Bart Verwilst a.k.a Bort :: w3bl0g

So I’ve tried the new browser Google released ( as beta ) called ‘Chrome’ on Linux. While I’m more than happy with the speed and cleanliness of my Firefox install, I decided to give it a whirl. While I couldn’t really see a staggering difference of loading times between the two, one thing that really stood out and bugged me ( and caused me to remove Chrome from my system again ) was the “Windows let’s give every god damned application its own theme and color scheme”-approach they took. Windows applications have the habit to look totally out of place, and have no integration whatsoever with the look and feel of the desktop.  ( Yes Steam client, I’m looking at you! ) The blue-ish browser with custom buttons and tool bar seemed to try hard not to blend into my brown Ubuntu desktop, so it’s gone. Let’s hope Google get their heads out of their asses and make Chrome conform to the standards, guidelines, themes and color schemes of the desktop, whether it’s Mac, Windows or Linux!

Update: They seem to have a “Use GTK+ theme” and “Use system title bar and borders” under Options, but that only partially fixes things, turning the blue to purple. Nonetheless, when disregarding the desktop environment, Chrome looks pretty slick, and can hopefully become a worthy competitor for other browsers, which can only be a good thing!

I bumped into this blogpost by accident. It suggests that the release quality has been going down for every new release of Ubuntu ( as shown in the graphs ). They come to that conclusion by using the polls on the forums that ask how smooth your install of Ubuntu was. Personally I have seen a lot of users around me that really start getting into Linux just because each release has become more usable and stable. More hardware is supported, more features are in the provided apps.

Sure, it can be that I’m mistaken and release quality is going down the drain. Or it can be that more and more users start using Ubuntu. And it’s mostly the users that are already having problems that come to the forums to look for answers and vote on those polls. Most users don’t start searching through forums when everything works out of the box..

Statistics always show what the creator wants you to see

While assembling a new laptop for my girlfriend, i stumbled upon this tiny beauty . Ofcourse this is too small for dedicated work, so i decided on the Dell Inspiron 1525 ( for just 650EUR ) for her, but my personal itch would be scratched more by the mini 9. It’s running Ubuntu 8.04.1, has wireless caps and a solid state disk, and ( duh ) a 9″ screen. All this for only $250! Sweet!

Too bad it costs 454 EUR in Belgium though ( What a rip-off! ) and it runs Windows XP! ( ‘WTF’ as my dear pal Raf put it )

Dear Apple,

I’m using your highly priced ( but for the most part awesome ) iPhone. When people cash out that much money for a phone, the least you can do is open up your API to allow other 3rd party applications to interface with it. Because of your closed iPhone calendar API for example, I’m unable to sync my OSS Zimbra with my iPhone. Lucky you, Apple, for not being as closely watched on lock-in practices as Microsoft is. Don’t worry, keep up this kind of unethical practices and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

Greetings.

Just a small note-to-self, this doesn’t work:

to !address@test.com

while this does:

to “!address@test.com”

On a brighter note, now that I have an iPhone ( and I seem to love it! ) I finally found the time/motivation to setup Funambol to interface with my Zimbra server, keeping the Zimbra contacts in sync with my iPhone! A howto will follow shortly!

We’ve had the pleasure of using the 64bit Flash player in the last couple of weeks. This week it’s time for Sun to do the same thing! The latest update of Java 6 ( Update 12 ) has a working 64 bit Java browser plugin!

No packages are available yet for Ubuntu/Debian, but they will surely follow soon!

Seems like 2009 will be the year of the 64bit Linux desktop

I’ve never been mr. elite coder. Programming never really was my main point of focus, and spent most of my time focussed on the Linux system level of things.

Over the years, I have coded in various languages, but on small personal projects, without any expert guidance or anything. The lack of guidance might be the reason of my almost complete withdrawal from coding the last couple of years.

I started with VB. Writing an instant messenger for example ( with own protocol, just for the fun of it ).

I played with Python. Coded with it for a few years, did some small Portage ( Gentoo ) work, wrote a Kazaa-like client with PyQt, hacked on Anaconda job-wise.. I found Python to be very easy to understand, and had a very low level of entry into code which you wrote like 6 months ago without hardly any comments ( i know, shame on me ), and noticed myself being back on track in a matter of hours!

I’ve done quite a lot with PHP. Wrote a couple of websites with it, webservices for system automation, but found myself using it more on the Linux system level in the end ( php-cli ). I still pretty much like PHP, but i HATE web development I’ve used Symfony for quite some time, and really started to like it. I looked at Drupal too, but something about it really turns me off. Can’t say what exactly though..

I’ve used c++ for about 2 years. Mostly with Qt, which i absolutely loved at the time ( been a few years ). The power of c++ with the easiness of Qt. Yummie! I’ve only found the GUI look-n-feel to be… clunky.. Can’t really explain what’s missing, but it just has an awkward feel to it. Gnome/GTK apps for example feel a lot more solid to me for some reason.

Then i tried Java for a few months. Never liked it. In my head I never stopped seeing it as an unsurmountable mountain of code. It just looked a daunting task. Not to mention all the .war / .jar crap.. Bleh!

Then i started with Mono ( C# ). I must say i really like the syntax and feel of it, it’s a joy to code in. It’s not really pleasant to see .dll and .exe’s pop up though.. And i have no idea what to think about the whole ethical aspect of it. I like C# as a language, but i hate the Microsoft side of it. Somehow I have this feeling inside that in the end it’s all yet another plan to dominate/break/destroy the Linux environment, first letting Mono be deeply entrenched, and then executing part 2 of their plans. Call me paranoid I also don’t like the Novell boys bending over and taking it like a man on MS’es every whim.

Never tried Ruby, didn’t appeal to me. No particular reason.

Tried Perl for a while, never liked it, too cryptic for my taste. I actually tried to avoid it whenever it was possible

Lately however, I started longing for development again. Over time, I’ve become less and less a FOSS contributor, which is really starting to annoy me. But I have the feeling that Linux system skills alone don’t allow you to really make a change in the FOSS world.

So.. what to choose to get into the game? As a Gnome user, my efforts would go to Gnome development. But i really don’t want to learn/code in C. I never liked GTK code-wise either. I know there are bindings for a lot of languages, but that feels so third-rank to me.. I could pickup C# instead, but the whole MS mindset behind it really turns me off.

Now, for the point of this rather long post. Anyone more programmer-oriented with any ideas on my dilemma? I would surely appreciate it What language/lib do you recommend? Open for suggestions

By default, Intrepid on both i386 and x86_64 comes with the 32bit flashplayer 10 through nspluginwrapper. A lot of the crashes people see come from nspluginwrapper itself, which is very unstable in Hardy.

A new version of nspluginwrapper in Intrepid fixes a lot of crashes though, so you’re better of with Intrepid in any case.

However, since mid november, Adobe finally came through on one of the most requested feature Linux users around the globe begged for/requested, real 64bit support!

For an alpha version, i must say it is pretty rock solid on my system. Let’s get on and replace the default 32bit flashplayer/nspluginwrapper combo with this new goodie!

First of all, let’s remove any already installed versions of Flash, along with nspluginwrapper.

# apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper

Next up, download the 64-bit Flash plugin from Adobe Labs. Select the tar.gz.

Unpack it and copy the resulting libflashplayer.so into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins if you want to enable it for all users, or in ~/.mozilla/plugins to enable it only for your current user. Restarting Firefox and browsing to about:plugins should show the newly installed Flash plugin.

Enjoy your native 64-bit Flashplayer

Let’s admit, the SSL warnings in Firefox 3.0 are a bit cumbersome. Normal “Joe Schmoe” users just don’t get it. As an example, my girlfriend came to me saying her webmail was broken, while it was just the SSL warning that was between her and her mail. Without my help, she would have just been grumpy, thinking i broke her mail again

I was wondering what the guys over at Mozilla were doing to make the situation a bit more clear. Now that Firefox 3.1 beta2 has been out for a while, i thought i would give it a spin and check out if anything changed since 3.0 in the SSL warning dept.

When you visit an SSL enabled site for the first time, this is presented to you.

In my opinion, this is a step in the right direction, explaining what has happened in semi-bitesize chuncks of text instead of cramming everything in 1 big, daunting blob of text as in FF 3.0.

Clicking on “Technical Details” or “I understand the Risks” show more information about both topics.

I really hope this will be fully translated in the users’ language to lower the barrier even more.

This is pretty much the same dialog as was the case in Firefox 3.0.

Although now it seems to get the certificate automatically, making you click only on “Confirm Security Exception” to proceed to the page you intended to visit.

All in all this seems like a step in the right direction to make this more userfriendly for the big public!

As this is only the second beta, the screenshots above are subject to change by the time 3.1 final is released.

By default, Zimbra isn’t very good in the spam-handling dept. You just keep on flagging messages as Junk, in the hopes that Zimbra is getting wiser on every occasion. Not really though..

Under the hood, Zimbra is relying on SpamAssassin to weed out the pharma mails. This heuristics-based method is pretty 90’s IMO, and while it still catches a lot of spam, rules have to be added/update on a regular basis in order to stay ahead of – or at least on par with – our good friends the spammers.

Enter DSpam. Dspam has a statistical approach to spam filtering. DSpam only knows that something is spam after you repeatedly show examples of it ( in Zimbra terms, mark it as junk ). After a while, dspam knows which words ( and combinations ) are mostly present in your spam and ham mails. Based on that knowledge, it will make educated guesses on what you consider spam and what you don’t. This means that dspam automatically keeps track of the latest trends in spam, as long as you follow up once in a while. Apart from that, dspam is written in C, and is insanely fast, especially in comparison with bloaty old Spamassassin.

One downside of Dspam however is that the project is pretty much euh.. dead or asleep, whatever you prefer. It sure has its share of quirks, especially on larger environments. But it does the job nicely for most people. Zimbra disabled dspam quite some time ago because of stability issues, so your mileage may vary.

By default, running

# zmamavisdctl stop

# /opt/zimbra/amavisd/sbin/amavisd -c /opt/zimbra/conf/amavisd.conf debug

will show you

Dec 11 13:37:42 zimbra01.verwilst.be /opt/zimbra/amavisd/sbin/amavisd[11878]: No $dspam,             not using it

Enabling Dspam in Zimbra is pretty straightforward though.

First of all, edit /opt/zimbra/conf/amavisd.conf.in . Uncomment the following line:

#$dspam = ‘/opt/zimbra/dspam/bin/dspam’;

Make sure the data dir of dspam is fully writable:

# chown zimbra: /opt/zimbra/data/dspam/data/ -R

Then run the amavisd command ( above ) again, or start it the Zimbra way:

# zmamavisdctl start

That’s pretty much all there is to it. You should see some DSPAM headers in every mail you receive ( look in the source of the mail ).

By default however, Zimbra only assigns a very small score to the mail when dspam marks it as spam. ( 0.5 points out of 6.6 required to be marked as spam by Zimbra ).

I put a lot of trust in DSpam, so i change the 0.5 points to 3 for spam, and -1 if dspam doesn’t think it’s spam.

Put the following lines in /opt/zimbra/conf/spamassassin/local.cf

header DSPAM_SPAM X-DSPAM-Result =~ /^Spam$/
describe DSPAM_SPAM Marked as spam by DSPAM
score DSPAM_SPAM 3

header DSPAM_HAM X-DSPAM-Result =~ /^Innocent$/
describe DSPAM_HAM Marked as ham by DSPAM
score DSPAM_HAM -1

And restart spamassassin:

# zmamavisdctl stop && zmamavisdctl start

Please beware that it might take a while for dspam to really start showing results! It needs to examine quite a lot of mails before it will start making decisions. You might want to set DSPAM_HAM closer to 0 the first few weeks..

Enjoy!

The guys over at ZenOSS were friendly enough to send us some goodies! Monitoring is quite the hot topic these days and although I’m more of a Zabbix “fanboy” myself, I must say others, like ZenOSS, sure have their places in many, sometimes very specific and/or different, areas.

Dressing up the male team members wouldn’t have had the same effect as our female coworkers, so we decided to take some quick pictures about it

It looks like the days of the  “You think monitoring so you think Nagios/Cacti” are really a thing of the past!

On a small update, it seems like great minds post alike

We‘re not always able to use the latest and greatest version of a Linux distribution. Being consultants, we’re usually dropped in an already-deployed environment, where the let’s-upgrade-the-distribution step is not desired or just plainly impossible without breaking everything that’s deployed on it.

This was the case recently, where we had to deploy a Zabbix server on a CentOS 4.x environment. We opted for Zabbix 1.6.1 for several reasons.

We try not to reinvent the wheel when possible, so I grabbed the RPM for CentOS 5 here. Usually this just compiles on Centos 4 without any issues. Not in this case though.

I’ve cooked up 3 small patches to fix the issues that kept Zabbix 1.6.1 from building on our platforms.

Grab them here, here and here. You might want to use this spec file ( based on the one from OCJTech ) as well!

In short, this disables jabber support ( which doesnt work anyways, you need to let an external script do the work! ), updates snmp support to handle older versions of snmp and lowers the required version of curl during the configure stage.

This should give you a nice shining bunch of zabbix-1.6.1 rpm’s for your beloved CentOS 4 system.

rm -rf zdnet-feed. Fucktards.

I have thrown together a package for the latest Zabbix beta release, 1.5.4, which can be downloaded from my PPA here. It’s based on the official Zabbix 1.4.6 package for Intrepid, but i added zabbix-proxy-mysql and zabbix-proxy-pgsql as well, along with some minor refactoring in the inner guts of the package. If you find issues, just give me a whistle!

After a loong silence in the Zimbra camp ( apart from the occasional 5.0 point release ), we have more information about the next major Zimbra release! While it versioned as 5.5 in the past, it has now been changed straight to 6.0.
Current milestones are:

• Beta 1 12/17/08
• Beta 2 01/19/09
• RC 1 02/23/09
• GA 03/23/09

Since it’s a pretty long road until the GA version, those days will probably slide a bit.

Features include Ubuntu 8.04 LTS support ( BETA in 5.0 ), “Disaster recovery via server-to-server sync” ( which sounds really nice, not sure what exactly it will do yet ), and others found here.

pay em..

Why oh why does Microsoft always insist in trying to reinvent the wheel ( poorly ).. In every field you can imagine they have a crappy clone ( Zune anyone? ) nobody wants. Same thing with their Live Search. They always end up paying the few fucktards who fall for the peanuts MS throws at them.

I have personally witnessed that they came around the bigger businesses, and actually _giving_ money ( and LOTS of it ) to replace all postfix/courier servers ( who run great for years in a row on commodity hardware ) with Exchange ( which only runs “well” if you have a battery of servers.) Luckily management refused every offer because of the hardware costs and maintenance it would require to keep the crap working. ( Lower TCO my *** )

The merchant paying the customer to take his crap.. How low can you go.

history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
148 who
132 the
123 bloody
110 hell
91 gives
85 a
52 damn
45 ?

Lately i have to sift through more and more useless del.icio.us and co posts titled “”Links from …”, they are annoying me more than email spam FFS if i want to see your bookmarks, ill check them out myself!

Once a week ( and soon twice ), I’m a Linux teacher @ Syntra West. I currently teach the class “advanced Linux” for the second-year students in the “Network administrator” course.

The best way to learn a new operating system is to get your hands dirty, but coming up with fun and practical exercises seem to be pretty hard. They already managed to install Drupal and Joomla on the self-deployed Apache server, but still the general “i-feel-at-home-here” feeling isn’t present yet.

I was wondering of some of you guys/girls know practical and “fun” ways to get better acquainted to the Linux way? I could then use them in my lessons and show them working with the console can be fun, flexible and powerful!

Thanks in advance