dolfschimmel.nl

A couple of years ago, I decided to register some of the .nl domain names with HostingDiscounter, for the moment it seemed fine.

Until last December, for every .nl domain you wanted to register/move/expire you needed a form as required by the SIDN. Last year December the SIDN decided that no forms are needed anymore. Which is some real progress, because from then on, everything should be possible fully electronic, right?

With all modern registrars who take their customers seriously, yes. For hostingdiscounter: no. You can register a domainname over the internet fully automatic. However, one needs to pay for changing the zonefiles (which is done by the staff manually,just like medieval times), also the changing of NameServers is done manually. And stuff gets worse, before you can cancel you contract with HostingDiscounter, you need to fill out a form, and send it by FAX or by Post, for their own administration they say. I wonder why they can’t automise that. They need to have that form 30 days before the domain name expires.

You need to specify on that form whether you want to cancel it, or move it. In case you want to move it, the move should be accomplished fourteen days before the expiration date of the contract. If it’s not accomplished fourteen days before the expiration date, they will automatically renew the contract for one more year, desperate beggers.

Though I’m not exactly sure what I want to do with the domain name it’s all about, I’m sure of one thing, I want to get rid of HostingDiscounter. I therefor modified the form in such way, that I have until the expiration date of the domain name to decide whether I move it, or let it expire permanently. They will probably not agree on that, but when I registered the domain name, this 14-day period is something that wasn’t mentioned in their terms of service, so I’m not tight to that for sure.

On the form it’s all about, they also require a signature. I don’t get the idea of that signature, it wasn’t needed when I registered the domain name, so they’ve got nothing to compare it too. However, I did personally sign the form. And as long as I sign it, it don’t matter what the sign(ature) is. Even if the signature says ‘invalid’, it is a valid signature (as approved by law). The signature I signed with, is attached to this post.

Anybody who is a big fan of bureaucracy I’d advice to register his/her domain names with hostingdiscounter. For anybody else (a vast majority I guess), please register your domain names somewhere else.

Signature:

For I wasn’t very keen on keeping removing all spam messages (see this post) I disabled any new comments.

I don’t know why I’ve never done so before, but today, I decided to check out what IP-addresses are used, and I discovered that it are just a couple of big spammers (and a few little ones). I blocked these IP’s, and let’s hope the best about it now. User comments are allowed by now.

For all spammers here, I’d suggest you start spamming these IP’s (which spammed me):
134.93.178.33
81.95.146.227
12.64.30.55

For some project of mine, I thought I needed LDAP, and installed it:

apt-get install ldap-utils slapd

Unfortunately, I kept getting the error:

Unrecognized database type (bdb)

or

Unrecognized database type (sql)

Depending on whatever database I tried. After several hours of putting a lot of effort, sweat, and tears into it, I decided to compile LDAP myself. After a couple of seconds, it said that I was missing some libraries for the Berkely DataBase (BDB) support. This made some bells ring, and it didn’t take too long, to figure out that I needed the package libdb*-dev in order to use the LDAP packages.

It wasn’t much of a problem to install LDAP now, after all, this is what should have been done in the start:
apt-get install libdb4.4-dev ldap-utils slapd

Btw, after having it all working, I was told that I wasn’t going to need it after all……

The past half of an hour, I’ve been busy on deleting over 1500 comments. After deleting these 1500 comments, already 4 other non-sense (=SPAM) comments were added. This means, that every hour aproximately 8 comments are posted, which equals about 192 per day.

I am not gonna removes these heaps of spam every day, and have decided to temporarily shutdown the user-sign-up-thing (whatever ). A honeypot that I link directly to my IP ban, seems like a nice thing, to set up tomorrow or the day after that…

In case you want to register at this blog, I have an account at gmail.com, and my username is dolfschimmel, you’re free to request a sign-up by email, which I will then set up manually.

Of course the way I built ktorrent in my previous post is utterly wrong, for it will still need the 32-bit libs in order to function.

I give it another shot;
su
w-get http://buntudot.org/people/~jdong/ktorrent/2.1.4/ktorrent_2.1.4~0jdong1.dsc

I add myself as the maintainer for the very simple reason that when I do something wrong with the packaging, people come to me, not to jdong who originally packaged ktorrent.

Result can be found here

After a couple of months, again, the intesion to post here more often

I recently upgraded ubuntu to feisty with not too many problems. Since then however, ktorrent kept crashing every 30 minutes or so. This would be solved with version 2.1.4 which is unfortunately not in the repositories yet. Iherefor downloaded the x86 feisty package from the ktorrent website, to install it using dpkg -i –force-architecture. Also this threw up several fatal errors. The solution? Create an amd64-bit package myself based on the x86 bit package…

su

nano source/DEBIAN/control


So till now, I’ve downloaded the original package, extracted the sources and the control files, and after that, changed the maintainer and version in the control file. All that’s left is to build the package itself…

dpkg -b source/ ktorrent-2.1.4~0DS0~7.04_amd64.deb

The final result can be found here.

Luckily I do not know/do/type everything by heart. I do copy sometimes something commands from other sites to see what there context is. for some reason the parameters that person used, did work with him, but not with me. I figured it out, and the final step is:

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mkisofs -o output.iso -b boot/boot.img -c boot/boot.catalog -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table newiso/

__ Edit __
“This is not a bootable disk. Please inseert a bootable floppy and press any key to try again”
Speaks for itself I’m afraid :’(

I created a new kernel config, by using the ubuntu kernel-config,and altering only the options of which I’m sure I need them. This results in a kernel that does not give any errors while compiling. The kernel-config can be found here.

Now I can continue with creating the final iso-file.

root@ubuntu:/mnt/memory# mkdir /home/ubuntu/newiso/pool/main/k/kernel-image-2.6.19.2_10.00.Custom_amd64/
root@ubuntu:/mnt/memory# cp kernel-image-2.6.19.2_10.00.Custom_amd64.deb /home/ubuntu/newiso/pool/main/k/kernel-image-2.6.19.2_10.00.Custom_amd64/
root@ubuntu:/mnt/memory# cd /home/ubuntu/newiso/pool/main/
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/newiso/pool/main# chmod -R o-w *
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/newiso/pool/main# cd ../../../

And then, all that’s left to do, is to put it alltogether to an in iso file:

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mkisofs -o debian_custom001-x86_64.iso -J -R -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table newiso/
INFO: UTF-8 character encoding detected by locale settings.
Assuming UTF-8 encoded filenames on source filesystem,
use -input-charset to override.
mkisofs: Uh oh, I cant find the boot catalog directory 'isolinux'!


Now I forgot about isolinux. Just have to figure out how I’m going to fix this.

For the current default stable debian release doesn’t support my chipset, I decided to slipstream my own Debian cd, installer included. I will try to minimalise the amount of packages, for I think the default netboot cd offers still too many. Also, I will use the newest stable kernel: 2.6.19.2 . Because I screwed up my previous ubuntu installation and because the ubuntu installer denies service, I do it all from a live-cd.

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# w-get http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r4/ia64/iso-cd/debian-31r4-ia64-netinst.iso
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mkdir /mnt/iso
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mount -o loop /home/ubuntu/debian-31r4-ia64-netinst.iso /mnt/iso
ioctl: LOOP_SET_FD: Invalid argument

I can’t figure out what the ioctl error means exactly, some say it’s a module that wasn’t compiled in the kernel, but that is not the problem here. Luckily I found a way to fix it:

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mkdir /mnt/memory
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/memory
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mkdir /mnt/iso
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# cp debian-31r4-ia64-netinst.iso /mnt/memory/
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mount -o loop /mnt/memory/debian-31r4-ia64-netinst.iso /mnt/iso

So now the iso is extracted/mounted in /mnt/iso. First off, I copied everything to another directory, looked if there are any differences (which weren’t the recursive directory loop warning can be ignored), and set the rights so that I can do the rest as a normal user.
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# mkdir newiso
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# cp -a /mnt/iso/* newiso/
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# cp -a /mnt/iso/.disk/ newiso/
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# diff -crN /mnt/iso/ newiso/
diff: /mnt/iso/debian: recursive directory loop
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# cd newiso/pool/main/
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu/newiso/pool/main# chmod -R o+w *


Now, it’s time to compile the kernel.
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# apt-get install kernel-package libncurses5-dev
...
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# w-get http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.19.2.tar.gz
root@ubuntu:/usr/src# rm -rf /mnt/memory/*
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# cd /mnt/memory
root@ubuntu:/usr/src# tar -xzf /home/ubuntu/linux-2.6.19.2.tar.gz


Ubuntu uses 1.7 GiB according to ‘df’. The default partition (tmpfs) ubuntu creates is 1.9 GiB, while the extracted linux kernel is 557 MiB. Herefor I emptied /mnt/memory first, and extracted it there.

root@ubuntu:/mnt/memory# cd linux-2.6.19.2/
root@ubuntu:/mnt/memory/linux-2.6.19.2# make oldconfig
root@ubuntu:/mnt/memory/linux-2.6.19.2# make-kpkg kernel-image


And then I get stuck with some error during the compiling of the kernel. Busy on figuring out what I did wrong during the configuration of the kernel. You can find my kernel-configuration here.