Mark's Blog

Today we have finished watching the second season of Dexter. And really enjoyed it.

Coming from sci-fi crime series such as “C.S.I. Las Vegas”, “~ New York” and “~ Miami” (although the latter is more action than crime) the new perspective was refreshing, watching over the shoulder of the bad-guy, sympathizing with him (!) and finally feeling relief when he – again – did not get arrasted (no, I will not reveal how’s ending here). Did I mention he works for the police?

Indeed, I do not know many stories where the bad wins and know even fewer novels where the author manages to get you yourself cought at thoughts such as “c’mon, he’s bad after all” and still let you keep that smile.

Go, and join the Dark Defender!
P.S.: Dexter‘s German voice is better than his English one.

Tags: movies

Recompiling my Linux VM from Pentium 4 to AMD Phenom I upgraded to GCC 4.3 due to its native Phenom support.

After reading AMD’s GCC Quick Reference Guide I have set CFLAGS to conservative -Os -march=amdfam10 -combine -pipe -m32 -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs -fomit-frame-pointer and experienced several compiler errors. Luckily during compile-time, therefore Gentoo’s Portage didn’t touch my old and working files.
So I replaced CFLAGS by -Os -mpopcnt -mmmx -msse -msse2 -msse3 -m3dnow -msse4a -pipe -m32 -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs -fomit-frame-pointer for the packages failed to compile, learning that GCC’s amdfam10 support is buggy with 4.3 series (up to todays 4.3.2-r2), which is most likely due to flag -mabm.

If you face a recompile of system and world, I recommend you upgrade portage, gcc and dependencies first and run emerge --keep-going. Doing that you can recompile what failed later with the replaced CFLAGS without the manual --resume --skipfirst orgies.

Tags: Gentoo, GNU/Linux

Having only one IP I had to share the HTTPS port so depending on the request’s host either the Linux VM or Exchange 2007 should be queried. Unfortunately, although Exchange can be configured to process requests on another port Outlook and Pocket PCs will not work that way.

Therefore I’ve first set up Apache’s mod_proxy on the Linux VM to proxy Exchange – which did not and does not and will not work due to RPC over HTTPS, which Microsoft is said to have created standards incompliant. Apache’s developers refuse to implement an exception [the bug report], and versions of httpd newer than 2.0.53 won’t work, including my 2.2.8.

Unlucky me I did not recogize this only testing access to OWA. Hence my apologizes here to all affected.

ISA 2006 does not work with Windows Server 2008, and the new version requires too much overhead for my taste. BTW, it is referred to as ‘Stirling’ and a beta can be found here.

Finally, I’ve decided to give Squid a try. And, after reading just a few example configurations (and this) I managed to get it working. It proxies successfully to MS Exchange, and by letting Apache bind to 127.0.0.1 for SSL even the host-based (“vhost”) relay works. Here you can grab my configuration file squid.conf for proxying/relaying between Exchange and other hosts.

If you know what to change to access Exchange by SQUID without SSL please let me know. (Altering cache_peer line will let squid access only Apache and thus break host-based relaying.)

Tags: apache, exchange, server, Squid

After moving my old Pentium 4 server into Hyper-V I’ve had some problems compiling a new kernel for the 64bit Hyper-V VM. The server itself had been moved by simple tar/netcat pipes into its new destination. (Thank you Alex, for the assistance!)

I had to emerge crossdev, then let crossdev compile Binutils, GCC etc. for the new enivronment by invoking crossdev -t amd64.

Having that done I configured the kernel as usual (don’t forget to activate IA32 emulation!) and compiled it by make ARCH=x86_64 CROSS_COMPILE=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu- bzImage. If you happen to compile modules simply append corresponding arguments.

After a restart everything will work fine.
Just remember to add a “legacy network card” (100 MBit –> tulip/DECnet 21140 in the kernel) to your VM and check whether it has changed from eth0 to something other! (See /proc/sys/net/ipv4/neigh/eth*)
Plus, try to compile the kernel as XEN guest (more) – Hyper-V is said to share interfaces with it (and more).

Tags: Gentoo, hyper-v, virtualization