Thursday, December 31. 2009Friday, December 25. 2009Friday, November 13. 2009ExpoVina & Sushi
I'll try to blog again more often, so that at least I'll have a log of my life, more or less.
 Yesterday (Tuesday) evening I and a couple of friends (Flavio, Andrea and Dersim) went to ExpoVina 2009 in Zürich, a big wine exposition held on 12 boats anchored at the Bürkliplatz port. We arrived at around 1700 and stayed till about 1920, sampling wines from different countries, regions and producers. I particularly appreciated the selection of sweet wines from Bindella, as I love sweet and dessert wines, and ordered a few right away, their VinSanto "Dolce Sinfonia" and the "Brachetto d'Aqui" were incredibly good. We also sampled a few wines from Valais, Switzerland, (Favre, Dubois), which were quite good, but I didn't order any of those, as they are relatively easy to find here, and I actually know the Favre Caves in Sion personally, as I was there with the military during my Fourier advancement course, and later with my father. They make quite good white wine, such as the Petite Arvine. Being a fan of sweet wines, I also couldn't resist ordering a few bottles of Samos, a very sweet Greek wine, by Keel. We also had our first taste of Spanish wine, from Casa del Vino, they were quite different from the usual Italian wines we were accustomed to, but quite good nonetheless. The people manning the stand were also very polite and helpful, telling us the differences and histories of the various wines as we sampled them, and offering us samples from all regions and types of wines they had. One of the friends with me then told us another guy we know (Simone) already was here a few days ago, and recommended to try the Port wines from Amarela, which we did. Most of us had no particular experience with Port wines at all, so the guy there helped us choose, and we all were pleasantly surprised, ordering a few bottles of Ruby Reserva and Finest Reserve. To conclude the wine-tasting evening, we enjoyed a few Italian red wines at Weibel, and had a nice discussion with the Italian guy there. All in all a very nice event, which I'll be sure to go again next year. After that we hooked up with a few other friends (albeit we were ~20 minutes late, sorry guys!  ) and went to eat Sushi at Nooch. I quite enjoy Asian food, and this was my first time eating sushi, and I must say it was very good, but I still prefer all the fried Chinese food and stuff. After that we all went home, and me and Flavio watched another episode of "My name is Earl", it's a really hilarious show that I recommend to anyone.  Yo, have a good day! Sunday, October 5. 2008Saturday, May 12. 2007Thursday, February 22. 2007FOSDEM 07, here we come!
Yo all!
Tomorrow to FOSDEM 07 /me goes, along with hansmi, KillerFox and blubb from the swiss crowd! Later on both flo and EleRas will join us too, so for me not only will it be "the great Gentoo dev gathering", but also "the great SysCP dev gathering", will all three of us present. As flo correctly guessed, I'll be sporting the black Gentoo t-shirt, which is amazingly comfortable, but flo's SysCP t-shirt intrigued me... Is it possible to have more of those @ flo? In black? /me loves black! We'll be able to discuss that at FOSDEM I think...Now off to bed, as I have to get up early (~4AM) to catch the first train to get to Basel, where the others await, and from there off to Bruxelles. Lugano-Basel-Frankfurt Am Main-Köln-Bruxelles is the exact route, almost 1000 Km, for a total en-route time of about 11 hours, yay! On the PHP front, I've finally put PHP 5.2.1 and PHP 4.4.5, with all the needed patches and, of course, Suhosin support, into the PHP Overlay. I'll test it all during the next days and hopefully commit to the tree on Monday at the latest. Many bugs are fixed with the latest releases, concurrentmodphp support was greatly improved and fixed (especially wrt 64bit archs), and the new MySQL extension patches are included to have the connection charset settable per-SAPI, for each PHP version, using php.ini, instead of my.cnf. Work on VCD is also going steady, we should be near feature-completion soon, so expect some form of pre-release in the next two weeks... Poke Hollow on #gentoo-vserver for more info. Best regards, cya all, CHTEKK. Monday, January 1. 2007Happy 2007!
Happy new year people!!!
I wish you all a great 2007 full of fun and happiness and all the other good stuff (new hardware comes to mind  ).23C3 finished two days ago, it was really great fun with great talks and great people (yeah, Polish guy living in the USA, from the university near Atlanta, you know who you are ).Now we've passed yesterday by visiting Berlin and at the moment we're connected through the Hostels connection... It depresses me to know it's at least twice as fast as my home DSL. By the way, all this convinced me to come to FOSDEM 07, so be prepared to know the CHTEKK (or be scared, that all depends). Cya, and happy new year, CHTEKK. Thursday, December 28. 2006Greetings from 23C3.
Yo! Greetings from the 23C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin.
Great talks and great people here, at the moment I'm attending a talk about JSON RPC (who knows, maybe that can/will be used someday to improve SysCP ), and before that I attended a really great talk about backbone hacking.As you can see from this blog post, the wireless network works well (as does the wired one). With regards to Gentoo devs, I've already seen and got to know hansmi, KillerFox and Pylon. I've also been told that mabi is around and hanno should be too (at least based on the fact he gave a Lightning Talk about XGL yesterday, which I sadly missed), we should really define a place to meet and get to know eachother... That goes for Gentoo and SysCP users too. I myself can usually be found attending some talk or down in the Hackcenter (central position, at a round table). Have fun! Best regards, CHTEKK. Monday, December 18. 2006Work continues ...
Work on SysCP 1.3 continues, even with Christmas approaching!
General cleanup in various parts was done, me and EleRas reviewed all the regular expressions of the RegExp validator now used to validate data coming from the user, now they're much better and precise, and I've also added a Type validator to check that the type of the passed data is what we expect. Paging was also removed from the 1.3 codebase, as it was incomplete, outdated and completely broken there... It will be reimplemented once we've completed other parts of SysCP 1.3 which have priority. And the biggest change probably, is that the whole login/logout system was updated and rewritten to conform to the new structure, the "new way of doing thins". It's still not 100% complete, but you can login and logout, so the main functionality is there. We've also switched to using Whirlpool as hashing algorithm for the SysCP account passwords, but we've already decided to later make this configurable by the admin; thanks to the hash extension present in PHP >=5.1.2 it's really easy to do that, and that extension is really great, thanks PHP devs for that!Best regards, CHTEKK. Sunday, November 19. 2006New Propel db structure on its way!
The new database structure for SysCP 1.4 is taking form, I'd say it's almost complete, only the foreign-key definitions are still missing, something I intend to rectify in a day or two.
While changing towards this new structure, we've also changed to use Propel to connect and work with the database, it will thus replace the old DatabaseHandler. Starting with SysCP 1.4, thanks to all this, we'll also support using SysCP on a PostgreSQL database, and there will also be a module to let your customers create and administrate PostgreSQL databases, just like you can now with MySQL. Only thing that deluded me a little is that the Propel generated classes change when built with MySQL or PgSQL, which is kinda "WTF?", as we're speaking about a database abstraction layer to an extent... Oh well, the changes are tiny and we'll then decide how to approach this... Either distributing two SysCP tarballs, one with PgSQL classes and one with the MySQL ones, or just supplying a diff against the MySQL ones to support PgSQL... Once we're more into the whole thing we'll be able to decide! Best regards, CHTEKK. Friday, November 10. 2006New PostgreSQL and PHP (late)
As the title says, I'm late with this blog post, but better late than never...
The new dev-db/libpq and dev-db/postgresql ebuilds reached Portage on Thursday, they seem to work well (we've received positive feedback until now) and already solved a number of bugs! Thanks to dev-zero too for all the work spent on them, we make a good team! Btw, it seems dbs are made to be maintained by two people... Me and dev-zero for PgSQL, me and vivo for MySQL, and it works very well! WEEEE TEAMWORK RULEZ! Thansk guys, it's great to work with you all! On the PHP front, 5.2.0 reached the overlay, I still have to update the eclasses a little and fix some stuff, as well as update the 4.4.X and 5.1.X releases with some patches, which will probably happen tomorrow, and they'll probably be put into Portage on Sunday or Monday, sorry for the little delay, but at least the stuff's well tested and working then. Best regards and a great weekend to all, CHTEKK. Monday, November 6. 2006News, news, ... ;)
Hi all, /me is back, since a few days now, and I've been working on updating stuff...
Today, together with vivo, MySQL 5.0.X stabilization was agreed on, and https://bugs.gentoo.org/144999 updated accordingly. x86 already responded and stabled dev-db/mysql-5.0.26-r1, the other arches will soon follow. The upgrade from 4.1.X should be painless, just remember to read the MySQL upgrading guide for instructions on how to backup your data before the upgrade, and be sure to run revdep-rebuild from gentoolkit after the upgrade, as all things linking to MySQL will need to be recompiled. New PostgreSQL ebuilds are also coming up, those are the first of the new generation of PostgreSQL ebuilds, done together with dev-zero, that will fix up a lot of issues and ease maintainance of PostgreSQL a lot, as well as permitting some exciting new things in the future. ETA for those new ebuilds to enter Portage is this evening (UTC timezone). PHP 5.2.0 is also finally out, congrats to the PHP Team, expect an ebuild for the final version in the PHP Overlay by Wednesday and in Portage by Saturday at most. Samhain will also be updated soon to the newest versions, so if you use that, stay tuned. Work on SysCP 1.3 is going on strong, more about that in another blog entry in the next days. Best regards, CHTEKK. Friday, October 27. 2006/me away until 03.11
I'll be away from this evening UTC until evening UTC 03.11.2006, so don't search for me or await any reply from me.
Absolutely no internet access, so... See ya all in a week! Best regards, CHTEKK. Tuesday, October 24. 2006Completion of languagesplitting
Right, no more "update"! I've done the last four modules today and EleRas did all the rest yesterday, many thanks for that.
Now we only need to update the old design and we'll then merge branches/syscp-1.3/ back into trunk/syscp-1.3/. YAY! Step 1 of our plan to conquer the webpanel world completed. EleRas also wrote a fancy script that does some comparisions and generates updated language files also for all the other languages SysCP supports, but those are highly incomplete now that many definitions etc. changed, so they will have to be updated by the translators. English (of course), italian and german we can take care of ourselves, but for all the others we'd very much appreciate help from the community, we already have a list of translators, but having other people also working on it or as backup would really be great! So if you know any of: Portugues, Chinese, Catalan, Russian, French, Spanish, Danish very well, drop a note to flo [at] syscp [dot] org and/or eleras [at] syscp [dot] org, thanks! Best regards, CHTEKK. Tuesday, October 17. 2006Saturday, October 14. 2006New SysCP blog & status
Hi all!
This blog post should be my first to also be syndicated on blog.syscp.org, one of the new resources we SysCP devs will use to better bring news and informations to you, the user. First, let me again thank Martin Burchert aka eremit for all the work he's done over the years and the big help and guidance he has provided to all of us, and the really fantastic work done on SysCP 1.3! Thanks Martin! Second, as EleRas said on his previous post, we're working on SysCP 1.3, largely following the proposals of SysCP EP01. We've already implemented most of the backend changes:
Also on the frontend side we're going pretty well:
Also a lot of bugfixes were added, as well as the theme by me and Luca Piona (which is also default in 1.2.14 now, yay!), thanks to EleRas for porting that to the SysCP 1.3 structure! We also should now be E_ALL and E_STRICT compliant on PHP 5.1.6 at least (that's what me and EleRas tested with, no more warnings, yay!). The PHPBeautifier SysCP filter also was ran over the whole codebase, and yelded very good results and a much more readable and beautiful code (it's all about beauty today, isn't it? ).And as EleRas also already announced, we're currently working on splitting up all the language files into a modular structure, it's no difficult job, but a tedious, boring one! Plans for the future (future = SysCP 1.4 final release):
There's also some talk about adding some type of optional LDAP support sometimes in the future, we'll see about that... Ah, and MacOS X support is also planned, again sometimes in the future, this will probably mainly be done by flo, unless someone buys me a Mac Mini (Intel CPU, at least 1GB ram, contact me for a shipping address ).That's it. Arrr, I wrote a little bit more than I intended to, but at least this should be a fairly complete status update and explain what we're going to do next, so... Let's do it! Best regards, CHTEKK. Sunday, July 30. 2006#gentoo-db
#gentoo-db has just opened it's (virtual) doors (or windows or terminals, depends on what IRC client you use
).The new channel is intented to provide a platform for discussions, concerning both support and development, centering on Gentoo and databases. At the moment Gentoo MySQL and PostgreSQL people hang out there, but it's my hope to see other developers and/or teams that maintain database-related packages for Gentoo (Firebird, Oracle, SQLite, BerkeleyDB, ...) join too, as well as users with experience in SQL and database management, or just people intersted in databases and their uses. Best regards, CHTEKK. Friday, July 14. 2006New PHP revisions in the tree
For all those who wondered, PHP in Gentoo is definitely not dead.
Just put new revisions in the tree (dev-lang/php-4.4.2-r6 and dev-lang/php-5.1.4-r4), that fix various bugs and security issues. On that note, a big thanks to Stefan Esser from Hardened-PHP.net for all his patches and work on securing PHP (and of course the Hardened-PHP patch itself)! The new PHP revisions also introduce a better separation between eclasses and ebuilds, making their managing and addition of new features easier. One of those new additions for now is the "concurrentmodphp" USE flag. It enables to build mod_php4 and mod_php5 in a way that both can be loaded at the same time into the same Apache2 instance, each mod_php then has it's own mime-types (application/x-httpd-php4{-source} for PHP4 and application/x-httpd-php5{-source} for PHP5) and configuration modifiers (php4_admin_value/php4_admin_flag for PHP4 and php5_admin_value/php5_admin_flag for PHP5 and so on). This feature is highly experimental, I could confirm it working on my x86 system and partially on an x86_64 system, but I'd very much like for users to try it out on systems where breakage is allowed (developement systems or test systems) and report back their results to me (chtekk@gentoo.org), thanks! To try it, do the following: emerge --syncthen don't forget to "etc-update" and re-emerge ALL of your installed PHP modules/extensions (such as dev-php4/pecl-zip etc.). Also all this does not work with the "java-internal" (PHP4) and "sharedext" (PHP4/5) USE flags enabled, so be sure to disable them when you emerge php. Best regards, CHTEKK. Tuesday, July 11. 2006Speeding up MPM-itk
A few days ago I added support for MPM-itk ("mpm-itk" USE flag) to our Apache 2.0 packages. MPM-itk is a user-switching MPM, that is, it switches to an assigned user when processing the requests, instead of processing everything as user apache (MPM-perchild, metux-MPM and MPM-peruser are other examples of this).
In it's original form it accomplishes this by doing the following: apache process as root, interpret the request --> fork() new process and switch (setuid(unprivuid) / setgid(unprivgid)) to unprivileged user for it, process the request --> kill of the setuid/setgid process, with the next request it will redo the processNow, this is foolproof, but provokes an immense performance hit, especially on static pages. Benchmarks done with ab2 showed that a normal Apache2 (MPM-prefork) can process about 240 PHP req/sec and 4000 HTML req/seq, while the MPM-itk patched Apache 2.0 managed about 110 PHP req/sec and 240 HTML req/sec, so you see, the peformance hit is enormous, and it's obiously due to the overhead of always having to fork() a new Apache process and then kill if off, for every request! I managed to successfully change the way the MPM works, and thus managed to bring it's speed to normal Apache levels (patch against MPM-itk available here), by changing the "worfklow" like this: apache process as root, interpret the request --> switch (setresuid(unprivuid, unprivuid, 0) / setresgid(unprivgid, unprivgid, 0)) to unprivileged user, process the request --> switch back to root (setresuid(0, 0, 0) / setresgid(0, 0, 0)), with the next request it will redo the processNow this solves the performance problems, as it doesn't anymore do the extra fork(), and fully reuses the process with the next request, but it introduces a new problem: a gaping security hole.  Since the processed request cannot be trusted, everything in there can simply setuid/setgid to root and do operations as root! A simple call to, for example, the posix_setuid/posix_setgid functions of the PHP POSIX extensio are enough to switch the user back to root and let the rest of the PHP script just work as root... This is totally unacceptable for security. So, now my call for help: has anyone got any idea how it's possible to realize this in a secure manner??? I can't think of any way to securely switch the process from root to unpriv user and back to root, without giving the untrusted code executed in the request processing phase the same ability (that is, to switch back to root). Ideas and comments are very appreciated.
Sunday, May 21. 2006Old-style PHP, bye bye!
Adieu old-style PHP (dev-php/php et all)...
One of many ways to say that, as I'm posting this, I'm cvs up'ing the affected directories to start the removal of the already masked old-style PHP packages, as announced one month ago. For all the ones that didn't yet migrate... Well, migrate NOW! And generally, enjoy the fact that "emerge php" will now install dev-lang/php, and you won't have to specify the directory anymore. Best regards, CHTEKK. |
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