Landfill of Wisdom

Just to summarize why Firefox does not trust the https://www.clevery.co.jp/ online shop. Apparently the server at https://www.clevery.co.jp/ only sends its own certificate when I open their page. What most sites usually do is that they send not only their own certificate, but also the certificate of their issuer, and the certificate of that issuer and so on up to the root certificate (excluding the last one). What is happening with the clevery server is that its certificate contains an extension that points to the location of the parent certificate. As given by OpenSSL Authority Information Access: OCSP - URI:http://ocsp.verisign.com CA Issuers - URI:http://SVR1024Secure-aia.verisign.com/SVR1024Secure2007-aia.cer So, apparently Firefox doesn't follow that path and that seems to be a recognized standard. A quick Google found this article by someone who ran into the same problem and who has already checked the status of that extension. I'll have to look more into it myself, but ...

Logwatch was good enough to show me that I had my logs filled with messages like these... repeating themselves over and over ad infinitum:

I have been using ekiga occasionally to call my parents back home. The default VoIP provider in ekiga did not provide a very good service initially but have improved lately. A call to a landline in Bulgaria is less than $0.04/min and the quality is acceptable. Still, the service is not as good as I wish it to be. I decided to give Gizmo a chance. I do have a Gizmo account, charged with a $0.25 sign-up bonus. I thus decided to make a call home and even though I could hear my wife very clearly (much better than with Diamondcard) she could not hear me. After some bugging with Gizmo's echo test I found the culprit. When I send a request for the user "echo" to the proxy server it sends a reply with the address of the echo test -- a different IP, same port (5060). I really have no idea what happens next, but my outgoing voice packets are obviously not sent to the echo address. The following is my speculation. Traffic going to/from port 5060 is being handled by the nf-nat-si...

A few days ago I decided to bump the kernel on the server from 2.6.20.7 to 2.6.21.5. While recompiling I decided to remove the support from 32-bit executables from the kernel and see what is going to break. Here is the short list: GRUB no longer worked. Apparently it is a 32-bit executable. memtest86+ cannot be compiled I can no longer chroot to my 32-bit rescue root that I only use to boot an old laptop over the network. Most of the stuff still works, GRUB is already installed in the boot sector, memtest86+ is only used at boot time (i.e. never, except when netbooting other machines), and the chroot -- I can live without upgrading it for now.

At the office my Firefox 2.0.0.4 again managed to eat up to 500 MB of RAM before I decided to kill it. That has been happening often lately. It's a machine with 2G of RAM and these leaks were not that big of a problem until now. However, lately I've been needing at least 1.5GB of RAM for work and the browser is getting in my way. I am pretty sure that this is a problem with some extension, but I've had no luck identifying the culprit. After disabling some extensions, these are the ones that I still have loaded: Firebug FoxyProxy FullerScreen Link Widgets Location Navigator Nuke Anything Ehnanced Split Browser Tamper Data User Agent Switcher Web Developer

Wrapping Japanese (well, any language in the CJK group) text in Vim can be tricky as there is seldom any whitespace where a line break can be inserted. A relatively decent solution is to use this script (currently dead). It will insert a line break where necessary while avoiding inserting a break in front of punctuation or other special symbols. Another quicker solution is to set the "m" and "B" format options: :set fo+=mB m will make it possible to break between any multi-byte characters, and B will prevent the insertion of space between multi-byte characters when joining lines with "gj" for example. This will quickly do the job, but with no regard for punctuation. Keep in mind that with both methods Cyrillic characters are treated as ordinary multi-byte characters. Therefore, it is not a good idea to have these settings automated if you are going to be handling Bulgarian for example. Considering the previous statement, it is easier to turn on/off the fo...

I am trying out Cacti for monitoring my systems. The package works more or less OK, except that it does not plot the graphics properly. I was getting messages like "sh: /rrdtool: No such file or directory" in my apache error log, unclear what was causing them. The cause of the problem -- I had PHP running in safe mode .