Following a blog is something I’m not really used to – no time for it, using wrong tools ? Now since I’m using Google+ on my android device, I can follow more timely the author’s posts.

This year, he started a christmas contest. Deadline to participate is tomorrow (!), but the gift list is worth it ! Simply send a picture of your old PC and enter the contest !

Chances are even quite good (currently 0.5%) for winning a new computer box (Cyrrus 7 one) that may replace my sheevaplug based fileserver.

A small bookmarklet allows to reset the settings for the currently loaded website. Load the page, reset the settings, fill in login+password and submit. Firefox should now ask if it should store the credentials.

Instructions on how to setup a new debian using the official installer were found here. The installer method was prefered over the lenny tarball installation to get a better control over the installation. Only difference to the method proposed in the article was the usage of the squeeze installer instead of the lenny installer in order to get the ext4 support.

Nice to see that the kirkwood platform is still supported by the debian project !

Slight hope however : even after 1 RMA, technical support suggests a 2nd RMA of the HDD, arguing that the error code suggests defect HDD PCB

Update : even 3rd disk showed the same error code (AJ36). Data transfer was as low as 30MB/s. Fortunately I could test a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420ASG 500GB. Two cool things :

• no more SATA issues, even after trasnfering 10GB (dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null was the easiest test for the problem, and works even on non-partitioned devices)
• 95+MB/s transfer rate

Of course this is only a 500G device, but at least it’s working fine with my older laptop (Fujitsu Amilo 1437G)

Ports.conf now has a statement

NameVirtualHost *:80

Which means all the vhost files (as in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled) need a directive :

<VirtualHost *:80>

Important part is the :80 statement. If missing, this leads to strange

[warn] _default_ VirtualHost overlap on port 80, the first has precedence

error messages

After some research, it came out that the apache logfile was reporting segfaults from the child processes. Unfortunately, this is not done in the domain’s error.log, but in /var/log/apache2/error.log

Lot of googling showed several possible causes for segfault in apache :

• PHP4 compatibility as set in httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/conf.d/…
• Conflicting Berkeley DB libraries installed. However… which subpart is using this ?
• Getting out of memory, having somewhere a malloc() returning NULL, and not catched by code (bad programming)
• Using rewrite rules and doing bad matching. This can be monitored by setting XXXXXX
• Releasing memory from recursive objects leads to memory leaks in PHP (< 5.3)

Sounds good, question is how good is the implementation of the hashes, as the safety of the generated passwords is directly related to it.

This is not really related to virtualbox but rather to the way the filesystem is allocating the blocks on the disk : it not necessarilly reuses blocks, so when new ones are allocated, the volume’s size increases.

Decreasing the size of a volume file (compacting) is not that easy. Virtualbox will only “forget” sectors that contain all zero’s. Doing this on linux is straight forward (dd), but there is no Windows equivalent.

In fact there is ! run sdelete -c C:\ to zero all available blocks on the disk. It will write to all free blocks, therefore the size of the volume will reach the maximum. It will also take some time.

Then, the volume file can be compacted :

VBoxManage modifyvdi <path to VDI file> compact

Several possibilities exist to handle this situation :

• Multi-purpose multiple mode modes
  • MMM-mode (Multiple Major Modes) makes it possible to load several major modes at the time. It is not restricted to HTML/PHP. However, last activity on this project was back in 2004 !
  • MuMaMo (Major Multiple Modes)
• Dedicated modes
  • nXhtml mode for editing Xhtml files. Homepage