Older blog entries for skx (starting at number 9)

30 Dec 2004 (updated 30 Dec 2004 at 16:48 UTC) »

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Install-fest

In the past 24 hours I have:

  • Installed Ubuntu Liux
  • Installed Gentoo Linux
  • Installed Debian Sarge

One installation of each distribution upon a Dell Dimension L800R, with 128Mb of memory and a 20Gb drive.

The order above is the order I did the installs - I knew I wanted to end up with Debian "proper", but thought it was worth exploring the alternatives to see where we are let down.

Gentoo .. I didn't like, although I can see that it's a seductive system. The flexability really is present, and the machine did a suprisingly good job of installing software from source. (I admit I didn't do a full system rebuild, nor did I get as far as starting the X11 Window system).

Ubuntu was very pretty, although the system was sluggish with Gnome installed I can't fault the distribution for that.

After all the past controvosy I was disappointed to find a lack of semi-naked people on my desktop when the installation had finished - guess I'm just a pervert ;)

(OT: Correlation between BDSM + Geek? Seems high, perhaps I really am just a pervert :)

Sarge's daily netinstaller worked well on the machine, the configuring gave me a working system in a minimal amount of time. I think that the Ubuntu installation was marginally ahead - because the install CD-ROM I burnt only had two options on tasksel "Mail server" and .. something else.

Once I'd fixed up the sources.list file I had more tasks and all was well.

Oh, almost forgot. I wrote a small introduction to running mod-security on Debian, including installation notes for Woody.

28 Dec 2004 (updated 28 Dec 2004 at 18:23 UTC) »
Visibility

Thanks to Salmoni for commenting on my invisibility.

Previously my diaries weren't rated as low as 1 - although previously I was certified as a Master which was probably unfair.

Mostly I've only written about Debian work for the past few months since my diary was being carried by Planet Debian, and that seemed to stimulate my Debian writing.

I removed myself from there when my main account disappeared - I did add this persona in as a replacement, but it seems to have a broken rss feed. I wonder if that's because I have less than N entries Advogato tries to generate?

That's the main reason I'm writing entries, to see if it will start working when I get enough written.

Still if people wish to certify me, and improve my diary rating it would be appreciated - my old diaries are still available - even though my account is gone.

Almost enough to make me sad ..

Debian Updates

I made a couple of updates today, including my first upload to woody - to fix the issue with nasm.

Setting up the environment for that was fun, I wasn't sure whether to use a nice UML setup or a chroot.

In the end I followed the documentation I'd written last time and setup a new UML environment.

D-A.org

My Debian Administration website got a massive facelift yesterday, moving to a CSS based layout.

Any feedback is welcome.

Now I need to write more articles. I was amazed to see that already 60 pieces have been posted.

Google seems to like it a lot too :)

FFS

Advogato is conspiring to make my diary entries unviewable.

First we lose the main account, and create a new one.

Then the new one has a feed which is unviewable - gives a zero-sized-reply.

Well it's been a nice few years, but I guess Advogato and me are just gonna have to part ways.

Happy Holidays everybody!

Moved Here

With the recent advogato troubles causing me to be unable to use my Stevey account I'm going to be using the skx journal exclusively now.

Debian Work

I've been fairly busy recently looking over the security holes posted by DJB and trying to patch them.

Most of them have been done now, but we're still pending an upload for PHP and a couple of other things.

Misc Debian

It looks like my update to late made it into the archive recently - splitting the data out into its own package.

That and the recent fixes for dsniff and libnids1 are what I've been doing for my packages recently.

Apache

Trying to keep my webserver running I put together a quick package of mod_dosevasive for Woody - available here.

Seems to work OK, only minimal hacking required to make the package, and to get it working on the site.

Other than that I've been working with a lot of Apache code recently, updating some of my inhouse modules and updating mod_curb for machinima.com.

15 Dec 2004 (updated 15 Dec 2004 at 13:33 UTC) »
I'm still not Stevey

I'm still unable to login as my main ego, which is frustrating.

Still I guess it gives me a chance to look over the glory days when I was hacker of the month!

Debian work is continuing nicely, with a few good bugs squished over the past week.

I've also written a few more articles on the Debian Admin site. Via the RSS feeds it's getting a lot of traffic - but few comments from users. (This is what led to the adverts going on the articles page not the index incidently. If people follow the RSS feeds they tend to just read an article which catches their eye and not explore. If you're logged into the site you see no adverts ever, if you're an anonymous visitor then you get one per article)

I suspect it's either going to tail off or increase steadily until a critical mass is reached when more people start writing and posting comments.

It's a little disappointing that the feedback has been so minimal, but I guess I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I set it up and it is still fun.

Jedi Hand Wave

This isn't the account youi're looking for...

For the past few days I haven't been able to login to Advogato as Stevey. The login page tells me the account doesn't exist, and points me to the account creation page.

When I use the account creation page to "recreate" my account I see an error telling me that the account already exists.

I know my username and password are correct, other people seem to be logging in and updating their diaries - so is something just broken for me? Or is the site having problems?

Interesting Diagnostics:

Two interesting links:

If I'd ever seen an account deletion link I might imagine that somebody had compromised my account and deleted it, but given there is no such link I've seen .. wtf?

28 Oct 2002 (updated 28 Oct 2002 at 13:47 UTC) »

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

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