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VDSL, die Suche nach dem PADO-Paket und ein Bayer auf Abwegen

(German)

Dass man mit der Deutschen Telekom viel Spaß haben kann, ist ja nichts Neues. Aber mit jeder Änderung läuft der Irrsinn des magenta-farbenen T zu neuen Höhen auf. Nach monatelangen Problemen mit meinem lahmenden DSL-Anschluss, sollte es endlich möglich sein, in meiner Straße VDSL zu bekommen. Nein, diesmal wirklich. Was soll das schon schiefgehen…

Book reviews ahead

Recently I received an unexpected email from Packt Publishing. They were looking for book reviewers. At first I hesitated because my pile of todos tells me I really shouldn't add more to it. But looking at their online catalog I learned that they offer many open-source related books. And taking a second look at my book shelf I even realized that I already own two Packt books.

Curious mice

You better not leave confidential documents near your optical mouse. You never know where it's looking at.

"This should work fine nowadays" (about vino, Compiz and wrong optimism)

I've been back from KDE (4.2!) to Gnome and with the mighty powers of Compiz my desktop is the envy of my Windows coworkers and still geeky functional. Well, somehow functional. For a while I wondered why I can't properly use VNC to remote-control my desktop from home. The connection works and I see the desktop but nothing seems to happen when I click or type. Now I figured out the desktop in the VNC client window is just not refreshed while my mouse and keyboard actions really do what they were supposed to on the VNC server. This is my sad tale of how I learned that a regression may mean driving the motorcycle to work in the middle of the night after cursing VNC. :)

Tired of Nagios and Cacti? Try Zabbix.

One of my professional duties in my past ten years was monitoring systems. Even my diploma thesis was dedicated to distributed monitoring (altough my professor sucked badly). Apart from a few custom-programmed scripts to analyze special situations (e.g. proxy clusters) I used tools that fellow administrators will find familiar: Nagios and Cacti. And another less famous text-configuration-based monitoring tool called Cricket.  That worked well somehow but Cricket was hard to learn for my coworkers and Cacti seems unreliable and fundamentally broken in terms of SNMP checking. Besides why do I have to set up availability checking in Nagios and set up checking of the same parameters in another software to draw graphs? Just recently I came across an open-source software I hadn't heard of before: Zabbix. And although it has a few rough edges it seems way more professional than other common tools (the commercial tools I saw are even worse than the open-source variants). I tried it and after a lot of reading and trying it looks like it has a good potential to replace Nagios and Cacti. So I thought I'd sum up my personal experiences with all of these tools.

ISPmail tutorial for Lenny is online

My new ISPmail tutorial for Lenny is out. Yay! For those who don't know what I'm talking about: I've been maintaining a tutorial for configuring a Debian-server as a full-fledged email server (Postfix/Dovecot/Amavis/MySQL: POP3, IMAP, SMTP, spam fighting, virus scanning, webmail, MySQL backend) since the days of Debian Woody that has a growing fan base.

Thanks for the great time, KDE

After years of being a dedicated KDE user it seems like it's finally time for me to go "back" to Gnome. I once tried KDE 4.x from the Debian 'experimental' branch knowing that it's probably unstable and will require a lot of patience. But I was willing to report bugs and dive into new things. It didn't take long though to find out that graphics were extraordinarily slow with the new "desktop effects". The worst was resizing a 'konsole' (KDE terminal window). It took 25 seconds until the window was resized and redrawn!

Don't (ab)use CSS for page layout

Before you BBQ me - note the word layout here. I'm not opposed to CSS. Instead don't get me started about crappy web sites that use "font size=+5 face=Arial" in every sentence or are even just saved from Micro$oft W*rd "as HTML". CSS is great for styling your contents. How do I want to make my H1 heading look like? How much space does a P paragraph have above and below? Which font style do I want to use? That's what CSS is good for. I like it. Keeps my (X)HTML clean and readable.

Automatic HTML validation of Pylons (or any WSGI) applications

While many other "web designers" create hacky websites (that break in many funny way once the browser developers figure out how to do their jobs right making the hacks fail) I almost always try to use W3C's web standards. Just that sometimes I forget to validate my own pages for proper CSS or (X)HTML. Thanks to the great "Web Developer" Firefox plugin I can press Ctrl+Shift+A and validate my local (X)HTML using their validation service. But I felt that a more automatic way would be nice.

NFS: sec=sys or ruin your day

And once again I was bitten by problems on my Debian laptop mounting directories from the file server via NFS. After a Debian dist-upgrade I couldn't login to KDE any more. Shell login worked somehow but I quickly found out I could neither read nor write any files there. Apparently an "ls -al" showed me the right permissions (not just unmappable numeric UIDs or something of that kind) and an "id -a" confirmed that my LDAP PAM configuration still worked. But reading or writing any file just lead to "Permission denied".

I'm not sure if it was an update in the nfs-common package in Sid.

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