Hoppla:

10:25:23 Dr-Greenthumb ~ $ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2    96Gi   96Gi    0Bi   100%    /
devfs          111Ki  111Ki    0Bi   100%    /dev
fdesc          1.0Ki  1.0Ki    0Bi   100%    /dev
map -hosts       0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /net
map auto_home    0Bi    0Bi    0Bi   100%    /home
10:25:25 Dr-Greenthumb ~ $

Das macht das Arbeiten eetwas träge!

So for those of you who did not notice: This blog has got a funky new domain name: I switched from jannis.to over to jann.is :) The .to extension has been bothering me for a while, and somebody has been blocking jannis.com for 8 years or so. Big shouts go out to Örn Arnarson who I abused as a human proxy in order to register an icelandic domain - cause they only let residents do so.

When I emptied my gmail trash, I was asked this question (click to enlarge):

Well - I do??? :)

Situation: All my music is sitting on an external harddrive that is connected to a NSLU2. No music when I'm using my laptop somewhere else but at home.

The NSLU2 is a device made by Linksys. It makes USB Flash memory or hard disk devices accessible over a network (NAS). You can install different flavors of linux on it to extend it's functionality. The easiest one to install is the unslung firmware that gives you a stripped down debian system. I have used this setup to run an rsync daemon on the NSLU2, as well as some other things like mt-daapd (an iTunes server).

In order to make bonjour services like mt-daapd, my printer, and whatnot availible even when I'm not at home, I installed openvpn on the NSLU2 so I can connect from everywhere. Obviously, the mDNS information required for service discovery from outside my home network was not multicasted through the VPN.

Of course, I could set up an SSH tunnel from my laptop to my NSLU2 at home, and then use mDNSProxyResponderPosix [1] to manually advertise the iTunes server on my laptop. But that's not the real thing. I need bridging so the multicast gets through. No luck with the unslung distribution, though, the kernel can't do it.

Because it's so much fun, I decided to install a full blown debian system on the NSLU2, as described in this excellent tutorial. It failed all the time. Sometimes it would crash during the partioning, sometimes during the copying of packages. I used a 4GB usb stick. I did some reading, and it turned out this happens when the NSLU2 runs out of memory and the solution was to increase the size of the swap partition.

Too bad that it ran out of memory when trying to partition the memory stick. I then launched a knoppix live CD in parallels, formatted the memory stick to create a swap partition and a large ext3 partition on my laptop. Then, in the NSLU2 debian installer I chose manual partitioning and then went back to the main menu and went along with the timezone configuration, effectively skipping the partitioning part of the installation.

It's still installing right now, but it all looks good and I'm confident this time it'll work. So when you encounter hangs, crashes or other errors during the installation or partitioning, try again with a smaller memory stick or partition the memory stick on your workstation.

Warning: Technical babbling ahead! I just ran into the problem that my server can't send mail with PHP and exim. Exim worked fine for any other process, just PHP would not send anything. The solution was to adjust the sendmail_path setting in my php.ini: It defaults to sendmail -t -i, but the -i option causes exim to falsly wait for more input. For Debian, just set sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t and PHP will be able to send mail.