If you want to disable MobileBackup and free up the abused disk space, simply run the following command and reboot.

sudo tmutil disablelocal

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments

Luckily that’s easy to fix. Simply comment SendEnv LANG LC_* in /etc/ssh_config out.

 Host *
 # SendEnv LANG LC_*
 # ForwardAgent no
 # ForwardX11 no
 ...

No other changes are needed. You could also permanently change your locale to UTF-8.
Just place export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in your shell’s source file.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | One comment

To have configruation changes persistent in Debian, you may not edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg directly, but need to edit/add the appropiate lines in /etc/defaults/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600n8"
GRUB_TERMINAL=console
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=9600 --unit=0 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

Now run update-grub and you’ll get the Bootloader and all Kernel and Init messages on your serial console the next time you boot.

To get a login promt on serial you need to modify /etc/inittab to:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6
# Serial console
s0:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -L 9600 ttyS0 vt102

That’s it. run init q to reload init and activate serial login, or simply reboot.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Nothing happened, no one could break in using any exploits or brute force and the website didn’t even go down.

So as a guy with a few years of experience with Apache, Unix and at least a little bit of experience with WordPress, I thought I’d share the things I do to secure my blog. No, I am not a big fan of security trough obscurity.

I run this website on my own server, not all of this might be possible if you’re on a shared hosting!

• non admin username
• get ssl (for wp-admin)
• require ssl for wp-admin in wp-config.php (add to end of file)

  define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

• restrict access to wp-admin using htpasswd on ssl vhost

   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "Unixhosts.org"
   AuthBasicProvider file
   AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd
   Require valid-user
  

• enforce ssl for wp-admin and also htaccess authentication on default vhost

   SSLOptions +StrictRequire
   SSLRequireSSL
   SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq "www.chrisk.de"
   ErrorDocument 403 https://www.chrisk.de/blog/wp-admin/
  

• ‘chown’ everything to root:root with only read access for the webserver
• and as always: use as few plugins as possible

There is one plugin you might want to use if you’re on a shared ssl: WordPress HTTPS. This helps you redirecting you to the correct folders on your shared ssl. Though it was still kind of buggy.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

At least it looks like, since visits to this blog have increased by 100% in the past two months. Let’s just say you all have an iPad (btw. why is Firefox 4 on Mac OS still telling me ‘iPad’ is a typo? ) and read outside

I’m pretty inactive over here… again But at least I spent the morning adding a few features and fixing a few bugs in wordpress:

• There are finally Social Share buttons
• Thumbnails should now work
• Fixed an issue with my feed
• and some internal things, like SSL for the admin area

I’m trying to force myself taking the time to travel and shoot again, so hopefully there will be a couple of things to posts this summer…

Chris out.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

I already wrote about the OCZ Vertex 2 E once or twice with somewhat mixed feelings.
Now after 6 months with the first one, and 3 months with the second one, I wouldn’t recommend buying any of these again. Well, at least not if you’re using Apple.

60Gb OCZ Vertex 2 E in my Mac Mini (6 Months old):

• huge loss in performance (maybe due to the lack of TRIM in OSX?)
• sometimes the mini won’t fall asleep or just wakes up again

120Gb OCZ Vertex 2 E in my MacBook Pro (10 weeks old):

• performance is still good
• suspend2disk doesn’t work. Known bug. OSX will crash. OCZ promised to fix it – but didn’t!
• sleep and direct wake-up results in the SSD not being recognized for ~10 minutes!!! No booting possible!

Most of the issues with OCZ’s SSDs seem to be sleep/hibernate related and from what I’ve heard do mostly affect Apple products, but their crappy support prevents me from buying any of their products again. They promised to release a firmware upgrade which fixes suspend2disk, but they did not. They closed the thread in their forums and don’t even respond to requests via eMail. But hey! At least they release the OCZ Vertex 3 – so you possibly get all these bugs fixed for just 180€!

All these issues and their non-responding support made me replace the Vertex with the new Intel 320 Series SSD. They might be slower according to their specs, but performance isn’t everything

Which leads me to the next part of this post…

The Intel 320 120Gb SSD! I installed this one in my MacBook Pro last week and what shall I say? After one week everything is great. I’m not talking about pure performance. I didn’t NOTE any difference in real life performance, but just in case… here is a simple sequential performance check:

OCZ Vertex 2 E 120Gb:

homer:~ $ dd if=/dev/zero of=10000M.img bs=1024 count=10000000
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 82.815477 secs (123648385 bytes/sec)
homer:~ $ dd if=10000M.img of=/dev/null
20000000+0 records in
20000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 47.731347 secs (214534068 bytes/sec)

Intel 320 Series 120Gb:

homer:~ mrkofee$ dd if=/dev/zero of=10000M.img bs=1024 count=10000000
10000000+0 records in
10000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 108.879939 secs (94048546 bytes/sec)
homer:~ mrkofee$ dd if=file.img of=/dev/null
20000000+0 records in
20000000+0 records out
10240000000 bytes transferred in 47.695655 secs (214694610 bytes/sec)

The Intel is a tad slower in pure sequential write performance, which is a bit disappointing considering it’s one generation newer than the Vertex 2… But, now to the important stuff

• Suspend2Disk: works
• Closing and directly opening the MBP: works
• Support: Well… it’s Intel. I don’t expect it to be any better than OCZ’s.
• The good feeling of reliability: works

I haven’t received any negative reports from friends about the Intel X25-M  (the 320 Series predecessor) nor have I found much on the Interwebs… so I’m much happier with the Intel now…

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | One comment

I recently came across monit. They state it’s up and running in just 15min. I got it faster

# Daemonize and check every 2mins.
set daemon  120

# Mail settings, in case you want to receive notifications
set mailserver relay.example.org
set mail-format { from: root@host1.example.org }
set alert admin@example.org

# The first check
check process zabbix_server with pidfile /var/run/zabbix/zabbix_server.pid
        start program = "/etc/init.d/zabbix-server start"
        stop program = "/etc/init.d/zabbix-server stop"
        group server

You can also monitor network availability, application availability, file permissions and system utilization…
I think this tool is really great for a small network, though I don’t think it would scale that well. Just give it a try.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Here is my ifstated.conf to fail-over between DSL and UMTS connections. Note that this only really works with OpenBSD >=4.9, because earlier versions seem to have issues where set-state is executed before init finished, which causes UMTS to start on every 24h disconnect of the DSL line.

init-state auto
# pppoe0 is my DSL connection
pppoe0_up = "pppoe0.link.up"

# figure out which state to start with
state auto {
 if $pppoe0_up {
 set-state dsl_up
 }
 if !$pppoe0_up {
 set-state dsl_down
 }
}

# DSL is up. Don't do anything until it fails.
state dsl_up {
 init {
 run "/sbin/ifconfig | mail -s 'DSL up' root"
 }
 if !$pppoe0_up {
 set-state dsl_down
 }
}

# DSL is down. Wait a few seconds (24h disconnect).
# Then go ahead and start UMTS, but only if DSL isn't back up!
state dsl_down {
 init {
 run "/bin/sleep 30; /sbin/ifconfig | mail -s 'DSL down' root"
 }
 if $pppoe0_up {
 set-state dsl_up
 }
 if !$pppoe0_up {
 set-state umts_start
 }
}

# Start pppd and bring UMTS up, until pppoe0 is still down
state umts_start {
 init {
 run "/usr/sbin/pppd call o2"
 run "sleep 30; /sbin/ifconfig | mail -s 'Starting UMTS' root"
 }
 if $pppoe0_up {
 set-state umts_stop
 }
}

# If pppoe0 is back up, kill pppd and switch back to dsl_up
state umts_stop {
 init {
 run "/usr/bin/pkill pppd"
 run "/sbin/ifconfig | mail -s 'Stopping UMTS' root"
 }
 set-state dsl_up
}

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Have a look at man umsm to see which devices are supported by OpenBSD.

The UMTS (USB)-Sticks are registered as /dev/cuaUX, where X is the number of your device… You’ll need userland pppd to connect. Place your peer configuration in /etc/ppp/peers/o2 for example:

cuaU0
connect /etc/ppp/connect.o2
disconnect /etc/ppp/disconnect.o2
nocrtscts
xonxoff
#:0.0.0.2 because 0.0.0.1 is the alias for my DSL default gateway
:0.0.0.2
noipdefault
ipcp-accept-local
defaultroute
novj
nobsdcomp
novjccomp
nopcomp
noaccomp
noauth
nomagic
persist

You’ll also need Chat scripts to connect and disconnect the connection. Note that you’ll need to at least adjust /etc/ppp/connect.o2 to suit your provider:

#!/bin/sh
chat -vs \
 ABORT 'NO CARRIER' \
 ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' \
 ABORT ERROR \
 ABORT 'NO ANSWER' \
 ABORT BUSY '' \
 at OK \
 atz OK \
 # uncomment the following if your SIM is PIN protected
 # and replace **** with your PIN
 #at+cpin=**** OK \
 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","pinternet.interkom.de"' OK \
 'atdt*99***1#' CONNECT

And /etc/ppp/disconnect.o2 looks like:

#!/bin/sh
chat -vs \
 ABORT 'NO CARRIER' \
 ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' \
 ABORT ERROR \
 ABORT 'NO ANSWER' \
 ABORT BUSY '' \
 '\K' '' '+++ATH'

Now make sure ppp0 is initialized on startup…

touch /etc/hostname.ppp0
sh /etc/netstart ppp0

… and to connect simply run pppd call o2 and pkill pppd to disconnect. Run ifconfig ppp0 to see if your connection is up and running:

ppp0: flags=8051<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        priority: 0
        groups: ppp egress
        inet 10.150.81.109 --> 0.0.0.2 netmask 0xfffffffc

Next post will be about auto fail-over between this and my regular DSL connection.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Sadly Preview.app currently doesn’t have support for PDF signatures, so I’ll need Reader X for that, but hopefully that changes with Mac OS X Lion!

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

But if you’re now additionally running OpenVPN in TCP mode over these links things get worse. The reason is, that TCP uses some kind of a three-way handshake to make sure all packets arrive in time and re-transmits those packets that don’t. With OpenVPN over TCP you now have your application’s TCP session encapsulated in your VPN”s TCP session, doubling your ACKs and re-transmissions (if needed).

Now I switched to UDP on the VPN’s session and if the link starts to loose packets, the VPN will too, but the application’s TCP session will make sure those packets are being re-transmitted. All in all everything feels much faster – at least for a crappy 3G connection.

See this link for a more detailed explanation.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

sudo /Developer-old/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

This removes all Xcode3 files, freeing up about 5Gb of space.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments

Finally got a new workspace… My old 22in Monitor was just too damn small for everything…

Since I called it review, here it comes: These monitors are great. The size is nice, the resolution of 2540×1440 is awesome and the colors are impressive. Did I mention gorgeous? </Apple Keynote>

BUT there are a few downsides:

• The screen has some kind of a glimmer in white areas, which is a little wired for text
• The screen seems to have a bug with Display-port. It sometimes just hangs and you need to power reset it
• I need a new Mac Mini with thunderbolt to run both at full resolution

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Most Linux based LiveCDs use Busybox and Squashfs for booting… Busybox has wget built in, so it’s possible to skip the NFS part, use wget and HTTP and load the squashfs to RAM. One still has to get TFTP trough firewalls, since it is needed to load the Kernel and Busybox, but OpenBSD for example has tftp-proxy built-in… So you need:

• DHCP to supply PXE options
• TFTP to serve the base system(s)
• PXELINUX as a kind of bootloader
• HTTPd to serve the rest of the system(s)

I want to have my favorite LiveCD GRML handy for rescue and Linux install purposes and OpenBSD of course

Let’s start with the Server you want to use to boot from:
Install tftpd-hpa, syslinux and a httpd, start tftpd-hpa with the ‘secure’ flag and place a copy of pxelinux.0 (usually in /usr/lib/syslinux/ in your $tftproot.

For GRML you’ll need to place linux26 and minirt.gz from the grml_netboot_package in your $tftproot. You’ll also need grml.squashfs from either grml-small, grml-medium or grml. I’d suggest grml-small as it needs to fit in your RAM. Place it in your $httproot.

Now configure (ISC) DHCPd to supply PXE informations:

next-server 10.1.32.1;
filename "/pxelinux.0";

Create a file called ‘default’ in a folder pxelinux.cfg in your $tftproot:

label GRML
kernel linux26
append initrd=minirt.gz fetch=http://<serverip>/grml.squashfs boot=live

Most PXE Loaders will try to find a file with the name of their IP Address, written in hex, then remove one case after another and fall back to ‘default’ if it doesn’t find anything. So symlink the appropriate files if you want to speed things up. ‘fetch’ tells GRML’s busybox to load it’s system files from the URL given.

To also serve the OpenBSD installer you need to download pxeboot and place it as pxeboot.0 in your $tftproot. You also need bsd.rd from any Release/Snapshot you want to serve. Call them whatever you want and also place them in your $tftproot. To serve pxeboot.0 (The OpenBSD Bootloader btw) add these two lines to ‘default’ in pxelinux.cfg:

label OpenBSD
kernel pxeboot.0

You’re done. Try booting your System from PXE. You’ll get a ‘boot>’ promt. Select your system, by typing whatever you supplied as ‘label’ in your ‘default’ config… e.g. GRML or OpenBSD… in case of OpenBSD you’ll then need to supply bsd.rd to boot, or whatever you renamed that file to…

If you encounter any problems, grep the logs, use ‘tcpdump’ and have a look at the SYSLINUX Wiki…

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Let’s start with what you have to do on your client:

$ dnssec-keygen -a HMAC-MD5 -b 512 -n USER -r /dev/urandom host1.dyn.example.org

Now copy Khost1.dyn.example.org.+157+39064.key (your pubkey) to your server’s configdir (in case of Debian: /etc/bind) and define it as follows:

key host1.dyn.example.org. {
        algorithm HMAC-MD5;
        secret "<put key from Khost1.dyn.example.org.+157+39064.private here>";
};
zone "dyn.example.org" {
        type master;
        file "master/dyn.example.org";
        allow-update { key host1.dyn.example.org.; };
};

This allows everyone with the Ktest.unixhosts.org.+157+39064.private key, to update zone ‘dyn.example.org’. Feel free to find out how to do privilege separation on your own Back to your client: Since we can’t use ddclient or similar clients, I wrote my own small script:

#!/bin/sh
dir=$(dirname $0)
old_ip=$(cat $dir/ip_cur.txt)
new_ip=$(ifconfig pppoe0 | grep -E 'inet.[0-9]' | \
       grep -v '127.0.0.1' | awk '{ print $2}')

if [ $old_ip != $new_ip ];
 then
  echo $new_ip >> $dir/ip_log.txt
  echo "server <yourserver>\nzone dyn.example.org \
    \nupdate delete host1.dyn.example.org. A\
    \nupdate add host1.dyn.example.org. 60 A $new_ip \
    \nsend" > $dir/ip_nsupdate_instructions.txt
  nsupdate -k $dir/Kfhost1.dyn.example.org.+157+25504.private \
    $dir/ip_nsupdate_instructions.txt || exit 1
  echo $new_ip > $dir/ip_cur.txt
fi

My script get’s the current IP Address of pppoe0, compares it to the one from it’s previous run and executes ‘nsupdate’ if they mismatch. ‘nsupdate’ doesn’t accept it’s configuration from stdin, that’s why I needed to hack around with echo… If ‘nsupdate’ fails (due to connection issues or something like that) my script exits. If update was successful it writes the current ip into ip_cur.txt, so the script only executes ‘nsupdate’ on IP Address change and not every time your run it. Add my script to crontab to run it once a minute or so…

* * * * * ip_update.sh

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

First off: A ‘hidden primary’ setup, uses one server for all zone-file changes that isn’t listed anywhere and doesn’t get any queries from clients,  and two or more ‘slaves’ that do the actual work. Have a look at this example zone-file:

$ORIGIN unixhosts.org.
unixhosts.org.   IN   SOA   amy.unixhosts.org.   hostmaster.unixhosts.org. (
                                         201102111       ; serial
                                         3h              ; refresh
                                         1m              ; retry
                                         1w              ; expire
                                         1m)             ; minimum

 IN              NS              ns.inwx.de.
 IN              NS              ns2.inwx.de.
 IN              NS              ns3.inwx.de.

The host amy.unixhosts.org is my ‘hidden primary’. As you can see, it’s not listed as NS, so it won’t get queries from actual client resolvers. ns[2,3].inwx.de are my name-servers for this zone, configured as slaves.

The ‘hidden primary’ config looks like:

zone "unixhosts.org" {
        type master;
        file "master/unixhosts.org";
        allow-transfer { unixhosts; inwx; };
        also-notify { 10.0.1.1; 10.0.2.1; 10.0.3.1; };
};

Whereas a ‘slave’ config looks like:

zone "unixhosts.org" {
        type slave;
        file "slave/unixhosts.org";
        masters { 10.0.0.1; };
        allow-transfer { clients; };
};

If your Infrastructure isn’t large enough to take responsibility for 3 public DNS servers, you might want to have a look at InterNetworX. I’m running their servers as ‘slaves’ for a few months now. Their support team is great and I haven’t had any issue within years!

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

Recently I needed to install Xen on one of our Machines in our Lab at work. KVM was not an option, because the System (a dual-xeon with HT) didn’t have hardware virtualization support. When I last used it, Xen 3 was a pain in the ass with it’s patched old Kernel and full-virtualized guests didn’t perform well. But Xen 4 now has support in upstream Kernel so I thought I’d give it a try… Installation went fine using aptitude. Everything got set up right. But there seems to be a bug with VGA Output though. I haven’t got a login promt or any init-script output until I removed ‘quiet’ from the Kernel’s bootloader options. But this seems to be Hypervisor related, as it does work with the Xen Kernel, but w/o Hypervisor beyond it. So, if all you get is something like

ERROR: Unable to locate IOAPIC for GSI 9

try removing quiet from your bootloader configuration…

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | No comment

I recently upgraded my 2010′s MacBook Pro with a 120Gb SSD. I already installed  a OCZ SSD in my Mac Mini a couple of months ago… Everything runs fast and smooth and the MBP’s battery run time is now even more awesome BUT… the hell! Hibernate is broken! It’s a known bug. Mac OS X just Kernel Oopses on wake-up! OCZ promises to fix it… since 6 months or maybe even longer, I don’t know. There is a Thread over at the OCZ forums, but it’s closed by the ops… lol!

I wasn’t aware of this issue until I ran into it myself. Maybe this post keeps someone from buying the OCZ. It might be worth waiting for the Intel G3 SSDs. But hey… I now have about 10h runtime with my MBP, so I shouldn’t need Hibernate anyway

UPDATE: I’m also having the issue that the Vertex2 isn’t recognized, when my MBP goes to sleep and I directly wake it up again. Reboot doesn’t fix it. It just doesn’t boot. Powering it off for 5 minutes does fix it! Weird…

© Chris for Chris' World, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments

So, if I don’t get back to this blog this year… Happy Holidays and a happy New Year!

I promise I’ll try to get back to a more regular posting schedule next year.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

It’s pretty simple to set up – but the docs aren’t straight forward

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Christian Kildau's Portfolio</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="./galleria.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="./galleria.flickr.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="./galleria.fullscreen.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="galleria">

<script type="text/javascript">
	api_key = '0a5a49ea38e03b11f477aaf066b5dcd2'
	var flickr = new Galleria.Flickr(api_key);

	flickr.getSet('72157614373115604', function(data) {
		$('#galleria').galleria({
		data_source: data,
		image_crop: false,
		show_info: true,
		autoplay: true,
		transition: 'fade',
		preload: 3,
	});
});
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>

No Flash required, so it even works on my (veeeery slow) iPhone 3G….

EDIT: Forgot the link.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

• Interoperability (e.g. no Flash)
• Easy handling
• Smooth transitions
• Automatic resize to fit the Browser’s windows
• Use Flickr as CDN and for stats

I came across a jQuery based solution called Galleria, which fits my needs pretty much, but it was slow! My Core2Duo MacBook Pro had a hard time sliding trough my 1600px images! And I haven’t got it to work with Flickr so far. I think Galleria is the way to go and I’ll try to get it to work with Flickr and play more smoothly, but in the meantime I embedded a Flickr slideshow in Flash… See My Portfolio

Hope to get it done today, but don’t really count on it

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

I spent the weekend to dig into the internals of HTML5 and JavaScript, trying to find a good way to publish a Portfolio here on my website that can be viewed on non-flash devices. So blog post delayed til next week.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

Finding the right workflow isn’t easy. The first thing I did was writing down what I wanted and what I already own:

• A MacBook Pro
• A Mac Mini
• A fast NAS (e.g. Fileserver) with tons of space
• An on-site backup to an external HDD

Currently I have my entire Library on the MacBook Pro’s internal 5400rpm hard-drive. This is just slow. Things feel very sluggish, which is why I want to replace that hard-drive with an SSD. SSDs are expensive or small, so I need to move my Library (80Gb at the moment) somewhere else… would be pretty easy if there weren’t my requirements:

• Have backups of everything
• Be able to import and edit Photos on the MacBook Pro when on the road
• Be able to import and edit Photos on the Mac Mini when at home
• Sit on the couch and edit some photos I imported to the Mac Mini earlier
• Upload Photos to the Web from on the road and from home trough Lightroom
• Have a separate archive where all my photos are seriously safe
• Be able to access part of the Archive from everywhere in the world

My solution is kinda complex. First of all I split my Library into two. One for the Archive and one for the “Current Work”. Nothing special about that.

• The Archive holds my finished Photos. The Photos them self sit on the NAS whereas the Catalog and other Metadata sits on the Mac Mini’s SSD for performance reasons. This means I can only use the Archive on the Mac Mini. Backups are handled by the NAS and are stored on an external HDD.
• The “Current Work” Library contains my recent photos which I’m still planning to edit. For flexibility reasons everything is stored on an external HDD and backed up to another external HDD from within Lightroom. No Time Machine here for the external HDD since I’m planning to use this Library on multiple computers.
• Photos are moved to the Archive when everything is finished.
• A Publish Service exports my favorite Shots in the Archive to a public folder on the NAS. I can easily access that folder at home or trough my VPN from everywhere in the world. Maybe I’ll add iPhoto’s sharing…
• I am also thinking of adding something like Crashplan to add another level of security by having an off-site Backup… not just for my photos.

This all sounds complex, maybe this makes it clearer (or worse ):

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments

The installation itself was as “easy” as I described earlier.

I then booted from the Snow Leopard installation DVD, selected Restore from Time Machine Backup and 30min later my system was back up. As a side note: You can restore from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD (as long as your data fits with no problems of course), but you will need to format the SSD using Disk Utility first. Otherwise the Restore Wizard will tell you, that your Backup doesn’t fit! It does format it later on again…

(I did re-install yesterday because of some weird issues with graphics performance, but that had nothing to do with the SSD or restore process. I had annoying lags when scrolling in Lightroom or Firefox for example since the Graphics Driver update for Snow Leopard a few months ago…)

Everything works smooth and well. System boot has decreased from 1min 15s to about 30s, OpenOffice now starts in 2s instead of 20s, Lightroom switches quickly between it’s modules… My average write speed is around 90MB/s, average read speed is around 150MB/s. Both for one stream. Should be much higher with multiple streams combined. But what’s more important is the very low access time.

After about one week the Vertex 2 looks like a good teammate for the Mini.

P.S. it looks like Sunday is a good day for scheduling my posts from now on

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | One comment

To keep things a bit more consistent I think I’ll try to schedule my posts on a weekly basis from now on.

Take care and please stay tuned

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | No comment

Luckily they seem to have fixed this in 2.1.3 as the ChangeLog states: fix a serious error in networking IO code.

So the solution is as easy as upgrading. I am running Ubuntu, but two months after netatalk-2.1.3 has been released, they don’t even have it in unstable. Lucky Gentoo users you! I needed to fix this very quickly as it started to disrupt my workflow. Sadly I currently don’t have the time to dig into the packaging system of Debian or Ubuntu, so I looked up Debian’s configure options and just compiled from source:

cp -a /etc/netatalk/ ~
aptitude purge netatalk
apt-get build-dep netatalk
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/netatalk/files/netatalk/2.1.3/netatalk-2.1.3.tar.bz2/download
tar xjvf netatalk-2.1.3.tar.bz2
cd netatalk-2.1.3
./configure  --with-shadow --enable-fhs --enable-tcp-wrappers --enable-timelord --enable-overwrite --with-pkgconfdir=/etc/netatalk --enable-krb4-uam --enable-krbV-uam --with-cnid-dbd-txn --with-libgcrypt-dir --with-cracklib=/var/cache/cracklib/cracklib_dict --enable-debian --disable-srvloc --enable-zeroconf --with-ssl-dir --enable-pgp-uam --prefix=/usr/local/netatalk/
make
sudo make install
mv ~/netatalk /etc/
/etc/init.d/netatalk start

This saves a copy of your running netatalk configuration to your home directory, removes netatalk, downloads all necessary libraries to build netatalk, downloads netatalk from SourceForge, extracts it, configures it, builds it, installs it, restores the configuration and starts it as usual.

I am running netatalk 2.1.3 for a week now and the error seems to be gone

If you know how to easily create a Debian package, feel free to post in the comments.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments

What has started as a 10 day road-trip from eastern Germany trough the Czech Republic, Austria and maybe Switzerland back to western Germany ended after just two days in Prague. On the first day we visited Karlovy Vary and drove to Prague on day two. But in Prague some ************* have smashed a windows and broke into our car and stole every single piece of clothing I own, my girlfriend’s laptop, my tripod, the car radio, ball pens, old shoes, some coverings, the drink holder…
We called the Czech police. They didn’t care, they didn’t come. They didn’t let us file a charge. 2500€ lost. No insurance will cover it. The car was that damaged, we had to abort the trip. Not that I wanted to continue, without any clothing.

I didn’t like the Czech people in the first place. They were rude, they all didn’t give a crap about anything. Several times my tripod has almost been knocked over. Every time we had a question the officials pretended they didn’t speak English or German or whatever.

I write this post just to put it all behind. Karlovy Vary and Prague are nice cities, I’ve been there the second time now (this time just to take photos), but they won’t see me again. Ever.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments

Fuck you Prague, fuck you Czech! Fuck you all! I have never seen people being that unhelpful and disinterested.

My girlfriend and I went to Prague for a night and this morning we wanted to leave to Vienna, Austria. But no, we didn’t do that. The parking situation in Prague and the entire Czech Republic is horrible, so we parked in a side street a few hundred meters from our so called “Hotel” where we had to pay the parking meter every two hours. Not just that the Hotel (Old Time Hotel) was horrible (dirty, ants, …), between 01:00AM where we last checked our car and 09:00AM when we came back, one of the windows have been smashed and every single piece of clothing I own has been stolen. Everything. About 2000€ worth of clothing. Not to mention my girlfriends Laptop. And don’t tell me we should have taken it out! We put all visible things in the hotel and stored the rest in the trunk. You also wouldn’t have carried your stuff that far to the Hotel for just one night! I think they came for the radio – a cheapish built-in one that comes from the manufacturer. They have even taken the coverings in the car. WTF?! And the charging cable for the navigation system, that we had a hard time getting out of fucking Prague.

We must have been standing there for like 15minutes. I was yelling and smashing everything. There were several people around us, no one came. We called the police. And then we waited in the rain and waited and waited with all the stuff we had taken to the hotel room (4 additional bags!). No one came. No Police. No one came to help, no one cared. They all pretended they didn’t speak English or German.

Three hours later a policeman finally came, but pretended he doesn’t speak a fucking single word of English, or German, or even Polanski! In the end he sent us home, telling us we should file a charge at home. Great!

Back home I wanted to buy at least some underwear and clean shirts, when the car’s engine also broke. And it was raining cats & dogs…

Holiday canceled. Good night.

UPDATE: Due to many many rude, disrespectful and sometimes very racist comments, I think I have to close comments on this post. I think everyone should be able to share his/her opinion, but there were so many comments I just had to trash because they were just too extreme. It is not my intention to censor any comments, nor is it my intention to offend anyone personal, so I rather just delete those comments. Don’t get me wrong! I shared MY experiences and I am still very pissed off. Anyway… comments closed.

© Chris for Chris' World, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments