MSIE und Geldautomaten //at 19:27 //by abe

Mir sind ja schon die Haare zu Berge gestanden, als ich von Geldautomaten mit Windows 95 als Betriebssystem hörte, aber das hier ist einfach die Höhe: Ein Geldautomat der Berliner Spaßkasse, bei dem bei der Geldausgabe der Internet Explorer einen Skript-Fehler meldet. “Zum Glück” lautet der Fehler “Zugriff verweigert”. Aber wir wissen ja, beim Internet Explorer ist selbst about:blank gefährlich.

Note to myself: Wenn Du das nächste Mal in Berlin bist, meide Geldautomaten der Berliner Spaßkasse.

Fixing server bugs on client side //at 15:35 //by abe

On my new job at ETH Zurich I stumbled over a lot of HTTP requests in the web server log file, obviously trying to fetch the automatic proxy configuration file (usually called proxy.pac) but requesting it with the last character missing and therefore requesting the nonexistent file proxy.pa:

195.176.XX.AB - - [16/May/2006:11:12:56 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.1" 404 5261 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.YY.CD - - [16/May/2006:11:16:32 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.ZZ.EF - - [16/May/2006:11:18:38 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.YY.CD - - [16/May/2006:11:24:16 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.ZZ.GHI - - [16/May/2006:11:31:44 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.0" 404 5235 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.XX.J - - [16/May/2006:11:33:35 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.1" 404 5261 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
195.176.ZZ.LMN - - [16/May/2006:11:35:18 +0200] "GET /proxy.pa HTTP/1.1" 404 5261 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"

WTF happend here? When I found a bunch of those request from a single host last night, I expected a local cut and waste typo on a single box. But during the day I got the same sort of defective requests from over 30 hosts in our network. So we looked at our dhcpd.conf, but all appearances of “proxy.pac” had its “c” at the right place.

WTF is happening here? After googling for a moment I found this mail on the squid users mailing list, stating the following:

WPAD worked reasonably well for WindowsNT and Windows2000; however, there was a problem with the file name in Windows2000 and the initial release of WindowsXP. The Microsoft DHCP Service returned the wrong byte count for the string returned for option 252. The DHCP Client compensated for this by decrementing the string length. This resulted in the file name being truncated when the ISC DHCP daemon was used. The solution was to define a symlink proxy.pa –> proxy.pac.

So in other words: Microsoft worked around a off-by-one bug in their own DHCP server by patching their DHCP client to parse faulty configurations — and obviously only faulty configurations by expecting some length statement to be always off-by-one. *hrrrrng*

Our solution was BTW to insert an appropriate Alias directive into our Apache web server hosting the file.

German voting statistics viewed from a Debian System //at 01:54 //by abe

The last years I always sticked to the voting statistics of the ARD Tagesschau, since the only acceptable other news source in German television, ZDF heute corporated with MSNBC.

But this year, also the Tagesschau showed the Microsoft logo in some statistic on TV, which the German Linux association LIVE tried to get removed by stating that this an illegal advertisment in a political TV show.

Well, they weren’t successful, but at least the statistics on the web don’t show an M$ logo. But they have another problem:

My desktop system, a Pentium II with 400 MHz and 578 MB of RAM, is still running Woody, because I yet can’t live without Galeon 1.2.x, which was replaced on Sarge by Galeon 1.3.x — a complete rewrite which lacks most features I liked in Galeon 1.2.x. Galeon 1.2.x doesn’t show the above mentioned website that good, so I tried some browsers from Sarge. But none of them showed that page correctly:

Galeon 1.2.5 based on Mozilla 1.4.2 from Debian 3.0 Woody	Firefox 1.0.4 from Debian 3.1 Sarge
Konqueror 3.3.2 from Debian 3.1 Sarge	Dillo 0.8.3 from Debian 3.1 Sarge

So interestingly, the page is best readable in Konqueror and Dillo while only Firefox doesn’t show all of the main content of the page.

Somehow I fear, the pages have been “optimised” for MSIE, while the ZDF voting statistics page just don’t work at all: It needs JavaShit and Flash. *plonk*

Regarding the published extrapolations: I’m at least happy that CDU (black, right conservative) and FDP (yellow, business liberal / free market) probably won’t have a majority. But what this will result in is still unknown. There are too many options open for our politicians to do any prediction. I would probably prefer Red-Red-Green or Red-Green as we have it at them moment. Worst case for me would be Black-Yellow.

about:blank ist unsicher sagt der MSIE //at 01:37 //by abe

Ich habe auf meinem Windows-2003-Testrechner im Büro about:blank als Startseite des MSIE eingestellt. Trotzdem kommt seit einem der letzten Windows-Updates beim Starten des MSIE immer irgendeine Microschrott-Seite. Einmal nach einem Update kann ich das als Marketing oder sonstwas noch verstehen, aber jetzt dauerhaft?

Zum Testen, ob wenigstens der Button “Startseite” noch tut, habe ich drauf geklickt. Und bekam das da:

Die Konfiguration auf diesem Rechner ist eine etwas gelockerte Windows 2003 Standard-Konfiguration.

Inhalt von about:blank ist übrigens:

<HTML></HTML>

Danke, Microsoft, daß Du mich vor einer solch gefährlichen Seite bewahrt hast!