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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:

• NoScript Allows JavaScript and Java execution only for trusted domains and offers whitelist based pre-emptive script blocking.
• Mozilla XForms Implementaion of the W3C XForms 1.0 SE recommendation.
• Greasemonkey Add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior.
• Fasterfox Performance and network tweaks like prefetching links, simultaneous connections, pipelining, DNS cache.
• 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.
• FoxyProxy Define multiple proxies, easy switch between them and define which one to use based on regex.
• XML Developer A toolbar helping when developing XML stuff.
• Web Developer Adds a toolbar and a menu entry with helpful stuff for developing webpages.
• User Agent Switcher Helps to get along with broken sites that check for a specific browser.
• 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
• PDF Download Chose between open and download of a PDF which is especially useful if you have Adobe Reader installed.

banks payment form charges

You have to fill them out yourself, you have to bring them and then they charge you up to EUR 3,00 (BAWAG, EUR 2,00 Bank Austria Creditanstalt) - you just have to hate them.