Talked with Vincent today and he told me that his webserver got traffic from a weird .ee website and that is was requesting a certain image very often. Apparently the website contains a reference (in their CSS) to a picture on his website. This is absurd and dispicable, so his decided to replace the requested image with a totally Not Suitable For Work image. Just in case the site admin ‘fixes’ his error, I took the liberty of making a screenshot. Enjoy!
If you use the Zarafa webaccess (6.40, but apparently also 6.30) on Ubuntu 9.10, apache2 will nicely segfault and you will not be able to access your webmail. Upside: the mobile server will keep functioning. Even Fedora has this problem and it was tracked down to an error in PHP. I do not want to compile my own software to work around this issue, since I am lazy and I use a package manager for a reason! I quickly found the least nasty workaround for this issue in this post on the Zarafa forums.I replace /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so (from karmic’s 5.2.10) with the libphp5.so from the 5.2.6 libapache2-mod-php5 package. At least the file will still be managed by dpkg and thus updated/upgraded if neccessary. As Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner, I will suggest the owner to does not update libapache2-mod-php5 until he upgrades to 10.04.
Just when you think you have seen it all, you experience something new. This happened when SSH’ing to a server which authenticates against an LDAP server:
The source of the problem was a configuration error in libnss-ldap.conf
Last week (during a LPI 101 course) one of my students gave me a bottle of sudocrem (by Boots healthcare). Yes, it contains a sudo component 
He gave it to me, since I explained vigorously why sudo is a good security mechanism, as long as you use it correctly.
Apparently this creme is used by many parents in the Netherlands for skincare of their young(er) children. Below you can find the obligatory picture:
When I saw the new name and the new website, my first thought went towards the licensing. After checking the site (and checking with Rainer) I was glad to see that the software remains free and GPL’d. The explanation about the name change on the project site also mentions non-GPL components, which I am not a fan of, and that they will refer to the software as Adiscon LogAnalyzer.
I can understand why they choose to prefix their company name to the software name, since it’s also “free” publicity and it’s clearer that Adiscon is the company behind LogAnalyzer. Adiscon has put a lot of time and effort into this product and they deserve credit for this. If you want or need commercial support, check out their support pack.
A fair heads-up to potential contributors: communication goes through the forums (e.g. no mailinglist). The GIT repository can be found here.
Lately I have been fiddling around with PHPlogcon. I wanted to consolidate logs from our servers on a single machine, which is a breeze to set up using any standard Linux syslog daemon. Furthermore I wanted a graphical front-end (a website is just fine) to enable access to the logs for the not-so-linux-savvy admins. So PHPlogcon fit the bill perfectly. It supports flat-file logs (yay) and even MySQL.
The Windows servers need an additional piece of software to get it to forward the “Eventlog” messages. The default “Windows Eventlog parser” which is shipped with PHPlogcon only works with a proprietary Windows Eventlog forwarders (Adiscon’s EventReporter and MonitorWare Agent), so I wrote my own parser for the Open Source SNARE Eventlog Agent. (sourceforge)
Just put the parser in classes/msgparsers/msgparser.eventlogsnare.class.php and add something like the this to your configuration file and you are done:
$CFG['Sources']['Source5']['ID'] = 'Source5'; $CFG['Sources']['Source5']['Name'] = 'EventLog'; $CFG['Sources']['Source5']['ViewID'] = 'EVTRPT'; $CFG['Sources']['Source5']['SourceType'] = SOURCE_DISK; $CFG['Sources']['Source5']['MsgParserList'] = "eventlogsnare"; $CFG['Sources']['Source5']['LogLineType'] = 'winsyslog'; $CFG['Sources']['Source5']['DiskFile'] = '/var/log/win_eventlog.log';
I just read “Windows 8 RTM to Hit in July 2011″ on Tomshardware. I suddenly remembered that Windows did not have a lot of ‘new’ versions in the past so I did some research.
According to wikipedia the last couple of end-user Microsoft Windows versions were released on: Windows XP (October 2001), Windows Vista (January 2007) , Windows 7 (October 2009). There is a huge gap after Windows XP and now the marketing machine started to work again at full speed, since Windows 8 will probably appear in 2011. This means you will have buy an upgrade (the cheapest solution) for your operating system every 2 years nowadays. A fresh install is often recommended to an upgrade, but that is even more expensive. I checked out amazon.com to see how much a Microsoft Windows license (cheapest / most expensive) costs:
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic with SP1 (upgrade) will cost you about $84
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (full version) is available for about $209
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (upgrade) costs about $110
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (full version) will be yours for about $273
I wonder how much Microsoft will make you pay for Windows 8…
What is an Operating System without an Office suite? This is what makes a computer really useful for a lot of people. Let us look at the prices for Microsoft Office (again, from amazon):
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 (upgrade) will cost you about $119
Microsoft Office Standard 2007 (upgrade) will go for about $179
Microsoft Office Standard 2007 (full version) will only cost you about $366
Microsoft Office Professional 2007 (full version) will go for about $404
Wow, I was really amazed how expensive this Office Suite can be!
Note: Please do not use “Office” if you specifically mean “Microsoft Office”.
I haven’t even looked at the prices for ‘normal’ security applications for anti-virus and firewalls, so you Microsoft Windows desktop is ‘ready for the internet’. Fortunately there are also free alternatives for all of the above (if you use Microsoft or not). Remember: you do NOT own a copy of Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, they merely grant you the ability to use it.
Just imagine how much money you can save by using an alternative such as Ubuntu (which basically is Linux). You will get (but is not limited to) the following:
Since USB is still ‘all the rage’ I thought I might take the time to show you some of my USB devices, which are compatible with Linux and which I personally find useful.
Konig Electronic USB 2.0 to IDE / S-ATA adapter (external, CMP-USBIDESAT2)
Just useful if you have some harddrives around which you need to test, format or fill and then want to put away again (or destroy). It ships with an external power supply, so you are all good to go.
swat@decius:~$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 008: ID 152d:2338 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JM20337 Hi-Speed USB to SATA & PATA Combo Bridge
RS-232 is still used when you configure switches or as a back-up interface for a server. Unfortunately netbooks do not tend to have a RS-232 port anymore, so this is the perfect solution.
swat@decius:~$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 043: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
If you need more than your standard (one) ethernet port on your laptop, this is a good solution. It is small and just works. The downside is that it is an Apple product and it’s only 100Mbit/s.
swat@decius:~$ lsusb Bus 002 Device 012: ID 05ac:1402 Apple, Inc.
