| Welcome to GORby's BLOG |
| Welcome
to my BLOG (or at least a feeble attempt...) It's pretty silly
actually, just generated with mozilla's composer as a test page, but I
plan to upgrade it to a php powered version sometime later |
| GORby @ : JAJC-SSH : soon to come: exodus-ssh : Palm : |
| |
| February
19, 2004 Well, well... looks like this page is getting an update after all. I had a lot of things on my mind lately (as a matter of fact, I still have), and as such have had very little time to maintain my little BLOG. After getting myself a brand new toy in the form of a Palm Tungsten T3 and thoroughly testing it, I've come to a few conclusions, with the 2 most important being: 1. The new screen with it's 320x480 or 480x320 resolution as you prefer is great (as long as you don't use it in bright sunlight). 2. Graffiti 2 sucks (well, that may be a bit harsh, but there are some annoying quirks) more? see the Palm section. |
| November
14, 2003 I finally got it ready for you: my little howto on using JAJC through an SSH tunnel I have been quite busy lately, but in spite of that I'll try to keep this site a bit more up to date... although it doesn't make much sense to just write messages when I don't have much to tell. I'm just developing a little photo album in PHP. Maybe more on that later. |
| September
9, 2003 Well, here's an update after quite some time of inactivity. First I had my DSL router acting strangely, and after finally solving that problem I went on a vacation. It appeared that the router, which had been comfortably sitting on top of our VCR, had turned a bit too hot and started acting strangely. It appeared to work normally (configuration interface, LED activity, even pretended to be connected), but no data was coming through. It started with problems playing MOHAA, changed into a problem with incoming connections after a cold boot (I literally let it cool down for a few hours) with MOHAA working just fine, and after another cold boot and a factory reset it had gotten worse... no connections in any direction :( After a week or so I remembered I once found a firmware for the device and decided to re-flash the router (it already had that same firmware flashed). It's working correctly again now. My best guess is that it overheated, and some data in the flash ROM was damaged (don't know how easily that happens, so it could be something totally different), because it worked correctly again after reflashing with the same firmware. In the meanwhile I'm planning to start worling on a reasonably big website, but I guess you'll just have to wait until it's online to see what it's all about. One thing is puzzling me... How will the MSN transports used by jabber servers be affected by the required 'security' *ahem* update of the MSN protocol. I hope they'll quickly find a way to keep it working. Oh well, I like the ICQ protocol better anyway. |
| July
30, 2003 Nothing special happened after my return from my holidays. Just announcing some scheduled downtime from august 1 to 4. This server will be serving at the LAN during the weekend. Just one thing I found after some googling... making mozilla use flash without showing those horrible flash banner ads. |
| July
16, 2003 Apparently the webalizer configuration still wasn't good enough that way, since webalizer doesn't look at the entire URL string, so I had to add some other ignore statements as well... The stats seem to be quite accurate now, with the total of all browsers reaching around 99%. Here's part of my webalizer config file, detailing how I group the visitors (just the 2 main groups) and omit the meaningless visits (attacks, scans, ...). This just gives you an idea off course, and you'd better check your logfiles to see if the same applies to you. If you filter this correctly, the number of requests resulting in a HTTP 404 error should be rather low (unless there are a lot of dead links pointing to your server). |
| July
12, 2003 I just updated my webalizer configuration to get a more precise share for the user agents. With my first configuration I got a list of browser groups, which didn't total 100%. When examining my apache log files I found out that most of these were caused by vulnerability scans of my system, but then targetted against MS Windows based servers (buffer overflow attacks on default.ida, trying to execute cmd.exe, ...), because these almost always don't specify a user agent (thus showing up as "-" in the apache access.log file). I also noticed that I got quite some log entries requesting .hash=*, with * being a hash of a file. This turned out to be traffic generated by p2p file sharing clients, which probably ended up on my server because of my variable IP, with some users in my IP pool using kazaa and the like... The solution was simple: make webalizer ignore all log file entries where the URL contains either default.ida, .exe or .hash= with the IgnoreUrl option. I also had a great barbecue today... thanks to my friends and especially to Eva, who organized it ;-) |
| July
11, 2003 Well, looks lke the LAN party site is finally online after some messing around with my postfix configuration. As mentioned in the previous post, I was looking for a way to send confirmation mails for the LAN. I used a postfix server, which I configured according to the instructions mentioned on http://www.linux4you.be, and that seemed to do the trick for me. At the moment it's just configured to send mail, because I only use it to send mails for my website. The problem I had with the Palm Tungsten T crashing every night was indeed related to the 'auto lock handheld' option as I expexted. It was easily solved by just turning off the option, setting a password for the Palm, and checking the option again. The problem first appeared after a hard reset followed by a system restore. Maybe there's a problem with restoring these settings. I also just changed the layout of the page to make it look better on handheld devices (mobile phone/PDA). |
| July
7, 2003 After a busy weekend I found some time to update some things around here. Had a good time at the LAN on saturday... I just created a new subsection of the site today, highlighting the upcomong LAN party my friends and I are organizing in august. It's not a publicly accessible LAN, just friends, but if you know somebody who is coming, you can ask them to invite you too. This section is far from complete, and I'm now looking around to find out what's the best way to send confirmation mails, so people can fill in a form to let me know they're coming. |
| July
5, 2003 Hmm, did some tests today ... I'm in a situation where ICQ is blocked by the firewall (but MSN isn't). Now I'm somebody who doesn't really like the standard MSN client, so I't rather use trillian like I do at home. But... trillian couldn't connect either. This is where the lasting connection from yesterday comes in handy... I decided to switch from trillian to a jabber client, and create an SSH tunnel from my windows machine (using putty) to my home server, to forward the local port 5222 to port 5222 of amessage.de (indeed, a jabber server). Using the jabber server's transports I'm now able to connect to ICQ and MSN. This method also solves a little annoyance... my MSN buddies saw me disconnect and reconnect every 10 minutes or zo. Guess this is caused by the firewall (over which I don't have any control). But anyway... this problem is solved now. Also, Mozilla 1.4 seems to be working fine, both at work and at home. Looks like my preferred browser and email client has just gotten better. I have been noticing a strange problem with my Palm Tungsten T... Every morning when I wake up, it has crashed. It won't power on anymore, if it was charging, the charge LED stays on when I remove it from the cradle... The only thing that helps is doing a soft reset. I'm hoping to find the cause of this annoyance soon. Guess it must have something to do with a timed event, so it should just be a matter of finding out which one. (my guess is the auto lock at 3:00 which I had set) |
| July
4, 2003 Well, here it is... my first post on my very own BLOG. You'll have to forgive me for using such a ridiculously simple layout, but this site is hosted on a very bandwidth-limited server (to be precise: my own gentoo linux box connected to the rest of the world with an 128kbit/s ADSL uplink). This page is put online after finally configuring some extra settings on my server. Some needed cron jobs are now finally in place. I noticed that the time of the software clock of my linux box was lagging behind quite a bit, which might interfere with some of the scripts I'm planning to make. These scripts would enable me to automatically disconnect and reconnect my ADSL connection. This would be a pretty simple task, if I wouldn't be using a separate broadband router. This router has a telnet interface however, so I just need to find a way to connect to it and run some simple commands. The main reason why I'm doing this is because my provider has a habit of disconnecting it's users after 36 hours. This means that at random times (router does only reconnect when there's an outgoing request, so the disconnect time varies) the server isn't available anymore, and I get a fresh IP, which takes some time to get updated by no-ip. What I'm trying to achieve now is that my linux server tells my router to disconnect at a time of the day when there's (almost) no activity on the server, and then reestablish a link by making an outgoing request and restarting the noip2 deamon to get the DNS updated as soon as possible. This guarantees that when I get up, I can be (almost) sure that the DNS is updated with the new IP during the night, and that my connection will last throughout the day. The reason why I need this will be explained later on. |
This is my blogchalk:
Belgium, Vlaams-Brabant, Leuven, Dutch, English, Bart, Male,
26-30, computer games, reading, movies, cycling.