Why I’m happy that FreeWRT doesn’t need a web interface //at 15:37 //by abe

When I have to read things like drive-by pharming (via Heise, Symlink article), I’m really happy that there are free 3rd party router firmwares out there, that don’t need any shitty web interface.

My ASUS WL-500g Premium runs FreeWRT and the only possibility to change the configuration is to login via ssh and edit the configuration files as root.

I really pity all those out there who have to cope with the partially really sleazy web interfaces home routers currently offer.

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. ;-)

New virtual home //at 01:36 //by abe

There were quite a lot of small changes in my personal e-mail, web server and DNS infrastructure during the last months. While for more than ten years all my mails came together on a Linux account at the Students Representatives of Computer Science (German: Fachschaftsrat Informatik, short: FS Info) at the University of Saarland and all but one domain was hosted at my former employer, now nearly everything (including this blog) has moved to a Hetzner root server run by me and some friends and running Debian Sarge for AMD64. Most of these moves happend divided in small steps during January and February this year.

Only one move happend a little earlier than expected: Without any notice all external mail to my FS Info account got lost in a black hole one hop in front of the FS Info mail server. It looks like the RBG of the Dept. of CS at the University of Saarland didn’t like my face —eh— mails anymore and just dropped them. No bounces, no notices. Not that I knew them as friendly and kind, but blackholing active e-mail accounts without notice leads to dismissal at other places. They should really go and hear alphascorpii’s BOFH talk.

So my long-time e-mail address abe@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de is no more valid and any mail there won’t get read or answered. But I don’t mind if you send any junk there, it’s not my job anymore.

For luck the hoster of my deuxchevaux.org domain, Internett, which I used for all non-university e-mail, changed the forward within a good hour, so I only lost incoming mails of about one and a half day (which was the time until I noticed the blackholing), namely most mails written to all of my addresses at 30th and 31st of January 2007. If you wrote me around that time and miss the answers, you now know why. The few people I expected mail from, already have been contacted.

So for the future, write emails only to abe@ either deuxchevaux.org or — if you can’t remember how to spell that (no, you’re not the only one ;-) — noone.org (“no one” as in “nobody”, not “no. one” as in “the best” ;-)

And so since then none of my coworkers can make fun of me because I don’t have root on the box where my mail is received. ;-)

One of the moves also gave me the possibility to get “my own” Jabber server, so the time with those two jabber addresses (abe@jabber.noxa.de and abe@amessage.de), where usually at least one had some problems with some gateways are also over. If you want to contact me using Jabber, use abe@noone.org, equal to my easier to remember e-mail address. ;-)

So there’s still left to move: web, mail and DNS of deuxchevaux.org and beckert.at (domain of my parents) and my old web pages on fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de as well as Planet Symlink. And of course the redesign of my web pages, which I’ve planned since more than a half decade… ;-)

The infrastructure in my real-life home also changed: My gateway to the world is now a 266 MHz MIPS based ASUS WL500g Premium (which I named “pluriel” after the multifunctional Citroën C3 Pluriel) running FreeWRT 1.0.1 which replaced tryane, an as noisy (power supply fan) as compact Unisys Aquanta CP mini-desktop with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX.