lefant.net/log - fabian linzbergers weblog

2007-11-25---some-backports

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

i have created debian backports to etch of current versions of mpd, rtorrent and mt-daapd and the dependencies needed to build / install them.

add

deb http://lefant.net/debian/ etch-backports main

to your /etc/apt/sources.list in case you are interested.

mt-daapd and rhythmbox are a great pair to store music on one computer and play on another, with little configuration on the server and none on the client, by the magic of zeroconf! highly recommended. should also work with itunes and other stuff from apple.

2007-10-11---ipv6 at debienna

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

yesterday at debienna i gave a talk about computer networking in general, ipv6 and vpn in particular. afterwards we had some nice further discussion.

i have also created a page in the wiki with some links in case you are interested: NetzwerkenConnectYourDevices

2007-07-26---debienna

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

since we are getting much too little attention online anyway, i will start blogging about debienna treff regularly from now on.

highlights:

maxx visits us once again (in his suit, straight from work, yay!)

maks talks about rsyslogd. he is looking for someone to package it.

koki reports about first experiences with puppet, tries to make my thinkpads bios beep when it is about to run out of battery.

i take a look at the ipv6 configuration in the q/office with harald, happily discovering that it still works and that i can even ping and connect to some machines in my home network

sixxs is a cool ipv6 tunnel broker

ipv6 connectivity fuer rerun.lefant.net restored.

i am totally envious of haralds cool funkfeuer reverse lookup for his home ip: k10v1.funkfeuer.at

noscript ist ein leiwandes firefox plugin, das es erlaubt selektiv javascript fuer manche hosts freizuschalten und andere nicht.

we briefly discuss the general resolution that has recently been proposed General Resolution: Endorse the concept of Debian Maintainers.

andreas fleckl starts updating our changelog. hacks on his dovecot / postfix virtualuser setup. koki recommends a link and helps out a little bit.

it seems dnsmasq does not at all cache dns lookups (even when they are done via udp, this behaviour is documented in the FAQ for tcp lookups). confirmed via tcpdump on debian etch, freewrt and freifunk firmware. odd. if you know a decent dnscache for an embedded device distribution (like freewrt or freifunk firmware), let us know.

cheap voip at voipcheap

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

2007-06-02

since i am implementing a voice over ip project at work, i naturally am also investigating options at home. for now i am running an asterisk server on my webserver and use it to call out to PSTN (mostly my girlfriend to her brother who is doing his civil service in sierra leone). fellow debian hacker klaus ita recommended a call by call provider: voipcheap

they seem to live up to their name and offer really nice rates. also austrian land lines are free as in free beer. you have to download a windows client to complete the registration which really sucks, but after delaying for more than two weeks i finally got around to do it today. 5 minutes later i am successfully placing my first free call to an austrian landline after adding something like the following to my asterisks sip.conf:

[voipcheap]
realm=sip.voipcheap.com
host=sip.voipcheap.com
username=<myname>
secret= <mypassword>
type=peer
qualify=no

(instructions found on here)

2007-08-23---debienna

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

highlights and random thoughts:

present at some point in the evening or another: lefant, harald, karl, andreas, maks, rotty, markus, gregor

i play around with the new metalab 2.0 soup.io, there is now soup.lefant.net. also there is a aggregate plugin of ikiwiki resulting in lefants soup on ikiwiki.

looking at the quintessenz backup server in the office i find that backuppc is slow and boxbackup is quick and efficient. i also run a boxbackup server at home on my nslu2 (32mb ram for those who don't know it), it is also in debian sid and there is an etch version on backports.org.

it seems an official darcs.debian.org is being planned. i was contacted as the debian maintainer for darcsweb and hurried to finally reply to two of the open bugs. of course i hope darcs.debian.org will feature darcsweb

checking out firehol. default config works good enough for my laptop

after about a week of use rss2imap seems to be good enough as a google reader replacement. a little of my privacy returns

http://www.mozart-oz.org/features.html is surely interesting for the functionally inclined.

at a later time we also discussed some further topics we would like to talk about in the future.

2007-07-22---phpfspot

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

2007-07-22

for some time now i have been using f-spot (website: http://f-spot.org/, which is a nice photo organization software for gnome. above all f-spot has great support for tagging, which in my opinion is a very important feature. you can also automatically create a static html thumbnail gallery for your website or export to flickr or gallery (the php thing many people seem to be using). however this way either you loose your tags (static html, gallery) or you handover your pictures and control over the url to flickr (which limits you to 200 pictures in their free plan anyway).

phpfspot (website: http://oss.netshadow.at/oss/phpfspot/Project, freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/phpfspot/) to the rescue!

after some whining on my part at work my colleague at work andreas unterkircher started looking for a better webfrontend solution (foremost including good support for the tags) himself and, finding none, started coding. for reference there is pennave with a similar goal (website: http://pennave.sourceforge.net/), however speed was really lacking and development very slow).

i am now happily running phpfspot myself (link: http://gallery.lefant.net/). i also use the thumbnail export feature to create thumbnail galleries for use in the debienna wiki (link: http://debienna.at/). the thumbnails on the starting page are created dynamically for each page visit (try reloading, see http://debienna.at/?action=raw for the page source and the ?RandomQuote hack) which uses the FotoFortunes wiki page as its source (warning, huge page). using phpfspots export feature i can now create the content of the ?FotoFortunes page automatically after selecting all pictures with the debienna tag.

the same works with literal html for blog entries like this one. find a thumbnail gallery of all my images tagged with "screens" below:

i am happy, thanks unki!

2007-11-25---voip-hacking-at-deepsec

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

tuesday and wednesday i attended a training titled "Practical VOIP/SIP Hacking" at the premiere of the future annual security conference deepsec in vienna. official site. the organisation was pretty professional, as to be expected for the business oriented pricing. the hotels network occassionally was a bit laggy, but that's probably not too surprising considering the demands of a bunch of workshops full of hackers doing network security stuff.

i really enjoyed it a lot. klaus really knows his sip and he addressed quite a range of typical configuration problems, possible exploits and how to fix them.

small hint for starters: never put openser on the internet in its default config, unless you want people to make free calls - you may be the one to pay the bill. other software of course mostly isn't much better, but default openser is literally configured as an open relay. cisco gateways are not much better, but since they are so expensive, will only ever be operated by real experts - haha

an excellent resource if you are interested in this field is also klaus's voip link collection.

i was definetely able to profit a lot for the system i am designing at work. stay tuned for some config samples as it becomes more and more production proofed.

2007-07-26---on-another-note

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:13:35 +0100

i will be attending the chaos communication camp from the 8th to the 12th of august. i will be staying at the LeiwandVille organised by metalab and quintessenz people.

the recent book from joe armstrong about erlang Programming Erlang - Software for a concurrent World has arrived. after digging through half the pdf of the beta version i can now continue reading on my daily commute in the underground. i am enjoying it a lot.