Craig Box's journeys, stories and notes...


Posts Tagged ‘linux’

Exipick, and importing Apache certificates into IIS

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

Greig's cool find of the day:

Exim comes with a script called exipick, which lets you see just the parts of the mail queue that match a particular pattern. ie. we want to get notified of messages that are queued on a backup MX, but aren't just bounces to fake addresses that will eventually time out:

exipick '!$local_error_message'

Which makes looking at mail queues much easier:

root@elston:~# exipick | wc -l
96
root@elston:~# exipick '!$local_error_message' | wc -l
0

My find is a little less interesting, and a little more "just googled it", but if you have certificates in Apache crt/key format, and you want to import them into IIS, you can
do so with openssl:

/etc/ssl/site.net.nz# openssl pkcs12 -export -out site.p12 -inkey site.key -in site.crt

Read more at Michael's meanderings, including about the useful SSLDiag utility.

SFD/NM updates

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

My NetworkManager PPTP plugin package for Ubuntu is sitting in the REVU queue. If all goes well it will be approved and end up in Universe for Edgy.

SFD preparations are coming along. We have people hard at work preparing 150 copies of the Kia Ora CD, a fantastic open source software CD for Windows, collated by zcat from WLUG, and of course we have 300 Ubuntu CDs to give away.

Oh, and MythTV 0.20 is out. Make sure you get 0.20a, as a big MythWeb bug slipped in at the last minute. All going well, it'll make Edgy, if a simple sync from Debian Multimedia is possible.

Where did he go?

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

I've gone quiet! What have I been doing?

The last three were done in the company of (and with thanks to) Cathy, who now has far less hair.

Slashback

Monday, August 21st, 2006

NetworkManager PPTP plugin: One Ubuntu package, hold the pepper!

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

Please see the updated NetworkManager PPTP Plugin for Ubuntu page. Thanks!

Some time after blogging about getting NetworkManager's PPTP plugin checked out of CVS, I have some news to report.

Tony Mee is a legend. The author of the plugin has spent a lot of time with me, by e-mail, Jabber and Skype, accepting bugfixes, working on solutions, explaining things slowly for my non-programmer-brain. Most of the work done has been by him. I can't thank him enough here.

A few points to note first:

  • This plugin is in the middle of being converted to handle things that aren't just PPTP, and as such it presents a few more options than it might need to. Ignore screens about GPRS and Bluetooth; hopefully a subsequent version will see me disable them.
  • It is the CVS HEAD version, with the new pluggable-auth-dialog removed, as it just didn't want to build right, and isn't yet ready to replace the old auth-dialog.
  • Default PPP options might not suit - you will probably have to tick "Refuse EAP" on Authentication and "Require MPPE encryption/Require 128 bit MPPE encryption" on Compression & Encryption to connect to a Windows 2003 VPN server.
  • There are a variety of bugs with the current version of NM that could bite you. The VPN plugins can't set the MTU, you can't edit a VPN connection immediately after making it, irrelevant tabs aren't hidden - most of these will require the new 0.7 series to be released, which probably won't happen before Edgy.
  • You will have to restart DBUS, or log out and log back in again, after installing this plugin, before you can connect.

As usual, everything I know about autotools and CVS I leant from Perry. Thanks!

Now, for the fun part. I have packaged the NetworkManager PPTP plugin for Ubuntu 6.06. Download it here. I will have it up in an apt repository in the next couple of days. Please raise bugs in the program at the GNOME bugzilla, please leave comments on the package or general messages of "Hello!" in the comments below.

The next step is to find out how to disable all the irrelevant parts in the package, and start considering my potential future as an Ubuntu MOTU.

Customising a Debian/Ubuntu installation CD

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

One of the things I maintain at work is a self-installing Linux distribution.

When I started in 2002, we were purchasing KickStart installed Red Hat 7.x machines from a local company. With Progeny's AutoInstall, I managed to get a CD that would automatically install Debian Woody, but not in a very nice fashion.

Ubuntu came out, was more up to date than Woody (I think my Commodore 64 was more up to date than Woody for a moment there), and so I changed to it after the second release. Hoary introducted some support for KickStart installations, but I found that much more power could be gained with the new debian-installer that was coming for Sarge. A guide to remastering your Ubuntu CD ensued.

Two releases later, I updated all the machines to Ubuntu Dapper, and tidied up the installer a whole heap. Today, under the chargeable heading of "documenting my self-installing Linux distribution in case I get hit by a bus", I have given the Ubuntu Install CD Customization page a complete overhaul. Read it - it's grand.

And the barriers keep falling...

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Due to their anti-trust arrangement with Microsoft, Real are bringing WMV/WMA to Linux, legally. And Sun have announced more about Java's upcoming release to Open Source.

Linux will "succeed" (not to say it isn't succeeding already, but be ready for "primetime" or "The Enterprise" when it is in a position where people can target their software to it, and want to do it. Each step helps.

Open source graphics drivers (Part 2)

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Quoth Ian:

Great to see [Intel open-sourcing their graphics drivers] - now if only AMD/ATI and Nvidia would follow suit.

They've had open-source drivers for their hardware for some time: quoth the truely excellent Keith Packard:

Intel has made free software drivers available for all of its graphics adapters since the i810, so if it says 'Intel graphics' on the label, you can be sure that free software will support it.

The release today adds support for the brand-new i965 chips which add advanced rendering capabilities to Intel's graphics adapters, including the ability to support OpenGL vertex shaders and hardware T&L. As far as I can tell, while the hardware has been announced, it's not yet available from retailers yet.

But, as for AMD/ATI? Ask, and ye shall receive? If it happens, it's yet another reason to love AMD. Good to see competition in the chip markets.

Desktop advances

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Wow. Turn your back on eye candy for a few weeks, and it just jumps up at you.

First, the new SLED menu for GNOME developed by Novell was dropped into GNOME CVS as 'slab'. Of course, people have customized it for their favourite distribution, and so now there are Fedora and Ubuntu packages of it available. Keep an eye on the plan to get the slab into Edgy Eft.

A lady by the name of QuinnStorm has done some amazing work with Novell's XGL and Compiz, really building a community around it. I track the development version of compiz, which just keeps picking up new and useful features - I don't really like the Expose-like funtionality, so I went to see how to turn it off, and fell over a new window decorator instead. Cool. (If you have the bug that you can't seem to turn off hot corners, read the compiz.net forum on the issue.)

A great list of things to configure about Compiz can be found on the Ubuntu wiki. Someone wrote a program called gset-compiz to do this all for you, but development hasn't kept up with the rapid pace of Compiz changes. (Hint: to stop background windows appearing faded out, disable the "trailfocus" plugin, and try hitting Ctrl-Windows or Shift-F9 if you have "water" in your list of enabled plugins!)

It also turns out that the aforementioned slab is available from QuinnStorm's repository. Is there anything she doesn't do? The only criticism I've seen is that the domain could be slightly more trustworthy-sounding than "beer or kid". Tough choice, even for someone who doesn't drink beer...

NetworkManager PPTP plugin: Checking out & building

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

A while ago I promised Anthony Mee that I'd try and build the latest version of his NetworkManger VPN plugin for Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks ago I realised I had no excuses not to start.

I was tripped up while trying to build it: libtool: link: cannot find the library `/usr/lib/libXrender.la' or unhandled argument `/usr/lib/libXrender.la'.

Two minutes on #ubuntu-motu, I was fixed up by slomo: I use the non-official XGL repository, which has a broken libcairo2-dev package: I needed to edit /usr/lib/libcairo.la and replace -L/usr/lib/libXrender.la with -lXrender. Seeing as the web didn't seem to know this fact, and I couldn't find anywhere on the WLUG wiki to put this, I thought I'd teach it here.

Slowly checked NetworkManager out of CVS.

Last weekend Perry gave me a crash course in building things with autotools, using 'cvs export' or 'make dist' to get distributable-ready code. With a bit of hacking around, we managed to get the plugin built.

Came across a big problem; the old plugin was "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp", and the new one is "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.ppp_starter". Took a random guess to figure out that the old VPN plugin was stored in gconf, and this was what was crashing the VPN dialog. Perry opined that the barrier to entry to anything with DBus was going to be so much higher than simple Unix-like XML-readin' apps, and I hope he'll put his feelings in words soon. When I get back to that machine, I'll raise a bug.

I think I now have everything I need to know to build a Debian package. Shame the thing doesn't actually work or anything. Have added Tony to Jabber and will hope to make some progress soon.

WordPress, how hard is to get an editor which gives me a <code>, <tt> or other monospace-this-part button?