Chez Benj

I'm back from a short trip with Nathalie to Brussels. We had a good time visiting the city, improving our knowledge of Belgian beers (we even tasted a fresh {@primus}!), bringing back some obligatory chocolates to our families ... and of course, staying away from geeky activities!

Oh nice, this was the last day of this firewall installation, which is to be delivered and checked on today. Part of my job was to make a bootable {@mkcdrec} rescue CD-ROM for my server. Of course, when everything was ready and after two hours lost trying to write the ISO image from a windows machine, the only machine that had a CD-ROM burner (funny how you can spend time on OS you don't know and don't want to know!), it was time for testing.

Today, while fixing the heel of one of my dear's shoes that she was to throw away, I just realized how geeks just love to fix hardware. Last time it was my hair clipper that I fixed and it is just an example of hardware I opened and fixed instead of just disposing it. And the vast majority of my geek friends do love opening various devices too, understanding how they work and finding an elegant solution (or gory kludge) to fix them.

My colleague and friend {@raceme} is currently struggling to restore a server that he was just to deliver to a customer. It was just after a security upgrade and it took us some time to find that it is because libsasl7 was upgraded ... and was broken! Bad luck, this project was nearly finished.

If you are involved in the development or in the packaging of a program, sooner or later you'll get bug reports. Every bug report is unique, but most of them fall into one category. Based on my Debian or upstream experience, here are the most common families of bug submitters I had to deal with.

Yesterday, {@kult} and I have spent nearly the whole afternoon trying to install woody on a server with an Adaptec 2120S raid controller. Of course, the 2.4.18 Linux kernel shipped with boot floppies does not recognize it. Of course, we had no Internet access at this time so we've tried several options, grepped kernel sources, eventually got the Internet, googled, found an outdated site with hints, tried a modified version of the boot floppies with a redhat kernel (of course, it did not work) and googled to find we need to use a 2.4.21 kernel (at last!).

Long time no weblog, but it doesn't mean I haven't done anything in the meantime! I finally made my new hackergotchi image, which is quite essential for a geek!

After three weeks of holidays, in Cahors, Poitiers, Oléron Island, Berlfort, back to a geeky life!

Encore une fois, 2h (au bas mot!) perdues à me battre avec l'authentification x509 de {@freeswan}. Encore une fois, du temps perdu parceque {@freeswan} charge le fichier /etc/x509cert.der s'il est présent pour l'envoyer au client ... qui ne loggue rien d'utile si c'est un windows !