Wilmer's stuff - OSS

spamass-milter and IPv6

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:51:51 +0100

While migrating my mailserver from Ubuntu Dapper to Debian Lenny, I noticed spamass-milter didn't want to start:

Could not parse "2001:770:017b::" as a network

After scratching my head on that for a while (it worked on the old box!) I remembered two years ago I spent some time adding IPv6 support to spamass-milter myself. Support as-in allowing IPv6 subnets to be whitelisted/auto-accepted. Very useful if you want mails from your local IPv6 machines to be accepted automatically without waiting for 10s while spamassasin is checking if you're not a spammer...

I never published the thing and now I could hardly find back the damn thing at all. :-)

http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/spamass-milter-ipv6.diff

Just to make sure I won't lose it again ... and maybe it'll be useful for someone else.

Also just de-Ubuntufied my laptop. Debian's doing great so far: Suspend and Resume actually work better out of the box, but fonts look a bit ugly (and sometimes really less readable I'm afraid) compared to Ubuntu...

Running 32-bit 3D apps on 64-bit Debian NVIDIA systems

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:46:22 +0100

Because Intel on-board video isn't quite good enough at 3D and my somewhat old laptop with built-in NVIDIA chip wasn't doing all that well at X-Plane either, I bought an NVIDIA GT240 card. Mostly because it seemed to be a good performer without doubling the power consumption of my PC. Stuff wasn't working all that well though and I got pretty frustrated:

QUOTE:

X Error of failed request: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error)
Major opcode of failed request: 135 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 2 (X_GLXRenderLarge)
Serial number of failed request: 1468
Current serial number in output stream: 1483

was all X-Plane could tell me. Google Earth also didn't work and seemed more like Google Black hole to me. Both are 32-bit apps. A 64-bit binary of Flightgear did work. Sigh.

After some poking I noticed the nvidia-glx package replaces /usr/lib{64,}/libGL* with its own versions, but didn't touch /usr/lib32. A-ha!

The fix: Get a 32-bit version of nvidia-glx, extract it somewhere (dpkg -X) and copy all the files in its usr/lib to /usr/lib32, overwriting the libGL symlink that is currently there.

Or, hmm, as I just found out: apt-get install nvidia-glx-ia32. I'm glad someone thought of it already.

Now X-Plane works perfectly (with maybe even ten times the frame rate I had with Intel on-board) and Google Earth can show me my house again.

Just blogging this since so far a Google search for any part of the error above didn't give useful results.

Now, I just have to find out if I can get a TV signal out of this thing somehow, since my TV was made long before HDMI was invented. :-/

HAR2009

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:20:13 +0200

Hey, it's more than two months ago already, but it's just in time for my thoughts on HAR2009! I put pictures on-line a little while ago already, but nothing else so far.

It's a pretty neat event. It feels like a festival, but then completely stuffed with geeks. And talks instead of concerts. And also, fantastic decoration. Or maybe I should call it light pollution? Also, we had our own GSM network! Of course, we also had police on site, because you don't want to know what this hacker scum does in their spare time. From the stories I heard, the police had a pretty unexciting but pleasant time there though.

All in all it was fun, and I met a whole bunch of people, including some happy BitlBee users and contributors. Most interesting was perhaps that I met a roommate of a former Mountain View teammate of mine at the train station before the conference already. The geek world is pretty small, I guess.

Bunch of pictures (and updated blog software)

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:25:43 +0200

Sigh. If a PHP coder says "The complete upgrade path is automatted and can be performed with a single mouse click.", don't believe him. I just spent almost an hour on a Serendipity upgrade. Maybe it works well if you have a dumbass FTP CGI-exec webhost, but I miss the good old days without "user friendly" installer scripts, where installing a webapp was a matter of unpacking a tarball and feeding a database dump to MySQL. Stuff just worked without having to give the webserver write permissions pretty much everywhere.

But now, after the hackish s9y upgrade I lost the old theme, random plugins broke and I had to reinstall + reconfigure them (after resolving some more permission issues), and the best part must be that the upgrade script does absolutely no error checking. After tons of error messages it says "upgrade successful". Fortunately it's also dumb and didn't mark the upgrade as successful, so I could retry the upgrade after fixing permissions. One day I'll just figure out how to move all this stuff to Blogger. :-/

Anyway, I promised pictures. Lots of stuff is now on http://wilmer.gaast.net/fotos/. Don't have very fast hosting for it yet, but I'll work that out later. Hilights are the pictures of my first flight lesson, and also pictures of my cool model airplane. Bought it in April (after mostly trashing my Super Cub and leaving it behind in Beilen), and got some cool in-flight pictures. I also bought a 37g camera especially designed for attaching to these planes, so soon I'll be spying on people in the park and around here in Dublin. :-P

Some pretty hiking pictures from this year's Mountain View trip are also there: Big Sur (under Monterey), Rancho San Antonio (just under Mountain View/Sunnyvale). In other news, I'm flying to New York on the 24th. Not sure if I'll make any pictures there since probably everything there has been photographed to death already.

Getting a list of your Firefox tabs

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:58:06 +0200

Just a quick Perl hack I put together last night. This "oneliner" reads the sessionstore.js file and prints the URLs of all tabs you're currently looking at. I also noticed that the sessionstore contains lots of other useful information, including all session cookies. I'm quite sure that will come in handy some day. :-D I took a quick look for code that does this, and found people trying to put some complicated grep/regex together, but that seemed way too fragile to me. One person did it in JavaScript (which makes a lot of sense since the session store is encoded as a JavaScript data structure), and I decided to go that way as well except I'm using Perl's JavaScript module so it can still run on the command-line. :-)

CODE:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use JavaScript;

my $rt = JavaScript::Runtime->new();
my $cx = $rt->create_context();

$cx->bind_function(fetch => sub { print( $_[0] . "\n" ); });

$sess = `cat ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.js`;

$sessparser = <<EOF;
for( var win_ in sess['windows'] )
{
win = sess['windows'][win_];
for( var tab_ in win['tabs'] )
{
tab = win['tabs'][tab_];
fetch(tab['entries'][tab['index'] - 1]['url']);
}
}
EOF

$cx->eval('var sess = ' . $sess . ';' . $sessparser);

And yes, my code is indented, but my shitty blog software likes to break it.

Mountain View, TAPFS and yet another gallery

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 03 May 2009 06:28:58 +0200

Writing from Mountain View again! Landed on Thursday, spent one day at work so far and today I got my bicycle fixed up so I can use it for commuting again. It's nice how year after year, the thing still works for me, all it needs when I come is some extra air in the tires. :-) One thing California is really not doing well this year is the weather, though. It's raining for two days already!

In other news, I should definitely be plugging The Australian Pink Floyd Show in this post. They were in Dublin about a week ago and they're amazingly good. Even a singer that sounds a lot like Roger Waters! The show was great too, with inflatable animals and everything, and the music sounded perfect. This tour they're playing all of The Wall, and for that that means not just a "copy" of the CD, but also many of the little filler pieces that PF used to play during the concerts.

Also working on a bit of OSS these weeks, adding more "diversity" to the already bloated landscape of gallery webapps. I'm making a difference though, SRSLY! I found myself making a lot more pictures since I bought my first dSLR and many of them aren't really part of an album/event or anything like that. I could just put them on Flickr or Picasa and be done with it, but that'd break my time-wasting tradition of hosting everything myself.

I already use F-Spot to manage my pictures, so it'd be nice to have a web gallery that can automatically use tag information from F-Spot. Turns out there are two programs that can do this already. They're not for me though; they automatically export everything, and there are pictures that I'd rather keep for myself. :-P

I then tried to adapt "original" to my wishes, but gave up when I saw it doesn't quite use templates and am rewriting it now using web.py and Cheetah templates. Going well, but TBH I feel homesick to PHP. Not that it's such a great language, it's more that I fail to understand why there are 982397832 different webapp frameworks for Python/WSGI/mod_python/whatever instead of just one that actually works.

This is a work in progress, and the progress is good. :-) Once it's done, I'll be able to post pictures here of my new radio-controlled airplane and other neat stuff. Yaaaay...

Pulling a JournalSpace ... almost

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:42:35 +0100

Wednesday, I had this very friendly mail in my INBOX, from mdam:

QUOTE:

This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on tosca

A Fail event had been detected on md device /dev/md1.

Faithfully yours, etc.

There was little reason to panic, since I had a spare disk installed already. A few man- and mdadm commands later, the array was resyncing. I walked away from the screen, confident that there was nothing to worry about.

How wrong could I be! Somewhere at 99% of the recovery process, one of the existing disks threw a read error. This was too much for md, and to punish me it marked two disks as spares, one as failed and only one as still working. RAID5 may be designed to deal with broken disks, but it does have its limits. ;-) This is where it got scary, especially since this machine is, say, 1300km away from me.

With some remote help, I managed to get the machine rebooted in single user mode with an sshd running. The disks were all available again, but the superblocks were sufficiently broken that md didn't want to construct the LVM array anymore. (Fortunately the rootfs array was not a problem!)

Anyway, I spent that night copying the raw partitions over to another machine. Tried to construct an array there, but things were untable, md often tried to resync the partitions (bad idea), or simply didn't want to run it for me. Instead of trying to make this go, I decided to write a little tool to do the dirty work for me. And that, reader, is why I'm writing this. :-)

To my surprise, I couldn't find any tool to do this on FreshMeat. Sure, when I search for "RAID recovery" on Google, I get plenty of ads for "Professional RAID recovery tools", but I don't want to pay $$$$ for a program that XORs a couple of GBs of data for me. :-P

So, behold: raidrec. Comes with no documentation, other than this blog article and the (long) comment at the top of the file. I hope it'll be useful for someone some day... It was for me. I have all my data back, LVM picked up all my volumes perfectly, and a few fscks later I managed to migrate all my VMs to OpenVZ running on a desktop elsewhere in the house. At least ruby (my workstation here in Dublin) isn't the only desktop machine being a part-time gaast.net webserver anymore. :-/

If anyone didn't get the JournalSpace reference (which fortunately isn't very accurate here anyway): http://journalspace.com/

F-Spot "plugin" for printing pictures via PhotoPrintIt

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:12:36 +0100

A little while ago I wrote a little Perl script that can be used to upload a bunch of pictures to PhotoPrintIt (Dutch people may know this from the shop Kruidvat). Together with a tiny .dll file this can be used as an F-Spot plugin to get pictures printed. Just select the ones you like in the picture browser, File->Export->Printing Service, wait for a little while, enter your address information and you're done. 2/3 days later you can collect your pictures at a local shop (or they'll be shipped to your home).

I'm not actually using this myself and don't intend to support it or spend a lot more time on improving it (not to mention adding a GUI), but maybe even in the current form it's already useful to someone. Just get the source using bzr: http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/printpics/.

Unbricking your Netgear ADSL router without Windows

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:45:06 +0200

So for about a year I have a DSL modem and a separate router (running OpenWRT) here. Simply because the average DSL router has crappy software (no decent CLI, connection tracking for nothing more complicated than TCP and for only a few hundred of them, crappy wireless ... well, you get the point). So I decided to buy a Linux-powered DSL router, the Netgear DG834G. I hoped for one with an AR7 board, because that one seems very well supported, but I received a v4 which has a Broadcom board instead. :-(

Anyway, Netgear is still pretty decent. The stock firmware comes with a telnetd (must be activated via the webserver though), and (well, forced by the GPL) they put tools on-line which I can use to rebuild firmware images, which I already abused to remove the multi-lingual web interface and use those precious kilobytes for a tcpdump binary instead. :-) Adding a kernel with IPv6 support is going to be more complicated though.

Anyway, I should first focus on making the thing actually wortk with my IPoA ADSL2+ connection.... sigh

But after bricking the thing once I did manage to write up a tool (based on a half-finished tool written by someone on the OpenWRT forum) to fix that very problem. These routers can be reflashed without any serial cable or whatever these days, using the power of raw Ethernet frames (R). It's a gross hack, but it works and is reasonably convenient. It's up for download for anyone who needs it. Be careful, only use it when things can't get any worse anyway!

mail2trac.pl

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:57:47 +0100

Yesterday I finally found an excuse to play with WWW::Mechanize. Wrote a little script that parses an e-mail and posts it as a ticket comment on BitlBee's Trac page. Just posting it here now in case someone else is interested. It works pretty well already, I just have to find something to MIME-decode messages, otherwise things look a bit ugly sometimes and signatures may not be detected and stripped properly.

The script is at: http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/mail2trac.pl. Just add it to your procmailrc or /etc/aliases and you're done!

[edit] MIME-decoding is there too now. That was a hell to implement... :-(

rxvt-unicode and ISO 14755 mode

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:22:08 +0200

Now that my (and pretty much every other) machine uses UTF-8 by default, I was pretty much forced to ditch rxvt in favour of rxvt-unicode. Unfortunately the rxvt-unicode authors think attaching some keycap picture insert mode to the Ctrl-Shift key combination (which is easy to hit by accident) would be HANDY. Even handier, it can only be disabled at compile time.

Thanks for nothing guys, I really hope there's at least one person on this planet who agrees that this is handy ... I'm afraid most people who accidentally hit Ctrl-Shift every few minutes don't agree.

So, behold:

CODE:

wilmer@ruby:~/bin$ cat fix-rxvt.sh
#!/bin/sh -ex
cd `mktemp -d /tmp/rxvt.XXXXXX`
apt-get source rxvt-unicode
sudo apt-get build-dep rxvt-unicode
cd rxvt-unicode-*/
perl -pi -e 's/--enable-iso14755/--disable-iso14755/g' debian/rules
dch -n 'ISO 14755/Keycap mode SUCKS!!!'
fakeroot debian/rules binary
sudo dpkg -i ../rxvt-unicode-lite*deb

For all you Debian+rxvt-unicode users out there waiting for this bug to be fixed... :-)

[edit]Added dch command to make sure apt-get doesn't reinstall the original package every time.[/edit]

Intel X.org driver, PAL TV-Out, colours please!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:55:52 +0200

Got a little bit confused by this bug report while trying to get the TV-out on my mainboard working properly. As any European TV, mine wants PAL signals, not NTSC. The bug report gave me the impression that there should be separate PAL/NTSC mode definitions. But in the current driver, this isn't the case anymore.

Instead, they now use RandR properties to maintain this setting. And RandR, at least for properties, seems to be read-only .... soooo, how does it work then???

Well, try something like this:

CODE:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "TV"
Option "TV Format" "PAL"
EndSection

Took me a whole weekend to find this, but at least it works now, in full colour! This didn't seem to be very well-documented to me, so I hope this post will help. If it doesn't work for you, maybe your TV doesn't understand S-Video. There's a very simple hack to solve that issue too. All you need is two wires, no need to solder anything. :-)

Dear Intel,

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 23:17:36 +0200

Thanks for making Linux drivers for the on-board graphics stuff on my mainboard. Next year, could you please not publish them as a .... .EXE file???

24!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:31:27 +0200

Yep, another birthday passed, and I celebrated it with my father and grandparents, here in Dublin. My grandparents never travelled by airplane so far, so it was quite an adventure. Unfortunately they had to get to know the great Irish weather here. But then again, it isn't all that different from the Dutch weather...

So a little while after my complaint about NTL blocking traffic to some sites, they now block access to all sites ... they cut me off. :-) Still waiting for my ADSL. This is Ireland, so if they say it'll take two weeks to ocnnect you, you do have to add two more. (That's how it works with appointments at least, I'm told. If you have an appointment at x, make sure you don't actually show up before x+15 min!) Oh heck, fortunately most bigger cities know these things called "security-unconscious neighbours" and "open access point"... ;-)

Still want to do some BitlBee snapshot release, maybe tomorrow. The new Jabber groupchat support works very well, it's working perfectly at work for over two months already, and I'm actually not even the only one who uses it. :-) And who knows when this will become a stable release... Clearly I've been too ambitious with adding new stuff, and too lazy to finish all the details to make it worth releasing. :-(

Oh yeah, and the new website rocks! But I suppose most people saw it already by now.

Got a place!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:22:09 +0200

It's a week ago already since I moved into my new apartment. I managed to find one very close to work. I can pretty much walk from my desk at home to the one at work in five minutes. :-) It's not that I'm lazy, I was actually looking for a place a bit further away, but this apartment is pretty big and I like that. Might make some pics later.

Also working on BitlBee Jabber MUC support again, and it works pretty well already. Actually I use it all the time at work by now. No more need for crappy GUI Jabber clients. :-D