pvaneynd

encrypted root filesystems on servers

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:09:44 GMT

The one problem I have with my server at home now seems to have a fix.

The server has a standard encrypted root, as configured by debian-installer. The issue with this is that after booting I need to go to the console and enter the LUKS password. As I do almost everything remotely this is a pain.

However C'T published a nice article a while ago on how to solve this. The short story is that you install a custom initrd plugin that starts dropbear and waits for the password on the console or via ssh.

Now to install and test this...

wireless in 2.6.26 considered bad for europeans

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:05:38 GMT

After upgrading to 2.6.26 I could not associate with my AP anymore. After searching I noticed that the amount of channels reported by iwlist wlan0 channel had changed. And the channel that my AP was using (13) just disappeared.

I openeded a bug with the iwl people and the end result is: in 2.6.25 the card selected the region for the wireless, in 2.6.26 the cfg80211 system is doing so and the default is 'US'.

So if you are in Europe you need to add a file /etc/modprobe.d/cfg80211-region with as contents:

options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU

Holiday recap

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:09:36 GMT

On the 4th we got the Caravan. We drove it back carefully and started loading it.

The 5th in the morning (not as early as we wanted) we left for Lausanne. Driving was uneventfull for us, but the first 300 km we say 3 caravan related accidents. Nothing makes you concentrate on driving as much as driving past a poor family on the side of the road standing next to the wrek of their stuff.

We had a few stops in France and got irritated by the low speed limit for caravans in Swizz (80 km/h instead of 130 km/h in France).

When we arrived we quickly contacted our friends and went to the cathedral of Lausanne for some open air party. The camping gave us free travel tickets on the public transport so it was very nice and easy to get round. I took an instant dislike to the old fashioned attitutes of the Swizz to smoking, aka "it is good for you".

The 6th it was raining a lot, so we visited the olympic museum in the city and then went for diner with the same friends again. All in all it was nice the camping was nice and the city also seems nice.

The 7th we left early for Venice. The GPS decided that the 'easy' way was not across the Mont Blanc Tunnel but the more difficult Saint Bernard Tunnel. In the fog. The picture does not do justice to the difficult driving conditions.

In the end we arrived in the camping which is on the end of a long road. At one point you see a sign saying: "left this and that camping, straight 25 more campings". We quickly (with some help) parked the caravan, setup the tent and had dinner. Then we went for a walk and were incredibly lucky: we just followed the stream of people and ended up on the beach just at the start of the fireworks display. Which was very nice and very very long.

The next few days were mostly taken up by going to the wonderful swimming pools, shopping and going for walks to the beach. In the evening the kids of the camping would all join in a 'baby dance' of dancing while being lead by the 'entertainers'.

The 11th we went to Venice. We took the 12 hour ticket public transport ticket and saw the Doge's palace and then had a long with a crossing of the Canale Grande by a gondola . At the end of a triering day we went home to our Caravan.

The 14th we left and drove to the camping of Milano. That one is a lot worse of course, especially it was a lot less clean. In any case we had a nice time walking round Milano and even went onto the top of the Cathedral. The evening of the 14th there was a great storm with lighting and a strong wind. The tent remained up, but was very wet...

The 15th we went via the Gottart across Switzerland and then to camping Lug ins Land near Bad Bellingen in Germany. There we relaxed for a day until the bad weather caught up with us. Just after we had folded up the tent (that only just got dried) it started raining again. So with rain we returned to Belgium where we cleaned up the caravan and returned it to the lender.

topo!

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:08:43 GMT

Yesterday we had a long meeting. At the end of which I had 6 voicemails.

Not all of them were form zoutke, but most of them. Turns out that her brother saw a mouse in our veranda.

When I come home several hours later I start searching and after a while find a mouse behind our washing machine. I poke it a bit and it escapes into the garden.

Later that night I see it again, jumping into a bush. Shortly followed by the arrival of Jerry, the cat of the neighbours, who starts looking "with interest" at that bush. So the likelihood it survived is low. That it wants to come back even lower :-)

Still, we're not taking chances. So I got mouse traps, poison bate and a window screen to keep insects and rodents out.

In other news we ordered a TV a week ago, it should arrive on Friday.. We selected a Sony KDL-32W4000. Let's hope it is a good as expected :-)

The dreambox is still dead. Dream promised that they would send the piece this week. Let's see...

a miracle!

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:08:00 GMT

Someone found our camera, brought it to school. There they identified the owner by the pictures on the card.

So Clara has her camera back! Joy!

went for a nice bike ride

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:42:29 GMT

Yesterday I slightly overdid my "let's go for a ride". 22 KMs is a lot for me, but I feel better afterwards...

what a cursed weekend

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:00:21 GMT

Not only was I unable to do any studying at all, no I also manage to lose the camera of my wife. The camera which was her birthday gift two years ago. With the pictures of our son at the schoolparty still in the camera bag.

Words cannot describe how angry I am at myself.

and poem

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:02:42 GMT

Today at work I got a bad phone call from my wife: the dreambox doesn't boot anymore.

After some fiddling it did boot, but without the HD. So thinking: HD must have died I tried removing it. After I removed the HD the dreambox won't boot at all.

Some frantic searching later I found the reason I think: there is a known problem with the PSU and the front-end cpu cannot bring up the system. Bummer. I created a ticket with dream support and I hope that the 'order' email will be enough, otherwise I'll have to search through all our documents for the damn bill.

Let's hope they just send a replacement PSU soon...

the ugly truth

Mon, 26 May 2008 03:22:32 GMT

This article in the Guardian about the problems in Naples and the Fist full of Euro "while Europe Napped" both give to my limited experience and knowledge an accurate view of the ugly problem that is Naples.
To be honest: I like Naples a lot, however some aspects are just plain wrong in the 20th century. For example the news that the government wants to create a rubbish dump in Chiaiano. To give you an idea how Chiaiano looks like: this is a google maps view. Quite urban and not the place to dump garbage...

And then to think that for foreigners at work think that Belgian politics is strange and outdated. Ha!

busy week

Sat, 24 May 2008 07:41:09 GMT

This was a busy week for me. I sort of volunteered to become one of the people responsible for the lab. At the same time I had a lot of fun torturing people, sorry, doing the assessment tests :-).

Being lab responsible will be very interesting as I will be forced to be 'hands-on' will all the stuff we support. Not to mention being able to automate as much of it as possible.

For the assessments we had to play out a scenario. It is fun to notice how people are almost on track to find the solution and then to disturb them. As an observer you can really see how people reason through the problem. Or not in some cases. Loads of fun (not at the expense on the candidate I haste to add, most of the jokes were on us)

weekend redux

Wed, 14 May 2008 05:12:27 GMT

Saturday was learning the care and maintenance of a caravan, followed by work in the garden.

Sunday was cutting the hedge, breaking the scissors, getting new scissors, breaking them too and finally in the end getting quality German indestructible scissors.

Monday was resting and going for a walk to Mechelen. Yesterday was a course and discovering a large (15cm across) infection on my leg. So I got a pack of instructions (if ... or ... or ... then go to the hospital immediately) and two packs of antibiotics.

So a quiet weekend :-S.

long short weekend

Sun, 04 May 2008 06:01:06 GMT

Most people in Belgium got the 2nd of May as an semi-official holiday (two official holidays fall on the same date today and the government delayed deciding what to do with the second day for too long), so we had a very long weekend. Cut short for me because I'm working on Sunday.

On Thursday I wanted to be early with our taxes, but we're still missing some forms. I thought "No problem, that data should be pre-filled in out declaration. I'll register for the on-line tax thingie". Well I could not: www.taxonweb.be has been down since at least Thursday. How confidence inspiring.

Friday we had a nice BBQ and yesterday we went shopping and kite-flying. The kite-flying was the more enjoyable event, even if I had to do most of the flying.

Exam scheduled

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:03:07 GMT

I scheduled my exam for the 18th of December. I'll have a month of intensive studying before that, but that's not enough time to do everything I need to do. So I'll start to study already a little.

Notice my mood.

passed the drake

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:11:47 GMT

Today I passed the CCIE Security written exam.

Now the practical, but first I need to recover from studying hard for the first time in years...

weekend redux

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:53:17 GMT

This weekend I started studying for the CCIE written exam. Man is that hard already.

We also went out and ordered the new laptop for zoutke: an Acer TravelMate 6292 with 3 years of extended warranty and accidental damage.

She wanted it to replace the 5 (or 6) year old R50 and to try out Vista. That's what you get if you convince your wife to take up computer administration :-(.

Oh that and a colleague 'invited' me to facebook. I don't know yet if I like that thing...

a per policy

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:19:29 GMT

I just noticed Cisco has a blogging policy. So just to make it clear: "the views expressed on this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cisco".

As if anybody would get confused about this.

Anyway you'll notice that I will sometimes comment about Cisco related stuff, but only by quoting public documents. That way I'm certain I'm not leaking something confidential, as I'm surrounded by the sticky stuff.

Elements 6 demo gone?

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:13:21 GMT

This morning I saw a 'download the 30 day demo' link for Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh. By the time I got into work (with the fat internet pipe) the link was gone and following the link that was there before gives me only windows versions to download.

Oh well.

a strange death

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 05:52:22 GMT

this morning I come down to find my thinkpad powered down. Searching a little in the logs shows:

Mar 26 02:35:11 sharrow kernel: ACPI: Critical trip point Mar 26 02:35:11 sharrow kernel: Critical temperature reached (100 C), shutting down. Mar 26 02:35:11 sharrow kernel: Critical temperature reached (95 C), shutting down.

However the fans work and at the moment the temperature is only 50 C.

So why did it get so hot?

a bright new product

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:48:34 GMT

zoutke was very happy today returning from shopping. The reason?

Delhaize now has "English Bread" which in reality is "Hovis" bread. Joy.

Fosdem and KT

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:39:14 GMT

I had a busy week. First last weekend I went to Fosdem and had a lot of fun. Not only where there interesting talks, I also had the opportunity to fix, package and upload a lot of packages.

Then at work we got an intensive Kepner-Tregoe training, which was a lot of fun and even seems very useful in solving problems at work. That however prevented me from doing any work at home at all, because we were given 'evening fun' :-S.

Anyway, next week I have to go help out another module because they have a load spike, so less firewalls and VPNs but more $otherstuff for me.

The Birthday cake

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:10:22 GMT

The Birthday cake

The Cupcakes

The Kitchenaid and the result

Last Tuesday we had the birthday party for our not-so-little one. As you can see the wonderful mommy managed to not only make a nice milk/egg free chocolate cake, but also to put a nice dalek on top.

Who is surprised that his English vocabulary consists mainly of the numbers of one to ten, 'birthday cake', 'Dr Who' and 'Exterminate!'?

The weekend before the cook also experimented with her newest toy and produced very nice cupcakes.

flash from the past

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:43:13 GMT

Yesterday I found by accident a 'get together' site for one of my schools in Germany: Stijn Streuvels basisschool in Kempen.

If you want to see young me: I'm the kid in red on the right.

A quick CL-debian related poll

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:37:48 GMT

View Poll: What prefered VCS for cl-debian work?

crash

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:34:06 GMT

Yesterday I dreamt we were walking outside and then happened to walk in a field where an SST had crashed, with people is NBC suits running round.

Today I wake up and remember I've been dreaming about walking round with the family in Australia (temperate jungle like setting, taking care for all the zillion of poisonous animals/plants there) when we saw an airplane looking a lot like an XB-70 fly over. Shortly after we saw it crash in a big explosion and I started checking the direction of the wind and where we could go to avoid the hazmat risk.

As dreams goes not even all that scary for me, however the repetition of the motive is getting a little distressing.

weekend at the sea

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:31:11 GMT

This weekend was the traditional 'fysica festival' weekend: a get together of my classmates from university and accumulated other friends.

(as usual most pictures are friends-only on flickr, please comment if you want to be added)

Unlike previous years this year it was at the sea, not in the 'mountains' of Luxemburg, and we were very lucky with the weather: it was nice, sunny and even warm. So much so that on sunday the kids were playing semi-naked on the beach in the water. It seems most of us are of the opinion that cold kids are ok as long as they have dry clothes afterwards, and in any case non of them turned blue :-). Inspired by the kids some of the adults decided to go for a swim themselves.

So in the day we went walking at the coast, having an icecream in Den Haan and just hanging out. The evenings were filled with games, walks and experiments on a deserted beach.

Day to day life is pretty hectic again with dentist, doctors and near accidents to keep me on my tows.