Chrisus zlog

As every year the colleen user group had a grillage. This year again at Eckenried, Philipp's and Gudrun's home. We had a nice evening, I barb'cued meat from Ander's Hofladen, slaughtered the morning before. Have a look at it at this place.

Bernd and I spent the whole saturday setting up two servers for Bobo Dioulassu. There were some holes where we felt in, but at 11 p.m. we could look at two working servers, Bilbo and Frodo. Together with them will come a third one for taking parts off if needed. We used Ubuntu-server LTS Hardy Heron which I think is not so bad. Webmin, Samba, DNS, Squid, are working, DHCP not yet. Setting up RAID5 worked from the beginning very fine! Well, that was great!
Some of the beginners-failures: using the same subnet for wan and lan and wondering, why it doesn't work. Forgetting 'sudo' 100 times at the beginning of a command. The plug of the network-cable was released 5 mm, but still in, caused us to reinstall some parts before thinking about it.
Also see at Bernd's pictures
The fourth server will stay here and enables me to test some configurations, most the DHCP and user management.

Just to be up to date: look for programs for your mobile to encrypt pictures like this one:

After leaving the SH3 I met a friend and had to fix a problem with WILLI (Telering) and Vista (M$). I solved it and now she can use the Internet-surfing and mail system. Don't ask me, what I had to to, because I had only to remove a former Antivir-Program, install a new one and remove and reinstall the Internet-USB-device. The new AntiVir removed a former trojan and now I wonder, how long this will work. Maybe I will send Bernd (the 'Spammaster') the next time to her ;-)

On friday we had our yearly Cug-conf. I cooked Enchiladas Rojas and afterwards I listened to a lot of spam lectures. There was also a report from making a still-picture-video that was very interesting and a lot of personal talking. In addition we fixed some malfunctions of my laptop. Now I can use skype and can use wlan from the terminal. Fine thing. It works at home too.

Never do what I did: RAM: 327 MB, 451 MHz. Start KDE, GIMP, Iceweasel, Icedove. Open a 9 MPixel Picture in GIMP, edit it so that you have 7 copys in the RAM and click on "save". It spawned to 250 MB in the RAM. The PC is locked and working and working... Log in at a console failures because there is a login-timeout of 60 seconds. So I think I will make a (sigh!) hard reset.

One more time, but it will not be finished at all. Today I attached him to marvin and to the Internet. Guess what happened: It didn't work. After calling Albert and Bernd I called my provider "Funk-Lan" and they wanted the MAC-address of the router. After a reboot it worked and I had access to the Internet. So I started WLAN. Connecting without encryption works, but neither WEP nor WPA nor WPA2. Sometimes I think I will reinstall my old netgear, because I don't know _why_ it doesn't work: connecting - please enter passphrase - connecting - please enter passphrase - connecting - ... and so on

... writing this on marvin, caliban opened his kwalletmanager and guess what: connected via WPA (PSK). Let's see, what will be tomorrow.

Today I had another 2 hour mobile-talk with Bernd because of my new open-wrt-linksys. After the first change it didn't boot again and I had to flash it again. Damn! There I waited too long with the power-plugin so it failed. Another flash. Damndamn! Then it worked. We made several settings so that I can exchange it at the weekend. What we didn't find was the setting to copy the MACaddress. Only a commandline-tool. Let's have a look. Thanks again to Bernd to bee so patient. :-)

Today I recieved my linksys wrt54gl-de. I managed all settings in the original firmware. Then I installed Linux (openwrt). The effect was: no linksys at all in any net. It was so called "bricked". I called Albert for almost an hour and then Bernd for almost 3 hours. We managed it to get a telnet connection and installed the openwrt while Odysseus booting. Sounds easy, but it was very tricky. The next days I will play with my new toy, hoping not have to do the procedure again. Thanks Albert and thanks Bernd for spending their time for/with me.

Some days ago I clicked on "buy now" at ebay for "512 MB RAM for Lenovo R60 thinkpad" for 7,30 EUR plus 4 EUR shipping to Austria. Today I recieved the RAM, wondering if it will be OK for this price. Managed the screwdriver and installed the RAM to caliban. Restart and ... it worked! So I have now 1 GB of RAM working inside caliban. And it feels like flushing soap. Fine!

With the help of davids instructions and a little logical thinking I managed it to have my wlan work again after installing a new kernel on caliban.

Today caliban had his baptism of fire at my final exam in informatics. Prof: "The old beamer will cause problems, I think it will not work" - xrandr and "beam". Prof: "Oh, thats great!". After my presentation and answering of the questions I finished Informatics. Now you can call me tripl.ped ;-)

Last Saturday we had a fine small Debian install party. Two new "low-end" desktops and one "high-aged" desktop. It took more time than I thought but I learned a little more than I hoped. Unfortunately I had no time to start the PCs at all. But time will come on weekend.

Found a new picture viewer: mirage. For my PC it is a very very fast viewer. Although there is no thumbnail preview it is more faster than anything I had.

Today I met two people who needed new PCs. The first one told me that she only uses mail and web for renting rooms and word for writing the offers. I showed her caliban with kde and showed her firefox, thunderbird and openoffice.org writer. "I can see no difference to my PC?" - "Do you mind "k" instead of "start"?" - "No, why should I?" - "Would you pay 100 EUR more for Windows instead of Linux?" - "No, not a cent if there is no difference for me." So she will become my testperson for a Linux PC user that is neither a freak nor a normal user. Just a simple simple user.
The second PC is new and uses MS Vista with firefox, thunderbird and Openoffice.org writer for renting rooms to guests. (They didn't ask me before shopping). Guess what they payed more? There were two users: A and B. Logged in as A. "password incorrect" ups. Logged in as B (no password - sic!). Clicked on "home of A" - "you need administrator privileges to proceed, confirm?" - yes. Had access to home of A. Coppied files to B. Opened user administration, changing password of A. "You need administrator privileges to procees, confirm?" - yes. Password was changed. Tested the same thing the other way round. Acts the same. So what the hell was that? And by the way: 3 GHz and 1 MB RAM. The feeling was equal to caliban.