After three month of dealing with Ubuntu on my Netbook, I have installed Debian Squeeze. I am very happy and want to thank everyone who was involved in the development and release process. :-)

Debian feels much better and stable then Ubuntu (The GUI is much faster - e.g. when changing windows). I will see that I can contribute somehow (e.g. Bugreports, Bug fixing, etc)

After two years I finally have a Linux computer. Last weekend I bought a Asus Eee PC 1015PD :-) This is a very nice toy and everything seem to work out of the box - I have chosen Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

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This week I installed 2.6.17.x on my server. Unfortunalely this kernel seem to cause some network problems. Since I ran this one, I have problems conneting to lists.horde.org. Ping (aka ICMP) is working, but TCP (http and smtp) is not. I can reproduce the problem with my systems @ home (the one that ran 2.6.17.x). The systems with < 2.6.17 can connect with out a problem...

I'm pretty sure that Linux 2.6.17 is the problem. I have no problem connecting to the host with Win32 and Ubuntu 6.06. And some guyes from debianforum.de also can reproduce the problem with 2.6.17.x (but they also can connect with Linux < 2.6.17).

Does someone of you guyes have an advice for me?

Some month ago I was looking for a newer version of DB designer. I don't found one since this project died. But it's source is used for MySQL workbench - but I could not find a release.

Then wildan-maulana mentioned MySQL workbench. I remembered that MySQL workbench is the follow-up project of DB designer, which I realy liked. I tryed the OS X version but it crashes when I create a new table :-( Maybe I have a look at the Linux i386 version in the next days.

Today I updated the memory of my system:

blackm@client:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1011        432        578          0         13        218
-/+ buffers/cache:        200        811
Swap:          478          0        478

I have 1 GB of RDRAM PC800-45 memory in my system now :-) Looks like this will be a good week.

Almost all german laws are available online to read, search and print. This is a pretty useful service and I've used it several times (police tryed to tell me that my car was not allowed to park at the place where I parked it, etc.)

Are there similar sites for other country's laws?

Marco asked if it's possible to setup apache to restrict host access and use http auth. I never had such a setup, so I gave it a try.

First I created a directory that uses http auth

cd /var/www
mkdir test
cd test
htpasswd -c htp blackm

Note: always put your password files outside your webroot!

The directory need some options to be turned of:

< Directory /var/www/test >
    AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit
< /Directory >

Put this in your apache configuration and reload it. AuthConfig make http auth working in .htaccess and Limit is for the mod_access directive

Now go back to /var/www/test and create the file .htaccess

Order Allow,Deny
Allow from [your hostname or ip] [an other one]

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthUserFile /var/www/test/htp
Require valid-user

It is important that the mod_access directive are before the http auth ones. By doing this way, only hosts (your hosts) are allowed to enter username and password. This should prevent your accounts from being cracked using brut force attacks.

This week horde 3.0.7 has been released. Since this release fix a few security problems, I decided to update my installations. I have one for my webmail / PIM and one for an unofficial cvs mirror.

Since the horde project provides patches, the update has been quit easy. Get you currently installed version

cat /lib/version.php

get the latest patch using wget and apply the patch zcat | patch -p1 Log into horde as administrator and check if the configuation need to be updated. If he cannot find the configuration, there is a problem with the file permission.

From time to time you should run

pear upgrade-all

to keep the pear modules up to date.

If you have a directory in which are all you backups (one file per day) you can use the following bash code to rotate these files.

if [ `ls -1 $DIR | wc -l` -ge 30 ]
then
    OLD=`expr \`ls -t1 $DIR | wc -l\` - 30`

    for FILE in `ls -t1 $DIR | tail -n $OLD`
    do
        rm $FILE
    done
fi

This will delete the oldest file if there are more then 30 file but always keep 30 files (if the backup process fail, old backups are not going to be deleted).

Since this weekend people in Florida a allowed to shoot each other.

But I can't imagine that this is realy useful. Are people in Florida realy that dangerous that they need be shoot? And what happen if you drive with a taxi? The driver can shoot you and tell the police you tryed to attack him - this law make it possible!

And I also ask myself how anybody could think about passing laws like this. Is it the cosmic radiation? Or did their cow-madness tests fail?

I'm happy not to live in Florida!