Welcome to BAFM

Recently I got the task, to implement unixODBC/freetds on one (well, it’s really three) of our web servers, as someone wanted to use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with PHP (without using the MSSQL functions, which PHP provides soo nicely; don’t ask me why). With that I also got a set of " instructions" on how to install freetds from source (remember, I was a Gentoo dev, so I know my way around, when it comes to building from source), as well as a small set of instructions on how to create the connection. ...

Okay, so I ended up toying with subversion via WebDAV on SLES today (I know, I know .. it’s bloody Sunday). It wasn’t much of a hassle though, after reading this. Sure, I made a few errors at first (simply confused the logic behind " Location" and " Directory"), but after that plain subversion commits via WebDAV (thus utilizing Apache) worked fine. For POC or as a hint to myself, here’s where and what I needed to add/change: ...

Remember, I talked about building RPM’s on SLES10SP2 on ppc64 ? Well, turns out I was rather stupid .. and it was rather simple (don’t ask me why I didn’t think of that). I tried asking solar, I used Google (apparently with the wrong search parameters), nothing though. Not a clue. Today it bugged me again, so I used Google again. This time with " ppc64 suse rpmbuild", and guess what I saw within the preview of the second hit .. ...

Today I had to search again on how to remove newline special characters with sed. Thanks to Kamil over at linux.dsplabs.com.au, I found it again rather quickly. Now, this is just for my own safekeeping, so I don’t end up googling for it again … 🤷 1 echo -e "Line containing nnewlines!" | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/n//g'

Well, it’s been a loong time since I first thought about retiring (yes, I know that #-dev’s topic states " developer blogs" ain’t for announcing important things, but my blog has to do for this; if not, I don’t care anymore :!: ). But I think it’s about time for me to leave. I haven’t done much lately, I’ve been soo damn busy with work these last months like I would never have imagined. I gave it some more thought, and I finally got to the point ( again I might add) where all just annoys and/or frustrates me. All the damn bickering, the childish behaviour Josh talked about (" noooo, that’s my TOY!"), the constant abuse of power (hey #-chat, #-kde ops). I thought most of us would at least try and behave like the elderish people we are (well besides the few of us, who really are children by law’s definition - hey there welp, omp, keytoaster ;-) ). But I guess that’s just been an imaginary thought I had .. * shrug*

As I was building the updated RPMs for SLES10, though needed to refresh my old patch. Also, I was getting strange messages from autotools and fixed these quirks, Now, I prepped a patch for it, and finished building new RPMs for i586 and x86_64.

Well, to begin with we had this really weird problem that the thin clients as well as the terminal server would only load user based group policy if you are a member of the group of local administrators. While that’s ok for the thin clients (users can’t actually change something unless they log in as “Administrator” - don’t ask me why), it’s a real no-no on the terminal server. ...

OK, so about an hour (yeah, yeah; I know .. I shouldn’t be working at that time, but it really gave me sleepless nights) ago, I finally figured out why the hell both my Windows XP Embedded thin clients as well as my Windows Server 2003 systems where showing this real weird behaviour when applying group policies, or more precise the user based configuration of a group policy. ...

Ok, so I ended up lying in bed for two hours, so I stood back up and searched for some stuff that floated my mind. The end result seems to be the following: VIA EPIA SN10000EG (199,30€) 2x Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (each 31,31€) Club 3D GeForce 7300 GT, 256MB DDR2, 2x DVI, TV-out, PCIe (CGNX-HG736) (55,00€) – still need to find a riser card Transcend SSD/IDE 8GB (169,00€) 2x Samsung SyncMaster 204B, 20.1", 1600x1200, VGA, DVI (LS20BRDBSQ) (each 309,00€) I still need to find a fitting power supply, but I’ll leave that for tomorrow. The above leads me with about 520,00€ for the “PC” and 680€ for the TFT’s (as I don’t have any). And that’ll give me a full silent (as in not a single moving part), quiet workstation for my desk. ...

I’m not sure whether or not I blogged about this before, but here it is just for me to actually remember what, in which order I need to do. If you got the list in form of a csv file, simply do the following: 1 2 3 4 wget -q http://tinyurl.com/4atkz7 -O - | grep "(" | cut -d'(' -f2 | cut -d')' -f1 | awk '{ print tolower($1) }' > retirements for developer in $( < retirements ); do retire.py --metadata $developer /cvs/gentoo-x86/ | diffstat > ~/metadata.$developer done That’ll give you a detailed list of which metadata.xml need to be changed.