Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for English

Tightening too much

After recent attack on sf.net servers, some services have been unavailable for some time. Now things are returning to "normal" operations, CVS has been made available yesterday.

But this has lead to other (quite unrelated) change, affecting all SCM services:

outbound email is not functional, so any script utilizing this will fail. If you need to send outbound email, a workaround would be to use curl and and external site or Project Web to send the email.

I think this is just wrong. If this is as a measure against spam, it will rather open dozens of other places where to send spam, because every project wanting commit notifications (or using CIA.vc), will need to deploy some script on web to send mail. And I guess it simply won't be much protected.

Maybe it's time to consider changing service provider...

PS: The bug I've reported on this topic is here.

phpMyAdmin translation status

As we're slowly heading towards phpMyAdmin 3.4, it is good time to look at current translations state.

There are few which are already at 100%, so they are in best possible shape:

Some languages really miss just few messages, so they will hopefully get to 100% soon:

And there is huge progress in Russian, which will at this pace get to 100% this week.

Was your language not listed? You can help it being better!

Upgrading to Squeeze

Squeeze was released this weekend and it's time to slowly migrate servers to it. The first to upgrade came the ones backing up phpMyAdmin demo server. Reason for trying them first is they have mostly same setup as other, while definitely not being critical to run all the time. For simple reasons that users break them time to time as well :-).

Everything went surprisingly smoothly, the only problematic thing being no availability of MariaDB packages for Squeeze right now. But it does not matter that much, as Lenny packages still work fine.

There should be no visible changes on the servers, but in case there is something broken, please let me know.

While having experience with upgrading database servers, I went to production database server and it is now running Squeeze as well. What still remains is the server doing virtualization, but I prefer to do this in time when I can quickly get to the housing, in case something goes wrong with the reboot.

Photo of a week 5

Picture this week is a little bit later because of time spent on FOSDEM and traveling there.

It was taken last Wednesday from Vyšehrad, the Prague castle is disappearing in morning fog.

Foggy morning in Prague

New phpMyAdmin themes

Today, I've made available two new themes for phpMyAdmin on our demo server.

First one is Toba theme which was contributed by Azhari Harahap:

Toba theme

Second one is Graphite theme which I've started during Hackweek and finished during free time around FOSDEM:

Graphite theme

And we're still waiting for more contributions to our Theme contest.

PS: Forgot to mention that new themes are only for 3.4 branch and won't work with others.

OpenWRT and resolving private ranges

For quite a long time, I have a problem, that DNS in my OpenWRT box does not resolv local range on wan interface. Today I have learned that it is doing it in order to protect me:

dnsmasq[15709]: possible DNS-rebind attack detected: jmnet.czf

But hey, my wan interface has 10.* address and I want to resolve 10.* domains there!

A little bit of googling revealed that this is caused by --stop-dns-rebind passed to dnsmasq. Okay, the easiest fix is to disable it. You need to change /etc/config/dhcp:

config 'dnsmasq'
        option 'rebind_protection' '0'

After reading source of /etc/init.d/dnsmasq I realized there is also way to whitelist some domains, what sounds like a slightly better idea. After fighting with syntax, I found the solution to be (again in /etc/config/dhcp):

config 'dnsmasq'
        list 'rebind_domain' '/czf/'

Next thing to explore is why is native IPv6 not working for me on the router though it should...

Screenshot support for Nokia DCT4 phones

After implementing the screenshot functionality for S60 phones, I wanted to add same thing for other phones as well. As there were some basics of the code for Nokia DCT4 phones, it was obvious place where to start.

After little of hacking, screenshots are working, for example this is screenshot of my Nokia 6234 I use for testing:

Nokia 6234 screen

Support for Sony-Ericsson phones should follow soon, Németh Márton is working on it.