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Firefox/Iceweasel has some "interesting" behaviour. Here are some fixes:

• Mouse wheel scrolling direction was changed between version 2 and 3. This can be fixed with mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines=-1 (Thanks weasel)
• Load diverted tabs in the background tabs.loadDivertedInBackground=true (Thanks Ganneff)

So at work I am forced to work with Outlook 2003 for more than half a year now and it sucks:

• slow startup, locks the box for half a minute and takes another minute until it got itself updated displaying the 5 messages I got overnight
• the status bar tells me all folders are in sync, still it takes about half a minute when switching to the calendar to display those days with appointments bold
• no sane 7-day week display, why can't they add those 2 days to the 5 days display?
• no threaded view - therefore I blame outlook to be the number one source of TOFU also known as top posting, a violation of RFC 1855 (Please read HOWTO Edit Messages if you don't know what I'm referring to)
• slow search - it takes up to 5 minutes to perform a search threw the 1.2 GB while I got immediate results from the 5 GB cyrus box in my old company
• stupid keybindings: CTRL-f is search in almost any (even MS) application, not so in Outlook
• it seems Outlook/Exchange doesn't store first name and last name as different fields, therefore you're stuck with unuseful sorting unless you change defaults and use a macro (they provide one of the worst examples themselfes) to change entries
• can't combine calendars - I like to have a private and a company calendar so I don't have to bother with the type of entries and it simply cannot display entries from both as one (open-xchange, groupwise, google calender... can)
• can't combine contacts either - I'd like to search in my contacts as well as the internal users as well as the companys shared contacts
• can't save inline images as anything different from BMP
• several menue entries like resending message are only available when you open the message in a separate window
• doesn't offer a way to extract the message source, you can only extract the message header

to be continued...

• no access to public or shared folders and resources (did someone mention IMAP and LDAP/ADS?)
• no sane IMAP client with LDAP/ADS support to work around that limits
• keys are too small to type (landscape instead of portrait anyone?)
• display is too small for longer reeading (landscape instead of portrait anyone?)

So basically it's too big for a nice phone and too small/to bad designed for typing and reading mail while the software has major limitations.

If the Nokia Communicator wasn't so thick I'd go for that one.

I finally migrated my homepage and my blog to ikiwiki. Some links have changed so please update your references.

Setting up an apache2 reverse proxy (updated)

If you want to use a reverse proxy with apache that appears to clients as foo.example.com but serves (cached) documents from bar.example.com:port/dir/ and follows redirects from bar.example.com then put the following in the vhosts configuration of foo.example.com:

ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / http://bar.example.com:port/dir/
ProxyPassReverse / http://bar.example.com:port/dir/

In addition you will need to enable the apache2 proxy and proxyhttp modules (eg with a2enmod proxy && a2enmod proxyhttp), then modify mods-enabled/proxy.conf and set ProxyRequests Off (you don't want an open proxy) and allow access from all.

boot parameters to install Debian on a SUN Netra X1

To get network and speed up serial console installation add

dmfe.blacklist=yes DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text

to the boot parameters.

Greylisting and broken MTAs

It's still amazing how many broken MTAs are out there that don't perform a resend within an appropriate time period. Greylisting is set to 60 seconds and a second delivery attempt will already whitelist but e.g. the following MTAs are too broken to retry delivery (additional to those already listed in the Debian supplied whitelist_clients:

mail.gw.deloitte.at[193.22.85.34] ip34.juprowa.at[213.129.253.34] mail.nextra.at[195.170.70.67]

XEN with routed DomUs

Configure /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp for routing:

(network-script network-route)
(vif-script     vif-route)

and enable arp proxy with sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.proxy_arp=1 for runtime and by adding

net.ipv4.conf.eth0.proxy_arp=1

to /etc/sysctl.conf permanently.

Wishlist of good old tools for Lenny

Unfortunately some of them are not availabel in Etch or are not installed per default but make support much much easier.

• apt-setup - it's a shame that one's missing in Etch. Mirror selection including proxy setup the easy way for everyone is imo a must have.
• modconf - should be in base and there are always some modules udev needn't load or you want to load in a specific order and you don't remember the name of each module available either

My favourite firefox extensions so far [updated]:

• NoScript Allows JavaScript and Java execution only for trusted domains and offers whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking.
• Greasemonkey Add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior.
• Tab Mix Plus Lets you adjust tab handling the way you need it and adds session management and crash recovery as well.
• Adblock Plus Get rid of all those annoying iframe-, banner-, remote- , flash and java ads.
• Web Developer Adds a toolbar and a menu entry with helpful stuff for developing webpages.
• Mozex Use external programs to edit textareas, handle mailto, telnet, ssh, ftp,...
• Flashblock Supress flash using a placeholder and load it when the placeholder is klicked
• SSL Blacklist Detects and warns about certificate chains that use the MD5 algorithm for RSA signatures as well as certificates with the Debian #363516 SSL bug