Kobaan's Blog

Blog Site moved AGAIN

2006-06-10T17:02:00.000+02:00

I completely forgot to mention my new blog site, since I did go over to publish my blog, website and podcast all in one place using Apple's iWeb.

Go here for my new blog, podcast and homepage:
http://sun4you.org/kobaan/RW

My blog's newsfeed is here:
http://sun4you.org/kobaan/RW/files/page0.xml

Hope to see you soon.

Bye,
Kobaan.

Special thx goes to Sun for hosting my site now !

Virtualization @ Mac Mini

2006-03-26T00:59:00.000+01:00

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my Intel-Mac.

Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q

Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a universal binary, which means that it will provide near native performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo Linux ;-) as it doesn't need to translate all the CPU operations to a foreign architecture.

Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I'm not missing a single application that I had used before on win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own application if I'll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.

Todays special: Mac Mini - Intel Style

2006-03-18T18:57:00.000+01:00

Year after year I enviously watch he development on Apple's newest Mac creations, Mac OS X, iPod's, iMac's, Mac mini and this year finally Apple decided to switch over processor technology from PowerPC over to Intel CPU's.

The biggest showstopper for me was their high selling prices . But with their new Intel Core chips which you can't buy yet for the PC market, and a relatively low price for a new revolutionary technology assembled together in a tiny little box, I couldn't any longer resist buying a Mac mini.Calculating together all the pieces, shows that the price is fair enough to buy, and as usual for Apple you can count on reliable prices for a long time period. So, if you buy later, it will cost almost the same and you will miss the technology advantage.

Compared to other processors, the Intel Core definitely has it's place, especially compared to power consumption (31Watts).

So here're some pictures of my new baby, the Mac mini Core Duo:

A new mac fan.

Support privacy !

2006-03-01T23:27:00.000+01:00

This time I want to encourage all folks of you owning a router which is capable of running the OpenWrt system.

What you need:
OpenWrt can be installed on many different router-hardware.
See here for a list of supported devices.

What you get:
Compared to other router system-software, OpenWrt by default is a very slim system. You can think of "minimalistic"="more secure".

Almost everything you'll ever need can be simply installed as packages or compiled by yourself. (e.g. a webserver/VoIP-proxy a.s.o.)

For GUI-enthusiasts the white-russian-release also offers the possibility to update, and configure your router via web-interface, although most of you people will be happy to have ssh-access and therefore full control over you linux-routerdevice.

Getting even more:
Most of the listed hardware devices, can use external or internal memory-sticks, sd-cards or at least nfs or samba shares, to install more software or hold more data accessible from your router.

How you can help:
Back to my initial thought for this blogentry.
As your router is usually up 24/7, and most people have flatrates, there's a great possibility to support the TOR network by installing a tor-server on your router and use it(or not) from within your LAN by accessing privoxy on your router to browse the web anonymously for example.

What is TOR:
TOR (The Onion Router network) is a concept to tunnel networktraffic through multiple other nodes before connecting to the final destination node. That way it will be harder for evesdroppers to trace your origin IP-address, and for hosters more safe to offer content without the danger of being shutdown when a server-ip might get blocked by someone.

Further you can provide access to the whole internet, dedicated services or even dedicated addresses through your own TOR server.
If you don't want others to use your router to access the internet, you can just contribute as a tunnel-peer for other TOR-servers.

Where to get:
All required packages for OpenWrt-capable routers can be found here and a precompiled privoxy-package here.

I'm addicted:
Of course you can do even more crazy stuff with OpenWrt see here.

Peace !

X3 Reunion - Patch 1.3 - Xenon/Khaak Invasion Massacre

2005-12-22T23:06:00.000+01:00

Since Patch 1.3 Khaak and Xenon become once more a real
threat in the X universe.

Some people already roll back to Version 1.2.01, as they suffer from massive universe wide khaak, xenon and even pirate
attacks backed by multiple carriers and destroyers.

The problem is that in former version, enemies that were killed
didn't respawn, that way the universe became more and more
quiet by time. Now with v1.3 all the destroyed ships recoreded
in the savefile will be respawned at once, thus sending huge
waves of enemies to the player and other races.

As a result, it might happen that complete sectors will be
entirely destructed by huge invasions, supply stations and their
ships being attacked, the whole economy that you knew before
will be gone.

But if you recall the beginning of the story in X3, you've been
warned by the senator, who said, that they can hardly hold 30%
of their fleet because of the war.

But that's bad news for us traders, who cannot afford an armada
of defence-ships or even destroyers to push back the enemies
or secure their stations and sectors.

Help is needed by other races KI ships, but as they might be
also destroyed and their supplies cut, you'll be finally on your own.

However further improvements have been done to the graphics
engine and overall speed is greatly improved allover.
Some storyelements should've been fixed too, but who will have
the time to find out that.

Protection of your profitssssss is what you need to care about
now.

Good luck.

Own X3 Map released

2005-12-21T23:39:00.000+01:00

I know there are already some good sectormaps available, even for the latest Release X2 of the X-universe saga.

There're also quite a few lists with some more information available, so I decided to include as much information as possible into my very own map.
If you're interested you can download it here: http://home.mnet-online.de/tuxine/x3kobaanmap.jpg (gif and png version also available)

Features:

Showing all sectors for X3 by their names
Graphical Sectorsize
Mark Solar Power Plants
Mark Shipyards
Mark Docks
Mark Pirate Bases
List Superfreighter I/II availability
Relative Spacegate Positions
Mark profitable asteroids for each sector by ore, silicon, nividium
List sector protection M1,M2,M6 and TL availability
Energie Support/Shortage mapping through the whole map
Prepared non-functional space-gates
Marketprice comparison
Rocket Damage/Speed/Range data

Changes:
V0.5
Included marketprice comparison list
Included rocket-data list
Included Race color-coding

V0.4
High resolution clean-ups
set non-functional gates visibility

V0.3
Energy-Support and shoratge highlighted through the map (blueish background)
Legend scaled to a more readable size
Scaled some known wide sectors in width t.b.c.

V0.2
Translated Sectorname Avarice to german Habgier
Include information on highest asteroid value: ore, silicon, nividium
Added pinpoints (yet invisible) for non-functional spacegates
List Superfreighter I/II availability

V0.1
Include information on shipyards, docks, pirate bases, solar power plants
Include information on spacegate positions
List sector protection M1,M2,M6 and TL availability

V0.0
Scaled sectors by their size (middle spacegate distance)
Initial version based on old maps, with additional sectors

I didn't translate the map to english yet, this may follow someday later.

Last minute XMAS gifts

2005-12-15T07:28:00.000+01:00

To all of you seeking for last minute xmas-presents, I can suggest this great audio CD of the korean band Bulldog Mansion which has a wide variety of different music styles as they play some funk, bigband, ballad, ska and rock.
In my eyes a perfect xmas gift for all people who want to escape the last frustating 5 years of english and/or german top100 music.

I just loved the songs of Bulldog Mansion when I did find a nice flash cartoon on the net: there she is (goto->amalloc) another part of this cartoon series will be published soon.

X3 Reunion - First Impressions

2005-12-14T19:31:00.000+01:00

Time to spend some time on blogging about my X3 Reunion progress.
Whenever you want to enjoy space / flight sims having a joystick is a must, even better when you got force-feedback ;-) So if you bump, it will bump back to you, physically.Reunion, is the 3rd part of Egosoft's space trading and combat series, above we can see Nikonofune which is the ship of Saya.
This is mine, at the very beginning, you'll already get a M4 Argon Buster and a Mercury TS,
but earning money is still hard to achive at the beginning.
This shows the landing lights of a solar power plant.
Space stations are huge, and there are only a few docking bays now, most of the time they'll be in the middle.

Nebula rendering, atmosphere and lighting textures are incredibly improved.
As well as station design. Most of them don't differ anymore between races, but their designs textures, bumpmapping and light effects are really eye-candy.
Dockingclamps. Although it's a space game there's good sound effects too, even in space, well it's a game so that goes ok.
And there is a great variety of BGM for all the space-sectors, some frightning, depressing or relaxing... as in Kingdoms End.
Are you still reading this text ? Enjoy the pictures.
This one is a bit obscure, this is the station in Grand Exchange, which obviously was sprayed by some teenagers ? ;-)))

Inside of the station it seems someone painted some japanese kanjis on the walls.... strange.
Where am I ?
One of my f****ing expensive superfreighters.
Being attacked by the side.... shame on them. My turret is in the rear.
Someone's in a hurry.... profitsssss....
A nice shot from the side, lighting is really great here. Each edge will reflect sunlight when moving... wow.
Asteroid fields are beatiful, as long as you see them early enough when flying through thick sight-killing shield-eating nebulas. (X2 had acid nebulas damaging your hull, I guess it's still the same, I don't wanna try this. But in X2 the shielding was weakened by lightning charges inside nebulas, which I haven't experienced yet in X3.
The weather is cloudy, beautiful storms cycling in the planets atmosphere.
A huge carrier ship of the Teladi. Slow but deadly. But who wants to be on war with that trading geniuses.

Expect more, when I find some time and mysterious places...

Andy.

Preparing for X3 Reunion - Part I

2005-11-13T21:54:00.000+01:00

Finally I bought all the components for my new X3 - Reunion Game-PC. So I started assembling all the parts together.

Although I will still miss the great Thermaltake Armor Chassis, which I cannot afford, the Aerocool Engine II on the picture to the right, is really a good alternative for 1/3 price.

The main focus was a combined front and rear fan working inside the PC case.

I also downgraded the CPU from a dual 4600 to a simple but fast enough for X3 Athlon 64 4000+ San Diego.

Those two steps were enough money-saving.

To further push performance to its peek I decided to invest in a high class graphics chipset at a low cost. The PowerColor X850XT PCIe ATI Radeon R480 Card with 256MB.

Compared to all the other X850XT its price is lowest, but outperfoms an Geforce 6800ultra quite nice ;-).

Since I did not yet buy my windows OS I just did a quickrun in Gentoo Linux, which was installed in a second(hour), and measured about 9700 fps with glxgears.

But not enough. Regarding to the latest discussion on egosoft forums
a lot of people suffer from AC97 sound issues, whilst people using a seperate sound card report to get a 10% performance increase.

Now I had two choices, buying a seperate soundcard for more money, or buying a mainboard with high quality onboard sound.

When I saw the specs on the MSI K8N Diamond compared to the Asus A8N SLI Premium or the DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D, the thing was crystalclear.

MSI offers 6x SATA 3GB's with excellent equipment, and an onboard Soundblaster Live 24bit on a lower price than the Asus..... yummie.....

Bought ...

Because of the 6 SATA's and the possibility to upgrade the CPU to dualcore in the distant future,

I was looking for a power supply with all those connectors for the future and a low-noise 12cm fan.

And I remembered the tests on tomshardware that showed only a few surviving candidates in a power supply stress test.

And the winner is: a 500 watts Seasonic S12 power supply with 4 SATA and Dual-CPU(not core) connectors ready for every usage.

Further it has an active power factor correction which saves energy when the system doesn't need the full power.

Let me excuse for the color of the dvd-rom drive. It's a samsung whatever I have no idea what version code or features it has. I just read it has 130ms access time for dvd, which is bad. I know that.

But it was cheap and my favourit Plextor 713 in black was sold out that day.

And.... so to say, I just bought it to get Gentoo Linux installed that day. :-DDD

Since I didn't want to have all technology and more important no cables filling the view into a windowed PC case, I installed a Samsung 200GB SATA2 8MB harddisk with native command queueing.

I didn't read much about harddisk speed yet but cache transfers show up with 1799.89 MB/sec in Linux and buffered reads with 55.26 MB/sec. That's worlds better than my old PATA.

Although I'm not convinced by SATA data and poer connectors yet, I can see them breaking apart someday.

Yep, and the memory... 2x512 CL2,5 Kingston DDR400, since I'm not the overclocking guy, everything here standard, and MSI's intelligent overclocking is also disabled. (maybe it's worth putting mem, cpu and gpu on fire when X4 is being released, we'll see)

so far....
;-)

The Mediacenter Ecstasy - Part IV

2005-09-09T22:09:00.000+02:00

Success ! I got DRM/DRI compiled cleanly and have an totally
accellerated X-Display. XVideo Motion Compensation is also working
as I found a precompiled Xorg version with all the stuff needed.

The funny thing is, that my MythTV database is now broken, had
no time yet to investigate that further, to much to do at work.

Meanwhile there's also a patch available for IR-Support on my
DVB-T Terratec 1400 card. But I think I'll skip this one and
use my good old X10 radio remote, which is already supported in
the kernel.

Let's see when everything is done, I'm also planning to strip
down the whole system to a working Image for you EPIA-folks
out there.

Good night...

The Mediacenter Odyssee - Part III

2005-09-04T12:52:00.000+02:00

Finally I decided to delete all the Fedora trash from my epia.

Since I found some good howto's for debian I gave Debian Sarge
a chance which installed fairly easy, and most important, rather
minimalistic. But again it lacks the newest kernel features
that will support my newer DVB-T card Terratec Cinergy 1400,
as well as framebuffer-support for the Epia M10000.

Fortunately, after some frickling, I managed to backport the DVB
stuff into the older "newest" debian development kernel,
and also the via-frambuffer driver.

A bigger problem was the DRM/DRI drivers which refused to compile
for my debian kernel, with some strange missing symbol errors...
Anyway Mythtv is now up and running, although without hardware
mpeg accelleration.
Menuloading is a real pain in the ass, and also channel switching,
but timeshifting and the EPG works great anyway...

On the internet I found an article on "KnoppMyth" which promised
to work "out of the box(from CD)" on a Epia system... waahhh....

After a short try, I realized that it works also without accelleration
and further needs a huge desktop installation....
Not to mention the missing support for my DVB card, but OK.

I really wonder that after those many years of DVB introduction
it's still impossible to buy a settopbox which has all features
built in.

For example Pinnacle's Showcenter (a streaming-client) can be combined
with a streaming server PC which has a PCTV card (analogue or DVB)
so it is possible to programm it like a VCR. But the only way to see
Live-TV is to programm a channel via Showcenter, wait for the recording
to start and then pickup the file inside the videolist and play it.

That's simply bullshit....

The Ultimate Mediacenter - Part II

2005-08-31T23:41:00.000+02:00

Meanwhile I gave Fedora a chance to proof that it's worth to build a mediacenter in less time than on gentoo.
After hours of downloading and burning the installation dvd (what happened to the good old network-install)
I managed to setup a minimal Fedora Core 3 system (minimal means 700MB on Fedora, ughh, Gentoo does the same in 40MB).

Due to the high demand of diskspace for a core installation I needed to assign a unused logical volume of my gentoo
base system and relocate /usr to it. But anyway everything works out of the box. Well done.

The Via Epia M10000 C3 Ezra mini-itx system needs special packages for hardware-acceleration (direct rendering, mpeg2-decoding, motion compensation).
Those are available for FC3 on: http://washington.kelkoo.net/epia/FC3
Simply installing xorg-x11 will select the epia-specific packages, as long as the epia repository is set up correctly.

Currently there's only a binary rpm for via-drm on the C3 nehemia(i686) version of the Epia M10000 board available.
So I had to rebuild a native C3 ezra-t(i586) version of the package:

rpmbuild --rebuild --target i586 kernel-module-via-drm-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-2.6.7-1.ucr.src.rpm

For the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T card and a few others there, just right in time, an backpatch-update for the cx88-driver on FC3 became available on http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable
cx88-kmdl-2.6.12-1.1376_FC3-0.0.4_20050708_202133-58.rhfc3.at.i586.rpm

So far done for the base.

I intendently left out more detailed setup of configfiles, startup-entries and so on, which can be found everywhere on google.
(xorg.conf for epia, minimal fc3 init.d, modules.conf, rc.local, .xinitrc)

For a mediabox which should boot really fast, a big window desktop is just overhead, so I'll use the minimalistic twm as my windowmanager, although there're people who prefer a minimalistic windowmaker instead. We'll see later if that's worth a change.
After installing TWM, I do "switchdesktop twm", for activation (twm should be default anyway).

Now for the mediacenter software...

I decided to use mythtv, as it is best supported and has wide plugin support for almost every feature someone could want.
Not sure yet if streaming internet tv will be supported through a playlist-wrapper for mplayer. We'll see later.

The Mythtv-suite as well as mplayer and friends are all available here:
http://apt.atrpms.net/fedora/3/en/i386/RPMS.at-stable

Fedora will not be my favourite system, but at least it's fast on Epia and package support is ok for common use. Except for the compile time gentoo's package-management is lightyears faster than on fedora.

Let's see how this stuff works tomorrow.
Good night.

The Ultimate Mediacenter - Part I

2005-08-30T23:24:00.000+02:00

I'm already looking a long time for the ultimate media and entertainment center out of the box, but yet nothin' serious came up my horizon so far.

Since living in a flat, I'm not allowed to use a satellite-dish which terminates my dream of the wonderufl DVB-S. We got cable with almost 40 channels, most of them home-shopping-crap... but at least Munich is DVB-T broadcasting about 24 channels since May this year. DVB-C brings only 8 free digital channels on cable, all the other stuff is commercial and really expensive.

So the obvious way to go was, using DVB-T together with analogue channels from the cable and mix all that well with the usual mediacenter stuff (movie player,photos,music,dvd,text).

I studied all of the latest set-top boxes, and commercial media-centers, but all of them lack one or more big features: Internet-TV-channels and custom onscreen infos/ticker
Finally you would end up with more single media boxes than a home-cinema-rack has AV-connectors.

Building my own PC media center seems the only way to achieve my "everybody's?" ultimate mediacenter goal.

The big problem now is, that it's almost impossible to find a software which can handle DVB-T and analogue channels within one channellist. That means you always have to change the device/tuner and then select the channel, instead of simply channeljump through analogue and digital broadcasts. Further to pass analogue channels the same way as a DVB receiver does to a mpeg2 decoder, analogue channels will need to be encoded to mpeg2 first to feed a unique output-decoder... grrrrrrrrr.
I think most people will not understand the above as long as they haven't tried by themselves.

OK, I skipped the analogue part for the moment, and start using DVB-T.

Yesterday I bought the Terratec Cinergy 1400 DVB-T Card, which is now officially supported in Kernel 2.6.13. (There're also mixed-mode cards available, but without mpeg2 encoder, which means it's just two cards in one, nothing more.)

Already a long time ago, I bought myself a Mini-ITX PC, to have a compact, powersaving and silent computer for the living room.
Since I'm a gentoo linux enthusiast, I compiled everything from scratch on that slow=powersaving machine.

Compiling the new kernel for an Epia M10000 Ezra board, was quite a challenge, although I had absolutely no problems in the past, but I found out "vesafb-tng" doesn't work anymore in 2.6.13, "vesafb-old" does only work if it's not compiled as a module. And compiling takes quite a time on this 900MHz hardware. For a first try I skipped patching the sources with older 2.6.7 epia patches, which I'll need later to get hardware-mpeg-acceleration CLE266, framebuffer and XVideo motion compensation XvMC running.

After compiling 2.6.13 for the third time, this time successful, I gave up and did go to sleep.
Not sure if I'll pick up there tomorrow, or simple use my already prepared debian-dvd's.

It's hard to reduce power consumption, if you have to let the computer running the whole night to get some stuff compiled. Where's the powersaving here ? A fast machine can at least save power when it's unused.

...to be continued...

Kobaan's Blog Initializer Post

2005-08-24T14:18:00.000+02:00

Hi fellows,

welcome to my blog...

as you can see, there's not much here right now, as I'm still trying to figure out how to import my old html diary.

check back soon...

Diary Import October 1999

1999-10-26T13:24:00.000+02:00

26^th october 1999

(The day is long Aya)

25^th october 1999

Improved my SQL firewall pages.

Compiling 2.2.13 for zuse and maybe for stun.de too.

24^th october 1999

Big cleaning up day again.

Some new cooking experiments. :-)) hmm.. delicious...

23^rd october 1999

Big cleaning up day,
And another shelf free for Aya.

Aya's leaving today, and going to Malaysia for shopping and
a last relaxing before language school. Enjoy !!!! ;-) Kiss.

22^nd october 1999

Did Sunscan 2.3B on all of my sparcy-firewalls. Passed ! :-)

Wrote an interface to search inside of the firewall logfiles
of course using PHP3 and all the logs written to the MySQL database.
Just half an hour work.... :-)))) Cool.

21^st october 1999

My parents left this morning for holiday in egypt.

Managing service contracts with SUN.

Finally I'm allowed to use PHP3 and MySQL at work.... :-(((((
GRRRRRRRRRRRR.......... now !!!!! that I'm almost finished with
all that script using flat files !!!!!!!!! Jesus !!!!!!!!!

20^th october 1999

Wrote documentation for all my firewall-scripts.

Linux 2.2.13 is out.... hmmm... a little bit late to install on stun.de.
What do you think Reyk and Gerd ?

Gone to dinner with my parents because they go on holiday tomorrow,
I wonder which they forget something or not. As usual :-)

19^th october 1999

A little (big) outage in one of our partners site :-)))
Hey Mr. Firewall... there's something wrong no more packets here....
And in fact... it wasn't the firewal, it wasn't the communication line,
it wasn't an power failure... just another cisco byte the dust :-)))

Bought something nice for Aya. :-) For XMAS of course.

18^th october 1999

Big Y2K Novell meeting at work.... this red-package stuff is
chasing me... :-)))

Wrote a script to analase the firewall rule usage to see or
manage performance optimization.

17^th october 1999

Installed a new mixing tap in the bathroom and also a new shower.
Wow 9 different ways of having a shower :-) a lot of massage functions
really interesting this shower-developement :-)

Replaced a few parts of my room-seperators, now it's much more smooth
to slide and installed distance plates for the two iron ropes.

Watched so many japanese movies and documentations on television...
...oh this will take a long time to fully understand the japanese.

16^th october 1999

Our family visit left this morning, and COLT Telecom is burrying new fiber
cables in front of my house. :-))) If they'll tell me which one of these thousands
of fibers is my gigabit internet connection :-))))))))))))

15^th october 1999

Set up the Cannaserver on Linux. Now my japanese dictionaries are working,
german, english and japanese, with Kana and Kanji input :-))))) Yippie !!!

14^th october 1999

Installed 4.7 again, now with a little bit more priviledges. :-) LC25

More updates for www.stun.de and some last configuration steps before the
installation in Frankfurt.

13^th october 1999

Installed netscape 4.7 at work, without being administrator.... big mistake
now my NT is a little bit confused. Time to hack a little bit.

Two new developement kernels released... we're now up on 2.3.22.

Oh my head.... too much party yesterday.

12^th october 1999

My trukish coworker gave a party because of quitting his old company,
and after that it's my moms 50th birthday. Big family party.....

What a day.

11^th october 1999

Solved the ssh problem on www.stun.de. Connections are no longer refused, when we're using
dynamic IP ranges. Net-fu is broken... hmmm... don't know why.

Kernel 2.4 will be already released in november 1999, hmmm... nice, so I can introduce
Aya into newest technology from beginning.

10^th october 1999

Today our scientific institutes are opened for the masses.
So I'll go and see what our nuclear-fission reactor is doing.
(I just hope that they can finish in my lifetime....)

Discussed some of my visions of nuclear fusion, and again I feel like they don't
want to hear new theories. Maybe they're all to horny doing practical experiments,
than thinking about easier, not yet realizable theories.

2.3.20 released yesterday.... boys... you make me trouble...
doing Stun.de updates for the kernelgrapher.

9^th october 1999

Bought a new pillow for Aya... sorry I couldn't find a plastic one as in Japan,
do you agree on feathers ?

Reyk called me on the phone and agreed to install the www.stun.de server in
Frankfurt on 28th.

Gerd agreed to be available on 28th for testing with the server from Munich.

Had big fun together with Gerd and Eva at Shananigans Irish Pub,
where Mane Maniac played live guitar and harmonica blues.
And bought two CD's :-)

8^th october 1999

FTP-Problem solved, now it's officially a software bug on the clients FTP.
And thanks to standards, we're not allowed to use a different software,
because of some software contracts.... :-)))) Another point for commercial....
(negative, of course)

Tonight there's an ANIME special on TV, most thing in original japanese audio
with german subtitles. Cool for learning languages I think, especially for
learning slang.

Managed my holiday so that I can pickup Aya in Frankfurt on 29th.

7^th october 1999

Our big ftp transfer problem is escalating today, and we finally found out why
it doesn't work. It's clear now that netmanage's chameleon ftp can't handle
passive ftp transfer correctly. When we installed WS_FTP the problem was gone.
Bullshit ! I can't understand why all these people just want to use commercial
products, because of support they all say.... yeah... fuck... Not one word about
bugs, only fixes and new features published. Every single shareware or freeware
is better documented and support than that fucking commercial stuff.
And then the customers make me responsible if something doens't work....
Fuck ! I can't do anything when those assheads don't know how to write correct code !
And you customers.... you wanted that shit from MS !
So don't blame me !

6^th october 1999

Forgot to mention that 2.3.19 is out, and on cutting edge you can read the fascinating
release date(time) 4-Oct-99 24:44 :-)))))))) yeah 24:44
Oh my god.... others are figthing with Y2K problems and we didn't recognize that we
already have to work 25 per day now ! :-))))))

At work there's more and more shit stacking....
Anyway, I feel very good at the moment, I need this stress.....

5^th october 1999

Had an almost perfect day, I feel so much energy...
everything went fine. Solved a severe firewall problem with active FTP connections
to well known services. Went to the companies doctor and he said that I'm in good
condition and the sight of my eyes is almost as sharp as the sight of an eagle.

Compiled Nedit for AIX today, and rm vi :-D Not really....

More radioactive shit happened, this time in south korea.
And in London a train crash occured...

4^th october 1999

What a week, so many ANIME in original japanese language on TV, I have to record
all of them, for Aya and me. (Nice to learn languages by reading subtitles in german)

Discovered a collection of precompiled CPAN modules, wow that fixes my union semun
problems.... :-) Tricky !

There's another date of www.stun.de installation in Frankfurt.
If everything goes ok, I'll install the server together with Reyk on 27th october
this time, I'll drive by myself and the day after in the very early morning
I can pick up my lovely girl from airport. Kiss :-x !!!!!!

Greenpeace says still four times higher radioacivity in Tokaimura but all people
are already back in their usual life, becuase the government said it's already over.

3^rd october 1999

Still birthdayparty-damaged...

Have to go to Oktoberfest today, with my coworkers.... oh how I hate Oktoberfest,
and next year I have to show Aya. I wish I could get just one year off.

Aya wrote me strange mails, I don't know what she means, and I don't feel
good by reading them....
I guess my answer are not much better in meaning....
maybe it's all because of culture difference.

Hey you people out there, how do you manage culture problems inside your
relationship ? I can't stand that japanese "saying nothing, block everything"
behaviour any longer. Am I the only one, or is it my fault ?

2^nd october 1999

Big birthday-party of one of my coworkers, I hope it's not getting too late
tonight. Everyone of us has prepared a little poem, song or present.
Will be nice I guess.

Ohhhh... my head.... someone switch off that light, and kill that noise in my head.

1^st october 1999

Discovered lots of dictionaries on the net, but everything precompiled,
but I need unencrypted versions for my CGI-Server.

Played around with XJdic.

Diary Import September 1999

1999-09-30T13:23:00.000+02:00

30^th september 1999

Biggest nuclear accident in Japan ever, and it's close to where Aya lives....
I go crazy..... come to me...  now !!!!!!!!!!!!


29^th september 1999

The firewall upgrade semmed successful, just a few small glitches today.

Discovered a perl script to convert web-pages into palm doc files,
and all that via the CGI interface.... hmmm looks like something for
www.stun.de.

The Yen is falling, hopefully keeps falling. Now 1.74,
against last weeks high at 1.80, so Aya should get much more Yen for my DM.

Did go to swimming with my dad, but oh surprise, it was closed due to
renovation.


28^th september 1999

Finished the insurance for Aya, my train abo and ordered another key for my
house.

Another Firewall Upgrade today, and guess, more problems.
But anyway not so much surprising, everything was solved within 2 hours.
Who's the King eh ???? ;-)

Met with Reyk and Babsi and had dinner at India Town.


27^th september 1999

Prepared the firewall upgrade for tomorrow, and also had little stress with
SecurID Authentication problems.

Gave up trying to set more different timezones on MS PC's. xclock works fine
when TZ is exported and the OS supports it, other than on AIX. :-(

Got a fresh haircut... yes, I'll never look like Alan... I wish I could.

Finished the outlook calendar export perl script to generate a HTML diary.


26^th september 1999

Too bad weather for flying around somewhere, so everything is cancelled.

ReInstalled the room seperator because the first version wasn't screwed
stable enough, the specification says up to 150kg load for tighten the iron rope
but in real my ceiling seems to be less specified. :-D

My parents visited me todays most interest to the room seperator I guess.

Finished downloading Turbolinux-J, 421MB synchronized.

Thomas joined our SETI@Stun.de team.


25^th september 1999

320MB synchronized so far. I think the biggest part is over, so I guess installing
TurboLinux-J will occure next week.

Will buy some stuff for my flat today, my parents discovered a new asian collection
of furniture, which might fit. Let's see.

Back in. Found a lot of thinks, most dishes and cups but also my room seperator
finally. I don't think Aya likes it, but... who cares ;-)
Anyway, I like it.

Will fly around castle Neuschwanstein tomorrow.
My coworker has a flight license and offered to my parents too, to do a short
trip around the block. We'll fly from Augsburg airport, time to flush my digital cam.


24^th september 1999

4 hours is not enough sleep for me. I need 18 at least.... a koalas average... :-)

Have to get up early just in case something bad is
happening with this yesterdays night firewall upgrade.
And wonder, everything went fine.

The SETI@Stun.de group was founded today, our team number is: 38971

Anyway I'm so tired now and going to bed, before lunch.
Good night.


23^rd september 1999

Got up really late today, because this will be a long night upgrading firewalls.

So far everything went fine, the OS update is almost
finished, but the patches seem to be a little problem.
Also got that interface plumbing problem again.
Plus the routes disappeared...

The rest of the fw upgrade was easy....

So I should find more sleep this night than I expected.


22^nd september 1999

Another firewall-migration successfully TESTED, the hot action is planned for
tomorrow.

Signed in for accounts on linuxtoday and themes.org which now has a free
designeable layout. Good work, guys ! I'm wondering when site-fu is finished.

No swimming today, because Reyk is ill, and Thomas is busy.

152MB of the japanese TurboLinux 4 synchronized. I guess I'm already finished
to the end of next week.


21^st september 1999

Another Solaris upgrade and lots of patchinstalls to upgrade on of our
old firewalls. Also fixed the Authentication problems by installing the
latest service pack...... damn.... most of the interface names are gone.
Plus had to open a support-case, because reserved tokens like "fri"
obviously for "Friday" cannot be used WITHIN objectnames like "r-fri-1".
A temporary workaround may be to set up cnames in DNS for those hosts.

The ncftp script is running fine.
Already 85MB of the TurboLinux-J 4.0 synchronized.

Invited Simone and Ralph to Shoya japanese restaurant.


20^th september 1999

Bought Aya's learning books today. Woo, really heavy stuff....

Another firewall upgrade today, but now the machine seems to
halt when loading the ruleset in version 4 syntax, version 3
instead works without problems.
Plus tons of compilation errors on authentication symbols.

Tried to purchase the japanese Turbolinux somewhere, bot nope.
So I created a list with files for automatic retrievement.
14 days I guess and I'm up to date synchronized with that tree.


19^th september 1999

Wacthed the oktoberfest parade on tv and recorded on tape for Aya.

BBQ in the garden...

Aya wrote today... it seems she's getting more nervous, at least I hope
so. If I would move to another country I would be in more panic now....

Saw the beautiful fireworks at the oktoberfest from my balcony.


18^th september 1999

Got the letter from school. but guess.....
Now I know (what I already knew) school starts on november the second.
But nothing else. HEY GUYS ARE YOU NUTS ?????????????
I wanted to know which books and what I have to pay !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stupid people may never disappear..... :-(((((((((((


17^th september 1999

I'm going crazy with Aya's language school, they said that they already
sent me the reservation and infos. But I didn't get anything.....
So I told them yesterday to send me again and where I can buy the books,
and how much I have to pay for the course fee.
But nothing yet.....


16^th september 1999

Wrote a lot of documentation today, and rearranged a lot of firewalling
rules. Also added some of my own inspiration (new, missing concepts).

Started a new project: Test your english, for germans, so selfcalled
english-experts. Check here.


15^th september 1999

Dokumented the upgraded firewall. And installed a new version of ADSM
for backing up the machine.

Wrote a very long letter, about 10kB to Aya and my computer crashed
before sending !!!!!!!!!!!! I made copy into clipboard but it was
gone too. Oh Jesus !!!!!! Someone must be working against me !
Anyway, tried to write again, but could only reconstruct 2kB.

Swimming with Tom, I think we missed Reyk. Sorry we've been so late !
Tried two new cocktails at the Thai-restaurant after swimming.
Ohhhhh, my head...... bad idea.


14^th september 1999

Tried to unite the worlds of Solaris and AIX for documentation
purposes, but ended up in to seperate versions after two hours...

Upgraded our first productive Firewall to version 4.
Absolutely no problems except the differnent paths,
again different on Solaris and AIX as well as for version 3.


13^th september 1999

Urgently had to update the kernel grapher because we already reached
2.3.18. WOW.

A lot of preparations for tomorrows Firewall upgrade.
Backup day, my favourite day.... BOFH ;-)

RC5 is running better since I got back two machines working on it.

Surfed a lot looking for japanese culture pages, to prepare and understand
a little bit more. Found many interesting sites.
And the best of all: www.sushi.infogate.de
Undoutedly the biggest source of Japanese restaurants all over the world
also featuring more restaurants in Munich than I ever heard of.
So I immediately stopped my database project collecting addresses.

By the way: Aya, I found Karaoke bar in Munich, they've 7000 japanese
songs :-))))) What do you think ? RAP session someday ?


12^th september 1999

Aya wrote today. She worked 13 days without a break, and slept only
5 hours per day. Oh my dear I told you not to work so hard !

Made a complete system backup of www.stun.de and start to tar some parts
of my machine too.

Played with the new /dev/speech device (a perl script to festival
speech synthesizer) which allows system informations and eMails
simply spoken by redirecting them to /dev/speech.

Next is a basic speech recognition to water my flowers on the
balcony via SNMP. (Sensors are ready, driver is zero-bytes in size.)


11^th september 1999

Got visit from our families friends, they have their own farm,
and want to see some parts of the city-life. Beergardens, castles
and stuff. Anyway enjoyed the stay at chinese tower in the english
garden and met my coworker Yann there. Boy the world gets smaller.... ;-)

Improved the japanese capacities of my Linux by adding some parts
of the japanese Turbolinux to my system. Looks pretty more stable
than before. Anyway, the kinput2 still crashes GNOME :-(


10^th september 1999

Also long day working, fixing yesterdays failed solaris upgrade.
The problem was a no more working call of ifconfig plumb which
halts the whole machine. Crazy ! And the /etc/routes is no longer
read by the systems rc-files. (Nice if you have a firewall on top) :-)

More and more people start reading my diary, according to the mass
of eMails sent to me with that subject. I know I should sometimes
add more links if I talk about sites and features, but have you
people ever heard of search-engines ? I don't want to collect lots
of dead links. Try www.google.com for all your needs.

Still no mail from Aya, I feel down....


9^th september 1999

Worked 15 hours today, much SUN problems with quad ethernet interfaces and
upgrading to solaris 2.6 with unbundeled patches. Thanks to Reyk for his
support. Anyway, it didn't work, so I have to get up early the next morning
and fix our now DOWNED firewall... :-(((((((((((

no more comment..... too tired....


8^th september 1999

Ordered our firewall upgrade licenses today. So I've got enough to do in the
next few days. Also tracked down some problems with fw-objects.

Reyk failed again, to appear on our regular wednesday swimming date !
:-) But anyway, Tom joined me and was absolutely fascinated about the
Thai food after. I drunk Mai Thai and (I forgot) cocktails, and feel
so much flying now.... :-))))))))) like in holiday....
(Thomas don't forget to look after my thai-chair. I need that at home.)

Kisses to my lovels cuty lady, and oyasumi, aishiteru.


7^th september 1999

Big meeting of all the newcomers at work. Me too. Little bit nervous.
Not a good day, everything went wrong.

Power shutdown, and time to upgrade some of our firewalls.
This will be a long long hard working day.
Too late for upgrade SUNOS needed too long to apply all patches so I had
to brake. And more work and pressure for the next days.

No time left to play tennis against my dad.

Drunk a lot of Magners Vintage Cider at Shananigans Irish Pub together
with Tom. He's really a good friend..... always there to cheer me up.
Thanks Tom.


6^th september 1999

Had a very hard day at work. First programming, and later some not so
fascinated coworkers, which tried to make buttons using Gimp.
Oh my god.... I know grey is a wonderful color.. back to the roots...
Anyway as long as my Netfu is running here, and I can make my
beautiful colored logos at home.... :-((((((((((

Nothing for dinner.... and a bad lunch... anyway not my day.

Tom is unreachable, Reyk busy, my parents away.. and Aya ???

Someone save me from this lonely planet.


5^th september 1999

BBQ in the garden, and almost a complete lazy day.

Downloaded a few lyrics for some japanese songs.


4^th september 1999

Finished another MD for Aya, this time with german songs.

Played piano the whole day, Westernhagen's "Kind von gestern"
is now mine :-))))

The Lotto-Server is unreachable, maybe the jackpot is too big. ;-)

And finally updated the diary entries a little bit more.

Tonight Lutz is playing Piano at the Vogler Bar in Munich.
I'll go there I think.


3^rd september 1999

Wrote a new firewall packet statistics grapher. Looks good.

Received my certificate from my old company today. WOW, they must
really miss me. Thank you very much for such a good qualification.
Almost as much valueable as a harvard exam. ;-)

BIG SCANDAL:
Independant crypto experts discovered backdoors in all Microsoft
Windows Operating Systems. They say inside the MS-Crypto-API
they disassembled the Security Keys of Microsoft itself, and
the NSA(National Security Agency) the american secret service.

This could be extremely damage Microsofts Publicity.
I wonder what the Russians, Chinese and maybe the Japanese say
to this.

The information was published also on the german Chaos Computer
Club and was checked very careful.


2^nd september 1999

Time to play Lotto. 27 Mio. DM, nice if I could have just a part....

Visited the japanese shop Japanalia today, and they really have a lot of
things, many kimonos, painting stuff, pottery and so on, up to bed and
shelf, paper walls and so on.... Would be big shopping if Aya likes too,
but I'm not sure that she wants to live japanese style in Germany ???

Bought new shoes for my upcoming tennis match against my father.

Gone for portugese dinner with Thomas. Interesting anyway.


1^st september 1999

See if my firewall logrotate and the script handle the new month.
And surprise, they failed. After checking for leading zeros the problem
seems fixed. Also rolled out an FW-1 V4 version of the user dump.

Played a little bit with 2 Sun 450 and 2 RS6K F50. Nice power for RC5 :-)))

A lot of trouble with my bank, because of too many (empty) accounts. ;-)

stun.de crashed (almost) the system showed more and more zombies,
plus the init routine died somehow. No shutdown possible and no kill.
WOW. When rebooting with 2.2.12 the system seems more stable,
and mem usage is much less, just 40% now.
Also very obscure, the kernel source tree is a little bit different
from my local machine. Time to get a new sourcebranch and recompile.
I don't trust that tripwire indexing, I reinstalled my own compiled
version instead of the RPM.

Waited for Reyk, swimming two hours, but he had no time... :-(

Diary Import August 1999

1999-08-31T13:12:00.000+02:00

31^st august 1999

Had a long conference with Reyk, who showed me some of the most
interesting security sites on the net. Thx, buddy. ;-)

Compiled 2.2.12 for www.stun.de and rebooted.
Compiled tripwire fresh for stun.de and core dumping seems gone.

Wrote an user dump to html converter for firewall-1. Hmm.. beauty !


30^th august 1999

Tom & Jerry marathon on Cartoon Network... and I have to work. :-(

Tripwire is dumping core all the time, debugging says something like
invalid inode or os... maybe I should repair my filesystem soon ???

Wrote a new firewall script to dump and log the usage of every object
configured on the firewall. This helps to keep track of unused objects.

Set up a new database for andys.stun.de which holds all information on
Asia Shops as well as Japanese Restaurants and Sushi Bars around Munich. :-)))

Cleaned up the bathroom.... uh I hate this work.... my back hurts..... :-((

No mail from Aya yet... hmmm... Heiki ?

Compiled 2.2.12 for my local machine, but not yet restarted.


29^th august 1999

More cleaning up in my room. Boy it was just right in time..... ;-)

Installed the ready-at-all tripwire.rpm on stun.de and setup an own
virtual host for the freshmeat mirror. http://freshmeat.stun.de
Also installed rpm2html for documentation purposes.

Have you ever heard rsync when syncing 100MB of small 1kb files over
100MBit and on a raid1 array :-))) WOW, what sound.....
I thought it would be hailing outside :-DDDD

Screwed my handy dustbuster, and installed the power supply more far
away. Cables under the carpet, I'll have to watch my next visitor
if (s)he's shaking. :-)))


28^th august 1999

Completely fascinated by the new video driver 2.0 playing around with
webcam and almost any TV-program displayed at once in a netscape
window. Updated within the image, so no page reloading ! WOW !

Updated the whole perl package, but the newest GD still wont build. :-(

Webcam is active again, and will transfer an instant picture on
every diary upload. I hope that I smile on that shots :-D.
Plus I set up the possibility to see me live as long as I'm connected,
just click on webcam on the right, to see if I'm online and
which IP address my server is currently linked to.

(Hey Aya, how's about videoconferencing ? :-)
But I think PHS is too slow....) :-(

Try "vidcap | xbgset stdin" and you can watch TV as your background image.
A simple infinite while do loop brings you almost satisfying flow.


27^th august 1999

Developed a new perl script dumping the usage date of each firewall
object. That way it should be possible to detect old unused objects.

Big party at work because of three of my coworkers became father
last month.

Finally discovered the beauty in programming perl.
There are so many modules around. Even for PalmPilot.... ts :-)

Started a mirror of freshmeat.net via the rsync service,
I think we'll activate this for linux.stun.de.


26^th august 1999

New perlscript dumping firewall-rules with date of last use.

Developed some concepts and new thoughts about network security.

Discovered the Kernel-HTTP-daemon kHTTPd which was included
in the 2.3.14 linux source. Interesting developement.


25^th august 1999

Added 3D pie graph to the firewall packet report filter.

2.2.12 is released, finally. But no time to review.

Played around with lspci and wrote a frontend for admin.stun.de.

Swimming was very funny today. So much tired we almost sink.
After that Reyk and me had dinner in a greek restaurant and
after a little shock in a thai karaoke bar. :-)))) That was funny....


24^th august 1999

Big bughunting in timecard-reader software. Ate up all my time.

Bought 8kg differnt kinds of meat today, and spent the evening
cutting into portions and freezing them.

Aya's package arrived today, but has gone back to the post office for
pickup because I worked to long ? to early ? at all ?
:-))) I think latter one.

Found my lost photos from my London trip, together with Aya,
in my parents house :-) I knew it.
Will stick them tonight in my album.

Linus seems to be a little bit unhappy on the 2.2.12 suggestion
of Alan, because he had to deliver a third revision already. :-)


23^rd august 1999

Tracked some serious mail delivery problems between two firewalls.

Rewrote my fw-scripts and move the ftp calls (with netrc) completely
inside the perl script using Net::FTP.

Coded the boogie players index page. Now dynamically from within MySQL.


22^nd august 1999

Tried to set up an own voicebox for Aya, but I couldn't find
out why my second ISDN line service-type doesn't match.
Pure configuration chaos....

Updated some of the new boogie pages and added more menus.
The event calendar is now in the same colour design.

Setting up a new homepage for japanese (or generally asian)
restaurants, bars, shops and so on.


21^st august 1999

Completely redesigned my corner of the flat, and it looks like
more space after throwing away some old books and stuff.

The boogie woogie event calendar is now up and running, anyway
the server is still OFFLINE, sorry.


20^th august 1999

My firewall log check scripts are running perfectly it seems, at work.

Set up some of the RC5 clients to my newly installed keyproxy server,
seti is still not working with authentication... Can it be so hard....

Compiled (partly) the newest ISDN4K utilities, but there seem
to be a lot of conflicts. 
Anyway is again up and running.

Had serious problems to poll my mail, there's obviously a problem
with big mails at netsurf ? Timeout or something ?

Finished the day at Shananigans Irish Pub together with Tom,
checking out some different ciders.


19^th august 1999

Installed and experimented with tripwire, wow, almost what I've been
looking for. A security tool to index your files and check integrity
access and every kind of modification.

After long time waiting for the kernel 2.2.12 to be released,
(2.2.11 has some nice bugs) I couldn't stand it anymore.
It seems Linus is busy, no time for the last review, so I decided to
reboot my machine to 2.2.11. BIG MISTAKE.
The whole ISDN subsystem is redesigned, so I have to get that 8 MB
TGZ but first reboot to 2.2.10. Great...
This may take some time...


18^th august 1999

Got my ACE administration software today, so I'm now the master of the
(universe :-) ) securid card distribution.
Nice job, and one more database which has to be in sync, manually,
with the firewall-1s.

Started our weekly swimming today, together with Reyk.
It's really fantastic for relaxion after a long and hard working day.


17^th august 1999

Traced back some weird IP packets which should pass our firewall,
but which are blocked somewhere before or after.... access lists...

Played with the Firewall Configuration Tool FCT and gave up the
graphical(although web-based) desktop after a lot of mysterious
blocking. IMHO the best way to configure FCT is, by hand in the
flatfiles, and after that use the web frontend to control and
for documentation.

Discovered again that a lot of mails from Aya are missing... :-((
The funny thing is that some parts are missing because of wrong
addressing others because of forwarding problems.
We now always send CC's but what matters if the receiver is
wrong or mails getting lost while forwarded.


16^th august 1999

Finally got my own telephone at work. Yippie !!!!!! :-))))

Discovered a wrong access list which blocked our firewall.

Played around with the nighty FCT firewall configuration tool for Linux.
WOW ! But anyway you have to know what you're doing....

Calculated how much money will be left per month for Aya and me...
... :-((( ... doesn't look good.


15^th august 1999

Updated the linux kernel grapher on linux.stun.de and added some
comments for all series, as well as included the 2.1 and 2.0 trees.

Updated the last modified file viewer on admin.stun.de, directories
are now linked for easier navigation.

Experimented with the IP-chains package.


14^th august 1999

A food-shopping and cooking day. Anyway being lazy.

Enjoying the flintstone week on cartoon network.

Compiled 2.2.11 for www.stun.de and zuse1, discovered some IP problems
which should be urgently fixed in 2.2.12.

Downloded the newest Portaloo and played with the news collector,
which is still not able to handle proxies.


13^th august 1999

Developed a first version of the name concept for our firewalls.

Reyk visited me today at my new company. Thanks ! Nice to have guests.
no further comment, we both know better ;-)
We also decided to go swimming from next wednesday on, every week
at night. So I hope to stay in shape for Aya ;-)

Met with Reyk, Babsi, Adriane and Birte at Shananigans Irish Pub.
Hey, Aya, Adriane is going to Japan for 1 year from next april on,
so you still have a chance to talk japanese to her !


12^th august 1999

News from the RedHat IPO.
The stocks running higher and higher, with a starting value
of 12$ they're now up to 80$ which lists them up on place 7 of the
first day winners top ten.

Installed Apache and PHP3 on my machine at work.
Experimented with gd and dynamic image-creation.


11^th august 1999

Today we've total solar eclipse in Munich.
Had bad luck because exactly at that time when I wanted to see
the corona the clouds covered my sight, just 1km farer everything
was perfect. At least I could experience 2 minutes nighttime.
GREAT ! :-)))
it must have been amazing to see the elephants in the zoo starting
shaking and the birds stop singing.
So the next one will be better. And 2081 should be possible if
Aya takes much care for me. ;-))))))


10^th august 1999

Wrote a password change script in perl, which allows complex
user administration via web-interface too.


9^th august 1999

Improved the firewall report script, and collected statistics
on denied packets.
Searching for an Apache user-administration tool.
Found nothing.

Some friends of our family visited us this week to see the
solar eclipse on wednesday.


8^th august 1999

Met Thomas who's right back from 1 week holiday in tents.
And the bad news, someone crushed his car.


7^th august 1999

Another shopping day. Bought wardrobe and shoe-board.


6^th august 1999

Novell is still pursuing me, and I had to join a Y2K meeting,
today.
Converted the FW-1 Docu of yesterday into excel....
Yeah, after lots of drugs I can agree that too, that MS is
much better for searching and documentation than HTML can
ever be. I wonder if they ever heard of Searchengines.
We'll see if there's a way to make these documentation
autoprocessing some day. But without MS I guess/hope. :-)

After discovering fwrules4.pl, done the docu again.
This time, including Icons and links of all objects,
so you can see which group-members and parameters belong
together.


5^th august 1999

The firewalls entries made yesterday didn't help, but someone
in NYC felt responsible for the firewall configuration on their
side. :-)))) Baehhhhhhhhh.... :-D

Started a support query for FW1-Documentation-Tools.
(no response.)
After a while searching the web I discovered, fwrules2.pl
which delivers a HTML output of almost every configuration
dialog within FW-1.


4^th august 1999

Yet no Outlook working at work, because of a wrong order
in our SAP management. Great :-(
Anyway, one more day, enjoying a MS-free life.

Coded a Y2K counter in JavaScript for the companies webpage.

Changed some firewall entries.


3^rd august 1999

Read much about firewalling concepts and comparisions between
different firewalls and proxies.


2^nd august 1999

My first day working for the new company.

A little bit stressy, nothing is coordinated for me,
no entrancecard, no timecard, no email, no server-id
working. No telephone and no one has time to care for.
Great work, I'm impressed.

Used the "spare" time to tune up my new computer at work.
Installed Netscape/Perl/PilotDesk/FW1-GUI aso.


1^st august 1999

Played with my camera which is now supported in gphoto.
A lot of pictures extracted and converted into HTML galleries.

Configured the PGP OpenKeyServer on www.stun.de, and it WORKS ! Yeah !
(Linked the howtos into the admin tree.)

Prepared everything for entering my new company tomorrow.

Diary Import July 1999

1999-07-31T13:16:00.000+02:00

31^st july 1999

My last free day. Holiday is over.
(And there was this man of that marriage party, whose words said:
...my last free day...    A.Busch)

Big Scampi BBQ in the garden. Made some pictures.
Downloaded the new gphoto package which now works wth my DC240.


30^th july 1999

Again to the dentist fixed everything for this year :-(=)

Redesigned my flat completely, now Aya can have her own corner
if she doesn't want to see me hacking on the keyboard... :-)))


29^th july 1999

Met with my former coworker Cetian, ate Pizza together and
talked 'bout ye good old times.

Made a list of all the asian shops around munich.
Maybe I'll publish this somewhere on the web. I couldn't find
something like that anywhere.

Tidied up my room and through away most of the old computer
magazines and books, which are not Y2K compliant in my eyes :-))) 


28^th july 1999

Food shopping and great cooking day. I made pictures of all work steps
waiting for gphotos DC240 driver to HTMLize those pictures.

Saw japanese anime on Vox, in original japanese language, wow impressive,
what's going on, this is the third movie within the last two weeks,
which is japanese original with german subtitles. All on german TV-stations.
Of course recorded them all on tape(not yet harddisk, are you kidding?)
for Aya.


27^th july 1999

Big shopping day, bought two new suits and much much more.

Found chocolate tea, honey met and spicy lemonade....
interesting isn't it ? :-))))))

Bought plates and bowls with kanjis on it.

Installed the Falken BBS for Linux on the Stun.de server,
it's just for testing and not a serious BBS, not even planned.
But it brings back the good old Mailboxing days via SSh :-)))


26^th july 1999

Installed my Satellite system as it should be the professional way,
without cabling on the fly throughout my whole room :-)))))

Rewrote the stun.de howto sor secure shell encrypted tunnel connections.
(Should be more easy to understand now.)

Downloaded FalkenBBS software for Linux, which should bring back the
good old mailbox times into the webbrowser. Be patient.


25^th july 1999

Cleaned up my balcony, and throw away that old dry dead plants ups....

Played with the SAT receiver and configured all the channels,
also did some syster testing ;-)

Installed perlseti, for supervision of the remote clients.


24^th july 1999

Reminded that it's possible to use superscription in HTML tags,
rewrote the diary for july with superscripted dates.

Bought a satellite system so that Aya and I can watch japanese television
now :-)))


23^rd july 1999

Cleaned up my room. It was really urgent :-))))

Installed the SETI@HOME 1.3 clients on my machines.


22^nd july 1999

Have to go to the dentist today..... :-((((((

Survived...


21^st july 1999

Downloaded 2.2.10ac12 and read some parts of the code.

Received my empty crime reference list by the police, which I need for my
application to the new company.

Visited some friends of the family in Marquatstein.


20^th july 1999

Tried to compile gISDN but again... some components missing.
GTK-- 1.0.1 is required, but only 1.0.0 is developed right now,
changing the script to 1.0.0 doesn't help. cool ne ?

Installed Civilization2 on Linux and played some rounds. Nice, nice.
I wonder how this behaves in a network environment.


19^th july 1999

gPhoto has now my DC240 camera in the CVS tree, I tried to compile, but
there seems to be a lot of definitions missing. HMMM ????

Added bavarian language as well as the first part of japanese language
to Mark Kronbeins MyGuestbook.

Downloaded Back Ocrifice 2000 just for testing. But I couldn't find
a linux port ??? Can it be ?

Met with Karin for lunch and saw her baby. Well done ;-) well done.


18^th july 1999

Reconfigured DNS and Resolver to get rid of these timeouts during
the RC5-Proxy flushing. It's now lightning faster and I cannot reproduce
any timeouts, so I also changed the config on ns.stun.de.


17^th july 1999

Had my garden BBQ party with a lot of my friends and old coworkers.


16^th july 1999

Celebrated the 50th anniversary of a friend of the family.
A very hard day... and a more hard night :-) Party !


15^th july 1999

Aya said that she'll come !!!!!!!!!!!!!! YYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH !!!!!

Rewrote the Net-Fu scripts for Linux.Stun.de,
configured more on the Rsync services and changed the Howtos.

Tried to make some menu buttons for Linux.Stun.de, but see by yourself.

Met with Gerd, Tom and Flo at Shananigans Irish Pub a had a lot of fun
because when I ordered Woodys, they said that they don't do woodys anymore,
when I asked for a chicken salad they answered that they have no power in the
kitchen, and finally when Gerd ordered Guiness, they told him that they
just can serve cans because it's empty. :-))))))) What a day....
Anyway we had a lot of fun.


14^th july 1999

Did a lot of shopping today.

Managing insurance for Aya.

Compiled 2.2.10 for www.stun.de and eliminated the use of modules completely.
Memory is now detected automatically, and a 60 seconds panic reboot is added.
Updated the Kernel Howto.


13^th july 1999

Finally wrote and sent the invitation for the garden BBQ party on next
saturday.

Managed my outstanding holiday to be paid, becuase my new company doesn't
accept holiday in august, which would be the only possibility by law.

Have to go to the foreign office again, and do some more paper work.
(Information about insurances and so on. Arrival dates...)


12^th july 1999

Read some amazing news about the CSC key cracking contest,
there's a price money of 10000 Euro for the one who cracks the
56-bit cipher.

Exploded a little bit about Aya's letter.
And wrote a embassy-howto. ;-) 

Seen Matrix on cinema. WOW !
It's a real Gibson, in my eyes.
But the Neuromancer trilogy is better, IMHO.


9^th to 11th july 1999

Doing a little bit vacancy this time, and going near Hannover from
high noon on until late sunday.

Refilled the Keyproxy and fetched enough buffers for the next three
days, I hope.

Tomorrow will be the love parade in Berlin, programmed my VCR, take a
look at www.love-parade.de.
This time it seems to be the last time in Berlin.
Cetin, I wish you much fun, which car is it this time ?


8^th july 1999

Aya shocked me a little bit as she said that she doesn't know what to do
with the embassy papers.... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cool down Andy, cool down..... girls... ts ts ts....

OK, so what did I do the rest of the day ? Hmmm,
looked for some new furniture, but I wanted to let Aya decide which
she likes better. I need a designer for my flat. Anyone out there ?


7^th july 1999

Burned a lot of MP3 CD's from Tom.

Wrote to Mel, Naoko and Aya.


6^th july 1999

My last day working for my old company, so I celebrated a little bit
with my coworkers eating cake and drinking champaign.
Just call it tradition :-)))

Made a backup of my old computer at work. Just in case, someone is killing
this machine while I'm on holiday.

Recorded a new MD, this time absolutely digital via SP/DIV.

Gone to bed really early.


5^th july 1999

Visited my old boss for the last time, and gave back all the companies
properties, like my good old linux laptop. :-((((((((

I wonder why he was so surprised that tomorrow is my last day working ?


4^th july 1999

Recompiled 2.2.10 because of a problem with my ISDN/Soundblaster conflict.
I wonder why it's not possible to recompile parts of modules, maybe it's
just a problem of the soundcore library.

ReDiscovered LIRC (The "Linux Infrared Remote Control" Project) which now offers a
X11AMP Plugin to remote control your MP3 player. Nice ;-)


3^rd july 1999

Set up NTP for my local machine and www.stun.de, now we have always the correct
time on our server. (Next thing is to program an internet time converter,
to display the internet beat "@XXX" on our homepage. See www.swatch.com
if you don't know what I'm talking about.)  

Met with Gerd and Eva and went together to the little octoberfest in Munich.
Hey Reyk and Tom whats up with your phones ?
After some american/chinese snacks we ended up at Shananigans Irish Pub.


2^nd july 1999

Played a little bit with Alan's PortalOO, a news collector similar to mine,
but with complete xml support. Failed to compile some modules because of
missing libraries. (I guess you need the rawhide cut, to compile these.)

I feel so sick.... :-(((
maybe too much chocolate anyway,
good night it's 3 AM now....


...after a while sleeping like dead...

Got my digital photos on paper now. And WOW ! it's amazing good quality
much more than I expected.

Tried to get some RedHat updates via ncftp but it's dumping core all the time ?????
And my preferred Rsync service offers no updates yet. Damn.


Finished all the paperwork for my old company and started sorting some of the
new contract documents and all the papers for Aya.


1^st july 1999

Played around with the UDMSearch templates.
And finally managed to index php3 pages as well.
(Watch your Mysql-log !!!!!!!!!!!!!! it's increasing dramatically when indexing.
Better to link it to /dev/null at that time.)

Emergency at work because of our biggest server crashed again.
And we had some mysterious Volume problems, four workstations saw different
data on the volumes. (Even DOS-Command and Explorer Output were different.)

Failed to activate FastEthernet on a special server for the fifth time now,
something must be damaged with this system. Maybe an interrupt problem, or
a damaged driver module binary ?

Diary Import June 1999

1999-06-30T13:18:00.000+02:00

30th june 1999

Installed the UdmSearch-Engine on WWW.Stun.de, which IMHO is much better and lightning
faster than the Excite WS one. It works with PHP3 and MySQL and the generated Index is
much smaller. (And it's small and fast, a russian program, perfect !!!!)

Installed the UdmSearch-Engine also on my local machine and deleted Excite.
It's so much space now ;-)

I finally found a useful howto to the gnuplot tool, although everything is written
in japanese there, I had no big problems to find the right explanations. 
Fixed the gnuplot date display and finished the Linux-Developement graph script.
Also did some minor updates to the virtual webserver statistic graphs, more space
on the left side, lines instead of boxes and smaller zoom.

Now localized all my dual celeron project components, so I can buy them this week,
maybe. I'm just thinking if it's not better to buy an alpha machine for almost the
same money ? Board+533Alpha=2400.- DM  2Cel466+Board+Socket=1600.- DM ????? Hmmm.


29th june 1999

"Expect" is still not working, out of PTY's, I can't believe
I compiled in 512 now in the kernel, instead of the usual 256,
and my former 64 setting. So there must be a library problem too.
Obviously in libexpect5.28.so.

Finally I'm ill. And I feel much down....


28th june 1999

Started programming of the Kernel-Developement Graph Plotter,
and it works, except for the Gnuplot date axis.
Can someone help me with this please, the demo code from NASA
is gone, and I almost gave up hacking to format the x-axis
as a date graph. "set timefmt" and "set xdata time" doesn't
work.

Wrote a shellscript to tail-f the actual RC5 Proxylog.
Fascinated by the ease of use I'll complete a HTML generation
in the next days I guess.

Downloaded some new japanese songs from Riechan.
Of course using Greed and not a browser.

Rebootet my machine, and see .... no more IP delayed timing
problems. So I hope that someone keeps tracking this behaviour
after some productiv uptime. In my case 7 days and high load
up to 3.2 and little network traffic 260kB/s was enough.


27th june 1999

Enhanced the spidercode and wrote some howtos.
Updated the Stun.de Hardware Page.

Mirrored some of the japanese cooking pages from the web.

Transferred the completed Boogie BIO's to Boogie.Stun.de.

Copied my digital photos to Andys.Stun.de.


26th june 1999

More programming for www.stun.de. This time, did some updates
to the linux news section, with complete rewrite of the caching
and polling code. Now it's much more efficient, and no more
timeouts can occur. Also included the spider tracking engine,
which should end in a statistic page to count browser usage.


25th june 1999

Took a lot of pictures with the digital camera in our garden,
and discovered that transferring the pictures via the pcmcia-adapter
of my laptop really is the final, solution.
(Accessing via drive letter, cool, and lightning fast.
No chance for USB and ASYNC.)

Did a lot of PHP3-programming for www.stun.de, (admins) see the
last.php3 page for the code. It accepts a path value which displays
all files in this path with the last modified date and additionally
changing colors for updates within the last day, week or month.
Further I included a nameserver-query page, and a manual page viewer,
also just for admins.


24th june 1999

"It's Backupday, my favourite day..." ;-) (Do you know Bastard Operator from Hell?)
Again started backup on 60m tapes and it now works.

After tetsting Kernel 2.2.10 for a while, it seems that the IP timing problem
from 2.2.2 is back. So I think we stay on 2.2.9 with the DoS security patch
on WWW.Stun.de.

Got my Digital camera today, a Kodak DC240 and shot a lot of pictures, but I
cannot publish them yet, first because of to less diskspace on netsurf, and
second because of the nonworking gphoto.
By the way, serial transmission costs so much power that I want to wait for
USB support being stable under Linux.

Finally gave up playing with the camera because the bundled video cable is
for the DC265 and not DC240. Great ! :-(

My ISP Netsurf is again unreachable, so that's finally why it has become more
cheap last month.


23rd june 1999

Bought one of these always talking furbies, to got some entertainment,
when hacking on my boogie code. Ups, he's awake again... saying "Huu !"
I think I'll connect him to the computer someday and enhance his
sensores.

Sent away the embassy-papers and package for Aya.

Found a lot of circuits on the internet for building small toy(study)-robots.
I printed them all and will start reconstructing some of them.

Switched two netware servers from token-ring to fast-ethernet.

Backuped WWW.Stun.de, and encountered problems with 120m tapes. Hmm ?

Got NFS working on Zuse1 to backup from WWW.Stun.de.

"Furby is going to sleep, now.... ts ts ts, great entertainment" :-)))

Downloaded gphoto, and discovered that the Kodak DC240 support
is not even comitted in the CVS tree. Maybe in a few weeks... ?


22nd june 1999

Bought some of the last components for my MP3-Player.

Did some minor updates to the boogie pages on Boogie.Stun.de.

Will compile 2.2.10 for WWW.Stun.de this evening, I guess.
(I didn't.)


21st june 1999

Ordered my digital still cam Kodak DC240. But I do hard, waiting..... ;-)

Sound doesn't work anymore, with 2.2.10... hmmm, looks like a dependecy
problem. Had no time yet to track down further.

My notice is now official, and everyone knows that I quit my old job.

The embassy papers for Aya are on their way. Hopefully.

(So I hope everyone can understand my stress in the last weeks, and that
there are not that much boogie updates as usual in the last time.
Sorry guys.)

Internet works this evening, and people who must know, told me that the
german IN-XS, one of the major german internet backbones, got smoked.
:-))) Wow, this is how it must be the day after. (Just additionally
without telephone and electric power.) Hmm, not nice. :-( 


20th june 1999

Still no connection to the internet.

Uli called me and ask for Netsurf (our internet provider)
20 minutes after KAP called me and asked the same.
Maybe it would be better if I do the support for Netsurf,
by myself ??? :-)))))) Am I callcenter or what ?

I start to wonder why my provider decreased the monthly fee.

Reyk also called me, at night, if I can access their webpages
(online stocks) and he sounded quite nervous.... keep cool,
it seems that the whole german internet or at least some of the
bigger providers are heavily knocked out.

Is that the punishment for not joining the internet demonstration
day a week ago ????

Uli PPPpolled my machine and downloaded the new linux kernel
via FTP. So who needs providers, we can do it by ourselves.

Therefore nothing to do. Tried to upgrade to the new raidtools,
but it doesn't seem to work. It's still invalid argument,
even when completely new created.


19th june 1999

A hard they working, almost 14 hours.
After upgrading some SCSI-drivers I experienced a BIOS problem,
which doesn't allow my old drivers to run on an old hardware...
very obscure... I'll write an explanation on monday, I think.

Bad day. My internet connection is broken....
And my RC5 is running out of keys.


18th june 1999

Today I got my MP3 hardware for constructing my own player,
but I'm missing some minor components as well as a software to
run it from linux.


17th june 1999

Sent my notice today.

Big shopping for suit and shoes.


16th june 1999

Emergency call at 4AM, uhh I hate that.
Slept the rest of the day.

When I woke up it was time to compile 2.2.10


15th june 1999

Got all the documents from the foreign office.
Now it's Aya's turn, and mine for insurance.


14th june 1999

Tried to get the visa application for Aya at the foreign office,
but I missed to bring some important documents....
Sooooo, I'll try again tomorrow maybe. Hopefully.

Developed a new feature for linux.stun.de which is a graphical
prediction for the upcoming linux kernels.
It looks nice as an excel diagram, but now it has to be converted
in mathematical functions used by PHP3.

Got mail from Aya. Yeah !!!!!!!!
She's working so hard 13.6hours on one day this week......
I think most europeans would go crazy...... like me....

Finished converting the boogie biography database which is now
exactly 300KB in size. Now the next step will be to include all
the update from my huge eMail archive, and after the event browser
will be a big step, supporter and contacts db will follow later.


13th june 1999

Gone for vietnamese dinner by bike together with Tom, and
we enjoyed mixed meat/fish soup-fondue.

The last students festival day, really nice again...
I hope that Aya will join me to go there in the next year.

Downloaded GREED which makes it possible to do HTTP and FTP
batch transfers via cron. This method is much better than
getting news from various sites directly via PHP3.
Now there's no possibility of long timeouts when some of
the server side included (remote)files are not available.

No more programming this night, soooo tired.....


12th june 1999

Did some more updates to the boogie database which is now 257KB
and including the letters H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,T,U,V,W,X and Y.
Or to make it more simple, everything except letter S which has
the most bio-information(too much conversion needed).

I also had to repair a part of the database after I discovered
that the FaceMySQL-Scripts don't care how much entries will be
updated if you don't select via the primary key.
(LIMIT=1 would have been enough for my needs.... ts ts ts...)

Also discovered that some players are missing, hmmm....
how could that happen ? I don't even copy and paste everything,
instead I write batches from the old pages.


11th june 1999

Did some conversions on the boogie database and created a new
table for credits and supporters.
Letter A,B,C,D,E,F,G and Z are finished now. Hard work.... :-((
The current database size is 110KB now.

After repairing some crashed servers at work, I went to the 1999
Stustaculum (Annual Students Festival) see: Program
and I met there with Thomas.


10th june 1999

Answered a lot of boogie mails...
no time for programming....

Installed SPDIF for digital audio copy from PC(MP3) to MD,
but had no time yet to test it.

From today on there's a big student event until sunday,
try searching for StuStaCulum 99 on Excite.de to see the
program. About 50 bands playing all for free.

I'll go there with Thomas and Gerd from tomorrow on.
I hope the wheater stays a little bit sunny these days.


9th june 1999

Had much stress at work because of a few more server crashes and
emergency meetings.

Reyk visited me at work and presented me his new digital still camera.
Wow, I hope that you can get a linux driver for that.
Try looking for gPhoto on the web.

After work we went together to the Shoya Sushi bar, and to our
great surprise there was Roberto Blanco sitting back to back with me.
it seems that he also knows the good points for having dinner. ;-)

Finally we finished the day at O'Reillys...


8th june 1999

Really good day. no further comment,
those one of you will know.

More Final Fantasy to become relaxed....


7th june 1999

Discovered that my Boogie-MySQL script is broken !!!!
AHHHHH !!!! PANIC !!!!!!!
Had no time to fix this yet.

Worked overtime, because I had to do some reboots and patches
to our biggest netware server.
I can't believe Novell released a patch for 3.x/4.x which
exactly describes our problems, just 5 days ago, for a product
which is almost 5 years old. Ts ts ts....

But anyway, the patch doesn't work.... :-((((


6th june 1999

Played Final Fantasy VII.... bad idea....
5 hours later wrote the diary for last week,
and gone to bed. ;-)

Tried to get the G2-Player to work.
But, you can't register without connection
to the internet VIA PROXY in my case.
But, you cannot save the configured proxy
as long as you're not registered.

So what should I do ?

>rm /home/andy/G2-*.tgz
>df
:-)

Who needs Web videos ?
I've got television... :-)))))


5th june 1999

Some more HTML writing for Stun.de.

Joined the Union Move, Munichs own LoveParade.
Much noise, techno music is getting boring...

Had nice dinner with Tom in the Outback australian bar.
(Nice memories....)

Finished the day with an ultra strong peppermint tea
in the Marrakesh at the Kunstpark Ost.


4th june 1999

Included different News-Tickers on the Linux.Stun.de
pages to automatically generate news pages via PHP3.

Tried to set up bugzilla, but my perl modules for apache
seem to fail.... I HATE IT !
New compilation again ?
I already wrote a 3 KB script to do this for me,
because it takes too long time to do everything
by hand if there's an error while compiling.


3rd june 1999

Wrote some cluster pages for Linux.Stun.de

Played around with on-the-fly button generation
with TTF fonts via PHP3.

More Final Fantasy VII... I wonder how this would look
like on a playstation/2. Photorealistic ?


2nd june 1999

Big problems compiling DBI, the MySQL modules and
Chart. Also GD doesn't seem to work on GLIBC2.1
systems.


1st june 1999

Installed new RC5 clients.
Updated TWIG.

Diary Import May 1999

1999-05-31T13:20:00.000+02:00

31th may 1999

More server crashes today...
it seems that the processor itself is the problem.

Signed Aya in for the language school from november on.
I hope that she'll decide to come...
Kiss you, darling.


30th may 1999

Compiled Apache1.3.6 again with PHP3.0.8 and IMAP+SSL-Support now working ! YEAH !!! ;-)
Configured TWIG (a fabulous eMail-Webfrontend with almost the same features like Outlook)
and installed everything new compiled on www.stun.de.

Facts of the day:
- SSL now works with our own certificate,
- IMAP(TWIG) works with SSL-Connections,
- more Admin Howto's written,
- Boogie Database Code Updates (now with auto indexing + improved database access),
- fixed some script-errors which occured since the RH6 upgrade, (what are they doing ?)


Talked to Uli on the phone who experienced some trouble when compiling gtk+ with gimp.

Called to Aya and she seemed to busy and tired again.... go on work, work, work,
some people need their time to get wiser.

Making MD for Aya and CD for Tomo.


29th may 1999

Lazy day, just enjoying the BBQ in my garden. ;-)


28th may 1999

Called to school if they also have holidays. They don't !


27th may 1999

More than good day for me.

Received Aya's school papers, finally.
Thanks, that's what I needed to loose my nervousity.

Invited my parents for dinner.

No programming :-)


26th may 1999

Can't remember, sorry.


25th may 1999

Wrote some scripts to fill the boogie database automatically.

Gave some hints to RedHat 6.0 Bugzilla, concerning RAID problems
after upgrading.

Hotmail seems to be crashed AGAIN ??? :-)))) (OS-Problem ???)
Damn, I need this to stay in contact with my beauty.
(maybe yesterdays letter fault)

And I'm still waiting for Aya's translation papers... HEY WHAT ARE YOU DOING ???


24th may 1999

Holiday.
Aya wrote me a long letter, and I wrote a really long letter back to her.

Tried to compile Apache again with SSL in addition, and guess.
It failed... Grrrrrrrrrrrrr..............
(maybe it's just because lack of diskspace)
The 6.0 update is eating up my drives. And I install very selective.


23th may 1999

Repaired my Raid after a failed upgrade of Redhat 5.2 to 6.0.
The new 0.90 raidtools don't know the old raidpartitions,
and the bloody RPM deleted my old ckraid and raidrun commands.
So it was a little bit tricky the get back my disks.
(But I'm sure that I'm not the only.)


22th may 1999

Downloaded the whole RedHat 6.0 via Rsync.
Hey I love that tool. Kill FTP.

Installed MySQL on www.stun.de.

Installed the boogie database on www.stun.de.

Wrote some new admin pages for MySQL and PHP3 on www.stun.de.


21th may 1999

Extracted all the boogie bio's from the old HTML pages.

Compiled Apache with PHP3 and MySQL support, which now, finally works
without errors. Transferred everything to www.stun.de.


20th may 1999

Wrote the PHP3 code for displaying the boogie woogie players biographies
out of the MySQL database. And it works fine (after some tuning).


19th may 1999

Upgraded the RC5-proxies to 3.06 and also some clients which now can
switch to OGR as well.


18th may 1999

Compiled 2.2.9 kernel on zuse1 and www.stun.de

Played around with the setiathome package, but it seems they compiled
without proxy support. Bad luck, maybe next version.


17th may 1999

Stress day. Three Server crashes within the same hour.
Discovered wrong configured encapsulations for hot standby routing.


16th may 1999

Emergency at work, our backbones need help.


15th may 1999

Weekend Work... :-(((
Power shutdown at work, and Reconfiguration of a netware server.


14th may 1999

Prepared the power shutdown for tomorrow.


13th may 1999
Had to work on this holy day, but thanks god nothing more
then a couple of server crashs and in the meantime found
some quiet minutes to study more japanese vocabulary.
Also found out how to fix my BTTV problem, which crashes
the whole machine after 10-25 minutes, and DESTROYS
my Soft-RAID !!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
(So all folks of you with the same problem try loading
bttv with TRITON1=1 and it should be fixed, hopefully,
because I'm 100 pc sure not to own a Triton board...)
Kernelpatch 2.2.8 arrived at home, but had no time yet to
patch and compile.


12th may 1999
Continued burning CD's while playing the japanese version
of Bushido Blade II on my playstation. Hey I love that game,
it's rather bloody but who cares....
Talked with Reyk on the phone and it looks like we agreed
a new date of installation for the FFM-Server, YES FFM again !
We're also thinking of using Soft-RAID with 9GB disks,
but I'm scared about power shortage problems.
Met with Tom and Gerd at O'Reillys Irish Pub, thought that
Reyk and Babsi would join, but they didn't ? What's up ?


11th may 1999
Big burning day, so many japanese CD's :-))))
Blasted Muckis playstation when installing the mc, but I'm sure
not to be responsible, because someone already tried this
before, according to the soldering points.


10th may 1999
Free day, because of my coming emergency support week.
Did big big big big big big big shopping....expensive too,
just for food.
Worked in our garden, cleaning the roof and finished the day
in chinese restaurant across the street. Yammi.


9th may 1999
Called Aya this morning 3AM my time, 10AM japan time,
but she doesn't seem to have much time for me. :-(((( Heiki ?
Demonstrated MD to my parents, and totally fascinated they
want this to be their xmas present this year... hmmm... ok.
Throw away that tape stuff, throw away old records.
Time for small smart mini discs. ;-)


8th may 1999
Converted lots of CD's and MP3 songs to MiniDisc, especially
all the Japan songs, to get karaoke feeling for my morning
shower :-)))
Called to Aya as every Saturday, but she said that she feels
bad and tired, and I should call her in the morning. Odaiji ni !


7th may 1999
Made a complete backup of our MP3 server to ZIP media,
which is very hard work ! Don't try this, it's easier to connect
a cd-recorder directly instead.
Burned 3 new MP3-CD's at home, so now the FPS collection
counts 15 MP3 CD's all together. 250 hours of music :-)))))


6th may 1999

Reyk is ill, and can not join the Linux show.
The Microsoft presentation of Windows 2000 was pretty
impressive, but Linux bored so much because of
incompetence sf the speaker.
I think he has never seen Linux before.
I already had my doubts when I saw Powerpoint as
the presentation software. :-)))

But anyway, a nice start for the day.
And also a nice present of the company, a big analog
clock, made in china, which is 5 minutes two fast
within two hours. But maybe it changes when the
batteries are going low. ;-)))

Ate Sushi to get back that japanese feeling ;-)


5th may 1999

Some problems with our 3.11 SFT-III server at work,
I wonder how they'll get this machine into Y2K ? :-)

Bought a MD-recorder today. Also something that
disturbed my inner peace since Japan.
Aya tried to convince me to buy MD in Japan, and
Albert also tried, but at that time I could resist.
OK, Aya you won !!! Kiss !
Expect some MD-exchange the next weeks :-)

Wanted to buy a dbox which makes it possible to
watch digital-TV and to see more foreign(english)
TV-stations. But it's so expensive without signing
a contract for the additional use of PAY-TV.
So now it's easy. KAP will give me Sat-Stuff on
Friday I guess, so that I can test a little bit.
There's also japanese (PAYTV) on Astra I heard.
I think about it, for you Aya, if you need ?
Anyway I do....


4th may 1999

Got invitation for Linux and Microsoft trade show from Tom
at his company for 6th may.

Bought a CD-recorder today, and I'm so happy to get back
my valuable space on harddisk.

Searched for video-stores that sell or are able of ordering
japanese videos. But bad luck for today.


3rd may 1999

Wrong alarm again. My coworker still is not father yet.


2nd may 1999

Compiled Linux 2.2.7 on my system and on www.stun.de.
And hurray !!!
My CD-changer is now supported, which forced me to
reactivate the bloody IDE interfaces on board.



1st may 1999

Started the barbeque for this year in our garden.
It would have been something nice for you Aya ! ;-)))

Had a nice cocktail party with Tom, and we cooked
together.

Called to Aya tonight, and she wants to send me her
translated documents. Sounds nice. I love you !

Diary Import April 1999

1999-04-30T13:11:00.000+02:00

30th april 1999

Our biggest Novell server crashed today.
I never saw this: The system generated more and more
filelocks until almost every user was locked out.
Nice. (I guess this to be a feature of our increasing
number of NT machines ??? Who'll join ?)


29th april 1999

Ordered my playstation MOD-Chip so that I can play
japanese games as well as "backups" ;-)

Met with Reyk for eating japanese noodle-soup "Ramen"
and some sushis for dessert ;-) went on to O'Reillys
Irish Pub, and we drunk a lot, after that we visited
Schuhmanns for some nice cocktails &-} Oh my head !!!


28th april 1999

Nice server crash after we tried a volume repair on
a machine that lacks memory.


27th april 1999

I thought that software piracy is finally gone with
a compact system, but NOPE !
Try searching the web for MOD-CHIPS :-))))))
and additional hardware is becoming more and more,
like: trainers, pads, guns, vcd-players, mega-memory
cards, ...


26th april 1999

My coworker thought he would become father today,
but it was wrong alarm.

Successfully fascinated Tom of my new playstation.
But he said he doesn't play anymore... ok I said the
same in the last three years :-))
No more crashed systems, no more driver problems,
no expensive hardware... cool ! That's plug and play !
anyway he seemed to enjoy some of the games, and
especially if he got the good vibrations !


25th april 1999

Found out more about playstation.
How to repair and laser tuning... they're all crazy !
Bought Civilization II for playstation.


24th april 1999

Got my first pictures from Japan.
Pretty nice, especially the pictures where I can
see my lovely lady. Kiss you. |-x


23th april 1999

Bought a playstation today. I couldn't stand any longer.
These japanese people infected me completely !
And it is more cheap in Germany than in Japan.
I just miss the japanese games...

Met at Shananigans Irish Pub together with Gerd,
and we enjoyed very good meal and Guiness.


22nd april 1999

Gave my first three films from Japan to developement.

Compiled Linux 2.2.5 on my system.


21st april 1999

My first day at work again....
Oh.... don't ask...

Flushed my RC5 buffers to the internet.
Hey look that keyrate :-))))))))))))
(Place 112 for today)


20th april 1999

Slept the whole day. 24 hours Jetlag ? ;-)


19th april 1999

Arrived back in Munich airport, one hour too late.
My parents picked me up, and I was so sleepy.

My phone bill balanced well, because I could
save money the last three weeks. (And I pulled
the plug out of my machine in holiday.
Just in case, you know !)

Got a letter from Naoko, thanks !
And I had to hear that she visited munich in the
begin of april... AHHHH !!!! Damn !
Sorry, it would have been so nice to meet you again.
Maybe next time ? Or in Japan, together with Aya ?

I miss Japan, and being surrounded by japanese people.
Whenever I see someone japanese I try to get closer
and listen what they say. But my japanese is anything
more than better since my visit. HELP !!!


1st-18th april 1999

Top secret japanese holiday with Aya. ;-)

Diary Import March 1999

1999-03-31T13:19:00.000+02:00

To make my japanese learning more efficient here's my
(new "jwotd": japanese word of the day)
to bad that I can't view you the kanji version too.
But I think the unicode guys are working on it.


28th-31st march 1999

Can't wait for you Aya !.
(only 2 days left ! being nervous !)

jwotd: (/)


27th march 1999

No time for long sleep, some last shopping needed.
Learning vocabulary for Japan.

No more entries until 21st April I think.

jwotd: (/)


26th march 1999

Last day at work, after a nice server crash.
Had a meeting how to upgrade all servers to 100MB ethernet.
But finished the time at work with a cool guiness :-))))

BIG SECURITY ALERT: Linux-WORM found.
See RedHat's Linux-Security Newsgroup for details.

Discovered my ISDN interface dialing every 8 minutes since
yesterday highnoon !
Oh my god, I don't want to get this bill !!!!!!!!! :-(((((

jwotd: (/)


25th march 1999

Quit church finally. So much trouble in office just for
one easy step. Unbelievable. I had to go to three people
and into 5 different rooms.

Played a little bit on our 622MB ATM testing network.
And discovered some nice IPX trouple with old revision boards.

NATO attacks Serbia, and german pilots have to join for
first time since WW II. Bad feeling.

My parents invited me for last "gscheit's"(bavarian: really
usefull) dinner, before I leave to Japan. Nice thanks !

jwotd: (/)


24rd march 1999

Kernel patch 2.2.4 released, but had no time for update yet.
But it needs to be upgraded because of the same IP delay problems
as before thought fixed.
Especially www.stun.de cannot go online without these.

Got more mail from Aya, so she's finished now with her study,
and passed exam and ceremony. Congratulations !!! Kiss you. ;-)

jwotd: (/)


23rd march 1999

Gnome 1.03 installed. Enlightenment and Sound activated.

Thomas is back safe from Equador. Thanks god, because they
seem to have civil war now.

jwotd: (/)


22nd march 1999

New Mysql installed. 3.22

Luggage packing (more planning) for my Japan trip.

HTTPD and FTPD and NWShell installed on test Netware server.
Year 2000 patches again.

Escalators work from highnoon on. Great work :-)))) Be ashamed !

jwotd: (/)


21st march 1999

Power on at work.
More problems, one dead server, two defect harddisks,
escalators and entrance security still inoperative.
Nice sunday. And so much backbone and other problems that
we gave up in the evening to be fresh for the next day.

MP3 for Linux installed.
Shoutcast Icecast Server downloaded.

jwotd: (/)


20th march 1999

Power shutdown at work.
Much trouble because our entrance security system to every
network room doesnt work, and all escalators don't work either.

Soundcard installed.

jwotd: (/)


19th march 1999

Pick up copies of the London photos for Aya.

Got my Traveler Cheques, lying in front of the door.
Nice work UPS, $1500US unsigned where everyone can take them !


jwotd: (/)


18th march 1999

Got school interview, and checked what Aya needs to come to
Germany in Sep/Nov ?

jwotd: (/)


17th march 1999

Power shortage at work. Too much work.
Complete server dead.
Can't remember the rest.

jwotd: (/)


16th march 1999

Had big meeting at work today. About network and server troubles.

Found some nice backdoors for MS-IIS :-)))) Stupid MS.

Aya still writes eMail to me which doesn't arrive, but she called
me in the very early morning. Thank you my darling.
First design of Aya's Homepage is now online.


jwotd: (ashita/tomorrow)


15th march 1999

Have no power to go anywhere or do anything...
...why should I. Waiting for Aya's mail...
Had no contact for 82 hours !!!!!!!!!!

jwotd: (kanashimi/sorrow)


14th march 1999

Everything on my local machine (except Root-Boot, I'm not tough enough
for that yet) set up as Raid1 now.

Compiled and installed kernel 2.2.3 for WWW.Stun.de,
updated lots of RPMs and wrote some new pages for the Admins.
Everyone has his own server-statistics-graph now !

Hey, someone give me a one or two 4 GB drive and we switch to Raid1 or Raid5.

Listened to my japanese learning CD, and slept in. Sorry. ;-)

jwotd: (tasukete/Help !)


13th march 1999

Raid-5 destruction-and-rebuild test was successful, but is
very slow, sure on one single harddisk !
But I also miss one additional harddrive to switch to Raid-5.

Redesigning my system partitions, to match Raid-1 mirroring,
for my old disks 1G/4G/4G.
If there's no entry in diary tomorrow you should know what happened.

Sent away tax and international insurance.

jwotd: (kagami/mirror)


12th march 1999

Tried to quit from church, because in Germany you have to
pay by law for christian church, but the office changed
to another location. So maybe next time.

Again a server crash, but who cares, netware is promised
dead and it's Bill's turn now.

More DNS entries today, and I think their concept also
leeks. If they do round robin, they'll get surprise...
...but let's see if they find out themselves. ;-)

Had no contact to Aya for 42 hours, which made it a really
bad day too.

Configured Raid-5 on one single harddisk just for testing
repair capabilities.
And wonder....
RedHat starts and stops them without having configured anything.
That's nice guys.... how long is that code in rc.system and
K99halt now ? I've never seen before.

jwotd: (kyookai/church)


11th march 1999

Did some necessary network tracing and discovered
wrong static route entries... Oh wonder...

Hacked in some DNS stuff.

Coworker had heart-attack and we had ambulance at work.
Nobody is listening if I say, don't panic, no stress,
keep cool, try to think first...

Waiting for mail from Aya, and feel down.

jwotd: (zeikin/tax)


10th march 1999

Did some tracing on IP timeouts at work and reinstalled
our private netware server including RC5 ;-)

RC5 is now approaching the TOP4 1400, I guess it will
balance out around 1000. (ab031ns)

Tried to compile Apache 1.3.4 with PHP 3.0.7 and MySQL 3.22.19
but everytime I miss some other strange libraries. Grrrrrrr...

jwotd: (tsuki/month)


9th march 1999

Hey Aya, once in Microsofts arms, and you can't escape ;-)))))))
Or Yahoo doesn't accept former hotmailers :-DDD

Kernel 2.2.2 tcp timeout problems seems solved.
For those who can't wait for patchfix here's a small workaround,
which "makes it a little bit better."
Go to /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack enter 0
Go to /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps enter 0
Go to /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling enter 0

If you even can't download the 2.2.3 version, because of stalled
transfers, try to shoot "ping" your way free.

jwotd: (toshi/year)


8th march 1999

They're are so BAKA sometimes at work. Told me to come to work but also
signed me in for emergency support, which tells me that I got free day
for today. But I even didn't know that I'm signed in, only for next week.
So I got two weeks in colon again.
What shells, good for money and holiday.  

What should I tell you now:
Everything change a few hours later, and I had to go to work.

(I love you Aya ! Count seconds for me.)

jwotd: (byoo/second)


7th march 1999

Tidied up the cellar, so that's enough place to put
more things in when Aya arrives.

jwotd: (fun/minute)


6th march 1999

Lazy day again, watching documentation about Australia
on TV and eating cake in bed.

jwotd: (jikan/hour)


5th march 1999

Gnome 1.0 has been released, but yet no time to test it.

Big shopping day. Bought new leather jacket, from birthday money.
And bought tons of Yakult, for my daily health :-)))))
(Aya, I need you !)

jwotd: (hiru/day)


4th march 1999

What a day for Microsoft :-)))))))))
They announced that Windows 95/98 will hang after 49.7 days uptime !
HHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Met with one of my best friends, who's visiting his former
hometown. After working in circus, he's now studying informatics
and running to use Linux. (unbelievable, for a former clown) ;-)
(Sorry Erwin !  Don't take it too serious with the "clown".)

jwotd: (shuukan/week)


3rd march 1999

Have to fix that "IP frame delayed" problem on IPPP devices.
Seems to be a kernel fault.
But didn't find "time" nor "fun" to do so.

Put it in the category "unsolved obscurities", Scully ! ;-)

jwotd: (namakemono/lazy)


2nd march 1999

Big meeting at work, because of the massive server crashes in the
last days (and today another two.)

jwotd: (michita/full)


1st march 1999

The last 28 days until I see my love again !

At work another two server crashes. (No, I'm not repeating !)
Don't ask me why. It's unbelievable.

jwotd: (aishiteru/I love you.)

Diary Import February 1999

1999-02-28T13:14:00.000+01:00

To make my japanese learning more efficient here's my
(new "jwotd": japanese word of the day)
to bad that I can't view you the kanji version too.
But I think the unicode guys are working on it.


28th february 1999

Not a nice day, 34 hours without contact to Aya.
Most of the time, waiting nervously for eMail.

Tried videotext on 2.2.2 again with new drivers,
but this bttv stuff freezes my machine every time
after 10-15 minutes.
And I always loose lots of RC5 buffers in proxy !
I hate that ! (Also about 5000 input buffers.)

jwotd: (samui/feel cold)


27th february 1999

Sleeping hopefully,
after 21 days without one free day,
not even weekend.

Successfully running on kernel 2.2.2 !

jwotd: (nemuru/sleep)


26th february 1999

Compiled 2.2.2 again and fixed that msp3400 problem from yesteday night,
or is it this morning ??? ;-))

And again, another server crashed too.
I can't tell you how I hate when they call me just after 4-5 hours
of sleep, even when I'm not on emergency support list.
Who do you think I am ? Jesus ? Can I cross over water ?

Tonight I wish that I can celebrate my uncle's birthday together
with the family. I hate to be busy with work at these times.

jwotd: (tanjoobi/birthday)


25th february 1999

Ok, I'm mad now.
But lots of mail from Aya. Thanks, my darling.

Another two servers crashed.

Upgraded all the RedHat stuff on my machine to be kernel 2.2
prepared, and after tried to compile 2.2.2, but just as usual,
if you want to change everything in one day, halted with an error.

jwotd: (okaerinasai/welcome home)


22nd to 24th february 1999

I'm in Stuttgart, for education.
Cisco Catalyst Switches.

I hope that I can get internet access there, Aya.
Otherwise I'll go mad !
I love you !

jwotd: (kyooiku/education)


20th and 21st february 1999

Power shutdown weekend at work.
But the best is, that our emergency center didn't know :-))))))))

Managed some calls to Cisco TAC via France to UK to USA and
back to UK.

Checked management dial-ins for Berlin.

And finally shut down all the Unix and Netware servers.
9 hours of work.

Used 10 minutes in the gallery of the bank, to play on a
grand piano, when the security people suggested me to do.

Wrote many many many eMails to Aya, as she did to me this day,
but I was so busy for long time. Sorry Aya.
Our correspondence is now 1.8 MB in just four weeks. WOW !!!!!

jwotd: (motto motto/more and more)


19th february 1999

At work:
I reconfigured a lot of 18 GB drives to remirror on our
biggest netware server. Some new AIX problems with local printing
and some new DNS entries.

At home:
Configured fetchmail today and rerouted all my local mailservers
to my working machine. Also internet mail is collected through
fetchmail now. GREAT WORK GUYS !!!!!!!! :-)))))
Mail delivery to the internet stays on netscapes messenger for
security reasons, but sendmail would also do.

Got nice eMails from Aya today.
Don't work so hard, ok ? ;-)

jwotd: (insatsu suru/print)


18th february 1999

Some more preparations for the weekend power shutdown.

Cetin has successfully killed the SYS volume on our support server,
and of course my only netware RC5 too. Thanks ! :-((((

Upgraded Gnome-FVWM and some libs.

jwotd: (denryuu/electrical power)


17th february 1999

Spent my birthday alone, because everyone is ill, and Aya
is still in Japan !

Therefore had lots of phonecalls this day. 

Set up paging service for incoming internet eMail.
So I now get informed by pager whenever Aya writes eMail to me.
Nice feature. :-)))))))))))))
(Perfect solution to meet online within a few minutes.)

jwotd: (denwa/phone)


16th february 1999

Did some planning for the power shutdown this weekend.
Lots of AIX machines and clusters affected.

Printed out a visual japanese dictionary, which could be very
useful for faster learning.

jwotd: (gashoo/picture)


15th february 1999

Another free monday, because of my emergency support work.

Started translating the book "Making out in japanese" into german.
Maybe Aya can use it, too. And it's good training for me as well.

I also restarted learning from Assimil book which is perfectly
for me. I hope to be able to read and write Kana and understand
and speak japanese in good quality to the end of this year.
Aya, I'm very good student !
Let's start teaching you german some more !

jwotd: (hon-yaku suru/translating)


14th february 1999

Valentines Day !
Aya, you know the URL.
Present will follow, I promise !

Downloaded tons of video stuff to get my webcam working again.
And I wonder if I should upgrade my Matrox BIOS or not.
Better not.

Video works, and also cable TV on my X-Display and also videotext.
I can't believe it, it seems they did good work the last two months.
So my webcam is finally up and running. You can go there by visiting
the dynamic link on andys.stun.de.
Otherwise there's also a pic of the day at: Here !


jwotd: (okurimono/present)


13th february 1999

Had to work today. Fix some network problems and test some
more ADSM client functions.

Upgraded to the new XFree Server 3.3.3.1-1 and some newer
patches released due to security issues.
GIMP runs again. Wow.

jwotd: (kinoo/function)


12th february 1999

Updated all ADSM clients of our servers at work and did finish
the most OS patches and library updates that are necessary for
Year 2000 compliance.
But I think there will be some more patches even after Year 2000.

Surprised by updating PC-BIOS which seems to have destroyed the
harddisks partition table. Never seen that before.
System partition boots. DOS partition even after fdisk /mbr
reactivating, sys a: c: and some other tools cannot force the
drive to boot. What's up here ?
Any hints ?

jwotd: (odoroki/surprise)


11th february 1999

Fighted with a netware server which doesn't want to work 100 MB half, nor
full duplex, due to inoperational driver parameters.

Almost finished with Y2K BIOS upgrades of all our communication servers.

Did some finetuning on the scanned in pictures from London holiday,
and AYA, check the URL again. a232 and a233 are really sexy !

Reyk: Buy Yakult for me, and rice crackers, please !!!!!!!!!

I'll go to bed now,
Oyasumi nasai, Munich.
Ohayou, Tokyo !

jwotd: (kau/buy)


10th february 1999

Got the pictures from London today.
Hey Aya, you're looking really sexy !
You know the URL !

Another emergency at work. This time a netware server crashes
all the time, when we try to mount volumes.
Vrepair doesn't seem to work, and a mirrored device was used
with so much space that we cannot remirror with new drive.
GREAT !

jwotd: (hijooji/emergency)


9th february 1999

More Y2K updates, and a big server meeting again.
I was so fascinated updating BIOS and OS-Patches, that
I forgot about time. So I'll start two hours later
on tomorrow. Hopefully.
And another week emergency service started for me, to make money.


jwotd: (kane/money)


8th february 1999

Enjoyed my free day,
slept a long time,
learned japanese,
and booked my flight to japan for end of march,

jwotd: (tobu/fly)


7th february 1999

Downloaded kernel 2.2.1 and the RedHat 5.2 to kernel 2.2 upgrade RPM's.
But I don't dare to install now. INET connection is to important at
the moment.

More eMails. And japanese learning !
Now learning how to write Kana !

jwotd: (narau/learn)


6th february 1999

Finally reached my long weekend.

glibc 2.1 has been released, and the big surprise:
StarOffice 5.0 doesn't work with it ! Perfect ! :-((

Wrote many eMails to Aya and we tried to meet in chat.

jwotd: (hanasu/talk)


5th february 1999

Did not fix the problem on a netware server which displays
symbol errors after every update I made. I hate that !
I need RPM for netware ? Somewhere hacking in progress ???

Changed my holiday to be in Japan in April !

jwotd: (nihon/japan)


4th february 1999

It's official now, I'm the "one" (poor one) (armes Schwein) that
is responsible for making every netware server in the company
ready for the next millenium.
A hint for all people with the same "order":
Don't try to migrate more than five servers a day, you'll start
making mistakes. Suddenly human again. I know that now.

Two of the three stale servers are stable again, but we need more
hardware for swapping, that's because there's already the next weak
machine.

Got 100 MB and 16 MB together working now in a 3.12 machine,
which had severe library problems with IPXRTR.NLM.

The first day I can feel harmony again, Aya didn't start working
and I think we're both happy now.

jwotd: (haamonii/harmony)


3rd february 1999

Oh god, what a day !
Three netware servers damaged at once.
One defective motherboard, two SIMM chips and a very obscure
problem with a harddisk array.

Worked 14 hours today. That's enough for me.
But my colleagues worked 22 yesterday and stayed at home for today.
Now who's baaka ? I think it's me.

Had no time to learn japanese today, and I'm missing Aya so much.

jwotd: (baaka/blockhead)


2nd february 1999

Had so much work to do today, I could shout !
Configured some firewall stuff.
Patched Arcserve and some netware servers to become Y2K compliant.

Learned a lot new japanese sentences and grammar.

Called to Aya and felt happy after I heard her voice.
Aya called me back four hours later and I felt very sad again.
(What are you doing with me girl !) 

Talked to Reyk about the FFM server (soon the MUC server),
and after that talked to Tom about his upcoming MCSE exam
on friday.

jwotd: (shikeen/test)


1st february 1999

Had to fight with some SNA problems on a AIX machine...

Upgraded to 434 RC5 clients and 304 perproxy.

Downloaded some japanese songs in MP3 format, but they are all encrypted.
Maybe some decryption time tomorrow :-)

Wrote six eMails to my love. Ganbatte kudasai.

jwotd: (aishiteru/I love you.)

Diary Import January 1999

1999-01-31T13:15:00.000+01:00

To make my japanese learning more efficient here's my
(new "jwotd": japanese word of the day)
to bad that I can't view you the kanji version too.
But I think the unicode guys are working on it.


31st january 1999

Alone again.
Waiting for a sign.
(no further comment)

jwotd: (kodooku/lonelyness)


30th january 1999

Back from London.
Aya missed her plane yesterday, so she will leave this noon.

jwotd: (hikooki/airplane)


21th to 29th january 1999

Hopefully Aya will be back in one piece, so we can leave to London.

jwotd: (nozoomu/hope)


20th january 1999

Designed a new spreadsheet for calculating price values for
old server systems. Nice work... 80 servers listed by their single
components and price drop over the past three years.
Thanks to KAP for his iteration formula.

Joined the always important server meeting to discuss some more
theories how to handle year 2000 :-)))) Talking, talking....
Maybe it will disapear if we would talk overtime...?

Hey Aya, I'm waiting for your call... Heiki ?

jwotd: (yobidaashi/phone call)


19th january 1999

Had to play with some HACMP cluster machines... boring....
if everything would work ! ;-)

Did some more Y2K updates especially for storage management.

DES-II-3 is running and we have done about 25% on one whole day.
(Cracked on the same day 3 PM by Deep Crack !)

Still waiting for Ayako to return.

jwotd: (kaaeru/return)


18th january 1999

Had to play a little bit with firewalls, but not that much action as
usual.

Bought many new books for learning japanese.

DES-III has started at 17:00 UTC and all my machines have successfully
switched over to !

Waiting for Aya to return...

jwotd: (matsu/wait)


17th january 1999

Sunday. Did nothing special, had not much fun to do anything.
Met with Thomas, gave him the chopsticks from Aya and we watched
Forbidden Planet and finally ended in Shannanigans Irish Pub together
with Florian. Talked to Aya from there. That's all for today.

jwotd: (hashi/chopsticks)


16th january 1999

More japanese language practising. If I only could understand when
to use which particle. HELP !!!!!!!!!!!!

Scanned in some more images. I wonder if the parallel port scanner
will also work on my Linux workstation ??? But no time yet.

Watched a documentation about Kyoto and ZEN on TV. Very interesting.

Installed RC5 proxy 303 and upgarded my personal clients to 2.105.430

And finally found the time to install my halogen spots in my bathroom,
almost one year gone :-))) Ups....
And one of the spots is defect, just as usual.

Hey Aya, I've received some answers from universities.
Kimi-nashi-da to tsurai. Karada-ni yoku ki-o tsukete.

jwotd: (naraau/learn)


15th january 1999

Played around with ADSM trace options, but on netware it's rather
uninteresting.

Lots of culture studies about Japan. Not only culture shock for them.
Printed about 200 pages. Also first answer from our University.
All for Aya.

Installed japanese fonts on my computer, and I'm totally fascinated
to be able looking up in japanese indexes on the web !!! Great !!!
This is much better training then reading books.

Printed some Meishi's (business cards). Meishi suki ?

jwotd: (kakikataa/font)


14th january 1999

Made some system backups from AIX cluster machines.
Did a lot of fine-tuning on netware scripts.

Bought a walkman to be able of recording from tapes
to my computer for making MP3's.
Of course, for japanese songs !!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-)
Aya I got it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And also a new flatbed scanner which was so unbelievable
cheap that I could buy one for each of my noisemakers.

Also just for scanning very very important pictures !


jwotd: (shashiin/photo)


13th january 1999

Documented two new AIX cluster machines today. 22 harddisks, wow !

Discovered a dying harddisk in a novell server, something for the
night shift. :-) I hope that it'll be swapped this week because
I'm on night shift next week.

Played around with the new ADSM client on a 3.12 netware server
and ! surprise ! the same problems as on 4.10 but saving goes on
after five minutes of locked file state.

Gone to the japanese embassy today, to check if Aya can study here
in Munich. Received a lot of hints, thanks, more work to now !

jwotd: (mondaai/problem)


12th january 1999

DES-III TEST I DAY

Installed the RC5 proxy analyzer which is a very funny tool
for those who can enjoy seeing different machines on different
OS's and architectures calculating RC5 keys.

Did some more updates on the RC5 clients and watched the
switching on 18:00 GMT which IMHO was a little bit to
struggling. Manual updates are working much better.

Wrote some more cards for learning japanese sentences.
Aya, aishiteru !

jwotd: (shikeen/test)


11th january 1999

Had to go to work again, just as Aya told me to, but I think I couldn't
really enjoy working...
Would be nice if I could retire and just travel around the world with her.
Someone to give me a lottery checkpot ???

Again Year 2000 discussions, they're getting nervous because there
appear to be more patches available on every day. :-))))
But no one was listen to me first.... 8-)

Updated most of the RC5 clients to 2.100.427 which is DES-III optimized,
for the first world-wide test on tomorrow morning.

jwotd: (discussion/tooron)


8th to 10th january 1999

Celebrated Ayas birthday and had a big dinner in a japanese restaurant.
Hmmm... Yammi !

Visited the castle of Herrenchiemsee. Long live the King !

Met with some of my best friends and had so much to talk about,
time was so short.

Had to say good-bye again, because she left to go to Italy.
Come back soon....

jwotd: (birthday/tanjoobi)


4th to 7th january 1999

Hopefully in Switzerland... no entries up to 8th ?
Yes, I was.... We spent some beautyful days there together.
No further comment.

jwotd: (isshoo-ni/together)


3rd january 1999

Printed out a lot of cartoons against Microsoft and decorated our
big white wall of the operation and supervision room.
Just want to see the faces of my colleagues...... :-)))))

Surfed the internet concerning London accomondation,
hey these Fish'n'Chips guys are crazy,
no standard, no comfort, bad food, dirty rooms and
so expensive....... I can't believe....
I thought London would be a civilized city. 

Guys I think I go mad....
Will meet tomorrow with my sweet girl in Switzerland.

jwotd: (yasumi/holiday)


2nd january 1999

Did a lot of Y2K updates at work. And it seems that we'll be ready
just right in time. The funny thin is that most of the BIOS and OS
patches are brand new from december 1998. I think we'll have to do
some more updates in the last seconds before 2000.

Kisses for my Lady.

jwotd: (sanchoo/mountain top)


1st january 1999

Got my first telephone call, and guess who called me:
Thank you very very very much, I miss you too.
If you have time to come to munich before we meet in London
feel free to come whenever you want. I'll be there.

Hey Reyk, mach schon mal die Tickets klar, am besten mit Unterkunft.

Very sleepy today, but have to go to work at 10 PM.
Thanks God that everything will be normal again after 5th so
that I can go to sleep in the evening and not in the morning...
simply just not my timezone. 

jwotd: (ooyorokobi/great pleasure)

Diary Import December 1998

1998-12-31T13:13:00.000+01:00

To make my japanese learning more efficient here's my
(new "jwotd": japanese word of the day)
to bad that I can't view you the kanji version too.
But I think the unicode guys are working on it.


31th december 1998

Wish you all a happy new year !

Hey Reyk, are you prepared for videoconferencing on midnight ?
No, he was not, because he didn't had to work ! BUUUHHHH !!!!! ;-)

After a few hours of bored working:
Celebrated the new year on Munichs Königsplatz.
Many crazy students there, making big fireworks, but had to go
back to work immediatley.

Finished a statistics about all our systems which are not yet
Year 2000 compliant and why. Huahhh, there're so many of them....

jwotd: (shinnen/the new year)


30th december 1998

Reviewed the 2.0.37 pre patch and there's a lot of new RAID stuff
in it. Also some completely rewrited code for i386 processors.
Memory detection is now done automatically up to 900 MB and when
done manually up to 3 GB, which should also be enough for the crazy
ones of you.
A lot of new PCI identification routines are also added.

The new 2.2.0 kernel is 54 MB in size... wow, a new record !
Some new features: NTFS filesystem support, Acorn, Sparc64  and SGI
architecture support, IRDA and video support.
For those of you trying the new code and wanting to report bugs
maybe first take a look on this page: Alan's Joblist.

Studied a little bit more japanese today, trying to build sentences
when just looking up some words in the dictionary. But it's so much
harder than in other languages.
Will need your help with this Aya.

Have to go to work from 22:30 to 6:00 am, and on sylvester too...
If someone wants to talk to me or wish me good new year feel free
to call me: +49-89-2171-8516

A big kiss from the tiger to the dragon !

jwotd: (narau/to learn)


29th december 1998

Kernel 2.2.0 is out. But I had no time and absolutely no fun
to take a look at it.

Just to lovesick.

jwotd: (koi no nayami/lovesick)


22th to 28th december 1998

Ayako from Japan is here. Finally.
What a X-mas gift for me.

We've visited castles (Neuschwanstein, Hohen Schwangau),
visited Salzburg, celebrated christmas, toured around
Munich and much more private things... ;-)

And she left.... very hard for me....

I love you !
(And don't forget to check your eMail.)

jwotd: (meisho/sightseeings)


21th december 1998

Gone to work today, and a fileserver crashed. Cool....
Also some minor problems, but who cares.... Xmas is near.

Printed some Alpha compatibility stuff and also some information of
different cluster software packages.

Reconfigured my RC5 machines to use a local proxy at work, next will be
fine tuning on contest switching and DES block flow to the internet.

jwotd: (butaniku/pork)
jwotd: (gyũniku/beef)
jwotd: (toriniku/chicken)


20th december 1998

Programmed some database applications using a web-interface with serverside
Perl-script and MySQL as the backend database.
Pretty cool, but I think I prefer flat files. Much easier to repair and
modify. (As long as I can live with two dimensions.)

Planned for the future is to use a MySQL database for all the information
about boogie woogie piano players and to easily create on the fly
webpages. Also to enable advanced search criterias and simple update and
modification handling... (long way to go...)

Played Xshipwars together with Reyk and did exchange some of the newest
RedHat 5.2 updates. (We also tried to install Gnome on Reyks laptop,
bad idea.... don't know... almost anything broke.)

New mail from Aya, so it seems she has found an internet-cafe in Frankfurt.
So here begins the crash course: ;-)
jwotd: (bo, fu/mother, father)
jwotd: (shukubo, shukufu/aunt, uncle)


19th december 1998

Don't ask me ! Everybody needs some relaxing !

jwotd: (gogo/afternoon)


18th december 1998

Almost nothing to do today.

Another X-mas party at work....
(The same procedure as every year.......)

Found someone from Digital who will hopefully sell me four Alpha-Workstations
to set up clustering for private testing with some friends.
I hope we can make the deal. ;-)

jwotd: (chũi/watch out !)


17th december 1998

Tidied up my desk at work and finished all open cases.
My colleagues tried to make some jokes, but I had no time to listen to them.
You should have seen their faces as I told them that I'm on holiday next
week. :-)))))
Panic... so it seems you've to do your jobs yourselves again ! :-D

jwotd: (iriguchi/entrance)


16th december 1998

Get more and more in touch with clustering. Another two machines at work,
and some news on a project by a friend.

Ordered Madge token-ring drivers for Linux today, and they gave them only
when filling out some forms about limited support alpha-release and so on.
But the Presto version isn't supported yet, and those dumbs gave me only
a part of the developement libraries so I couldn't recompile a modified
version for my needs...

Now my rooms are perfectly clean ! Makes me think they never were before...
And where is the visitor ???? Hey Ayako, no eMail and no phone calls yet,
what's up. Do you want to stay forever in the Netherlands ???

Finally built up my 16 channel mixer and connected almost everything
which offered a connector useful or not.
Sounds really great when you can watch TV, tune in another channel on the
VCR, hear a CD, get the PC sound of two machines and play E-guitar at the
same time 8-)))))))))))))))))))

jwotd: (sei/clean)


15th december 1998

Doing the DNS administration at work from today on. Yeah....

Finished to pin in all my Australia photos. 8-)))
Now it's showtime.

Downloaded Beowulf to get some more know-how on clustering technique.

jwotd: (terebi/tv)


14th december 1998

Swapped some router interfaces on a cisco 7206. Plug and play :-))
Had to remove a token-ring probe which produces automatic beacon
wraps on a hub port almost every minute, very obscure...

Investigated the new 2.0.37pre2 kernel features, which contains a lot of
raid controller support addition on network drivers (especially for my cards)
and some new hardware detection and description routines.

Downloaded Netscape Communicator 4.5 already fortyfied and the Apache 1.3.3
which is already compiled with SSL support. (Yep, I still was unable to
compile it myself. SSLeavy is a little bit too tricky for me.)

Collected some fun stuff for the upcoming hard working days.
(Audio-samples from the series "Married with children", sure MP3!)

Seen the new bttv 0.5.22 which now has videodat support and the vbidecode
included in the package. Maybe I can reactivate my vidcam and lifevideo feed
because the latest driver seems to break eveything.

jwotd: (samukatta/it was cold)


13th december 1998

Burried in eMail again.... hooohooo :-(( I hate it, don't you !!!!!!!!!!

Reyk and myself decided to buy Alphas in january and do some
experiments on Linux clustering.

Tidied up my bathroom and kitchen completely.
Hey man that was just the right time !

Learned some new japanese phrases. Hey I seem to love that language.

jwotd: (yasumi/holiday)


12th december 1998

Had a fascinating night, working from highnoon to 6 AM after a colleague
has destroyed some of the contents of three different netware servers.
:-(((((((

Since this day had no real beginning, I did go to bed when arriving
from work.

Completed another part of my Australia photo album.
Only 350 pictures left. :-))))) :-(

jwotd: (eki/railway station)


11th december 1998

In the morning did some japanese phrases practising.
Now I can understand what time it is in steps of five minutes.
And also colours, countries and some other stuff.
(It only takes 2 hours to learn 200 new words. I'm surprised by myself...)
WoW ! ;-)

Get called by my colleagues because of some problems on two netware
servers after a planned movement of volumes.

jwotd: (Nani o kaimashita ka?/What did you buy?)


10th december 1998

And again a netware server installed. So they're moving to NT, I see :-)))

Time to get my castle polished. Tidy up day.

Installed my 100 MBit hub today ! So the every six hour plug swapping
comes to an end. And RC5 can work uninterrupted. ;-)

jwotd: (Nihon-go ga wakarimashita ka?/Did you understand the japanese?)


9th december 1998

Did some fine tuning on our netware servers.

Enjoyed our company's X-mas party.

jwotd: (p&atile;tĩ/party)


8th december 1998

Installed another netware server to get some load sharing effect.
But this requires moving some of the users. Stress......

Upgraded Markus's Linux machine and enabled netware emulation,
samba and pnp sound, everything without having to reboot !!!!!!!!!

jwotd: (made/until)


7th december 1998

Martin Schmitt plays at Jan's Bistro, I hope to get there in time.
Nope. To much to work for today, sorry.

The main harddisk of www.stun.de seems to be defect, because I heard
it respinning this morning. Reyk will give me his 2 GB UW harddisk
for swapping.
BTW: next install date (yes it's still here) is the 12.12.98
Hope the best. Password rotation and SSL needs to be completed on friday.

jwotd: (getsuyõbi/monday)


6th december 1998

Results of the last 9 hours (CCNACHT):

- world record for the biggest heterogenic Linux cluster
- german internet backbones glowing in the dark nicht
- ISPs overloaded due to multiple the videostreams
- 140 MB internet traffic through my local network
- IRCed and Videoconferenced until late morning
- Transferred 2 GB of MP3 stuff internally
- Tom, Martin and me are very tired, but not bored at all.

Good night for now.

jwotd: (nemu/tired)


5th december 1998

Tonight is the big ComputerClub night, so don't expect to much
details. Instead go to: http://www.ccnacht.de

jwotd: (hitoban/the whole night)


4th december 1998

Another quart gone, time for statistics at work. This weekend a
year 2000 compatibility test is planned. Wish you much fun folks,
without me.

My perl scripts displaying web activity and counting page accesses
are up and running. Fascinating ! ;-)

Wrote some emergency stuff for www.stun.de.

Tonight there's a Guinness Book record to fight for in every Irish
Pub in Germany. I wont miss that.

Will get visited by Ayako from Japan in about two weeks. Time to get
all the words in my head. 8-))

jwotd: (raihõ/visit)


3rd december 1998

Got my big 19 inch network rack today, thanks to Cetin for driving,
so I can move all my machines in the rack and close the door to get
my silence back. :-)

Tried the BIND 8 configuration and everything runs beautyful and fast.

Hacked some more perl code to do page access counting and web server
statistics as on-the-fly images. Hey I think I love it...

Configured masquerading today so that we can start the long CC-Night
without any problems. Next step will be load sharing with a second ISP.

jwotd: (todana/cupboard)


2nd december 1998

Installed another (it was the same, but on a different hardware) 4.11
netware server, and on the old (newer) hardware a 3.12 one, at work.

Bought two new books to be prepared for sylvester at work ;-)
One is "Goto Perl 5" and the other "CGI programming for the WWW",
I'm still waiting for the "CGI programming in Perl" to become available.

Revised the whole nameserver configuration today, since the RedHat
5.2 update has changed from BIND 4 to BIND 8, which is completely
different.
Takes a lot of time, and you can do a lot of mistakes too.
(www.stun.de and zuse1.fps-net.mbox are totally tuned now.)

Maybe some performance problems are resolved too, I just didn't have
the time to verify this. (gatewaying and BIND 8 DNS through firewalls)

jwotd: (moto/basics)


1st december 1998

Configured gatewaying and some firewalling stuff to be prepared
for the spectacular Computer Club Night coming up this weekend.
Here is a first part of the upcoming program:


FR 4.12.98
   16:00 Computerclub Spezial (TV: WDR)
   - 17:00
   21:00 Essen
   23:00 Irish Pub (Guiness Buch Rekordversuch):
   (Gerd, Andy, Thomas, Reyk)
   - 0:00
SA 5.12.98
   0:00 Irish Pub (Deutschland Rekordversuch)
   - 2:30
   4:00-14:00 SCHLAFEN !!!
   14:30 Computerclub Praxis live (TV: WDR)
   18:00 Aufbau Hardware / Internettest (Routing) Proxy
   20:00 Essen
   21:00 Computerclub Vorschau Programm (TV: WDR)
   23:00 Computerclub Nacht Paderborn live
         (TV: WDR/Phoenix ; RADIO: 3 Stations ; INET: 60 WEBCAMS !!!)
   - 0:00
SO 6.12.98
   0:00 Computerclub Nacht (Linux Cluster WeltRekord Versuch)
   - 6:15
   6:30 Hardware Abbauen
   - 8:00
   9:00-18:00 SCHLAFEN !!!


jwotd: (mojõshimono/event)

Diary Import November 1998

1998-11-30T13:21:00.000+01:00

30th november 1998

Had a free day and watched the Truman Show at the movies together with Tom.

After that we had some Guinness at Shans.
In our heated discussion about MCSE's and Windows NT the barkeeper
suddenly joined in and suggested Tom to try Linux as an alternative. ;-)
Unbelievable ! I never heard so many fu..ing bullsh.ts in one sentence
before as he told about the bugs in NT.
This really was a very surprinsing evening. When the barkeepers propose
you to install Linux (and give Unix's just two more years on the market)
who will this all come to an end ??? 8-))))))))))))))))

jwotd: (gyõten/surprise)


29th november 1998

Thinking about two 10GB harddisk for my MP3 suite ???? ;-)
Maybe a christmas gift to myself. 8-)))))))

Downloaded some of the RedHat updates and did a re-rsync to the CDROM
tree of RedHat 5.2 (some packages were missing. tetex-stuff)

Martin Schmitt is giving a gig tonight. Boogie Woogie Piano of course.

jwotd: (fushi/melody)


28th november 1998

Improved my Perl programming to the usage of the CGI.pm subroutines.

Was invited at Tom's inauguration party because of his new flat.
A lot of people there and almost everyone has discovered Tom's one
and only passion: Food ! ;-)

jwotd: (shukuga/party)


27th november 1998

Finished the tragedy of mirroring several partitions on the ultras
diskarrays. Quite complex.... if you do it for the first time. ;-)
(Who else wants its SUN's mirrored, call me !!!)

Had no time to install the Firewall-1 yet, so this one moves...
...maybe next month ?

Discovered the world of Perl since c't has explained the basics.
m4 has gone. Perl is coming.

jwotd: (muzuka/difficult)


26th november 1998

The day is long Willis !
(Do you have Netscape 4 ? Type: about:Willis)

For me today, it's SUN-day :-)))))))))

Planned to install linux on both ultrasparcs but this architecture isn't
currently supported..... damn !!!!!!!!!!!

Fooled around trying to set up mirroring with disk suite which is much
more complex in the gui environment, than the old text based version.
(Did I mention wrong way mirroring ??? 8-))) Ups.....)

Birgit and Chris invited me for dinner at the Saigon. Yammi. ;-)

jwotd: (hi/sun)


25th november 1998

Installed an novell netware 4.11 server today for the first time,
crazy what have they done ??? 4.10 was such easy and the 4.11
installation broke four times. Simple hang-ups. Never had that problem
before. So "I did it my way", copying everything by hand, which worked
in just 20 Minutes.

Installed StarOffice 5.0 now, which really works fantastic if you still
know the original 4.0 version based on linux. ;-)

Discovered tons of high-quality games at the game tome for linux and
a few petitions to remember the commercial game hacker(coder) clubs ;-))
such as Westwood, Warner, Lucas Arts, Simon & Schuster, ...
that there are some people out in the woods with non-MS OS's on their
machines. But maybe they're just all extorted by the Helloween-monster.
M8-[=]S

jwotd: (shigoto/occupation)


24th november 1998

Encountered some really strange netware problems.
Volumes that obviously have mashed FAT entries ??? Ugly !
Informed everyone about an emergency repair and just one minute
before shutdown the error was gone ?!? :-[

Axel Zwingenberger is giving a gig tonight at Landshut, so I don't
wont to miss this. BTW he now has his own location on the net:
www.boogiewoogie.net

jwotd: (ongaku/music)


23rd november 1998

The new official 2.0.36 RH5.2 Kernel has to be downloaded and installed.
I think I'll wait for some more stuff to get the complete update directory
at updates.redhat.com.

Downloaded some more themes for the Enlightenment window manager.
Hey, this one is real fun ! 8-)
Even if you mix it with the Gnome panel.

Have to install two firewalls in the second week of 1999 on E250 SUNs. ;-)

This thursday and friday might be a linux day we'll see.
Someone tries to install a SNA server which can handle 1000 simultaneously
and in addition they'll be encrypted in realtime.
Can you guess what the operating system will be :-)))))))))))))))))))))))))

Trash all your exchange servers and set up linux clusters !!!!!!!!!!
(All of those pig noses, who wont believe me that linux takes its chance.)

jwotd: (asobu/play)


22nd november 1998

Downloaded StarOffice 5.0 for linux today. 70 MB no problems.
But you'll have to get your installation code at StarDivision.
Just for those of you who'll install it in a few years. 8-))))

jwotd: (chokoréto/chocolate) ;-) Yammi


21st november 1998

Markus has used my machine to compute MP3's and disabled the RC5 task.
Gonna kill him !!!!!!!!!!! :-(=)

Had to go to work today and reloaded 80 HUB's with new images.
Plus tried to install Winword across a 5KB/sec line. Huahhh..... ;-)

Totally fascinated discovered the "Enlightenment" window manager for
linux. Which makes every machine looking really freaky. 8-))))))
(Just like the laptop desktop in the movie "Hackers".)

jwotd: (gekido shiteiru/angry) :-(=)


20th november 1998

Three of my four reported bugs on RH5.2 bugzilla have already been
solved. Hey those guys are lightning fast. |->

Tested my new Langenscheid Japanese language training program,
pretty cool....

c't reported about the halloween documents and wrote that the Microsoft
employees themselves are totally fascinated of Linux's features and
development. Ahhh, they're getting cold feet ???? ;-))))))))))

jwotd: (óyorokobi/great pleasure)


19th november 1998

Urged two more people to install Gnome. ;-)

Harddisk prices are falling dramatically. Pretty cool.

Try to download StarOffice 5 for Linux tonight.


18th november 1998

Got the IP address for the FFM server today, so now it really becomes
a serious thing. ;-))) Here it is 62.144.162.100

Somebody tell me how this works http://4563862512 ????
How do I know my own magic number ???

Reyk bought the RedHat 5.2 CD today, so you'll see him having a
install party tonight ??? 8-))))))

BTW: Have you heard of the Third Linux Install Party in Munich
some days ago ? Don't know the URL now, look back here later.
Has something to do with CompuPlus and the Munich Linus Users Group.

Have to cook for my mom now.... see ya tomorrow...

Met with Gerd, Eva and Tom at Shans, where the E.Z. Pieces are having
a gig tonight as every wednesday in november.
(Didn't know that Alanis Morisette has a twin sister who sings Ironic
more powerful than she does.)


17th november 1998

Had a meeting with Novell today, how to increase netware performance
on our biggest server and the entire campus.
Too bad that someone said from the beginning that everything will be
migrated to NT next year. (unbelievable st... you know what I mean...)

Again had trouble at work because of the disability of some people
that don't know what their work is and who and for what they're paid.

Someone send me an offer... those guys here are just to stupid to
survive the market.


15th to 16th november 1998

My mom had an accident at home and has brought to a hospital
because of very serious injuries.

...no further activities these days....


14th november 1998

Discovered another three bugs in the new RedHat 5.2 release which I
started to track down and inform RedHat about.

Met with Gerd and enjoyed the live band at Shans after some delicious
chinese food. ;-))))))


13th november 1998

Did many flash updates on Lexmark printerports at work.

Downloaded the first three updates for RedHat 5.2 !

Compiled and installed the 2.0.36 linux kernel.
But that didn't solve some obscure shared lib problems.


12th november 1998

Lexmark problem now fixed. The updates will last 'til tomorrow.

Got my 16 channel mixer today, yippi !!! 8-))))))))))

Tried to understand the python scripting language. Gave up. ;-)
Is there a language in the world that is understandable for normal
human beings ???

Tried balsa mail reader for Gnome, but POP3 seems not to be supported
at the moment. (To the programmers, I need multiple POP3's !!! min.5)

Tried to configure MPPP 128kBit ISDN syncppp but it doesn't seem to
work even no entries about added channels in the debug output.
Very strange....

Wrote my first bug report on RedHat 5.2. The shipped procinfo-14.2
has its problems displaying all 16 IRQ's correctly. instead of IRQ
8 to 15 it shows up 16 to 23. Never heard of them ?? :-)))))
procinfo 13 is ok !


11th november 1998

Solved the SNA problems on the AIX machines. An power outage yesterday
did some funny things to the PU's and SNA gateways.

Another problem occured and seems solved, which occures when printing
from a netware server through the ATM backbone to a marknet xle printerbox.
Old images like 3.62.1 seem to have a problem here and are unable
to receive anything bigger than 1kB. The new image 4.133.1 works and
also the marknet pro 3 version. But the big item is that we cannot flash
the 3.x images to 4.x ones. :-)) Hey, what a mess for Lexmark support :-))

Played a little bit with PHP 3, but IMHO it's very hard to learn for
what you earn with it. I think it's better to get familiar with perl
and SSI then. (Also not my favourite choice. m4 would be better)

Gone at the movies together with Tom and watched Antz !
A really great cartoon movie with a touch of Woody Allen's
kind of neurotic.


10th november 1998

Upgraded the ffm-server to RedHat 5.2 Apollo.
Wow ! Absolutely no problems.
Everything went fine, three rpmsaves had to be renamed and finished.
Pretty cool.

Dial-Up is again connected to ffm and fax receive is for sure down.

Tomorrow there's a really hairy job for me to do, because one of
our AIX machines at work suddenly refuses to speak SNA.
What a wise decision :-))))

Who needs IP ? When you've got a big wide ATM backbone there's much
enough space for broadcasters like SNA, NETBEUI, NETBIOS, etc.. ;-)


9th november 1998

The new ATM backbone runs perfectly. Everything is lightning fast.
Great work guys !
Route tracking is now some more complicated since you have to check
virtual paths through the backbone. But I love this. ;-))))

We cancelled the installation date tomorrow for the ffm server.
It's much to expensive to go there by train instead of waiting
one or two more weeks and go there by car with a friend.

Also the backup telnet access isn't done yet. And believe me,
I don't want to start without that, because no other out of band
access is possible.

Finished downloading RedHat 5.2 with an average of 8.2kB/s which
is really great for ISDN and german ISP connections into the UK.


8th november 1998

Had a bad night. Our network supervision called me at 1am and again
at 3:30 pm so I had to take a quick look whats going on at work.
My colleagues just finished their ATM construction half an hour before
and missed some things that didn't work 100 pc. So it was my job. :-(

Intensified my knowledge in m4 HTML writing, and I found the first
weak point. m4_define is limited in size. About 100 chars ????
Another problem is the inclusion of multiple macros into one single
definement. And the last bad behaviour seems to be in the string
processing. Sometimes the "`" and "'" work and sometimes not.
Depends on how many spaces, lines or included-defines you use ????

Downloading the next piece of redhat 5.2.
No sponsors found yet ;-)


7th november 1998

Another saturday at work, had to stop and restart two AIX HACMP clusters.
What fun.... but everything went fine. Some other problems occured on
cisco routers where standby ip was configured but udp had its problems.

Few more CDs converted just like the days before.

Downloaded almost the half redhat 5.2 now, don't want to see my bill
for this. Somebody give me a 8MBit link ???
At this place some compliments to my provider netsurf.de:
Most of the time 8,2kB/sec to everywhere in the world and never busy
phone lines, really fantastic.


6th november 1998

Not my day...

Several problems with netware for SAA host connections and a crashed
fileserver at highnoon plus phone terror the whole day.


5th november 1998

Continued RSyncing redhat5.2 which I started yesterday late night.


4th november 1998

More MP3s done. I urgently need a very huge random access media
to store all my MP3 converted CDs. Anyone experienced on DVD-RAM ?

FFM-server installation will be tuesday, definetely I hope.


3rd november 1998

Hey, saw that RedHat 5.2 was released yesterday.
But didn't find time to start downloading yet.

Did a lot of new MP3 plus installed a new 4.3 GB harddisk in our
netware server at work to get them stored. ;-)

Radio is past, realtime streaming is now ! 8-)))


2nd november 1998

Installation was cancelled. Not at least as there is a new security
hole discovered in ssh 1.2.26. We ran 1.2.22 ups....

Now 1.2.26-3 from RedHat is installed in which according to RedHat
itself this vulnerability is already fixed.

Wrote some automatic scripts for the FFM-server to restart daemons,
shutdown, rebooting, mirroring (on demand using rsync) and so on...

An emergency script has to be written to start up an independent
sshd or telnetd to ensure accessing the system in case of a died
inetd. This should be activatable by special http-request, since
this is the only daemon running standalone.
(sshd runs lightning fast from inetd, so it's started by the
superdaemon instead of running all the time standalone)

Hey Gerd, whats up with those passwords ???
(Dialup isn't reactivated yet.)

Next installation date is this thursday or at latest next tuesday.


1st november 1998

Completed work on the FFM server for the installation on tomorrow.
Also installed an additional fan for the baramundi :-)))

Dial-up is disabled guys ! Fax-receiption is back online !

Tried to sample from an old single record. Oh it's horrible,
without a real mixer and preamp it's almost impossible.
After 5 hours of plugging sampling and thinking the thing was
done and ended up (guess) yep as a MP3.

Rebuild my private machine which was divided into several pieces
to complete the FFM server in the last two months.

Switched off the mailbox, since most of the valueable contents
have moved to the FFM server.

Tomorrow evening you should be able to contact the server at
http://www.stun.de
If nothing went wrong.

Don't be shocked there are no pages done yet !!!
It's all under construction. Pages will be set up by the individuals.

Diary Import October 1998

1998-10-31T13:21:00.000+01:00

31st october 1998

Wrote a script to do root mirroring on demand for the FFM server.
This one includes redundancy in case of usage failures or even
complete crash of the first harddrive. The second part mirrors
the home, usr and var areas to set up a fully functional webserver
with the most recent data in case of an emergency due to drive
failure of the main data harddisk.
I think this way is much better than the current raid-1 option.

Heard from Computrclub on WDR that they'll set up a cluster of
300 Linux machines and will report live all the night from
december 5th to 6th. So stay tuned. Live on the internet.


30th october 1998

Had some AIX trouble at work, where the ulimit says unlimited and
an uncompress to an archived +2GB file says ulimit reached.
Maybe its just uncompress itself, that can only handle files smaller
2GB. How boring.....

Prepared SSA harddisk drives for installing on tomorrow.

Kept looking for a tool to easy created an interactively update
HTML pages, through a browser page itself and groups or users
should be support with read only and write access. Any proposes ?

Reactivated the CD-ROM drive of my fathers computer, which hasn't
been turned on for a half year now. (Meanwhile it may happen, that
Win95 forgets its hardware settings and drivers...????) :-)

Played with Tom a few rounds of "You don't know Jack !"


29th october 1998

Installed a netware 4.1 server at work to catch all the NOT-LOGGED-IN
connections of the whole campus produced by our NT machines because
of a failure in the old intranetware client 4.11(+a).

Met with Gerd and had japanese sushi dinner at Munichs Enshu.

Spent the rest of the night at the "Vogler Bar" where Lutz is giving
a boogie piano gig. Met there with Karl and everyone of us played a
short boogie medley. (I hate that cold wheater....fingerfreezer...)


28th october 1998

Wrote to Novell to ask for any suggestions on making our netware
server as fast as possible including software and OS updates as
well as for any cost.

Discovered a giant archive of MP3s at work. Urgently need something
to store all the files. It's growing day for day, almost scaring.
A 650 MB CD-ROM cannot be the final solution. Also DVD-RAM seems
to be dying because of its low dimensioned capacity.

Installed Gimp on NT4, if you delete the script-fu part it'll
work. Not fast and sometimes very odd in graphics redraw, but it
works. Maybe this will force Adobe to lower prices for PS5.

Experimented with some new diary styles, but after showing the
first results to some colleagues and reviewing the extended code
I decided to live with the old style layout.

Copied the whole mailbox and a few archives of japanese programs
into the FFM servers ftp area. As long as locally possible. ;-)

Lutz is playing boogie tomorrow evening so I've to go there.
Hey Karl, Reyk, Babsi and Gerd would you like to join ?


27th october 1998

Had a big meeting at work today. Although we gave the responsible
persons many different solutions, they wont accept anything that
fixes problems finally. Instead they're giving up more and more
of the fine features. And IMHO it's simply unfair to compete with
a netware 4 750 user ppro200 machine against a 100 user p2/350 NT 4.
I regret it not being allowed to give them a linux samba machine on
a p133. Maybe death rate of NT admins would increase to much...

Made big plans how to increase performance of a netware 4 server
updating several hardware and software components.

Installed a scsi tape drive and made backups from my mailbox and
the FFM server. Can't remember how to store only files from within
a list, so I discovered "taper". Hey, what's tar, doc ?

Got a big problem solved.
It's not easy to rsync a big directory tree when you configure
a module for /home/ftp/ab and try to search the files in /home/ab.
8-)) (This costs me two weeks of my life.)
Now the backups have to be remade..... grrrrr....

I forgot to mention that I discovered autoexpect about three days ago.
It's like a macro recorder which makes it very easy to cron file
transfers and telnet sessions....
(Take a look at it ! The output is a fully functional expect script.)


26th october 1998

What a day of horror today. Arrived at work and instantly joined
a group of six other technicians to fix some serious problems on
our new fast-ethernet migrated secondary network.
Most of the NT machines showed up blue screen after about 10 minutes
running. Switch to switch connectivity was ok, but every connection
from a PC to its default gateway had about 40 pc misses. Wow.....
And a third failure seems to be a problem on the UPS power line.
If two lasers heat up at the same time, some of the newer ATX-PCs
showed "Out of scan range" monitor messages because of the graphics
adapter failed to work immediately.
Now think again what would happen if we would use cheaper monitors.
Blast away.... :-))))))))))))))))

Have to install a fan on the 4 GB harddisk of the FFM server because
it heats up much too high. Ouch.

BTW: Aussies would call them Barramundi harddisks :-)))))))))))


25th october 1998

My parents arrived early morning 5:40 AM directly from Kuala Lumpur,
so I got to get up much to early for a sunday morning. Uahh...

Much stories from my parents to listen to...


24th october 1998

Bought 128MB memory for the FFM server, installed it and rerun lilo
with the memory option. Time that they add automatic memory detection
for more than 64MB main memory in the next Linux kernel.

Updated the FFM page. Hey Gerd, would you recalculate costs ?

One of my colleagues had panic at work, since he discovered that
no one has joined him to track the secondary network problems.
I'm sorry, but today is the big meeting with my old school friends.

First time, I saw that crazy Beatles movie "Yeah, yeah, yeah" on TV.
Looks like the male version of "Spice World". ;-)


23rd october 1998

Reached place 3500 at RC5 statistics. But I'm sure I'll fall in the
next estimated 20 years... :-))))))
RC5 64-bit encryption seems to be enough for this century.

Tried to get RSync running when copying many files to the server
but yet I don't know how to automaticaly create the neede directory
branch structure.

Wrote the FFM admin kernel howtos using m4 macro language for
design changes.
Hey Gerd: please upload me the m4 for NT. Thx.

Again much trouble at work, this time most of our bigger secondary
networks, experienced heavy load problems on routers and switches.
And additionally they wont upgrade their 1500 intranetware clients,
which at the moment is only a fourth of all planned NT workstations.

ts, ts, ts... You know most people are lazy, but those are really
stupid ones. You want support ? If so, do it, and don't ask,
or move over to Linux, finally.

Gone for chinese dinner together with Gerd and finished the evening
with a cool Guinness. (It seems I found someone to translate all the
boogie text stuff, I never had time for.)


22nd october 1998

Installed GNOME 0.30 completely with all the newest packages
available. Had absolutely no problems uninstalling the old GNOME
core, libs, gtk, glib etc. Really good work !!!!!!!!!
(For those of you doing the same: Be informed to install the
glib and gtk compatibility versions (gtk+10 and glib10) before,
and the developement versions 1.1.x after.)

Found the solution how to get rid of the NOT-LOGGED-IN connections
on our Netware 3.x and 4.x servers when using NT clients on the
same network. (Hey that will be much fun to upgrade the intranetware
clients on all NT machines installed to version 4.2)

Made MP3s of four older CDs on NT 4. Hell, they'd never heard of
process priority and correct memory management, I guess.

Ever tried to remove a CDROM when NT is under heavy load ?
After load goes back to normal the explorer refuses to do anything
before you put back the SAME CD into the drive.
Of course you can feel free to reboot your machine to solve this. :-))))

Got invited for roastbeef dinner by my uncle and aunt. Thanks, yummie !
Finally got my Skokiann by Louis Armstrong (+6min version) from my
uncle. (Just know, whom to ask.)


21st october 1998

And again, tons of stuff to do at work. Had to restore 160 MB
file structures with ADSM, but server load and stone old tapes
made it a real horror trip. (Did I mention users, which can't
wait 'til it's all done. So I earned some nice file locks.)

It seems that no one was delighted of working this morning,
when I arrived at highnoon.

Collected almost all available images of didgeridoos on the net
to set up a new personal didge homepage. Since someone ask me
for that yesterday.

Wrote two new admin howtos for www.stun.de.
Using Rsync and Secure Shell.


20th october 1998

Tried to configure telnet forwarding via ssh to the FFM server,
but this looks like there are some tricks needed.

At work they told me that the server crashed two times after our
big work. But IMHO this will be another mans problem.
As far as I can say, the server is up and running from that minute
on when I walked through the door this morning. ;-) You know.
God loves some people.
Maybe because of the bible. (Linux in a nutshell, you remember ???)

Installed new harddisks on a netware server and did some profiling.

Wrote a really cool HTML page, where you can have an overview of
all german TV stations at once. :-))) Pretty cool, this is something
for FFM (http://andys.stun.de/tv)

Played around with some Winamp audio plugins.
Hey Azzurro speeded up to 50 pc could be the next chartbreaker. ;-)
I'll look forward to mix a new techno version of it. Be tensed...


19th october 1998

Finished the server reconstruction early 5 AM in the morning....
Damn, we're now working for 21 hours. Mad, really mad.....
Now it's urgently time to get some sleep.


18th october 1998

Started rearranging Netware volumes on our big 4.1 server
together with Cetin early morning at 8:30 AM.

We expected to have everything done at latest 8 PM, but
our estimated schedule differs more and more...

Never trust a schedule....


17th october 1998

Installed and tested around the RSync-Server on the FFM machine,
which still resides in Munich. Hey Reyk what's fact ???

Did some Chinese cooking with Tom at his new apartment.

Will have to work tomorrow....


16th october 1998

Did some documentation of new AIX systems and a run around hunting
for the serial numbers of all AIX storage sub systems.

Spent the rest of the day at Birgit's birthday party.


15th october 1998

Hey I'm on place 3600 with RC5. Not bad for an individual.

Had some (human) trouble at work, sometimes they drive me mad. 8-(=)

Got another two job announcements for web page design.
Thanks, but first of all, I even got no time to update my own pages
and second, I regret your ignorance for all the really cool
web sites around. Maybe later when I reached that level too.
(Wait for my new boogie pages...)

A propos boogie pages:
My scanner is still inactive, so you all have to wait for the new
pictures you sent to me. (It's more a problem of space on my desk
to put the scanner in range of the computer.)

I also need a solution for my 300 CDs, maybe someone make me a gift?
A 500 disk changer should be ok for the beginning. ;-)


14th october 1998

Met with IBM for AIX hardware support. Hey those guys are lightning fast.

Installed the 4 GB harddisk on the FFM server and moved some filesystems.
Works great, absolutely no problems, also the mirror copy of the whole
root partition disk. So we now can boot from the second disk, just in case.

Hey, I got innd working as news-server. Great ! Subscribing, posting
and reading with Netscape. Pretty cool.

My ISP is again unreachable.... hey guys don't go on with that, I don't
want to move again that soon.


13th october 1998

HACMP now works again after some praying, but the lf-terminal
is defect. Will met with IBM on thursday.

Installed Winamp 2.03 at work, hey who needs that CD-Audio drivers ????
Instead use the whole space on CD for MP3's :-))))))))

Deinstalled my future network cupboard for soon transport next week or so.

Discovered how to install stable and unstable code libraries for use
at the same time. (I hope that works also on the next stable version update.)

Gerd is hopefully working on the FFM password rotation concept.

Invited my uncle and aunt to japanese dinner. Very delicious... ;-)


12th october 1998

HACMP trouble on an AIX cluster....huahhhh, not my day.
Introduced Alex into real web-chat, not just company-wide.
Maybe she'll manage IRC someday. I'm working on it ! ;-)

Gerd still has trouble connecting via PPP to the FFM-server
but I'm sure not for long, cause it's moving on saturday.

We'll discuss that this evening with some Guinness at Shans.


11th october 1998

Studied the new c't magazine. And seen a documentation on TV
how to easy implementing structures of real AI to machines.
Hey that looks like a new project to me:
Simple, cheap and fascinating(c)Spock.

Tried to recompile BeRo-FTPD for use with shadow passwords and
statistics. But suddenly everything seems broken. ???
First compilation was without any problems, I thougth...


10th october 1998

Bought a new videorecorder. Hey this one has some really nice
features like synchronizing the channles from my TV and indexing
videotapes via videotext onto special chiplabels.

Hey that works great, but I'm missing RS232 and /dev/sony-vcr0 ? ;-)


9th october 1998

Had much trouble at work, lots of network problems.
Did some buffer tuning on 14 Cisco routers, much work....


8th october 1998

Some new AIX problems. 9 GB disks on 4 GB volume groups with 4 MB
PP size. Hmm....

Installed my japanese word processor and dictionary tools on my
new machine at work. Hey that works.... Kanji, Kata-, Hiragana....

Met with Tom at Shanannigans.


7th october 1998

L0pht has done it's work ;-) Only 13 hours :-))))))))))
Now, everything works and gets installed.

Again did some code tracing on the Newbridge software, after some
of the newest patches have found their way into the machine.
I hate those script writers and environment exporters.

Encountered some obscure sendmail failure messages when emailing to
unknown users. Somehow the whole process did some funny things.

Had dinner at my preferred Chinese with Gerd and showed the world
some snooker after that. (Without Guinness, bad quote.)


6th october 1998

Did some debugging on Solaris XDM and on the newbridge management
software. Ugly. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Maybe a NT WS
licensed connections problem.

A propos NT, tried to install some programs and gone crazy.
Now it's time for L0pht ;-)

RC5 got 1,1Mkey/sec on the 400MHz machine, maybe it'd be better
running Linux instead of NT. Just for performance. :-)))


5th october 1998

Got my 400 MHz Pentium II at work today.
They've installed NT and restricted almost everything. Ugly.
What shells, as long as RC5 gets more power :-)))))

Had to solve sendmail problems on an Ultra-Sparc at work.
Torture that man who had installed this machine ! >:-(

Now the POP3 server on the FFM machine works fine.
Also tried to setup temporary PPP dialin. Try again Gerd.

Finally my videorecorder is broken. Damn, have to buy a new one
this week. Unrepairable defect. But a good stand-by tuner with IR.


4th october 1998

Sendmail now works fine, also on my own system with fidonet and uucp,
since I downgraded to the glibc compatible version 8.8.7.

Mail delivery between www.stun.de and zuse1.fps-net.mbox were completely
successful, I hope that's enough testing offline. Time for SPOP.

Also did IP address change just for testing without problems.

The Net-Fu server is now running without problems as it seems,
but I think it's better we'll start it only when we need to.



3rd october 1998

Configured sendmail on the FFM server. Some of the host aliasing
function don't work, but the rest is fine.


2nd october 1998

Did some Excite page updates on the FFM server.


1st october 1998

Played around with WGET which is really a fantastic tool, almost like
Netcat but much better for automatic download scripts of all kind.
With the ability to mirror or index whole websites.

But I was not able to get it work on the FFM's raw RH51.
My personal daily upgraded systems had absolutely no problems.

Diary Import September 1998

1998-09-30T13:22:00.000+02:00

30th september 1998

Net-Fu is now up and running on the FFM server.
You now can see that our Kung-Fu is still the best ;-)

(Remind me that I include pragma no-cache in all CGI outputs.)


25th to 29th september 1998

I'm ill ! Tonsilitis and a flu, just as usual. :-(


24th september 1998

Installed the Excite search engine on the FFM server and started
first indexing. Also set up automatically updating every highnoon.


23rd september 1998

What a horrible day for me. 10 hours without any electricity
because they are intalling a new counter.
This will gonna throw me back several places on RC5 statistics.

Power restored. Everything went fine. Also the OS/2 box came up
without any circumstances as usual.


22nd september 1998

Did some shopping today, and bought a new frame for my planned
boogie woogie collage to hang over my piano.

Time for a Guinness tonight, so I met with Gerd, Chris and Birgit at
Shananigins and enjoyed the folksdance evening.

Discoverd some beautiful compositions by George Gershwin on a TV
documentation in the late evening and decided to buy a CD tomorrow.
Maybe some of his songs can give me new inspiration on playing the
piano.


21st september 1998

Did some minor updates on my personal homepages.
Just forgot to add one of my favourite music styles: A Capella

Again some updates on the boogie pages. Hey what's going on, here !
Everybody got internet access for free ?

Another breakthrough in FFM server configuration, finally got the
nameservice running with domain only addressing.
Type http://stun.de and you'll get transported to http://www.stun.de


20th september 1998

Reconnection time to the FFM server after pulling the plug is also very
obscure. Sometimes the session isn't cancelled at all and the other time
you have to wait about 3 minutes getting a ping replied.

Some more boogie-page updates on the way, especially new images.

Got in touch with m4 macro processing, and it's really amusing.
I'll try to code some of my HTML pages in m4.


19th september 1998

Did lots of boogie page updates, not only text also some new images.

Experienced problems with BeroFTPD, and it seems that shadow passwords are
not supported yet ???

Tried to configure sendmail with multidomains and virtusertable, but
I think it wasn't the great idea after restarting. Grrhgihateit !
This one's for Gerd.

Played around with Net-Fu with the currently downloaded X virtual frame
buffer. But there are still some problems around as long as it isn't
recompiled completely I think.

Also checked out the new version of bttv 0.5.16, but it still has problems
on millenium II when using 1024x768x16bpp resolution.

Watched Virtuosity on TV, also a very strange story, Lownmower-Man is better.


18th september 1998

Did some fine tuning on the FFM servers configuration files and gave up
RAID-1 configuring, it's really hard, and without the possibility to repair
a crashed disk, it is not useful in our minds.

Downloaded some more packages to upgrade libs that made problems.

Hacked some new pages for the admins, added new users, configured
sendmail aliases, encountered problems in named MX records.
Set up logfile rotation, installed shadow passwords and got the hardware
finished (drive bays installed and harddisks plugged in).


17th september 1998

Got BeroFTPD running on the FFM server as well as Apache completely
configured including virtual hosts and server status.
Also the monitoring of the Winbond chip, some howto pages for us
admins and the complete nameserver configuration are set up.

SSH is running perfectly, I'm configuring the whole machine through
this encrypted and compressed link. And the best, I can unplug the
ethernet for 300 seconds without loosing link nor synchronisation !


16th september 1998

Installed lots of missing packages on the FFM server,
enabled dial-up for tty sessions so far, fascinated played
around with monitoring of temperatures.

Gone working just to join a little party of our team-leader.

Visited Tom in his new flat. And as I mentioned before it is
now smaller than it looked like before. You wont believe that ?
We then went to the "all you can eat" chinese, and ended up
just a few meters away at Shanannigans Irish pub. Hmm, Guinness !

Got secure shell running on FFM. Will now try md software raid,
just in case something goes wrong when almost everything is
set up and configured.


15th september 1998

Holiday for the next three weeks now.

Did big shopping, to get my food storage filled up again.

Installed RC5 on the FFM server, and benchmark testing showed
up 2.5 Mkeys/sec in DES and 860Kkeys/sec in RC5-64. Wow !


14th september 1998

Had some important meetings today, describing the scenarios
from last weekends netware changes action.

Played around with the winbond monitoring code, and surprise
it works ! There must be a second temperature sensor onboard
of the Gigabyte 686BX. But I can't imagine where this should be.
Maybe inside the BX chipset itself, or inside the 83977 winbond.

Showed Gerd the FFM server, and after that had some Guinness at
Shanannigans.


13th september 1998

The floppy seems to be really damaged, I used mine instead.
RedHat 5.1 got installed. Fast-Ethernet works great.
Temperature of the Celeron 300 is just about 24 degrees. Wow !

Don't want to do too much, this will be a positive day.
Except, writing my team-leader, what went wrong yesterday at work.


12th september 1998

Oh what a day. Motherboard and processor are ok, the latter one
had to be pressed with much force into the slot 1. Now it works.
Except that Toms floppy wont boot. I'll check this tomorrow.

Wasted 7 hours at work, trying to move netware volumes to 18 GB
harddisks. But volume file compression is gonna killing me.
Hope that they'll not cancel my vacancy plans.


11th september 1998

What a bad day. Swapped the motherboard and the new one is also
damaged. Maybe the processor itself is bad.


10th september 1998

FFM Status:
Couldn't get any swapable disk drive bays for SCSI so I used
mine instead.
Also took out some memory chips from my machine to get the FFM
server up. But then, had to give back the new motherboard,
because it had some obscure power problems.
I hope that's all and that they'll give me a new one.
Damn, everything was ready screwed and set up. I wanted to
install RedHat today, and start configuring.

Opened a new case at Computer 2000, oh I forgot the server
crash yesterday. Again Netware 4 dead-lock problems.

And, meanwhile as usual, a backbone crash for about 10 minutes.


9th september 1998

Bought and installed a slot fan for the FFM server.

Did some more configuration work on the apache.
Hey I love those virtual hosts. But we've to learn how to
use ../ links, because they break when chrooted.

Mounted drive bays for removeable disks into the FFM server.
It's worth it believe me. Oh I hate those micro screws !!!!!

Tried to find some more documentation on BeroFTPD. Nothing.
Maybe I should take a look at the man pages they are big enough.

Got a 3 1/2 inch floppy from Tom, and installed it.
So main memory and big harddisks are the last.


8th september 1998

Downloaded and reviewed the 2.0.36pre8 code. Hey they've moved
some unstable code back ?!?

Received a new boogie CD and bio by Henning Pertiet. Many thanks !

Exchanged a servers storage unit which reported fan failure.
Eyhhhh, what a dirty matter. All three server pairs were covered
with 5mm fine dust. Needed two hours to clean that up.

Met with Gerd and had a cool Guinness at O'Reillys.
After that had some sushi at Shoya. Hmmm, delicious !

Did almost any boogie pages updates that were pending in my
eMails inbox. There are just a few images to be scanned.

2:40 AM, virtual hosts are working on HTTP !
Server includes don't, but this should be minor.


7th september 1998

How I love monday mornings. The entire network stands still at work.

Bought motherboard and processor together with Reyk for the FFM server.

Screwed and cabled the server components, but don't want to test
it right now. I think that this will avoid a sleepless night.

Updated the FFM page with some of the FIX costs.


6th september 1998

Met Gerd online. What a surprise !

It looks like that Netscapes related server has gone !
What a pity, it's a real nice feature.

Installed Net-Fu, which works now in some parts. But there are
many additional packages needed not mentioned in the documentation.
Maybe I'll complete that tomorrow.
Let me tell you that this version is much much better than the
Net-Fus installed at webgfx pages.


5th september 1998

Visited the sports festival, of the insurance company where my
mum is working. It rained all the time, really nice. :-(
But food and drinking was for free, so it was well balanced. :-)

Exchanged some new CD's with Uli. Time to get the FPS 98/III
released. Maybe this will be a triple set this time.

Experimented with some new GIMP plugins like fire and photo stack.
Really nice features. There are some examples in here.


4th september 1998

And again a backbone crash at highnoon ! Fantastic.

Interactively designed some logos for the FFM machine at
www.webgfx.ch.
They're using the same NET_FU GIMP plugins available for download.
So anyone can setup such a interactive logomaker with webfrontend.

Met with Gerd and discussed some of the FFM stuff.

Had a nice talk to two young girls at the Chinese where Gerd
and me had dinner. And after saying goodbye, learned that we don't
even know their names. This had to be corrected in our minds,
with some cool Guinness at Shanannigans.


3rd september 1998

Tidied up my PC's harddisk at work and some servers, I was connected
at that time, too.

Installed the currently released bttv 0.5.15 video device driver,
but haven't seen a correct video yet. What are they doing ?????

Maybe it's only my system that has gone unstable.
Time for RedHat Mustang, to be released on CD !

Tried to install Freeciv in the latest version from sep 2nd,
a civilization II clone, but that one doesn't work either,
because of some missing libraries on my system. My fault.

Just took a quick look at the Streamserver package, which seems
to be exactly what I was looking for. A realtime videoserver
distributing streamed GIF or JPEG sequences. And there's a
special bttv add-on, which I tried to compile. Guess ! :-(

Installed PHP to get database access working on Apache, and this
one looks very very good, and has very easy code to implement on
HTML pages. PHP also makes possible beautiful serverside includes
and interactivly designed web-pages. (dynamic images and so on.)

A little bit frustrated, began to play LinCity and got asleep
after a few hours when income shows up negative values.


2nd september 1998

Reviewed the 2.0.36pre7 patch, lots of network stuff in here
and some important information on Cyrix and AMD CPU's.

Prof. Chaos called again, but I don't mind picking up the phone.
Give them your finger... you know !

Created lots of Compaq ROMpaq disks for upgrading our
big netware servers bios, config and harddisk firmware
to support an array of 18.2 GB harddisks.

Spent the whole night at work, improving our backbone and
doing some address changes on netware servers.

Finally got the 19 inch chassis for WWW.STUN.DE at home,
thanks to KAP's big car. ;-)

Upgraded to GIMP 1.0 with all the surroundings, gtk+, glib, ...
I have to say that I'm not satisfied with this version, my
machine locks after temporary diskspace disappeared when
creating big images. I'd never seen that before on 0.99.
It seems everything gets more worse when upgraded.
First the 2.0.35 kernel with its obscuring EIP exceptions
when almost every bit of physical memory is used.
Now the new GIMP and its enormous memory hunger.

Maybe, I should just add another 128 MB stripe.
Time to get the first GB complete. ;-)))))))
Would be much fun to watch the machine testing memory on boot.


1st september 1998

Another day of experience when one of our backbones crashes down.
Do you know other companies running there token ring backbone on
90 pc utilization ! Maybe we'll take money for a look, in future.

Professor Chaos called me, because his AIX workstation network
connection failed again. If you could see that shaky connector.
So I told him about solar flares and clickety !

Printed out and studied the new linux gazette.

Learned how to set up virtual FTP servers, if needed, using the
HOST command, which is also a newer feature of FTP clients.
But I guess we wont need that for FFM.

Diary Import August 1998

1998-08-31T13:11:00.000+02:00

31th august 1998

Made the stupid failure not to talk to this beautiful girl at
McDonalds yesterday evening. Damn, this is gonna drive me mad !

Did some server-care on our AIX machines, cleaning coredumps,
logfiles, unread mail spools, etc.

Met with Gerd and Michael at O'Reillys, and had pretty much fun
talking about girls and previous relationships, like the woman
do usually.


30th august 1998

Updated another two of my new personal homepages.

Did a little bit fine-tuning on SSH.

Tried to set up hourly passwords on the system, but that's really
hard. You always have to watch out not to lock up yourself.

Gerd called for some Guinness, so, by4now !


29th august 1998

Successfully installed SSH on my system.
Fascinating, also the X-Session is lightning fast !


28th august 1998

The hardware internals page for the FFM server is completed,
and I'm very satisfied with the result. You wanna take a look.

Received our 19 inch server case for FFM today !
Yep, time for big shopping next week ! ;-)

Finally got my tax forms completed, so I hopefully can ignore
the reminder, which will come for sure in the next few days.


27th august 1998

Spent almost the whole day, resolving hostnames and IP addresses
to complete a list containing all our unix machines. The funny
thing is, how to lookup DNS without knowing IP nor hostname.
I guess, God knows why he created MAC adresses ?

Finally got a solution for our FFM virtual host problems:

   The default webserver is
   www.stun.de:80
  
   links to all other webservers on the different ports are listed on
   /index.html
  
   including virtual hosts
   linux.stun.de:80
   etc.stun.de:80
  
   additionally we setup separated webservers for each
   linux.stun.de:81
   etc.stun.de:8x

Now, let's see what our requests do:

HTTP/1.0 requests / from www.stun.de
www.stun.de replies /index.html from www.stun.de document root

HTTP/1.0 requests / from linux.stun.de
www.stun.de replies /index.html from www.stun.de document root

HTTP/1.0 requests /something/other from linux.stun.de root
www.stun.de replies 404 and may redirect to www.stun.de/index.html

HTTP/1.0 requests / from linux.stun.de:81
linux.stun.de:81 replies /index.html from linux.stun.de:81 root


HTTP/1.1 requests / from www.stun.de
www.stun.de replies /index.html from www.stun.de

HTTP/1.1 requests / from linux.stun.de
linux.stun.de:80 replies /index.html from virtual host linux.stun.de:80

HTTP/1.1 requests / from linux.stun.de:81
linux.stun.de:81 replies /index.html from linux.stun.de:81 root

Any questions ? ;-)


26th august 1998

Collected some informations on digital still video cameras,
and tried to buy one, but every model I wanted was not
available at the moment.

Gone mad with Apache !!!
Talked to Netscape describing my Apache HTTP/1.1 problems
on Communicator 4.06. Damn, I can't believe it, full 1.1
support will be available in 5.0 only. And MSIE 4 HTTP/1.1
support is so bad that it is disabled by default on most
web-servers.

HTTP/1.0 Request Principle:
===========================
Client: http://test.stun.de/index.html
       DNS-Lookup test.stun.de -> IP
       send request GET /index.html to IP
Server: reply http://www.stun.de/index.html (which is wrong)

HTTP/1.1 Request Principle:
===========================
Client: http://test.stun.de/index.html
       DNS-Lookup test.stun.de -> IP
       send request GET test.stun.de/index.html to IP
Server: reply http://test.stun.de/index.html (which is correct)

So it seems we have no chance to enable name-only-based
virtual hosts with only one IP address. F**k It !
W3C has released HTTP/1.1 in 1994 and Netscape nor MS have
implemented it yet correctly. What's up Mozilla-guys !

Hey Reyk ! Did some updates to the FFM-page.


25th august 1998

Upgraded my Apache to 1.3.1 to get the virtual hosts working
without the need for more IP adresses, but since that update
everything is forbidden.

Discovered a nice statement for the programmers of you:

while (! asleep()) sheep++;


As I guessed we're only four at O'Reillys than the expected
seven. The first time, we didn't get our meals. I hope they'll
change that in future.


24th august 1998

Fortified my Netscape Communicator 4.06 again, to do some
128-bit encrypted homebanking.

Compared some data sheets of digital still video cameras,
but I'm not satisfied with price and quality at the moment.

Called many people by phone, and the odds are good that we'll
have a big gig at O'Reillys tomorrow evening.

Printed out the Securing RedHat Manual by Kurt Seifried.

Discovered the Bastard User from Hell release, but it is far from
being half as good as the original BOFH, therefor it isn't linked
either.

Urgently have to find out how to install differnt desktop themes
for Gnome from the GTK+ packages.


23rd august 1998

Time to say goodbye to some good friends and there dog,
which will move to spain the next days.
So this will be a barbeque-only day.


22nd august 1998

An aweful day, started with an emergency call at 1:30 AM,
the backbone had problems, fortunately everything went OK
just 40 minutes later, so I get back to sleep, just to
get into the same situation at 7:30 AM.

I hate those saturdays.

Tried to do the volume changes on a netware server, that I've
planned a few days ago and had to learn, that some stupid
users have filled additional 600 MB's of the first volume.
The bad thing is thess are 400 MB too much.
Now I've got to do a full backup and restore someday to get the
changes affect, instead of simply copying on the same harddisk.

Got the new Netscape 4.06 but don't know how to use the internet
keywords yet. Also my 128 encryption support has gone with this
update. Time to get a new fortifier.

Tried to update gnome from 0.13 to 0.28 but missed to download
one or two essential libs. Also gnotes, ee-0.2 wont work.

Analyzed the 2.0.36pre6 patch, but there's nothin of interest
for me. Just Linux ROSE updates (X.25 PLP) some 3com netdriver,
pci, processor and smp update stuff.


21st august 1998

Did I mention the Netware server crash yesterday evening ???
Mirroring wasn't even completed this morning.

But I now know why the discport doesn't connect in the last days.
Just plug it into a neighbour network, so that a router answers
the GNS-Queries instead of the server, and you'll never experience
timing problems.

Processed all our AIX's and deleted logfiles and error reports.

Got some great lyrics from Tom, Beatles for Sysadmins.
I'll put them right here tomorrow.

Payed the bill for my second ISP.


20th august 1998

Did some cost calculation for our FFM stuff and had a phonecall
with Gerd who is designing the first LINUX.STUN.DE logos.

Get very angry when trying to reconnect a Microtest Discport
to a Netware server. Damn, I hate those graphical interfaces.


19th august 1998

Had a workshop day and got introduced into Newbridge Mainstreet
Multiplexers. Really fascinating, especially how easy it must be
for the secret service agencies to spy out phone and data
connections, without need to be in range. Just copy timeslots
and send them round the globe. Wow....

Yesterday we founded the Linux User Group LINUX.STUN.DE,
so I've picked up all the various penguins available on
the web to design our new logo.


18th august 1998

Touch down ! Hey ya I don't want to see that Maestro statistics,
this time a Netware-GPF occures when loading servman.
Who said there's a running Netware 4 server available for Linux.

Thought about the next saturday reorganization of Netware volumes.
Could be very easy if nothing stupid happens.

Identified the crying harddisk in our management-Sun, which soon will
only be good as a sonic stunner for mosquitos.

Tried to get all the Admin-Gurus under one hat, but could
only convince Gerd and with big luck (thanks SUN) Reyk.
See ya at 20:30 at O'Reillys guys.


17th august 1998

Played around with the pilot tools for linux.
Really nice features, you'll never see somethin' on MS.

Yet another three CD's converted. Now my archive is almost
1GB of MP3 audio, which is equal to 1000 minutes or 67 hours
of CD quality music.

Let's play with DVD-RAM values:
5.2 GB on one DVD-RAM media would be equal to 347 hours or
14.4 days and nights or 2 weeks of audio. Hey that's a jukebox, babe.


16th august 1998

A boring day. I think I'll do nothing today.
Except of converting some more CD's.


15th august 1998

Faxed some high grade security stuff about Cisco's IOS to Reyk.
So if anyone of you is using a public accesible Cisco, get the
latest security information from CERT.

Converted 5 CD's today. Time to get the DVD-RAM drive with 5.2GB.
The media-price is just amazing: 70.-DM ! The drive itself 1200.-DM.
This way you should be able to store 130 hours audio in MP3 format
on just one DVD-RAM and you can delete and overwrite it as often as
you want.


14th august 1998

Today our whole team got introduced into ATM and how to handle
a faulty backbone, fast-uplink, trace etc...
Great presentation, thanks to Ecky !

Got the answer from C2000, that the BIOS on the harddisk itself
has some serious bugs and that they should be upgraded before
used for the first time. Great, so if you have an IBM 9 or 18GB
harddisk check for revision 01c0 or later to get lucky.

Mucky is doin' a 15 hours job today, and don't seem to be that
delighted when calling him on the phone. I think I'll visit
him now, to ease his pain.

And another day comes to an end with a cool Guinness and a
really tasty 8 oz sirloin at O'Reillys.


13th august 1998

Just a more private day...

Opened another case at Computer 2000 to check if there are
problems to Compaq-BIOS or Netware-OS when using 18GB harddisks.

Yet another CD in MP3 format.


12th august 1998

Got the bill for our domain-registration today.
(Hey, thanks Peter, pretty nice offer.)

Created the first version of the STUN.DE logo
but remember, it's the first version, just an idea.

Tried to find a web-based notepad for multiuser usage, but
the guestbook applications arond, don't fulfill these
requirements yet. So I fear we'll fall back to MS-Access.
(1:0 for World-Domination 99)

Tried some of the ciders, Woody's drinks , a rusty nail
and Guinness together with Tom in my favourite Irish pub
"Shanannigans".


11th august 1998

Another day our biggest netware machine crashed.

Did some shopping with Reyk, who will try to install
RedHat 5.1 tonight on his laptop, I guess.
I just hope there are already updates on the new powertools CD.

It seems that Alan's 2.0.36pre3 is out.
Damn, if I only would get the time to test the last one.


10th august 1998

Tried to wrote a letter in Kanji, but gave up after the
first sentence. Huhhh... it's really hard....
I guess, I'll just try writing a few words in Kana and
the rest of it in english.

Heard some serious critics about RedHat 5.1, for those who
installed it from scratch, which changes my plans running
RH 5.1 on our FFM-box. Maybe we should first install 5.0
and after that upgrade to 5.1.

For myself, I'll try Debian 2.0 the next days.


9th august 1998

Coverted another three CD's into MP3 to get my Blues Brothers
Monster Album completed. (est. 3 hours of music on one CD)

Just wait for my Monster Boogie Woogie CD, 13 hours music
on one CD !

Discovered someone holding my PPP-dialup link up for 23 hours !
Hey, I don't want to see that bill. God bless you. 0:-]


8th august 1998

Made some important advances in playing boogie piano,
listening to Peter Heger's CD "Na endlich !".

Updated my newly designed personal homepage.
I'll change the layout again, because it's not really
my style in its curent form.


7th august 1998

Again, updated the boogie pages with Christian Bleiming's bio.
Called Henning Pertiet by phone, and in a few days will receive
some bio too.

Converted CD's from Alanis Morisette and Eros Ramazotti into
MP3 files.


6th august 1998

Moved to a new system in determining my lottery numbers for
cracking the 35 mio. DM Jackpot this saturday.

Printed out the Linux Gazette august issue.


5th august 1998

Registered our domain stun.de today.

Did a lot of updates to my RedHat system with all the
latest published RPM's.

Played around with some of the new Gnome applications
and found the useful gicq, gpgp and xwhois.

Downloaded the 2.0.36pre2 patch and discovered 1 MB
new isdn diffs in it !
Maybe this one becomes essential in a few days.


4th august 1998

Install WWWThreads at work, and they were fascinated by it.
So we think about using it as a ToDo list or better as an
case management archive.

Investigated some free domains to register for FFM,
and found one, I'll register it tomorrow.

Experimented with SAINT, the next generation of SATAN !


3rd august 1998

Installed UFP-Terminal from Ronald Bieber, to enhance my Intranet
content, for my StarTrek fascinated mailbox-users.
This one is created from UFP-Info and is completely designed in HTML.

Set up the phone line in Tom's new appartment. Lot of work to do Tom,
better start working today than tomorrow, lot of work !!!
Unbelievable lot of work.


2nd august 1998

Just enjoyed the day, lying lazy on my bed and watching TV.


1st august 1998

Bought the Pro-Pilot flightsimulator today and I'm totally
fascinated by its authentic behaviour. The bad thing is,
that this software needs Win 95, the good news: the simulator
itself is from Sierra not MS !
Maybe they'll port it someday ??? ;-)

Sabre for Linux is just too far away from Pro-Pilot, but who
knows, Sabre developement is still in progress...

Received Christian Bleiming's boogie CD's, many thanks !!!
Updated the boogie pages.

Diary Import July 1998

1998-07-31T13:16:00.000+02:00

31st july 1998

Had a crashed netware server today with 1000 users. What a day.
Mirroring of the 112 gigs is still running after 14 hours.

Prited out the USB specifications. So I'm sure that I'll
play around with this hardware stuff soon, since Linux can
handle it better than Win98, according to Alan's smoke party.


30th july 1998

Updateted the emergency documentation of our AIX machines.

Configured automatic indexing on my local search engine.

Started to write a script to collect the status of all my
HTML pages. Maybe this will gonna be something for the masses,
when finished. If you already know such a tool, let me know.

The output will look like this:

Current project status in category: general
Location:	Filename:	Filedate:	Filesize:	Version:
/	index.html	07/10/98	6807	3.00.001
/diary	diary.html	07/30/98	14079	unknown
Current project status in category: boogie
Location:	Filename:	Filedate:	Filesize:	Version:
/boogie	bpage_1.html	07/29/98	3469	3.00.012

Organized a network administrator meeting at O'Reillys
Irish Pub, so that Tom, Reyk and myself could exchange
our experiences and pains in this business.
(You know the name O'Reilly, don't you ?
Just the right name for a pub to attract Linux fanatics.)

You could say this evening was the foundation of the
"Bavarian Linux Administrators Group".
Short: BLAG & PLAY ! ;-)


29th july 1998

Gave my Pentium II some work to do: 750 MB wave files
converted to 67 MB mp3 files. Cool compression rate 11:1 !

Played again with my webcam. Take a look.
It's bad in quality I know, but the cam was very cheap,
therefore, you can almost forget using it with artificial
light.

Got in touch with HP-UX 10.20, nice they also support volume
groups as in AIX. Anyone make me a gift ?!?

Did a lot of updates to the boogie pages.


28th july 1998

Collected all the debugging stuff for Alan.
I hope that I don't steal his valueable time.

Had big problems with SNA on an AIX. And discovered four
hours later, that they had changed the hostname yesterday.
The documentation of the SNA application says: If you ever
change the hostname, you have to install the application
from scratch. Well done, guys !

Again tested my billard center. Closed again !
So I had some Guinness with Gerd at Shanannigans.


27th july 1998

Discovered a new problem in 2.0.35 memory management,
when loading previously brandnew compiled bttv modules
(0.5.6 and also 0.5.8), I could reproduce the GPF
problems I ran into yesterday. Not a process, but the
kernel himself seems to grab all available memory.
Unloading modules, doesn't free up memory.

Wrote that immediately to Alan, before he releases 2.2 !

And another day rebooting my machine, to get the system
stable, and uptime counting starts from the beginning !

Learned that simply taring files doesn't include
pointfiles. Ahhh that's what find is good for.
Maybe my personal uptime is just to long, since I had
no weekend for a while.


26th july 1998

Set up live video on my webserver, now you can take
a look at me while working. It takes me a bit time to get
the BTTV capture and transformations working.
CGI scripting was easy instead.

(The above link is on an Intranet !
So if you want to take a look on me live, you first have to
identify my dynamic IP while I'm online, but you should have
a fair chance !!!)

Spent another day at work, since our monitoring alarmed me
that one of our primary backbones has some trouble.
It for sure was not a network failure. Our tftp-server SUN
was unhappy with its disappearing disk space on the root
partition.

Had a mysterious GPF problem (general protection fault) when
su-ing to other users. So I had some practice in debugging
the EIP symbols. Lynx was grabbing all available memory ! F**k !
(As I said some days before, it's hard to measure uptimes.)

Reviewed the 2.0.36pre1. Don't know if I'll compile another
kernel tonight. But the TLAN 1.0 update would concern me.

One of these neverending days....
Again been alarme by our monitoring, and again the same
management module in our primary backbone. So I decided
on the spot to swap the whole management board.
Lord, please let me sleep now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You wont believe that, but in some countries the 26th of
july is a sunday. And believe it or not, some people don't
work on sundays. Maybe I've chosen the wrong religion.
Which one says: "On the seventh day, you should rest !" ?


25th july 1998

Had to work today. They tried to update our hosts OS390,
but failed when trying to run IMS on 18 GB harddisks,
so the had to go back to the old release.
Rebooting the host makes much fun if you have 40 SNA
links to netware for SAA servers. Uhhh..my legs.

Printed out all of this year published Linux-Gazette
issues. Lots of stuff to read, but always helpful.

Discovered the www.freshmeat.net and immediately subscribed
to their mailing list. You wanna subscribe too ?


24th july 1998

Installed WWWthreads, a nice little blackboard system
completely designed in Perl for easy cgi installation
on webservers. Great ! :-)))))

Reorganized lots of logical volumes on an AIX, missed
to shutdown one database, so I had to repair DB2 too.

Downloaded Alan's 2.0.36pre1, hope thats the last one
before 2.2. (It's hard to measure and assess uptimes
when installing a new kernel every second day.)


23rd july 1998

Did a lot of documentation on an AIX for reorganizing
volume groups tomorrow afternoon.

Nobody at work believes me that multiple seperate duplexed
disks on a fileserver are much more efficiently on performance
than one big single duplexed disk. I hate those pigheaded guys.

Debugged XDM sessions on a Sparc 20, which had refused to
startup xclients from the initscripts.

Taught Markus a little bit C programming.
Maybe he'll write a better database software someday ? ;-)

Received the advertisments for the Amacom Flipdisk, which
would be a very nice backup device on Linux.

Discoverd how to debug crashed kernels. Heya that makes fun !
Have to try debugging a running kernel, nice feature !

The day was long Willis !


22nd july 1998

Had to do escalation procedures to Novell and Computer 2000
because of our SNA problems.

Played around with AIX printing filters.
Why is noone using PostScript ?
It could be all so easy.

Had a BBQ chicken pizza at Munich's Planet Hollywood,
not bad, but not the right place for me.


21st july 1998

My first day at work, after holiday.

Experimented with the LexLink Tools for AIX. IP is better !

Tried a little bit Netware programming, there are some
dirty tricks around.


20th july 1998

Changed the diary dates to full month names, and made them
Y2K-compliant.

Did another four pages of my new 28 big new homepages.


19th july 1998

Enjoyed the day, did some work on my new homepage.
If you want to take a first look: New Homepage
I'm not satisfied with the colours font size and background yet, but
this should be minorities.


18th july 1998

Worked on my new personal homepage V3.xx, which will consist
of 28 very personally documents. Looks fine so far.

Created lots of fine web arts with Gimp.


17th july 1998

Enjoyed the day.

Enjoyed Armageddon and Mercury Puzzle with Reyk and Babsi
at the royal cinema. Great ciname, great movies.

Damn, they have cracked DES-II-2 in 56 hours, but not by
distributed.net members. They've built up a special crypto
processor just to crack DES !!!

Security live long and prosper, goodbye....


16th july 1998

Removed Squid from my configuration and installed
WWWOffle instead. And believe me, it's much more
comfortable.

Installed my venetian blind on my big living room window,
so I guess it'll be a cool day tomorrow ! 8-}


15th july 1998

My last week on holiday.

Tried to poll news from my fidolink, but it seems there are
many many bit failures during transfer. Have to check this
in more deep.

Did dozens of minor updates in the local configs.
Checked security for the whole filesystem.
Added banners for the dial-up services.

Answered a few questions on news://linux.redhat

Tried to write down my PPP device/interface problems.


14th july 1998

Compiled and installed the final 2.0.35 kernel.

Compiled the tricky CDDA2WAV, now it works.


13th july 1998

DES-II-2 has started, so all my machines are working on it.
Overall rate is about 8 Mkeys/second. I'll know that exactly
in a few days. (Lot of work to update all the different machines
on the different OS's.)

Encoded the blues brothers 2000 soundtrack to MP3 for my
ultimate mp3-blues-cd.

Disconnected a lot of harddisk drives and fans from my pc's
to make my sleep more softly. ;-)


12th july 1998

Did some updates on the boogie-woogie pages.

Had lots of fun at a friends birthday party.


11th july 1998

Played around with VIC, nice video conferencing tool for linux.

Updated the boogie-woogie event calendar.


10th july 1998

Set up DNS for my internal fidonet. Found a solution for my
net-pf-4, net-pf-3 error messages. (RTFM may help sometime.)

Convinced Tom to join the DES-II-2 contest on monday.

Used the time to answer and update all the boogie news in
my inbox folder.

Will go to the little octoberfest tonight.


9th july 1998

Played around with LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control),
nice tool ! ;-)

Found some more tools for my bttv-driver, but had no time
to test it so far.

Did a complete backup of my mailbox areas via ftp.
TCP/IP and FTP are such stupid protocols !
You need to acknowledge 300MB for 1GB to transfer. Great ! &-{

Got ifcico and ifmail working over VModem/Telnet, now I can
get all my fidomail via TCP/IP as a new virtual line !
Pretty cool !

Reyk had to fight with dummy devices on a sun, hope he got it.


8th july 1998

Updated my PalmPilot's OS to 2.05, works fine under linux.

Tested incoming and outgoing faximiles, had no problems,
many thanks to the c't team !

Tried to compile some new gnome-pre-alpha software, but without
success. What have they done with the C-compiler ??? Had no
chance to compile anything without parsing errors !

Had some crashs with gnome when video4linux runs for more than
20 minutes. Just console blocking.


7th july 1998

Edited a few HTML pages for my new PPP-based mailbox-system.
Thought about transparent proxying for ftp, when allowing
users just to make connections to the dialin-server.

Played around with Kanji-term, and hunted for some japanese
language training programs on the linux-os.
(wnn, canna, skk, ng, mule) Pretty cool !

Set up hourly fortunes for every login session. ;-))))


6th july 1998

Another big shopping day, finally I got a lamp for my kitchen.

Now leeching the last few megabytes to complete my updated
RedHat 5.1 CD image.

Got Gnome running, as I like it ! Wow !
So all you outthere having problems with KDE change to Gnome.


5th july 1998

PalmPilot PPP now works fine, but without authentication.

Compiled 2.0.35pre5, which runs so far.

Tried to get KDE running, now with 200 MB of RAM, but after
five minutes swaps again to disk with crash. Great !


4th july 1998

New RC5 clients are now available, so I had to go through all my
RC5 condemned machines. Join us on 13 july with DES-II-2 !

Got big brother running more or less. Nice tool.

The Germans lost against Croatia ! What a fool !

Experimented most of the day with PalmPilot's direct PPP link
to my server, but without any success.
mgetty seems to loose connection after receiving the first string.
Ignoring carrier detection don't seem to work properly.

The normal modem line, now works without any failures.
(FAX, UUCP, FIDO, PPP and LOGIN) Great !
Time to get the Fido-mailer linux-based.


3rd july 1998

Ohhh, my head.... I guess the fourth Guinness was the bad one...

Reyk seems to be in trouble, because one of his linux machines
can't mount it's root partition anymore. Bad luck !

Tested the IPPP dialup with Chris, and obviously we have the
same problem with multiple interfaces and IPPP-daemons.
(Calls are accepted on ippp1 instead of ippp4, the daemon started
for ippp2 answers on ippp4, the static IP from ippp1 becomes
overwritten with the dynamic IP of ippp4, GREAT f.ck !!! )

Maybe I should change to FreeBSD someday.


2nd july 1998

The firewall configuration is broken again... but finally INN
seems to work now. Just waiting for Chris's feed.

Registered my linux machines at counter.li.org, this time
without form-failures from netscape.

Updated the system with the newest redhat updates.
Fighted around with the 2.0.35pre patches...

Installed the excite search engine for private webservers, works
great, but was a little bit tricky since we don't use the old
perl 5.001 anymore.

Will have some Guinness tonight with Reyk and Babsi at O'Reillys.


1st july 1998

Bought an effect processor for my e-guitar, sounds great !

Tried again to get up INN running..... no chance....
But found two new patches, one for netscape's form problem and
the other for the INN path problem ! Ahh, amazing...

Phoned to Chris, but it seems it'll take some more time until
he can feed me with news. Also dialup still isn't working yet.

Had to notice, that my preferred billard center started its
summer break today for the next 2 months, sorry Gerd.

Diary Import June 1998

1998-06-30T13:17:00.000+02:00

30th june 1998

Again had to do big shopping, but this time only for food.

Totally fascinated by my new camera. It's amazing what figures
you can do by playing with your own video feedback. (snapshot)

Configured a cisco with Reyk, and also configured a very
huge pizza for us midnight-technicians ! Mmmmm... yammy....


29th june 1998

Did big shopping today, no computer components, just for clothes.
(I think buying computer components instead would have been much
cheaper !)

Today I got my video camera for my PC, so I tried some programs
that promise video conferencing in realtime.

Also in the same package I found IBM's VoiceType OEM which offers
realtime speech recognition for Win95/98/NT. It really is very
very good, but where're the linux binaries ????

Tonight we had an amazing firework at the Karlsfelder Seefest.


28th june 1998

Played around with MP3 streaming through my HTTP-server to my
other three machines, works great !!!

Installed the new RC5 proxy that supports the new DES-II-2
Challenge, to be just in time, when DES-II-2 starts.

Listened to a very good blues band at the Olympiapark and
finished the day with two extremly tasty pints of Guinness &-}


27th june 1998

Woke up at 6 am, oh my god !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Knocking out myself !

Collected a lot of stuff from all my scratch disks, to burn the
new FPS II/98 CD on Tom's machine.

Meanwhile did some chinese cooking with Thomas and I can tell ya
that his kitchen had to bear a lot after this cooking event.

Burned two more CD's. And again discovered the old classic:
"The incredible machine" played about 5 hours 'til level 57
and again felt hungry.... at 1:30 am, ups....


26th june 1998

A terribly warm day ! Weather should change to rain for the weekend.
I believe that, because this is my last day at work and I've finally
reached my first longer holiday for this year, so don't worry if
diary entries will be a little bit shorter for the next three weeks.

Did nothin' special today, just the handing over for my backup
colleagues. Again ordered pizzas at the same service, and again had
to wait one hour..... ts ts ts
I think they should rename themselves into Pray-for-pizza.de, now I
also can imagine why the bigger competitioner calls himself AVANTI !

Visited Reyk to get some new tools and discussed commercial firewalls
vs. freeware firewalls.

Leeched all the new RC5 and RedHat 5.1 updated stuff. But I think
I'll try it at the earliest on saturday or sunday... we'll see....


25th june 1998

Updated the emergency documentations for our Netware and AIX
servers.
(huuhhh... that really was hard work)

Time to Call-a-pizza.de, which has probably one of the best
order forms realized in javascript, that I've ever seen.
But a great orderform is not that important, when you have
to wait almost 40 minutes for your pizzas to arrive.

Had a wired idea, to program the biggest collection of screen-
savers for the palmpilot. Anyone who demands this ?


24th june 1998

Wrote a couple of eMails to people also suffering from the
"not-logged-in" connections problem on Netware 4.x, I hope this
will result in some more concrete answers than the NOVGRP-L
mailinglist.

Collected y2k tools for testing our Novell servers for year 2000.

Did some sort of picknick in my garden... the birds pick and
the cherries fall on my n(e)ck.


23rd june 1998

Corrected SSA link problems on an AIX machine and again had to fix
some entries on the Ultra Enterprise II in conjuction with Cisco's
Secure ACS and an oracle database.

Compression now also works on IPPP interfaces of my dial-up server,
but linkage between devices and interfaces are still "random".

This evening my mother discovered my first white hair, I seriously
should stop working with all that Hi-Tec stuff. :-o
Or maybe just substitute my 17 inch cathode tube with a nice new
25 inch true color plasma screen ?!? :-)))


22nd june 1998

Monday, I can't tell ya how I love that weekday.

Had to fight with an oracle installation on an Ultra, completed my
nameserver documentations. And finally I got my Xserver running in
32-bit depth. Oh god... I was blind... it was too easy, and could
have worked already the week before. Damn.

Now, I can watch TV in the background of my desktop and draw some
nice pictures with gimp at the same time.


21st june 1998

Still on the search for my diary background...
Does anyone of you know where I can get an image of the map from the
game Kyrandia or Kings Quest VI. (Just the margin of such an old map
would be fine !)
Until I find that real background I'll use this one.


20th june 1998

Hacked some HTML-TAG's to get this diary online in a neverseen design.
Searched on the web for my papyros background: negative.

Today is my aunts 50th birthday, time for a big family celebration.
Met a couple of teachers there, and had to convince them using Linux
at school for their lessons instead of Win NT. Also urged them to use
firewalls. Time to preach them the bible... ;->


19th june 1998

Friday, time to give all clients new barths. Ah, they've done a new
RC5 client release. Well let's see what has been improved....

Printed out all the documentation on TIS's firewall-toolkit.

Bought "Linux in a nutshell", I thougth I could live without a bible...
...some people say, having a bible on a bookshelf, protects you from
bad daemons, so I'll give that a try ;-)


18th june 1998

Helped a collegue and played around a little bit with Cisco Secure
Server Remote Management on an Ultra-2.
Debugged the authentication failures on the management webserver.
Did some doku updates of a few AIX's.

Compiled a new kernel with the logo hack, hey pretty cool penguin !
Yeah ! Nameserver runs, without any errors.... thanks debugging....


17th june 1998

Plugged in the new Win/TV card, but still can't see video under linux
as long as my Xserver runs in 8-bit color depth. (Damn, it seems that
Matrox Mil2 isn't supported with more colours yet)

Compiled a new kernel with all the video stuff from Alan.... Thx.
Played around with that nagra thing... Good work guys....


16th june 1998

Had to phone with a guy who wants to run FreeBSD.... Uhhh, how ugly...
So, since it's for his business, I gave him some hints for these and that.

Again had problems with IPPP when statically pre-binding devices to
interfaces. (Now I'm about 100 pc sure, I've found a new bug in PPP
support, I'll discuss that with a few people.)


15th june 1998

Since I'm reading Alan's diary almost daily for one and a half months
now, I decided to write a diary for myself. Maybe anyone is interested
what other people are doing. Like me :-))) (No, I got enough work to do,
believe me !)