Today I had just another try to get Nexenta running. But the same bad thing happend again (like the first try). Everything seemed to work well, but then the building process of the boot archive never ends.

So I guess that's why Nexenta is still alpha. I should have another try with an other operating system and kill Nexenta shortly.

Nevertheless my hope to get an operating system, which uses the OpenSolaris kernel, running didn't die.

This evening I have a try with the installation of Nexenta. It was a normal, non-graphical, installation. You have got three TTYs there: the first for the installation, the second for a root-shell and the third for tetris. :-)

Everything went in the background, many questions, less (verbose) output - not funny. You have to sit down and wait all the time - then the big surprise to me:
Nexenta installed GRUB into the MBR. I didn't think that Nexenta uses GRUB as the bootmanager to boot the OpenSolaris kernel.

But at least I didn't figured out yet, why I need the boot archive to get booted. So the building process still runs...

Have a great night and I'll tell you 2morrow how Nexenta really works as a server OS. ;-)

No one else (beside me) ever thought that I would make a blog entry about VIM 7 - but today I read on Symlink that VIM 7 was released.

The new master features seem to be:

• spelling corrections for around 50 languages
• tabs
• grep inside
• improve undo functions
• offer better Unicode support

And I had to see: Emacs has got this features all ready (almost) ;-) And I wonder if Symlink would report every master version of Emacs, too.

As I told some forkbomb geeks yesterday that I was going to have a date with this special girl again they began to told me some stuff about girls.

Then today I got a message that I should emerge rl to get a real life (do you see the irony?). And after that, I got a real life in my /usr/bin - really nice. :-)

rl works really real - if you want to have a try do a

$ /bin/dmesg > dmesg
$ /usr/bin/rl dmesg

It's... random... like your real life. ;-) You never know what lines you will get next.

Thanks to Frank for the hint with rl. :-)

Hello today was just another MediaWiki-Upgrade day.
I've upgraded from a 1.5.6 to a 1.6.5 version of the MediaWiki.

I've read the upgrade instructions and thought that it could be a lovely evening. Then I have got again a problem to run

$ php update.php

It said No database connection etc.pp. So I've decided to define some variables in the update.php directly.
I've wrote into the file (almost on top):

$wgDBadminuser = "root";
$wgDBadminpassword = "PASSWORD";
$wgDBname = "wikidb";

I've done the first error to use my wiki user, which has got any privileges to create new tables. So you should reconsider if you really need your root user or your wiki user...

The upgrade was done - have all a great day with your MediaWikis. ;-)
P.S.: I hate the MediaWiki's developer, because they moved from CVS to Subversion without any note and without any explenations how to update to the new repositories - really nice of them!

Yesterday was just another ChaosMeeting in Nordhausen.

We had a small discussion there about Unix commands or better shell commands. Did you know for example that the opposite of a cat is a tac (reverse listing of the input stream)?

Or did you know that you can write something into a file until you write a special string?

basti@Woody:~$ cat << EOF > /tmp/foo
> HELP
> /me/
> _please_
> EOF
basti@Woody:~$

And this needn't to be EOF - it could be ANY other string. Really nice in the daily administrativ work here. :-)

Yesterday I tried to install a jabberd on nanofortnight.org. To get started I listen to a /dev/radio show about Jabber and then saw the video of the 'ChaosSeminar' about Jabber of the CCC Ulm.
It was quiet insteresting, but nothing about how I could get started.

So I merged jabberd 1.4.3. Everything went okay. Then I had to go through the whole config file (/etc/jabber/multiple.xml) to check every option (twice).... Some hours later the server ran.

I went to my Debian box and apt-get there psi... some minutes later I was connected to my own server. Really cool.
But there was still one thing left... the ICQ transport/gateway.

Furthermore I merged JIT (ICQ transport for wpjabber/jabberd). I looked at the external howtos but it still didn't work. After some hours of retries and restarts I figured out that there exist a /usr/portage/net-im/jit/files/README.Gentoo. I followed those instructions and - w0000000h0 - it really worked.

After that Jabber day I think I got some facts:

• Don't trust ICQ/AiM/Yahoo/MSN and their companies
• GnuPG encryption over SSL is really cool
• Jabber is an open protocol which based on XMPP
• XMPP is much more nit-picking than Jabber is
• Jabber is really bad documentated (beside the RFCs of XMPP).
• XML configs can be really nice, but look really if they're not
• The standard isn't full implemented until now; we have still a buffer to get things better

If you would like to have a try with Jabber, too, go to the list of clients of jabber.org.

Last but not least. My jabberd runs on jabber.nanofortnight.org:5223 (ssl only) and the ICQ transport on icq.jabber.nanofortnight.org. Enjoy it.
-btw- I am sebastian@jabber.nanofortnight.org. :-)

Hello everybody. Today was the first day of my holidays (till next Thursday).
So I prepared myself and my PowerBook for the Chemnitzer Linux Days.

At first, I tried to get my airport device to work under Gentoo GNU/Linux.
It was easy to follow the instructions on Gentoo's forum but the card could not authenticate.
The only 'hack' that works fine was:

	/sbin/iwconfig eth1 rate 11M

But where should I added this? To /etc/conf.d/local.start? I think the local scripts start to early or to late for the airport. So I add the line above and the call of /etc/init.d/net.eth1 into the local.start file... and it works for me.

At second, I had a try with cpufreq. I thought I should start cpufreqd but I figured out that it is enough to run /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils with the powersave governor - at least it works for me.

At third, I configured my WindowMaker and set up a boring background. So I searched for some beautiful wallpapers and found a nice webpage which contains cool wallpapers.
And I believe there is a way to change the wallpapers per cron and wmsetbg. But that's not primary... ;-)

And last but not least, I had a look at the crypto loopback support.
I created a file with dd and random data, crypted it, then put an ext3 file system on it and mounted it. That's it. My $HOME is now a crypted file. Very cool. :-)
There exist only one thing which isn't perfect yet; everytime I login I haven't got a home directory because I must mount it on my own and confirm the passphrase. But I think I can fix it if I put in my profile or bashrc a mount call...

Enough for today... have a nice night and if you have got time have a look at the 'Citchen Radio 44' about hacker, blinkenlights and something more about our culture and the policy.
Tim was the todays guest and all in all was it a really funny and interesting talk.

Hello you, reader of this blog, nice to meet you. ;-)

Today I thought the whole evening about an operating system I could use on my new x86.
And I have got only a few wishes on my lists.

It shouldn't be:

• Windows(tm)
• Linux(tm)
• GNU/Hurd
• Minix
• OpenBSD
• Slowaris

But it should:

• run on a x86 architecture
• have got the gcc (version doesn't matter)
• run without a GUI (so good bye native MacOS)
• be POSIX conform

So I thought of:

• FreeBSD
• SchilliX
• Nexenta OS

This could be very difficult. FreeBSD is just another *nix distribution, and I don't want to go on this way...
SchilliX sounds not too bad to me, but if you have got a look at the history, the development seems to be frozen.
Nexenta OS is a mix of the Debian system (with the GNUtils) and the OpenSolaris kernel, so you try another way, but you can keep the whole GNU experience(s).

I think I should give Nexenta OS a try. More news about this topic soon....
Good night.

Hello. I've searched the first quarter of the day for things which I can do. So I listened to the last spreeblick podcast and then had a look at my nice MediaWiki installation on nanofortnight.org.

I wondered why some features didn't work so I upgraded to 1.5.6 (from 1.4.x) and in the same run upgradet to PHP 5.1.2.
Gentoo's emerge said everything went well so I started my $browser and wondered why the MediaWiki didn't work.
I noticed quickly that I had to follow the Upgrade Instructions of the Wikimedia.

The whole upgrade process was one big mess - nothing went well.
So I hacked my mysql database a little bit, modified some MediaWiki scripts and then noticed that the upgrade instruction of the Wikimedia was rubbish.

If the Wikimedia wrote about:
"

To convert your database to utf-8, you have two ways:
   1. ....
   2. ....

"
They mean that you should follow step one and two.

Around five(!) hours later my MediaWiki was running again, but the characters (mutations) were broken. I don't want to fix that stuff again with MediaWiki so I simply rewrote the article (thanks to Pascal ;-)) and everything is fine now.

Thanks again to the Wikimedia for that nice evening with the MediaWiki and to the others:
Good night!

Today Steffen (a.k.a. cdp_xe) announced his 0.7.2 version of xyria::dnsd.
The main features of the new version are the iCNAME-lookups and the CNAMES for A/AAAA records with round robin.

You can find the ChangeLog there and also the Download link for the Xyria suit.