Tech on Cristian Livadaru's Blog

How I got into tech

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:44:27 +0100

One decision, one choice, it was the start of my tech journey. Still asking myself today, what if? What if I would have gotten that toy I wanted? Would I have done something different today? Would I work with wood instead of computers? Guess I will never know, but I do remember how I got here, and I am happy for that decision.

Enshittification of Social Media

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 16:05:24 +0100

A short talk about the current state of social media or rather it‘s Enshittification. What options are there and what are the downsides?

Tailscale Broken After Docker Upgrade

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:13:25 +0100

After updating my linux server, which installed containerd.io 1.7.24, tailscale inside docker stopped working.

Authentik Authorization Webhook

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:38:33 +0200

We have a custom application that needs to authenticate users against Authentik, but we also need to assign this user to a group in Paperless NGX. To accomplish this, we will use the Authentik Notification Webhook.

Sync UCS LDAP to Authentik

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 18:53:39 +0200

We decided to use Authentik as our SSO solution, but we need to sync the users from our UCS LDAP to Authentik. The LDAP sync is not that hard, but there are some pitfalls to look out for to getting the right values mapped from LDAP to Authentik.

Database Backups in Docker with Tailscale

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:51:26 +0200

Running a Rails application in Docker, with a PostgreSQL is nothing new, the database however needs to be reachable from another site through where Tailscale comes in. This might make backups a bit more complicated, but it’s not impossible.

Postfix complains about Cannot start TLS: handshake failure

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 18:39:11 +0000

Ok, this was a huge waste of time going down this rabbit hole. Postfix complains about handshake failure when trying to send emails over TLS. Non TLS works fine, receiving mails via TLS works fine, what gives?

Backing up databases to Minio S3 with Docker

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 12:39:11 +0000

You have lots of databases and you want to back them up to a central location. You could use a cloud provider, but what if you want to keep the data on your own server? Minio S3 is a great solution for this and with Docker it’s easy to set up.

Generating let's encrypt wildcard SSL certificates with INWX and DNS challenge

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 12:39:11 +0000

Using INWX as a DNS provider for the DNS challenge with nginx-proxy-manager and Let’s Encrypt wildcard SSL certificates is easy, but what the hell is that shared secret?

Generating let's encrypt wildcard SSL certificates with ISPConfig and DNS challenge

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 11:07:11 +0000

Generating wildcard SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt and DNS challenge is a bit tricky with ISPConfig. It could be very straight forward but there is a little bug in the ISPConfig API or the nginx-proxy-manager that calls the API. Here is how you can work around it.

Fixing GitLab CI: dial tcp: lookup docker no such host

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 11:41:42 +0200

Another issue I keep encountering with project upgrades, which I tend to forget about, is that during the build phase on GitLab CI, the old dind (Docker in Docker) setup no longer works, resulting in a ’no such host’ error message.

Conferences with childcare

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 11:12:00 +0000

Childcare at conferences is something that I see way to little of but should be done much more often. While kids have fun and learn new things, parents can do the same. We are wasting future talent by not offering parents and children chances to learn new things.

💥Solving max_grant_frames under XEN

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 11:48:42 +0200

Being hit with this problem a second time, I noticed that the initial fix was not enough. There are pieces of informations scattered around several mailinglists, forum posts, blogs and also a very detailed technical explenation on what is happening under the hood, but I couldn’t find a post describing the solution. So here goes my take on how to solve this.

📣 Sensu Notifications

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 06:48:42 +0200

Notifications in sensu can be complicated, but sometimes you just need to think out of the box. Maybe there are better ways to distribute the notifications. Just send them to some central place where you have more control on distributing the notifications. While you could do this in sensu, it definitely is a pain in the ass to constantly run ansible to deploy the changes.

Home Assistant With TimescaleDB and Grafana

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 16:30:42 +0200

In my pursuit of adding some nice graphs to my home assistant installation I first started going down the InfluxDB path but quickly had to give up and used TimescaleDB instead

Copying data between two seafile servers

Thu, 19 May 2022 07:17:25 +0000

You could just copy data between two seafile servers via seafile client or web, but life’s to short for that.

Privacy focused voice assistant with Rhasspy and Home Assistan

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 15:01:04 +0000

Having my issues with privacy in regards to voice assistants like Alexa or Google home, I needed something that works without cloud services, Rhasspy delivers but getting there is quite a bumby ride.

Flooding phishing forms with bash and curl

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 10:10:30 +0000

In 2018 I wrote a quick post on how to flood phishing pages with a python script. Unfortunately that doesn’t work with python3 anymore and also doesn’t handle POST request, me not really being a python dev decided to use bash with two packages instead of coding something in ruby.

Install packages

apt install pwgen gpw

That’s it for the packages, now you have something to generate usernames and passwords.

Gather the fields

Looking at the page sources shows two fields being used, a field email and password.

Wallabag: Invalid datetime format

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 15:19:43 +0000

This pesky little issue prevented me in adding a lot of links to wallabag, but as it turns out, the fix is really simple.

Assets missing in Rails Docker container

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 11:28:31 +0000

So you’ve deployed your new shiny rails app as a fancy docker container in production … but what’s that? Where the f* are all the assets?

Building toys with raspberry PI

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 10:21:08 +0000

Trying to come up with something useful build on a raspberry to teach my daughter about tech and coding.

FusionPBX and anonymous callerID

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 11:27:13 +0000

Some carriers might block calls if the call has no caller id in the sip FROM. I stumbled upon such an issue while forwarding inbound calls from FusionPBX to a cell phone number. The calls were rejected if they reached fusionpbx with anonymous as the caller id.

Doing FusionPBX Provisioning the right way

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:31:03 +0000

Reusing passwords is never a good idea and by default the fusionpbx setup would use the same user and password for all domains when provisioning.

Install Mikrotik CHR on a XEN dom0

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 11:15:19 +0000

If you want to play around with mikrotik or a need a mikrotik CHR, you can install it on XEN and run it without any issues.

How to deal with phishing sites

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 12:16:24 +0000

I’ve been receiving some phishing mails aimed at Zimbra users. I could just delete and ignore them, but where’s the fun in that?

Testing websites with cypress and GitLab CI - Part2

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 10:34:58 +0000

In the second part, I’ll show you how to set up gitlab CI to deploy your locomotive CMS App and run tests on it.

Testing websites with cypress and GitLab CI - Part1

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 09:26:23 +0000

Testing a web app is common practice but when it comes to simpler websites it is often overlooked which caused pain, pain which can be avoided by creating specs. Let me guide you through spec creation for simple web pages which we will then automate and have them run in gitlab CI.

Freeswitch/Fusionpbx: Play audio after call was picked up

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 09:59:04 +0000

Want to play and audio to the called number after the call was picked up?

Upgrading PostgreSQL 9.1 to 9.4

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 17:17:47 +0000

Happy times with locales during a simple upgrade

Error: The locale requested by the environment is invalid. Error: Could not create target cluster

Switching mailservers with nginx as mail proxy

Fri, 02 Mar 2018 13:23:07 +0000

Switching mailserver with lots of active users isn’t an easy task. First you need to copy the mails to the new server and then get all the users to change mailserver settings at the same time to switch to the new server.

SSH from Mac OS High Sierra to old SSH Servers

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 08:00:00 +0000

Change SSH client settings to enable SSH logins to older SSH servers or Mikrotik routers

Extending an LVM backed by an LSI RAID controller

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 11:47:51 +0000

Adding new disks to a LSI controller, creating a new VD and extending an existing LVM volume group

Migrating IMAP accounts to Zimbra

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 12:42:17 +0000

Having to move ~ 180 Mail accounts from an older IMAP server to Zimbra (open source version) I though I would document the process if anyone else finds themself in this situation.

Changing conference voice prompts on FusionPBX

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 15:50:44 +0000

Offering VoIP solutions to endusers requires the VoIP system to speak their language. Here’s how to change the language for the conference system on fusionpx

Changing disks of a Linux mdadm RAID

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 13:50:20 +0000

If you change all disks at once there will be issues booting the system and mounting the correct disks, here’s how I solved this issue.

Google: The Next Pirate Bay….?

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Threat Level – Wired Blogs At one of the world’s most popular sites, there’s some 300 full-length movies for the taking, including the recently released The Simpsons Movie, Shrek the Third, Oceans Thirteen, The Bourne Ultimatum, Knocked Up and more. Quality varies.

Computerworld - Just how did Microsoft get OOXML support in Eastern Europe?

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This question, is simply answered by reading my blog about corruption

After the International Organization for Standardization voted to reject Microsoft’s Office Open XML document format as a standard, the detailed results from ISO member countries give us a lot of material to analyze.

Votes from South-eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia countries showed Microsoft’s domination of that market, and especially good connections with authorities because most of the national standardization bodies voted “Yes with no comments”.

CIA offers Government participation to Taliban

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

According to “derStandard” the CIA offered the Taliban (The Taliban (Pashto: طالبان ṭālibān, also anglicized as Taleban) are an extremist, terrorist, and ethnic fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Pashtun movement) participation in Afghan government, if they renounce to connections to Al Qaeda and other terroristic groups. Ok, let me think a minute, as they attacked Afghanistan, didn’t they want to free the people (besides trying to find Bin Laden)?

On October 7, 2001, the United States, aided by the United Kingdom, Canada, and supported by a coalition of other countries including several from the NATO alliance, initiated military actions in Afghanistan, code named Operation Enduring Freedom, and bombed Taliban and Al Qaeda related camps. The stated intent of military operations was to remove the Taliban from power because of the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden for his involvement in the September 11 attacks, and disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations

China’s cyber army is preparing to march on America, says Pentagon - Times Online

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Chinese military hackers have prepared a detailed plan to disable America’s aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyber attack, according to a Pentagon report obtained by The Times.

China’s cyber army is preparing to march on America, says Pentagon – Times Online

creepy …

On the worm that affects Skype for Windows users - Heartbeat

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Skype has learned that a computer virus called “w32/Ramex.A” is affecting users of Skype for Windows. Users whose computers are infected with this virus will send a chat message to other Skype users asking them to click on a web link that can infect the computer of the person who receives the message.

Please note that Skype users ONLY become infected after they have downloaded the link and run the malicious software. The chat message, of which there are several versions, is cleverly written and may appear to be a legitimate chat message, which may fool some users into clicking on the link.

1 Terabyte in a month

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I did it, 1 Terabyte traffic in one month


Data from 2007/08/01 00:00:00 CEST to 2007/08/31 23:58:59 CEST
forwarded incoming GREEN (eth0) : 924G
forwarded incoming RED (eth1) : 88G

well …. almost, it’s only 1012G. Well, better luck next month

Telekom Austria (AON) also thinks we are stupid

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Seems like AON is trying to fool consumers. They have launched (quite some time ago but I saw it now for the first time) a commercial campaign against mobile internet. They say that “real broadband” is better, faster and cheaper and also that if you have reached your limit you will have to pay for mobile internet but with “real broadband” you pay from 4 euro more and have flat rate. Ok, lets compare We will take the cheapest AON has to offer, that will be AON speed 500. This will be 20 Euro a month and receive 500MB traffic included and a speed of 512kbit/s down, we will ignore upstream. This means you could download with max 64kb/s! And what if you exceed the included 500MB ? You pay 7 cents for each MB! Oh, almost forgot, you need a phone connection for AON ! This means you also have to pay the phone, this is NOT included in the 20 Euro. Now let’s look at what one HUI has to offer. You pay 10 Euro a month and get 250MB for this, if you want extra 250MB you pay 5 Euro. So you have the 500MB for 15 Euro. How about the speed? See for your self

The bad and ugly GOTO

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In school you learn to never ever use GOTO in your programs, since in real life things turn out to be much different then in school it’s not quite practicable. I was looking for GOTO in Bash and came across this statement

Quote: Originally Posted by gnashley Not a good idea to use GOTO in BASH. Try using a while statement instead, or use functions.

And this was the reply

HowTo install openfire (former wildfire) on Debian

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This has been done on a Debian Sarge installation but it should work on Etch also, I will report if it does once I have done it, sometime this week. I found this post on howtoforge and it helped me alot.

First you need Java JRE, lucky me I had a deb package on my server from some other tests so I didn’t need to create a new JRE deb package. Follow this howto to create a debian package so you can install JRE the debian way. Once you installed the JRE you can continue with openfire.

[HowTo] Installing eAccelerator on Debian etch

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This works for php4 and php5, apache1.3 and 2!

first get php5-dev (or php4-dev, depending on what you use) apt-get install php5-dev

get eaccelerator from here and unpack it.

cd eaccelerator-0.9.5
phpize
./configure
make
make install

create the eaccelerator cache directories

mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator

and add this to your php.ini (in my case: /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini )


extension=eaccelerator.so
eaccelerator.shm_size=64
eaccelerator.cache_dir=/tmp/eaccelerator
eaccelerator.enable=1
eaccelerator.optimizer=1
eaccelerator.check_mtime=1
eaccelerator.debug=0
eaccelerator.filter=
eaccelerator.shm_max=0
eaccelerator.shm_ttl=0
eaccelerator.shm\_prune\_period=0
eaccelerator.shm_only=0
eaccelerator.compress=1
eaccelerator.compress_level=9
eaccelerator.allowed\_admin\_path=/path/to/control.php

adjust the memory to whatever you like. Copy the control.php to whatever path you like (must be some htdocs accessible path) and set the path in eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path= … edit the file and user/password. now restart apache and you are done! go to the link where control.php is and check if you can login and if it works.

IPCop out of the 'box'

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a VIA mini ITX mainboard to make a new firewall, the old one with a Pentium1 166mhz was going a bit slow and since I also wanted to use VPN I needed something better. IPCop was installed quite fast, and a quick search brought me to this great howto. After setting up VPN I needed a client for Mac OS and I found “Tunnelblick“, quick installation and everything worked great. Now together with my mobile internet connection I can log in from everywhere and also be secured. Ok but what is it with the topic, out of the box? Well, usually this has some other meaning, but I really mean my IPCop works “out of the box”, I couldn’t find a case where I could fit it in so I just took a cardboard box

My fileserver in action

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well, after I managed to fill 600Gigs it was time to get a new hard disk. I do still have some IDE Ports on that boad free, but why not get a SATA controller and a brand new SATA disk instead? Faster and it will also work if I switch the mainboard.

Well, there was only one problem, I still had my two big discs in a RAID 0 array which can’t be expanded by a third disk so it was time to switch to LVM. Lucky me that I had 4 SATA disks for the server I am working on where I can move my data to free the disks for the LVM. It took awhile to move 600gigs but now everything is done and my fileserver is back online with a nice and big LVM that could be expanded …. if I had more power connectors for the hard disks and space in the case for a new disk, the harddisk in the photo that is outside of the case is really connected and running

Finally, mobile internet

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I went to the One shop and got a driver CD for the Mac. The driver is something under 200kb! Come on one … you could have sent me this trough a fucking e-mail!

Anyway, the speed is quite impressing! Check this out

One HUI speed

1.3mbit … coooool

getmail vs fetchmail

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I recently got quite fed up of fetchmail. The problem is that there are mails on an account from invalid sender domains (like foo.bar for example) since my Postfix rejects such mail because it can only be spam fetchmail didn’t manage to delete them. So it looped leaving the junk mails on the pop account and flooding my logfiles. The solution was getmail. Since I use postfix amavis cyrus there was no example config that fits my needs so I did some experiments but finally a mail from Elimar Riesebieter on the Mailinglist solved my problem.

Sweet Titles by class

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on the new version of the SMS Central which will be integrated in Joomla, it quite takes some time since I don’t have internet at home and it’s more a trial and error process. This is when you notice how much one is used to the internet and google. But at least I have MAMP (Apache PHP MySql) for Mac and I can at least do some tests. I came across Sweet Titles, which is great, but by default it does the “Sweet Titles” for the complete site, which isn’t really nice on a joomla site. The simplest solution is to use getEelementById to do it only for one id, this again is also not what I want, because a ID has to be unique, and I want it on more then one place. My solution was to use a GetElementsByClass function which I found here, and modify the original sweettitle.js.

Running Kolab on a AMD64

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

To get Kolab running on a 64bit system, compile the source on a 32bit system or if you have, like in my case, a running kolab that you want to migrate then no compilation is needed. Just install the 32bit libs (apt-get install ia32-libs) and kolab is ready to go. Don’t forget to add users/groups/startup scripts to the new 64bit system. Now I just have to get rid of the stupid “User Deleted, awaiting cleanup…” message, which has nothing to do with amd64, this message is there since Kolab was installed and a user deleted.

Let the fun begin :)

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I love shopping computer parts, especially if it’s purpose will be to run a Server using Debian. Well I just picked up some parts from Ditech, not much, only 2 boxes ![:)][2] Now that the assembly is ready and debian almost finished burning … I will start to install a base system and a raid5 on it, that will be all for today.

Problems during install … Well I didn’t get to far the first problems was right after booting. The Debin installer seems to have problems recognizing the IDE (or the now so called PATA) CD-Rom on Core 2 Duo mainboards. Strange. The solution is quite simple, I took the cd-rom out of the server, used one of my old IDE cases for external harddisks and abused that to connect the cdrom via usb ![:)][2] Worked. The next thing is, network card was not detected I “worked around” this problem by inserting some 3com I found at home, but the next thing was the sata controller. arggg. Now I only have one more chance, downloading a daily snapshop of debian etch and hope that there is a new kernel on that one. That should solve my problems. If not …. I will have to continue searching tomorrow for solutions.

This is how every Internet connection should be :)

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

700MB in 13 minutes with 927 KB/s

wget ftp://ftp.easynet.be/ubuntu-iso/edgy/ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso --16:55:43-- ftp://ftp.easynet.be/ubuntu-iso/edgy/ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso => `ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso' Length: 732,293,120 (unauthoritative) 100%[========================] 732,293,120 1.08M/s ETA 00:00 17:08:49 (927.31 KB/s) - `ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso' saved [732293120]

Cleaning up Gallery2 Cache

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I wondered why my Gallery2 database backup was so HUGE ! (3gigs of text!) That couldn’t be right. After I search a bit on menalto.com on the forum I found out that the cache was the problem. After deleting the cache, the same database had only 16MB ! That is quite a difference. Anyway, the cache has it’s useful part, else you could turn it of so I wrote a little script to clean up everything that is older then a week. The DB then still has about 200MB but that is not comparable to 3GB ! So here is my little script.

Kolab, a opensource Groupware solution

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Want a Mailsever for a office that does all out of the box with virusscanner, spamfilter? Well Kolab could be one thing you should look at. Due to the fact that it uses Postfix and Cyrus, there is no way you could compare the performance to an exchange server (also called by someone as the best harddisk Benchmark ). Well since I love debian as server distribution it was also the OS I chose for this installation. But unfortunately there are no Debian packages for Kolab but you can still use the sources. I found an excellent HowTo (in german). This explains step by step all you need. The biggest problem was that I had to compile all kolab packages from source. On the P3 500Mhz I had here to install it took 6 hours! so make sure you have a loooot of coffee and time to get this done. Apropos coffee, it’s time for a new one. The next problem one might encounter is, like in my case, when you use the same machine to install the new server. How do you get the old mails for the old installation on the new one? Well if you have XEN installed somewhere it’s a matter of minutes to setup a new Virtual server, install cyrus on it and follow my Howto to import the old mails on the Xen Vserver. This might sound like a bit of to much work, but it really is simple. Why didn’t I import the mails directly on the new Kolab server if the old one was also cyrus? Well, the old setup was a bit different and also a different cyrus version so I didn’t want to mess up to much with Kolab so I thought this would be the easiest way and all went out perfect. But wait, now I still don’t have any of the old mails on the new Kolab installation. Well for this task you could use imapsync. I used it like this: imapsync –host1 192.168.0.101 –user1 foo –host2 localhost –user2 –authmech1 LOGIN –password1 foobar –password2 foobar –noauthmd5 –subscribe Caution! if other users are logged in the machine where you start imapsync you should not user –password1 and –password2 since one could see the password in the process list. Refer to the imapsync manual and use the version where it reads the passwords from file! Don’t forget the –subscribe option else any folder from the old server will not be shown on the new one, they will be imported and one could manually subscribe with thunderbird or a webmail, but for some users this task could be to complicated so make their (and finally you life) easier because I bet you will not be very pleased to hear “Oh my good, where are all my mail folders” from all users you have! One final thing … if anybody is interested in installing it on a debian 3.1 on x86 platform, check the download locations carefully! There ARE binaries for debian! And you won’t have to wait 6 hours for compilation, like me, just because you where to fucking blind to see the ix86-debian-3.1 folder! arggg… I could punch myself for this. If you still didn’t find it, try here.

Testing gallery 2.2

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Gallery2.2 still isn’t released, but since I can’t wait to see it I started to install the nightly snapshot of gallery2.2, don’t worry! only on a testsystem I’m not upgrading the main gallery installation, yet. So what’s so great about gallery2.2, well actually there is no specific feature that I’m waiting for but I do bet there are a lot of things that I will like. The first thing that I noticed was that 2.2 now also knows Romanian The installation was easy as always, but the hard part will be the upgrade, this I will test the next days to get an idea of what awaits me when upgrading the existing gallery. Didn’t do that now since I only have 300mb left on my test VPS. New modules: There is a new printing service, a Flash video player, mp3 player, replicate items (like a link only that this one really replicates (copies) the item. So and here I am now at step 9 of 11 and my installation kind of stopped activating the user modules, but that isn’t something that will stop me. Looking at the admin interface it does look a bit newer and shinier, but the first thing I saw that sounds great is the Dynamic album feature. Well, enough for now. Looks quite interesting, and as soon as I have created an testinstallation with some images in it I will post a link.

Bye Bye image spam!

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Some might have noticed the increasing amount of new spam that comes as image. This makes it impossible for a spam-filter like spamassassin to filter anything since the content of the spam is hidden as image and the text in the mail is random or some pieces from lord of the rings. The solution? OCR ! There is a nice plugin for spamassassin called ocrtext. This little plugin, among with some other tools will fight spam that comes as image. Also new tricks, like animated gifs which can bypass other ocr plugins, will be recognized by ocrtext. I have only done short testing. But I think next week I can say if it was successful or not since I recently got a lot of image spam, this really pissed me of so I finally decided to do something against it.

Camcorder Problems SOLVED

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Finally after so much time it came to my mind to ask in some forum what the problem could be. After a search on google I cam across a german video editing forum, digitalvideoschnitt. I got a reply quite fast and I just tried it out and it worked. The problems seems to be when the camera is plugged in to the source! The problems don’t occur when running on battery! The problem seems to occur because of a ground loop since there are 2 grounds, the firewire and the source. Sounds strange but it works and that’s what counts!

Shell Shock :)

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

One Week Back to Windows – OSNews.com

One of the things that has always made Unices so popular and admired was the shells out there. In fact, most operating systems today have some sort of a competent CLI interface. This is for two reasons. Firstly, in order to offer a way to automate repetitive tasks. Secondly, because you may expect to login remotely, without having access to a graphical environment. And thirdly, because there are cases when you will simply discard the GUI, like when running a web server.

Camcorder problems

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I always had this problem since I have my Panasonic NV-MX300! I do not know how to explain the problem so I will demonstrate it with this movie

Noticed the squares appearing two times at the beginning? This can be only from the camcorder. I do NOT have this on the tape if I play it with my camcorder (the same as used for recording, as mentioned, the Panasonic) on TV I do not have these problems. It can not be from the software, I had this in Pinacle, Vegas on windows and also on the Mac in iMovie and Final Cut so there is no way this could be from software or the OS. Neither could it be the hardware, it occurred on my old PC (1.7GHz), Laptop(3GHz), Mac Mini and on the iMac. I once had to capture a movie from a different camcorder, also Panasonic but a different model and there I did not have this problem. So what is this and how do I solve this? Or is there some external device I could use to capture the tapes?

Anybody want some worms, trojans, spyware?

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I have seen some infected computers, but never, never, have I seen something like this


—— scan results —— directories: 1342
scanned files: 24026
alerts: **1348**

DoS attack?

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I had to reboot my server after it was unreachable. It all started with nagios sending me some sms, to many process, http doesn’t respond, https doesn’t respond … As I finally managed to try to login it was already to lade, the server wasn’t responding anymore. After a reboot everything was fine again, but not for long. Again from the same many connections to apache where made so I added the ip to the firewall blacklist and now it’s silent again. But this is not a final solution, I made some new adjustments to Apache, now only limited connections/IP are allowed, I tried first 5 but although I wasn’t doing much I got the “Service temporary unavailable” message so I increased it to 10, further have I set the MaxClients count from apache from 150, to 100 and I am thinking of reducing it further, I will have to do a stress test some day. The next step will be bandwidth limitation, some domains are already limited by mod_bandwidth but I would like to solve it different and not with a apache module. Well some information really comes when you need it, a friend of mine pointed me to TC (traffic control) so I will take a look at that, when I have time.

Photo editing

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was just playing around with some features of Aperture after watching some tutorial movies. Now this is a great piece of software, thank you apple! I would like to demonstrate what big difference you achieve by editing the photos. Of course you could just do it right with the camera, but I don’t earn my money with this so it’s ok for me if my photos are not perfect and need a retouch on the mac. First, the original one, then one edited slightly in iPhoto and the last one just played around in Aperture with Heights and Shadows, now I love the result of the last one.

Backup the internet

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just received a mail from Blizznet:

ab sofort verrechnen wir bis Ende des Jahres 2006 kein Zusatzdatenvolumen!

Das heißt, Sie profitieren rückwirkend mit Anfang September von unlimitiertem Datentransfer ohne Einschränkung und ohne Nachverrechnung!

Viel Spaß beim Surfen wünscht Ihnen

Ihr blizznet-Team

This means, 10mbit up/downstream with no limit. I must be in paradise!

No DVD Shrink for Mac? Think again !

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the briliant crossover office, runing Windows application on a mac is no problem. One might say “wait, there is Paralelles and VMware” but … what do they cost, compared to crossover office? and … dvd shrink does NOT work with Paralleles, at least not “out of the box” and why wait till you start a virtual machine to rip a DVD ? So move your but to the crossover office store and get yourself a licesnsed copy of Crossover Office, you won’t regret I have first tested DVD Shrink 3.1 which after 50% crashed with “not enough memory” well 1.5 gb of RAM should be enough for something like DVD Shrink. But I must addmit I had quite a lot running and my iMac got quite slow during the process. After installing DVD Shrink 3.2 and quittung some application ( firefox, camino, gallery remote, adium, mail, itunes, sofa control and some others ) DVD Shrink worked like a charm, fast, no crash and best of all, it could create a “backup” from an image I had on my HD.

Ooops I did it again ... Failing flashplugin update

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

no, not me, but Ubuntu did it again, after an upgrade the flashplayer did not finish the installation correctly, solution in the forum on the second page

Failing flashplugin update – Sep 19 – Ubuntu Forums

bye bye LVM, hello raid0

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Du to the extreme performance that LVM gave me I decided to change my 2 big disks in a raid0 instead. It’s strange, I have a LVM in the same computer with no problems and a LVM on my production server, also no problems. Only the LVM with the two 300GB Disks caused problems. just look at this performance!


dd if=/dev/zero of=dd.txt count=500 bs=4096
500 0 records in
500 0 records out
2048000 bytes transferred
in 10.020213 seconds (204387 bytes/sec)

this is 199 kb/s ! on a local disk! that performance increased to 3.6mb/s after booting with Kernel 2.4 well and here is is the raid0 performance

Fix the fetchmail antispam bug

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Fetchmail has a feature where you can tell on what errorcode fetchmail should treat the mail as spam and discard it anyway! Normaly fetchamil would not discard a mail if it wasn’t accepted, but in some cases, like when the sender domain is not valid the mail is rejected with error 450. The lcX mailserver for example does this which reduces spam a little bit. The problem is that fetchmail has a bug and will not discard the message, to fix this and remain using the debian packages, one could do this:

All computers are off :)

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

For the frst time since 7 Year I have turned off ALL computers at home. The oldest one, the Firewall, a P1 166MHz is runing without being turned off since about 5 years! Time flies by real fast isn’t it? I’m interested to see the next electricity bill

Mysql gone crazy

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Good that I always switch of my mobile when I go to sleep. Why? Imagine waking up, switching your mobile on and then the ringing begins, you get one sms after the other … a total of 45 messages. Oh no … not what you might think, it was nagios that was telling me that something is wrong with the server. For some reason (couldn’t find out why) mysql had a cpu usage of 88-99% and my server had a load average of 11 ! There was no way mysql wanted to shut down so the only solution kill -9. Everything is running again but I hate it when something happens and I don’t know why. Now I can just hope it won’t happen again.

Dear Sir Bill Gates: invoice enclosed

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Oh I love this one. Just received this from Moga, an article on TheRegister. I think my colleagues know just too good how it feels to come back from a meeting and find a rebooted PC and all you work is gone. I must say I was lucky until now since I was always in front of the pc as windows wanted to reboot and game me some time to hit a cancel button. This reminds me of a other story. Imagine writing a 300 Pages doc. With the “oh so powerful and much better then OpenOffice” Winword. You save the document and the next day you want to open it and print it, but no no … Winword has other plans, it simply crashes. This happened to my colleague. Thank good I had an older version of OpenOffice installed, I opened the “corrupt” winword .doc file without a problem, saved it again as .doc file for winword (which then had only 1MB instead of 3) and the file could be opened again in winword, without any problem and nothing was missing. Just some tables looked strange, but that was fixed much faster then writing 300 pages from 0.

compatible=mysql40, or how to screw your database in 2 easy steps

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Yes once again I had nothing better to do then move servers, fuck and today it wasn’t even raining. Ok I came across a lot of problems as usual, one was that I decided not to use debian testing anymore, I wanted only stable ! One of the problems was that stable had mysql4.0 and my old database was 4.1 and of course there where problems while trying to import the database, but hey, there is a nice parameter –compatible=mysql40 sounds like exactly what I needed … After I finished the server almost I found out what “compatible” means for the sickheads who implemented this parameter. “compatible” means that this line: `object_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, will be transformed into this: `object_id` int(11) NOT NULL default ’0′,

Skype for Mac 1.5 Beta and video preview now available

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Finaly ! I have waited soo long for this one

I’m happy to write this because video has been the number one thing requested in Skype for Mac since… well, pretty much ever since we released Skype a few years ago.

raid+lvm ... can get tricky if you don look exactly

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I should think twice before doing stuff with lvm on a raid ! I am setting up a new server, rebooted it with a rescue system so I could create the raid 1, this was quite simple mdadm –create …. and raid was finished, then the lvm over it, pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate and ready to go … but alas I had to reboot the rescue system ( shit happens ) after the reboot ( since it was a rescue system which is read only ) the raid didn’t start, but I could start lvm which of-course complained that things are double ( on sda and sdb, because of the raid) I actually ignored that and started installing xen, after a short time I noticed what big shit I did. so … I stoped lvm again, starte raid ( mdadm –assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 ) and the raid is reconstructing. I have NO clue what it will look like after it’s finished, no idea where the lvm acutaly write to ( sda or sdb? ) and if after the rebuild of the raid the data will still be there … maybee I should just start from scratch.

thank you, neighbor

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

oh no, my internet is not working today, blizznet seems to have some DNS problems, almos al .at domains are being resolved, and .. heise.de …. strange. anyway, this gives me some time to relax and forget about computers, go smoke a cigar, drink some cuban rum and write a blog. write a blog? without a internet connection? well thanks to my neighbor which hasn’t set up his wireless router correct I do have internet but I won’t abuse it, I will only use it to read my mails and write this blog, I promise

Today's Trafic stats

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

oh my good …. I never would even imagine that I would do more the 100gigs until the end of the month … and today is only the 07th !!!


ipacsum -s 200607010000
IP accounting summary
Host: foo.bar / Time created: 2006/07/07 12:48:36 CEST
Data from 2006/07/01 00:00:00 CEST to 2006/07/07 12:48:36 CEST
  forwarded incoming GREEN (eth0)                 :             75G
  forwarded incoming RED (eth1)                   :             44G

this means 119 Gigs of transfer this month ! Blizznet is going to kill me for this

10Mbit with no Traffic limits?

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

yes, Blizznet has offered it’s customers as a kind of “thank you” a real flatrate for July and August and this with normal Blizznet speed ( 10Mbit ) The result after the first weekend ( Today is the 3rd as some might have noticed ) is this:


ipacsum -s 200607010000
IP accounting summary
Host: foo.bar / Time created: 2006/07/03 13:38:19 CEST
Data from 2006/07/01 00:00:00 CEST to 2006/07/03 13:38:19 CEST
  forwarded incoming GREEN (eth0)                 :             23G
  forwarded incoming RED (eth1)                   :             13G

that would be 13G of download and 23G of upload … in only 2.5 days!

The Perfect Xen Setup For Debian And Ubuntu | HowtoForge Linux Howtos and Tutorials

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The Perfect Xen Setup For Debian And Ubuntu | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials

I think I NEVER saw a better howto in my life. It realy is a copy & paste howto, everything works as explained, great tutorial! Now I have 3 vm on my AMD 1.67GHz and there are more to come. think I could turn of some computers at home after this. I actualy could also install IPCop as vm … ok ok this is going to far, at least now I have a teset machine to continue with my DTC Cyrus tests.

nagios with sms notification

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

so finaly I finished seting up nagios on my server to monitor themselves and in case of a problem send me an SMS. I found a plugin to send the sms on the nagios exchange site but that didn’t quite work out of the box. First problem is that the URL creation will never work, the URL for the message is created before the session id is assigned to the variable, this can’t work! The second problem is that the message is sent “as is” for example “Server xy is down” this won’t work either! The text has to be url_encoded ( in php, or uri_encode in perl ) so I created a patch which you can download here. Then the description of the usage on the site is not correct

RTFM! posibly before installing something

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I should know it better, especially that this isn’t the first time it happens. I installed once again after a long time nagios on my server so I have something that keeps an eye on the server. Anyway … I installed nagios-mysql ( as I did the last time ) but it looks like the database has to be created before installing, or … who knows, I still didn’t RTFM. well the result was that the 5 min. nagios was running I dumped about 2 gigs of syslog messages that where saved in the syslog, message, users AND the nagios.log … I had over 8 Gigs of logs, good performance test for syslog-ng by the way. Anyway now I finally cleaned up everything, as .gz the file isn’t that big at all only 8.5 MB, OK now that logrotate is finished I should get back to my server.

the curse of modern technology ...

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I remember as I was a kid, with 11 Years I went by train to Romania, this was in 1990/1991, I was all on my own on a train, nothing special one might think, me nither … Ok there was some funy story at the end as I kind of got lost in Arad in the Train station

Yes I did it :)

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

as you can see I switched to WordPress the import from RSS was quite simple but all html tags have been scrambled so I hat heaps of < and > to change back so my content will display. Anyway I am ( for the moment ) happy with wordpress but time will show how good the decision was. The instalation is quite simple, not that serendipity (s9y) installation was more complicated, but if you intent to do a installation for more users with only one codebase wordpress ofers a more simple posibility or rather the debian package delivers a good configuration for this purpose.

Finaly, rejected mails for unexistsing users

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I think I had this small “problem” quite a long time. A few years I gues, actualy since I switched to Cyrus and this is quite a long time ago. 2002 maybee ? Anyway I knew about that litle problem but it wasn’t so bad to put to much time in it and as I was trying the first time to fix it I had the problem that I didn’t know where to get the existing users from. Oh… almost forgot to mention the smal problem I had. Postfix doesn’t know anything about the existing users from cyrus since there is no place where it should look for the users, only cyrus knows about it. But since the switch to users in mysql this problem is solved, postfix can check the database to look for the users, so in main.cf change this value:

Fighting with tinyMCE+iManager in S9y blog

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I have been trying the whole weekend to get tinyMCE with iManager to work in s9y. I found a blog about this but not realy helpful, the first problem was that you have to get the tinyMCE compressor also which isn’t mentioned in the documentation, and then read the iManager doc carfully. Well I read the iManager doc 10 times but still the iManager didn’t load from the tinyMCE. For this you have to copy the mentioned files from the doc, but somehow it still didn’t work. Today finaly everything works but I don’t understand why. The problem was the Language !!! If you use a langauage that TinyMCE doesn’t support, it won’t work!

My Mac mini

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Apple has always been for me the nice shiny thing that costs much more the a normal PC and doesn’t offer you the same software as it does on a pc. But then one day the mac mini apeared, it was smal, and at a good price and looking at the data, usb, firewire, WiFi, bluetooth, lan, modem, and a cd/dvd-writer that also suport double layer dvd …

mac mini

that was motivation enough to give apple a try, and since it’s not that expensive as a G5 it was the risk worth to try it and if I didn’t like I wouldn’t have lost so much money, but that was not the case. After truning this little mac on and giving it a first try I was more then surprised, it’s the kind of feeling that you have wasted years with something you didn’t like and now you found what you have been looking for ages. The interface is great and all it’s nice features, the mac mini is so silent that I can leave it in my sleeping room without bothering me, it boots fast and the working speed is ok as long as I don’t have iPhoto open with over 10.000 Fotos. The software package that comes with Mac OSX is great, you have iPhoto for all your fotos and with a little plugin you can use iPhoto with Gallery2. iDVD is also great for creating dvd menu’s and slide shows of your fotos. So I could create a DVD of my holiday for everyone with all fotos and a nice menu for the ones that don’s realy know or want to look at the pc at the fotos. Well I can say I love this little mac mini, this is way the best thing I could buy except of my Canon EOS 350D Now I am looking forward to the MacBook Pro with the Intel Core Duo processor in February and then I will get rid of my Acer notebook.

Problems with Gallery2

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I noticed last week that some pictures in Clau’s gallery are "wrong" the images displayed in the gallery where from a different album and not only that, they where from a different user. I clicked on the thumbnail and then I saw the correct image so I just recreated the thumbnails and thought that my problems are solved … until today … Continue reading “Problems with Gallery2″

Testing around with Gallery 2

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Since Gallery 2 has now been released since a while and isn’t beta anymore I thought it would be time to give it a try and see how it looks like and how the administration is. Well… I can only say "wow" this realy is a great piece of software !The import from Gallery 1 was so easy, I just needed the Path to my old album and then some clicks and some coffee to wait till the import finishes since it took quite a while for almos 3000 pics.So here it is, my first album with gallery 2