Treg's blog

Je kent het wel, je bent op locatie of in het buitenland en je zou graag een email versturen. Internet toegang op je laptop is geen probleem, maar je standaard uitgaande mailserver is (natuurlijk) niet bereikbaar vanaf deze “vreemde” ISP. Ziehier de oplossing, een lange lijst van mailservers van ISP’s over de hele wereld. Snel even de uitgaande mailserver wijzigen en je kan terug mailen. Handig!

Since I’m maintaining a Drupal based website, I’m very interested in Drupal security issues. Last weeks, many attempts to hack the website (with injections, registrations and form abuse) have been made.

So, please upgrade your Drupal websites to version 5.11 or 6.5! More info can you find in this article SA-2008-060.

Never ever try to install wordpress (> 2.1 I thought) on a machine (apache2 and php5.2) with “zend.ze1_compatibility_mode = On” in the php.ini settings. This setting will make apache2 childs crash. (I suppose there is something totaly wrong with the Zend lib)

Just adjust the setting to “zend.ze1_compatibility_mode = Off”

Finally there’s a bugfix for the Linux kernel SATA bug I mentioned in this post. This is how I fixed it on my Ubuntu 7.04 machine:

– Make a file called stopsata in the folder /etc/init.d
The file should contain the following two rules:
#!/bin/sh
echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_disk/0\:0\:0\:0/stop_on_shutdown
– Make a file called S89stopsata in the folder /etc/rc0.d
The file is a symlink to the previously made script. You can link it with:
ln -s /etc/init.d/stopsata S89stopsata

Attention, Ubuntu 7.04 is using kernel 2.6.20.x. This fix is already included in the kernel but not standard activated yet.

Info/patch about the bug on kernel.org: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7838
Info about the bug on Ubuntu’s launchpad: Bug #63937

Since the latest network-manager-openvpn doens’t support pkcs12 certs, I needed to convert the pkcs12 key into other keys. This is how I managed to do it.

Extract CA cert, client cert and private key to a single PEM file
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.pem

Extract client cert to client.cer (no private key or CA cert)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.crt -clcerts -nokeys

Extract client private key to client.key (no certs)
> openssl pkcs12 -in client.p12 -out client.key -nocerts

Lately I installed an Ubuntu Dapper LTS 6.06 server with a 3ware 8006-2 sata raid controller. I wanted to use the CLI and the 3DMD raidcontroller software. So I downloaded the software on the website, installed it, but it just refused to work, complaining about wrong drivers. I suppose the drivers into kernel 2.6.15.x are good enough, in fact they are _to_ good/new. So I started to find a solution. I found one by downloading the newest CLI version 9.4.1.

The 3DMD tool wouldn’t work either, so I tried to install the 3DM2 tool. It failed because the installer didn’t generate a .pem file. So I searched some repositories with 3DM2 binaries and found a debian based package.

wget http://ftp.debian-unofficial.org/debian/pool/restricted/3/3ware-3dm2-binary-i386/3ware-3dm2-binary_9.3.0.4-1duo1_i386.deb

I just had do install it with dpkg and it works perfectly now.

The guys from I Make Things are amazing! It’s a sort of blog where some friends are making weekend projects. This weekend (month) they wanted to go to space using a weather balloon to reach 100k feat. You can watch the video podcast about how they made the balloon.

N3rd.tv ‘s a fantastic initiative from Jochem Kossen and Sander van de Graaf. On a weekly base, they bring you all the latest OpenSource related news in a sort of (dutch) TV news. N3rd.tv got it’s name because the show deals with “nerd like” topics or at least a bit geeky. Are you tyred of reading and reading and reading all the newssites and weblogs with tech info, than this is the show you must watch. (and it’s funny too)

Fortunately people decided to develop a new version of the Linux Flash player. On this moment version 7 ‘s the latest stable version. BUT, a few days ago version 9 beta has been released. Finally Linux users will be able to see all those Flash based sites and movies (which are nearly all made for flash 8 ).
You can find the player in the Sevaes Repo for Ubuntu Edgy Linux. The package ‘s also hard masked in Gentoo Portage (here).