Dirk-Jan’s blog

In order to test a HTTP connection and response you are probably already familiar with telnet to do a HTTP GET request against port 80. However it’s not possible to use the same technique for testing a webserver response on port 443 (SSL), as you can see below.

To do a HTTP get against a SSL secured website you need openssl to do the magic. See the following example.

There are several ways to find out which release of Ubuntu you’re using. But the most easy way is to make use of the lsb_release (LSB stands for Linux Standard Base) command which pulls it’s info from ‘/etc/lsb-release’. This is a command line utility, so you’ll need to open a Terminal in which you can enter the commands. You can use the -a switch to see all information, as the example below shows. The -h switch will display a list of all possible options.

The lsb_release command does not show what architecture version you’re using. To find this out, you can use the uname command. The next example will show a 64-bit architecture.

The find you wich kernel release you’re currently using you can issue a uname -r. Use the -a switch if you want all information from the uname command displayed at once.

See ‘man uname’ for more details on using the uname.

Today I decided it was time to introduce my iPhone to the campus wireless network, instead of using the slow GPRS network of my carrier. I’m still a happy user of the first generation iPhone, so I’m stuck with GPRS and that’s why I like WIFI.

So I downloaded the already made VU-iphone.mobileconfig file to my workstation and fired up my favorite MUA, what happens to be Mozilla Thunderbird to mail the configuration as a attachment, just like the way the online manual described. But as soon as I opened up the mail app on the phone the message looked like normal text and there was no attachment to open. I decided to use Mutt as an alternative and repeated the steps described above. This time the attachment showed up as it should be. So I was able to import the wireless configuration and finished the wireless setup.

Now I’m happy being wireless connected but still curious why the attachment send by Thunderbird did not show up correctly in the mobile mail app. So I compared both mail clients MIME behaviour and it appears that Thunderbird is not behaving correctly according to rfc2183. As you can see it uses Content-Disposition type ‘inline’ instead of the correct ‘attachment’ type.

I have stripped the irrelevant header and body information of the message.

Thunderbird:

Mutt:

This looks like a bug..

As mentioned earlier I would post my wireless configuration of the Cisco 877W router as soon as I got it to work the way I like. In this setup the commonly used IRB bridge option is not used. This configuration will also work on the 857W model.

On the (outside) dialer0 interface I had to add the following line to enable NAT:

And at last you’ll need the next ip nat and access-list lines to make it work:

You can use the show dot11 or debug dot11 commands to troubleshoot. For example, the following output displays a associated device:

Enjoy being wireless!

Since switched over to a new theme I needed to rearrange the way the sidebar should look. The list of archives was just to long, think 20 months is the default, to be aesthetic correct. So I started to look for a limit setting in de admin interface of Wordpress, but could not find a way to change the limit. I probably looked over it. So browsing through the php scripts I found the file responsible for the way the archives section behaves.

I use Wordpress version 2.5.1 from the Debian lenny repository

Edit the following file:

And look for the following function:

Change the options you whish, I lowered the limit to 10 months.

During the upgrade from Etch to Lenny I was surprised that the Gallery2 package was not available for the current stable release of Debian. At first it was no problem, but the Gallery2 package of old stable Etch is to old for the most recent WPG2 plug-in for Wordpress, so I had to upgrade Gallery2 using a upstream version as one of the package maintainers made clear:

“Gallery2 is not available in Lenny due to the large amount of differences between the previous version and 2.3-1 from unstable. The release team decided not to include Gallery2 in stable due to this disruptive change late in the release process. The gallery2 package from sid can be installed via pinning.”

I’ve documented the steps I took for upgrading Gallery2.

1. Create to following file if it not exists:

2. Add the following lines:

* If you are using testing Debian make sure testing is the bigger number.
* This file will install only from the highest pin but it will show you if the packages is available in testing or unstable.

3. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following lines:

4. Update the apt database and upgrade the gallery2 package:

You’ll notice that the package will be kept back. Issue a dist-upgrade to install the upstream package.

Restart apache and as soon as you visit the gallery2 site you’ll be asked to start the upgrade process, which went very smoothly.

Recently I had to choose another ISP for my home internet connection, and because my previous modem was a bit limited in it’s capabilities I decided it was time to invest in a Cisco 877W Integrated Services Router.
The main reason to choose for the 877W is that I used to work with Cisco appliances, so I’m familiar with IOS and like the CLI to manage the device.

After unpacking the device I connected the serial console cable which comes with the 877W to my laptop and turned on the device. The first step was to make the internal LAN work. My new internet connection comes with 8 public IP addresses, so I had to change my internal LAN from private space to public. Now the LAN part was done I could setup the WAN interface, which took quite some time to figure out how to setup correctly.

While discovering the device it appeared that the preinstalled IOS version was a really old one that goes back to 2006. I decided to load a more recent firmware image, better safe than sorry.

With the following specs I’ve created a configuration that works well for the SurfSnel ADSL product of InterNLnet:

Provider: InterNLnet (SurfSnel ADSL)
Protocol: PPPoA routed (RFC 2364)
Encapsulation: VC MUX
VPI/VCI: 0/35
Authentication: PAP

The above configuration will most likely also work on the 857W! As you’ll probably notice the wireless configuration has not been setup, so later more on this story..

This guide will help you setup Firefly Media Server to serve iTunes. This server based program, previously known as “mt-daapd” shares your media collection to iTunes. DAAP stands for Digital Audio Access Protocol and is developed by Apple to share media across a local network.

I have done the installation on Debian Lenny, but Firefly (still called mt-daapd on the Debian repository!) is even available on Windows. In order to publish the firefly shared library on the network I have used Avahi, which is a free implementation of Zeroconf including mDNS/DNS-SD.

1. Install the needed packages including dependencies

2. Setup Avahi by creating /etc/avahi/services/mt-daapd.service

3. Restart the Avahi daemon

4. Edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf. The following variables where important to me:

5. Restart mt-daapd

The first time you start mt-daapd it will do a full scan to update the mt-daapd database. Watch the /var/log/daemon.log file to see when it’s ready.

Now you should be able to connect to the mt-daapd admin webinterface at http://yourservername:3689.

6. You’re done!
Fire up iTunes and you’ll see the just created Firefly library become available under Shared. You can also use this service with Rhythmbox Music Player, XMMS with the DAAP plugin, or any other DAAP compatible music player.