Well, I'm new here. I've known Jeremy for a little while, and he gave me the ability to post book reviews. I finished the first one this morning on IPv6 Network Programming. I'm a little disturbed that there isn't a read more link on this entry. I sent an email to Jeremy, hopefully he'll see it.

I'm starting to read Silence on the Wire by Michal Zalewski. It looks to be an interesting read.

I'll be mostly offline for the next few weeks, and therefore will not be making many updates to the KernelTrap front page. Others will hopefully be updating the page as time permits, and you can expect some updates from the OpenBSD hackathon next week [story].

Remember that the KernelTrap forums remain active (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, GNU/Hurd, and more.) Additionally, the threaded mailing list archives are automatically updated every 15 minutes (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OGP, and more.). KernelTrap user blogs can also be found here.

KernelTrap has found a new home with Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. Associate Director of the OSL, Scott Kveton explained, "the OSL staff were all avid readers of KernelTrap.org and we wanted to do something for this great site. In addition, we really wanted to help a kernel-related site that focuses on the community and community-related issues." Working with Scott and the others at the OSL has already proven to be a rewarding experience.

For the past two years, all colocation costs for KernelTrap have been generously donated by Danube Technologies, Inc.. Danube president, Laszlo Szalvay said, "it was a pleasure hosting KernelTrap for the past few years; we really enjoyed having them on board and are glad to help the open source community." Danube began providing flawless hosting for KernelTrap in August of 2003, however since that time they have refocused their energies, moving away from providing hosting. Laszlo explained, "Danube Technologies, Inc. provides software development services including staff augmentation, project outsourcing, and process mentoring and training." During the search for and later the implementation of our new hosting, Danube has remained excellent to work with.

I'll be mostly offline for the next couple of weeks, and therefore unable to make updates to the KernelTrap front page. Of course, remember that the forums remain active (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, GNU/Hurd, and more. Additionally, the threaded mailing list archives are automatically updated every 15 minutes.

I'm going to be offline for the next few weeks, and there will be infrequent updates to this site until my return. The forums, kernel hacker journals and local blogs will remain active, so be sure to check beyond the front page. As always, you can get an overview of all new content at http://kerneltrap.org/all.

Meh, I need to put this site back in my bookmarks.

Great site - still very informative, right up there with LWN.

I thought it was bad enough when I started getting 400+ spam emails every single day delivered to my primary inbox. Long ago I began trying to deal with this with a handful of simple regular expressions, but quickly decided that such an approach required too large of a continuous investment of time. Researching the alternatives, I finally moved on to Spamassassin, and though not a perfect solution, have managed to get it tuned to where I don't usually get more than 1 false-positive a month, and a reasonable amount of false-negatives. Having recently upgraded to version 3.0, it appears things have gotten even better.

Now there's a new annoyance beginning, spam comments on KernelTrap. As of yet there haven't been that many (no more than one or two a week), but I suspect it's only a matter of time. Eventually someone will write a custom tool that can automatically post spam to Drupal-powered websites. Inspired by my experience with Spamassassin, I decided to write my own spam filter in PHP using Bayesian Logic. It turned out being quite simple, only taking a few hours last weekend to get something moderately function.

For some reason every time that I requested my password to be reset on here, I never got a response until just today.

Oh well, it got me to actually sit down and look at MT. I actually had it running on my FREESCO box, until of course apache crapped out on me with a constant 403 forbidden error that I never did get rid of.

In what should for the most part go unnoticed, KernelTrap has been updated to Drupal 4.4.1. The only change that will likely bring comment is the removal of the "Remember me" button upon login. While a nice feature, it was causing other annoying problems due to the way it was implemented, such as when leaving comments to take a reader to a completely different story. I'll have to address the login issue another day.

Has anybody seen the teasers for NBC's upcoming miniseries, 10.5? Lisa and I saw a promo today, and of all the carnage, it showed a particularly tantalizing CGI of the Space Needle coming down. (While that site sort of sucks for good pics of the Space Needle, it has a really cool interactive webcam. Check it out.) If you don't know this already, my wife Lisa absolutely hates the Space Needle, and when this comes on, she's up off the couch and cheering with both arms up, like a hooligan at a monster truck rally. It was great. So, needless to say, I'll be taping that. It's actually a nice birthday present for me from NBC as it starts May 2, the day before my birthday. On a note related to the Space Needle, be sure to check out this guy's page who is justifyably upset about light pollution. I wouldn't have thought to mention it at all until I checked out the last comparison picture. Very amusing.

Woke up this morning, following my normal routine. Got to the KernelTrap potion of the routine, and found that the webpage wouldn't load. The server returned pings, I could log in via ssh, httpd processes were running, but my browser wouldn't connect. I restarted the apache server, but same problem.

The logs made it clear: I'd had 9 hours of downtime. Awful!

As to the problem at hand, I finally resolved it all by upgrading http and ssl to the latest versions, aware that both had DoS type bugs in the versions I was using. While at it, I finally upgraded from the 2.4.21 kernel that I'd installed when I first sent the server to California a year ago, to the current stable 2.4.25.

This website is undergoing an upgrade today to Drupal 4.4. Some things are likely to break, and I'll be working to fix them. If you notice anything wrong, please leave a comment here to let me know -- don't assume that I'm aware of it, no matter how obvious it may be.

For the most part, the noticeable changes should be minimal. In upgrading the theme, I had to make a few changes - let me know if these cause any display problems on your browser. In the long run, the upgrade will offer more power to the site, so it's worth a little pain. Unfortunately the 'All' link is temporarily disabled -- I hope to re-enable it soon.

The themes seem to have changed for me....now on each theme, the main content area is much smaller, and the sidebar that has most of my KT stuff is freakin' huge!

Here's a screenshot (click for a full sized image):

trying to upgrade.
I saw the directions that I needed to grab all of these:
device-mapper-1.00.07-1.i386.rpm
device-mapper-debuginfo-1.00.07-1.i386.rpm
hotplug-2003_08_05-1.i386.rpm
hotplug-debuginfo-2003_08_05-1.i386.rpm
initscripts-7.28-1.i386.rpm
initscripts-debuginfo-7.28-1.i386.rpm
kernel-2.6.2-1.177.i686.rpm
kernel-2.6.2-1.177.ppc64pseries.rpm

I'm back in town, resubscribing to kernel development mailing lists and starting to make time to read them and catch up. Hopefully I'll be able to start posting regular stories again within the next day or two. This weekend has been spent at a Folk Festival, helping my girlfriend with her booth where she's selling handmade soy candles and incense. Also stopped by her 'day job', Atlantic Coast Kayak, and test paddled one of the sleek new models... Love at first sight.