Boring day

Nothing much happened. Learned few things about mpeg4 and divx. Also, possibly, found a bug in xscreensaver. I will have to verify it tomorrow. Strange thing: popup windows from ical are visible even when screensaver is running.

In other news: Q3 lan party postponed for one week. Sad…

Linuxalization of the home network completed

Installed Red Hat Linux 7.2 on my girlfriend’s computer. Now I have clean pure Linux network at home. I used the chance also to make few changes to home net organization. Mainly, I moved all computers to use dhcp and have /home directory nfs mounted from the server. Very convenient. I also synchronized all /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/shadow on all machines. Dirtly temporary hack. I am trying to figure out how to make OpenLDAP work. Another thing to remember for home net setups is -R option for dhcpcd. This option will prevent DHCP client from overwriting /etc/resolv.conf and messing up info.

I am still deciding on which icq client to use. These decision cannot stabilize for like 4-5 years now ;) . Basically, I am down to choice between Licq (X), and CenterICQ (console). Both are very nice, flexible, and stable. CenterICQ seems to be more up-to-date though, using newest ICQ2000 protocol, with SMS support. It also provides a tool to convert all you history and contacts.

Meanwhile, I am also getting ready for Quake3 LAN party next Saturday. It’s my first LAN party, so I feel kinda excited :) . I’ve spent the whole night today tweaking my config file. It will be up here in the nearest future. Off to bed now…

Gucho 0wned

I am pretty busy these days. My home server has been cracked via old ssh. I had to clean up the machine, then decided to use it as a honeypot for some time. By now, I think I have everything I need, so machine is reinstalled. Red Hat 7.2 has been installed on it. I am occupied with configuration of the server and I am using these downtimes to reorganize my home network a little bit. So, no usefull staff today, except for the promise that I will put together and publish here the information I got from this attack. Get back later! :)

TeX

TeXFinally, after considerable thought, I have chosen, not without the help of others, to use TeX for writing documentation. After two days of using it, I must admit that I enjoy it really much. There are few helpful online resource like TeX User Group, UK List of TeX FAQ, LaTex and BibTeX course notes (with lots of examples). For those who can read and understand Russian, TeX FAQ and TeX section of opensource.ru might be of some help.

Java, CVS, and documentation

Last few days were pretty active. First of all, I was playing with apache, JBoss and resin setup. I managed to get them to work together, although failed to make resin handle web apps from the /.

I also spent a fair amount of time on CVS, mutt+gnupg, CA with openssl and some other stuff. CVS makes me happy. I’ve read about some BSD application called arch, which is supposed to be even better then CVS, though the port for Linux is not complete yet, so be it :) Mutt was pretty easy to set up with gnupg. Actually, it happened so, that I had pgp support compiled in for ages, and gpg.rc configuration file was kindly provided with the distribution of mutt package.

Now I am about to write several technical documents for our company internal use, so I was looking for the right way to do it. Office suits were not even thought of, after I remembered my Final Year Project preparation in MS Office. Yuck, that was a pain in the … Hmm.. Mkay. So, I went off to the direction of XML and SGML, but that land is a bit confusing. DocBook followed with recomendations from Linux Documentaion Project (aka LDP). All roads lead to Rome, though and I ended up with TeX idea in my head. I will live it through over the weekend and I will decide finally what to use.