Yesterday I was on the 6th newcomer festival in Ilmenau called VORSICHT! Band. It was a very loud event.
There were a lot of students, known faces and other rock people. The styles of the bands differed a lot. They played rock, hip hop, funky styles and many more on three stages. We all had a lot of fun and danced all the time. The bands rocked the house (ehm, our cafeteria ;))

My absolut favourite was the band Good Mourning. They come from Erfurt and played a good mix of low and loud accords. The female voice was really nice. The band got the second jury award.

After the festival we went to the BD club because the bhc closed because of to less people. So a lot of people celebrated the aftershow party in the BD. It was very very hot there. But we had fun nevertheless.

All in all a great night, too. And now after the long day, time to sleep for me.

Two days ago I was in our local cinema to watch the movie 21. It is based on a true story of the MIT Blackjack Team.
Students of the MIT went to casinos to play there blackjack and to count probabilities of cards*. So they made a lot of money in Vegas.

It was a nice movie with a very good and interesting story. It fascinates me much that it is based on a true story.
The other point is, that it was the first time that I was in our local cinema. It is a really sweet and small one. It was a nice evening together with my girlfriend. It was fun to watch the film.

Yesterday on the way home I had a look at a wonderful sunset. It was like magic. It was a great feeling to look into this red light.

Sometimes it couldn't get better. And sometimes, it gets better. I hate the raining days if I can have more of these special days.
I miss you, darling.

Some time ago I was in the cinema together with Astrid and watched the movie The Wave. It is based on the social experiment The Third Wave, which has been done in 1967 on the Cubberley High School in Palo Alto.

The main question is: "Is another dictatorship in Germany again possible now?"
There is a teacher and his pupils in a project week and they are supposed to work together on the topic autocracy.
It begins as a little game between the teacher and the pupils but soon everybody loses control of the experiment. It becomes clearer and clearer that a dictatorship is also possible in the present.

It's a great movie about that topic. You feel a little bit involved into the plot. I'm happy that I saw The Wave.

Like every year - today is Pi Day. No need to say more. ;-)
Happy birthday, Albert.

Today I installed rdiff-backup to handle my backups. It is an interesting project which can handle incremental backups. It works like rsync over a ssh connection. So you needn't to up/download everything everytime. Furthermore it preserves all information, it is space and bandwidth efficient and you can backup several operating systems with it.

It has got a good documentation and there're step-per-step instructions to set up a "push up" solution.

But I needed a "pull down" solution. It wasn't very hard to set something like this up. But you should be careful with shell=/bin/false.

On Saturday I was on the Chemnitzer Linux Days 2008. It was hard to travel there and travel back, because of Emma. But it was cool as usual. I listened to one presentation about software licenses and then went around and talked to some people - for example to the Symlink guys and to the CACert guys and to many others. It was fun. All in all a very good event - since 10 years.

If you would like, you can even have a look at my pictures of the CLT 08.
Maybe I see you in the next year there, too. :-)

Please notice that we'll reboot nanofortnight on Thursday, 07.02.2008, 15:00 +0100 because of a kernel switch.
This will be a switch between 2.4 and 2.6.

Gentoo stopped the support of the 2.4 kernels. We used this upgrade guide for the migration. Hopefully the downtime will be as short as possible. We'll hope the best.

If you're using LDAP with those options in /etc/conf.d/slapd

OPTS="-h 'ldap://127.0.0.1 ldaps://foo.bar.tld:23523'"

a missconfigured /etc/resolv.conf could be fatal. Your slapd would not run and die with

slapd[12876]: daemon: getaddrinfo() failed: Temporary failure in name resolution

A possible solution is to resolve your hostname yourself. Just put a $IP $HOSTNAME of yourself in the /etc/hosts. That should be very safe.

Another point is that if your name resolution is broken ssh will have got problems with local users if it cannot reach the ldap daemon because it is down.

Connection closed by remote host

This only happens if you send a public key to authorize yourself. To fix this issue try to don't send any public key

ssh foo.bar.tld -l localuser -o PubkeyAuthentication=no

Thanks to KillerFox for reproducing these things.

Almost one week ago we've got a hardware failure on nanofortnight. One heat sink lost contact. Now we tried a little bit of thermal grease to fix it. After a downtime to cool down we've got problems with almost all of our services.
The problem was based upon the fact that we replaced dnscache with the nameservers of our provider.
But we forget that /etc/resolv.conf is overwritten with the config of /etc/conf.d/net on startup. So everything couldn't be resolved at this time anymore.

Today I was at the data center and fixed it myself. Everything should be up, running and just fine. Sorry for any inconviences. If you still notice some strange things, please report it.
At the end I want to thank again the team of mammutware for the great support.