Category Archives: Announcement

Announcements

Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 2 released

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This new beta may be more on the alpha side of beta as it includes a substantial number of changes to improve security. Rather than using the standard strcpy, strcat, etc it now uses the OpenBSD secure string handling functions strlcat and strlcpy and use of sprintf has been changed to snprintf to try and avoid possible buffer overruns. I’m not actually aware of any attacks but this is quite old code so you never know your luck.

I’ve also changed the implementation of the nsearch() function to use strcasestr() which makes it much simpler.

You can download the release from Sourceforge.

Please test and comment!

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Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 1 released

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Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta1 has been released.

This is a complete rebase from the version of Vacation at Savannah Non-GNU which had been released under the modified BSD license with no advertising clause. This actually means Vacation finally links legally with GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!

This beta also includes a patch graciously supplied by Roberto Piola that makes Vacation ignore emails that have the SpamAssassin “X-Spam-Status: Yes” header set, indicating that it believes they are spam.

As a beta release from a new codebase you should keep the usual caveats in mind, it may not reply to emails, core dump randomly, blow up, eat your dog or even work properly. We would appreciate reports of all of those instances (well, except maybe for the dog) to the vacation-list kindly hosted at SourceForge.

See the mailing list summary for Vacation to find out how to join the list.

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda (as they say where I come from). 🙂

Chris

LUV (Melbourne Chapter) October General Meeting: Intel Architecture and Hacked Slugs

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Paraphrased from the original.

Start: Oct 3 2006 – 19:00
End: Oct 3 2006 – 21:00

Location: The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building. Trinity College Main Campus. The University of Melbourne. Parkville. Melways Map: 2B C5.

Intel’s Core Architecture by David Jones

David Jones is a Solutions Specialist with Intel Australia specialising in Server Architecture, working directly with end users such as Westpac Bank, Ludwig Cancer Research, VPAC and others advising on latest technologies available from Intel. David has been with Intel for 10 years and in IT for 20 years, coming from a UNIX background. Today David will introduce Intel’s latest Architecture (Core Architecture) and explain the differences between Hyperthreading and Dual Core technologies.

Hacked slugs, solving all your problems with little NAS boxes by Michael Still

This talk will discuss how to get your own version of Linux running on a Linksys NSLU2, known to the Linux community as a slug. This is a consumer grade network attached storage (NAS) system. These devices are quite inexpensive, are physically small, and run on low voltage DC power. I also discuss how to handle having your firmware flash go bad, and provide some thoughts on projects made possible by these devices. The presentation will also include extra demonstrations of the process of flashing and setting up one of these devices.

Ed: as usual there will be a pre-meeting curry at 6pm

LUV Server Down – Colocation Power Work Again!

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It appears that Eftel have took the power down again at the colocation facility in Collins Street, but unlike last time it would appear that the server isn’t back up yet. This could be because the outage is still going on (it’s still listed as current on their site as I write even though it was scheduled for just Saturday) or it could be that there’s a problem with the box.

The LUV sysadmin has tried to get permission to go and investigate today (Sunday), but it appears it won’t be possible until Monday.

Linux Users Victoria – Webserver Down – Electrical Work at CoLo

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For those wondering (as I was) about why you can no longer get to the LUV website or mailing lists, it’s because the colocation facility (EFTel, who provide free hosting to us for which we are very grateful) are having major electrical work done at the Melbourne CoLo. The ticket (#8705) says:

8705 Scheduled maintenance 26-Aug-2006 14:30:00 27-Aug-2006 00:00:00 MAJOR ELECTRICAL SHUTDOWN – 530 Collins St: Affecting ALL Victorian Services

Update: Back up again..

The Vacation Mail Responder – 1.2.6.2 Released

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The Vacation Mail Responder has been abandoned for over 5 years now, so I contacted the former maintainers and asked them about taking on the project. They were happy about that and so now I find myself looking after it, along with Brian May.

I’ve made a minor bug fix (to add the Precedence: bulk header to all responses it generates) and updated the maintainer information and just released 1.2.6.2, over 5 years from the 1.2.6.1 release.

The main question is now, of course, where do we go from here ? One of the options we’re seriously considering is whether we should rebase from the native packages in Debian & Ubuntu as their version has been independently developed and gone much further than this one.

But for now I can go to sleep tonight feeling happy that I’ve taken on my first open source project and started to breath some life into it once more..