rullzer

This weekend I finally updated the router (Linksys WRT54GL) to OpenWRT-8.09.1. I was running 7.07 so it was about time. This means I moved form a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel.

It seems there are still some problems with the wifi but we have a dedicated acces point for that. Which means the required software is not even installed on the router. This is a good thing since there is very limit storage on the router.

While I was playing with the router I wanted to, finally, get OpenVPN running on it. Not that I really need the VPN but it is a matter of principles! So I started out with the OpenVPN Howto which guides your pretty much trough the whole setup.

However since room on the openwrt is limited, the easy-rsa (for key generation and signing) is not included. So I used my server to generate the keys and certs.

The ethernet-bridging is not necessary in my scenario but it seems the best way to go, espessialy since I want to implement it for some people that want to browse the samba shares. It is however important to note that you should have different local subnet and remote subnet.

So a productive weekend. It still feels cool that the router (which coasts only 55 euro’s) can be pimped so you can ssh to it, work with IPtables and act as an OpenVPN server! Embedded linux rocks

So after upgrading my sabnzbd installation to version 0.4.11, which I by the way the way should create a better ebuild for and do some dependency cleaning but that is a different story.

Like I was saying after upgrading to version 0.4.11 I decided I wanted to close port 8080 (the one sabnzbd is using) to the outside word. Now I know apache has some nice proxy functions so it should be easy.

Make sure apache is compiled with the following modules: apache2_modules_proxy apache2_modules_proxy_http apache2_modules_proxy_balancer

That was the hard part. Now just add a vhost:


ServerName yourserver.com

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd/
ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd/a

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.sabnzb.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.sabnzb.log combined



This assumes that you have sabnzbd listening on localhost:8080. Now you probably do not want the whole world watching your downloads (or deleting them or whatever). So we just add some basic apache authentication, use htpasswd2 to create a file with authorized users and add the following lines into the location block.


AuthName "Login Required"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile <>
require valid-user


That is all.
Happy downloading!

It is still vacation and I decided that I needed something today on this not to sunny day. So after cycling trough the city and discovering that some places in Amsterdam could really use some attention in OSM (will do that later this week), I decided to setup my own jabber(XMPP) server.

After browsing trough the portage tree landed on jabberd2. It is writen in C (no java or whatever on my server!) and easy to setup. This basically means that I could register and login using kopete in no time!

Now the things I like about open protocols (and software of course) is that most of the times you can do way cooler things with it. Take the MSN (of Live) protocol for example: sending messages in plain text over the net! I prefer secure connections, all the time actually, and that is possible with jabber. It is even specified in the RFC. And not just my connection to my server, also the server2server connections are secure. I mean that is just awesome! Since I see no point in securing only one part of the route.

Now of course some of the people I chat with can still not use SSL which would mean kind of a security risk, and we do not want that. But since you can use a client of your liking I can also use OTR encryption while using jabber.

Now I already told you that jabber is open. Which means anyone with enough time (and some skills) can write a library for this protocol. Which in turn makes it easy to use for status messages of your bash scripts or for elog messages from portage! Now I have not checked on any of this but I could imaging jabber plugins for torrent/usenet deamons (informing you of your finished download) or even bootup messages from computers that you maintain informing you of several useful things!

Long story short. I like Jabber!

Edit: I am now using ejabberd (or recomandation of a fried) and the webinterface rocks!

While cleaning up my package.keywords and filling stable requests I got a good, or I like to think so, idea about “improving” Gentoo. Well maybe improving is to big of a word for it but they can help to improve Gentoo.

As many of you probably know Gentoo is often not, when not running ~ARCH, the most up to date distro. I am not blaming anyone since the devs, arch testers etc are doing a great job, but in some areas we are just lagging behind.

Now of course this rss feed (sorry I forgot who created it…) keeps a nice list of packages in the tree for more than 30 days. Browsing trough this list from time to time has allowed me to fill a bunch of stable requests for packages I use on a regular basis.

Now what kind of other usefull things could we extract from the portage tree that would help improving Gentoo? I toughed of two things:

• Finding “important” packages: With some smart python program packages which have a lot of other packages depending on it could be located. These packages are often important to keep up to date. Also keeping those packages up to date often allows for more packages to be stabilized.
• Finding packages without a stable version: A lot of new packages hit the tree on a regular basis (this is of course a good thing). However this also leads to packages in the tree without a stable version. Of course there is a period in which this is not possible. But after the 30 days (or make it 45 for the initial version) it would be good to stabilize since then people that want to run a stable system can also use the package!.

Unfortunately I do now have the time to write these tools. But they would be really cool and use full to see! If anyone has some spare time… you know what to do! And of course tell me if you know any other things we could extract from the portage tree in order to help improving Gentoo.

From time to time I browse trough some of the files on my system. Today is one of those days. When coming across my /etc/portage/package.keywords/-directory I found out that right now I am not running the most stable system (according to gentoo). Of course KDE4.2 is the main reason for my huge lists of package unmasks and then there is Xorg-1.5 but that is pulled in by KDE4.2…

But even without all those packages the list is still huge… So probably I will be spending some hours today on cleaning my package.keywords and filling some stable requests. Which is always good. We need to keep those Gentoo-devs busy

It has been long since my last post. Too long. I won’t fill you up on all the things I have done. Or maybe I will in other posts. But today I want to talk about openstreetmap.

As you might (or might not) know openstreetmap aims to provide a free (as in speech) map of the world. You can help by adding or editing the map. This is what I have been doing the last couple of months. Mostly fixing roads or adding new cycleways. Now of course cycling is good exercise. And it feels good to contribute to a free world map. However the real kick is seeing your changes of your work!

This can be seen on the main website. However that is only updated once a week. There are several other tile servers that serve a part of the map. These servers are generally updated more often. However when you use a tile server you are can’t change the rendering. So how great would it be to create your own rendering?

Check out my wiki entry. Of course it is a wiki so add all improvement you can think of.

So my base system is running smooth. Distcc and crossdev are up and running and the server is doing a great job compiling everythin for it. NFS is running which safes a lot of space and keeps me from cleaning the distfiles every day. Since well 4 gb is not a lot .

Other than that I’m supprised how fast the system boots. I guess it is because there is not much hardware to detect. Other than that the kernel is also very small and when I get over at my folks tomorrow I can get it even smaller I believe.

Right now KDE is compiling since I promised my gf’s father to check what the old thing could do. currently I’m at packag e 146 of 192 since this morning. So that will be done tomorrow. And it will be time to run KDE…. that would be the ultimate test. Howver I feel fluxbox or something will run a lot smoother. But maybe I’ll test that later.

I’m wondering what I could do with the laptop. Cause it would be nice to put it to good use. Now useing it for presentations or something would be great. Or other than that using it for some basic school stuf for one of my sisters or something could also be the case. Ah well I’ll check it tomorrow

After going trough my /usr/portage/distfiles/ I found a lot of tarballs that belong to versions of packages that are no longer in portage. Now these tarballs take up a lot of space. Doing a nice rm -rf * will ofcource take care of the problem but then all the tarballs that are still in portage will have to be downloaded again if once of the gentoo boxes in the network needs it (currently 4). Now it is not that I have a datalimit but it is a matter of principle.

So there must be an easier solution. I’ll try to look into it but python is writen in portage so maybe I can just include it and check for all packages and versions and remove the tarballs that have no corresponding ebuild. This script doesn’t have to run every day since it would take some time I guess but once a week or so just to keep the system clean.

Please let me know if anybody is interested in such an app or knows if it already exists…

So this weekend my girlfriend father pointed out that they had an old laptop lying around. I decided it would be fun to run gentoo on it and use it for anything I could think of. First to give you an impression

Compaq Armada 100s
550 Mhz Cpu
56 meg ram
8 meg video-ram

This laptop is old so that means the CD-ROM does not react that well to CD-R’s. This is bad when you want to boot from a CD-ROM. But I got it working. Now after booting the kernel (nofb ofcourse, and more options). An error messgae kept spamming my screen wich was caused by udev loading the usbmodule (while I gave nousb as one of the options to the kernel). This is not what should happen so I filled a bug (#206954).

The solution was easy just rmmod uhci_usb and it stopped. So that ment no USB support into the kernel. The USB port (yeah only 1) is know to be broken on this laptop I read on other sites.

Now since I wanted to use the laptops full potential I ofcourse changed the CHOST etc. But a downside ofcourse was that gcc and glibc needed to be recompiled….. It is compiling gcc for 10 hours straigt now. And I have no idea how long it will keep on going. But if it isn’t finished in another 10 hours It will be killed and I have to think of something else.

I’ll keep you posted on the process with this laptop.

So since it is vacation, Christmas is over and I have some time to fill. I have been thinking about some projects to do but could not really think of something doable in a few days. Since well I do not mind long term project I just want something where I have something working in a few days.

I had a nice idea that I borrowed from Tobias Koenig about bus-services. So I checked the transport company in Amsterdam. Wrote them a nice email if they have a way to communicate with the database. XML-RPC or something like that. Since I do understand they would not allow me directly on the database. An email came back that they do not have such a service and indeed could not allow me on directly on the database.

That is all understandable but the departure times are all available on the internet so I decided to give it one last try. A dump of the departure times from the database. But again they could not help me. Now I wonder why is that. I wrote a nice email that I just wanted to make a nice program. Why can’t they share that stuff with me? Or anyone else?

Now I could ofcourse parse the whole stuf by myself. But that would mean I had to write some ugly parser in their web of html. Which I do not like.

So that project won’t work for me. Then a friend of mine suggested a simple bittorrent client. That can run on a server and a nice client program to connect to it. So It can run while you are asleep or whatever. However after looking at a bittorrent file and the protocol I figured that would not be something I could have working in a few days.

So no project now. If you have any suggestions drop a comment please.