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Felix J. Ogris' private homepage: some stuff about homemade software, FreeBSD, Linux, computers, and hacking in general.

Somewhat more nosy? Mailto www@ogris.de.

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recent news

[2023-05-23] ampctrld version 2 lowers the number of addresses to listen on to a maximum of 16.

[2021-04-28]

New version of kvmlib comes with 5 new features:
- The cmd command, which connects you to the monitor of a running QEMU instance, now accepts additional parameters, which are passed to the monitor
- Previously, the detect-zeroes option for hard drives was set to unmap by default. As I encountered problems with virtual drives, regardless of the guest operating system, detect-zeroes is not set anymore
- Fixed the bug that prevented you from configuring up to 4 virtual cdrom drives
- You can close and eject any cdrom by specifing its drive number (0-3)
- Improved help
The CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) of the upcoming FreeBSD 14 has two major changes:
1. By using the peer or peer6 parameter, carp uses unicast instead of multicast. This is helpful if your FreeBSD hosts run as virtual machines.
2. CARP creates no virtual network interface anymore. ifconfig carp0 create won't work. Instead, you assign it as an alias to the physical interface:
```
# ifconfig vtnet0 vhid 31 advskew 100 peer 192.168.0.29 pass foobar 192.168.0.31/24 alias
```
  Of course you have to load the carp module before: kldload carp. Then, ifconfig vtnet0 prints:
  
  To make this persistent after reboot, add it to /etc/rc.conf:
```
# sysrc kld_list+=carp
# sysrc ifconfig_vtnet0_alias0="vhid 31 advskew 100 peer 192.168.0.29 pass foobar 192.168.0.31/24"
```

[2021-04-25] New version of kvmlib allows you to use a different QEMU executable than qemu-system-x86_64, and exits with an error message if you use the cdrom command without a path to an ISO file.

[2023-04-23] If your recent Gentoo Linux box complains that /var/tmp already exists and is not a directory during system boot, i.e. maybe because it is a symlink to /tmp, then create a file named /etc/tmpfiles.d/tmp.conf containing this configuration:

L /var/tmp - - - - /tmp

For further details, you'll have to read the man page of systemd-tmpfiles.

[2023-04-17] If you run a Cyrus IMAP server that suddenly stops exporting some or even all calendar events, you might consider reconstructing the respective mailboxes, e.g. on a FreeBSD server:

# su - cyrus
% sbin/reconstruct -nrGR user.username.#calendars
% sbin/reconstruct -rGR user.username.#calendars

[2023-03-29] grapheqd version 7 supports IPv6 addresses and can listen on multiple addresses at the same time.

[2023-03-28] As announced 18 days ago, ampctrld is a re-implementation of ampcontrol in plain C. It has two new features: It allows you to assign user-defined names to input sources, and can listen on multiple addresses, i.e. an IPv4 and an IPv6 address at the same time. Additionally, it saves system resources:

And:

[2023-03-27] How to get the base64 encoded SHA hash of an existing file, part two:

C, using the OpenSSL API: sha512.c

[2023-03-10] New version of ampcontrol handles initial connection errors, and makes use of the new Buffer API of Node.js.
I need to rewrite it again, though. This time in C, since memory consumption of Node.js is far too heavyweight for my taste:

[2023-02-25]

grapheqd version 6 fixes a typo which threw an error if compiling for ALSA, i.e. on Linux.
LogBlitz version 14 allows you to adjust the logout button, e.g. add a JavaScript onclick handler.

[2023-02-16] LogBlitz version 13 allows you to assign user roles based on additional environment settings.

[2023-02-15] LogBlitz version 12 introduces user roles.

[2023-01-28] LogBlitz version 11 saves selected filenames in a cookie, and uses different cookies for each user.

[2022-12-18] How to get the base64 encoded SHA hash of an existing file:

Python:

import hashlib, base64
print(base64.b64encode(hashlib.sha512(open("/etc/passwd", "rb").read()).digest()))

Perl:

use Digest::SHA;
my $b64_sha512 = Digest::SHA->new("sha512")->addfile("/etc/passwd", "b")->b64digest;
print($b64_sha512, "=" x ((4 - length($b64_sha512) % 4) % 4));

Shell:

$ openssl sha512 -binary /etc/passwd | openssl base64 -A

[2022-12-09] LogBlitz version 10 comes with a performance improvement if you don't search for regular expressions.

[2022-12-04] My new howto Apache and form based login makes use of mod_auth_form.

[2022-11-01]

New version of check_tvh.py allows you to pass options on the command line, power cycles the USB capture device, and drops support for Python 2
New version of s3file.py explains the meaning of file flags in the long format output of LS-L and such (see --examples), and adjust shown filenames to the left
Updated my howto Small Python container for Docker to run as unprivileged user, and to display the correct local time and date.

[2022-10-27] How to create a Small Python container for Docker

[2022-10-19]

New version of privatebinc.py, which is a simple Python client for PrivateBin, now supports attachments
cURL and self signed certificates on FreeBSD 13.

[2022-10-18] New version of s3file.py fixes a highly dangerous error in the examples output (DELETE where GET was meant), and has examples for dealing with metadata.

[2022-10-15] New version of check_tvh.py reloads the cuse kernel module as well.

[2022-10-12] My howto pgAdmin 4 on Gentoo now covers the latest version of pgAdmin 4, and explains how to handle updates of Python.

[2022-09-14] LogBlitz version 9 displays its execution time, and adds the name of the current user to the title of the logout link.

[2022-08-30] If you upgrade to LogBlitz version 8, you might configure a logout url.

[2022-08-25]

[2022-07-31] New howto: Automatic version numbers with Git.

[2022-07-15] Tvhead2TVB version 1.0.1.0 handles activation through a program's info popup correctly, and uses JGoodies as UI library, which comes bundled with TV-Browser.

[2022-06-25] grapheqd version 5 has 3 new features:

It can read PCM data from an external program, e.g. ffmpeg
It reopens the sound device in case of a failure
The RC script for FreeBSD supports profiles, i.e. you can configure multiple instances of grapheqd on the same host.

[2022-06-18] New howto: pgAdmin 4 on Gentoo.

[2022-06-13] Older versions of the ConvertFrom-SecureString cmdlet did not have an -AsPlainText parameter. When you have to use PowerShell prior to version 7, you might use ConvertSecureStringToPlainText.ps1.

[2022-06-06] Gave both s3file.py and nextcron.py their own pages:

[2022-06-05] New version of s3file.py has command shortcuts for:

creating a bucket
creating a bucket with object locking
determining if a bucket has object locking enabled
setting object locking in compliance or governance mode
enabling object versioning
determining if a bucket has object versioning enabled
disabling object versioning
determining if a bucket has access logging enabled
listing all objects in a bucket, optionally with all object versions, human readable filesizes, and/or numeric user ids.

[2022-06-02] LogBlitz version 7 supports pyre2, highlights non-matching lines in case of an inverted search, and contains several optimizations.

[2022-05-26] LogBlitz version 6 allows you to display lines before and after each matching line, and highlights every found query string.

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