Author: halfgaar

http://www.halfgaar.net/

Halfgaar is Wiebe. Wiebe is a contributing author on this weblog. He also has a lot of stuff (such as long, in-depth articles) on his personal website.

Wiebe works at YTEC, where he is a senior developer of customer-specific tailor-made software (“klantspecifieke maatwerk software“) for clients in a few select markets: wholesale, printing and healthcare.

Checking SMART status on a 3Ware controller with smartctl

A RAID controller hides the physical disks from the operating system, so it's harder to query the SMART data. Luckily, smartctl has a way to do it: Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on June 17, 2013, at 14:06 | Comments closed

Adding foreign key constraints to PowerDNS default schema

In an earlier post I made, I described how to manually create the SQL schema, because it didn't itself. When I installed Power DNS 3.1-4 on a Raspberry Pi, I noticed it had created the scheme itself this time. However, it did not make the foreign key constraints. This is dumb. I regularly need to remove domains from the DB and I don't want stale or incorrect references as a result. Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on June 12, 2013, at 23:06 | 1 comment

Privacy? Can you pay with that?

Dutch articles, but there are English sources in it: Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on June 07, 2013, at 09:06 | Comments closed

Xen VM: Frag is bigger than frame

Our Xen VM's crashed at some point. This had to do with network traffic, apparently. My source link is dead. Only posting the workaround: Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on June 06, 2013, at 11:06 | Comments closed

Design: The Scourge of the Web

When the printing press was invented, we had the understanding that text is best read when contrast is high. They didn't use black ink on paper for nothing. I bet they didn't even consider any other color. Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on June 02, 2013, at 12:06 | Comments closed

Creative Audigy 2 ZS design flaws

I would really like to know what the designers at Creative Labs have in mind when they design sound cards. Their cards seem to be broken by design. The Live card was bad enough with its random collection of DACs and DPS's, but the Audigy 2 ZS seems no better. Aside from the fact that it's advertised as 96 kHz and 24 bit, which it isn't, it has serious design issues. I had some sound anomalies, so I decided to measure and test. I found: Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on May 09, 2013, at 13:05 | 14 comments

Distracted by the Boston bombing, CISPA passes the house on April 18th 2013

CISPA allows the U.S. government to request information from private corporations about you without a warrant, without ever telling you. Furthermore, it protects these corporations against any legal recourse. Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on April 27, 2013, at 13:04 | Comments closed

Postfix, SASL and rimap: making sure the domain is not stripped from the user name

When you want to use your IMAP account as authentication for Postfix, you can set the SASL mechanism to "rimap". However, by default, it will not supply the realm (domain) and therefore will authenticate with an incomplete username (john instead of john@bla.com). Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on April 23, 2013, at 17:04 | Comments closed

SSHFS on Windows

Just as a jot, a tool to access SSH shares via SSHFS on Windows: win-sshfs. It gives you a drive letter, instead of fiddling with separate tools to access files. Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on March 25, 2013, at 18:03 | Comments closed

Disabling http(s) trimming from Firefox address bar

Some time ago, the Firefox developers decided it was a good idea to trim the http(s):// from the address in the address bar. Since then, I've been getting HTTPS site where I don't want it, because I can't see what I'm doing. Especially so because HTTPS has no concept of virtual host names, and putting https:// in front of any domain might put you on a completely different web site. So, when I accidentally typed https:// in front of an URL once, it will remember that, but not show me... Read More »
By halfgaar, 6 years ago, on March 24, 2013, at 12:03 | 1 comment