elstel.org

llogrotate-ng, the program to rotate logfiles before new ones can be downloaded is now ready to be used. Up to now you had to use more-or-less directory specific bash scripts for this purpose, scripts which had to be adapted manually instead of featuring an own configuration file/section. In the README you can find interesting thoughts about program verification, directly provided by me. The difference to llogrotate-ng v1.4 is part of the explications, a program version I had written and claimed to be verified more-or-less by hand but which I could not test at that time. Have fun with llogrotate-ng, or the now for the first time being tested errorfree version!

Some smaller compatibility issues with webstat-bash have been resolved in the version now available: The script called count is now named itemcount. Under Linux a name clash with a totally different program also called 'count' (package llvm-test) caused problems when installed. If two different programs called the same get installed in the search $PATH, only one of them can be used without explicit specification of the path of the executable. Windows users will estimate the port to Python 3 since the rather old Python 2 may not be available or installed in every environment. Furthermore the new version contains a small fixup that makes count, countrytable as well as other sub-commands use the same search pattern counting all GET, HEAD and POST accesses on the web server (default mask inlined within the script, see more: http protocol). The implicit default command to list the country table shall now also work a bit faster, because it executes the record selection before the applied field reordering.

There was a known issue with xchroot v2.7.4 under Mageia 8: When xchroot did change the user no X-connection could be made without a manual xhost +SI:localuser:»targetUser« or xhost +local:. This was because Mageia did not provide an xauth token that matched the hostname likely due to an invalid /etc/hostname file. Now xchroot can generate an xauth token for the target user if none should be provided at invocation. The xauth mechanism was completely rewritten. It shall now be more stable. If there is a stale lock on the Xauthority file which makes xchroot hang you can now press Ctrl-C to force the retraction of this lock and make xchroot succeed (Otherwise xauth will display an error message after a while if it gives up on getting the lock.). Only the xauth token for the target hostname and the target display will be passed on to the chroot environment unless --alldisplays is given. The chroot environment will always have an xauth token even if the user should issue an xhost -local: later on.

Since python2 is no more installed by default on many systems or not even available as on MacOS we have ported the vpngate-extract script to python3. The old python2 version can still be downloaded as in the brackets. VPNgate-extract can be used to extract .ovpn files from a list with download URL given by --help in order to connect to free VPNs around the world. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it enables you to connect to another computer in some other country and see the internet as from there.

We have extended our documentation on how to create chroots for the rpm based distributions Fedora and Mageia. Programs like dnf, zypper and debootstrap are nowadays available for most distributions which facilitates the chroot creation by users without him/her having to install a whole system directly on hardware. Furthermore we have reordered the docuemtation items in a more logically consistent way.

Besides this I am currently packaging lots of the software at elstel.org for different distributions. Where to find online repositories is issued under /software. We will apply for xchroot and possibly other programs to get included into Debian while we have updated the openSUSE package. Additionally I am planning to update existing packages more frequently though only direct download from elstel.org may at times yield the most ultimate new version.