Landfill of Wisdom

I just got a brand new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 . The keyboard is great, but its left Alt key is a bit too small a bit too much to the side and very hard to reach with my thumb. Japanese keyboards have three extra keys around the space bar, keys that I never use, but keys that eat the width of other keys (just look at the English and Japanese variants and you'll see what I mean ). I thus wanted to assign that never-used-key to behave the same as an ALT. It turned out to be easier than expected. Detailed information about the process can be found in an article from Microsoft . It tells you that you need to add a binary key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map . Its first eight bytes are all zeros, the next four bytes are the number of mappings (little-endian, so "02 00 00 00" for 2), and then four bytes for each mapping plus a mapping of all zeros ("00 00 00 00") as a terminator. The number of mapping...

Inserting page breaks when printing in VIM is trivial but I had never had to do it. It basically involves two steps. First, insert the form-feed character in your file where you want a page break to occur. The character is 0x0C and you can use Control+V and then Control+L to insert it. It will display as "^L" on the screen. Second, tell VIM to obey these breaks by adding formfeed:y to your printoptions. In other words :set printoptions=formfeed:y And now print. It should work with no problem at all.

VMware Workstation 6 Beta has been out for almost a month now. I tried it out and some of the features are really nice. The one I like best is that virtual machines can be left to run in the background now. That, combined with the integrated VNC support means that you can run a virtual machine on a headless remote location and then connect and manage it with VNC. Pretty slick. An annoying "feature" of the Beta is that it does not offer an option to disable debugging in the virtual machine. This can lower the performance considerably, but it is trivial to replace the debugging binary in bin-debug with the optimized one from bin.

I am running netqmail patched for with TLS support under sslserver from the ucspi-ssl package. However, every time a connection is closed the sslserver process segfaults. On the Opteron it also causes messages like sslserver[13106] general protection rip:2ab6c23cf687 rsp:7fffe89e9308 error:0 to appear in my system log. Currently tracing the problem, but it seems that the process dedicated to handling the encryption assumes that it has to start an encrypted connection even though it has not been requested to do so. I'll have to dig around a bit more. Update: I also have a very trivial patch that fixes the issue. I've been running with it for over an year now and there have been no issues so it should be safe. Here is the file: ucspi-ssl-070-fixsegfault.patch

I just got a few very weird errors when updating a cvs checkout of Horde . See for yourselves: # cvs up cvs [update aborted]: cannot get working directory: No such file or directory After lots of scratching I figured that the cause is hidden in the fact that a parent directory is mounted with "-o bind". After changing to the original, non-bound directory, it worked fine. Update: Lots of other stuff also breaks with -o bind -- For example /bin/pwd. Very annoying.

A few common problems when setting up a stateful firewall to allow FTP traffic. FTP needs a separate data connection for transferring files or file listings. It has two modes of operation passive The clients request the server to listen for a connection. The server responds with the address and port where it is listening for the data connection. The client connects. active The client listens on a port for the data connection. The client notifies the server about the address and port. The server connects to the client Stateful firewalls only allow specific traffic or already established/related traffic. Since the data connection uses a separate port it cannot easily be distinguished as being related to the legitimate FTP connection. This is where the helpers come in play. ip_conntrack_ftp is a module that monitors ftp traffic and marks a data connection as RELATED to the control connection of a FTP session. When using the module, make sure you pass the option ports=21, or it will monito...

I have been trying to figure out why rsync was Segfault-ing when trying to transfer several hundred gigabytes from the old server to the new one. It was working fine but I interrupted it a few times. And then, when I was down to 5-6 gigabytes it would transfer a file or two (small files at that) and just spit out a weird message, like rsync error: errors with program diagnostics or it would complain about a timeout (I am copying from an NFS volume, what timeout?), or simply receive a Segfault. In a desperate attempt to figure out at least when the problem was occurring I decided to rebuild it with debugging symbols enabled. env CFLAGS=-ggdb3 emerge -av rsync I then fired up gdb an ran the problematic commands gdb run -avPAH /remote/... /var/.... and it worked fine . Since I had -Os in my CFLAGS, I tried using -O2 instead and still, there were no problems. Lesson learned, -Os does break stuff. Update: Well, -O2 saved the day for a while but rsync again started segfaulting when I tri...