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I started this new blog site here because I tend to forget things, especially when these were done in a hurry (like at work, where you often have to do several things at the same time, with a timeline like: “should be finished yesterday”). So to remember how I did things, I started to document them - and because most of what I’m doing today concerning hard- and software, services, and networks, is done with Linux and free and open source tools, I document them here - in the public. This is my 2¢ of giving back.

From shared webhosting to an own virtual server in just 75 hours, using just free and open source. See the how and why.

We’re just back from LinuxTag, which took place in Wiesbaden this year from May 3rd until 6th.

It’s official: I’ll talk on LinuxTag in about a week from now. See the Debian Wiki and the LinuxTag 2006 Workshop pages for details.

The LinuxTag is - according to their own pages in german and english - the “World’s No. 1 Linux Expo and Conference since 1996″. This year it will be in Wiesbaden from May 3rd until 6th.

Since Thursday last week, I splitted up an old machine into 4 virtual ones, like I reported here and here. Now, after a bit of fine-tuning, I got all but one unused one running fine.

Yesterday, I splitted up a machine for virtual hosting & development purposes. I used Xen 3.0.2-2 for it, and everything went well.

I reported here about splitting an old Celeron machine and setting up small parts of it as separate Debian machines. In one of these machines, called oc03, I set up Debian Sarge with an Apache2 web server, a Postfix mail server, a MySQL database, PHP, FTP, Webalizer, in short: everything we have here on our real web hosting package as well.

In fall last year, Checkpoint announced its plans to take over Sourcefire, which sells Marti Roesch’s famous Snort intrusion detection & prevention system, for a sum of about 225 Million US-Dollars. Now, two weeks ago, after an investigation through the US government, the offer was withdrawn and the deal was cancelled.

The German division of nosoftwarepatents.com have awarded Philips and the European Patent Office the “nosoftwarepatent of the month” for its patent on right mouse-clicks to bring up context menus.

Today I upgraded all Debian machines in the company. The reason for doing so was mostly because of dsa-1017, which describes vulnerabilities in the actual 2.6.8 kernels (of Debian “Sarge” aka stable). We are using an apt-proxy, so all in all it took me less than an hour.

On last year’s Linuxtag I was bugging some HP staff about the laptops they planned to offer without the usual Redmond tax. Plus I did so later on the phone. On this weblog, I asked why they cancelled producing and selling our Deskjet 6840 printer without further notice. Plus I asked more or less all hardware vendors to increase their support for free (libre) and open source software.

Lately, I read a book review on Florian Mueller’s “No Lobbyists As Such — The War over Software Patents in the European Union”, which was quite interesting - tho I still don’t know why NewsForge put that under “Entertainment”.

This year I went to the FOSDEM for the first time, and like the last few years, I will most probably also visit Linuxtag. But what I missed so far, and where I also cannot go this time, is the Debconf, which will be in Mexico. So I searched around a bit and found almost the whole conference of last year (in Finland) on 2 DVDs, which you can download for free.

Yesterday my son Jeremy sent an email. He is about to rent a root server together with a friend, which they want to use as a gaming server. Their OS of choice: Debian GNU/Linux.

Today Norbert Tretkowski, one of the Debian Developers, posted about his experiences with his new iRiver T10 USB device, and his conclusion is the same I would have:

I came to the LXer Linux news site quite some time ago, while they still had between 1.000 and 2.000 readers daily - now it’s over 300.000 a month. It is just a great site. Almost ad-free, mostly community-driven, and lead by great minds like Tom Adelstein, who is also an author and co-author with O’Reilly.

This is just great great stuff. I wish we’d have more sites like these. So for LXer, like for the Planets, it’s a five-thumbs-up. Highly recommended stuff. At least daily.

This is one of the best articles I ever read about teaching and the use of F(L)OSS (free (libre) open source software).

As Ross Burton first pointed out in his personal Blog and on planet.debian.org, there's an article at Groklaw where Andreas Pleschek from IBM, Stuttgart, Germany, announced Notes on Linux.

Hmmm ok - you are thinking about getting new computer hardware, either a desktop or a laptop.
The problem is: where would you get one - if you don’t build it yourself - without the “Redmond tax”?

Last time I looked at Ubuntu (that was ‘Breezy Badger’, or 5.10) I noticed a little applet popping up and telling me that there were updates available for the machine.