autossh vs TCP resetter //at 00:49 //by abe

LUG-Camp 2007 in Interlaken is nearly over, and I’m reading my mail as usual using ssh, screen and mutt on the server. But the ssh connection resets every few minutes. According to the LUSC people (who are running the gateway) some script kiddie is running a TCP resetter somewhere in the network.

I remembered that I read about autossh in the Debian package list once a while and that it sounded cool but I had no use for it yet. Until now.

I’m writing this over the same crashing ssh connection and I’m typing without taking big notice of the quite often occurring connection resets:

autossh noone.org -t 'screen -rd'

It just works. :-)

Goodbye Woody, Welcome Etch //at 00:53 //by abe

It finally happened. I installed Debian Etch on my last Woody box, a 400 MHz Pentium II with 576 MB RAM named gsa which is my home desktop since I bought it at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe.

And no I didn’t do a dist-upgrade, neither direct no via Sarge. As already planned I removed some no more necessary operating systems from that box and installed Etch on the freed disk space. Woody is still installed on that box in parallel and was recognized perfectly by Etch’s installer.

I took a few hours but also was big fun to go through Etch package list and to decide what to install. Overall the installation of 5 GB of software took about half a day.

In general everything went fine, the only thing I’m yet missing is sound. Etch didn’t seem to recognize my soundcard at all although it’s a well-known brand and defacto standard for many other soundcards: a Creative Labs Soundblaster. Well, the 16-Bit ISA version, needing the full length of the slot. Worked fine under Woody. Well, I hope I’ll get it working again manually.

What on the other hand is really nice with udev hell —eh— hal and all those new automatic bells and whistles: The desktop (well, at least GNOME Nautilus as well as XFCE, but probably also KDE) recognises when I insert a 3.5” floppy into the drive and shows me a nice floppy icon on the desktop. You think, that’s impossible? Floppy drives don’t inform the rest of the system when a floppy has been inserted without you polling the drive every few seconds? Well, USB floppy drives can. And they do. :-)

I still need time to migrate all the old settings from Woody to Etch. I’ll probably stick with FVWM, but perhaps will use the GNOME enabled version. What’s already done is the migration from tcsh to zsh. On all new or dist-upgraded systems after Etch I’ve chosen zsh so with my last Woody installation retiring I’ve also fully migrated to zsh.

So I’ve got now most of my active private boxes running Etch. Only the noone.org web and mail server “sym” (an amd64 box) as well as my 133 MHz ThinkPad “bijou” are still running Sarge, both with 2.6 kernels.

So with switching to Etch on gsa, I also got no more Debian box running a 2.4 kernel. The only 2.4 kernel I run is on my FreeWRT WLAN router named pluriel, which runs 2.4.33.3. But I expect that 2.6.18 will be as stable and long lasting as the famous and rock-solid 2.4.18 from Woody. 18 seems to be Debian’s favourite kernel minor version recently. ;-)

VCFe talk online / bijou vs Etch //at 00:18 //by abe

With a few days lag, the slides to my VCFe 8.0 talk Aktuelle, freie Software auf alter Hardware (“Up to date, free software on old hardware”, held in German using Kazehakase and S5) are now online. In comparision to my former talks on that subject (held at some DebianDays), this talk was not Debian focused but focused more on not so well known, but resource-friendly free software as well as focused on an audience which has more knowledge of old hardware than of current software. :-)

Additionally, I updated my old blog post about X on my ThinkPad 760ED named bijou so that now also my current XF86Config-4 for Sarge on that box is linked in there.

Apropos bijou: I couldn’t recommend Debian 4.0 Etch that much for old computers with not so much memory since especially aptitude has grown much in regards of it’s memory and performance needs. Regarding my experiences with Etch, any computer with less than 50 MB of RAM will start to swap if aptitude is only started on such a box. I’ve looked throough the aptitude documentation, but I haven’t found a way to switch of some of the tables it generates internally. E.g. I have no need for the tag database it always generates. I really would be happy, if someone knows a way to turn even only that feature off. Then I may dist-upgrade bijou to Etch, since I found that dselect is no real alternative to aptitude anymore.

Oh yeah, and I of course bought new old hardware at the VCFe: A 386SX Thin Client named Flytech Carry-I 9300 from 1991 with about 200 MB of harddisk and 10 MB of RAM.