Bart Verwilst a.k.a Bort :: Blog

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

In the line of duty, we were force-fed a Sun X4150 server running Solaris 10. We don’t have any Solaris expertise in-house ( we’re all Linux dudes ), so it was quite the challenge to fix a network issue we were having. The server had 4 NIC’s, which should be paired  by 2, to create 2 bonded interfaces, each with an active and a passive NIC. ( Bonding mode 1 in Linux  ).

Now, in Linux, this would be a piece of cake. In Solaris, it was a bit more challenging.

First of all, a third-party installed the server. The NIC’s came divided in 2 interfaces, aggr1 and aggr2. At first I assumed that bonding was called “aggregation” under Solaris, just as it’s called “teaming” under windows. Since we were experiencing quite a bit of packetloss on those links, we went to investigate some more. We wanted redundant switches, so LACP ( Link Aggregation Control Protocol ) wasn’t an option, since that requires the use of only a single switch.

Our guess was that the Solaris wasn’t configured in active-passive mode, but we lacked the Solaris-knowledge to exactly find out what to fix. Booting the Sun server with a Centos livecd, and configuring bonding the “Linux Way” worked flawlessly, and packetloss disappeared.

Turning our attention back to the Solaris machine ( with the help of an external support guy ), we configured the Solaris box with IPMP ( IP Multipath ). The inner workings are a bit different than good old mode1 bonding, but the result was the same.

We had 4 interfaces, which needed to be grouped in pairs of 2. So e1000g0 and e1000g1 would combine under bond0 and e1000g2 and e1000g3 would be grouped under bond1.

We created 4 files:

/etc/hostname.e1000g0 contained:

group bond0 up

node1

/etc/hostname.e1000g1 contained:

group bond0 up

This added the 2 devices to bond0, and configured the first ( primary ) device with the ip address of node1 ( which is defined in our /etc/hosts file )

/etc/hostname.e1000g2 contained:

group bond1 up

node2

/etc/hostname.e1000g1 contained:

group bond1 up

Then we did the same for the other 2 interfaces, but assigned another ip address ( the address of node2, defined in our /etc/hosts file as well ), and another groupname.

This makes sure that when we reboot the server, the machine comes up in a happily bonded state, without packet loss! Hooray!

An “ifconfig -a” showed us the following:

lo0: flags=2001000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,VIRTUAL> mtu 8232 index 1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000

e1000g0: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2
inet 10.0.1.10 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255
groupname bond0
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:30

e1000g1: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 3
inet 0.0.0.0 netmask ff000000 broadcast 0.255.255.255
groupname bond0
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:31

e1000g2: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 4
inet 10.0.2.10 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 10.0.2.255
groupname bond1
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:32

e1000g3: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 5
inet 0.0.0.0 netmask ff000000 broadcast 0.255.255.255
groupname bond1
ether 0:1b:23:a3:42:33

When we pull out of the cables on any NIC, the system switches the ip address to the secondary NIC in the group, and becomes the active member until the connection of the primary NIC is back up.

Back in the good old rss-free days, you could spend countless fun-filled hours browsing your favorite sites, looking for new articles or cool new anecdotes. Sometimes you would forget one of your beloved sites for a while, so that when you remember it again, the articles have stacked up since your last visit, giving you an even more abundant reading-frenzy. Every time you browse to one of your sites, you get this warm fuzzy “will there be an awesome article there, begging to be read?” feeling. It really brightened up those boring/lazy hours everyone has now and then.

Enter RSS. Wether you’re subscribed to 10, 100 or more sites, you race through them so fast, that in 5 minutes time, you’re back to “ok, ive checked out everything that’s new in internet-land, now what…”. Boredom strikes again. No more hunting nice articles, or trying hard to remember that one awesome site that just slips your mind right now.. Pff.. efficiency is overrated.

As the final phase of the Firefox 3.0 development cycle approaches, people all over the world seem to get more and more anxious and excited about the upcoming release. ZDNet has some preliminary Javascript benchmarks with most current browsers, and FF 3 seems to easily outpace every one of them, being 3 times as fast as Firefox 2, and 5 times faster than IE 7! Read more about it here!

Microsoft Windows Home Server has had a data corruption bug in their backups for many months now ( since December IIRC ). They are stating that this bug has their top priority. Then they say they hope to have it fixed by June. I mean WTF…  if it takes them over 7 months to fix their “top priority” bugs, i can’t even begin to imagine how long their low priority bugs take to be resolved ( if ever ) In the meantime, people dumb enough to pay for MS products, like Windows Home Server, can use open source backup alternatives WITHOUT fear for corruption Bacula and BackupPC are just a couple of names that come to mind right away

Firefox 3 has new “invalid SSL certificate” warning screens. All fine and dandy, but pretty confusing, and way too much work to allow the certificate.

When you browse to a site with an invalid/unknown ssl certificate ( such as self-signed certificates ), you see this screen:

At first glance, it seemed the site was down, and i checked whether i typed the URL correctly. Yep, it was. Then i reread the message more clearly, and noticed it was in fact the SSL stuffs. This is where your Joe Schmoe and Jane Doe sits in front of the screen, wondering why their beloved site is down, and go on surfing to another place.

To actually allow you to view the site, it gets even more cumbersome. You need to go to 3 obscure steps to allow the page to be viewed, as seen below:

Clicking “Add Exception” brings you to this page:

Next, “Get Certificate” :

And, finally, the last button, “Confirm Security Exception”. And then we are able to see the page we intended to view

Ofcourse, this is just a beta ( 3 to be exact ), so I’m pretty sure some GUI master will improve the situation

For the rest, I’m absolutely LOVING Firefox 3, sure is heading to be a big winner Now if only the plugins/addons follow soon..

When your beloved MSN messaging service dies on you again, you make take a minute to look at some other messaging networks, like ooh let’s say Jabber. You can use Google Talk and Pidgin on Windows to chat with other Jabber users, or Adium X on Mac OS X. Bye bye vendor lock-in, downtime, and annoying custom smileys and banners!

I managed to go to Fosdem today with Bernard, to keep the tradition going (I think I’ve been there on every edition). I must say, today was one of the busiest Fosdem events I’ve ever seen. They expanded into more buildings, and most rooms were pretty packed.

We first went to the OpenQRM presentation with the hopes of learning something new.. I was kind of disappointed about the presentation though, so we left early.

The LVM2 presentation was a lot better, with examples of new features in their CVS repositories. lvextend lv1 -l +100%LV for example doubles the size of the current LV ( IIRC ) Afterwards the LVM2 metadata and its’ flaws and structure were highlighted. Pretty good speaker, albeit a bit nervous sometimes

A quick glance in the MySQL proxy lightning talk later, we were on the way home. I wanted to see PostgresQL HA, but it was a 90 minute wait, which was a bit too long for our taste And as an added bonus, leaving early made me come home early enough to enjoy a “ballekes in tomatensaus” meal at my father-in-law

We managed to obtain some Firefox and Ubuntu posters ( which already decorate my walls already at my desk at home ) and some Firefox/Thunderbird/Postgresql pins.

Next year, count me in for another visit!

As seen here,  Firefox has been downloaded – at least – 500 million times!

Image stolen from a Mozilla blog

Check out this article.

In short it’s about 2 alternatives for bzip2 and gzip, that do the same as their counterparts, but actually use multiple cores if available, thus greatly reducing (de)compression time!

IMO the original bzip2 and gzip should support this out of the box.. multi-cored machines are already widespread, and more and more tools ( especially cpu-intensive ones ) should be updated to make use of them.. bzip2 and gzip are 2 apps that would benefit a lot!

I was brainstorming about what vacuum cleaner I was going to order, when suddenly we found the holy grail in vacuum cleaning!

If you just put a Windows XP install CD ( Or a Vista CD if your house is REALLY dirty ) on your living room table, the contents of the CD suck so hard that your house will never see a single particle of dust again!

Thank you MS!

Apparently nobody was able to counter-offer on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, so things are starting to look pretty sad..

There are rumors that some Yahoo executives would do everything in their power to stop the Microsoft deal, giving Google a small chance, but it’s all over for Yahoo anyways.. I can imagine that the best employees already looked for a job with more certainty, and that if Google takes over, a lot of people will become redundant since Google has its own skilled people.. And if Microsoft takes over.. bleh, don’t even want to consider that..

I will have to dig into the Zimbra license again to make sure that the project is forkable, but i pretty much think a fork would be the only thing to save it. Hell, I would even start it up myself Where is anti-trust when you need it?

Embrace and extinguish anyone?

It’s still not entirely sure that Microsoft will buy Yahoo. A group of venture capitalists are also preparing to do a counter-offer. Let’s hope that, if Yahoo is bought, it’s not by Microsoft.. Yahoo has a few nice things ( Zimbra being one of them ), which most likely wouldn’t do well with the Microsoft lovin’ we’re all used to.

Since last week I have another bankaccount, this time a shared one with my girlfriend. Since it is also an “EasyPack”, I currently have 2 identical (apart from the accountnr ofcourse ) cards in my wallet, which is pretty annoying.

I still think the 8.5 EUR for the bankcard personalisation is a pretty hefty fee for something that trivial, but now it has become a necessity.. I wasn’t going to use a simple boring template out of the ones the bank provides, so i fired up the Gimp and made simple (boring? ) one myself!

This is the result:

Yeah yeah, geeky, i know..

Teneinde een signaal te geven dat de huidige limieten die Belgacom en Telenet op het internetgebruik van hun klanten zetten op zijn minst gezegd achterhaald zijn, wordt 30 december een dag waar hopelijk massaal veel gedownload zal worden. Let’s hope they get the hint.

Join here , of lees het volledige verhaal hier

PS. Forgot to write in English… so sue me

I’m baaack! After a long time of being too lazy of resurrecting my weblog, it’s finally back.

I’ve lost 2 years worth of blogging content though ( lost my backup ), so it’ll be a fresh start.

Once I settle on a theme that doesn’t look too gay/ugly, I’ll be back in business! Stay tuned