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I’ve just spent far too much time trying to install voyage linux on my new ALIX.2D13. Everything was fine, the only problem was that I did try to use GRUB and that wasn’t working. After changing to LILO it works like a charm. The problem is probably caused by a huge version gap between etch and sid. Etch has some something like 0.9x and sid 1.9x. I thought that the Voyage installer would use the shipped grub inside a chroot. Anyway, LILO works and this is fine. I have no special requirements for this box’s bootmanager. As soon as everything is set up and tested the box is going to be deployed.

The installation of voyage linux itself is covered in detail in the Getting Started guide.

Very usefull information can be found at networksoul and this chaos wiki.

I recommend picocom to connect to the serial console:

picocom –baud 38400 –flow n –databits 8 /dev/ttyUSB0

If your computer doesn’t have a serial port anymore, like mine, I recommend the LogiLink “USB2.0 to Serial Adapter” (UA0043 v.2.0). It’s cheap and works flawlessly. Another great LogiLink product I can reommend in this context is the LogiLink “USB2.0 Aluminum All-in-one Card Reader” (CR0001B v.2.0). Why I mention these two here? I find it hard to find cheap linux compatible adapters of which I know that they work on linux, so here is the information I would have like had before I bought those. The USB-Serial-Adapter is recognized as “Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port”. The Card-Reader is shown as four separate drives.

Sometimes, at least. I did just want to look up some term I’ve read somewhere and of course … it’s already deleted. Löschhölle at its best. It was there once, but now it’s gone.

Why do they have to do this?

Is the wikipedia database so overloaded that they have to throw out everything that is not 100% fine or are these just selfish, stupid and jealous people trying to show others how great they are?

Really, Wikipedia-Admins, I don’t quite get it …

Kontact, a part of the Kolab project, has some very nice Groupware features that were presented on the MK09.

Fortunately most of these are very well usable even without a Kolab server.

Unfortunately these are not so well documented (or the documentation is not very easy to find).

When trying out these features in noticed that the groupware features will only work properly (at least with Kontact from KDE 4.3) if you access your mailbox via “Disconnected IMAP”. If you fail to do so you’ll probably get an “Write access denied” error.

Please note, that Kontact is very unstable sometimes, but again, this depends heavily on the version of Kontact/KDE you use. My experience is based on KDE 4.3 from Debian unstable.

Right, it is called unstable for a reason …

I’ve been following the IPv6 development for a while now and have looked at most IPv6 stuff. Today I did take a look at the Teredo proctoll and I’m impressed how well it works. Really nice. Try out Miredo on Linux or BSD.

Since VMWare made their Server available at no cost this has risen to be an highly interesting alternative for virtualisation. Anyone can download it from their website and get serials for free. This is highly mature software and is rather easy to install. However, on 64-bit Systems there are a few caveats. If you happen to have the problem that VMWare won’t accept your serials, than you have to install the ia32-libs package. Also see the comments on this howto.

When you did successfully install VMWare, you probably want to provide your VMs with network connecitivity. There are several ways to achieve this and the approach depends on how you use your servers.

Interface Aliases: http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/focus-linux/2002-01/0094.html

Routing: Use Host-only network

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iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.2.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -A INPUT -i vmnet1 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o vmnet1 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -o eth0 -i vmnet1 -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp -d <external -ip> -i eth0 --dport </external><external -port> -j DNAT --to <internal -ip>:</internal><internal -port></internal></external>

Funny OSM Map (c) OpenStreetMaps

Sometimes OpenStreetMaps can be quite funny.

Since I got a Fritz!Box as my Home-Router, the good old Linksys WRT54G just lay in the corner and settled dust. Is became aware of OpenWRT a long time ago, but I didn’t take the time to try it out. One reason was that I didn’t want to loose the comfortable web GUI for configuration internet access. Today I finally got the latest release of OpenWRT (Kamikaze 7.09).

The installation of the OpenWRT Firmware was quiete easy. At first I did backup my old router configuration in the Webinterface, then I did an Firmware Upgrade, also from the Webinterface. After the firmware was uploaded the router took about one or two minutes to reboot and did then respond to pings on 192.168.1.1. Note: If you already have a device using the address 192.168.1.1 on the network, you’d better connect the WRT54 directly to your pc.

The documentation for OpenWRT is quite scattered around the wiki. Probably the first page to look at is the page about configuring Kamikaze. One thing that confused me at frist was how I could log in to the router after the upgrade. Since OpenWRT, by default, doesn’t offer a webinterface and I couldn’t find a default password for SSH I was curios how to log in. The solution is fairly simple: Just connect via telnet, set a root password and the log in via SSH. If you want to change the ip address, go to /etc/config/network and change the address of the “br-lan” interface. You should also add a default gateway and an DNS server, in case your router isn’t going to be connected over his wan interface.

The Debian KDE Maintainers recently released inofficial Backports of KDE4.1 for Debian Lenny for those who didn’t wan’t to use experimental packages or wait for lenny to become stable. I was waiting for this packages for a long time. Since I’ve used KDE 4.0 at work I did want to use it at home, too. But I did not want to break my system more than absolutly necessary and I didn’t like some of the shortcoming of KDE 4.0, so I had to wait. The 4.1 release looked very promising to me and so I did decide to give it a try. Many people told me not to use KDE 4.1 but I did really like KDE 4 since my first contact. Unfortunately there are known issues with KDE 4.1 and the proprietary Nvidia drivers which I use and the compositing features of KWin only work with TwinView and not Xinerama, so I did prepare myself to some hurdles. I want to give a short report of my experiences on KDE 4.1 on Debian GNU/Linux lenny.
Basically I did follow the steps described on the Backports page:

Continue reading ‘Test drive KDE4.1 on Debian Lenny’

OpenVPN is a great VPN solution: Easy to use, flexible and stable. But it lacks documentation. When trying to assign static ip adresses to my VPN clients I felt a bit lost. The solution is to create a directory inside the OpenVPN configuration directory and put the client-dependent configuration snippets there. Lets assume this directory is called “ccd” for “Client Configuration Directory”. Then you need to add the line “client-config-dir ccd” to your server.conf.

Inside the ccd you create one file for each client you want to configure and call the file exactly as the common name from the clients certificate. In this files you can use ordinary OpenVPN configuration statements. For assigning fixed IPs you would use “ipconfig-push 10.8.0.X 10.8.0.0″ if you use the suggested subnet of “10.8.0.0″.

Since I’ve installed the final release of Firefox 3 on my Debian “lenny” system there is this annoying bug, that Firefox keeps switching to offline mode all the time, i.e. when I close it.

After some searching I found out that there are others who have the same problem and that this is a “feature” related to an application called “Network Manager”. Altough Network Manager is installed – I can’t tell why – I did never use it. So why does Firefox keeps annoying me? I don’t want to click on “File -> Work Offline” everytime I start Firefox to get access to the Internet. If you experience the same problem and wan’t to check if it is NM’s fault then run this command in a terminal and see if you get a result of “3″ (which means that NM thinks you are online) or “4″ (which means offline).

A developer claimed that setting “toolkit.networkmanager.disable” to true would cause Firefox to stop this behavior, I’ll try it out … Nope, doesn’t work. Only completly removing NetworkManager helps.