against the vpopmail database and it instructs the local delivery part to use the sieve plugin. (which I’ve configured some paths for).
However, next part literally took me hours to figure out. I wanted to use the Dovecot LDA only for my test email account. So I created a .qmail file for my user – according to their wiki :

According to their wiki, this should be the correct way to invoke the deliver program. So I send a test mail to benv-test@benv.junerules.com …. nothing happens. Nothing in logs, nothing.
Oh that’s a lie, the error log says:

Of course it doesn’t work yet, I haven’t put a sieve filter in place yet. So I put a simple reject filter there so I know it works when it does
This is the contents of a file ~vpopmail/domains/benv.junerules.com/benv/.sieve/dovecot.sieve. Corresponding with the dovecot.conf plugin settings.

I send another mail. Same stuff in the logs. Mhm… more debugging would be great guys. I have no idea if it loads a sieve filter, from what directory or if it does anything at all! GRRRr.
After a lot of cursing and throwing with plants and cats and hammers, I went through the mailing archives from the John’s qmail-patch list and found a snippet from someone else that set up something similar. Apparently the way to invoke the deliver program is different. Because I use the qmail extension addresses, benv-test@benv.junerules.com was given as user. However, vpopmail only knows about benv@benv.junerules.com, so it failed. Blegh.
So for now I decided to use the solution offered by the mailinglist:

A little explanation on the environment variables. Normally when I send a message to benv-test@benv.junerules.com they look like this:

The DTLINE rewrite isn’t strictly necessary but looks a bit nicer in the logs. However, the EXT@USER part should not contain all the extensions since they won’t resolve to a vpopmail user.
With the rewritten .qmail file I send another test email. Here’s the log:

Woohoo, it rejected!
So Sieve works. Next thing to do is to get ManageSieve up and running and test it with thunderbird and some sieve addons
But that’s a rant for later, my eyes are collapsing.

Javascript wtf in firebug

For reasons unknown to us, this piece of code acts very strange. First it evaluates selected == index which it considered to be false. (outlined in green in the image) So far so good. However, what it does next is a real WTF.
Can someone explain to us why this code runs INTO the if statement?
The if (false) { whatever } part?
Personally I’d expect the code to jump over the if block, since that’s what if statement are for. Skipping code unless the evaluation is true.
Or explained a lot better on wikipedia. However, what happens is that whatever is actually executed.

So after carefully inspecting this piece of code and saying obscene stuff, minds boggled, trying to find that hidden semicolon or whatever, we couldn’t find it. Maybe a browser bug? But both Opera (version 10.10) and Firefox (version 3.5.5) failed in the same way.
Maybe some magic with jQuery? Whatever it is, it remains a mystery to us.

I went to their page and found out they require a login for no apparent reason. I tried bugmenot and decided that bugmenot is a piece of shit since they refuse to carry logins for almost all sites I try to use it for. Getting angry with the login I registered with a throwaway email account (if you don’t have one, consider using something like mailinator) and downloaded their image. Wonder why they don’t use a torrent for it… oh well, their problem.
And since I’m still fed up with their login garbage, HERE’S A DIRECT LINK TO THE CHROME OS IMAGE. It will probably break real soon, but wget on this link worked on a completely different machine, so you might get lucky for now.

Once the image completed downloading and after installing the latest version (3.0.12 today) of VirtualBox, I created a new machine. Obviously I couldn’t be bothered to read whatever the clowns of gdtd had to say (if anything) about creating a virtual machine and the required settings for that, so I went with “It’s Linux, enable all possible acceleration and NX flags and whatnot and put it on a SATA controller, for network use a bridge, and here’s 1024MB of memory”. Surprisingly it worked right away.
After only a few seconds this screen came up:

Chrome OS Login screen

Chrome OS after login

Clicking on the leftmost tab thingy gives us some more toys for now:

Took a while to load over here though, but that could be because of a slow internet connection.
All these ‘applications’ are actually shortcuts to websites. Google Docs etc are nothing new, and the Chess application is simply a piece of flash. Oh well, at least that means flash works.

Conclusion:
It’s a fun toy for now, quick to boot but not so great if you have a slow internet connection. Other than that it’s not really useful yet, but that’s to be expected from an early build like this.
Maybe I’ll try it on some real iron later. Since Google is targetting it at netbooks etc I might give it a shot on our EEE PC
It will be interesting to see how this OS turns out when they finally release it.

The instructions for ubuntu were a good starting point. I’ll summarize:

1. Download these drivers for the FX DocuPrint C525A.
2. Unzip and use alien to convert the package to a .deb, and install it.
   benv@error:/tmp$ unzip dpc525a_linux_.0.0.tar.zip; alien Fuji_Xerox-DocuPrint_C525_A_AP-1.0-1.i386.rpm; dpkg -i fuji-xerox-docuprint-c525-a-ap_1.0-2_i386.deb
3. Go to http://localhost:631/admin and add a new network printer.
4. Select a protocol (either Jetdirect or LPD) and enter the IP address of the printer
5. Select the PPD file you installed from the .deb archive (/usr/share/cups/model/FujiXerox/en/FX_DocuPrint_C525_A_AP.ppd) or select the driver through the menu system
6. In cups go set the default printer options and make sure to set the optional tray module to 250 Sheet Feeder.

Issues I ran into

That’s all pretty default as the linked installation guide says. However, in my first attempt I used the JetDirect protocol on port 9100 (using an IP address, not a hostname). While this worked, everything was dirt slow. Going to the options page of a print dialog took almost a minute!
After some messing around I decided to try other protocols. The other protocol that worked was LPD/LPR. But not only did it work, but it’s fast! Click *BAF* Bluescreen1!!… uhh, I mean, print dialog
Anyway, instead of using an URI like socket://192.168.1.123:9100 simply use lpd://192.168.1.123:515. Let me repeat this so that people who skip over this post also read it: Use lpd://192.168.1.123:515 instead of socket://blabla, this works a lot faster!.

Once I got the printer in CUPS I also ran into the issue that the printer would respond but give an error on the printer itself. This was because I forgot to properly select the Tray Module, make sure it’s set to the 250 Feeder like in this picture:

Xerox 6125N tray module selection

Another issue, cups doesn’t seem to give all options for this printer in their default options dialog. This is bad, because you need to change the default paper source. Default it’s set to the bypass tray, which means you have to manually insert the paper when printing. Very annoying. However, using other tools give you more options. Using system-config-printer for instance gives the chance to change it. Make sure you put it to auto or tray 1 like this:

Xerox 6125N Paper source selection

When you finally manage to get those options set, the printer works perfectly under linux.
Have fun printing!

Oh yeah, here’s a slackware package in case you don’t want to mess with aliens and pokemon os
Slackware package for Xerox Phaser 6125N cups driver - Version 1.0 - SHA: 5f8b6478f93a6484d4834990448b152fb10d9cdd

And now, back to my Glenlivet… mmmmmmm

Glenlivet 18 year old

Dragon Age and Wine

First I decided to check it if the game would run in Wine. The appdb has some info that doesn’t sound too terrible, and since the latest git builds sometimes give better results I needed to test no matter what the test results said. So I built the latest git version of wine (which should be version 1.1.33 by now, but since they had WineConf it’s still labeled 1.1.32) and fired up the installer in a new prefix. I always install games in their own wine prefix so they don’t bug eachother with dlls and hacks needed to get them running. The game seems to need a few hacks from winetricks, specifically gecko and vcrun2005. Without the gecko component the Dotnet part of the installer crashed for me (it takes forever to install though). You might also want to install physx, since the game uses that as well. (and a lot of ppl had the physx installer fail through wine, good thing it’s in winetricks now). Finally I also installed d3dx9 just to be sure, since it needs DirectX to run.

Installing using the Installer

The installer should now come up, like this.

Dragon Age - Installer (wine)

Dragon Age Installer Adminerror (wine)

Dragon Age Installer under wine (2)

Dragon Age – Manual installation

Since the installer is pretty much a bitch, and I noticed it didn’t do much except for bitch and wine and unrar some packages, I tried to see if I could get it to run without needing the installer. Here goes! (you need the rar utility for this).
I created a new wine prefix and installed the required winetricks parts as above, but instead of running the installer I did this:

After this you should have a directory listing that looks very much like after using the official installer. The only worry I had was the game looking for registry entries, but it seems like those aren’t needed that much. (read, for me it started without asking stuff).
In fact, what baffles me is: this way it doesn’t even ask about a CD key. Very very interesting. However, I did need to use a no-cd patch to get it to run under wine (for both installation methods). Meh, nothing new there.

Running it under wine

Starting up the game will probably give you a black screen that does nothing until you click/bash your keyboard a few times. This is because the intro movies don’t work under wine at the moment.
However, you can disable those movies in the .INI file:

(or use a text editor).

Dragon Age Title Screen (wine)

For me the flickering was basically gone (during gameplay at least) when I reduced the graphics detail to “low”. (I could have Framebuffer effects enabled and also texture details set to high).
What helps is basically lowering the graphics settings:

• Lower the resolution
• Don’t run fullscreen

Anyway, that makes it playable under wine.

BenV’s opinion on the game

It’s a very worthy game to play if you’re into Baldur’s gate etc. The graphics are very nice compared to what I’m used to (especially under windows ) and the interface works properly.
The intro story is completely different depending on the race, class, and background (noble or commoner) you pick. I played as a casteless dwarf rogue and had the intro story living in the slums of the city, my sister being a whore trying to marry her way up to the noble class, while thieving and robbing my way around myself. Needless I butchered my way through the intro, cheating my boss out of some money and fighting a lot.
On the other hand my girlfriend started out as a human mage and had a lot less fighting and a lot more blabla and stuff from dreamworlds etc and could talk her way through a big part of the intro. (of course she also ran into the necessary fights, if it were only to teach the combat system of the game).
Speaking of which, the combat system is also well done. The party can be told to hold ground and they will actually stay there instead of having your archers/mages being raped in the front. Stealthing around and backstabbing also works very nicely

No LAN games

Anyway, I’m sure you can read enough reviews about the game that explain all that in much more detail.
But the one thing that is very very bad is the lack of multiplayer LAN games.
If there’s one thing we loved about Baldur’s Gate it was the ability to play the game with 3 computers all controlling the very same party, all players with their own character.
So why is it not in this game? I’ve seen a lot of BS on slashdot and other sites where the basic arguments are:

• It would take too much time to implement and therefore reduce the quality of the single player game
• It’s not possible without having a linear story / it would need a completely different story not geared to “the one”
• UI must be more complex for multiplayer
• I’m a fucking retard

Well, I think:

• Adding multiplayer would require LAN support which is extra code (but they already need that pretty much because of the DLC garbage). However, it’s not THAT MUCH more. A few screens to setup a game and deal with permissions together with a few tweaks to deal with synchronisation. That’s all. Peanuts compared to the rest of the game.
• See Baldur’s Gate, we -loved- that kind of multiplayer. Doesn’t need a different story at all, exactly the same story was excellent.
• The UI can be exactly the same, worked fine for Baldur’s Gate. There are however a few details that are nice to have when doing a multiplayer game, like people still being able to walk around and do stuff while others talk to NPCs, but no major overhauls.
• Yes, you are.

I’m sure most people who scream “NO” to the multiplayer support (and I wonder why) assume that big changes are needed to the game to make it multiplayer. Perhaps they have the wrong idea about what kind of multiplayer makes us happy.
However, since EA games got involved (see the whole DLC fiasco) there’s little hope that it’ll be changed.
Pity. Anyway, it’s still a very nice game. Time to play!

• 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.

A few years ago I used mldonkey for it. Worked fine, but their torrent support was getting worse and worse. (basically they didn’t update their product for ages, and when they did it didn’t improve much). It had a web interface that worked nicely though, and it was easy to control. Another cute thing was that it also supported other protocols that I still used back then like Edonkey.

However, at some point I got fed up with it and searched for a better product. Especially since I didn’t care about the other protocols anymore I could search for a pure torrent client. Many of them only support running as a client with some kind of fancy GUI… not good for running on our server. But then I found Rtorrent.
While it was a bitch to run on my server since it demanded to run in a terminal (and therefore refused to run under daemontools) — a problem I made bearable by running it in screen under a new user that was accessible through ssh keys — it worked very nicely. I had it running with a web interface called wtorrent.
But then yesterday I got very needy and demanded that it used IPv6 to connect to others. Sadly it fails to do that. Don’t know if it’s a configuration problem or simply because the author doesn’t have enough time to fix it. I tried the latest development builds and compiling it with –enable-ipv6, but it doesn’t seem to listen. In other words: time for a new client.

So after some searching I ran into Deluge. It seems to fulfill all my requirements, so I decided to give it a shot. A few bonus points are immediately earned because Deluge uses the more commonly used libtorrent, not to be confused by the other libtorrent that rtorrent uses. The bonus points are because the rasterbar libtorrent has plugin support among things and in general is a bit more up to date on the whole torrent protocol as far as I can tell. (makes you wonder why rtorrent doesn’t use it).
Time for installation!
Slackbuild had no problems chewing through libtorrent and spitting out a nice slackware package. However, Deluge is built in python so some manual work to get a package from it. (I seriously need to get some time to work on slackbuild to support this stuff).

Voila, a nice package. After installing it, and creating a new user for it, it was time to see if it would work in daemontools.
However, I didn’t check any dependencies so trying to run the deluge program failed:

Meh, xdg… fine. Fortunately python has easy_install as perl has cpan, so I installed a bunch of required things for it (like twisted, pyopenssl, chardet, mako). For xdg easy_install didn’t work though, so I handed it to easy_install using this url. After this it started up, even in daemontools! Another success.
For those who are interested, my daemontools run file looks like this:

You obviously need to adjust the paths and interface and whatnot to your own ideals
After starting it for the first time it created some configuration and state files and is now waiting for connections. Woohoo.

So now, how do we connect to it? Seems like the web interface isn’t running yet. This is because deluge uses a client/server model where the daemon does
all the work, but it doesn’t deal with the interface side. So to run the web interface we have to start a separate deluge process. Let’s also put that in daemontools:

After firing this one up you can connect using your browser on port 8112. Default password is deluge. After logging in you get the connection manager which shows the running daemon that you started up earlier. (or at least, that’s what it did here):

Deluge Connection Manager

Cry me a river

Stolen from Wayfinder’s blog – check it out, it has many more funny face pics, not to mention great music!

As a side story, since we moved our junerules.com domain from our very kind previous host to our own Xenbro machine, the amount of spam we receive plummeted. Apparently not because they stopped spamming on the domain though. I’m sure our previous host is glad he doesn’t have to deal with all the attention and traffic anymore .
The main reason for this spam drop seems to be spamdyke. I’m sure you have your own opinion about how nice or acceptable it is to run graylisting and reverse DNS checking and all that, but my opinion is that if you have a badly configured mailserver (read: windows zombie machine) you can die in a fire for all I care. Fix your mailserver and then I’ll accept your mail.
Too bad for the few properly configured mailservers out there that now have to try twice to get through the graylisting…. then again, it’s a small price to pay.

Anyway, to get rid of assholes trying to bruteforce their way into my ssh daemon I run fail2ban, which lets you try to get in a few times and then blocks your IP for a week. That’s how much I like them. So I decided to add a new filter to fail2ban, which gets rid of asshole mailservers that will fail their next attempts anyway. Those are the mailservers that spamdyke denies with the following errors:

• DENIED_RDNS_MISSING – in other words, the mailserver doesn’t have a reverse DNS entry. You can’t be serious, that has to be a zombie.
• DENIED_IP_IN_CC_RDNS – means the mailserver probably has a dynamic IP address from their local ISP. Mostly zombies. Sorry for the 2 mailservers our there that are legitimate that mail like this. I’ll whitelist you whenever I see complaints.
• DENIED_RDNS_RESOLVE – means the reverse DNS does not resolve to the IP address it connected from. Get lost. However, this one should be used with care, because if the DNS resolver fails for whatever reason spamdyke will also issue this. So make a real good consideration if you want to use this in the fail2ban filter.

Since above failures will keep coming back if they retry, I block these asshole servers for a week.
Here’s my /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/spamdyke.conf:
Fail2ban spamdyke filter - Version 0.1 - SHA: 1ee23545d87998d0314d2683eb8f2a099cf9fca9

Simply put it in /etc/fail2ban/filter.d and edit /etc/fail2ban/jail.local and add something like this:

Then reload fail2ban:

After enabling it about 12 hours ago, this is the result:

Simply amazing. We’ll end up blocking half the internet. Oh well, it’s only the bad part of internet anyway.

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

Gee, that’s really…. helpful. OF COURSE THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG, I’M TRYING TO INSTALL PHP!!!!
But let’s not get angry yet, I’m sure it’ll throw more tantrums at us while we try to chunk it together.
In case you’re wondering, I’m trying to configure php so it has curl support. Apparently php’s configure has decided for me that in order to have curl support, it also requires ldap.

“Then don’t configure it with ldap support!”
I didn’t. In fact, I explicity told it NOT to support ldap. –without-ldap. Doesn’t matter. Somehow it picked up the requirement to include ldap in the tests. After some searching I found out that the real source for this problem is the curl-config script:

Note the -lldap there. So basically this is Slackware’s fault. Meh.

Solution 1:
* Get rid of ldap in curl. This involves recompiling curl from source.
Solution 2: Probably the easiest way is to hack curl-config

Solution 3:
* Install the openldap-client package. However, now you have ldap on your system which you probably don’t use on a webserver.

I went for solution 1, recompiling it myself from the slackware sources:

After upgrading the curl package with this build it worked for me without the ldap nonsense.

Well, I’ll give you the details: it’s missing an assembler. You can find out about this if you actually bother to read the config.log file in the srclib/apr dir:

The simple fix: install an assembler. Slackware has the binutils package for that.
slackpkg install binutils, done.

So Opera doesn’t suck^Wsocks, huh.
However, since I personally don’t like Firefox enough to recommend people using it over Opera, we’ll have to get socks support using an external program. There are several options for doing this. Bascially what we need is some method to catch the calls to the socket system call and converts them to go through the socks proxy. My expert google skills have found me 3 solutions:

• Tsocks
• Proxychains
• Kernel Socks Bouncer

From this list TSocks sounds like the easiest one, even though it hasn’t been updated in _years_. Means either it works or it’s impossible to get to work these days . Anyway, slackbuild didn’t have any issues building me a tsocks package. Let’s see if it works!
First we create a little tsocks.conf file:

This tells tsocks that we want to access the proxy for everything that isn’t in our LAN (192.168.1.0/24) using a server on 127.0.0.1 on port 1234. It’s picky about the whitespace around the ‘=’ in the config though, don’t forget them. Now we have to enable tsocks, either by running the application by using the tsocks wrapper script, or by letting tsocks put itself in the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. I chose the latter:

*BZZZT* WRONG! That’s strike 1 for being an ancient (not updated for more than 5 years) piece of junk. I’m running a 64 bit OS, that means the library is inside /usr/lib64. Fine, we patch it:

If you’re getting errors about that /usr/lib/libtsocks.so not being found, unset your LD_PRELOAD variable
Good, time for a test!

It works! In order to make Opera use it simply start it like that:

NEXT! ProxyChains
“Q: Why use it in the first place? Tsocks works!”
A: Because it’s always good to have more than 1 tool available to use. Because its latest version is not 7 years old (only 2 *cough*). Because it has other features. Because it’s fun to test shit

Chalk down another success for slackbuild. Next, the configuration file. /etc/proxychains.conf is automagically installed, so we only have to adapt it if we choose to. The default config should work for tor, but we want it for my SSH proxy. I changed the default proxy at the end of the file to be ’socks5 127.0.0.1 1234′. Note that it has the cool features to use several proxies (hence the name I suppose) in a chain (randomly if wanted) and also to proxy DNS. Anyway, the test (after unsettings the LD_PRELOAD variable!):

Cool, another working solution. Note how it proxied the DNS request for us. Also I find this one easier to use than tsocks.

Finally there’s this Kernel Socks Bouncer module, but it’s too much of a hassle for me to run kernel modules for a simple socks proxy. Let me know if it’s great if you used it
Thanks for reading folks!

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.

Sun Oct 4 00:17:50 CDT 2009
ap/mysql-5.1.39-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
This bumps the version of the shared libraries to .so.16.0.0.

Yeah, that’s all great, but for me this broke on several of my machines. Not because of the expected recompiles (after all, a new library, so stuff like vpopmail might need a recompile, I’m fine with that), but because MySQL failed to handle my configuration files on those machines. You see, I like my data more than I like MySQL, and prefer their InnoDB tables above MyISAM for that matter (yeah yeah, it’s still MySQL, whatever). Means I have some configuration lines about InnoDB in my /etc/my.cnf, like this:

So after the upgrade of the package, mysql came down as fast as it came up:

Aha… so, I need to run some kind of upgrade tool called mysql_upgrade, good that they told me about that in advance. (Thanks Slackware guys )
So we try running the upgrade tool:

Yeah… mysql didn’t quite come up because of the configuration issues, right. You’d hope an upgrade tool would fix that too, but oh well, guess we’ll have to do that ourselves.
In fact, let’s read what they have to say about it themselves. Upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1.
Let’s see…. backup, check… read this document… (gee, wonder what we’re doing now)… read about changes… yeah yeah, cute, plugin api, whatever… run the upgrade tool… yeah that failed. If this bla, if that bla… and then the magic:

If problems occur, such as that the new mysqld server does not start or that you cannot connect without a password, verify that you do not have an old my.cnf file from your previous installation.

Guess I do huh. So yeah, obviously MySQL starts fine whenever you empty the config file. But what about my old config settings? Are they still needed?
Apparently you can now choose betwen running InnoDB native or as a plugin. Guess I’ll stick to native.
Now for the fun part. Checking the options to put in the my.cnf file. Huh, the option that it barfed about still exists… how can this be? This document tells us how to set up InnoDB… nothing new in there. Conclusion: Slackware fucked up. (that is, you can probably run it as a plugin, but I don’t want it as a plugin! At least tell me about this in the Changelog guys!)
In case -you- want to run it as a plugin, the page I linked describes it. Basically you have to put this in your /etc/my.cnf:

Checking the mysql.Slackbuild script from slackware64-current confirms my suspicions:

Fine. So I change the mysql.Slackbuild:

Ironically, running the patched mysql.Slackbuild killed my running mysqld because of the famous OOM killer. Guess 1GB of memory isn’t enough for both compiling AND running MySQL these days :p
Anyway, it gave my a package, and after upgrading to it I finally had InnoDB back the way I wanted. Yeah, my old configuration file works fine again too.

****UPDATE****
Seems like the guys at slackware fixed it, from their Changelog:

So what things are missing in the vanilla Qmail 1.03 package?

• IPv6 support
• A ton of antispam features like SPF, DomainKeys, MFCHECK, etc
• Authentication support
• Filter support for stuff like Spamassassin, ClamAV, /dev/null
• Virtual domains

Probably more, but these are things I care about. Some of these points are not entirely true, for instance you could add filter support by mangling the .qmail files for all users, but these are things you want centralized so all things have to pass the filter, not for only a few accounts.
In order to fix the missing features I use a few things.
First of all: John M. Simpson’s combined patch. This patch fixes more than half of the list. It’s a collection of smaller patches all rolled together in a nice patch that cleanly applies to qmail 1.0.3 as supplied by D.J. Bernstein. Thanks a lot to Mr Simpson! His pages also have a lot of notes and scripts on how to get qmail up and running, and how to run the services from daemontools. You might want to check them out.
Next, I use vpopmail to handle the virtual domains problem. Together with qmailadmin they make the virtual domains thing very easy.

Anyway, that is all old stuff. New stuff is having Qmail working correctly using IPv6.
It’s easy to get it up and running, basically just compile qmail as usual and patch ucspi-tcp using Fefe’s IPv6 patch. Make a few new qmail-smtp services for the IPv6 enabled addressses and go!
While this does work for receiving mail, it fails for a few things in the combined patch – like SPF checking.
You will run into stuff like:

Obviously this is a lie, but at least it’s dealt with gracefully. However, you want SPF checking for the IPv6 address!
Fortunately, Brandon Turner has patched this with a patch that applies to Qmail 1.0.3 when already patched with John’s patch. Enough patches for you?
After recompiling and restarting your services you will see that it works now. Thanks Brandon!

What does Slackware have to do with this?
Nothing, I just like the way it runs the qmail services :-p

However, when compiling like this both v5.5 and v5.4.2.1 of net-snmp gave me:

Google was as useless as ever (only 1 thread about this who solved it installing some ancient version of lmsensors or something), so I had to dick around to get this to work.
First I wondered what was different about my server at home and Xenbro. 32 vs 64 bits obviously, but otherwise… not that much.
So I tried upgrading libtool from version 1.5 to 2.2.6a. Recompile wasted another 5 minutes of my life.
Then I read something about ucd-snmp/lmSensors vs ucd-snmp/lmsensorsMib. I have no idea what this is supposed to do, but I’d be better of not having read about it. Both options won’t compile because of the same compilation error above.

Finally after hours of cursing I installed lm_sensors 2.10 to /usr/local and hinted net-snmp to compile using -L/usr/local/lib, doing that made it it compile. You just have to push it a bit when it breaks… (and yes, I found out some older lm_sensors stuff was still lingering around on that home server). It kinda went like this:

Amazing enough it even works now. You’d expect it to crash and barf all over the place…. or at least I did.

Now finally back to what I wanted to do: SENSOR GRAPHS in Cacti!!!
A pretty much excellent description on how to do this is here: Eric A. Hall’s on Cacti and lmsensor readings.
His steps summarized:

1. Get net-snmp to return sensor readings
2. Download Cacti-netsnmp-lmsensors.tar.gz which I mirrored here: Cacti lmsensors - Version 0.8 - SHA: f9c3f8b4d172cce9e63fa3fa0c0bbf7a58c17e7c
3. Untar, put files in right place, import templates in Cacti
4. Add data queries and graphs to hosts

For more details check out his page, it has a detailed explanation. Thanks for building it Eric!

Then there’s disk stats. Half the links on the forums are hard to find or dead, so I’ll just take my own downloads. Easier for the next time I need it
This is the original thread for snmpdiskio with the templates in here. Then there’s a missing download for a copy/paste version of this post. I’ll save the copy/pasting for you, just leech it if you need it (only for when your net-snmp fails!):
snmpdiskio - Version 0.9.6 - SHA: 0a4229c35a879240ea4c5128adbd1cb60b745757
Finally there’s a script that fetches the stuff here. Put that script in resource/snmp_queries/partition.xml
Import the two templates from the snmpdiskio-v0.9.4 tarball.
Next add the new snmp query (“Get Device I/O”) to your device (Devices -> $yourdevice -> at bottom select it from the pulldown menu). Create graphs for this device -> have fun.

I was going to add some images, but I’m too tired now. Hope you can get it to work, good luck

Easy. Make sure ip forwarding is enabled though (check /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward, it should be 1) , and for IPv6 forwarding you need to enable /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding. Note that you must enable it on the -all- directory, only enabling it on a single interface won’t do what you’d expect (this took me a while to figure out ).
After requesting both a set of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses I stumbled upon Xen’s /etc/xen/scripts/vif-route script which doesn’t do anything with IPv6! Since I do want my IPv6 space routed to my domU (and probably to the others as well) I decided to molest the script a little. My modification assumes you provide both the IPv4 address and IPv6 range you want to use on the domU. Here’s the diff:
xen 3.4 vif-route patch to support IPv6 - Version - SHA: e82dd95b8725c326121603fbd6168b3f88f5b881
Note that my patch adds some extra logging as well, you can hack that out yourself if it annoys you.
If patching is too difficult for you, here’s the patched vif-route script:
Patched Xen 3.4.1 vif-route to support IPv6 - Version - SHA: 29a28f4a8cff787233c1163435c86730fd5346fa

Don’t forget to put your IP addresses in your domU’s config file:

After patching vif-route and enabling the script in xend-config.sxp you still have to set routes to the dom0 in your domU. Example for dom0 with 192.168.1.1 and 1234::1

Now it works (unless you did something stupid of course)

Through a mobile phone!

Lotjuh has an LG Chocolate (of which the battery is dying), and with it came a little cable that connects the device to a USB port. So hopefully I plugged it into my laptop. The one that runs pokemon os. dmesg showed some gibberish, but it was only about some kind of mass storage device it found. Bah.
The phone showed a screen with:

If you use modem, select “Connectivity-modem”

However, it didn’t respond to any keypresses. After disconnecting it again and going through the menu I finally found the holy grail that I was looking for. It was filled with candy. And modem. It was hidden at Menu -> Settings -> Connectivity -> Modem -> YES YES YES!!!
Connecting it again now gave cdc_acm 3-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device. Woohoo!
But how do we use such a thing? And since I’m not bringing this laptop, how do we use it on slackware?

Google was more helpful this time and showed me wvdial. Sounds easy, so I got the wvstreams library and ran it through slackbuild. However, it complained about not finding Qt and readline. Qt was fixed by installing the official qt3 package and sourcing /etc/profile.d/qt.sh, but readline failed because of this:

This problem was quickly fixed by adding the ncurses library to the LIBS environment variable like this:

This time around configure didn’t complain anymore and we continued to build the package.
That also failed:

No surprise that it couldn’t find libdus there. Not only that, it’s the wrong library, I don’t have the thing statically linked.
Here’s a patch that suppsedly fixes it:
wvstreams 4.6 dbus patch - Version - SHA: d64703eb27da74348ac0e745c498138c78650f5c
You’d expect it to work now, but ha! It doesn’t. Somehow it fails to set DBUS_LIBDIR to /usr/lib (or /usr/lib64 if you have a 64 bit version of slackware), so help him with it and it’ll work:

Now it should compile fine after you run configure again (I used slackbuild of course) and you’ll have the wvstreams package. (it even worked on 64 bit!)

Next the wvdial tool was pulled through slackbuild.
However, this thing doesn’t even include configure, only a Makefile. So edit the Makefile to change the paths and use make to compile.
Or take my packages if you trust me for not formatting your harddisk and rootkitting your mom:
32 bit slackware 13 package:
wvdial 32 bit slackware 13 package - Version - SHA: c19693808861373fa403ea5e9caf427c2cc64924
64 bit slackware 13 package:
wvdial slackware 13 (i386) package - Version 1.60 - SHA: 19d67b45ca26542adc7967725483266415710ff6

Then finally, time to test the mobile connection!
First for the configuration of the modem, run wvdialconf and it will write a config file for you to /etc/wvdial.conf.

Next, edit the configuration file and change the Phone, User, and Password line to reflect your account that you got from your ISP. When that’s done you can finally try to dial up!

Woohoo, it logged in! At this point wvdial will be stuck until you want to disconnect (CTRL-C or kill).
Have fun paying for your expensive slow as dirt dial-up internet. But hopefully it will be good enough for me to check mail and play Billy this weekend

Traffic graph

Disk I/O

HDD temperature

Why make these graphs? Because you can. Because they can show you gradual changes that you normally wouldn’t notice because the change per day is only very little. Because they’re fancy. Because they can give an indication on how hot stuff runs. Because they can kill your mother while you sleep. Because they got all the legendary items that you’ll never have. Tons of reasons.
But mainly because they’re pretty

Fileserver in the barn

These days there are plenty of options, but back the option that I liked best was write some scripts that hack together a bunch of rrdtool commands and run those from cron every 5 minutes. For those who don’t know rrdtool, RRDtool is a neat tool that creates round robin databases that you can feed data into based on an interval of your choosing. After feeding it information you can pull graphs out of it as shown in the top images with a ton of options.
Hacking these scripts together was fun the first time, but after a while it gets tedious. Especially when you lose the scripts to a harddisk crash or have to rewrite them because of different output etc. So what some people do is use a tool that takes data from a source (still a script in most cases, but very tiny scripts) and stashes it into a rrdtool database for them. Some of them even generate the graphs for you with a nice little (web)interface.

So after losing the entire fileserver after moving (guess it didn’t like being removed from the barn) I checked out several tools.

• MRTG is well known for making those router datatraffic graphs. People (ab)use it for generating tons of other graphs as well these days. Nice and simple if you want to generate those data traffic graphs, but if you want a tool that is a little more versatile you probably do not want MRTG. It’s cool though, and made by the same author as RRDtool.
• Munin is a bigger project aimed at monitoring pretty much everything. There’s a ton of plugins for this beast that do just that. However, when playing around with it I found out that it also sucked a ton of CPU out of my machine while generating the graphs every time. It has a CGI mode where it’s supposed to only generate those when requested, but I couldn’t get it working (dead image links and everything). Cute toy, but it’s still very rough around the edges. Too much for my liking, so I ditched it after toying with it for a few months.
• Then we have Cacti, the tool I still use today. You can read more about it below.
• Of course there are also a ton of commercial solutions for this, but I don’t like commercial stuff. I’ve heard a few good things about ZenOSS though… but I can’t get through their commercial site. No info, only marketing bullshit. So no go. (and no sale)

Cacti

Right now I’m back to Cacti again for the pretty graphs solution. Why Cacti?

• Relatively nice web interface to configure and view your data sources, devices to monitor, and of course your graphs
• Comes with a bunch of good default graphs and tools. Templates are good.
• Doesn’t suck the life out of my CPU, although obviously all monitoring solutions waste a bunch of CPU. One reason is that it generates graphs on demand, not every 5 minutes.
• Easy installation (Apache + PHP + MySQL), doesn’t require much on other devices that you want to monitor. (SNMP is enough most of the times)

What sucks about Cacti?

• It can be a bitch to get a graph working. One of the reasons I switched to other products was that I couldn’t get Cacti to work for some very simple graphs, but I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work.
• Interface could use a redesign. It works, but the steps to generate a graph are confusing, there are several ways to do it and half of them don’t work as you’d expect. Maybe some wizards could fix this though.
• Development isn’t dead, but it sure as hell isn’t going anywhere soon. When I quit using Cacti it pretty much looked and worked the same as it does now. That’s been 3 years I think.

Installing Cacti is something you’ll manage yourself. Just trash it in the webdir, point your browser at it and walk through the installation steps. Easy enough. Just make sure your server has net-snmp installed. Now for adding some basic graphs.

The easiest way of generating graphs is by getting your data through SNMP. Most (not too cheap) routers and managed switches respond to it, and on all *nix systems you can get it running. Configuring SNMP can be a little more annoying though, since it’s one of those products that are really confusing to start with. Either walk through snmpconf -g basic_setup to generate your snmpd.conf, or take mine for some defaults. Be sure to close SNMP from outside your network of trust (the internet), they don’t need that access. SNMP is one of those protocols that can’t convince me of being secure. There are 3 versions of it, version 1 basically has no security, version 2 has no security with added layers of obscurity and with version 3 it becomes impossible to operate while having user/password/network combinations of “security”. So I don’t trust it, but that’s what a firewall is for. Since I don’t trust it anyway, I have the configuration pretty much open for reading anything by anyone as long as you can reach it. (I’m sure the SNMP experts disagree with my vision. You can link your tutorials on how to set it up below).
snmpd.conf - Version - SHA: 2312cae8b385d02864094427db75696857d16a32
Oh yeah, another beauty: smnpd and its configuration depend on how it was compiled. So sometimes you do get disk stats, sometimes you don’t. Sensor statistics usually isn’t included, but if you recompile net-snmp and add --with-mib-modules="ucd-snmp/lmSensors" (and your other modules!!!) you at least have a chance of getting it working.
If you want to test or check the information that your snmp daemon returns, try snmpwalk -v1 -c public $YOURHOSTNAME.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s walk through the steps of creating fancy graphs.

0. On your device that you want to make graphs of, install snmpd and put the snmpd.conf in /etc/snmp. Oh, and start snmpd.
1. In the webinterface (as admin), go to Console -> Devices and click add in the upper right corner
2. Fill out information that’s obvious (hostname, description) and pick ucd/net SNMP host for template. I always pick SNMP version 2 (since 3 is so much more hassle to setup) and hit create. It should return Save Successful.If it mentions SNMP error then your snmp daemon could not be reached or returned bad information. Fix it! For pokemon os check out /etc/default/snmpd where they run it only on 127.0.0.1 by default. Either remove it or add your internal network IP address there. If you think it’s fixed OR want some debug info, scroll down to Associated Data Queries and click verbose query (any one will do). Once SNMP information doesn’t moan about errors anymore but gives you some decent info, it’s good.
3. Click Create Graphs for this Host. You should now get a selection screen where you can check boxes of things you want graphs from. If because of your constant failing the SNMP queries failed to get results in the previous step and therefore show you no options in the Data Query boxes, you might have to click the green circle in the blue bar to reload that query. If it’s still empty your snmpd probably doesn’t supply that information.
4. Enable the checkboxes for lines that sound like they would make an interesting graph. CPU, Memory, and Load usually work and if you have interface statistics pick one that has a reasonable IP address. Hit Create when you’ve enabled all checkboxes that sound good.
5. This is enough to let Cacti generate graphs, but you also want to be able to view those graphs. Go to Graph Trees in the left menu and click Default Tree on the rigth pane. Click Add, then for Tree Item Type take Host. Select your newly created device and hit Create. Now go fix yourself a cup of coffee while the graphs are being manufactured.

“But my graphs are empty! Images missing! My head exploding!”
Yeah, I know that feeling. First of all: WAIT! First the graphs have to be generated and collect some data before something appears. This will take a few cycles, and a cycle is 5 minutes. In other words: go fish for half an hour, play a game, do a rain dance. Now there should be pretty graphs!
Like this:

Cacti new graphs

Now go add your other devices!
If you feel like trying out some more advanced stuff, check out some of the scripts/templates on the cacti forums . For instance the Disk IO graphs I can be made with this snmpdiskio package.

Well, enough for now, thanks for reading!

The Settlers 1

The Settlers 2

Anyway, today I decided to try out this free open source clone (that can even import Settlers II maps these days, isn’t that cute?).
So on to the build process. I leeched the SVN version (you know me, official releases are for sissies) and took a look through the source. Waaaah! SCONS…. so much for getting my hopes up. Oh well, let’s see how well it does today.
Running scons started with some notifications about not having optipng and pngrewrite and such (might get those later if I care about those 3 bytes they might shave off, I like the programs though) and then bailed out with this:

To which I told it “No, it is not.”. Guess I’ll have to fix that for you huh? Fine. (yeah, I don’t bother to check requirements these days… they’re all for pokemon OS anyway, I’ll just find out where the train stops by letting it derail).
So I find the SDL_gfx site from google and copy paste the latest release link to slackbuild.pl, which leeches it and starts compiling. Until:

Oh really, asshole… mhm, maybe google did not give me the latest release page. Or maybe SDL_gfx fails. Let’s find out.
So I run into ohloh’s sdl-gfx page, that has a button that made me slightly mad/angry/annoyed/I kill you.
It looks like this: Where’s the download?. Yeah, where’s the fscking download, that’s what -I- want to know. So I follow the link and get the option to

provide your users with downloads in 2 ways

. *RAAAH*. Do I look like a project manager to you? *RAGE*.
The quickest way to fix these kind of issues is usually to forget about official sources and immediately walk to the pokemon OS repositories to get the patches. Funny how they are convenient sometimes. So I run to their latest repository version, fetch their patches and check them out. Huh, no patches for this? After which I finally read the README from the official SDL_gfx source. *hehehe*, maybe I should have done that before I started ranting about this. The README mentions:

To build without MMX code enabled (i.e. PPC or for AMD64 architecture
which is missing pusha/popa):
./configure –disable-mmx

Aha! To be fair, it was kind of hidden in the README after a lot of blabla about stuff that I really don’t care about like what primitives it supports. Normally I do read the INSTALL file, but that contains the boilerplate GPL install file for this source. Makes me wonder why they don’t automagically disable MMX, that’s what configure is for after all. Oh well.
With the –disable-mmx configure switch it compiled and I had a package. Back to Widelands:

What the heck is libgigglez?

libggz wraps many common low-level functions which are often used in C programming.

I see, another Boost wannabe. Or maybe libc. Or glib. You get the point.

The first such group is memory handling, which offers functions such as ggz_strdup() or ggz_malloc(), which resemble their counterparts from libc but are more convenient to use. For instance, ggz_strdup(NULL) returns NULL instead of crashing, and ggz_malloc() includes a reference counter to be used for debugging in combination with ggz_free().

Ahaha, yeah, more convienient. Instead making sure you’re not trying to copy garbage in the first place you could simply copy NULL by using ggz_strdup and have your program end up with empty strings or a not working communication protocol. Much more convenient indeed
And obviously they haven’t heard of the malloc debugging features that are already present in the libc library. Hopefully their debugger is more easy to use and shows more info, but I don’t care for now. I’ll regard this ggz library as “More choice is always better”. Let’s see if it works on slackware64.
I stashed libggz-0.0.14.1.tar.gz through slackbuild, which compiled it without any issues. Good. Scons also wanted ggz-client-libs so I also ran it through slackbuild. Another win for slackbuild.

Back at Widelands scons finally agreed on the libraries and went on, then complained about my TERM variable since it was not equal to “xterm-color” or “dumb”… seriously, why bother checking if you’re going to act retarded anyway. Stick to terminfo/termcap for color support. After that it complained about me not having ‘krazy2′ and

you will submit code with i. a. spelling errors!

Yeah, that’s just what I was planning to do. And they will quake in their boots when looking at my code.

After 5 million more “Checking for errors” checks it went on compiling. Finally it said:

Time to play!

Widelands titlescreen

Widelands ingame (1)

Widelands ingame (2)

While it’s still very much in development, it already is fun to play. You’ll recognize a bunch of stuff from the original game, but Widelands also changed some things like buildings and resource names. For example where Setllers 1 required a Sawmill, Widelands requires a “Wood hardener”. Convenient stuff like watch windows are implemented so you can keep track of a building, roads can be built piece by piece but also in 1 go like in the later Settler games, statistics about buildings and production, and there’s tons more. They included background music and sounds like birds singing etc, which is cute, but it’s a good thing they can be turned off as well.

Widelands with watch window

Widelands ingame story stuff

So far I enjoyed playing the tutorial campaign. However, I haven’t done the combat part yet, I’m quite sure I’ll get bored of the game when I run into that….. but don’t let that stop you!
Go give the game a try, it’s fun

Widelands ingame Statistics

Enough about where you might encounter them, I wanted to talk about having them as a plant.
“Huh, plant?”
Yeah, you know… a greenish thing with leaves and sometimes flowers that stands in the dirt all day trying to catch sunlight and occasionally some water.
“Never heard of it.”
Idiot. Play some more Mario or Spore until you know.

What I did this year was:

• Buy a red bell pepper from the shop (because we needed one for dinner or whatever). Pick any color you like though, except for green, since green ones taste bad
• When preparing it for the food -keep- the part that has all the seeds, and peel off a bunch of them.
• Put those seeds on a saucer and let them dry for a while (a day orso)
• Take a pot, fill it with some nice soil and put the seeds into the soil. (not too deep!)
• Cover the pot with a little foil. (I used a rubber band to keep it in place)
• Put the pot in front of the window so it gets some nice sunlight during the day
• Wait, water the pot a little once every few days

After a week or so something will start to grow in there. Mine looked like this:

Paprika plantje jong

Paprika plantjes

Things I’ve noticed while growing these:

• The plants grow bigger if they have more room to grow. We put one plant in a big pot and two plants in smaller pots. It shows in the size of the plant. For reference, here is one of the smaller ones and the big one. The smaller plant is less than half the size.




• They don’t like a lack of water. Sounds obvious, but when they are out of water for a short period, a day orso, (and the leaves start hanging and looking sad) the fruit will get distorted shapes. (or get dropped completely).
• As they grow bigger the stem hardens so they don’t really need support from sticks or anything. Quite surprising with the big fruit.
• It’s fun to see your own bell pepper hanging on the plant, however, checking it every 5 minutes won’t make it bigger or more colored.

As for the question “How about putting them outside?”, I haven’t tried this year since our garden was not quite ready for stuff like that yet. Also I expect that they dislike the dutch climate and therefore will either die, be sad and give no fruit, or give tiny fruit. I’ll try it next year though, just to see what it does

So…. try it yourself!
Next year I’ll also try growing some Jalapeño peppers, should be pretty much the same process

PCSX-Reloaded about screen

PCSX-Reloaded running Final Fantasy 8

PCSX-Reloaded showing Final Fantasy 8 intro movie

PCSX-Reloaded showing Final Fantasy 8 intro movie (2)

Offtopic: Do you know what really annoys me in games?
UNSKIPPABLE CONTENT!
In this case the intro movie, but it goes for countless of things: cutscenes (either ingame or fmv), “game over” screens, long talks that I don’t give a damn about when I already know what they’re saying… I’m sure there are plenty more examples of this. If you’re developing a game, make sure you don’t force your gamer through this nonsense. Yeah, it’s cute, and we understand that you spent countless of hours wasting your time on fancy graphics, but after the first time I really don’t want to sit through it again. Especially if I just died and am forced through it -again-.

So now that I had it running in the background and could rant while it showed the intro, here’s an ingame shot

PCSX-Reloaded showing Final Fantasy 8 ingame

Keep up the good work PCSX-Reloaded guys!
And fix your homepage.
Things that are currently wrong with it:
* It doesn’t tell me anything ABOUT the product, except for that it’s a fork/branch of PCSX
* It doesn’t have any screenshots (what is it with graphical programs that don’t have screenshots on their website? That’ s a FAIL right there)
* It doesn’t have any information on requirements etc, I just tried to compile it on 64 bit linux because I hoped it would work, not because your site tells me it does.

The issue was on teigetje, you remember the box from the NFS story earlier today.
Starting firefox gave nothing, it was just stuck. Running a strace on it:

The exact reason isn’t known to me, probably NFS related, but this works to get it going:

In other words, this comments out the /lib/libsafe.so.2 line so it wont be loaded anymore using LD_PRELOAD.
“But isn’t that unsafe?”
Pfffrt…. if you insist on firefox you’re probably opening yourself up for Adobe issues anyway. And libsafe doesn’t really make stuff “safe”, it only tries to protect your machine against buffer overflow attacks. So now it’s up to your kernel to ’safe’ you instead.

… huh? What’s taking so long? Our server with issues? That’s unlikely since I still used it 5 minutes earlier. After checking out the NFS server and deciding nothing was wrong with it (or at least, it didn’t look like it) I got fed up with it and went to bed.
Don’t you hate it when stuff stops working just when you’re tired and want to go to sleep? Fortunately for me this is our own internal problem so I could actually do so

Today I decided to go find out what the hell was wrong with it. So again I booted the machine to find out the above kernel messages.
Time for some tcpdump on the nfs server to see if that can shine some light on this situation. (needless to say there were no useful log entries anywhere).
Tcpdump:

Hmm, interesting. The first request seems to “work” (read: it receives an answer) while the rest of the messages are somehow ignored. Wonder why…
Just to make sure I checked the firewall on the server, which should allow pretty much everything:

Well, that seems to be true. Maybe something weird in the mount options? Let’s see the /etc/fstab for the NFS client:

Nothing weird… or is there? After messing around with it for a bit I decided it really wasn’t anything in there.
Time to do a test on a different machine in the network. On my workstation I tried to mount the root path after giving myself permissions and re-exporting the nfs paths:

And there it was, being stuck for what seems to be forever. So in other words: the mount worked, but then it doesn’t respond for the ls command. What… the… fuck.
Mind boggling, while the logs on the nfs server gave no hints at all. (as usual).
To make this even more interesting, there is another export on that same nfs server that most workstation use, called general_stores. (to access the music collection etc).
Can’t remember that being broken…. let’s test:

How can this be?! This mount works fine while the other doesn’t? What the hell is so special about that NFS client’s export?

And then it hit me.

*WHACK*
(ouch)

The window that I had open with the ls -al tmp suddenly decided to work. It gave this listing:

Doh! /proc … of course that’s the problem! That’s why tcpdump showed the “proc” entries!

But why?

Well, recently I moved some disks around and added a ‘crossmnt‘ option in the /etc/exports file on the NFS server.
This option gives the nfs clients the ability to cross mount borders, so for example if I have this on the nfs server:
* /mnt/disk with device /dev/sda1 mounted there
* /mnt/disk/stuff with device /dev/sdb1 mounted there
And then export /mnt/disk and mount it on my nfs client, I can see /mnt/disk/stuff with its contents because of the crossmnt option. Without that option the directory would be empty on nfs clients.

So how does this relate to proc? Well, since proc is “special” it has a ton of special files that nfs can’t deal with and therefore can not export.
Now normally this wouldn’t be an issue, since it shouldn’t be mounted in the first place (the nfs server has its own /proc, the nfs cilent mounts its own version so it only needs a place to mount it on). However, a little earlier my girly friend mounted it “because she had to build E“. Don’t ask.
E again…. always the same…
After unmounting the proc dir and rebooting the NFS client it had no more problems and booted fine.

Conclusion:
NFS can’t deal with proc. Don’t hide a mounted procfs in your nfs exports.
NFS sucks because of stuff like this, but I haven’t found anything better so far. Guess we’ll stick with it for now.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Aion installation on XP in Virtualbox 3.0.6

Aion Updater

Aion GameGuard part`

Aion dies

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)

Anyway, I decided to upgrade my 0.9.15 installation since it still glitches every now and then.
With glitches I mean “The music played by mpd suddenly sounds as if you have quad damage in quake 3 arena and filter out most of the music frequencies”. You know, when you shoot a quad damage rocket through a hallway, that kind of sound. Restarting pulseaudio always fixes this. (I’ve been running into this glitch ever since I started using pulse). Seems to occur randomly though… sometimes when the server is busy, sometimes when switching from a .mod file to a .mp3 file, sometimes just when the lights turn on. You know the kind of glitch.
Other than I kind of enjoy pulseaudio, even though it’s a struggle to get going. It does allow our server to stream to other servers and stuff like that, which is very cute. Oh, and per application volume levels and mixing etc… also good.
This pulseaudio installation runs on our local server — in daemon/server mode — btw, on which we have connected our amplifier and speakers as to enlighten our office/game room/throne chamber.

So for compiling version 0.9.16 the first thing I ran into was libsndfile that was outdated. Version 1.0.17 was too old, so I ran slackbuild on the new libsndfile v1.0.20.tar.gz. Out came a package, upgrade, voila.
Next, I noticed the pulseaudio configure output telling me:

I kinda wondered why, since my system definately runs udev. In config.log we find:

Aha.
New challenge!
Let’s see if we can grab the official slackware udev sources and get them to run a newer package! Today the latest udev is udev version 1.4.6.
So I changed the udev.Slackbuild to pick version 1.4.6

Running udev.Slackbuild now soon brought another set of issues to my attention. The first being that the slackware patch for the rule generator breaks.
Without looking too much at the script I simply manually patched it and created a new diff. Here it is:
rule_generator.diff.gz - Version 0.1 - SHA: cf73f104543ce989fd11b383c440405110e915a2

Running the slackbuild now gave me a new error:

It never takes me long to realize that this error stems from the new kernel I installed earlier. (did I mention that linux 2.6.31 is released? ).
Google brought me this, which informs us about something that should have been in 2.6.31 if you ask me. Fine, we’ll fix it ourselves.
Another slackbuild run takes us past this error and gives us a new udev package. Inspecting the new package I noticed a /libexec directory that shouldn’t be in the root of the package. Meh, probably explains the configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-libdir-name.
So we change the udev.Slackbuild again with some new configure options (stolen from their own INSTALL file):

Btw, can someone explain to me why I always manage to fuck up the file order to diff? (my patches normally come out reversed )
Here’s the complete file if you want it:
udev.Slackbuild - Version 1.4.6 - SHA: d550e146bdf34d1ad0e256936a94b7f9b7d62fd2

So after building and upgrading the package, it even restarted without glitches. Woei.
Back to pulseaudio!

Running configure now correctly informs us about udev being YES. HAL->udev compat still said “no” though. I don’t care for now, let’s see if it works.
My slackbuild.pl ran the make part and showed a ton of “leer coden, mongool” warnings (people should simply disable warnings if they don’t handle them if you ask me).
Regardless of the warnings the compilation completed and I now have a shiny new package.
After upgrading and restarting pulseaudio, there’s even sound coming out of my speakers when I hinted mpd to play. Woei.

No, that has nothing to do with Apple/Mac computers or Media Access Control, it’s
part of the SSH protocol (and others) called Messenge Authentication Code. This blog has a nice explanation: Jan Pechanec on SSH messages.

Funny thing, my brother also had this exact issue with the same kind of laptop. Well…. in his case it was putty failing his connection from a windows machine to this laptop.
The reason? Same as ever, checksum offloading.
You can check if your card does this with the ethtool program:

And the fix for this:

Fixed.

” Wait, what does Pokemon OS have to do with this?”
Well, isn’t that obvious? It’s supposed to magically work, and it doesn’t!
Probably more a kernel thing though… oh well.

Oh. Boost….. that time of the month. If there’s one piece of trash I’ve run into very often on my compilation expeditions…. it’s boost. What a cancer piece of trash that is. You wouldn’t believe the amount of cursing I’ve gone through on my trails through “build from source” land because of boost. It never works, and when it does it’s limping on. They should have called it “blast” instead.
These days boost is in the official slackware repositories. You’d think that would help, since I can’t mess up the paths etc anymore. (compiling boost is another disaster btw, don’t go there unless you like torture). But noo, as usual the programs that use boost (“because we can’t code ™”, or at least, that’s what I think) are so good at coding stuff themselves that they fail the autoconf for it as well. Prutsers. Well, to be honest, if they can’t code it themselves it’s probably smart to use a library that handles it for them….. but boost? :/

Anyway, back to qBitTorrent. Actually, it’s libtorrent-rasterbar that’s failing. Attempt 1, configure with only a prefix and no other options:

WHat?! Do you ahve Boost::System? Yes. I mean no!
… seriously, who comes up with this shit….
So we dig into config.log and find:

Or in other words: nothing we didn’t already know. FUCK.
Time for a trace.

…. /usr/lib? Says who? Not me, that’s for sure. idiots.
In fact, I’m quite sure that it’s in /usr/lib64.

Jup, as expected. Boost is kanker. Since boost doesn’t have the usual pkgconfig issues, we can only conclude that the reason is that either this configure.in was written by a moron, or that
boost supplies invalid tests for finding itself through the autoconf system. I suspect the latter, but that’s just me

In this case the solution is simple, since the configure script has an override option. Wonder why… maybe they ran into boost idiocies before?
The solution:

This runs through configure, it finds the boost garbage and runs through. And guess what? It even compiles!

The gist of this rant: autoconf is pretty useless if you make assumptions that autoconf is supposed to detect. If you write software, don’t assume this stuff, try to detect it.
Also: when it fails, give me an error message that is useful, not some generic error code. “Library not found” vs “library not found because libblabla.so doesn’t exist in /usr/lib”.

About qbittorrent: it’s a cute little torrent client for linux. Especially if you like faily lightweight stuff that does has a gui. The thing I like about those lightweight clients: they’re fast.
This one even has an RSS reader these days…. cute.
Here’s a screenie:

qbittorrent v1.5.0

So qBittorrent: keep up the good work, and get rid of boost

Try this:

Apparently this is caused by the p4-clockmod module.
You know, this piece of junk:

p4-clockmod

The reason?
Well, the ondemand and the conservative governors want to be able to switch to a different speed before their calculations become invalid.
The p4-clockmod thing apparently makes the latency of switching so BIG that it becomes impossible. Or so they think.
Which leaves only the sucky powersave and performance governors. (and of course userspace).

The kernel menuconfig help states:

This driver should be only used in exceptional
circumstances when very low power is needed because it causes severe
slowdowns and noticeable latencies. Normally Speedstep should be used
instead.

Lovely. I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.
*enables CONFIG_X86_ACPI_CPUFREQ instead*

Note that when they’re both compiled in (as opposed to modules) the retarded thing seems to go for the clockmod. Just great.

What. the Fuck.

So, I check the server logs. Nothing.
NOTHING!!!!

Restarted apache. Nothing (surprise!)

Started php myself on index.php. Nothing.
Strace on php to try to figure out what the fuck.
And then I get a glimpse of where it goes wrong when I see it enter a cache dir.
The cache dir has tons of stuff, but most of them look like these:

You get the point.

Fixed. Piece of cancer. Thanks for telling me…

On my laptop this is one of the first things I enabled to make my battery last longer.
Now that we’re going to put a server in a rack where they will bill us depending on the amount of power consumed, this sounds like a welcome thing to have enabled.

Our latest Xen install has Xen 3.4, on which they’ve enabled it by default. Isn’t that nice?
So basically, if your processor etc is good enough to support it, you can mess around with it using the xenpm tool.

For instance we can check the parameters for CPU 0 like this:

As you can see, it’s very much like the whole cpufreq ordeal. It has an ondemand governor, a powersave one, etc. Right now this CPU is using the ondemand governor, which will ramp up the clock when demand increases.
However, since this is a quad core and not a real quad processor machine we can only change the governor for all 4 cores at the same time, not for individual ones. (would be cool to have 1 core burning away power while the rest idles by….).

Anyway, the xenpm tool allows us to monitor and change various aspects of this.
For instance this will do a little benchmark and show the processor states during the benchmark.

As you can see my processor is mostly idle.
State C0 is the most active state, C1 is sleeping with use of the HLT instruction.
Your processor can have many more states, like my laptop which has 4.

Anyway, I put the change to ondemand governor in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local, so let’s hope it helps.

To read some more about the details of this stuff you can check out the Xenpm wiki page.

Simple question:
“Where in /proc can I find a list of IP addresses with corresponding interfaces?”

Simple answer:
Try /proc/net/if_inet6!

… that’s great…. but I really wanted the IPv4 addresses as well.
“/proc/net/if_inet4″ or “/proc/net/if_inet”? Noooooo….

Conclusion: KANKER LINUX!

Obviously I can get the address by calling ‘ip addr show‘, ‘ifconfig‘ or a heap of other solution involving calling ioctl on sockets or using the netlink interface… but seriously, blegh.

The most retarded thing is that pretty much every other statistic about my network devices is there… including active connections and whatnot, but ipv4 addresses? Nooooo….. *RAAH*