Linux

The Huawei E220/E270 stick I got from my mobile provider is working on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx out-of-the-box.

Upgrading all the gear to the newest Ubuntu release also includes Apple’s iBook. It took some time, but was in the end straightforward. Only 2 issues are currently worth mentioning, one about chvt, the other about Gnome Keyring.

In the standard rsyslog setup of Ubuntu a kernel message goes to 3 log files (syslog, messages and kern.log), i.e. running LOG targets in your firewall setup can really hog your /var/log volume.

I decided to simply discard the kernel messages after logging them to kern.log.

A few days ago I managed to connect a new power adapter to the iBook G4 to reanimate it after more than a year of deep freeze.

I soon realized that the installed MacOS is definitely out-of-date including many of the applications (e.g. Safari, Firefox, iPhoto).

Since an upgrade would not only cost money, but the latest MacOS is no longer available for this architecture, I downloaded the unofficial Ubuntu PPC release.

I was always wondering, why folders on an Exchange server, containing special characters in the name, show up that different in the IMAP protocol (e.g. using Mail::IMAPClient in Perl scripts).

But now I understand, this is just the result of the IMAP specification, that uses a modified UTF-7 encoding for non-ASCII characters (see RFC 2060, section 5.1.3).

If you ever need to automatically convert folder names into that modified UTF-7, the Perl module Encode::IMAPUTF7 may render useful.

To fix the recent failure of Network UPS Tools on my APC Back-UPS attached to Debian Etch, I used a pragmatic approach:

• The problem with a missing or changing USB device is fixed by udev providing a static device name.
• The 2nd problem with a crashing newhidups driver is solved by monit.

Using bzip2 instead of gzip will sometimes save you valuable storage capacity.

Quite some time ago I already wrote a simple script to replace a gzip archive in case bzip2 compression is doing a better job.

At least the package of policyd-weight in Debian Etch provides defaults, you should better check: