colin@
colino.net

Il y a quelques jours, Unixgarden a publié sur son site un ancien article que j’avais écrit pour Linux Pratique, qui visait à présenter Sylpheed-Claws — qui ne s’appelait pas encore Claws Mail :-)

Voici l’article. Ça me fait de vieux souvenirs, je l’ai écrit entre la version 1.9.14 et 1.9.15, c’est à dire début octobre 2005. Le canal IRC était #sylpheed, sur IRCNet. On avait encore le plugin ClamAV, pas encore de plugin PDF re-disparu depuis, et les plugins TNEF Parser, SpamReport, S/MIME, RSSyl, GtkHtmlViewer, AttRemover, AttachWarner et Archiver n’existaient pas encore. On a fait du chemin :-)

It’s been a long time since I last blogged! I’ve been really busy with real life…

As you may know, dear reader, my wife (Clo) is pregnant and we’ll have a baby soon (in about 50 days !), so we’ve been preparing stuff in advance. Over the last monthes, we’ve redone the floor in the future baby’s room, created cupboards, painted things, we’ve boughtfurniture , we’ve moved our “office” in the living room, we’ve built a few things, we spent time in baby stores to make lists, see what we needed, buy a few things, etc.

Now we’re almost ready, so we’re waiting :-)

Also, there’s been a whole lot of people at home to visit us - both of my sisters, Clo’s brother, my mother, Clo’s parents, … Very nice! If only we knew we’d just have to make babies to bring them over! ;-p

Yes, I’ve been linking to Clo’s blog everywhere. Not my fault if she blogs more than me!

On the Claws Mail front, I’ve put some days off to use and, following the announce of the GTK team of GTK+3, I’ve removed every fucking deprecated line in our source code and rewrote code that worked; just because the GTK+ guys can’t be bothered with keeping deprecated code around, I’ve rewritten about 10.000 lines, I think. Thanks, dudes. We’ve also been able to fix a good number of bugs, and added support for client SSL certificates.

Maybe we’ll release soon…

English version below.

Aujourd’hui 15 otages des FARC ont été libérés par l’armée colombienne. Je me réjouis pour eux, et je suis complètement impressionné par la méthode employée. Au lieu de s’aplatir et d’échanger une otage contre un certain nombre de guerilleros, la Colombie a planifié une opération militaire et l’a parfaitement mise en oeuvre.

Après avoir localisé les otages par quatre mois de reconnaissance sur le terrain, ils ont utilisé la méthode de l’ingénierie sociale qui marche tellement bien quand elle bien utilisée, pour convaincre les FARC qu’un ordre venu d’en haut leur demander de transférer 15 otages plus profond dans la jungle pour plus de sécurité. Et une poignée de soldats s’est pointée en t-shirt du Che dans un hélicoptère repeint, s’est posée au milieu d’une soixantaine de guerilleros, a embarqué 14 otages et 2 gardiens des FARC, a redécollé, et a neutralisé les 2 gardiens avant de retourner à leur base.

Le tout avec zéro coups de feu tirés, et zéro victimes. J’imagine à peine la dose d’adrénaline contre laquelle ils ont dû lutter durant l’opération…

English:

Today 15 hostages of the FARC have been released by the Columbian army. I’m really happy for them, and I’m also quite impressed by the method employed by the army. Instead of bending down and trading one hostage for a number of FARC guerilleros, they’ve set up a perfect military operation with no negociation.

Based on information gathering and social engineering via radio, they managed to locate the hostages, managed to convince the FARC that hostages had to be transferred for more security, did not to blow their cover after landing, did neutralize the two FARC embarked with them in the helicopter, and made it back to their base after having shot zero rounds and made zero victims. A mission perfectly done, and I only can imagine the amount of adrenaline they had to manage during these twenty minutes!

I’ve seen this mentioned in a few geek news outlets, the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. 1.5 meters of CAT5 cable for $500 — but then your music will sound so much better than with $1.5 cables !

The Amazon reviews are mostly hilarious. I wonder how large the target market can be for this, which is the perfect example of Snake Oil Product :-) The tags are mostly right.

Je viens de me rendre compte que mon chat Crapule fait un blog dans mon dos. C’est plutôt incroyable !

“These developers seem to have their priorities in the right place.”

Jonathan Corbet of LWN published last week a review of Claws Mail. I’m quite happy about what he says, his review is quite positive and, as I like his work a lot, I’m pleased!

Deux photos, de nous et de Clo, prises par Maman ce week-end. Et il y a aussi quelques nouvelles sur le blog de Clo :-)

To be able to change BIOS settings from the command-line on a Dell Poweredge, you need the syscfg utility. It’s very useful when you want to change a configuration on, for example, 32 nodes at once, without having to plug screen, plug keyboard, reboot, change setting, reboot 32 times. Here is how I installed it on the CentOS 5 distribution :

# cd ; wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
# yum install srvadmin-hapi
# wget ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/sysman/dtk_2.5_80_Linux.iso
# mkdir dtk
# mount -o loop dtk_2.5_80_Linux.iso dtk/
# cd dtk/isolinux/
# cp  SA.2 ~/SA.2.gz
# cd; gunzip SA.2.gz
# mkdir stage2
# cd stage2
# cpio -i < ../SA.2
# cd lofs
# mkdir dell
# mount -o loop dell.cramfs dell/
# mkdir -p /usr/local/sbin ; cp dell/toolkit/bin/syscfg /usr/local/sbin/
# umount dell
# cd
# umount dtk

And voilà! You can now use syscfg:

# /usr/local/sbin/syscfg –biosver
biosver=1.5.1
# /usr/local/sbin/syscfg –virtualization=enable
virtualization=enable

I’d have preferred an easier way, but couldn’t find syscfg’s RPM.

When deploying that to a lot of nodes, you probably don’t want to go through all the associated network downloads of the first phase (wget of the yum repository, yum, and wget of the 230MB iso), so you can take shortcuts:

# for node in $(list_of_nodes); do scp /usr/local/sbin/syscfg /var/cache/yum/dell-hardware-auto/packages/srvadmin-*.rpm $node: ; ssh $node “mkdir -p /usr/local/sbin; mv syscfg /usr/local/sbin; rpm -ivh srvadmin-*.rpm”; done;

I had, until recently, a problem when it came to test memory on the nodes in my lab. Until now, I was able to PXE boot memtest+, but had to go down to the lab and plug a screen to check the output. Multiple annoyances: first I had to move my ass to the lab room, then I add to do some difficult things to plug a screen to the node, then I had to come back from time to time and look at the output. All of these right in front of the cooling units, which blow some really cold air now that they work correctly.

This morning I investigated in the source code of memtest+ and found out it supports output to serial consoles since recently!

A little upgrade later, I can now boot memtest+ with the console=ttyS0,57600 command line parameter and just watch my serial line output, without moving at all! Yay!

DEFAULT memtest console=ttyS0,57600

LABEL memtest

KERNEL images/tools/memtest

Viva PXE!

(Btw for those who’ll find funny to use DEFAULT memtest… PXE boot choices are updated via a cgi script called from an intranet tool, which itself is wrapped in a little GTK systray applet. This applet allows to reboot, shut down, power on, reinstall various distributions, follow serial line, open an ssh connection, on the lab’s nodes. This tool is also useable via command line for scripting power).

Encore une fois aujourd’hui, j’ai entendu quelqu’un expliquer que ne pas respecter le code de la route à vélo, ça fait perdre des points sur son permis. Comme ça commence à m’agacer, je l’écris:

Conformément à une circulaire du 23 novembre 1992, il ne peut y avoir retrait de points que pour les infractions commises au moyen de véhicules pour la conduite desquels un permis de conduire est exigé. (3.1d)

Griller un feu rouge, prendre un sens interdit, faire des excès de vitesse sur la rocade… Vous pouvez faire tout ceci à vélo, et vous risquerez une amende pécuniaire - mais certainement pas un retrait de points sur votre permis.

De la même manière, vous pouvez faire n’importe quoi à rollers et vous exposer à une amende maximale de 4 €, si vous vous faites choper sur la route : en tant que piéton (statut légal des personnes à rollers ou skate board), l’article R.412-34 de code de la route vous interdit d’utiliser la chaussée lorsqu’un trottoir existe. 4 €, pas plus, pas moins.