Tadek’s Blog

We recently visited our friends who started their own start-up. No, not in the Silicon Valley, but here in Kilchberg. And not in IT, but in pâtisserie.

http://cake-plus.ch/

We heard the chocolate cake is to die for. We are so getting it for Christmas, topped with Christmas decorations. Sweet

I recently wanted to test TLS with SMTP. I followed instructions on http://qmail.jms1.net/test-auth.shtml and got it to work in less than 30s

In short:

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("\000user\000password")'
openssl s_client -starttls smtp -crlf -connect <ip>:<port>
auth <auth_command>
mail from:<tadek@pietraszek.org>
rcpt to:<tadek@pietraszek.org>
data
...
.

Interestingly, when I tried typing RCPT s_client would interpret it as “renegotiate”, which confused me a bit, but you can inhibit it with --quiet or type it in lowercase like I did

T.

I recently started getting nagmails about running out of quota on my home directory. Being a very messy user, I had no idea where the space went. I tried playing with du manually, but it’s much easier with xdu:

sudo apt-get install xdu
du > /tmp/blah
xdu -n /tmp/blah

I know it’s easy, but every time I write it I have to study the man page of find to figure out the correct parameters:

File only deletion:

find <dir> -atime +7 -type f -print | xargs rm -f

Recursive deletion (be careful):

find <dir> -atime +7 -print | xargs rm -rf

I just enabled SVN access on my server through the web interface. It was quite easy and, since we have a Postgres DB authentication, there’s no need to edit inconvenient password files

All I had to do was to enable the SVN module: link dav_svn.{load|conf} in mods-enabled and add the following line to the SSL-ed vhost.

<Location "/svn/foo">
   SVNPath /var/lib/svn/foo
   Dav svn
  <LimitExcept OPTIONS GET>
    Require user user@example.com user2@example.com
  </LimitExcept>
</Location>

Since the SSL-ed vhost already requires authentication, I didn’t have to change anything. I also had to create an SVN repository svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/lib/svn/foo and change the permissions to www-data.

The checkout command is:

svn –username user@example.com –password my_secret_password co https://my.example.com/svn/foo

SVN caches the username and password, so any further operations are done without prompting you for it. If you don’t like it, you can disable it with --no-auth-cache.

Finally, one annoying thing. Initially, I would just try to connect without –username and SVN would first try my Unix user name and then ask for it. Unfortunately, some (but not all) users I tried in this way would get a mysterious:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/svn/foo'
svn: PROPFIND of '/svn/foo': authorization failed (https://example.com)

WTH?