BenV's notes

Archive for 2011

Trac notifications

by on Dec.06, 2011, under Software

After setting up a new trac installation (v0.12 stable) I tried to get notifications up and running.
I’ve done this plenty times already so you’d think this should be easy.
Edit the trac/conf/trac.ini, set smtp_enabled=true and make sure the smtp settings and always_cc address make sense.

However, this time it just wouldn’t work for some reason. No errors, nothing in the trac log, but no emails on ticket changes. (continue reading…)

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Diablo 3 Beta and Wine

by on Sep.18, 2011, under Software

This morning my mailbox opened up with an email inviting me to the Diablo 3 Beta. After checking the headers
to make sure it wasn’t another battlenet phishing scam I noticed that the Received headers really came from blizzard.com, and they even signed the mail with a domainkey. Also they didn’t include some link but simply told me to go to battle net and get the goods there.

Diablo 3 Beta Invite

Diablo 3 Beta Invite


Surprisingly they state:

We also invite you to share your Diablo III beta experience with the world! All participants can take screen shots, capture video, and/or publicly disclose information about their beta test experience.

(instead of the usual non-disclosure agreement). So thanks Blizzard and a friend who works there who is no doubt responsible for getting me this invite in the first place 🙂 (continue reading…)

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Qmail + Spamdyke and validrcpto

by on Sep.16, 2011, under Software

Today I decided it was time to get rid of both backscatter and the useless spamfiltering of mail that will bounce anyway.
Obviously I’m not running a vanilla qmail, but a patched version (by John M. Simpson) of Qmail that adds lovely antispam features such as checks for reverse dns records, SPF records, fixes a ton of annoyances and generally makes Qmail a lot nicer.
On top of that I run Spamdyke to apply graylisting for some domains, add blacklists/whitelists and do some more spam checking. (continue reading…)

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IE Fascism

by on Aug.25, 2011, under Software

Obviously dealing with windows isn’t my favorite, but it comes along as part of the job.

Today my boss wanted to view some car site in internet exploder, because “Some sites don’t show properly in Firefox, Internet Explorer does a better job sometimes”. So I was like “You mean garbage sites that still write IE specific html… oh never mind, show it :)”

First he showed his problem in Firefox. As far as I’m concerned it looked like a failing search engine on the site and nothing html related, but whatever. (continue reading…)

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Syslog-ng POLLERR occurred while idle; fd=’NN’

by on Aug.05, 2011, under Software

While trying to craft a custom firewall traffic logger using iptables and syslog-ng to run it through a script I ran into this lovely error.
Syslog-ng is happy to spam 2458734597 lines (or more if you have lots of diskspace ;)) like this into your syslog:

Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='16'
Aug 5 15:11:47 ss syslog-ng[18731]: POLLERR occurred while idle; fd='17'

The reason was -not- that it could not be executed…. the reason was that the program (“test.sh”) quit (or at least closed its input) instantly.
Good to know for next time.

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Humble Bundle part 3

by on Jul.27, 2011, under Software

And here we go again (and again!)!

Get 5 games, donate to charity / the EFF, and support developers at the same time. Or only get the games. Or only support the EFF. Or whatever 😉
Do it now! Humble Bundle 3 is here!

The games this time: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves.

The last one has an interesting graphics style: it looks like it’s all put together from ripped up magazines.

As for weird graphics, the first one features drawings made of crayons… which you draw yourself!
Here’s a video of it:

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

The rest you’ll have to find out for yourself.
Did I mention you get them on Steam / Desura as well for that price? 😉

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Mounting partition in disk image

by on Jul.22, 2011, under Boring

This is already 20 times on google, but I hate searching so here we go another time.
And without tools that slack doesn’t have. Just the normal (s)fdisk etc.

Steps:
1. Figure out start offset for your image. You’re interested in “sectors of X bytes” and the number in the “Start” column for the target partition.

root@images:~$ sfdisk -lu sources.img
unrecognized format - using sectors
Disk sources.img: cannot get geometry

Disk sources.img: 261 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0

Device Boot Start End #sectors Id System
sources.img1 63 4192964 4192902 83 Linux
sources.img2 0 - 0 0 Empty
sources.img3 0 - 0 0 Empty
sources.img4 0 - 0 0 Empty

2. Convert the offset in sectors to bytes by multiplying the two numbers you read from the output.
63 * 512 = 32256
3. Mount with an offset:

root@images:~$ mount -o loop,ro,offset=32256 sources.img /mnt

Done.

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Sony

by on Jul.22, 2011, under Fun, Morons

This just made my day.

First I read on slashdot that their insurer sues them, and personally I hope they win because of Sony’s incompetence regarding their ‘security’. Not that I like insurance companies much, so they can burn as well… which makes this almost perfect. In a lawsuit only the lawyers win, so once those lawyers die in a fire this will be perfect. (continue reading…)

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Need Ventrilo/Teamspeak? Try Mumble!

by on Jun.29, 2011, under Software

Firelands!

Today the 4.2.0 aka Firelands patch was released for World of Warcraft.

First thing to notice: where did all my inventory space go? And why do I have tons of ingame mail? Well, they removed the keyring, making a bunch of keys obsolete (which they send you gold for in return through ingame mail), and the rest of them are stashed in your inventory.
Gee thanks assholes. Guess those keys are really a lot bigger than those 128 axes I carry in my backpacks.

Apparently this is needed to make room for the Dungeon Journal, which shows you the stuff you would normally check Wowwiki etc for, things like boss abilities and drop lists. Don’t know why that requires the key ring to go away, but leave that to Blizzard.
Of course with new content comes a new daily grind guide. Wonder how long I’ll manage to put up with that.
(continue reading…)

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CMake note

by on Jun.17, 2011, under Software

Another note for future reference!

Unfortunately CMake is something I run into way too often these days, and since I can never remember how to tell it to do certain shit, here’s how.
They should give me a configure along with the product.

The equivalent of

./configure --prefix=/usr
=>
export CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr

Destdir seems something CMAKE does understand, so just

export DESTDIR=`pwd`/tmp

and it’ll work just fine.

Finally, for the interactive configuration of something we have:

cmake -i

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