False Prophets

I’ve been meaning to set up a blog to keep track of random things that I run into and feel like sharing. One of those happened today, so I finally figured out how to install blosxom. I haven’t gotten around to making a pretty CSS for it yet (not sure if I ever will, but I can pretend…) so for now it’s somewhat utilitarian and default-looking.

Blosxom is pretty bare-bones without plugins, and while Blosxom itself seems well documented the plugins are much less so. I spent about ten hours mucking around with the minimal set of plugins I needed to get something acceptable (timezone, autoblock, feedback, entriescache, interpolate_conditional, permalink, cooluri2, lastmodified, and a bunch of modified templates to use feedback and permalink). I tried and then discarded followsymlinks and metadate (for not playing well with other plugins I was using) and entries_index (lastmodified wanted something which set %others, so I used entriescache instead).

I needed to hack lastmodified to work with entriescache, since it cleverly gets the timestamps from the cache, which are now publication dates. So here’s a slightly modified lastmodified plugin which stats files directly.

I spent a while getting RSS to behave, too. I used lastmodified to set lastBuildDate, modified the story template to use permalinks which were acceptable to feedback (it wants .rss on the end or it decides they aren’t story pages), and eventually figured out that I needed to set <guid> to prevent liferea from thinking each modified post was new by comparing descriptions.

All in all it was far more work than I meant to do last night when I decided this was a good idea. Hopefully I haven’t messed it up too badly. We’ll see whether I upset Planet. Leave me a note if it makes your feed reader unhappy, or something.

I was actually going to use ikiwiki, but chickened out at the last moment; blosxom had fewer dependencies and I didn’t want to mess around with getting ikiwiki to install on sarge. And it still seems to be evolving - so while it’s wicked cool, I think I’ll let it have a little more time to settle first.

I spent most of this morning messing around with OpenWRT. I bought a LinkSys WRT54G quite a while ago (to replace a flaky D-Link DI-614+), and put OpenWRT on it. It took a little work to get it to do what I wanted, including fixing a quoting bug in the WPA startup script and tracking down an updated dnsmasq, but eventually I got it set up. Mostly the stock things: NAT, firewalling, wireless with WPA2, DHCP, internal DNS. Except that it can do one thing that none of the stock firmwares could: provide static DHCP addresses to specific boards, including custom options. This was absolutely essential for me to retire my old DHCP server, since I keep an embedded board lab in my office. I need the DHCP server to be able to tell boards where to get kernels and root filesystems.

Anyway, it works well. Except that I’ve been having too many dropped connections lately and I have no way to track down whether it’s the laptop (Dell Latitude D400, ipw2200 - mostly in Windows lately, I haven’t retested it in Ubuntu in a bit) or the AP. I updated the Windows drivers and now it periodically tries to rekey, fails, reports “duplicated RSN” whatever that means, and periodically reports authentication failures. About the same as before except that now it has better diagnostic tools to tell me in undocumented messages what went wrong, instead of just telling me that something went wrong.

So I next went looking for an updated driver for the other end. Which was a mistake. Note to others: if most of your packages are on a cromfs, running “ipkg update” is going to tear through your available MTD space really fast.

And ipkg is not graceful at updates the way dpkg is; it failed to upgrade base-files due to file conflicts, leaving the updated dnsmasq unable to start. These are the same sorts of conflicts that you see in apt-get upgrade periodically: files moving from one package to another without sufficient package relationships (or in ipkg’s case, maybe sufficient package manager support) to do it seamlessly. Then when I retried the update it succeeded, but it wiped out my firewall config and password file without asking.

I don’t really blame OpenWRT for this. “ipkg update” just isn’t a good idea with their tools. But I miss apt. And I really miss 2.6 kernels; the binary-only Broadcom drivers that power the WRT54G only work on 2.4.30. And it’s tight on flash/RAM anyway.

So I went looking at options. Obviously, I can’t get something that does exactly what I want for the kind of mass-market price the WRT54G sells at. But a suggestion from a coworker sent me looking at Mini-ITX systems, like the nice-looking Mini-Box M200. And at smaller things, like the WRAP WiFi and Soekris boards.

I haven’t done a hardware project of any sort since last summer, so I’m thinking about building myself an access point with benefits. I haven’t decided what the benefits will be yet - if I get something like one of the Soekris boards, probably just bigger compact flash and back to dnsmasq for internal DHCP. But if I get a Mini-ITX system, I can throw a hard drive in it, arrange over-the-network backups, and use it as an incoming mail hub. This would let me decomission one of the always-on computers in my office. A mighty attractive proposition, although a bit less so now that the heat wave has broken.