Chris’ Blog

One of my NSLU2’s went up the swanny two weeks back. Typically it was the one 80 miles away at home, that not only is my primary mail exchanger but also the DHCP server for my home network, chances are somebody might notice. Thankfully I have the ability to fail over DHCP onto sandman with a one line configuration change and a restart of dnsmasq, which I did.

Whilst I was at home this past week I got to work trying to work out what was up. The documentation in Debian about the LED sequences told me that it was getting stuck at the initramfs stage of boot. Basically it couldn’t load the actual operating system off the discs. This meant I would have to delve deep and play with the contents of the flash memory.

I mounted the USB sticks that I use as its discs on my server and extracted a copy of the current kernels and initramfs images that were on it. I also found the Debian installation flash firmware and set about hacking the two. I found some instructions on how to modify an existing image which is what I did. I swapped out the kernel and initramfs in the firmware for the latest ones on my discs and flashed the NSLU2. Same thing happened! So I then set about using the previous kernel version which worked like a charm. For now I have removed the new kernel from it and forced it to keep the old version. I will look into updating it when I have a little more time.

A new month a new desktop wallpaper:

… about this. Well more likely is I am just being too lazy. But it has been quite a while since I wrote anything of much substance up here, currently I am unable to sleep which sucks somewhat. I’ve been very busy as of late, I’ve finished my quite frankly ludicrous 5 week “Easter” “break” where I did not much but work, bum around, and drove places. So I am back at the grindstone that is university, ploughing through coursework at such a rate I guess I could describe as “relaxed” but that maybe pushing definition boundaries. I’m looking forward to next week when the last of my coursework is handed in and I am free to revise for exams, oh heck!

I’ve had a new desktop for the latter part of April inspired by a trip to Weston’s Cider of Much Marcle, Herefordshire over me holiday.

I am moving towards a landmark on last.fm, 100 000 tracks played. Not decided what will be my 100 000th track hopefully I don’t go over it by mistake with something non-worthy.

I leave you with the thought, why would a dairy company write “Allergy information: contains milk” on the side of a bottle of milk? Surely that is the whole idea? Or maybe I am missing something…

I am currently enjoying the visual refresh Wordpress has been given in version 2.5. Its quite cool.

A new month (2 weeks ago), a new screen and thus a two new desktop backgrounds (and last months):

So today I come to you with a confession, I discovered one of my boxen had been successfully attacked and the attacker had by the looks of things used it for launching DDoS attacks. I feel particularly stupid because the entire thing was my fault, I left the root password as root. Although I must stress I didn’t set it to this, I was using a pre-build debian install because the d-i installer was broken under arm and forgot to change the root password to something a little more secure.

So it is the other side of the festive period and I am slightly better for it, financially. Next pay day should be even better, worked over 70 hours plus in 2 1/2 weeks. I bought myself a new phone over Christmas, it is a Nokia 3110c, and I got it for cheap using staff discount - not complaining. I’ve filled it up with a 2GB SanDisk MicroSD card from the ever fantastic SVP and now use it as my music player as well.

I started up a little project after I got a new phone with the basic aim to write a basic webmail client in PHP optimised for portable devices, its untitled so far. But it is very light on resources making use of PHP 5 with the IMAP Extension, and memcached for caching of IMAP data. I will make the source available via Subversion soon enough.

Over the holidays I have just had a made some serious changes to my server configuration, doing away with my reliance on Linux-VServer because it is just not stable enough. One of the instances crashes it generally will not sort itself out in a reasonable time without a reboot of the entire host, what I was trying to avoid. So instead I have moved most stuff back onto sandman proper now, the exceptions are a couple of things which need Debian Testing which still run on a VServer host. I hope to remove the need for these and then remove VServer totally and install OpenVZ which appears to be much more robust.

I am now using Lighttpd to serve the bulk of my web content because it has much lower resource usage than Apache and is fairly extensible and customisable, certainly more so than Apache until I discovered mod_macro. It does have some draw backs to Apache, like I cannot do PAM authentication or run Subversion without piggy backing it through Apache and certain configuration drawbacks. But considering the only VHost that really needs PAM authentication is my Subversion repository and that cannot move away from Apache I think I am okay.

Merry humbug to everyone who believes that some bloke called Jesus was born 2007 years ago today, Merry Christmas to others who joins in the madness just because its ‘easier’ that way. Christmas is overly commercialised nowadays and has lost its religious meaning, boo-hoo. Any how it is two years since I started this little blog as a trash can for the crap that accumulates in my head, although apparently some of it is useful to others. Enjoy the festive period, as it means a lack of work and academia for some variable period, in my case 4 weeks. *grins*

Ekiga is a VoIP client for GNOME. I recently registered with SIPGate.co.uk as I am planning to have a go at setting up Asterisk sometime in the near future. Sadly it wasn’t a well documented process and after searching Google, SIPGate’s website and Ubuntu Forums for help I found some tips on debugging Ekiga. Armed with this knowledge ekiga --debug=[1-6] I managed to discover the required ports for successful NAT traversal. They are as follows:

• 5060 - 5100/udp
• 8000 - 8012/udp
• 5004/udp
• 10000/udp
• 3478 - 3497/udp
• 3478 - 3497/tcp
• 1720/udp
• 30000 - 30010/tcp

I am sure they could be refined and there maybe some that are unnecessary but it Works or Me™, use them at your own risk.