Unix

This is how I upgraded the Squid package from 3.1.19 to 3.2.6 on my Ubuntu 12.04 installations. The 3.2.x branch contains support for multiple cores, so that's a pretty important update to have. 12.04 is an LTS release, so I'm really not sure why 3.2.6 hasn't been backported to it. Anyhow, here's how I did it:

Set up the dquilt shell alias as described in the Debian New Maintainer's Guide:

alias dquilt="quilt --quiltrc=${HOME}/.quiltrc-dpkg"

Create ~/.quiltrc-dpkg containing

I recently evaluated several open-source HTTP proxy servers. I was looking for something lightweight and fast, without a persistent cache or with no cache at all.

I recently had to get into the Mosh pit with my good old friend Hardy Heron aka Ubuntu 8.04 TLS.

wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/keithw/mosh/zipball/mosh-1.2.2
mv mosh-1.2.2 mosh-1.2.2.zip
unzip mosh-1.2.2.zip
cd keithw-mosh-df955aa
sudo sed -i -r 's/#\s*(.*hardy-backports.*)/\1/' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libprotobuf-dev \
                     protobuf-compiler libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev libio-pty-perl
./autogen.sh
protobuf_CFLAGS=" " protobuf_LIBS="-lprotobuf" ./configure --prefix="/usr"
sed -i s/LITE_RUNTIME/SPEED/ src/protobufs/*.proto
make
sudo make install

The awesome Hudson Continuous Integration project seems to be undergoing some organizational changes at the moment. Its leader, Kohsuke Kawaguchi has left Sun/Oracle and started up his own company revolving around professional services for Hudson, it seems. Let's hope this is not going to be one of those messy "open-source project going commercial" scenarios. Anyways, one of the more immediate problems caused by the changes is that the Debian package repository did not get any updates since late March. In a Hudson mailing list Kohsuke casually announced that he'd be pushing packages to this Hudson CI Debian and Ubuntu package repository but this fact isn't reflected on the official Hudson website yet which is why I am mentioning it here, putting all of my SEO weight behind the link ;-).

Update 06/27/2010: This workaround is still necessary for Lucid (10.04 LTS) and Precise (12.04 LTS). These instructions still work for those releases with minor adjustments (see the updates at the end of the article).

This forum post got me started but I got stuck in various places and thought I'd summarize what worked for me. I'm not going to explain much but if you're going to work with Bind and DLZ you probably know what you're dealing with. I also won't go into configuring DLZ because that depends on your particular DB schema and there is sufficient documentation on the DLZ website.

We need MySQL of course:

I use mod_authn_dbd to check HTTP authentication credentials against a MySQL database. After switching from Basic to Digest authentication I got 500 errors and No DBD Authn configured! in the server's error log. It took me a while to realize that it wasn't enough to change

… is actually easy thanks to Dnsruby. The following code illustrates that:

Today I ran into a subtle issue regarding the order in which Windows Vista queries connection-specific DNS servers. I tested a setup with a PPTP VPN server that also provides DNS name resolution services to its VPN clients. For that purpose I ran both a BIND 9 name server and a Poptop PPPD daemon on the same box. It is dual-homed, i.e. one interface is the private interface of the VPN tunnel endpoint and the other one is the public Ethernet interface through which the server is linked to the internet. I configured BIND to listen on both interfaces.

It took me sometime to find Ubuntu torrents that work. I noticed that the .torrent files on the official Ubuntu server and its mirrors point to dead torrents. After some digging, I found this tracker to be most up to date. In case you're stumbling over this problem too, give it a try. It seems to be the official Ubuntu tracker.

[This article is now somewhat obsolete because vmware-server have been included the official portage tree. There is no need for a separate overlay. The bug reports still apply. This is an updated version of a two previous article on the subject.]

The new VMware Server is going to replace VMware's GSX Server product. And it's more than just a new name: VMware will supposedly release it free of charge. Being still in beta testing, there are currently no stable ebuilds available for it on Gentoo Linux. Fortunately, Mike Auty and others are working on one and they are doing a fine job. They also seem to be streamlining and consolidating other related VMware ebuilds. You can keep track of their progress on these Bugzilla bugs:

• Problems regarding the vmware-module ebuild: 137422.
• Problems regarding the vmware-player ebuild: 137423.
• Problems regarding the vmware-server ebuild: 137424.
• Problems regarding the vmware-server-console ebuild: 137425.
• Problems regarding the vmware-workstation ebuild: 137426.
• Problems regarding the vmware-workstation-tools ebuild: 137428.
• Problems regarding the vmware overlay in general: 122500.

The VMware Server ebuilds are not part of the official stable Gentoo portage tree so if you want to install them on your system you will have to jump through a few extra hoops. Fortunately this process has become very convenient and straight-forward thanks to Gunnar Wrobel's layman.

[This is an updated version of a previous article on the subject.]

VMWare is going to replace its GSX Server product with the new VMware Server. And it's going to be more than just a new name: the best thing about it is that VMware releases it free of charge. Being still in beta testing, there are currently no stable ebuilds available for it on Gentoo Linux. Fortunately, Mike Auty is working on one and he is doing a fine job. You should keep track of his progress on Gentoo Bugzilla bug #122500. For people with little Portage experience (author included) it can be a bit complicated to throw together an ebuild from bugzilla attachments.

Ever wondered why port scanners like nmap are able to tell that some of the ports on your server are protected by a firewall? Have a peek at this nmap transcript:

Starting nmap 3.75 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2006-02-23 22:54 CET
Interesting ports on doodah.com (12.34.56.78):
(The 1658 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
21/tcp   open     ftp
22/tcp   open     ssh
53/tcp   open     domain
80/tcp   open     http
3306/tcp filtered mysql

I'm quite sure my firewall blocks access to the mysql port. Yet it bugs me that it is possible to tell that I have MySQL installed on my system simply by performing a port scan.

[This is and outdated version of the article. Read the new version!]

VMware Server is going to replace GSX server. The best thing about it is that VMware releases it free of charge. Being still in beta testing, there are currently no stable ebuilds available for it on Gentoo Linux. Fortunately, Mike Auty is working on one and he is doing a fine job. You should keep track of his progress on Gentoo Bugzilla bug #122500. For people with little Portage experience (author included) it can be a bit complicated to throw together an ebuild from bugzilla attachments.

If you are a user of Urchin 4 or 5 you might have noticed that Urchin’s “Countries” report does not match the standards that Urchin has set for professional website statistics.  It seems to be Urchin’s weak spot.  It might be ok for you but I was certainly disappointed when I discovered that Urchin determines (or should I rather say: attempts to determine) a visitor’s location from a database that is derived from reverse DNS lookups. This type of location reporting can hardly be considered state-of-the-art, even less so for a commercial website log file analytics application. This article is about how Urchin 5 can be fooled into using true Geo IP mappings for its Countries report.

Urchin is a professional web log analysis and statistics application. It was recently acquired by Google and what used to be called Urchin 6 On Demand is now being integrated into Google Analytics. I don’t know for how long the stand-alone Urchin 5 will be around but right now it is still used by many individuals and corporations. I was not happy with the way Urchin deals with dynamic URLs, i.e. URLs that have query parameters in them. After playing around with Urchin 5's advanced filters for a while, I came to the conclusion that they can be employed to improve Urchin's dynamic URL handling.

I'm currently struggling to get Gentoo to install from a Live CD on a new Dell Lattitude X300. It boots the kernel just fine but the init script can't mount the live CD because it doesn't find the cdrom drive. The X300 comes with a docking station which holds the CD drive which is connected internally via USB.