There was a time when I was very openminded and pragmatic. Sadly though, I've been pushed into some kind of defensive posture for a while now because everyone keeps attacking me on my choice to use Debian and Debian derivatives over anything else. Because of this, a lot of my replies can be snappy and condescending.

I'll apologize for that right now :)

One of the readers (Karanbir Singh) of this blog (who ever thought people would be reading this) suggested that I look at Puppet or CFEngine as a better means of maintaining a large number of servers.
At first I was very sceptic about this solution and replied very quickly that it was probably no good in my case. However, after thinking about it for a while walking in the snow (yes, spring has just begun and its snowing... this global warming thing is starting to act up) I realised that it is (or could be) actually a nice solution.

Next to Fedora 8, I plan to try out Centos 5 because it is supposed to be more secure and stable (why else would Redhat use it over Fedora ?)

It appears I can reuse the kickstart file I created for Fedora 8, since the installation went ok.

But then come the problems.

Under Debian, after a basic install, I can use this sequence of commands to install any package thats known in the Debian universe:

. /etc/bash_completion
apt-get install <some package>

I include bash_completion here because it is a vital tool for me on any modern Linux system (because I'm a bad typer, I rely on bash completion a lot. And it's also a lot faster to work with)

Under CentOS, there is no bash_completion and there is no apt-get. Instead, there is yum.
So first thing to try:

yum install bash-completion

6 months ago, I asked the netfilter-devel mailinglist about the status of nf-HiPAC in netfilter. Because of the upcoming netfilter workshop at that time, the question was postponed.

During the workshop, nf-HiPAC was discussed and it was concluded that nf-HiPAC would be integrated into mainstream netfilter.

However, after 6 months, the HIPAC website remains unchanged.

So, now what ? My current firewalls are dangerously outdated and I feel the pressing need to upgrade and review my current setup. At this moment, I'm not very confident in the future of nf-HiPAC and because netfilter by itself can not pull the load (hence why nf-HiPAC exists), I'm forced to consider less pleasant alternatives.

Seen on Planet Debian:

Mike Hommey reports on his blog that he is impressed with procmails sourcecode (obviously he's being sarcastic)

goto jiasc;
do
{ *++to= *++from;
jiasc:;
}
while(--count);

This looks like a good candidate for an OverTheWire wargame level

I'm taking a fresh look at PIC programming and hope to talk RS232 with my PIC sometime soon

https://www.ccsinfo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=59260

I said in some earlier post that I don't use the singularity-versioning functionality very much. But that doesn't mean having different versions of my files is overkill.

In my current setup, singularity-versioning automatically versions all the files in certain directories using bazaar-ng. Then I also have a singularity-backup-client package installed on the client, which provides a script called by singularity-backup-server on the backup server.

I want to combine all of the above: I will drop singularity-versioning and use rdiff-backup in singularity-backup-client/server.

Rdiff-backup can take a backup incrementally and store each difference in a separate file. So, I have backups of all my files AND I can go back several versions if I wish. No need to keep a local repository, everything is done on the server.

[Update]
The first test to see what running rdiff-backup feels and looks like, failed with:

So, I've decided to give my laptop an overhaul and upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy.

Instead of using FUSE with EncFS, I'm going for dm-crypt this time. A guide on how to do this can be found here:
http://pupeno.com/2007/06/10/encrypted-home-ubuntu/

In good singularity tradition, I've created a new Ubuntu repository for Gutsy, which I will use when reinstalling my laptop for real.
This repository kan be found under http://www.singularity.be/gutsy/

After installing singularity-encfs (the name didn't change, it's still an encrypted filesystem), set a password on the root account and logout the regular user. Then login as root and execute

singularity-encfs  

In my QEMU situation, I usually run

http://pupeno.com/2007/06/10/encrypted-home-ubuntu/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=437911

It's been about half a year since I've reinstalled my laptop, and it's time for a review of how it's doing in the real world. The current installation is based on Ubuntu Feisty. Right now, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon is the way to go and it's about time I upgraded.

Most of the laptop installation will remain the same, but I will make some corrections and additions.

Phase 1 - Encrypted filesystem

I still want an encrypted filesystem, but I don't want to use EncFS anymore. I found out the hard way that EncFS is quite slow (I get a max throughput of 10MB/s on my SATA disk, which gets 60MB/s when I don't use EncFS).
I also found out that the default EncFS options don't play nice with a lot of applications like rtin and evolution.

More than a month has passed since I requested my home-address to be changed to Leuven. This week, I finally received my new identitycard, and electronic one (EID).

Nosey as I am, I tried to read everything on that card with the only smartcard reader I have: "Texas Instruments PCI6515 SmartCard Controller" built into my Dell Latitude D610. Unfortunately, there is currentnly no linux-driver for this device yet and I wasn't prepared to write on just for this experiment. So, I borrowed one of the BEID smartcard readers that the Belgian government is apparently giving away.

This is what I installed on Ubuntu Feisty 7.04:

apt-get install beidgui libacr38u libacr38ucontrol0 beid-tools pcscd libpcsclite-dev libengine-pkcs11-openssl libbeid2-dev
ln -s /usr/lib/libbeidpkcs11.so.2 /usr/lib/libbeidpkcs11.so
ldconfig
/etc/init.d/pcscd start

I started beidgui and it worked!