Note for self:

export GZIP="--rsyncable"

Makes sense for a lot of the backup scripts we have.

I knew gzip had an "rsyncable" option, but I never thought to check if gzip accepted an environment variable since I'm too lazy to set this everywhere it is needed. I'm tempted to add this to "/etc/profile", is that likely to break anything?

Seems 123-REG and 1AND1 both allow the unsuspecting user to enter "CNAME and other", and happily serve such data out to the Internet.

123-REG at least server other data out.
1AND1 just serve the CNAME.

Given ISC Bind stopped loading zones this broken before my previous existence as a DNS consultant, one is left wondering......

"If you do worse at DNS management than one would do with "vim" and ISC BIND, perhaps it is time to find another vocation."

You downloaded ethereal setup exe from ethereal.com when you meant to install Wireshark:

http://www.wireshark.org/

See Wireshark FAQ, and don't bother reporting it to the website contact address given on ethereal.com it bounces.

Now get a real OS ;)

The last two times I've investigate the SSL mixed content warning on websites we manage it has been produced in error, one a browser bug, one a browser plug-in bug. But this would be so much easier if the browsers would list what they perceive as non-SSL content, or even the first item of non-SSL content.

Does any browser do that?

I missed the "thanks to Debian" bit, I was seeing balloons on top of bug reports and getting irritated by them whilst trying to workaround a bug in Postgres that day.

Today however I needed some old packages, we have Squid 2.7STABLE6.1 installed on a i386 box, and I need to migrate this to amd64 and didn't want to brave the updates needed to do the same with current Debian Squeeze version of same. With the help of the search box on snapshot.debian.org I picked up exactly the same releases for amd64 as the deb files I have archived locally for i386, and was able to install the hideously hacked about Squid proxy config we use, which will last us until things quieten down and I can test using Debian Squeeze itself for the same task, thus gaining all those good things like security team support.

So today I'd like to express my gratitude to the Debian developers involved with Squid, Snapshot.debian.org, Steve and the folks here who told me about snapshot and so much more, and all those contributors to Debian who make my life so much simpler than with that GNU/Linux distro that I used before.

Thanks!

Trying to migrate from 32 bit to 64 bit web server.

Perl autobundle based approach didn't look like they would ever leave me a working set of local perl modules (and definitely not till several days of installing was past), so I rsync'ed /usr/local/share/perl and /usr/local/lib/perl.

None of the compiled code in /usr/local/lib/perl is usuable as it is 32bit code, but cpan has a "recompile" option for just this sort of situation. A couple of modules failed automatic recompilation, but doing cpan "force install" of two that failed, and two dependencies, and it was left complaining about an in-house Perl module written in C (huh?) - at which point my System Admin hat is removed, and my "can I remember how to write C" hat replaced it.

It took a lot of reading before I noticed the "recompile" command in cpan. If you need to use it you've probably gone wrong, on the other hand ~5500 perl modules installed and working before lunch.

We have multisite Drupal install on Debian.

One site being tranferred to Drupal had "/drupal6"
aliased to "/usr/share/drupal6", where as other sites have "/usr/share/drupal6" as DocumentRoot.

This site was reported as "system configuration doesn't allow" clean URLS.

Adding a redirect to the Drupal .htaccess file to explicitly rewrite worked as a workaround.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/drupal6/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /drupal6/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

As documented here:
http://drupal.org/node/15365

Firebug shows that although the drupal settings had "http://www.example.com/";, and I was visiting "http://www.example.com/"; the "OPTIONS" were sent to "http://example.com/";. Redirected "www.example.com" to "example.com", changed the settings to "example.com" and all was well.

I should find the bug and file a report.

Mozilla devs look away now...

They changed the layout of the folders, I can't figure out how to persuade it to display how many messages I have in each folder any more.

They changed it to display "You", and contact names when I want to know which email address was used (both myself and my correspondents have more than one email address). Sure you can disable it, but they have put a menu to the right which sits on top of the email address when it is displayed in full. Bleeding over the text - talk about GUI design fail.

The menu on each message kind of makes some sense had it been laid out correctly. By default Debian is giving me a "reply" with drop-down arrow. The drop down so far has only offered me "reply", so appears to be a waste of space. I also have a "reply all" displayed on group messages, with a drop down offering "reply", but no "reply to group", so it encourages people to reply to sender and group (please no this is so ****ing annoying don't encourage it please), or sender, but not "group".

Disabling the useful "always show reply to sender" gets rid of the mostly redundant drop down "reply", and helps with the text flowing under the buttons, but actually that is a useful button. Also disabling "icons" (show text only) helps, I'm doubtful of the utility of icons in menu's, witness "icons only" gives me more space back but I'm not interested in learning what the icons correspond to, but I can "read" (literacy is a relative safe assumption for users of email clients).

Migration assistant gets me my old toolbar back, but it doesn't remove the new one, so just clutters up the display more. I assume that some plug-in controls are in the wrong menu is a plug-in author thing, but the menu on the message doesn't have any more room.... Perhaps it we reclaimed the screen estate used by "tabs" (even when only one is open) we could put the message menu in a space of its own. Tabs are only fashionable - a sensible app switcher removes the need or utility. Indeed I'm beginning to find them tiresome in Firefox these days since I switch tabs a lot and applications a lot, and the difference breaks the flow.

"Close other tabs" - silently fails if the other tab is the folder view. A misnomer perhaps?

Some new features seem a little underwhelming in presentation. "Favourite folder" seems a sensible if minor improvement although I can't see myself using it (maybe it makes more sense for news readers?), but if icons are worth having at all they should offer visual clues like which folders are marked as favourites!

Some changes seem to be inherited from Firefox code base, and have interesting features. If you view a message and then enable "auto-detect" of character sets it temporarily changes the view of the current message to a source like view. I assume a straight forward bug.

I like the faster search, there are some lovely little features in passing.

With some hacking around I can persuade it to do most of what 2.x did, but with email addresses disappearing under buttons in the pane view and no totals for mailboxes. If I used KDE at home I would have switched to Kmail already, as it is Icedove will probably get a little more use, but I fear that Mozilla has fallen victim to the fashion of fiddling with perfectly good and long established UI design ideas in order to make the product harder to use - oops I meant to say "trendy".

If the GUI folk are bored how about writing code not to offer "close other tabs" when no closeable tabs are open, or the great two greyed out options "close other tabs" + "Close tab", when neither work. And remove the "tab" when no tabs are open (especially when "open in another windows" is selected so no tabs will ever be shown).

Oh and can the "total" field in the column editor ever be populated now?

Lenny rsync timing out copying between two servers in the same switch. Last week it was giving some sort of error copying the same set of files which was resolved by deleting a specific partially copied file.

Both are suspected by me of being known bugs in rsync, although the first could have been a file system error of some sort.