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2010-01-03: Again: the UWP-HDR-Calendar!
It was the first test. I went to the next copyshop to make a printout of my HDR-Calender 2010. This seemed to be harder than I thought. First I have to admit: the PDF is not prepared for printing regarding the colors. I made it on a computer screen, of course. And so it got darker in the prints than I thougt. The guy from Sprintout told me he cannot do anything against this, there is no possibility to adapt the colors before the printout. But what was even ridiculous: their machines cannot print without edges! I told the guy I'd like to have them without the white edges (ok, he cutted them...) but he said, it's not possible to print without white edges. Even more worse: the image haven't been scaled down, no, it has been cut off at the edges, the white edges are covering parts of the original image! I'd say, I'll never go to this store for A3-prints anymore. Today almos every A4 printer can print edgelessly and when I'm going to a copyshop I can expect that their damn expensive machines can do the same with A3 format. Ok, I could have say I don't want the copies in that case, but when I'm ordering something I'm buying it. And: it surely had a value, it was a clear test. And now I know how to NOT DO it! A hint to the rest of the world...
I'll now try to give the calendar to an internet shop to get some better prints. Strange, all people yelling, we, the internet-buyers would destroy the cities when we're not buying at the small shops. And when I'm trying to go to the small shop, it ends in a hell of a disaster. Before you're giving the calendar to a printing shop you should ask them those questions:
1. Is A3 printing possible without edges?
2. If this isn't possible, maybe the image can at least scaled down instead of losing image-parts through cutting?
3. Is it possible to change/adapt the colors before the print so it looks at least a little bit more like on the computer screen?
I'd say, you should at least have 1 and 3 answered with yes before giving the start signal. Maybe there's even a Sprintout shop which can do it? Perhaps the guy just didn't know how to handle those things or he even didn't want to? I really can't believe that those machines cannot handle those demands, they're simply too expensive. Maybe it's not the idea of finding the right store, it can also be the way of finding the right employee who can do these tasks?
BTW, happy new year! :)

2009-12-31: For the patient: the UWP-HDR-Calendar 2010!
Wow. My last english entry here was in January this year. I guess, I have to work on my english pages, hm? Anyway, for those ones of you who sometimes take a look inside here I have a special after-Xmas-present:
The ultimate UWP-HDR-Calendar for the year 2010!
It's an A3-PDF (I don't know if this fits to US-printers...) and you can copy it, send it around, print it, even sell it! There's just one condition: don't change it, you must give it away as it is.
All of the images inside are HDR images I made over the last 2 years. Mostly this year. They seems different, which is because I changed my technics over time (yes, I'm learning, too!) and I pimped my camera etc.
I hope you enjoy it and have a happy new year!

2009-01-20: Bad ideas and good hopes
Hey gals'n'guys! First of all: a happy new year! Yes, this blog's still alive although I must admit: sometimes it smells a bit cheesy. Anyway, this time I have a lot to tell. One of the strangest ideas I read about was Ralf's idea to challenge the Nigeria spamming guys. We had some attacks at work, mostly coming from Nigeria IPs and it was a lot of work to get rid of those phishing mails. No need to tell that we had users who answered the mails with username and password so that the Nigerian spammers could use our webmail-system to send spam into the world. They made it upto 4 hours in the night, more than 250k mails. I calculated about 400 people working because they had to put all the data via cut'n'paste into the webmail-GUI and there was even a limit (I don't tell how big) of maximum count of receiving email addresses. However, it was a lot of work to get rid of this crap and to regain our reputation (yes, during that time of thos 250k emails, they used our hosts for spamming so we had been official marked as spammers) etc. And now Ralf says to the bullying guys: "What you want, hm? Shall I kick your head? Or what? You bloody !§$%&%!" I don't think, that this is a good idea...
Another bad idea was This one: Kick 10 fake friends from your facebook-friends-list and you'll get a whopper for free. Whut? It was clear that this offer won't stay long...
Even more strange was the idea of Larry Flint for a Porn Bailout. Really? Porn-stuff cannot resist recession? I don't think so. But in the end it might be a good idea to show the public how stupid all those bailout programs are. Maybe Mr. Flynt wanted to tell them: Hey, all the money will migrate into the wrong pockets.
The better idea is the search for freedom. FreedomHouse has a PDF with statistics, how many countries and people are really "free", in terms of free spech and other elementary human rights. It's not really optimistic statistics, but I won't give up the hope. Although today the hope will be as big as almost never before. So many people hoping that Obama will bring paradise to earth, I'm wondering that he hasn't collapsed under this pressure. I surely also hope for a change, but the US are almost bankrupt, Obamas possibilities seems to be very small. And: a change will need time. I'd say we shouldn't hope for tomorrow but maybe in 2 years it might make a difference. At this time change will start. Too bad that most people will be against Obama in that time because all of these developments had been not fast enough for most of them. But: we really should party today, because the worst politician of the world will end his desaster today! Hooray!
One last hope: Charge GWB for high treason! This must be done now!

2008-12-11: Linux and stupid teachers
Sometimes I'm thinking about logic in this world. It looked like we had a logic peak some years ago (about 2001 I'd say) and with 9/11 it seems that those terrorists not only bombed away the human rights, they simply destroyed logic and brainpower. It's not only in the Bush-world of the USA, it's a world wide effect. Everyday I'm reading about stupid ideas politicians, religious or economic leaders come up with and it looks like a race to show which one might be the biggest idiot. Or maybe who's the one, which can destroy humankind the fastest way? On the other hand I also read about good news. And I always have the hope that this run to an idiocracy world is only because the dirt has somehow got to the top of the world places. We just have to get rid of them but no problem: we got enough intelligent people. And at this point such bad things are happening. Here are some quotes:
"No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful."
"I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back."
"I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them."
You cannot speak more stupid words in a row regarding computer stuff. A Teacher, which should be more intelligent than most of us shows one of the highest stupid levels I've ever seen. This is the time where my hope for this world and the human race gets a bit down. Maybe not all teachers are that stupid? At least I hope so...
BTW, if this is more a case of corruption (schools often get stuff from Microsoft and so the teachers are against free software) it will have the same effect: teaching the pupils/students stupidity.
The only good point here is: if Linux is banned from school everyone will want to have it. :)

2008-10-01: Me against Motherboard: 0 - 1
My mainboard really's making me angry. I told about my USB problems and some solutions. Now I can tell that I tried them. I tried noapic, nolapic or even both as boot options. 3 things happened.
1st: my SATA controller only worked in IDE mode, AHCI mode was dead
2nd: the whole system got extremely slow
3rd: although there was no interrup sharing at all irq 7 (the one for EHCI) died as spurious and made the USB stuff unusable again.
Last chance is to try a full 64 bit kernel. Problem: the fgrlx driver. Will it work? I don't know. Right now it seems almost impossible to get the kernel up because the initrd image won't be found at startup. Whut? The 32 bit kernels are running and can find the initrd image while the 64 bit kernel can't?
This is motherboard hell, I'll continue to report...

2008-09-16: USB: the war continues
I think I told about my USB problems with my new mainboard? It seems hard to use them, often the bus is stopping, resetting and sometimes even dieing so I have to reboot. Especially while using USB hubs the bus got resetted very early and often, but only under heavy load (20 MB/s or more). I tried to avoid hubs although my old boards were quite the opposite: every media only worked WITH USB hub. But even while not using USB hubs I had lots of problems.
One day a friend came and brought a USB disk. It didn't wanted to run: found shortly, disconnected. Severel times. And USB dead after 6 repetitions. This disk had no extra power. I thought, maybe my USB ports don't deliver enough power? I used an active hub and: I could use exactly ONE device at the hub without any problems. Activating a second disk at the hub leaded to the same device reset as before. But: this time with an extra kernel oops message: IRQ lost, use irqpoll. What? This is a very fast board, I ill not slow it down to 386-level just because the USB part is either bad on the board or in the linux kernel! But: I've seen lots of people coming to the same point as I did. They all had SMP boards and it seems the only way of a workaround is using noapic or nolapic during booting the linux kernel. I'll test this and will tell the world. This whole US crap really sucks!

2008-08-21: VMware problems & solutions and Debian is 15 now!
First I have to tell about some problems I had at work. We have a virtual Server in our DMZ which hosts lots of virtual clients. Hm, lots. Ok, 6 at this time. But hey, at least it's one of 2 virtual servers. Right now the virtualization software is VMware Server. It's quite ok for our needs although for our non-DMZ-machines we're now using ESX servers. Anyway, we started the virtualization long time ago without much planning. As often, IT starts with some kind of testing and "let's see if we get some benefit out of it" and after a while a second server followed the first one. We thought about moving virtual guests between the hosts for update or crash reasons. But: the IP spaces had been different. So after moving we would have to touch every virtual guest's IP adress. But some of them are not our machines, they are guests from different customers who just want to host their web sites. We could do a move of a machine by ourselves in a few minutes but when the owners are not reachable it wouldn't run because we can't log in into their machines and therefore cannot change the IP adresses. So I decided: we need a DMZ-network in one IP space segment. The reason why we had two different segments had been the space between the buildings. They are about 9 km away from each other. Now we were creating a "Metro-DMZ-Network" (trust me: when you want to do virtualization, this is the FIRST thing to do: create a metro network! Only one IP-Segment!) where every virtual guest will be put in.
Now it was time for a test case. I had a new virtual machine from a customer and I wanted to shift it to the new metro network. The virtual guest itself had the new address yet, but the virtual host itself had to get a second ethernet cable with the new address. Now my main problem was: how to tell the guest to use the second line? The hints of vmware had been bad because they're saying you need Virtual center for it. We didn't have it because it costs money and at this time we really don't need it yet. The other way I've seen in usergroups was: reconfiguring through vmware-config.pl. But as I started it a message said: Do you really want to stop every virtual guest now? NO! Of course not! I just wanted to change ONE machine, not all of them! Those others should run further! There seemed to be no other solution so I took the perl script and read it. I found out that there was a tool called
vmnet-bridge
and the command
vmnet-bridge -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-1.pid /dev/vmnet1 eth1
should do the trick. But: /dev/vmnet1 didn't exist, just vmnet0 which was connected to eth0 and should stay this way. I read on in vmware-config.pl and found out that the VMware guys just did a mknod command to add devices:
mknod /dev/vmnet1 c 119 1
After I did this, I used the vmnet-bridge-command and added the interface in the guest settings with Custom network: use /dev/vmnet1 And: it worked! I didn't have to boot! Great!
Now my main problem was: how to make this stuff surviving a reboot? I found the vmnet0 string which was bridged to eth0 first only in
/etc/vmware/locations
That's where I added the vmnet1-stuff next to the vmnet0-stuff and now I'm hoping that the system is running even after a reboot...
Anyway, after so much work there's also a point of party:
DEBIAN is 15 years old!
YIPPEEE!
Too bad I missed the right day in fact. That's the strange things in OpenSource: almost no marketing. Not even at the main page of the project you can read news about this event. Very strange. Of course 15 is only a number and there's other stuff that matters more for Debian guys. Nevertheless I can say, the official start of Debian (that's what the archeologists believe these days) is August 16th, 1993. Maybe there will be a party when Debian is 20 or 25? Maybe only when it reaches 50 years? I'd say, if there will be a 50 years party I will come and donate some beer for the masses. If I'm still alive at this time: August 16th, 2043...

2008-08-14: New T-Shirts!
Today I have the pleasure to announce some new stuff you can buy in the best T-shirt-shop of the world! This is the variety in english I can offer:

I love gaudy colors Me cago en tu puta madre -> I like your hair

The first one maybe clear to you but the second needs a bit of explaining. I tried to learn spanish for some years now. It's a hard job and I thought: Hm, maybe you're not the only one to learn this fabulous language? So I made this shirt as a "starter" for all of you spanish-loving gals'n'guys. The next Spain vacation will be a dream because of this shirt in the local's language. This shirt shows respect for their culture and you'll be in fast contact with the locals (maybe even "full body contact"? Hint: drool!). Your friends will envy you for this! I shout out a loud "¡Coño carajo!" to you party people!
(BTW, I'm not responsible for anything that will hapen with you while you're wearing this shirt! This is a "buy-and-use at your own risk"!)

2008-08-12: ATI drivers and kernel 2.6.26: a real mess! :(
The graphics driver situation inside the Linux world is a real mess. In the past I bought Nvidia boards because it was easy to get their proprietary 3D driver running. Until one day the updates for old graphic boards had been stopped. One of my old laptops had been fallen into stoneage at that day and so I swore to myself: Nvidia? Never again! Here you can see the mess with proprietary drivers. The producer of the hardware is the one who limits the lifetime of the stuff you bought. It just ends the support and you're f*cked.
When I bought a new PC there was at least the decision between ATI (belongs to AMD now) and Intel hardware. Intel has completely open drivers but mostly for the 2D world. The 3D world is a mess so the result is: good bye games like Nexuiz or Sauerbraten. It's really strange that the only part where Windows is ahead of Linux are the games. And that's just because there is no real graphics market. 2 (or now 3 with Intel) players are not enough to get rid of this proprietary shit.
But: what to do now? I thought a long time and bought a cheap Radeon HD 2600 card. It seemed the open source video driver had guys working on it (I've never seen progress in Nouvea, the open surce Nvidia driver) and after some while even 2D should work. So I hoped in some months the whole thing will be completed. After trying the free radeon drivers I noticed that not even 2D is working because it needs 3D stuff to run. AAAAAAAAARGH! There had been trouble with an "unfree Atom BIOS" but ATI/AMD says it's completely open etc. Trouble, trouble, trouble. I just want to play some 3D games with Linux, is it that hard?
I decided to use the proprietary driverv fglrx from ATI. At least it will work with kernel 2.6.25 I read before. The first try didn't work because I just loaded the debian modules. But there was a driver version mismatch. After rebuilding it by myself everything ran fin. Until I started the first XV-TV-Session. The X server crashed and the whole system had to be resetted. After installing a newer version everything worked fine. But: I had lots of trouble with the USB subsystem. Using hubs was nearly impossible and using the full power of USB2 and the USB-subsystem died. I read about those problems and that both problems are solved in kernel 2.6.26. I waited some days until a debian version was ready. It installed and so I tried to generate the new fglrx module. It didn't compile. AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!
THIS IS CRAP!!! What a bunch of shit!
I really started to hate those AMD guys who pushed out a fglrx-driver version AFTER 2.6.26 had been out a long time. It didn't compile and I wasn't the only one who noticed. Some guys wrote a patch for it and it runs now, but it sometimes crashes. What do we learn out of this? Proprietary software is coming directly from hell. It's there to punish you: "So you don't have an open driver, hm? Here, eat this and die! Hahahaha!" Now I know why people often refer about proprietary vs. open source software as religious wars...
Ok, let's try this:
This is a call for all Taiwanese/Chinese/Japanese companies to build graphics hardware with free drivers! I promise, I will buy your stuff, if it brings completely open source drivers and if it's capable to play 3D games, run google earth fast etc. I even will put FREE ads on my page for you (at least for one year!) and will encourage other linux guys doing the same! Deal?

2008-05-14: New Gallery: WGT 2008, Leipzig
Same procedure as last year: Wave Gotik Treffen No. 17 in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. Of course we've seen lots of bands but not that much good ones like last year. We met lots of friends and have seen the strangest styles people can wear, it really was a wonderful festival!
One of the things I like to do at this festival is photoshooting. This time I had my 16 GB chip with me and I shot about 3100 pictures and at the end about 2000 stayed alive. I got rid of 1100 because of fuzziness or other bad stuff at the images. Nevertheless, about 350 made it in the top 10 and here comes the new Gallery: WGT 2008!
As always I'm sorry about the german text only, but hey, at least it's about images! :)
Have fun!

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2010-01-03:	Again: the UWP-HDR-Calendar! It was the first test. I went to the next copyshop to make a printout of my HDR-Calender 2010. This seemed to be harder than I thought. First I have to admit: the PDF is not prepared for printing regarding the colors. I made it on a computer screen, of course. And so it got darker in the prints than I thougt. The guy from Sprintout told me he cannot do anything against this, there is no possibility to adapt the colors before the printout. But what was even ridiculous: their machines cannot print without edges! I told the guy I'd like to have them without the white edges (ok, he cutted them...) but he said, it's not possible to print without white edges. Even more worse: the image haven't been scaled down, no, it has been cut off at the edges, the white edges are covering parts of the original image! I'd say, I'll never go to this store for A3-prints anymore. Today almos every A4 printer can print edgelessly and when I'm going to a copyshop I can expect that their damn expensive machines can do the same with A3 format. Ok, I could have say I don't want the copies in that case, but when I'm ordering something I'm buying it. And: it surely had a value, it was a clear test. And now I know how to NOT DO it! A hint to the rest of the world... I'll now try to give the calendar to an internet shop to get some better prints. Strange, all people yelling, we, the internet-buyers would destroy the cities when we're not buying at the small shops. And when I'm trying to go to the small shop, it ends in a hell of a disaster. Before you're giving the calendar to a printing shop you should ask them those questions: 1. Is A3 printing possible without edges? 2. If this isn't possible, maybe the image can at least scaled down instead of losing image-parts through cutting? 3. Is it possible to change/adapt the colors before the print so it looks at least a little bit more like on the computer screen? I'd say, you should at least have 1 and 3 answered with yes before giving the start signal. Maybe there's even a Sprintout shop which can do it? Perhaps the guy just didn't know how to handle those things or he even didn't want to? I really can't believe that those machines cannot handle those demands, they're simply too expensive. Maybe it's not the idea of finding the right store, it can also be the way of finding the right employee who can do these tasks? BTW, happy new year! :)
2009-12-31:	For the patient: the UWP-HDR-Calendar 2010! Wow. My last english entry here was in January this year. I guess, I have to work on my english pages, hm? Anyway, for those ones of you who sometimes take a look inside here I have a special after-Xmas-present: The ultimate UWP-HDR-Calendar for the year 2010! It's an A3-PDF (I don't know if this fits to US-printers...) and you can copy it, send it around, print it, even sell it! There's just one condition: don't change it, you must give it away as it is. All of the images inside are HDR images I made over the last 2 years. Mostly this year. They seems different, which is because I changed my technics over time (yes, I'm learning, too!) and I pimped my camera etc. I hope you enjoy it and have a happy new year!
2009-01-20:	Bad ideas and good hopes Hey gals'n'guys! First of all: a happy new year! Yes, this blog's still alive although I must admit: sometimes it smells a bit cheesy. Anyway, this time I have a lot to tell. One of the strangest ideas I read about was Ralf's idea to challenge the Nigeria spamming guys. We had some attacks at work, mostly coming from Nigeria IPs and it was a lot of work to get rid of those phishing mails. No need to tell that we had users who answered the mails with username and password so that the Nigerian spammers could use our webmail-system to send spam into the world. They made it upto 4 hours in the night, more than 250k mails. I calculated about 400 people working because they had to put all the data via cut'n'paste into the webmail-GUI and there was even a limit (I don't tell how big) of maximum count of receiving email addresses. However, it was a lot of work to get rid of this crap and to regain our reputation (yes, during that time of thos 250k emails, they used our hosts for spamming so we had been official marked as spammers) etc. And now Ralf says to the bullying guys: "What you want, hm? Shall I kick your head? Or what? You bloody !§$%&%!" I don't think, that this is a good idea... Another bad idea was This one: Kick 10 fake friends from your facebook-friends-list and you'll get a whopper for free. Whut? It was clear that this offer won't stay long... Even more strange was the idea of Larry Flint for a Porn Bailout. Really? Porn-stuff cannot resist recession? I don't think so. But in the end it might be a good idea to show the public how stupid all those bailout programs are. Maybe Mr. Flynt wanted to tell them: Hey, all the money will migrate into the wrong pockets. The better idea is the search for freedom. FreedomHouse has a PDF with statistics, how many countries and people are really "free", in terms of free spech and other elementary human rights. It's not really optimistic statistics, but I won't give up the hope. Although today the hope will be as big as almost never before. So many people hoping that Obama will bring paradise to earth, I'm wondering that he hasn't collapsed under this pressure. I surely also hope for a change, but the US are almost bankrupt, Obamas possibilities seems to be very small. And: a change will need time. I'd say we shouldn't hope for tomorrow but maybe in 2 years it might make a difference. At this time change will start. Too bad that most people will be against Obama in that time because all of these developments had been not fast enough for most of them. But: we really should party today, because the worst politician of the world will end his desaster today! Hooray! One last hope: Charge GWB for high treason! This must be done now!
2008-12-11:	Linux and stupid teachers Sometimes I'm thinking about logic in this world. It looked like we had a logic peak some years ago (about 2001 I'd say) and with 9/11 it seems that those terrorists not only bombed away the human rights, they simply destroyed logic and brainpower. It's not only in the Bush-world of the USA, it's a world wide effect. Everyday I'm reading about stupid ideas politicians, religious or economic leaders come up with and it looks like a race to show which one might be the biggest idiot. Or maybe who's the one, which can destroy humankind the fastest way? On the other hand I also read about good news. And I always have the hope that this run to an idiocracy world is only because the dirt has somehow got to the top of the world places. We just have to get rid of them but no problem: we got enough intelligent people. And at this point such bad things are happening. Here are some quotes: "No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful." "I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back." "I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them." You cannot speak more stupid words in a row regarding computer stuff. A Teacher, which should be more intelligent than most of us shows one of the highest stupid levels I've ever seen. This is the time where my hope for this world and the human race gets a bit down. Maybe not all teachers are that stupid? At least I hope so... BTW, if this is more a case of corruption (schools often get stuff from Microsoft and so the teachers are against free software) it will have the same effect: teaching the pupils/students stupidity. The only good point here is: if Linux is banned from school everyone will want to have it. :)
2008-10-01:	Me against Motherboard: 0 - 1 My mainboard really's making me angry. I told about my USB problems and some solutions. Now I can tell that I tried them. I tried noapic, nolapic or even both as boot options. 3 things happened. 1st: my SATA controller only worked in IDE mode, AHCI mode was dead 2nd: the whole system got extremely slow 3rd: although there was no interrup sharing at all irq 7 (the one for EHCI) died as spurious and made the USB stuff unusable again. Last chance is to try a full 64 bit kernel. Problem: the fgrlx driver. Will it work? I don't know. Right now it seems almost impossible to get the kernel up because the initrd image won't be found at startup. Whut? The 32 bit kernels are running and can find the initrd image while the 64 bit kernel can't? This is motherboard hell, I'll continue to report...
2008-09-16:	USB: the war continues I think I told about my USB problems with my new mainboard? It seems hard to use them, often the bus is stopping, resetting and sometimes even dieing so I have to reboot. Especially while using USB hubs the bus got resetted very early and often, but only under heavy load (20 MB/s or more). I tried to avoid hubs although my old boards were quite the opposite: every media only worked WITH USB hub. But even while not using USB hubs I had lots of problems. One day a friend came and brought a USB disk. It didn't wanted to run: found shortly, disconnected. Severel times. And USB dead after 6 repetitions. This disk had no extra power. I thought, maybe my USB ports don't deliver enough power? I used an active hub and: I could use exactly ONE device at the hub without any problems. Activating a second disk at the hub leaded to the same device reset as before. But: this time with an extra kernel oops message: IRQ lost, use irqpoll. What? This is a very fast board, I ill not slow it down to 386-level just because the USB part is either bad on the board or in the linux kernel! But: I've seen lots of people coming to the same point as I did. They all had SMP boards and it seems the only way of a workaround is using noapic or nolapic during booting the linux kernel. I'll test this and will tell the world. This whole US crap really sucks!
2008-08-21:	VMware problems & solutions and Debian is 15 now! First I have to tell about some problems I had at work. We have a virtual Server in our DMZ which hosts lots of virtual clients. Hm, lots. Ok, 6 at this time. But hey, at least it's one of 2 virtual servers. Right now the virtualization software is VMware Server. It's quite ok for our needs although for our non-DMZ-machines we're now using ESX servers. Anyway, we started the virtualization long time ago without much planning. As often, IT starts with some kind of testing and "let's see if we get some benefit out of it" and after a while a second server followed the first one. We thought about moving virtual guests between the hosts for update or crash reasons. But: the IP spaces had been different. So after moving we would have to touch every virtual guest's IP adress. But some of them are not our machines, they are guests from different customers who just want to host their web sites. We could do a move of a machine by ourselves in a few minutes but when the owners are not reachable it wouldn't run because we can't log in into their machines and therefore cannot change the IP adresses. So I decided: we need a DMZ-network in one IP space segment. The reason why we had two different segments had been the space between the buildings. They are about 9 km away from each other. Now we were creating a "Metro-DMZ-Network" (trust me: when you want to do virtualization, this is the FIRST thing to do: create a metro network! Only one IP-Segment!) where every virtual guest will be put in. Now it was time for a test case. I had a new virtual machine from a customer and I wanted to shift it to the new metro network. The virtual guest itself had the new address yet, but the virtual host itself had to get a second ethernet cable with the new address. Now my main problem was: how to tell the guest to use the second line? The hints of vmware had been bad because they're saying you need Virtual center for it. We didn't have it because it costs money and at this time we really don't need it yet. The other way I've seen in usergroups was: reconfiguring through vmware-config.pl. But as I started it a message said: Do you really want to stop every virtual guest now? NO! Of course not! I just wanted to change ONE machine, not all of them! Those others should run further! There seemed to be no other solution so I took the perl script and read it. I found out that there was a tool called vmnet-bridge and the command vmnet-bridge -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-1.pid /dev/vmnet1 eth1 should do the trick. But: /dev/vmnet1 didn't exist, just vmnet0 which was connected to eth0 and should stay this way. I read on in vmware-config.pl and found out that the VMware guys just did a mknod command to add devices: mknod /dev/vmnet1 c 119 1 After I did this, I used the vmnet-bridge-command and added the interface in the guest settings with Custom network: use /dev/vmnet1 And: it worked! I didn't have to boot! Great! Now my main problem was: how to make this stuff surviving a reboot? I found the vmnet0 string which was bridged to eth0 first only in /etc/vmware/locations That's where I added the vmnet1-stuff next to the vmnet0-stuff and now I'm hoping that the system is running even after a reboot... Anyway, after so much work there's also a point of party: DEBIAN is 15 years old! YIPPEEE! Too bad I missed the right day in fact. That's the strange things in OpenSource: almost no marketing. Not even at the main page of the project you can read news about this event. Very strange. Of course 15 is only a number and there's other stuff that matters more for Debian guys. Nevertheless I can say, the official start of Debian (that's what the archeologists believe these days) is August 16th, 1993. Maybe there will be a party when Debian is 20 or 25? Maybe only when it reaches 50 years? I'd say, if there will be a 50 years party I will come and donate some beer for the masses. If I'm still alive at this time: August 16th, 2043...
2008-08-14:	New T-Shirts! Today I have the pleasure to announce some new stuff you can buy in the best T-shirt-shop of the world! This is the variety in english I can offer: The first one maybe clear to you but the second needs a bit of explaining. I tried to learn spanish for some years now. It's a hard job and I thought: Hm, maybe you're not the only one to learn this fabulous language? So I made this shirt as a "starter" for all of you spanish-loving gals'n'guys. The next Spain vacation will be a dream because of this shirt in the local's language. This shirt shows respect for their culture and you'll be in fast contact with the locals (maybe even "full body contact"? Hint: drool!). Your friends will envy you for this! I shout out a loud "¡Coño carajo!" to you party people! (BTW, I'm not responsible for anything that will hapen with you while you're wearing this shirt! This is a "buy-and-use at your own risk"!)
2008-08-12:	ATI drivers and kernel 2.6.26: a real mess! :( The graphics driver situation inside the Linux world is a real mess. In the past I bought Nvidia boards because it was easy to get their proprietary 3D driver running. Until one day the updates for old graphic boards had been stopped. One of my old laptops had been fallen into stoneage at that day and so I swore to myself: Nvidia? Never again! Here you can see the mess with proprietary drivers. The producer of the hardware is the one who limits the lifetime of the stuff you bought. It just ends the support and you're f*cked. When I bought a new PC there was at least the decision between ATI (belongs to AMD now) and Intel hardware. Intel has completely open drivers but mostly for the 2D world. The 3D world is a mess so the result is: good bye games like Nexuiz or Sauerbraten. It's really strange that the only part where Windows is ahead of Linux are the games. And that's just because there is no real graphics market. 2 (or now 3 with Intel) players are not enough to get rid of this proprietary shit. But: what to do now? I thought a long time and bought a cheap Radeon HD 2600 card. It seemed the open source video driver had guys working on it (I've never seen progress in Nouvea, the open surce Nvidia driver) and after some while even 2D should work. So I hoped in some months the whole thing will be completed. After trying the free radeon drivers I noticed that not even 2D is working because it needs 3D stuff to run. AAAAAAAAARGH! There had been trouble with an "unfree Atom BIOS" but ATI/AMD says it's completely open etc. Trouble, trouble, trouble. I just want to play some 3D games with Linux, is it that hard? I decided to use the proprietary driverv fglrx from ATI. At least it will work with kernel 2.6.25 I read before. The first try didn't work because I just loaded the debian modules. But there was a driver version mismatch. After rebuilding it by myself everything ran fin. Until I started the first XV-TV-Session. The X server crashed and the whole system had to be resetted. After installing a newer version everything worked fine. But: I had lots of trouble with the USB subsystem. Using hubs was nearly impossible and using the full power of USB2 and the USB-subsystem died. I read about those problems and that both problems are solved in kernel 2.6.26. I waited some days until a debian version was ready. It installed and so I tried to generate the new fglrx module. It didn't compile. AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! THIS IS CRAP!!! What a bunch of shit! I really started to hate those AMD guys who pushed out a fglrx-driver version AFTER 2.6.26 had been out a long time. It didn't compile and I wasn't the only one who noticed. Some guys wrote a patch for it and it runs now, but it sometimes crashes. What do we learn out of this? Proprietary software is coming directly from hell. It's there to punish you: "So you don't have an open driver, hm? Here, eat this and die! Hahahaha!" Now I know why people often refer about proprietary vs. open source software as religious wars... Ok, let's try this: This is a call for all Taiwanese/Chinese/Japanese companies to build graphics hardware with free drivers! I promise, I will buy your stuff, if it brings completely open source drivers and if it's capable to play 3D games, run google earth fast etc. I even will put FREE ads on my page for you (at least for one year!) and will encourage other linux guys doing the same! Deal?
2008-05-14:	New Gallery: WGT 2008, Leipzig Same procedure as last year: Wave Gotik Treffen No. 17 in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. Of course we've seen lots of bands but not that much good ones like last year. We met lots of friends and have seen the strangest styles people can wear, it really was a wonderful festival! One of the things I like to do at this festival is photoshooting. This time I had my 16 GB chip with me and I shot about 3100 pictures and at the end about 2000 stayed alive. I got rid of 1100 because of fuzziness or other bad stuff at the images. Nevertheless, about 350 made it in the top 10 and here comes the new Gallery: WGT 2008! As always I'm sorry about the german text only, but hey, at least it's about images! :) Have fun!