Paul's Blog Entries for February 2006

Wednesday 1st February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Joey Barton

Joey's agent said it wasn't all about money but it seems that that's exactly what it's about. Joey wants parity with the club's top earners (and the offer the club has made will apparently make him the third-top earner at the club), yet many other players are established internationals and Joey is well short of that level at the moment. I think there'll be a hot reception for him at the game tonight.

Newcastle Game

Quite an enjoyable game, though Newcastle's defence was terrible. The first couple of goals were like those we used to concede on a regular basis, with no closing down on the edge of the box when Riera scored the first, and neither Boumsong nor Bramble making a challenge on Cole for the second. As for the third, Vassell ran past Boumsong as though he wasn't there; did someone say that Boumsong was better than Distin once? Methinks they were having a laugh.

Joey got the reception I expected, though credit to him for putting in a good performance. I'd had given MoM to Sinclair (again) personally though.

Thursday 2nd February 2006

Souness

Can't say I'm surprised he got the chop. Their defence was awful and their goals scored record of late speaks for itself.

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Friday 3rd February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Someone raised a bug on my bittorrent package, regarding BitTorrent using mozilla rather than firefox for the search torrents feature. BitTorrent uses python's webbrowser module to bring up a browser, and this seems to look for mozilla-firefox rather than firefox, and the Fedora firefox package only includes the binary firefox. So I think the best fix would be to fix the python package in Core.

Monday 6th February 2006

Fedora Extras

Local Packages

Tuesday 7th February 2006

Wednesday 8th February 2006

Firewall Rebooted

Rebooted goalkeeper after 66 days of uptime in order to use kernel-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4, which fixes a remotely exploitable bug in ICMP (CVE-2006-0454).

Leon

Leon's current favourite activity is touching his toes.

leon-touch-toes.jpg

Fedora Extras

Wiki

Updated to version 1.5.2 of moin. My package now includes a link to the dictionary from the words package for the spellchecker, so I removed the old link that I made manually and also the cache file. 

# service httpd stop
# rpm -Uvh moin-1.5.2-1.fc4.noarch.rpm
# cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/MoinMoin/dict
# rm linux.words
# cd /var/www/tips/data/cache
# rm spellchecker.dict
# cd ../..
# rm -rf underlay
# cp -r /usr/share/moin/underlay .
# chown -R apache:apache underlay
# chcon -R -t httpd_sys_script_rw_t underlay
# service httpd start

Rebuilding the spellchecker.dict (at the first spellcheck request) took around two and a half hours on my humble Celeron 600MHz. On the server at work, it was rather quicker (well under a minute).

Thursday 9th February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Wiki

Friday 10th February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Sunday 12th February 2006

Family Get-Together

With Bingning's mum in London this week, we needed a babysitter so that we could attend the game against Charlton. My mum didn't need to be asked twice ;-) The game was enjoyable (a "3-2 thriller" you might say), with Joey Barton improving on his Steven Gerrard impression by smacking in a 30-yarder, Richard Dunne scoring his first non-disallowed goal for aeons, and Georgios Samaras opening his account for the club with a fine header. After the game we had a very nice meal brought over by my mum. Leon behaved very well and had his milk quicker than usual. He even slept from 10pm through till 6:30am. What a great day!

Monday 13h February 2006

Firewall

The shorewall package in Fedora Extras 4 had a major version upgrade from 2.4.6 to 3.0.4. This included a bunch of configuration file changes, so I spent an hour or so this morning upgrading my firewall. Seems OK.

PPTP Client

James pushed an upgrade of pptp to version 1.7.1. He also released RPM packages after just updating version but not bumping release back down to 1. Grr. I tweaked the spec file to fit in with my current cosmetic preferences, and also to include the new document file PROTOCOL-SECURITY (which basically just advises people to use some other protocol instead of PPTP). I released the updated packages locally, on the sourceforge yum repository and in the sourceforge release area.

There's also an update to the pptpconfig package (20060214), but James didn't touch that spec file so we're back to release 1 on that one. Packages updated locally, in the yum repo, and on sourceforge as per the pptp package.

Local Packages

Made some significant changes to the dovecot package:

Having run the new package on my home server over the weekend without issues, I'm now releasing it.

I also updated pptp to 1.7.1 and pptpconfig to 20060214.

Fedora Extras

Tuesday 14th February 2006

Valentine's Day

Bingning and I have agreed not to waste any money by buying each other Valentine's Day bumpf. Very sensible I think.

Local Packages

Wednesday 15th February 2006

Bingning Back at Work

Today was Bingning's first day back at work since Leon was born, and since Bingning's mum is in London this week, I took a couple of days off to look after Leon. The little rascal decided to have a dump just as I was changing his nappy...

OpenVPN

Being at home offered me the opportunity of testing the client side of the OpenVPN setup I've been working on at work. I must say this has been surprisingly easy to get going and I'm very happy with it so far.

Thursday 16th February 2006

Fedora Extras

Did my bit of the great Fedora Extras rebuild, taking the opportunity to clean up many of my spec files.

Firewall

Upgraded shorewall to 3.0.5, and added blacklist support on my adsl interface:

/etc/shorewall/interfaces: 

#ZONE   INTERFACE       BROADCAST       OPTIONS
net     adsl            -               routefilter,norfc1918,tcpflags,blacklist
loc     eth0            detect          tcpflags
rtr     eth1            192.168.17.255  dhcp
vpn     tun0

/etc/shorewall/blacklist: 

#ADDRESS/SUBNET         PROTOCOL        PORT
#
# Referrer spammers
209.172.35.0/26         tcp
#
# Persistent virus attackers
218.212.189.0/24        tcp             25
206.3.23.248            tcp             25

Local Packages

Friday 17th February 2006

OpenVPN

Have spent much of this week reading up on, and implementing, OpenVPN for $WORKPLACE. I'm really impressed with the ease of which I've been able to get this to a state where it's now ready for testing by a few people. The documentation and cross-platform support is outstanding. Kudos to everyone involved!

Sunday 19th February 2006

FA Cup

A thoroughly entertaining game, which I watched on TV tonight. I haven't been to an away game all season (can't remember when that last happened - well over a decade ago) so it was nice t osee such a big contingent of Blues in the away end at Villa Park. Excellent finish by Milan Baros but I'd think even the most ardent of Villa fans would agree that City deserved the equalizer, however late it was. It'll be a moment young Micah Richards will never forget, that's for sure.

Monday 20th February 2006

Leon

Big day for Leon today; his first solid food. He had 2g of baby rice mixed with 15ml milk. A small start, and he puked most of it back up again later, but it's a start nonetheless.

Tuesday 21st February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

The Fedora Extras 4 buildsystem seems to be borked, so I'll have to requeue the builds (5008 & 5020) for that distribution.

Thursday 23rd February 2006

Wiki

Changed over from mod_python to mod_fastcgi. It does seem a little faster so we'll see how it goes on. Will document things at a later date.

Friday 24th February 2006

Local Packages

I've released some of the wiki stuff I've been playing with. No guarantees that anything will work reliably but it works for me.

The FastCGI packages are currently designed only for the Apache web server, though it should be possible to tweak them for other web servers.

Wiki

Default theme changed to monobook.

Monday 27th February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Tuesday 28th February 2006

Local Packages

Fedora Extras

Wiki

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Next Month: March 2006