Advisories for both OpenSSH and Sendmail were released over the past few days. Both packages had remotely exploitable bugs.
I forgot to blog this yesterday, but the RPMs available from Red Hat are also on apt-rpm. Just do an apt-get upgrade to upgrade your server.
Author Archives: Donncha
Looking for a house?
Eddie Irvine’s house is for sale, and a steal at the €6.5m guide price!
The RIAA For Dummies – 60 Second Edition
Tim has a frightening cartoon explaining copyright. Dare you sing’ Happy Birthday!’ now? You might get busted!
PHP Newsletter software
PHPList was mentioned on various blogs a few weeks back and we’ve used it here a few times. I’m not 100% happy with it however as it’s missing some glaring features and those make sending emails very difficult.
I searched freshmeat.net earlier today and installed LetterIt, a similar piece of software from Germany.
It’s a fairly simple program, doesn’t look very flash, but it does work well, and we just sent out a mailing to over 1,000 customers this afternoon with it.
WordPress and Smarty
I was drafted in to help on WordPress a long time ago. Unfortunately I haven’t done much work on any OSS projects in a while and it was bothering me.
I did do some useful work though – I found out that the Smarty register_resource construct was buggy when using caching. That rules out using MySQL as a backend to hold templates. (I posted a mail to the Smarty list but nothing came of it. *shrug*)
Finally, after re-installing Linux on my new hard drive last weekend I Smartyised WP! Here’s a WIP snapshot.
What does it do? Well, I wrapped some of the Smarty template API (ie. bloginfo(), etc) in Smarty functions of the same names. I’ve only done enough to get the default template working, as it’s laborious work and I wanted to get something out quickly!
The template is split up into 3 parts: top.tpl, post.tpl and end.tpl. They live in users/main/templates/ and can be edited there with a text editor. The online editor from b2++ will make it’s way there eventually probably.
Before trying this, please be sure to backup your WP installation. The files in the tarball don’t conflict with the files in CVS but I can’t guarantee that this won’t delete all your WP install files if you’re not careful!
Download the WP – Smarty mod. (40Kb)
F 16
Wow! Amazing photo of an F16 at an air show in Poland.
At the Chicago Air and Water Show last August I went snap happy but never got anything near as good as this shot. He was lucky the fighter was banking just over his head (see the comments).
I tried in vain to snap 600mph jets as they passed a few hundred feet away but by the time I’d found them in the sky and zoomed back, in the plane was a few miles away..
Scared of Spiders? He's waiting!
Are you scared of spiders?
Memory stick weirdness
This is strange, but I’ve mentioned problems with Memory Sticks and Linux before. When I plug my camera into my PC /var/log/messages sometimes reports errors reading the camera memory:
Sep 16 11:22:52 donncha kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:07.2-2, assigned address 13
Sep 16 11:22:55 donncha /etc/hotplug/usb.agent: Setup usb-storage for USB product 54c/10/440
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: Device not ready. Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
Sep 16 11:22:56 donncha kernel: unable to read partition table
Sep 16 11:22:57 donncha devlabel: devlabel service started/restarted
and similar problems have been reported elsewhere!
As you can see, it looks like the camera has been detected on /dev/sda.
For no better reason than “what if?” I tried /dev/sdb instead, and surprise, it worked!
Really strange..
Hurricane Isabel Approaches
Wow! This is an amazing photo of the hurricane off the American coast. I would hate to be in the path of that thing when it reaches land. *gulp*
Graphs are a good thing
kasia posted about using mrtg which got me thinking about using it as well. It comes installed with Red Hat 9 (and I’m sure earlier) so it’s on all our servers.
apt-get install mrtg was easy.
Copying her script and configuration over was a sinch too. Just put it into /etc/mrtg/
Then I managed to get the linux_stats.pl script working with the aid of this email.
Finally, I managed to record stats about Apache using the script here and with help from here. The killer was trying to debug why the Perl script wasn’t working. It took me a while to figure out I should have the ?auto at the end of the server-status url. bah!
I’m going to try MySQL next!