BenV's notes

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

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

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

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

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

(continue reading…)

As I often instruct people to do:

Cry me a river

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

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

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

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

(continue reading…)

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

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

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

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1538482 bytes received

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:

--- wp-admin/includes/file.php.org 2009-10-21 17:03:47.000000000 +0200
+++ wp-admin/includes/file.php 2009-10-21 17:03:06.000000000 +0200
@@ -445,7 +445,7 @@
if ( ! $handle )
return new WP_Error('http_no_file', __('Could not create Temporary file'));

if ( is_wp_error($response) ) {
fclose($handle);

[Download not found]

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

File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.

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.