Nanoblogger update
Posted on February 16, 2010
| 1 minutes
| 86 words
| Ton Kersten
Today I saw that a new version of Nanoblogger was released, so I decided to update.
I thought this would be a breeze, but it turned out that Kevin (the maintainer of Nanoblogger) changed a lot between the last two versions. Nanoblogger calls (in my setup) Markdown to format the webpages and that’s where it stopped. A little debugging got things going again and I mailed Kevin the patch.
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Git version 1.6.6.1
Posted on January 22, 2010
| 1 minutes
| 31 words
| Ton Kersten
This morning a git (1.6.6.1) arrived with a copule of nice bug fixes.
I created complete CentOS5 RPM’s for this again.
These new RPM’s can be found in the files section.
Software patents
Posted on January 19, 2010
| 1 minutes
| 26 words
| Ton Kersten
They have started again, those EU nitwits. When does the EU just stop
with this madness?
Stop them now and (re)sign the petition against software patents.
Nanoblogger upgrade
Posted on January 14, 2010
| 1 minutes
| 54 words
| Ton Kersten
Today I upgraded my NanoBlogger software from version 3.3 to version
3.4.1.
This whole process was completely painless. Just installed Nanoblogger
3.4.1 and regenerated everything and that was it.
A quick `side by side' compare of the old and the new one revealed
nothing special.
If you see any errors, please let me know.
SSH troubles resolved
Posted on January 5, 2010
| 3 minutes
| 502 words
| Ton Kersten
When I was installing a new server I thought that it would be nice to have the server display a nice banner when I contact it. With OpenSSH this is rather easy to achieve. Just setting the Banner option in /etc/ssh/sshd_config should do the trick. I also thought it would be nice to have the servername displayed, created with Figlet. So when I login the screen should look something like this:
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Git version 1.6.6
Posted on January 4, 2010
| 1 minutes
| 25 words
| Ton Kersten
A new git (1.6.6) arrived and I thought I should create RPM’s for this
again.
These new RPM’s can be found in the files section.
It's broken again
Posted on November 20, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 205 words
| Ton Kersten
A new git (1.6.5.3) arrived and I thought I should create RPM’s for this again.
This turned out to be rather tedious and frustrating.
Running ~ rpmbuild -ba git.spec ~
as usual gave me this error
I/O error : Attempt to load network entity http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd /home/tonk/rpmbuild/BUILD/git-1.6.5.2/Documentation/git-add.xml:2: warning: \ failed to load external entity "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd" Hmm, never seen that one before. Digging around in the Makefile and adding a lot of `echo`s to display some debugging info, I found it.
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MDNS name resolving problem
Posted on November 10, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 131 words
| Ton Kersten
Within a mixed Linux and Microsoft Windows network I ran into the following problem:
A host with the hostname linux1.firm.local could be ping`ed and found with `nslookup and dig, but it was impossible to start a ssh session. The result kept being: Unknown host.
Playing Cherlock Holmes revealed that this had to do with Avahi and mdns, so with the .local part of the hostname.
In my /etc/nsswitch.conf the hosts: line read: (Using Ubuntu 8.
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UNIX version 7 on x86
Posted on November 5, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 197 words
| Ton Kersten
A co-worker at our company found a VMware image for an ancient UNIX version, called UNIX V7. This version dates back to the good old days of 1979, and therefore it is now already 30 years old. He found this at Nordier.
It’s is incredible that a UNIX version of so long ago already supports multi-processing and multi-user.
I tried to run this version of UNIX on my VMware server version 2.
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Git 1.6.5.1 RPM's online
Posted on October 19, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 38 words
| Ton Kersten
Again, there is a new version of the Git Version Control System
available, named version 1.6.5.1. This version contains some bug-fixes,
no feature enhancements.
This new version (1.6.5.1) is now packaged and online in the files
section.
Git 1.6.5 RPM's online
Posted on October 12, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 31 words
| Ton Kersten
This morning I found out that there is a new version for the Git Version
Control System. This new version (1.6.5) in now packaged and online in
the files section.
OpenFiler repair exercise
Posted on September 16, 2009
| 3 minutes
| 459 words
| Ton Kersten
At our local radio station (Omroep Groesbeek) we use OpenFiler version 2.3 for our storage solution.
Yesterday, however, we didn’t have a storage solution but a storage problem. None of the exported disks could be accessed, neither through Samba nor NFS. Further investigation showed that the operating disk was completely kaputt. I tried to make a clone of the disk with CloneZilla but the clone failed and the new file systems where unusable as well.
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git RPM's online
Posted on September 14, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 183 words
| Ton Kersten
Using git on a daily basis now, it bugged me that there are no RPM’s for git on CentOS 5.3. At the git download site it’s possible to download versions for Fedora 9, but that’s not what I want or need.
So I decided to make my own. Downloading the source, unpacking and running make git.spec gave me a basic spec file to start with.
After minor tweaks I tried to cook the RPM, but I was in for a surprise.
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My git Hash filter
Posted on August 10, 2009
| 3 minutes
| 569 words
| Ton Kersten
Some time ago I told you about the vigit program, to combine editing and submitting to git. This had some disadvantages, that made me search for a better solution.
I found this in the git filtering capabilities.
The major problem was that the file was modified by vigit after it was checked in to git. This means that the command
git diff always showed differences. That was something I didn’t like at all.
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Switching to git completely
Posted on August 9, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 99 words
| Ton Kersten
OK, it took some time, but the holidays where in my way.
I finally switched completely to git, the best version control system out there, at this moment.
I found a bug in the vigit program, that I corrected and my header program is now default for git and I have removed CVS. Nobody should use that anymore, because it’s rather old and served it’s purpose.
I’m now experimenting with git filters to make the checkin and checkout better and that there’s no difference between the file on disk and the one in the repository.
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Hmm, VMware and 4k disk blocks
Posted on July 14, 2009
| 2 minutes
| 223 words
| Ton Kersten
At work we now have a very nice SAN with two machines running VMware vSphere. I did try to add fibre storage to the VMware machines and that didn’t work. I did get a lot of errors and unknown problems. Even Google never heard of them. One of those was ~ Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to get disk partition information ~
Googling for this and more generic terms pointed me to a hint to partition the disk on the VMware server itself and then create a VMFS filesystem onto it.
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Jaunty up and running
Posted on July 13, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 78 words
| Ton Kersten
Oke, that’s it. Ubuntu Jaunty up and running. After hardly two hours of installing and configuring it’s done. I have Ubuntu up and running. With zsh, Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice 3.1 (although I never use it), all the VPN connections I need, TeX Live, Mutt, ext4, XFCE 4.6, Wifi, webcam and all the things I forgot.
I didn’t need Google, hack it or whatever. Just configure it the way I want.
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Updated the Geek Code
Posted on June 5, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 58 words
| Ton Kersten
It was a long time ago that I created a Geek Code Block for myself. As I
aged this block aged with we, so it was about time I updated it.
Take a look at the about page to see the new code. I also added a
decoded version for those who do not like to decode stuff.
Adding repositories to OpenSolaris
Posted on May 16, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 102 words
| Ton Kersten
After a week of Prince2 and coming back to my old self again I started my laptop in OpenSolaris. There where some minor things that needed to be resolved. Trying to resolve these was not at all easy, because I needed some extra software not available in the OpenSolaris repository.
Searching the web (Google is certainly your friend) I found some extra repositories I could use. These can be easily installed using the package manager, so I’ll give the URL’s only.
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Donating blood 100 times
Posted on May 15, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 73 words
| Ton Kersten
Being a blood donor since 1982 I have been donating blood on a regular
basis. Today I reached the milestone, that I’m very happy about. I
donated blood 100 times. This equals 50 litres of blood in total.
I would like to urge you all: Please give. It doesn’t cost you
anything but a little time and you help a lot of people. So: Give
If you live in the Netherlands goto
Sanquin
Prince2 foundation exam
Posted on May 13, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 160 words
| Ton Kersten
The last 3 days were very hectic. I attended the course Prince2 Foundation which prepared me for the Prince2 exam. Three days of good old, hardcore studying. I really felt like an old man, not a student. I can hardly believe I did this for years non-stop and partied all the time. I even get exhausted thinking about it. Those were really good times, with very fond memories.
But all the hard work payed off.
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Installing OpenSolaris on my laptop
Posted on May 10, 2009
| 2 minutes
| 337 words
| Ton Kersten
My private laptop came delivered with Windows (of course), but I wanted a UNIX/Linux like OS as well. Running a lot of computers with Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Slackware, Debian and others) I decided I wanted something else.
I came up with the idea that it should be Solaris, to experiment with the fantastic ZFS. But the real Sun Solaris lacks support for my laptop, so I thought I could run OpenSolaris, which has better hardware support.
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sed breaks links
Posted on May 4, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 212 words
| Ton Kersten
When using the stream editor (sed) with the -i option, it does break links. Like this:
~$ mkdir test ~$ cd test ~/test$ echo Hello > f1 ~/test$ ln -s f1 f2 ~/test$ ls -l total 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 tonk tonk 2 May 4 09:28 f2 -> f1 ~/test$ sed -i.bck 's/Hello/Bello/' f2 ~/test$ ls -l total 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f1 -rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:29 f2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 tonk tonk 2 May 4 09:28 f2.
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That bloody Shift-Backspace
Posted on April 24, 2009
| 2 minutes
| 239 words
| Ton Kersten
On my laptop I’m running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 with XFCE 4.6 and it works great. But (Isn’t there always a but'?) every once in a while I killed my Xsession with some type of key combination. The standard combination for this is `Ctrl-Alt-Backspace so I switched that off in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf'. I added the`ServerFlags`section, like this. ~ Section "ServerFlags" Option "DontZap" "on" EndSection ~ After restarting I tried the dreadful`Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and I thought that `Bob’s your uncle'.
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Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel
Posted on April 22, 2009
| 1 minutes
| 73 words
| Ton Kersten
Last week I saw a documentary about the German mathematician
David Hilbert. This very
interesting documentary had some nice mathematical problems that seem
impossible to solve, but when thought through there always was a little
loophole.
If you are a bit into maths, this really is stuff to read.