Archive for August, 2006

The next best thing to getting ran over by an 18th wheeler would be having a gentoo baselayout update breaking havoc over your mail server.

I have no idea why, but Courier, which is the mail server suite I use, in conjunction with DJ Bernstein’s qmail and vpopmail, all this lovely stuff keeps breaking all the time on Gentoo. I’ve had courier hand mask’ed since they kept screwing up.

Now, the lastest baselayout prevents authdaemond from starting, and leaves no evidence in the logs. The Gentoo bugzilla is confusing, they say it’s Courier’s fault, and that they need maintainers, and that uh.. I don’t know, I’m not sure. They sound like they expect the problem to fix itself, or that it will magically occur at some time.

Gentoo is definitely not something you should run on a production server, sometimes.

Update: Well, updating to the lastest courier and removing /etc/init.d/authdaemond seems to have fixed it. The ones who are having problems are actually those who are running the “unstable” courier, with ~x86 flags. I wish you guys luck.

iCal. Such a nice calendering application that is, and a pioneer in the vastly used ics calendar format. Is it the ultimate calendar ever? Well, almost.

What drove me insane was that, while you can publish your calendars to a WebDAV server for others to see and subscribe to, you cannot edit the calendars that are published — unless you have a .mac account. While I sincerly hope this will be in Leopard, I’m not holding my breath.

You see, I run Linux on my desktop at home, and Mac OS X on my laptop, for work. I just wanted to find a simple way to share my calendar between the two machines, and to be able to edit them on any machine.

And it just so happens I just have the solution. Read the rest of this entry »

My quad Xeon’s clock keeps drifting. It was now two days in the future.

I ntp’ed it:

nailhead # ntpdate time.apple.com
15 Aug 23:54:57 ntpdate[22961]: step time server 17.254.0.27 offset -131984.081641 sec

131984.081641 seconds in the future, huh? Guess the flux capacitor still has hiccups there. I’m working on a fix, but all I can think of requires a reboot, which I’m not going to do right now. Stay tuned.

I have a machine on my network that is very special. It’s a rather old Quad Xeon, an HP LH4 that I scavenged out of the proverbial dumpster of a buisness that didn’t want it anymore. In fact, they were about to trash six of them.

I decided it was a crime to shitcan such beautiful machines, so with the help of my friend Mike “I mangle french words” Le Blanc, we drove there, armed with a large truck and patience. Carrying them down the three stories with no elevator was an interesting experience. I scavenged lots and lots of interesting hardware there.

But i’m getting ahead of myself here. The point is, lots of screwy things start occuring when you have a Quad SMP machine, such a timers and clock drift. I started having a lot of problems with Apache recently… once in a blue moon, on restart, it would spawn a single process with no PID file, and hang there. Checking out error_log pointed out that apache would apparently hang while generating the Secret seed for Digest authentication (mod_digest). Disabling mod_digest would have worked, but sadly, I use it. This could be found in error_log:

[notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ...
[notice] Digest: done
[notice] Apache configured -- resuming normal operations
[notice] caught SIGTERM, shutting down
[notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec2)
[notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication ...

Fortunately, I cobbled up a fix. Updated! Read on for a more elegant fix. Read the rest of this entry »