• Thunderbird IMAP TLS Bug

    Thunderbird seems to be a bit buggy connecting via IMAP/TLS to a Courier server. When Courier is set up to disallow non-TLS connections, it advertises STARTTLS and LOGINDISABLED. This is a challenge for the mail client to send the STARTTLS command before logging in. Thunderbird doesn’t do that: as soon as it sees LOGINDISABLED, it…

  • Debian, make and kernel rebuild troubles

    Building the Linux kernel on my Debian/unstable machine recently caused some trouble: everytime I ran make, all files were (re-)compiled, not just the ones of modules I just added. The problem is related to the latest make version 3.81rc-1. Downgrading to 3.81beta4 solved this for me. It’s actually a bug in kbuild, but I can…

  • View Free Disk Space on a Vserver

    Edit /etc/mtab to contain the line: /dev/hdv1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 Then df -h can show the free disk space.

  • Debian Auto-Login

    To have a Debian installation auto-login a certain user on the console on bootup, install the mingetty package and change this line in /etc/inittab: 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1 to 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty –autologin root tty1

  • Neat way to FTP backup

    Here’s what I do to backup my Debian box to a FTP server without temporarily occupying local disk space: tar cf – –exclude ‘/var/cache’ –exclude ‘/var/lib/apt’ –exclude ‘/var/lib/dpkg’ –exclude ‘/var/tmp’ /etc /root /home /var /usr/lib/cgi-bin /usr/local/sbin | bzip2 | curl -n -T – ftp://ftp.server.com/backup.tar.bz2

  • Wake On LAN with A8N SLI, Linux and nvnet driver

    Wake on LAN with the reverse-engineered forcedeth driver on Gentoo Linux amd64 does not work for me. I enabled the Wake up setting in the BIOS and ethtool as well as editing the shutdown script to enable WOL prior to shutdown doesn’t help, see here. The PC won’t wake up, neither on magic packet nor…

  • OMNeT++ Mobility Framework Compilation

    On error messages like: BasicSnrEval.cc:36: error: no matching function for call to ‘BasicSnrEval::BasicSnrEval()’ BasicSnrEval.h:82: note: candidates are: BasicSnrEval::BasicSnrEval(const char*, cModule*, unsigned int) edit the header file like this: BasicSnrEval(const char* n=NULL, cModule *p=NULL, unsigned s=0)

  • OMNeT++ INET framework compilation with GCC 4

    If you get compilation errors like these: error: cast from ‘something*’ to ‘int’ loses precision change the (int) cast to a (long) cast in the corresponding line.

  • Generate a CA and self-signed certificates

    Create CA: openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 4096 openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -key ca.key -out ca.crt Create certificate: openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 4096 openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr Make sure you enter different things for organization, unit and common name! Don’t use the IP address as CN, as Konqueror cannot…

  • Backupninja and MySQL

    Backupninja has a MySQL backup feature, which dumps each database to a separate file. To restore, each database has to be created manually and each file needs to be imported. This backupninja action dumps all databases and their CREATE statements into a single file and backs it up: mysqldump -u backup -p[passwd], –all-databases > /var/backups/mysql/all-databases.sql…

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