Outlook and Authenticated SMTP

Every now and then I am completely taken aback by the sheer idiocy that is Outlook. Perhaps more aptly called Outbreak. This morning we were having issues with authenticated SMTP. I telnet to port 25 and it tells me:

250-AUTH GSSAPI NTLM DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5

The logs tells us outlook is trying to use NTLM, so we disable it:

250-AUTH GSSAPI DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5

This causes outlook to switch to no authentication at all. So we somewhat unwillingly turn on plain text auth:

250-AUTH GSSAPI LOGIN PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5

And what do you know, it starts using LOGIN. From experience I already know outlook cannot do PLAIN either.

So you mean to tell me that outlook only supports NTLM and LOGIN?

The night I saw a ghost

I recently remembered this incident again. I was in grade 5, in primary school. At the time it was still customary for children to go on a week of "outdoor school", once in grade 5 and once in grade 9. This week would be spent in the outdoors (as you would expect), learning about nature, going on long hikes, although a small percentage of time was spent on lectures about life and morality. This yearly event usually took place either at Swakopmund on the west coast, or in a small town called Aus in the Namib dessert close to Lüderitz.

One of the things we did was called the night march, which consisted of hiking through the dessert at night. On this evening, I recall seeing some hundred paces away the silhouettes of two men. One was trying to pick the other up onto his back. At the time I was too tired to be bothered by it, today I often put it down to it my fertile imagination. But it does make some sense. The germans fought the english in this area during the second world war. I can sort of understand how a wounded man might have been helped by a fellow soldier. Maybe, just maybe, this scenario keeps replaying itself in the distant Namib...

Technique

For the last couple of weeks our dance instructor has been trying to teach us some proper technique. The first target: the rhumba. Bend the knees, and point your foot (because it is a latin dance), but keep your foot in contact with the ground (for balance). Push forward, extend your legs. Quite a nice workout actually. But very VERY hard (to remember all the details). Evidence that men can in fact multitask: not only do you have to concentrate on all those little details, you also have to lead the lady.

In time I'm sure the lower parts of the brain will take over as things become second nature.

Fun with NFS

I once read a story of a man who constantly challenged the remaining milage indicator on his car's instrument cluster. As a result, he constantly ran out of fuel, proving that the car's computer did it's job. When I read this story, I thought experience must win his trust at some point, and that the whole thing is just silly.

However, I think I have been doing pretty much the same thing with NFS. I constantly challenge the proven knowledge that you should not run mail on NFS.

We currently host quite a few Virtual Servers, based on the Linux VServer project. At some point we ran out of local diskspace, plopped in a big ol' chunk of diskspace in another dedicated machine and started running virtual hosts from NFS. These mostly work fine, except in the case of postfix. Postfix has come a long way in allowing mailboxes on NFS, but it definitly does not like it when you put it's queues on NFS.

Such were my experiences today: Postfix drops my test emails straight into the corrupt queue. It looks like it gets worse if you add amavis into the mix. I eventually mounted a local filesystem onto /var/spool/postfix and tried it again, and this time it worked perfectly.

Moral of the story? Don't challenge NFS. It has been proven to suck at doing mail.

Bad Parking

This seems to be a common problem. Either the driver's ability to park is inversely proportional to the type of vehicle he/she can afford, or they are so selfish that they simply don't care about other motorists. This is not an issolated incident, it has happened once too often to me. It is extremely irritating when you see this sort of thing while looking for an open spot in an almost-full parking garage.

Server Upgrade Blues

Last night I spend more than three hours in Hetzner's Data Center upgrading two machines. What a frustrating job it was.

On the first machine I had to replace the single 2.8Ghz processor with two new processors, which mean I had to get the old one out first. I could not get the heatsink off because a one of the four screws jamned in the stud fixing it to the chasis. After removing the whole main board form the case I finally got the new processors and harddrives in. Still need to do a BIOS upgrade though, it complains about missing microcode and you need to push F1 before it will boot.

On the second machine -- an Intel rackmount model -- I had to install another SATA drive. But it seems the motherboard/backboard combination only allows two SATA drives. It looks like you can set this in the BIOS, but no ammount of twidling worked, so I had to give up on this one.

At least I finally met Hamish in person. And he lent me a hand with the particularly difficult cpu replacement. There is something to be said for someone who'd stay there until past nine and still be willing to help. Thanks Hamish!

Gripes with the LSB

I have very little understanding of what the LSB people are trying to do, but I've always thought it a good thing. The idea that there are several levels and that an application can decide how much of it is required seems like a good idea. But over the last few months I've come to dislike it somewhat. It started when I installed nagios on a new Debian Testing system. Nagios depends on lsb-core, which in turn depends on a few things that seems utterly insane to me. For example, it depends on both lpr AND lprng or cupsys-client. I can live with cupsys-client, but I haven't used lpr in years. It also depends on alien, which in turn depends on rpm.

This means that in order for me to have nagios installed on a server, I also need to install a print server that won't be used, a package management program that won't be used, and a package converter that won't be used. This seriously messes with my need to keep my systems clean and minimal.

It would seem that the LSB was obviously designed with Redhat type systems in mind. This is the only reason I can think of for a dependency on alien and rpm. I suspect what is required is simply a lower level (lower than core?) that does not depend on insane things you should never need to install. Either that, or lsb-core will not be adopted by debian package maintainers who have similar feelings. Not sure if there are any though...

Wheels are back

After 4 days in the workshop my car is finally back. It took 2 days to get hold of the exhaust manifold, the gasket and the studs required to fix it to the cylinder head. Then two of the threads on the cylinder head stripped and required a helicoils to be fitted. After putting the 2k cost on the creditcard all seems in order again. It performs and sounds a little different, which is to be expected I suppose. And it has a weird burning smell due to the brand new exhaust manifold still going through it's burn-in phase.

Book Review:The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel

This was another Christmas present, from my parents. It actually fits into my bookshelf nicely, along with Josh McDowel's "The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict", Alister Mcgrath's "The Twilight of atheim" and the CS Lewis Collection I've been working on.

In this book, the author adresses eight of the primary objections to Christianity. The are:

1. If there is a God, why is there suffering?
2. How can any rational person believe in miracles?
3. How could a loving God kill children, as is written in the old Testament?
4. How could God send people to Hell?
5. How could Jesus be the only way to heaven?
6. Why does the evidence of science seem so compelling?
7. What about all the bad things the church has done?
8. If I still doubt, how can I be a Christian?

These 8 were picked specifically because of an interview with Charles Templeton. Templeton is Billy Graham's former right-hand man, a man who later in his life lost his faith and became an agnostic.

The author interviewed people who are known to be outspoken and knowledgable on the relevant subjects, and posed one question to each of them. In the end I think he did a terrific job in getting these questions answered.

The most important thing, I think, is that he very clearly explains how it is possible for a rational man to still have faith. I would say he did such a good job that the above questions, used as an argument to disprove the existence of God, has been successfully answered. Or to put it differently, you'd have to read this book and come up with something better before you can use any of the above in an argument against Christianity.

Yesterday I considered buying Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" to get a counter argument, but that will have to wait a little (I can only spend so much on books every month). With the exception of Mcdowel's book, the book is a little more expensive than the others I've bought on the subject and reviews arround the book (similar to McDowel's book) are mixed. I spent some time reading selected pieces in the bookstore. I got the impression that he is playing a defence attorney: more interested in poking holes in theories than in providing alternative explanations. He is almost too critical at times, and so strongly biased against religion that one has to wonder if it will prove to be a honest counter argument rather than just a emotional response. I'll obviously also have to make time to actually read it, which isn't going to be easy.

Mixed emotions

The other night when my favourite auto-technician was sitting in my garage trying to figure out what is wrong with his Bosch ESItronic setup, I asked him to just listen to the snapping noises my Toyota Corolla makes right after I start it. He says it is probably a timing belt tensioner, but it is best to check it as soon as possible and to bring it in the next day.

A little later my phone rings again, he says they only needed to adjust the tensioner. However, my exhaust manifold is cracked. I tell him that I know about the exhaust manifold problem: It cracked and was repaired by the previous owner, which unfortunately caused it to warp somewhat causing the exhaust port on cylinder 4 to whisper a little. I patched the problem with some gun-gum a couple of years ago and simply didn't get round to it again. He informs me that the problem is worse than that: it has cracked again (that would explain the somewhat loud whispering I've been hearing lately), and the studs that holds it to the cylinder head also needs replacing. The previous owner also messed up one of the threads, which needed a helicoil fitted.

A couple of months ago I parked on an incline one day, looked underneath the car and noticed the left outer CV joint boot was torn.

This sort of thing always leaves me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, if I didn't look I would not have known about the problem and I would have been quite happy. On the other hand, now that I've looked I am a little unhappy about the unexpected expenses, yet very glad that I noticed sooner rather than later.

Automotive software bugs

My phone rang. It was my favourite auto-technician asking if I can check his workshop PC as some Bosch technician said it might be a hardware problem. Just before dark he arrived with the PC and the KTS unit (the KTS is a small embedded device that sits between the PC and the vehicle's ECU). We fired up the PC and up it came, diagnosing one fault on the golf: Idle speed too high. We cleared the error memory and tried again, but it refused to reconnect to the KTS unless we reboot first. After much back and forth we eventually got one of those dreaded "illegal operation" errors, followed by this beauty:

Zugriffsverletzung bei adresse 047D0F6B in modul KTS500_SD_IDENT.DLL

While trying to find a way to reproduce the error we finally got a notice telling us that the firmware on the KTS is outdated. Cool, that sort of makes a lot of sense. We update the firmware and the problem appears to be gone. My friend goes on his merry way.

The next morning my phone rings again. Apparently the gremlin is back, but it only affects certain vehicles. A service announcement from Bosch says to switch the KTS protocol version back to 1.0, which seems to have little effect.

Now did I mention that this piece of crappy software costs several thousand rands? What's more, if you don't buy the next upgrade the KTS stops working. If you don't buy the add-on package every year (addons include petrol ignition systems, diesel ignition systems, wiring diagrams, service history etc etc) the old information you already paid for is removed from your computer. These guys make Microsoft look like a girl scout.

So I consult with someone I know who builds diagnostic tools for Volkswagens and he tells me what the problem is with my golf's idling speed. The golf 1.4i (and several others, eg Polo Playa 1.4i) is fitted with the MP9 fuel injection computer. The MP9 comes from Brazil. It has a bug in the firmware which cannot be fixed because the source code has been lost.

The bug is an interesting one. The ECU takes readings from the throttle body to determine throttle position. To compensate for dirt buildup in the throttle body, it calculates the rest position and factors it into the calculation. The designer however did not allow for the condition where a throttle body might return to a clean state. With a new or cleaned throttle body, the resting position reading is of course a lot lower: the ECU subtracts what it thinks is the correction factor and causes an overflow to occur. Over time the effect gets so bad that the car won't idle properly at all.

The only way to fix the problem is to reset the values stored in EEPROM to the factory defaults. Any VW dealer will however tell you that you need to replace the throttle body AND the ECU, an excercise that will set you back several thousand South African Rands. Apparently the fix is as easy as 1) clean throttle body with a bit of paraffin and 2) reset the values stored in the ECU. You cannot perform this operation with the Bosch ESItronic software though. But apparently there are several others that can.

Windows Drive Letter Madness

In the first week of December I once again upgraded my parents' PC's. One of the steps in this upgrade involves installing windows 2000 in a dual boot setup on my fathers' PC. I also installed a new bigger harddrive at the time, so to save time and ease data migration I left the old drive in the system while setting up the new one.

Now the windows installation program noticed the old installation on the second hard drive and decided I could not use C:, and instead assigned me F:. I figured it shouldn't matter, and besides, surely it can be changed.

Then of course he tried to install the software for his Garmin GPS, which promptly failed with an error message complaining that C is an invalid drive.

After spending several hours on this I now know that you cannot change the drive letter at installation time and definitely not afterwards. You have to unplug the disks you are not using at the time and reinstall.

I finally found a solution using the subst command. It allows you to map any physical drive and path to a virtual drive, so this would do the job:

subst c: f:\

I finally contrived this little hack:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"subst"="c:\\winnt\\system32\\subst.exe c: f:\\"

Lets hope that's the end of it.

Dead Battery

When we got back from holiday on the 1st of January the golf failed to start. Of course the moment the battery goes that flat the imobiliser makes it impossible even if the engine still turns (albeit very slowly). So I first tried to push-start it, as it seemed there was enough power left to power the ignition, but eventually resorted to jump starting. Initially I thought this was simply the result of the 10 days it had been standing and the drain of the imobiliser and the clock. But then last night it was the same thing again. I took out the old trusty battery acid tester and determined that 5 out of 6 cells have a SG of 1200 (just barely alive) and the 6th one is dead. After 6 years, I suppose it is time for a new battery. Interesting to see that some batteries actually still last that long. Then again, it is the original battery fitted by VW at the factory, which I think is sourced from Bosch, which iirc has a 5 year warranty.

Book Review: And another thing: The World according to Clarkson

Got this one as a Christmas present. It is basically a compilation of newspaper columns by Top Gear Presenter Jeremy Clarkson. It's got a few interesting stories in it, and a couple that really made me laugh. The first story about how your perceived status-in-life is affected by the colour of your credit card, yet the prestigious "black" credit card turned out to be completely useless was in my opinion one of the best. His comments on how the old does not understand the young and how there is probably nothing left that makes any sense to his mother was also quite good.

But then I started getting irritated because of the frequent moaning about speed cameras and anti-smoking legislation. I for one am all for anti-smoking legislation, mostly because I have chronic sinusitus and smoke makes it worse. And no-one can deny that speed does kill, even though our local authorities does apply it somewhat selectively in areas where they are bound to make the most money. On the one hand he says people should stop moaning about the marriage legislation that disallows gay marriages and just deal with it (he says the law was meant to establish a safe place for kids to be born into, so by definition gays do not qualify, just like he does not qualify to play for man united as he has terrible ball sense), yet he himself cannot stop moaning about tax on tobacco or tax on fast driving.

Except for that, and the fact that many of the things he writes about makes little sense outside of brittain, it isn't too bad.

Gripes with update-grub and general package quality

About a year ago I installed ubuntu dapper on two of our servers. Being oldskool I wanted to use trusted old lilo but I was asked by the powers that be to use grub as the other techs knows it better. I very quickly got irritated because of the default options: quiet and splash. I want my servers to run in text mode and be noisy when they boot. Opened up /boot/grub/menu.lst and modified defoptions like a good boy, but unfortunately you cannot have an empty defoptions. update-grub cannot distinguish between an empty and a non-existant setting, so it very helpfully sets it back to the default. Putting a single space in there works exactly once: it removes the space next time you run update-grub and the next time it goes back to the default. So I hacked it:

# defoptions=iwantthisempty

This morning I had an issue with a kernel that does not understand root=UUID=blahblah syntax. Don't ask, bleeding edge hardware and that sort of thing. So once again I modified the kopt setting and it kept ignoring me. At least you can override it by using a version specific setting:

# kopt_2_6_18=root=/dev/sda1 ro

It turns out that update-grub always converts old style syntax to the new UUID syntax, so kopt is pretty much useless if you need to set a legacy root setting.

Then there is the fglrx-kernel-source package. It was broken in dapper. It is STILL broken in edgy. Others have reported similar problems with this package. I contributed a patch that solves most of the problems a while ago,
but nevertheless the broken package shipped with edgy.