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Monday, June 11. 2007
Well, it had to happen sometime. I ran the install.sh script included in a tarball (which had to run as root) and it screwed my system.
Running:
chmod -R 775 /$VARIABLE
When $VARIABLE is undefined it does bad things, very bad things. I managed to repair enough of the files to be able to login remotely, and I'm currently going through and reinstalling all the Debian packages on my box, fixing other issues as they arise. It is highly likely this cockup will hang around for years and years to come.
Bug report has been filed.
I'm going to install Xen on this box and do any testing of applications in a clean room which I can just blow away if things go horribly wrong again.
Tuesday, June 5. 2007
Everybody thinks that running a virus scanner on a Windows box is a good thing, right?
Well, it seems that it can be bad if you want to have working IPv6.
I spent several hours at a customers site yesterday working on IPv6 enabling their Windows XP workstations, but was having issues. I did the usual trick of turning off any and all Windows firewalls and the virus scanner, but we still had issues.
The behaviour was that IPv6 addresses were being allocated, we could ping and tracert6 to IPv6 hosts, we could telnet to port 80 on them, but neither Internet Explorer or Firefox wanted to work. Going to an IPv6 website would cause the browser to just hang. Looking in a network dump I could see an initial connection being made to the server, but then no actual requests.
I decided to blame the virus scanner, on the basis that they quite often interfere with the normal flow of events. Even though it was turned off, it might still be interfering. After actually uninstalling it (and rebooting, uninstalling it caused Internet Explorer to crash), everything worked!
Moral of the story, if you're using a virus scanner (in this case NOD32 from ESET) and you're having issues using IPv6, uninstall the virus scanner!
Tuesday, May 29. 2007
Okay, I've finally uploaded some photos of Brooke. I've decided to try out PicasaWeb, so the photos are here.
Debbie (Susanne's sister) also has a gallery with some photos of Brooke available.
Annoyances with F-Spot exporting to PicasaWeb are that it doesn't upload the tags or the comments. Oh, also it doesn't synchronise, it re-exports all the photos each time.
Update 1: Actually it does upload the comments, but I didn't notice because the export exports a new copy. So I had to copies of each photo. One with comments, one without.
Update 2: And, look, only 6 weeks after Brooke was born, not a year!
Update 3: Fix the first link to PicasaWeb.
Sunday, May 27. 2007
The guys at SixXS have added a new tool to their treasure trove of IPv6 tools. A BitTorrent tracker available only via IPv6.
Go and check out the catalog for some installation CDs and whatever else they throw up there.
Tuesday, May 1. 2007
On the topic of birth announcements, at Catalyst we have an internal IRC channel for general chit-chat and communication within teams. We now have a habit of setting the topic of the main channel to announce new staff members. On the 14th of April the topic was set to:
New staff: François, on L7, New person: Brooke Rose Ruthven, 9:10am, 14/4/2007, 6lb8oz (congratulations Andrew & Susanne)
Thank you karora for setting the topic!
At some stage Brooke might move into the "New staff" classification, who knows? 
Monday, April 30. 2007
Nice, we're now on Planet Andrew. I hope people don't mind if Susanne occasionally posts there.
Monday, April 30. 2007
We have a new arrival, a little girl, Brooke Ruthven!
She was born on Saturday the 14th of April at 9:10 am, weighing in at 6 pound 8 ounces (2.95 kg, but the metric system seems wrong for babies...). Mum and Brooke came home on Monday evening, and are doing very well. A proud Dad managed to survive the labour experience with both hands intact, just.
We're having fun settling into a life style that involves sleep deprivation and smelly nappies.
We'll hopefully post some updates to this blog over the coming weeks. Photos should start to appear on our gallery sometime soonish. But to show off our little girl, here are a few photos.
(Why the LCA2007 tag? Check out the t-shirt Susanne is wearing...)
Update: Thanks to Graeme for putting some photos up here!
Sunday, April 29. 2007
Sigh, comments are currently broken. There is an issue with Serendipity using sequences in PostgreSQL...
I'll hopefully have comments fixed soonish.
Update: Okay, it seems that posting comments from an IPv6 address is beyond the abilities of Serendipity at the moment. I'll look in that sometime soon. It only affects 2 people that I know of, unfortunately one of them is me...
Update 2: Changing the database slightly has resolved this issue. Bug report on the Serendipity site. It'll be fixed for 1.2 correctly.
Monday, April 9. 2007
After just over a year (we celebrated our 1 year anniversary a couple of weekends ago) we have finally uploaded the photos from our wedding!
Unfortunately due to copyright we can't reproduce the fantastic photos from our fantastic professional photographer, but we do have a stack of brilliant photos from family members which we can reproduce!
They are available here in our gallery.
Monday, April 9. 2007
w00t!
Debian Etch is released!
Now it is time to perform the ritual upgrade dance on a bunch of machines that weren't already running Etch while it was the testing distribution. And also I'll need to decide if the boxes that were already running it should move to lenny (which will is the name for the next stable release). I think I'll defer that decision a few months though...
Thursday, March 15. 2007
Our blog is now accessible via the IPv6 Internet. While I've had the network IPv6 enabled for few months now, I've finally taken the plunge and changed Dynamic DNS providers, which means I can make our addresses available via DNS.
I used DynDNS for many years, but unfortunately they don't support AAAA records. I'm now using FreeDNS. They allow a domain name to have a static AAAA record and then dynamic updating of an A record. Which is exactly what I need!
Wednesday, March 14. 2007
Firewalling IPv6 on Linux seems to be a vaguely documented topic, and most of that documentation seems to be out of date as it is a fast moving target. I've spent a bit of time over the last couple of days working on improving my firewalling situation and thought I should write up what I've found.
After a bit of digging I found that while IPv6 connection tracking was merged in 2.6.16, the configuration options are somewhat hidden. Up until yesterday I was running 2.6.19.x on my firewall and I discovered that while ip6tables allowed me to configure a stateful firewall, it wasn't actually doing anything!
I looked around for the required nf_conntrack_ipv6 module and couldn't find it. I looked in my running kernels config and couldn't find it. In fact I couldn't find any option for enabling IPv6 connection tracking at all. After some digging (grep'ing the Kconfig files helps) I found that I needed to change over to the new (experimental) Layer 3 Independent Connection tracking support.
The catch here is that if you have the old school Connection tracking (CONFIG_IP_NF_CONNTRACK) enabled you'll never see the new independent method (CONFIG_NF_CONNTRACK) in menuconfig. Which is why I'd never seen it before. So I disabled CONFIG_IP_NF_CONNTRACK (in IP: Netfilter Configuration), enabled (the now visible) CONFIG_NF_CONNTRACK (in Core Netfilter Configuration) went into both the IP and IPv6 Netfilter Configuration menus and selected support for the connection tracking option.
Compiled, installed and rebooted. Suddenly I had IPv6 connection tracking working. w00t! But no IPv4 NAT. Damn. It turns out that IPv4 NAT support was only ported to the new Layer 3 Independent Connection stuff in 2.6.20.
So I downloaded 2.6.20.3, jumped into the IP: Netfilter Configuration menu and found "Full NAT". That's what I want. Compiled, installed and rebooted.
Now I have my old IPv4 NAT working, and a full stateful IPv6 firewall (with no NAT!).
Oh, if you are using IPv6 stateful firewalling with Linux then you want to upgrade to 2.6.20.3, it fixes an issue with incorrectly classifying IPv6 fragments as ESTABLISHED and letting them through. Oops. Also, 2.6.20 moves the config options around again...
Sunday, March 4. 2007
At Linux.conf.au 2007 there was an organised GPG key signing session, where lots of people performed the GPG KeySigning dance. Afterwards quite a few (but less) people hung around in the foyer for the to perform the CAcert assurance dance.
I assured a few people, then joined a queue to be assured by one of the CAcert super assurers (and continued to assure people while waiting in the queue). This assurance bumped me up to the maximum number of points allowed for normal people. W00t!
I wasn't the only person from Catalyst to use this trick to get maximum points. As a result we now have 3 people able to allocate 35 points each. We also have a number of other people who can allocate less points than that. So if you're in the Wellington region and are interested in CAcert, drop by our offices (with suitable ID) and we can get you bootstrapped so you can start assuring people as well.
Sunday, March 4. 2007
It's kinda funny, I keep on finding little itches that I want to scratch, but never have the time to scratch them all. Before Susanne became pregnant I didn't have much time to scratch them. Now I have less time, and once the baby is born, well, practically none I expect.
I thought I would write down what some of them are on the hope it might focus me so I'll work on them in what spare time I have. Just some of the coding related itches I have are (not in any particular order):
- Dashboard - I really want to get back into this
- Really Simple CalDAV Store - Just generally get more involved with it.
- Finish an Outlook 2000 calendar to CalDAV importer so Susanne's calendar can be available on the network (using RSCDS).
- OpenSync - I'd like to have my Treo 650 sync nicely with Evolution and various LDAP phone directories. Also, once this is working perhaps Susanne can stop using Outlook (she only uses Outlook because it syncs with her Treo 650).
- Revision control plugin for Tomboy - I use tomboy for note taking on my desktop at work, my desktop at home and a notebook. I use git for my .tomboy directory to keep the Tomboy directory in sync across my work desktop and the notebook. It'd be nice if tomboy automatically added new pages, and committed changed pages for me.
- Improve tagging on the desktop - Leaftag is neat, but I'd like to have integrated support in the Save/Open Gnome dialog window, and have those tags shared amongst other users on my system & network.
- mpd - I would like to integrate Avahi so I don't have to setup environment variables on new machines anymore. The other feature I'd like to add is a basic plugin handler.
- Improve the integration between Asterisk and the Gnome desktop. There are some desktop apps for interacting with Asterisk out there, but they don't have the Gnome feel to them. I've had some ideas of different use cases and how they might be implemented. I'm going to generate some mock UIs soonish.
And then there is the ongoing tweaking of my MythTV setup, and all the other neat and nifty things I stumble upon and want to play with.
Wednesday, February 21. 2007
Susanne and I have been spending the last few months setting up the nursery in preparation for the baby. This has involved sorting through some clothes that we've been giving (in the photo the t-shirt says "I love Daddy" - thanks Naina!). We have a cot (no mattress yet, that is supposed to arrive this week), a change table and lots of other bits and pieces. It is amazing how much paraphernalia is required, just mind boggling!
A task which we still need to carry out in the nursery is to paint it. We think we've finally decided on a colour, that has been incredibly difficult. We never imagined it'd be so difficult!
Susanne's belly is a continually growing thing which seems to have a mind of its own. One of Susanne's favourite games is to play "where's the baby?". i.e., try and spot where the baby's head is at the moment based on where the bulge is located around her belly. Her belly can get really lopsided! The changes around her belly button have been quite funny as well, as you can see in the photo, it is almost poking out. The photo was taken during week 24, 6 weeks ago. It is a lot bigger now!
We're now at week 30, 3 quarters of the way through. It is still kind of hard to come to grips with how our lives will change once the baby is born. Kinda scary, but also very exciting.
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