Jimmy’s weblog

The last days I spent a lot of time to test the debian bugtracking system since I’m responsible for the bugtracking system for GRML. The debian package debbugs doesn’t configure the system automatically, but the README provides enough information to make it work. I was glad that the system was working, but then I found a bug which makes it impossible to search for bugs(Bug #139696). So I had to get the package from the testing release and review my configuration. Unfortunately it didn’t work anymore due to different package names for the perl libs in testing. The solution was:

apt-get install libmime-base64-perl

When I bought my workstation a year ago I didn’t want to invest too much money in the power supply. Therefore I bought a cheap one, which turned out to be noisy. The same holds true for my server, so I’m starting to make both computers more silent than they’re now. Today I replaced the fan of the power supply in my workstation. The old one is a S8025H, replaced by a SmartCooler LFM1580E(about 15 EUR). Since the new one runs at only 1500 rpm I decided to compare both fans to make sure, the new one is good enough. The first thing I had to learn is that 1 CFM(cubic feet per meter) = 1.7m³/h. Here I could find a datasheet of the 8025H and for the SmartCooler I found the data on the package(The webpage didn’t work with opera ). My new fan has only about 22 cfm but I can’t hear it anymore. So I’ve to stress my workstation to find out if my power supply will explode

After I setup my ldap server I wanted to tell proftpd to use ldap authentication. I could find enough documentation to configure proftpd, but it didn’t work. Debian BTS gave me the reason, an outstanding bug in proftpd-ldap(only in the stable release). So I had to fetch the package from the testing release
The lines I had to add to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf are:

// Default Release is woody
APT::Default-Release \"stable\";
APT::Cache-Limit 12582912;

Next run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. This will upgrade a few additional packages, including libc(After writing this posting I realized that using codenames like woody doesn’t work, when setting APT::Default-Release. So the upgrade of proftpd-ldap installed only packages of the testing distribution. It was very hard to downgrade to stable again. This posting gave me some hints. I managed to get a clean stable system again, but then I realized that when installing proftpd-ldap/testing again that the same packages get upgraded as before These packages are really required and it was not a wrong configuration, as I thought before.).
I had to reinstall ldap-utils, I’m not sure why it was automatically removed. There was also a syntax change in proftpd, LsDefaultOptions was replaced by ListOptions.
After that everything worked fine with ldap.

Alsa

I had to setup a few things on a IBM T40 notebook. The first task was to enable alsa, which is usually no problem. The OS was Debian unstable so I only had to install a few packages and to answer a few questions. There are two alsa-drivers for intel chipset where the second is for the modem. I marked both of them for compilation in the alsa setup. But when I tried to start alsamixer I got: “no mixer elems found”. After some googling I found out that the second alsa-driver must not be loaded. I had to blacklist it in /etc/hotplug/blacklist.d/alsa-base, which was installed by one of the alsa packages. The name of the alsa-driver was snd-intel8×0m. Unfortunately I was not able to rmmod all snd-* modules, so I had to reboot the notebook. After that alsa worked and I only had to change some permission, so that all users are allowed to use it(This time I didn’t want to add every user to group audio):

chmod o+rwx /dev/snd
chmod o+rw /dev/snd/*

WLAN

It’s a centrino notebook with Intel 2100 mini-PCI network card, therefore I thought it’s time to test the Intel IPW2100 driver. The installation was very easy, since there is good documentation available. But I had to face another problem when loading both network drivers at the same time: e1000 became eth1 and ipw2100 became eth0 and I wanted it the other way round . Again, I blacklisted both drivers in /etc/hotplug/blacklist and defined aliases in /etc/modutils/aliases. Since hotplug was not allowed to load the drivers anymore, the networking script now loads them, using modprobe and thus my defined order.

Today I had to search for about two hours to find out how to configure postfix to deliver mail to courier. Courier Imapd uses maildir so you just have to tell postfix to deliver mail to the user’s maildir. Only one line is needed in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

home_mailbox = Maildir/

The trailing backslash is important, it indicates a maildir directory. This option is well documented in the manpage of local(8).

Today I installed the Debian bug tracking system(package debbugs) on my woody server. Although there’s no automatic configuration, it was rather easy to setup. It also works well with postfix due to the good documentation provided in /usr/share/doc/debbugs There is a script for cron in /usr/share/doc/debbugs/examples which I copied to /etc/cron.d. It didn’t work. I had to insert the user-field and checked for trailing newlines, since this was a problem of cron in the stable release.

When using samba as a WINS server it would be nice to tell all clients the ip of the WINS server. The man page of dhcp doesn’t say anything about wins or netbios, but google does
The ISC FAQ contains information about netbios options.
I also found a few sites describing the setup for dhcp. Basically it’s always:

option netbios-name-servers 172.16.0.1;
option netbios-dd-server 172.16.0.1;
option netbios-node-type 8;

where 172.16.0.1 is the ip of the wins server.
Here I found a hint what “netbios-dd-server” means.

The last days I spent more time on testing VPNs. Since I’m running a simple packet filter on my server I had to find the rules for iptables to let the vpn traffic pass through. Here they are for a pptp server:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 1723 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p 47 -j ACCEPT

My iptables setup just restricts incoming traffic, so when using more complex setups you need to define similiar rules for the OUTPUT or/and FORWARD chain, too.