Random administration thoughts

I'm a "big fan" of IPv6 since, like all great technologies, it might actually solve more problems than it introduces. Unfortunately, the ISPs (particularly mine) haven't really reached this level of fanboyism, which also made me turn off all IPv6 stuff from the kernel, as it really makes little sense to connect a handful of home PCs together using 128-bit addresses and use old 32-bit IPv4 for the internet. On top of that, these cheap wireless routers people use for connecting wireless devices don't support it either, but you can always try to brick the device and void your warranty with e.g. OpenWrt (on my todo list).

Some recent update for Debian incorrectly assumed that everyone used stock kernels and thus had the feature enabled. In case you didn't, it would fail to launch the NFS server with this kind of error message

rpc.nfsd: unable to create inet6 TCP socket: errno 97
(Address family not supported by protocol)

Novell suggests the following solution which actually happens to work. Another thing I had long forgotten appeared when compiling a new kernel. When mounting file systems as an ordinary user (the 'users' option set in /etc/fstab), the mount automatically gets the noexec flag set on. This more or less prevents one from compiling the kernel when it's located on this user mounted file system. Good to remember.

(Yet another) new blog

Usually the first post in a blog serves very little value to the reader and I won't be doing any kind of exceptions here. For what it's worth, I wrote my first HTML blog / home page before I even had a modem in around 1994, and continued the effort on a "hypertext platform" I wrote in QBasic (which, in the end, never got functionality updates after basic directory listing and hyperlink support was there). I finally got interested in "dynamic" web technologies (SSI, PHP) few years later. After that, I've mostly sticked with "backend technologies", i.e. something where you don't need to worry about awfully buggy legacy browsers. I've had some sort of blog / site up since those early days, usually with more or less interesting open source content and random thoughts. I can't remember how many blog instances I've created along the years, but usually the old ones have died gracefully.