The Log Book Of Manuel Kiessling

Say you have an installation of apt-proxy running on a Debian Sarge machine to serve files for apt on your other machines, then you will receive errors like this when issuing an apt-get update on an Etch machine: Error reading from server. Remote end closed connection.The reason is that Etch tries to download a file called Packages.diff which Sarge’s apt-proxy doesn’t know how to serve.

apt-proxy therefore log notes the following:

2007/02/09 10:10 CET [Channel,129,213.203.200.122] [debug] Request: GET /debian/dists/etch/main/binary-amd64/Packages.diff/Index
2007/02/09 10:10 CET [Channel,129,213.203.200.122] [debug] abort - unknown extension

Adding the following line to /etc/apt/apt.conf on your Etch machines will tell them not to download those files:

Acquire::PDiffs “false”;

Filed by Manuel Kiessling at 10:30 am under technology, linux, software, open source, debian
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Before I switched to WordPress, I had a “classical” homepage like everybody else had before everybody else switched to a blog. However, I hate throwing away stuff in real life as much as in the virtual world.

Thus, with the magic help of Xen, I was able to re-setup my old homepage, and made it available via http://old.manuel.kiessling.net/. It should be 99% functional, and still contains some of the more interesting stuff I created over the years, but never migrated to my new homepage.

Filed by Manuel Kiessling at 3:20 pm under intern
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(Mostly inspired by Silent Bob’s list, as we really seem to share the same taste)

• 300
• Pan’s Labyrinth
• The Fountain
• The Departed
• The Last King Of Scotland
• Das Parfüm
• Clerks II (I should probably watch Clerks first however…)
• Thank You For Smoking
• Children Of Men

But Mission Impossible III? Are you kidding?

Filed by Manuel Kiessling at 9:39 pm under movies
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As my server crashed last week, I decided to not set up a homepage for my Open Source webchat project ARSC again.
It simply isn’t worth the hassle, because I didn’t do any work on ARSC for over 1 year now.

The SourceForge project page of ARSC is of course still active, and I don’t see any sense in deactivating it, because the latest stable release still works very well, supporting PHP4 and PHP5, MySQL 4 and 5, register_globals = Off and PHP’s safe_mode.

Filed by Manuel Kiessling at 10:26 am under technology, arsc, software, open source
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VHCS, the Virtual Hosting Control System, seems to be a full-featured and stable OSS alternative to Confixx, Plesk and Co. I don‘t use it myself (yet), but did set up an installation for a friend who needed a simple to use yet complete solution to administrate his eMail and Websites.

Installation on a freshly-installed Debian Sarge system went absolutely smooth - a new release with full support for Etch is on the way.

The feature list is quite impressive, you can completely manage everything commonly needed in a LAMP environment, even a webmail client is included. As far as I can see, no „dirty hacks“ are used, besides VHCS itself you only need common and official Debian packages.

Not that there aren‘t drawbacks: With the basic installation, everything runs unencrypted - no SCP, only FTP, and Postfix, Courier Imap, Apache and MySQL all running in non-SSL mode. I did not yet find the time to have a closer look at the configuration, looks like those can be enabled.

VHCS is actually designed to provide a complete hosting solution, including the management of resellers which in turn can completely manage their users, and those user can completely manage their Web/Mail/Database environment. But it already makes sense if you have only one user and this user is you (or, as in my case, a friend of yours who knows a bit about LAMP but not wouldn‘t be able to set up everything from scratch himself).

Filed by Manuel Kiessling at 8:52 am under technology, linux
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