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Using Mozilla Weave

Notebooks are usefull things, you can take them with you and your office is where ever you are. I am currently switching to a new notebook and that is sometimes a little bit painful. It takes days to get all software and settings to work as it was on the old one. You know what I mean?

Over the last years I started to use IMAP for mails and subversion for code and other snippets to put most of the things I need to a central server. But I have found no solution for bookmarks and stuff like that. Yea, I know, there are several online services where you can store bookmarks and share them with other people. For security reasons I want to store my bookmarks on my own servers.

Mozilla Weave Logo

For that purpose Mozilla Weave is exactly what I am looking for! It is a Mozilla Firefox Plugin and stores bookmarks, browsing history or saved passwords on an WebDAV Server. Mozilla also provides an public WebDAV service and currently they have reached their account limit and do not allow new registrations. But if you are going to use your own WebDAV server you can still download the XPI package from that location.

I configured Apache as a WebDAV server like that:

Alias /webdav/ "/var/www/webdav/" 
<directory /var/www/webdav>
  DAV on
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "WebDAV Storage"
  AuthUserFile /etc/httpd/passwd/passwd.dav
  require user frank
  Options Indexes
</Directory>

After installing the weave plugin you have to change the settings of the WebDAV server to use:
Mozilla Weave Setup

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Cyrus 2.3.8 and Thunderbird 2.0 ACL Problem

I am currently moving my IT infrastructure to a new server. That included also an switch to Cyrus IMAP 2.3.8 - which comes with Fedora Core 6. After an smooth and short move I have seen - so far - on problem in combination with Thunderbird 2.0. I could move mails to the trash, but all "Delete Mail" buttons are disabled. :-(

It turned out that Cyrus 2.3.8 has a few more ACLs and to resolve that issue I had to add those ACLs to my mailboxes. You have a lot of users with many mailboxes? Jo Rhett has posted a short Perl-Script on the info-cyrus maillinglist http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/info-cyrus/2007-April/025878.html.

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Freshmeat for the Weekend 22/06

VMware Server RC 1 (Build 24927) got released! It is free, so grab a copy and give it an test drive. I just want to outline two advanced topics:

  • Linked Clones is an concept to use one basedisk for several VMs. Changes made by the VMs are written to snapshot images. That helps you to safe diskspace when using a lot of VMs. You can read more on how to do linked clones with VMware Server in the following thread on VMTN.
  • Use arbitrary block devices as Physical Disks in VMs. VMware normally allows you to use /dev/sd* and /dev/hd* devices. So you may run in to problems if you wanted to use LVM, soft-RAID (md) or things like AoE (ATA over Ethernet). vmware-bdwrapper solves such problems. Read how to get vmware-bdwrapper working with VMware Server in that thread.

But VMware Server RC1 was not the only release you should check out, get the following things as well if you are interested:

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Software Releases of the Week

Ok, here are some new Software Releases I stumbled into this week:

  • WordPress 1.5.1
    It is mainly a maintenance release with a lot of bugs fixed. To get the feeds working (RSS2 etc.) I needed to patch wp-blog-headers.php (see ID1323: Feeds return 304 when no new posts have been made Description Bug).
    I am using an paranoid setup with to different websites (wp-admin on localhost and only public stuff on the internet) I had to patch wp-includes/functions.php to reflect some changes for the get_settings('home'||'siteurl') function to get correct absolute URLs throughout the links.
  • Bugzilla 2.18.1
    No big deal in updating that, checksetup.pl a few times and guess what - after starting mysqld - bugzilla just worked fine :-D.
  • Gaim 1.3.0
    Hehe, the usual security issues CAN-2005-1261 and CAN-2005-1262 .
  • GNU ddrescue 1.0-pre1
    That tool saved my life several times during recovery from a bad harddisc. So make sure that you always have a copy of it on your rescue cdrom. It is much much faster than normal dd when it comes down to bad blocks.
  • Metasploit Framework 2.4
    If you have some time and some vulerable test systems you have to try that one out by yourself!
  • Rootkit Hunter 1.2.6
    *little bit ashamed* that tool was new to me, I used chkrootkit and AntiExploit before.
  • Clover 1.3.7 and Spike PHPCoverage 0.6
    Wow, two releases of test coverage software in one week, so if you have to perform some coverage analysis during for your tests you may want to check them out.
  • John the Ripper 1.6.38
    In case you lost/forgot your password John may help you to "remember" it.
  • Grand 0.7.1
    Got lost with your target dependencies in Ant? Grand uses Graphviz to produce some nice pictures for you.