Da bei mir an der Uni wirklich alles ziemlich laut Microsoft schreit, war es früher oder später abzusehen, dass sowas kommen würde.
Und zwar die Guidelines für einen Labreport.

Report should be produced using a suitable office package (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

Okay, soweit noch kein Problem, dafür gibts ja OpenOffice.org .

Aber damit ist es noch nicht getan:

Text in Times New Roman, 1.5 line spacing, fully justified, margin ca. 2 cm sides, 3 cm on top and bottom.

Damit wird es dann doch schon hakeliger. “Times New Roman” klingt schon ganz stark nach M$. Und natürlich ist unter OOo unter Linux TNR so erstmal nicht verfügbar. Um dieses Problem zu lösen hat RedHat die “Liberation Fonts” entwickelt. Diese sind OpenSource und sollen möglichst nahe an die MS Fonts herankommen.

Aber, was ich auch nicht wusste, offenbar hat Microsoft die Core Web fonts mal als OpenSource, oder zumindest freeware, veröffentlicht. Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts on Linux

Also kann man dieses Problem nochmal umschiffen. Wirklich, wirklich interessant wird die Diskussion (auf die ich mich jetzt schon freue, die Uni ist wirklich M$ durch und durch :) ), wenn die neuen Fonts von Office 2007 verlangt werden.
Denn ein freies Äquivalent gibt es noch nicht, und diese Aussage von M$ klingt schon sehr restriktiv:

You may use the fonts that accompany the PowerPoint Viewer only to display and print content from a device running a Microsoft Windows operating system.

Ins Detail geht hier der oooninja:

Metric Equivalent Fonts and Font Substitution

Install Free Office 2007 Fonts for Linux and XP

Aber der Reihe nach.

Zunächst habe ich mich die Tage doch tatsächlich mal am Patchen (man sollte hier vielleicht eher cracken sagen, aber das klingt für mein ‘Können’ zu hochtrabend) eines Programmes versucht. Nein, nicht weil ich es nicht kaufen will und auch nicht um den Patch zu veröffentlichen. (Was ich ganz sicher nicht tun werde…)
Mir waren nur Diskussionen aufgefallen, dass für die neue Version des Programms sogar der Patch/Crack/WasAuchImmer verkauft wird und es sonst keinen gäbe. Das hat mich dann doch dazu verleitet, mir einfach mal anzuschauen, ob das tatsächlich so schwer ist.
Ein (sehr gutes!) Flash-Tutorial zum Umgang mit OllyDBG und einige Stunden später war es dann geschafft, und es funktioniert sogar. Mehr schlecht als recht, da ich an einigen Stellen mehr auf gut Glück modifiziert habe… Es scheinen aber die richtigen Stellen gewesen zu sein.

So, dann gab es noch ein kleines Script um automatisiert (HTTP) POST-Requests zu fahren, in PHP. Auch das tut mittlerweile seinen Dienst.

Wenn ich dann nicht gerade eben meine Hausübung (es war etwas knifflig, mehrere Stunden Arbeit) gelöscht hätte, wäre soweit alles gut. Jetzt sitze ich hier von einer Gentoo Live-CD und krame mit debugfs in Inode-Tabellen rum. Die “DiskInternals Linux Recovery” bekommt aber auch mal eine Chance, ist vielleicht komfortabler als das Händische…sowas ärgert maßlos!

debian:/home/max# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md2 : active raid1 sda7[2] sdb7[1]
50395776 blocks [2/1] [_U]
[=======>.............] recovery = 36.1% (18207488/50395776) finish=6.5min speed=82215K/sec

unused devices:

Why not the whole disk? Well, for my root partition I, at least for now, prefer backing up my data manually. As RAID1 protects my data from a failing harddrive, it does NOT protect it from a failing user (i.e. me). So if I accidently delete something important (who knows), I can at least restore it.

Ich bin begeistert. Firmware 2.0.2 hatte mein phone komplett ausgebremst. Gemessene !!! 12 Sekunden !!! brauchte es um die Kontakte zu öffnen.

Seit 2.1 geht wieder alles wie gewohnt in unter einer Sekunde! Wundervoll :)

Meine Einstellungen von meiner gepwnten 2.0.2 konnte ich leider nicht wiederherstellen, damit startet das phone nicht mehr komplett. Was aber höchstwahrscheinlich daran liegt, dass ich unter 2.0.2 an so ziemlich allem rumgespielt hatte, an dem man (inoffiziell) rumspielen kann. Daher ist das vielleicht ganz gut so ;)

What I read is that spammers have started to change their IPs very fast, which results in spam mails being more likely to falsely pass RBL Filters.

So what to do about it? There are several possibilitys. One is to use a tool like Spamassassin that can check the mailbody (and the links in it) against databases on the internet and/or their internal (learning) filter.

But I’m not quite convinced yet to use such a system. It’s not just the configuration that might be a little more complicated than eg. RBLs. What also scares me off a little is the maintaining effort. A system like that is very likely to have at least a few false positives, that have to be marked as such, so that the system can ‘learn’ from it. I don’t know yet whether I like that kind of a solution.

But what else is there?

Is Greylisting an answer?
How it works is basically that it at first refuses any email that someone is trying to send to your server with an error like a server misconfiguration error. The sender’s IP is stored then, and after a little while (say, something like 5 minutes), when (and if) the server tries to resend the message to you, it will be accepted and the sender will be added to a whitelist.

The hope in that is that spammers either won’t try to send the email again, or that those extra 5 minutes were enough for the spammers to be detected by services such as spamhaus.

The idea is good, and I think I will implement greylisting on my server and try it – also to see how many ‘real’ mailservers and (free)mailservices there are that also do not try to resend an email after a failure (that would be a false positive then).

Attention: WEIRD!! To attract some spammers for testing purposes, I’m just publishing another emailaddress:

stest@klappspaten.info

The new (Debian) Kernel 2.6.24-1-amd64 no comes with ‘built in’ drivers and firmware for various Ralink WIFI devices. E.g. there are drivers for both PCI and USB devices (rt2×00 chipsets, including rt2500 (pci), rt2400) from rt2×00.serialmonkey.com compiled as modules into the kernel.
Unfortunately, those drivers really didn’t work out for me. My WIFI PCI Card has got a Ralink rt2500 chipset. I used to compile the module myself, using the rt2500 drivers from rt2×00.serialmonke.com CVS.
But with kernel 2.6.24-1 various modules, such as rt2×00, rt2×00pci, rt2500, rt2500pci, were loaded automatically. But the result wasn’t what I had hoped for. Even though my WIFI card was recognized immediately and connecting to my WIFI was really easy, because of the new GNOME network manager that includes WIFI connections, the transferrate always went down to 1 Mbit/s.

I could not manage to get it faster.

So the conclusion, I built the kernel again, manually, without any WIFI support included. Then I used those nice rt2500 CVS drivers from serialmonkeys.org and all works fine again :)

Currently I’m spending my very rare free time (I’m pretty busy with school right now) on getting my gentoo installation to work properly ;)

Edit: (Thanks adlerweb): Yeah I know I could’ve blacklisted the built-in modules, but I was in the mood (and found some time ;) ) for some ‘handicrafts’

My environment is PHP5 and MySQL 5. Some problems I’ve been facing could possibly be *not* apearing on older installations of PHP/MySQL.

What you need for that is:

• The WBB 1.1.1 to phpbb 2.0.0 Updater | MIRROR
• Of course your old Installation of WBB 1.2
• A NEW, PLAIN Installation of phpBB 2.0.0. You need 2.0.0, you can update that later to 2.X or 3.

The phpBB 2.0.0 installation didn’t work correctly because I’m using MySQL 5 (the installation worked (during the setup just check MySQL 4.x when you’re asked) but I e.g. couldn’t log in) but I don’t think this is going to be a problem.

What you have to do first (after installing phpBB 2.0.0) is to make the images / avatars and images / smilies wirteable by the webserver (chmod 777/700 on suPHP servers).

Now we do the important change. Since the converter is natively made for WBB 1.1.X , you have to make the following changes:

(Codechange #1) Find every line that contains _data.inc.php in import.php and change it to admin/_data.inc.php. There should only be two lines with that path, so not much to change.

(Codechange #2) Then you have to edit the beginning of import.php and set the correct paths. Only edit this first 3-4 lines !

Afterwards upload the files (import.php and import_db.php) to your WBB folder on the server.

Now go to yourdomain.com/yourwbbfolder/import.php in your browser.

If you are receiving this error right now: ERROR: Unable to find wBB global.php include.
Check path defines. You either didn’t do Codechange 1 or 2.

Now click on Start Import.

Then do the next step.

If you receive any error like: “Forumname: All Forums need a category” which I did quite a few times, do that:

(Databasechange #1) You have to edit the WBB boards table (e.g. with phpmyadmin) in that way, that every forum has a parent.
That means we need to edit the “boardparentid” for each board that is displayed to us in the error message (after you fixed one and refreshed the importer you might probably get that error again for another forum). For me it worked to just set “boardparentid” to 1 for every board. Of course that configuration is then wrong after the update, because not every board was having 1 as parent when we started, but we can change that later in the new forum.

Then we go for the next step:

You will get an error: * Deleting existing users :: OK
Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in …../webs/Max1/hwsboard/import_db.php on line 81

(Codechange #3) As this is a “normal” PHP parse error, we can simply fix this by finding the wrong code, which is the following in import_db.php :

$this->free_result($this->$query_id);

This of course has to be:

$this->free_result($this->query_id);

Reupload the files and you will get some further.

After that I got: * Converting moderators ::
Database error in WoltLab Burning Board: Invalid SQL: SELECT objectid, boardid FROM bb1_object2board WHERE mod = ‘1′

Unfortunately I couldn’t really find a fix for that as this seems to be a problem because I’m using MySQL 5 and all the scripts are just old.
The easiest way to get round this is to comment that part in import.php out.

(Codechange #4)

So put this:

// Moderators convert
print ” * Converting moderators :: “;
flush();
$user_mods = array();
$moderators = $DB_site->query(“SELECT objectid, boardid FROM bb”.$n.”_object2board WHERE mod = ‘1′”) or die_nice(“Unable to get moderators”);
while (list($objectid,$forumid) = $DB_site->fetch_array($moderators)) {
$user_mods[] = $objectid;
$group_query = $db->sql_query(“SELECT group_id FROM ” . USER_GROUP_TABLE . ” WHERE user_id=”.$objectid) or die_nice(“Unable to get group_id for user”);
list($groupid) = $db->sql_fetchrow($group_query);
$db->sql_query(“INSERT INTO ” . AUTH_ACCESS_TABLE . ” (group_id, forum_id, auth_mod) VALUES ($groupid, $forumid, 1)”) or die_nice(“Unable to insert moderators”);
}
// Update user_level for users that are moderator
if (count($user_mods)) {
$sql = “UPDATE ” . USERS_TABLE . ”
SET user_level = ” . MOD . ”
WHERE user_id IN (” . implode(“, “, $user_mods) . “) AND user_level <> ” . ADMIN;
$db->sql_query($sql) or die_nice(“Couldn’t update user levels to moderator”);
}

into /* …. */. This means that moderator information is not going to be updated and we have to reassign moderators manually afterwards.

The next step is topics. It worked just as is for me.

Then posts. Then polls.

* Importing polls ::
ERROR: Unable to insert poll options

That again isn’t too difficult to fix.

(Codechange #5)

Find that part in import.php:

while ($opt = $DB_site->fetch_array($opt_query))
{
$ins_opt_sql = “insert into phpbb_vote_results (vote_id, vote_option_text, vote_result) values (” . $poll[pollid] . “, ‘” . addslashes($opt['field']) . “‘, ” . $opt['votes'] . “)”;
$db->sql_query($ins_opt_sql) or die_nice(“Unable to insert poll options”);
}

(Or simply search for Unable to insert poll options in import.php)

We can easily see that “Insert Into phpbb_vote_results …” can’t be correct. That query isn’t using our defined prefix for the phpBB DB but just the default. So change that default to your setting. E.g. if your prefix is phpbb2 change it to phpbb2_vote_results.

Next: pm.

Next: wordlist.

Next: end.

And that’s it (hopefully). How far all that is working with an update to phpBB 3 afterwards… we will see ;)

So long.