One of those Infornaut nights

We are sitting at the one Medha right now, had some kebaps earlier and freaking around. After watching some really funny movies the Tob started to learn about C++ Boost, I'm writing this stupid block entry and packaging some programs to RPMs and Medha and Buck read stupid websites that amuses them. No, I won't put any links to such pages here, they are just... no word found...

I hate Spam!

Yesterday the spam mafia led a strike against niemueller.de. It seems that some dull is sending spam mails with niemueller.de as sender adress. The viruses that spoof sending adresses do the rest. I get a mail every 5.5 minutes. And this is not exaggerated! It is true! I got a total of 259 emails yesterday. Only five emails were emails really adressed to myself (not counting mailing lists, they are sorted out before). This means that 98% of these emails were spam. About 10% could be sorted out by SpamAssassin and did not get into my inbox. The rest (227 mails) did. Of these mails about 5% were "real" spam mails. The rest were returning mails send by some stupid "$§()/§$* from my domain. If I like Thunderbird for one feature it's the bayesian filter for my email!

I hope we soon get some kind of efficient spam protection in place. RMX, SPF and DMP look pretty promosing. But we need one standard to get an effective tool against spam and not many. I just hope that these dumb penny-mail (pay a penny for each mail) will not get true! The mentioned protocols should not be too hard to implement, so let's get going!

Upgrading RedHat 8.0 to Fedora Core 1

AS I mentioned earlier here are some technical details about my weekend. This applies only to the time at home and not in Cologne, of course :-)

When I came home our new old printer had arrived. I got an HP LaserJet 1100 from eBay which will work under Linux just fine. So after having a really good square meal I went up and installed the printer. Working, as expected.

But there was this CUPS rant from Eric S. Raymond and I thought I should give CUPS a try. It promised to have some really cool features (the auto-detection is great! more later).

This lead me to another problem... We have several machines at home. The two that I have to care about are the Linux machines. One is the router for our home network (with the really cool name "home"!) and one is mickey, an old PII 300 desktop machine with 256 MB of RAM for my parents. They are both installed with the pretty old RedHat 8.0. So now I got a good reason to change this...

"This will be no problem. Apt will do the job!" I thought. Later I should know how wrong I was. But to make it clear: I could not blame apt or the RPM system for these problems, but just plain old hardware...

I started with mickey (Thought: "If this works out I can safely upgrade the router with a minimum downtime so we are only offline for a short time period"). If course it was hard to tell my brother that he and his friends won't be able to play CS for about two hours where I'd download all packages. After managing this I started. Due to the small hard drive I mounted a NFS export from my notebook to keep the packages. This worked just fine. But what I did not think about: You need more place than the actual packages you will have installed after the upgrade for two reasons: RPM will install packages first and THEN uninstall the old ones. This is good to be crash safe. The second problem is that the space of the files currently being open will not be freed until they are closed. This means that about 100 MB (this is what I got) will be free after rebooting the system (since some essential libraries are part of these opened files this is the only way to really free all the space, but still: Upgrading two major releases up with a downtime of about 5 mins is pretty good..).

So I had to install about 250 of the ~550 packages "by hand" piece by piece. What you should not do: Upgrade glibc to the new one without installing the new elfutils and the new RPM version...

After upgrading ONLY the glibc and direct dependencies I got "Cannot handle file 'libc.so.6' with TLS data" on further RPM calls. Pretty bad... But Google gave me a hint to a solution to this problem. After copying cpio from the notebook I upgraded RPM. Stupid me. I should have read and upgraded RPM and elfutils at once... So I copied the libs (.so files) for the elfutils via NFS from my notebook. This way I could use RPM to install the real elfutils package and the other needed.
About two hours later I had upgraded the machine to Fedora Core 1... Prelink really is a nice thing. It speeds up OpenOffice (startup) a lot!

So after this I decided to go to bed and to upgrade the router next day. Wise decision!

So on Sunday I got up at 11am and started upgrading almost immediately. What I thought: "This should be easy. More than 1.6 gigs of free space will get apt-get upgrade flying!". But starting the download got me back to the real world. With the DSL line it took about two more hours to download (I mounted the apt dir from mickey to this machine, but I forgot that I did not install the updates repo on mickey, but on home I did...). After the download it started installing. Not really fast. I took a shower, walked the dog and when I came back he had about 30% done. Then he came to the isdn4k packages. damnit, I should have remembered! i'm using the ISDN lines for faxing and dialin between home and Aachen for maintenance (for example if DSL is down). I have a Sedlbauer ISA card for this purpose. But there is a bug somewhere in hisax or whereever: You first have to manually remove all ippp+ interfaces and then unload the ISDN modules. Otherwise the machine will get into an endless loop (something about SKB on the console, did not investigate this further) and will not do anything...

So after rebooting I restarted the upgrade. Of course the last installed packages were installed twice (old and new version). After fixing this I continued installing the packages. BUT: The old SCSI drive in the machine was really angry with me giving all this hard work to it and so it stopped working, three times, each time needed a reboot! In the end the update went through and finally I had bot machines upgraded. Phew! (Thanks for this one to Medha and you all can try to guess what was wrong and you will never know...)

So finally I got to the stuff I started all this for: CUPS. I started redhat-config-printer on home and configured the printers (The mentioned HP 1100 on the parallel port and an HP DeskJet 845C via USB). This was as easy as possible. After reading the ESR story I started investigating cupsd.conf... But then I though: Hey, let's try it the "user way"... I went back to the config interface and chose "sharing" for the printers. There I could share the printers. So I did. And after half a minute the printer showed up on mickey without configuring anything! This is pretty cool! So I cannot see why this minimal configuration embarasses ESR that bad...

Wine

Last weekend was pretty good. On Friday I started this weekend visiting Anne in Cologne. We had a really nice dinner and then had... our first bottle of wine :-) Yes, it is true. Until now we did not really consume alcohol (last new year's eve (in Paris) we even forgot sparkling wine, which is a tradition in Germany). But last week we decided that it is about time to give wine a try. We managed to empty half of the bottle on Friday, before we fell asleep (this was at 22:30, so this is way to early for a CS student. This must have been the wine...)...

On saturday I drove home. After enjoying a square meal I started to work on the technical details on the home network (read the following post, which is above this one, logic).

On Sunday I returned to Cologne and Anne and me emptied the rest of the bottle. Whow, we made it! OK, but seems that we will not become real wine lovers or it still will take some time...

On Monday we had to get up at 7am (no, not pm stupid!) My body was not yet ready to resist getting up so early and so we had a nice breakfast. Then we both had to go to work and after getting back to Aachen I discovered that you can do a lot more in one day when getting up early! Should try this more often.

At least tommorrow I will have to get up early as we are doing some tests the the AllemaniACs RoboCup robots at 9 am...

Hopefully this posts suits the Buck to get some personal details of my life online. At least Helgar expressed her appreciation and fixed my typos :-)

What to consider when upgrading to kernel 2.6

Yesterday we upgraded the kernel of a friend's machine and today I upgraded the kernel of my workstation. Since I use Fedora Core 1 I used the RPMs from the Fedora development branch. Installation works just fine but when booting up for the first time you may encounter some problems... The first one is that you need to upgrade the hotplug package to fit the new sysfs. This solved some annoying startup error messages.

Secondly your X probably won't start. At least Buck's and mine didn't. The section for the Mouse0 input device pointed to /dev/psaux. To avoid this there are two possible solutions (basically doing the same thing):

• Change the device to /dev/input/mice or


• create a symbolic link from /dev/mouse to /dev/input/mice and set the device to /dev/mouse

Although the second approach seems rendundant this is what the new system-config-display from Fedora did.

The NVidia drivers still don't work. I think I will try an ATI card next time...