rullzer

So today I had my first matlab experience. The exercise was not complete so it was a blast… I can’t say I like it much so far. I mean matrix computation are easier than I have ever seen. But common. If I have 1 space to after a ; it all goes wrong. Ah well I’m currently compiling octave and koctave so I can work also on it at home. But all of a sudden I had to recompile GCC… with fortran support. The first time I’ll ever use that… Ah well. Lets hope after this no more suprises in relation to matlab.

So today it was time for the big Apache update at my home server.
Of course PHP had to be recompiled but other than that Apache started like a brand new car. Or so it seemed.

I tried visiting one of the sites hosted on the server but I got denied. I tried an other site but again denied. After going trough the logs and the (main) config file I only discovered that the permission was denied by Apache. Now it comes. The Apache config file has been split. So I had to check /etc/apache/modules.d as well. It would have been nice to have that in big blinking text after the emerge… But it turns out that the default settings were that Apache denied everyone…. now what is that about…. A webserver which default setup is to deny everyone….

But with that it wasn’t done.
A new issue with the new Apache is that not all the env vars are set correctly. The user you run under is Apache which it should be but the ~ is set to /root. So the svn viewer a friend of mine made wasn’t working anymore. Now that was fixed in the end by a simple adjustment in the calling of the code. But never the less it is an annoying thing that it isn’t set correctly. But I’m probably not the only one with the problem so maybe a new revision is already on its way.

Apache 2.2 is running sweet now. So take your time for it if you are doing the upgrade. But upgrading in general is not a bad idea of course.

A while ago I wrote a little story about fail2ban. Back then I was using an unstable version (turned out later). And it did not work that well at the time.

However today I was updating the router and I checked all open connections (It can keep track of that) and I noticed some connections going to my server that I could not find out. Some people use my server for svn etc. But I recognize those IP’s most of the time. So anyway. I opened auth.log on the server (again) and I noticed a lot of login failures like: NTadmin, admin etc. So I figured I was in somebodies scanning range again and I decided that I would give fail2ban another try.

Currently version 0.8.0 is the latest and the even releases are stable. So that should be save. However they switched the entire configuration. Not a problem but you need to know it So after some easy configuring I started fail2ban. Worked like a charm. 5 minutes later all the unknown connections dropped (got killed) so another fine program to use.

First of all for you people that just think what a weird title. You should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Really read that book…

Having sad that. The weather is to damn nice! Thank god i have a laptop so I can sit outside while working on the school projects. But the nice weather also has a downside… It makes you damn thirsty! I have to work tonight but else i would now open my first cold beer.. Tomorrow i will..

If it is due to the weather or that my laptop hard disk is just failing on me i do not know. But all of a sudden i get weird errors. Files that can’t be removed. Incorrect Inodes.. Seems like it is time to run a deep fsck on my laptop again.. But i just kind of have the feeling that my harddisk is slowly dying.. Now I still have warranty (asus gives you 2 years of warranty…) So if it has to break i hope it does before september…

But aside from the warranty. Except running fsck I do not know what to do… It is also weird that it is just some invalid inodes etc. Since dma etc still works. I did a check on the temperature of the harddisk and it is about 38 degrees so I would think that is not to bad. (since the CPU is around 50 degrees).

Ah well. I’ll start backing up some stuff. Altough almost all code is in subversion repo’s, all audio is also on the server and all mail is on an other server (i love imap)… Now lets pray that the problem will solve itself…

So we are having this assignment at school to build a chatserver. Not to fancy. Sort of single room IRC chatserver. In the end all the written servers should be able to work together so we have a huge chatnetwork (always nice to have about 6 servers for 15 people..) But that is not the point. We choose write it in C, more specific multi threaded C. We use poll to get the CPU usage down. The only problem we have now is that when we try to be good people and close the server (so not SIGINT-ing!!!) the accept call on the socket just won’t die.

Now I know accept is blocking. But even when i close the socket accept still won’t quit. So now we are basically forced either to create a new thread. Since we can close threads. Or to make accept non blocking. We probably will go for the first one since that way a lot less CPU is used. However it really makes me wonder why you can’t interupt accept without a signal. It must be some kind of conspiracy…………. (imagine a spooky sound)

So i told you all my sister now got her own PC. That is all good. Running gentoo with KDE and she does not have any problem at all. (Not that I expected them). However the PC needed a new CPU fan. The thing that was in it just made an awefull noise.

So a new Artic cooling was ordered which arrived today. So after opening the PC it was time to remove the old fan. This was a hell of a job. Since the person that installed that thing in the first place did not do it right. He managed to get the powercable of the fan stuck between the clip. Which resulted in that i had to cut the cable. I didn’t wanna to this because if the new fan would not work I would still have the old one but now i had to so I did what i had to do and cut the cable. Which i would later regret but like i said i had no choose.

So I cleared the CPU attached some new cooling-glue-stuff and attached the new cooler. I connected the powercable of the cooler to the motherboard. Everything went well (or so I toughed) but when i turned on the PC i got the message CPU cooler not working properly. At first I was shocked. But a quick look into the case told me that the fan was running. So what could it be? I did a reset of the BIOS. Tried all the jumpers I could find but nothing worked. So I reconnected the cables of the old cooler (it was why i did not want to cut the cable). Anyway I disconnected the new cooler and connected the old one (I did not replace it on the motherboard). And turned the PC on. And it just worked. I was stunned. I took a quick check in the BIOS. And in the PC Health status theire was a thing “Check Fan speed during POST”. So I disabled that. Saved the BIOS and turned the PC off again. The new cooler got connected again and now it did work!

So I want to know why! And more who! Toughed setting a hard limit in the BIOS for the minimum fan speed? It is just something i do not get. I mean if you say that it should spin and you get a fan speed back that is near zero. I get the error. But it is still spinning at 2400 RPM OK it is about half of the original fanspeed but still. Also nothing is mentioned about this in the manual. Ah well be warned ya all if you are going to replace a CPU cooler on a motherboard that is around 3-4 years old.

Right now the I am coping back the documents etc to the PC of my in laws. But let me tell you about the adventure that i had to go trough to get to this stage.

It started all Thursday. All the components arrived and I began to put it all together. But when i was connecting the cables I ran into the first problem. The 24-pin cable was to short!! What the fuck is that about? I mean i admit it is a tight case, but damn. Would those 10 cm of extra cable really be that much of a problem? Anyway so Friday i had to get myself an extension cable. So after i finally got the extension cable I could get back here and plug in everything else.

Then the second thing came. I realized that the firmware of the motherboard was outdated. And that if I would just install windows ( believe me I tried to make them switch to linux ) the transfer mode of the Optical drives would be set to PIO instead of DMA. And that (thanks to our good friend bill) I will not be able to change that. How do I know that? Because my dad has the same motherboard. So now is my question why! O Why can’t MSI just get it right at once. Or ship theire motherboards with a more recenter version of the firmware. This one was more than a year old. Ah well. So I had to drive back to my place to get a floppy with the new firmware. After that i was ready to go and install windows.

I know windows says that they are a userfriendly OS etc. But why is it then that the start of installing the OS is not even a little bit graphical? I mean with many linux distros i can just choose to use a GUI to partition my hard disk. But in windows. No way. Now not that I don’t get the partitioner I am just wondering why doesn’t MS does something about that?

Ah well now it is time for some breakfast.

OK this is not really annoying more amusing… Fryday night i ordered a server for my cousin. But I’m not here to explain why. I’m here to share a nice email with you i got from the store i ordered. They suggest to me to let them put the server together. That is nice. But of course i have to pay for that. I get a year warranty but that means i can’t open the thing for a year. Well it does not really mean that but in essence i just can’t touch a thing installed by them. What’s weird about that you think? Well nothing but here it comes:

They also offered to install winXP home on it. Now i do not want winXP. But the best part is I get a year of warranty on the winXP installation? What is that? Does that mean i can’t update the system else the warranty is gone? And can I drop of the system if it gets full of spyware? I mean how can you give a year warranty of software installation? Is it because i run linux that i do not understand this or is it something else?

Now let me be clear i do not mind my little nephew using hotmail. Not do i mind the people using hotmail only for MSN. But i just do not get the user who is >20 and uses hotmail on a regular basis. And then comes complaining to me because he can’t read my email! I mean what is that.

Now i see some hotmail fanatics thinking i can read all mail!! Well maybe now.
But for 1. Hotmail does not support encrypted email messages. Now i can forgive hotmail for that since well not many people use encrypted messages and if you do you probably do not wanna sent them to hotmail.
2. I sent a PGP signed message to someone that uses hotmail a year ago. And it said my key failed! What is that? I do not know if that problem is solved now by the way.
3. What is it about hotmail that it does not validate? Why can’t they just create a decent website?

But I’m getting off the point. My point is when you are for example >20 years old you can afford to spent 40 euro’s year on a domain name and hosting. I mean Most people get more email than mail. Think about it. You want your own mailbox at home. You do not go to a large place they store mail? So why not you own domain? We spent so much time on-line that we a personal place for you identity is not a bad idea right?

So my dad got a new system. Core 2 duo system. Well all nice and smooth. However after putting everything together it was time for the boot. Also worked. Until we wanted to boot from the CD-ROM. And well it was impossible….. However it could in no way find the cd-rom. Now after an hour i finally figured out what it was. There is no onboard IDE controller. Well actually there is. But it is combinded with the raid controller. So i had to enable the raid controller. Turn on IDE. And then i could boot form the cd-rom.

Now I’m wondering what idiot tought of this? Who’s idea was it to think. Of course no one boots from cd-rom? And why o why did they design it so that it is almost impossible to use RAID and IDE? Now i do not use raid on the workstation. But damn. So all be warned for MSI motherboards!