Today I had to move an Inbox of some Gig mail to transfer from a dovecot to a cyrus imap server. I thought using imapsync would just do the trick, but no it doesn’t. Many of the messages wasn’t transferable cause “Message contains invalid header”.
I tried to upgrade imapsync, dovecot and cyrus to the latest version, but nothing fixed the problem. Digging around in the ned did lead me after hours to Renes
How to fix emails for Cyrus LMTP and IMAP. I did throw his script on the Inbox of the dovecot server, but this did lead me into getting “FETCH for mailbox got too little data” in the dovecot server log and breaking down the connection of the imap client to the server. This could be fixed while removing corresponding dovecot.index.cache and restarting the server.

To make it short: many thanks to wouter, myon, weasel and especially santiago and panthera … you made my month, definetly!

After a hard week at work I’m just off for vacation until the weekend without network access. If there are urgent steps needed with my packages, just feel free for a 0day NMU.

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

In case you missed it, alien 2.0 was final released (5 weeks ago).

Actual I’m involved into a project which maybe of interest for you if you like opera particular when you are a Richard Wagner enthusiast.
Since long time, the waiting period for obtaining tickets increases a lot. At the moment I think you have to wait around 8 years, which is a worse.
Time changes also at Bayreuth Festival, they seems to refocus their audience. Looks like the aspects of huge waiting list and new medias influenced that process. This year the opera “Die Meistersinger” is broadcasted online under the slogan “live dabei” (live there) via the great thing called “Internet” and to a public viewing area in Bayreuth, which is a premiere in both cases. So if you don’t have a ticket for the Festspielhaus and not in a position to make use of the public viewing but interested to have a look at the opera, you may want to check if your system matches the technical requirements and give it a try.

postfwd 1.10pre7c-1 has been accepted and did hit experimental yesterday.
If you using policyd-weight you might want to give it a try, since its active development stoped. If you are annoyed by too much spam, it maybe a good idea as well.
Please have a look on postfwd.cf, there is no default config provided, since the configuration depends heavily on your environment. But maybe you have a look at /usr/share/doc/postfwd/examples, there is what you expect.
If you have any comments, send a mail to the maintainer or if there are bugs I didn’t spotted yet, please fill one!
In case I don’t respond quit fast, maybe I’m in the delivery room or anywhere else in the hospital or something like that, so please give me some extra time.
In case there are no big issues, I plan to upload the package to unstable in a reasonable time.

Last week I noticed, that Kabel Deutschland, a cable provider in germany, returns for any non existing hosts “204.9.89.60″. It seems, thats it is rolled out since last fall. Even for DNSSEC enabled infrastructure it breaks it totally:

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> +dnssec web.pixaco.se @83.169.184.161
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; ANSWER SECTION:
web.pixaco.se. 0 IN A 204.9.89.60 Beside that, this behavour breaks the whole DNS, since many mechanism rely on a negative answer. The most visible effect for the users is, that when having a typo on surfing, he will forwarded to http://suche.kabeldeutschland.de/de.kde.assist/?domain=<domainyoutypedinyourprompt>. Since 204.9.88.0/21 is located at our transatlantic friends from US, there might be some problem with leaking privacy informations. I don’t feel happy, if I had a typo in my URL and getting listed for it on any terror list or providing the newest porno links to my american friends inside the organisations with the tree capitals. All that for getting some extra money, but racing pricedumping for connectivity, this sucks a lot.
If you are a customer and feel pissed, you can send a friendly note to them:

Kabel Deutschland Vertrieb und Service GmbH & Co. KG
Beschwerdestelle
99116 Erfurt
kundenservice@kabeldeutschland.de
Fax: 01805299925

A quick and dirty workaround for dnsmasq maybe to add “bogus-nxdomain=204.9.89.60″ to your config file. This doesn’t fix the DNSSEC problem.
The problem also pops up at dns-operations and there are traces at google too.

After shutdown of the old L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET the IP address formerly associated with it, the IP continued to answere requests. More informations can be found at the ICANN Blog
UPDATE: Before bothering around, if you read the ICANN Blog, you realize that the issue was fixed very shortly. The whole problem is, that the file of the root DNS servers have to be keeped up to date. This issue should be fixed by operator of resolving nameservers (usually your ISP). A goody will be, to have this fixed by the next point release of debian, but it is NOT security critical.
Thanks Thijs for make me sensible that my article may misslead people who are not reading the referenced document.
UPDATE 2: A more technical description can also be found at Renesys Blog and a disussion how it is related to debian.

I’m off for vacation for just a week without any internet access (Oh my good, I will hate my inbox). This break will give me some time for my wife and my daughter before my second daughter will arrive in this world which is scheduled for mid june.
If there anything strange happen with my packages, just feel free for a 0day NMU.
Just after this week, I will attend to RIPE 56 where my latency will just a bit lower than normal.

Cause the subject, I did build a new package which can be installed on etch, lenny and of course sid. You can fetch it from http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/archive/bpo/wordpress/2.5.1-1~bpo40+1/ or get via

deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian etch-backports main non-free contrib Selfnote: Dump the wordpress user into separate domU

This Tuesday Robert Felber released a new upstream version. It is a (local) security bugfix (and some minor fixes) which was reported on Sunday by Chris Howells to the Debian Security Team (as well as to other vendors). Today DSA-1531 was released. Right from the DSA:
“… created its socket in an insecure way, which may be exploited to overwrite or remove arbitary files from the local system.” So please update you systems if you use this package asap. While we are at policyd-weight… there is one bug open (#471645) where I’m unsure if I want to fix it, cause only stable is effected and the problem can be solved by providing a adjusted array of rbl in the config file. Should I ask for inclusion directly into stable? But it’s a really minor issue. Or try to get 0.1.14.15 uploaded to volatile? I’m really unsure and suggestions are welcome.

Like (almost) every year I visited obligatory the event. Since my family^Wreallife is normaly preventing me from such a party, this one left cause it’s in my old homeland and there are good friends forcing me to join them (my wife can’t deny a please of her brother :). (more…)

Today a customer asked for hosting several domains with different content on one apache virtual host. The little tricky part was, that the sites should not be accessed by subdirs like http://domain20.org/subdir20/ and http://domain21.org/subdir21/ which can be done with a little script which parses the $_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’]. So mod_rewrite is an option.
To make it user accessable, we use .htaccess. This requires “AllowOverride +FileInfo” to be set for the DocumentRoot in the vhost config. The .htaccess in DocumentRoot could look something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain10.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain11.org$
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME !dir1/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -f [OR]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -d
RewriteRule (.*) dir1/$1 [L]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain20.org$ [OR]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST domain21.org$
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME !dir2/
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -f [OR]
RewriteCond % REQUEST_FILENAME -d
RewriteRule (.*) dir2/$1 [L]

Last week I did again some work on nagios-plugins. After the announcement of Dann Frazier to upload NMU to fix a trivial bug, I thought it’s time again to give some extra care to the package. So I prepared 1.4.11-2 fixing the important bugs and uploaded it. I also commited some minor fixes to the svn, so these issues will get fixed by the next upload. Since the development of policyd-weigh stalled and unfortunately maybe get stuck, I was looking for an alternative, which maybe found with postfwd. It’s quite flexible but it also will take more time (and care!) to get a reliable configuration, which maybe effective as policyd-weight (still) is right now. While checking the dependencies for postfwd I noticed that Net::DNS::Async isn’t available in Debian (yet). So I decided to create a package starting with dh-make-perl, join the Debian Perl Group and let it review. Damyan Ivanov was so kind to review and upload it, Gregor Herrmann did also give some much useful hints. Thanks to both! And yes, I also found time to step forward with NM, since I was overloaded the last weeks with usual work and life. Thank to my AM to be so appreciative.

Like Meike already told, it was a nice event, like always. IMHO it’s based on the good balance of community and a small amount of business booth and of course the visitors.
This year we was apart the Sidux Project. Didn’t heared about (much) before, but their slogan is Hot & Spicy! Maybe ‘hot’, cause it’s based on Debian unstable. Hopefully you won’t get tears if it’s too spicy. Anyways … if you want, you could take a look. My opinion is, this would be a good case for a Custom Debian Distribution, if there would be a requirement for it. But he.. everybody is free to do, what ever he want, if nobody else is restricted.
The talks I attended was in most cases excellent, some of them was funny … only one of them did really suck. Desktop Virtualision … after the talk, my question if there could anything else virtualized then the OS from Redmond, was answered with ‘Unfortunetly only XP’ … how lovely!

Searching for an alternative for our old Cisco Border Router we are evaluating some software routing suites on “normal” server hardware.
First we tried Vyatta, but the routing software frequently crashed completly. Maybe this is fixed with VC4 Alpha 1, but we didn’t test that.
Next try was the development version (0.99.9) of quagga from Debian testing, but it looks like a peering with one of our cisco router fails after the hold timer expires. (more…)

Since some weeks I’m really busy, private and at work. It’s going into the end of the year and everybody is in hurry. There seems also coming some changes for our family down the road in the future, but more maybe later. Additionally one months ago Santiago Ruano Rinc n did surprisingly turn up as my AM. We started fast, but I got stuck at P&P part 1 with the License comparisons, cause actually I’m so busy at work and with my family, that I can’t concentrate enough late at night, when trying to work on the papers. For example the graphviz license is completely overwhelming me. My hope in the last time was some bigger timeslots at the weekends, but they got smashed by my family and/or work issues. I hope Santiago is not getting annoyed by me and I can find hopefully some free time on holidays or in the first weeks next year. Anyways … Christian Perrier started a review and translation process of ipplans debconf templates by the debian-i18n contributors. The templates was in really bad conditions, most of it was copied over from gallery2 and I did know that they wasn’t so good. Thanks for all your work, when the process is over I’m proud to include your really nice work. Two other packages got updates. php-suhosin got new upstream release after months which fixes the broken perdir/.htaccess support. Unfortunatly I missed the release (cause there is no announcement list and there was no watch file) unless Raphael Geissert did leave a note. I integrated the new VCS and homepage stuff also and formorer did fix some minor issues. So we can hopefully upload now (when it arrives testing) the first package to backport.org and sleep little bit better, when using PHP on stable.
nagios-plugins also got updated. Since Seanius seems really busy (like allways), nobody did really took care of the package. In October it got two CVE which was solved via NMU by the testing-security team, also two new upstream releases where available. So I droped the obsolete patches, integrated new once, did make the new shiny lintian a bit more happy, some minor fixes and queued the package to Seanius. ;)
You can expect both packages on backport.org soon. My other (comaintained) packages will get updated to latest policy and VCS/homepage guidelines in the near future. Actually I’ve to prioritize what to do with the left time slots. :/

… it’s a old, but matchs the actual complex of some discussions in the country where I actualy live.