Yesterday around 22:00 IST Planet TCE was launched. It took me just an hour to come up with this planet. Planet is a wonderful software which is very flexible. Right now the planet has minimal subscription and in future it will grow with more subscriptions. It aggregates blog feeds of students/staff/alumnus of Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai.

Will try to tweak the CSS of this planet when I find time :)

In machines where we have two interfaces say eth0 and eth1, for which you have specified static ip in /etc/network/interfaces, after a reboot the static ip which we have assigned gets screwed among these interfaces ie., the physical interfaces to which eth0 and eth1 must be mapped may change after a reboot, which creates problem when both these networks are entirely different in your servers. This happens with Debian etch. The following could be done in order to overcome this.

In your /etc/network/interfaces give names like eth-pvt, eth-pub, eth-dep, etc and assign the static ip addresses.

This document explains the step by step procedure in configuring SSL based apache server (https) which servers subversion repositories and authenticates the clients using a PKCS#12 (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2138) based certificate provided by the client, when challenged by the server.

Components required

- apache 2.0 or greater
- openssl 0.9 or greater

Compiling apache

 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/httpd-2.2.9 --enable-ssl
 --enable-dav=shared --enable-dav-fs=shared --enable-dav-lock=shared
 --enable-rewrite=shared

Create certificate authority

I hit this problem when I was adding code to support storing encrypted passphrases in gnome-keyring for subversion. When we add a new key to the default keyring we are prompted for a password for locking/unlocking the default keyring. Sometimes I forget the password which I gave to this default keyring, which prevents me from viewing the default keyring and the keys associated with them, using the gnome-keyring-manager.

I found out that these encrypted passwords all those associated information about the keyrings are stored in the file '~/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring' in Debian based distros.

In Debian it is sometimes possible to have different alternatives for the same program. One such is 'java'. We have the GNU gcj and Sun provided java compilers available in Debian etch. I had the following java installed in my box as default

java version "1.4.2"
gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-20)

Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I wanted to switch to Sun provided java version.