Cyconet Blog

off for vacation

cyco — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:36:17 +0000

I’m off for vacation for just a week without any internet access (Oh my good, I will hate my inbox). This break will give me some time for my wife and my daughter before my second daughter will arrive in this world which is scheduled for mid june.
If there anything strange happen with my packages, just feel free for a 0day NMU.
Just after this week, I will attend to RIPE 56 where my latency will just a bit lower than normal.

security: wordpress 2.5.1 which fixes CVE-2008-1930

cyco — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:15:26 +0000

Cause the subject, I did build a new package which can be installed on etch, lenny and of course sid. You can fetch it from http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/bpo/wordpress/2.5.1-1~bpo40+1/ or get via

deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian etch-backports main non-free contrib

Selfnote: Dump the wordpress user into separate domU

security: policyd-weight 0.1.14-beta-6etch1/0.1.14.15-1

cyco — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:12:21 +0000

This Tuesday Robert Felber released a new upstream version. It is a (local) security bugfix (and some minor fixes) which was reported on Sunday by Chris Howells to the Debian Security Team (as well as to other vendors). Today DSA-1531 was released.

Right from the DSA:
“… created its socket in an insecure way, which may be exploited to overwrite or remove arbitary files from the local system.”

So please update you systems if you use this package asap.

While we are at policyd-weight… there is one bug open (#471645) where I’m unsure if I want to fix it, cause only stable is effected and the problem can be solved by providing a adjusted array of rbl in the config file. Should I ask for inclusion directly into stable? But it’s a really minor issue. Or try to get 0.1.14.15 uploaded to volatile? I’m really unsure and suggestions are welcome.

Liquid Sunday 4.1

cyco — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:30:15 +0000

Like (almost) every year I visited obligatory the event. Since my family^Wreallife is normaly preventing me from such a party, this one left cause it’s in my old homeland and there are good friends forcing me to join them (my wife can’t deny a please of her brother :).
After it was sabotaged last year, this year the location wasn’t anymore in the KSA Tautenhain but in the “Volkspalast” Leipzig. I never visited this location before, but in contrast to the KSA it is a regular (commercial) location. So I was quite interested how such a great event could be integrated into a more or less mainstream location.
We reached 23 o’clock and it was really empty … there was a big floor where usually the weekly party is on stage. The music was less commercial then expected, later I found out on a lineup, that this was called Housefloor , I guess this floor was dedicated to the crowd visting the location regularly. So we discovered 3 more areas and I was keeping in the Mainfloor, which was a room much smaller and did look like a old fabric room (with additional deco). Around 1 o’clock there was many people in that room … a short round through the other areas did take me back to the Mainfloor. The deco there was great like every year and inside this room the usual feeling of the event could be recognised. Outside that room, is looked like every discotheque and the people seems also not like on the last events. To make long things short … Inside the Mainfloor sound, ambiente and crowd was great, but I didn’t care about the rest. And yes … the music was LOUD, but that’s okay for me on such a party.

selfnote: How to handle multiple domains with one apache vhost in a smart way

cyco — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:02:57 +0000

Today a customer asked for hosting several domains with different content on one apache virtual host. The little tricky part was, that the sites should not be accessed by subdirs like http://domain20.org/subdir20/ and http://domain21.org/subdir21/ which can be done with a little script which parses the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. So mod_rewrite is an option.
To make it user accessable, we use .htaccess. This requires “AllowOverride +FileInfo” to be set for the DocumentRoot in the vhost config. The .htaccess in DocumentRoot could look something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain10.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain11.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !dir1/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule (.*) dir1/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain20.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain21.org$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !dir2/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule (.*) dir2/$1 [L]

bit nagios-plugin bugsquashing, stalling policyd-weight and my first perl module package

cyco — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:18:57 +0000

Last week I did again some work on nagios-plugins. After the announcement of Dann Frazier to upload NMU to fix a trivial bug, I thought it’s time again to give some extra care to the package. So I prepared 1.4.11-2 fixing the important bugs and uploaded it. I also commited some minor fixes to the svn, so these issues will get fixed by the next upload.

Since the development of policyd-weigh stalled and unfortunately maybe get stuck, I was looking for an alternative, which maybe found with postfwd. It’s quite flexible but it also will take more time (and care!) to get a reliable configuration, which maybe effective as policyd-weight (still) is right now. While checking the dependencies for postfwd I noticed that Net::DNS::Async isn’t available in Debian (yet). So I decided to create a package starting with dh-make-perl, join the Debian Perl Group and let it review. Damyan Ivanov was so kind to review and upload it, Gregor Herrmann did also give some much useful hints. Thanks to both!

And yes, I also found time to step forward with NM, since I was overloaded the last weeks with usual work and life. Thank to my AM to be so appreciative.

10th Chemnitz Linux Days

cyco — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:01:08 +0000

Like Meike already told, it was a nice event, like always. IMHO it’s based on the good balance of community and a small amount of business booth and of course the visitors.
This year we was apart the Sidux Project. Didn’t heared about (much) before, but their slogan is Hot & Spicy! Maybe ‘hot’, cause it’s based on Debian unstable. Hopefully you won’t get tears if it’s too spicy. Anyways … if you want, you could take a look. My opinion is, this would be a good case for a Custom Debian Distribution, if there would be a requirement for it. But he.. everybody is free to do, what ever he want, if nobody else is restricted.
The talks I attended was in most cases excellent, some of them was funny … only one of them did really suck. Desktop Virtualision … after the talk, my question if there could anything else virtualized then the OS from Redmond, was answered with ‘Unfortunetly only XP’ … how lovely!

Routing Suite in an ISP environment?

cyco — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:21:10 +0000

Searching for an alternative for our old Cisco Border Router we are evaluating some software routing suites on “normal” server hardware.
First we tried Vyatta, but the routing software frequently crashed completly. Maybe this is fixed with VC4 Alpha 1, but we didn’t test that.
Next try was the development version (0.99.9) of quagga from Debian testing, but it looks like a peering with one of our cisco router fails after the hold timer expires.

2008/02/19 15:08:06 BGP: Performing BGP general scanning
2008/02/19 15:08:06 BGP: scanning IPv4 Unicast routing tables
2008/02/19 15:08:06 BGP: scanning IPv6 Unicast routing tables
2008/02/19 15:08:07 BGP: Import timer expired.
2008/02/19 15:08:13 BGP: 192.168.96.2 rcvd UPDATE w/ attr: nexthop 212.202.214.150, origin i, localpref 100, metric 0, path 20676 2914 2914 2914 2914 4755 4755 4755 4755 4755 9583
2008/02/19 15:08:13 BGP: 192.168.96.2 rcvd 124.7.35.0/24
2008/02/19 15:08:13 BGP: Zebra send: IPv4 route add 124.7.35.0/24 nexthop 212.202.214.150 metric 0
2008/02/19 15:08:17 BGP: 192.168.96.2 sending KEEPALIVE
2008/02/19 15:08:17 BGP: 192.168.96.2 KEEPALIVE rcvd
2008/02/19 15:08:17 BGP: %NOTIFICATION: received from neighbor 192.168.96.2 4/0 (Hold Timer Expired) 0 bytes
2008/02/19 15:08:17 BGP: %ADJCHANGE: neighbor 192.168.96.2 Down BGP Notification received

Any ideas are welcome … also some other routing suite alternatives.

Package updates and others

cyco — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:51:04 +0000

Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago Santiago Ruano Rincón did surprisingly turn up as my AM. We started fast, but I got stuck at P&P part 1 with the License comparisons, cause actually I’m so busy at work and with my family, that I can’t concentrate enough late at night, when trying to work on the papers. For example the graphviz license is completely overwhelming me. My hope in the last time was some bigger timeslots at the weekends, but they got smashed by my family and/or work issues. I hope Santiago is not getting annoyed by me and I can find hopefully some free time on holidays or in the first weeks next year.

Anyways … Christian Perrier started a review and translation process of ipplans debconf templates by the debian-i18n contributors. The templates was in really bad conditions, most of it was copied over from gallery2 and I did know that they wasn’t so good. Thanks for all your work, when the process is over I’m proud to include your really nice work.

Two other packages got updates. php-suhosin got new upstream release after months which fixes the broken perdir/.htaccess support. Unfortunatly I missed the release (cause there is no announcement list and there was no watch file) unless Raphael Geissert did leave a note. I integrated the new VCS and homepage stuff also and formorer did fix some minor issues. So we can hopefully upload now (when it arrives testing) the first package to backport.org and sleep little bit better, when using PHP on stable.
nagios-plugins also got updated. Since Seanius seems really busy (like allways), nobody did really took care of the package. In October it got two CVE which was solved via NMU by the testing-security team, also two new upstream releases where available. So I droped the obsolete patches, integrated new once, did make the new shiny lintian a bit more happy, some minor fixes and queued the package to Seanius. ;)
You can expect both packages on backport.org soon. My other (comaintained) packages will get updated to latest policy and VCS/homepage guidelines in the near future. Actually I’ve to prioritize what to do with the left time slots. :/

Too much coffee …

cyco — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:15:20 +0000

… it’s a old, but matchs the actual complex of some discussions in the country where I actualy live.