neitzels irrelevant irregular intarweb notes

A bit of care an feeding for susan.marshlabs.gaertner.de, my main X11 Terminal. Susan was bought for 15 EUR on ebay and runs an old Firefox locally. There are some drawbacks:

1. JavaScript/Java code will run slow and often run into time-outs; this can best be dealt with by disabling js/java altogether :-)

2. Essentially no current SSL site will be covered by a root certificate in Firefox's CA store anymore, requiring me to ack any site cert individually.

So this night downloaded a batch of current root certs to miles and added the first NFS-mount on susan. This turned out to be easy-peasy -- instant success.

This will also help to get better unicode fonts. The ones present on susan have just too many holes. Alexis, the Olinuxino A20 ARM board just a few feet nearby, should by able to provide some vastly better fonts from its SD card.

A night well-spent at the http://stratum0.org/ hackerspace, thanks to DoomMaster. Useful things learned:

• Debian package laptop-mode-tools, avoiding those insane harddisk spin-ups due to syncer running every 30secs.

• ssh -D for SOCKS-based proxying, complementing the already familiar -L/-R forwardings.

• Alt-Backtick in gnome for switching application sub panes.

And last not least:

• Trying to hack your WLAN driver gets difficult if you need to take a look at an older CVS revision -- but your WLAN ain't working yet.

Some three hours reading on Mikrotik's RouterOS used on billy.marshlabs.gaertner.de:

I mostly wanted to get more acquainted with general CLI concepts. The tricky thing about this little box is that it has such a damn lot of advanced, marshlabs-applicable and foremost interesting features that it is difficult to resist chasing all those tempting hyperlinks in the docs.

I'm learning Eric Allmann's sendmail since 25 years now and so far haven't stopped doing this. There isn't a year I'm not learning something new about sendmail.

Today was a day to revisit sendmail's (optional) way of caching the last dialogue with other mailhosts, the hoststat option. Things re-learned:

# sendmail -bh      (aka hoststat)
# sendmail -bH      (aka purgestat)
# sendmail -O Timeout.hoststatus=1s -v -q

(Research done on the decsystem running ultrix-4.4 and a fairly current sendail-18.4.x, having the op.me handy.)

Another dead horse to dismount from:

debian gives up on XCP due to lack of upstream (i.e., Citrix) cooperation.

And this had been touted with so much fanfare, as in supported Linux distributions (currently Debian and Ubuntu). XenProject's own documentation on XCP-XAPI was, to put it mildly, quite confusing to me.

Xen never worked on tafkap.marshlabs.gaertner.de, an N270-Atom Samsung NC10 running Ubuntu-12.04-LTS (aka precise pangolin). When booted into the Dom0 kernel, the system would freeze after running for some five minutes. This NC10 has 2GB RAM and 500 GB disk, quite a fat netbook and good for hosting several VMs.

After years of being dimly aware that vim(1) is somehow capable of re-formatting paragraphs, I researched the documentation and switched over from !}fmt and !}par to the gq commands. Perhaps it sticks this time.

Discovered liferea(1) (and liferea-add-feed(1)) as RSS/ATOM reader as already installed on my wheezy desktop netbook, so I gave it a try. (Accidently found while using man -k news for looking for a real news client. Life moves on, I'm afraid - while I'm writing this, yet another CfV for deleting de.comm.uucp is active.)

susan.marshlabs.gaertner.de (an "IGEL" brand X terminal) just got a new TFT screen: from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 for just 15 EUR. Well, make that 2x1280x1024: susan is dual-headed.