Musings

I have struggled to install Debian on my new file server. With the new installer disk this was a breeze - until it tried to download additional packages from the internet. Turns out that I had access to my internal network, but no access at all to the external world. I checked the things one checks in this situation: ifconfig: OK, /etc/network/interfaces (OK - and I tried both DHCP and static), route -n (route to the internal network and to the ADSL router as gateway: OK), /etc/resolv.conf (had the DNS servers of my provider, but I couldn’t ping them), IPCHAINS - emtpy table), network cable (changed several times), router ports (plugged it in into one port that I know worked) ...

A lot of people have been asking: What is it, that ZAPPATA does? The technical answer: It’s a personal mail server that uses it’s own peer to peer, secure infrastructrue to exchange mail But there’s another answer: Michael Sampson has written an excellent report with an overview over different collaboration technologies. In it, he lists, the pros and cons of the different tools (email, IM, Presence, RSS, Shared Workspaces). Email has a list of whopping 11 negatives, cited below: ...

I have salvaged a Dell PowerEdge 1400 SC with dual P3 / 800 MHz CPUs. It is going to serve as my home file server (with a 3Ware RAID Controller and 480 GB of RAID 5 disks). So far, it has booted with a Knoppix CD, so I know that it will work (eventually). Here are the links, that will hopefully help me get this beast (god - it is loud - that will be a problem for the WAF) up and running. ...

It took quite a bit longer than expected, but R. and I have managed to release the first public beta of our vision of Personal Groupware: Please feel free to download the beta version of ZAPPATA and abuse it.

I have a Sony Ericsson T610 and happened upon these nifty tricks that increase the fun factor. The T610 is a nice little phone, with a bad camera but otherwise it’s full featured. As usual with SE phones, it’s bluetooth implementation just works and it does all the stuff the mobile professional with too much money (GRPS on holidays to work and surf) needs. At first, when ompared to soemthing like the Sharp GX20 which I have been seeing a lot lately, the GX20 (or it’s successor the GX30) win hand down. (The screen on the GX models is absolutely stunning (240*320 pixels)). But Bluetooth is only enabled for handsets. There is no modem that can be used (even though the GX20/30 uses GPRS for it’s WAP / Web stuff). In short: It’s totally useless for me. ...

Version 1: su bea -c “cd /opt/local/somewhere && ./runSomeShellScript.sh” Version 2: su - bea -c “cd /opt/local/somewhere && ./runSomeShellScript.sh” It took me about an hour to figure out why my installation package (which used version 1) didn’t work. Stranger because it worked flawlessly from the commandline. All *nix geeks will already have spotted the difference and LTAO my mistake. For all others: the “-” parameter to su specifies that the user should get his own correct environemnt. Without the “-”, the new shell process will inherit the environment from the calling process (which – as it was in my case – lacked some ENVIRONMENT variables that the script excpected) ...