Silke and I dedicated our recent trip to the art of Claude Monet. We started by visiting the Musée de l’Orangerie which reopened in 2006 after seven years of renovation. Here we could finally see Monet’s magnificent paintings of the Water Lilies. For Silke a dream came true. While she had already seen other smaller paintings of the Water Lilies before she really wanted to see the eight tremendous canvases in the Musée de l’Orangerie.

The next day we went on a trip to Giverny a picturesque village in the Normandy. Claude Monet moved to a country estate in Giverny in 1883 and bought it in 1890. With the help of his family he planted a beautiful garden on the property. Monet spent most of his remaining life there and made his home world famous by painting the water lilies in his water garden. Silke and I were curios to see what the garden looked like which inspired Monet that much. When we got there we began to understand.

You can really feel the ambiance and tranquility that his garden has. And it would be even better if it wasn’t full of tourists.

What else did Silke and I do in Paris? We visited several parks, walked along boulevards, went shopping at Fauchon, Betjeman and Barton and the Galeries Lafayette and enjoyed a lot of very good food. But there are still so many places in Paris that we want to see.

And Star Trek didn’t disappoint me: action, humour and drama presented at Warp speed. The actors playing the crew of the enterprise are excellent, in particular Chris Pine. He plays James T. Kirk as a daredevil who you hate and love at the same time. He even manages to remind you of William Shatner without being sappy. After two hours which seem to pass in an instant a whole new universe opens up in front of you.

So far Star Trek is definitely the best movie I’ve seen this year.

Well, nothing really. Just like the X-Men movies X-Men Origins: Wolverine is full of action, humour and special effects. The movie reveals a lot about the events before the first X-Men movie including of course Logan’s past. If you liked the X-Men trilogy this movie is a must.

It started with a new 4GB CompactFlash card for our digital camera, an Olympus C5050 Zoom. The CF card was supposed to replace an old 1GB Microdrive to increase both the capacity and the battery lifetime of the camera. What was supposed to be a simple task (open camera, remove card, insert new card) took me hours. After a firmware update of the camera and various attempts I finally found out that the camera only supports the FAT16 file system which is limitted to 2GB. I managed to work around that restriction by manually creating a 2GB FAT16 file system on the CF card. This is not an ideal solution but still gives us twice as much disk space and better battery lifetime.

A few days later I wanted to install a firmware update onto the LO100c remote management card in my server. Unfortunately HP only supports two possible ways to do that:

1. Update the firmware by running a program under Windows on the machine itself.
2. Create a bootable USB stick with the update program on it under Windows.

As I don’t have Windows installed on my server (or anywhere else for that matter) I tried the second option with my brandnew 8GB USB stick. But the *rude language censored* update program complained that the USB stick was larger than 2GB and refused to write the software to it. I had to borrow my old 256MB stick from Silke to be able to complete the firmware update.

So does this all mean that you can have too  much disk space? By no means! There is just a lot of outdated software out there.

The movie itself is a lovely animated film. It has a lot of humour and action mixed with a little bit of sentimentality. It turns out of course that the Monsters are lovely people, while some of the humans are the real monsters. And at the end of an entertaining picture you get your happy ending.

Except for one scene at the beginning the movie doesn’t toy with the 3D effects fortunately. But they definitely enhance the visual impressions a lot. If the camera moves through an asteroid belt it looks like you are really in space. And a car chase in 3D has that extra edge. I’m really looking forward to see what other filmmakers will do with this exciting technology.

1. Sendmail’s configuration files are incomprehensible to most people including me. You can build them from somewhat understandable templates. But that is still far from ideal.
2. Sendmail’s monolithic architecture is prone to security problems.
3. As Sendmail is basically an interpreter for a weird text processing language with builtin SMTP support it is not very efficient.
4. Sendmail’s support for filtering spam e-mails is somewhat limited, at least if you don’t want to write rules for its configuration file manually.
5. After Sendmail was removed from the NetBSD source tree convenience was no longer an excuse to use it on my NetBSD systems.

I picked Postfix as the replacement because it is now in the NetBSD source tree (very convenient), uses a secure architecture, provides powerfull builtin mail filtering and last but not least support for Sendmail mail filters (see below).

I started the migration almost three years ago by switching all my NetBSD clients to Postfix which wasn’t really difficult. However the last machine still running Sendmail was my main mail server which provides multiple services:

1. It is used as mail relay by all our computers at home and by some of our friends and our family members.
2. It is the primary mail server for a couple of domains like zhadum.org.uk.
3. It provides backup mail services for a few other domains.

This server’s spam filtering was also reasonably complicated. Besides milter-greylist and milter-regex it used multiple home grown scripts which modified the configuration automatically. Porting all those extras to Postfix wouldn’t be an easy task.

A few weeks back I realized how long this project had dragged on and got back to my Postfix book. After I had finished reading it I finally set a date for the migration.

On the big day things went pretty well initially. I had warned my users and configured packet filter rules to prevent new e-mails from arriving before I finished. After a quick check on the backup mail server I stopped Sendmail and started working on the Postfix configuration. An hour later I had a configuration which seemed to be mostly working. Two problems remained however:

1. procmail was reporting errors when it tried to save e-mails to a large mail folder.
2. If Postfix was configured to use milter-greylist for mail filtering it stopped accepting E-Mails over SMTP.

Trying to solve both problems at the same time I made no headway at all. I finally decided to focus on the procmail problem and turned off mail filtering temporarily. After various futile attempts to debug the problem I finally resorted to ktrace(1) to figure out why procmail was failing. Reading the kernel trace data I finally found the cause of the problem: Postfix imposed a process limit which restricted the maximum file size that procmail could use. A quick look in the documentation revealed that the mailbox_size_limit setting controlled this behavior. After changing it to a suitable value procmail worked fine.

The milter problem was unfortunately much harder to solve. I spent hours checking my configuration and couldn’t find a problem. I finally began to debug Postfix itself and found a problem in the internal communication between two of its components. Thanks to Michael van Elst’s help I managed to fix the problem. Postfix and milter-greylist started to cooperate at long last and I finished my work at about 1:00 o’clock on Sunday morning.

Postfix worked very reliably ever since and I only had to make a few configuration changes. I’m also astonished how much faster than Sendmail it delivers e-mail. I didn’t think it would make such a difference on a fast machine connected via an A-DSL link.

Finally having finished this I’m not about to be idle tough as a new home IT project has emerged: migrating my friend’s server which is my backup mail server to Postfix as well. I hope that I’ll get this one done more timely.

Our next destination was the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The museum is an impressive building from 1881. But the exhibits are even more remarkable. You can view fossils of dinosaurs and other extinct animals and even the enormous 30 metre long skeleton of a blue whale. As the museum is much too large to see everything during a single visit we will definitely have to go back there.

Our last stop was the cafe and restaurant The Wolseley where Silke and I planned to have our first Wiener Schnitzel in years. While our dinner there was a tad on the pricey side it was well worth it as the food from starters to dessert was delicious. And the Schnitzel was one of the best I ever had.

Well fed (or perhaps too well fed) and happy after a day full of discoveries we skipped a couple of tube stations before finally hopping on and then taking the train home to Cambridge.

As one of the local NetBSD developers I’m representing The NetBSD Project on the program committee. The program committee will review suggestions for talks and tutorials for the conference. So if you have a paper that you would like to present or an idea for a tutorial please let us know as the conference cannot succeed without your contributions.

In addition Stephen Borrill is organising a NetBSD developer summit in Cambridge before the EuroBSDCon. We hope to see you at the summit

Restaurant 22 is a nice cosy restaurant with a relaxing atmosphere, excellent service and exquisite food. The most demanding part of dinner is to compile your own 4 to 5 course meal from the monthly menu while enjoying the amuse-bouche and the complementary bread. During the next two hours you will be served all the delicious courses one by one, with ample time to enjoy both the food and the conversation with your charming companion.

After a nice relaxing dinner you will leave Restaurant 22 well-fed and satisfied with all the delicacies you were served.

By contrast Silke and I had a really nice day. As we are both fortunate enough to be able to work from home we could avoid the traffic chaos. Silke took a few photos in the morning and we had a snowball fight afterwards.

During our lunch break we even build a small snowman.

In the afternoon it got a bit warmer and the snow began to melt. I guess that most of it will be gone by tomorrow.