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I use Exim version 4 on Debian Sarge, and I want to start using a “Real-time Black-hole List” (RBL) service. How the hell do I do that? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great things about Linux is that it’s an open platform, so you can get round stupid DRM nonsense. The BBC produces lots of great stuff in real media format, but some of it isn’t made available to people outside the UK. I want to review some of this material, and I want my review to be available outside the UK.

So, I need to take some of the audio from a RealPlayer stream and store it as MP3. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the magic formula to boot into a Windows (slave) hard drive from Grub. Windows thinks that it’s installed on the master, but I’ve moved it over to the slave position. Sadly it refused to boot from there. The trick is to tell the BIOS to remap the drives, and thereby fool Windows into thinking it’s on the master. Read the rest of this entry »

The ‘Native Posix Thread Library’ (NPTL) is not supported by User Mode Linux (UML). NPTL is the much-vaunted ‘new’ threading implementation in the Linux 2.6.x kernels. There can be many symptoms of this problem, but the one I seem to always get is a crash whenever a program tries to resolve a host name. Whatever the symptoms, you will only see problems with a 2.6.x UML kernel - the same filesystem will work correctly when you boot it with a 2.4.x UML kernel.

The solution: Disable the new threading by renaming /lib/tls to /lib/tls.DISABLED on the guest, and reboot UML.

Although this solution is simple, it’s not permanent (at least on Debian). apt will continue to re-create the /lib/tls directory whenever it is updated. Then you’ll start to see crashes again when you next reboot.