Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

When I migrated from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9, I used the backup function in Evolution. Before backing up my mail accounts (POP3), I deleted all the sent mails and emptied the trash because it was the perfect moment to do so and it would make the backup file a lot smaller. With 5 mails left in Evolution, the backup file was still around 170MB compressed, strange heh?

I had a closer look at my .evolution folder and figured out that there was a huge “cache” directory for each mail account. This folder seems to contain ALL the messages I ever sent/received since the account’s creation.

I can’t see why there should be any cache for POP accounts (seems to be an IMAP feature), and why that cache is still there after emptying the trash…a Google search later, this seems to be a known bug.

I manually deleted the content of the cache folders and everything seems to work fine, no consequence on my inbox content.

So, if you are using Evolution with a POP account and you wonder where your disk space has gone, have a look at this…

With the introduction of OpenJDK in Fedora 9 (one of the best thing that could happen to Fedora if you ask me), you now have an easy access to the infinite power of a great IDE: NetBeans. Until now, I still used Windows a lot because of specific software like Enterprise Architect, Office 2007 (colleagues who don’t want to switch to OOo) or NetBeans; now that the latter works almost out of the box with Fedora 9, I can reduce my Windows usage by 1/3

To install NetBeans, you need to install the openjdk-devel package first; yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel should resolve your problems. Then simply head to http://www.netbeans.org and grab the edition you need…done.

Note that since version 6.1, you can’t simply install the PHP plugin on other editions than “NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP” to highlight your PHP code. If you wonder, all editions can be installed in parallel and will register correctly in the Gnome Applications/Programming menu. Fedora 9 is definitively a huge step forward.

As everyone probably knows, Fedora 9 was released earlyer today, you can grab a copy on http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

I installed it and overall it’s a much better experience than Fedora 8! All control keys on my laptop work

As for now, I only encountered a very serious bug: I have a swiss-french (fr_CH-latin1) keyboard, and that’s what I chose during the installation process. Later during the install, you have to create an user and enter a password, that’s what I did, and…I couldn’t login to Gnome with that password! I had to Alt-F2, login as root and manually change the password for my user with “passwd”. This is a bug that will affect absolutely all swiss-french users at least…

That’s it for now. Ah, I updated my “software to install” page to get Fedora 9 with mp3/wmv/divx support…

I didn’t see it until now, but VirtualBox version 1.6 was released a couple of days ago. You can get it on Sun’s website. Interestingly, there is already a binary for Fedora 9 but I think there is a typo in the drop box…”Fedora 9 AMD” is probably the 64-Bit version.

Changelog:

• The new Sun livery
• Solaris and Mac versions no longer in beta
• Guest Additions for Solaris
• Seamless windowing for Solaris and Linux guests
• SATA support for up to 32 hard disks per VM (first product in the industry to do SATA!)
• PAE support for guests (memory model required by some server OSes)
• Web Services API for remote management
• Significant improvements to scalability

I can see that you are lazy, and I know how hard it is to type an user name and password each time you want to login via SSH on a server.

Today, we are going to learn how to configure your computer and a server to allow automatic SSH authentications using your public RSA key. Less work = More fun!

Configuration on your computer:

As your normal user, open a terminal and type ssh-keygen

It will ask you some questions, you can simply press enter to acknowledge the default choices. You don’t need to enter a password here if you don’t want to be asked for it at each login on the server, it’s not a security flaw. The output should be something like that:

[Steven@HP6710 ~]$ ssh-keygen

Generating public/private rsa key pair.

Enter file in which to save the key (/home/Steven/.ssh/id_rsa):

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):

Enter same passphrase again:

Your identification has been saved in /home/Steven/.ssh/id_rsa.

Your public key has been saved in /home/Steven/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

The important thing is that you have 2 new files in your user/.ssh directory.

• id_rsa is your private key, you should NEVER give it away.
• id_rsa.pub on the other side is your public key, the one that you can give away.

Configuration on the server:

As the user you wish to be logged in (let’s say root), also run the ssh-keygen command to create the /root/.ssh directory. Now go to your /root/.ssh directory and create a text file named authorized_keys2. Copy the content of your computer’s public key file (id_rsa.pub on HP6710) to this file and save it.

Job done, now you can run ssh root@server from your computer and it will log you in automagically

I’m using wireless home routers and Access Points since a very long time, I remember when I paid up to 200€ for an early Linksys 802.11b Access Point. The only problem I have with them, is that they always die horribly after a while. Let’s go back in my router-love history…I had the following products:

• 2x Linksys WAP11: the power supply died and burned the whole PCB. They both lasted 1 year.
• Linksys WAP54G: the power supply also died after a long agony during which the wireless connection was less and less reliable. It lasted 2 years.
• D-Link DI-824VUP+: the wireless connection was never reliable and the supposed PPTP VPN-server function never worked. They stopped to support the product roughly 6 months after it was released. The biggest piece of shit I ever had. It’s still in operation as a purely Ethernet router.
• D-Link DI-524: the wireless part of the router died today. It lasted 2 years. It had a very short signal range too.

Today, I replaced the DI-524 with a brand new ZyXEL NBG334W and god is it better! Simply by looking at the Web interface and the manual, you can tell that this product is in an other class. It’s a real configuration interface, with options you need and you can also access it via Telnet. Forget Linksys’ or D-Link’s Playmobile interface. The signal strength and range are good too.

ZyXEL always had a good reputation, we used a lot of their products at work but I never tried their home products. At around 30€, it’s not that expensive. Note the nice “Guest WLAN” function.