i summon one kim

I’ve been always a fan of the robust upgrade procedure documented in the Debian release notes, which has worked without problems even over ssh to remote machines. This has made upgrading very painless (at least since sarge — I haven’t used Debian actively longer than that).

Yesterday I ran into a problem, though, which was only saved by having remote console access. I have a system with a slightly more complicated disk setup: it has two SCSI disks running as a RAID 1 array using md and lvm. Upon rebooting after the upgrade, the system didn’t reappear on the network. What I found on the console was the initramfs panic shell: the root file system had not been found. Rebooting the old etch kernel worked fine.

The workaround proved to be very simple, once I distilled it from the search engine results. Just add rootdelay=10 to the kernel options in the bootloader. I’m using GRUB so this translates to editing the kopt line in /boot/grub/menu.lst and running update-grub.

I had also added raid1 to modules in /etc/initramfs-tools and regenerated the initrd, but that (alone) didn’t help. I’m not even sure it is needed at all — it might already be included anyway when using MODULES=most in initramfs.conf.

I’m following most web sites with Google Reader these days. With some sites I’ve noticed that images don’t show up in the reader interface. I figured this would be because the site is attempting to protect against hot-linking to its resources — and it seems I was right.

The quick fix with Firefox is to disable sending referer-information for inlined images. You can do this in about:config by changing the value of network.http.sendRefererHeader to 1.

While there, I also changed network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer to false. This prevents referer-information from being sent between different secure sites.

I’ve been slowly pushing upgrades through my NetBSD machines and recently upgraded the “music server” that runs SlimServer to power my SqueezeBoxen. That brought a new version of Perl on the machine, which made SlimServer unhappy — it wouldn’t start anymore. I tried to rerun the little script that downloads the “blessed” versions of various CPAN packages from Slim Devices, but the files needed for my trusty old 6.2.1 version were no longer available on their server.

Well, I can’t live without the SqueezeBoxen so an emergency update was needed. (more…)

Some time ago I added some UTF-8 pages to this site. I promptly started receiving one error message per page from the Swish-e search engine I’m using. Of course, the search results also showed “garbage” since Swish-e only handles single byte characters.

Today I got tired of the errors arriving in my mailbox, so I dug into the code and fixed things. (more…)

I reconfigured my Nokia E65 mobile phone to connect to my Asterisk PBX, so I can make and receive SIP calls instead of cellular calls when I’m at home or at the office. I already had the corresponding WLANs configured on the phone for web browsing, so I didn’t have to do that part now (and thus those settings are not documented here). (more…)

I spent some time with my parents about a month ago fine tuning the echo cancellation on our SIP phones. Today I got a chance to refresh my memory while connecting the phones of a friend to a CallWeaver PBX I had setup for him. Hopefully I have now collected in one place all the settings that were changed from the factory defaults. If you have a Linksys SPA3102 phone adapter or a Linksys SPA942 phone, you may find some useful hints in here. (more…)

For a long time now I’ve removed the generator meta tag from all WordPress installations I’ve setup. Mentioning WordPress is just honey for the bees. Since I removed the meta tags the amount of spam has decreased remarkably. Posts about WordPress are targeted much sooner and for much longer than other posts.

Starting with WordPress 2.4 the generator information is inserted by the core code, as opposed to the theme. This means that the meta tag will reappear even if you have removed it from your theme. However, this is actually a good change, because now you can disable the tag not only from the HTML pages generated by the theme, but also from all other formats WordPress outputs. The information is created by a couple of functions centrally instead of scattered instances through the code.

I’ve created a plugin to accomplish this: No Generator works with the trunk code from svn, and will work with 2.4 once it is released.