Christopher Kunz

Am 12.09.09. eröffnet in Hannover-Linden eine neue Mittelalterkneipe. Die Betreiber sind keine Unbekannten - es sind nicht die Leute vom Knobi-Brot-Stand bei Hiller.
Also:
Samstag 12.09.09
Ab 20:00 Uhr
Mittelalterliche Spelunke
Nedderfeldstraße 22
Hannover

Mit Livemusik!

Anfahrt mit der U-Bahn Linie 10 bis Leinaustraße oder Küchengarten (dürfte gleich weit sein), von da aus ~5 Minuten zu Fuß.

UPDATE: Die Eröffnung war ein Riesenspaß - die Kneipe ist sehr hübsch geworden und es war knallvoll. Die Einwohner der Nedderfeldstraße wurden wohl durch den Feuerzauber und die Live-und-Draußen-Musik etwas verunsichert, so daß gegen Mitternacht zwei bis drei Mannschaftswagen vor der Kneipe standen (die waren wohl noch von der NPD-Demo in Hannover). Passiert ist aber nichts. In den nächsten Tagen gehe ich da nochmal auf ein Bier vorbei.

UPDATE 2: Die Mittelalterspelunke hat auch eine Homepage, die aber komischerweise recht wenig Liebe bei Google hat. Das ändere ich hiermit: Mittelalterspelunke Hannover

Ich bin nächstes Wochenende mal wieder auf einem MPS (Mittelalterlich Phantasie Spectaculum) zugegen. Dieses Mal in Hamburg-Öjendorf; Hinfahrbefehl für alle Hamburger!

Veranstaltungstage: Samstag, 05.09.09 von 13:00 bis 00:00 & Sonntag, 06.09.09 von 11:00 bis 19:30

Veranstaltungsort: Öjendorfer Park, Hamburg-Öjendorf

Bands: Die Streuner, Luxuria Auris, Duivelspack, Faun, Rapalje, Vermaledeyt, Saltatio Mortis, Schelmish

Mehr Infos: http://www.spectaculum.de/termine/hamburg/

Ich lagere mit einem kleinen Duhlstein-Lager und dem Lumpenpack zusammen.

A week ago, I reviewed Wolfenstein, the most recent installment in the popular franchise. As I pointed out, the lack of originality that showed in the name seemed to also affect gameplay quite a bit. After I have finished the game (see pics in my Wolfenstein Gallery), I have some more good and also some more bad to say about the game. Read on after the break...

Me and Wolfenstein, we go way back. In 1992, I played the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D when it was actually legal in Germany (a week or so; got the disk off an imported english games magazine for a gazillion bucks). Wolf3D’s level editor was awesome on a stick. I loved Return to Castle Wolfenstein and just today, I picked up the newest addition to the Wolfenstein franchise, aptly named, erm, Wolfenstein. 

Review and a couple pics after the break.

I have recently installed SilverStripe to test if it fits into our shared hosting concept. Read after the break about my impressions.

Morgen und übermorgen bin ich als Tagesgast auf dem Mittelalterlich Phantasie Spectaculum in Telgte zugegen. Dort gibt’s wie immer jede Menge Leute in komischen Klamotten und einige Bands.

Mehr Infos:

• Veranstaltungsübersicht MPS Telgte


• Bands: Duivelspack, Saltatio Mortis, Faun, Rapalje, Vermaledeyt


• Eintritt: 15 Euro (glaube ich), am Sonntag Familientag - alle unter-15jährigen gratis.
  

From our corporate inbox:

Dear filoo GmbH,

We are a domain name registration center. We have something urgent need to confirm with you. On the August 12th, 2009, We received an application formally, one company named “ filoo Foresight Investment Ltd” wanted to register “ filoo ” as their euro-american & asia-pacific domain names and Internationalized Brand Name. After our initial examination, we found that this application issue involved your company name or trademark, Considering this may bring something effect to your company, so we inform you in no time.
In order to deal with this issue better, Please let the Principal contact us directly and as soon as possible if you considered these domain names and Internationalized Brand Name are important to you and there was necessary to protect them by registering them first.
We view your feedback very seriously and seek your kind cooperation in this matter! Thank you!

Kind Regards,
Angelina Zheng
Senior Consulting Director

International Brand Security & Protection Dept.
Asia Internet Network Information Center
ANIC NetWork Solutions Ltd (Branch Office)
Tel: +86-10101-75620-6698 ext.805 (Mon-Fri, 9am to 6:30pm,GMT+8)
Mail: Angelina@anicnetwork.com

This reeks of fraud. There is no “Asia Internet NIC”, only the Asia-Pacific NIC (apnic.net), so this is probably an advance fee fraud. I’d guess that whoever answers is asked a fee to fight off the presumed other registration attempt.

Whois info for anicnetwork.com:
Registrant ID ...................V-X-16515-3054
Registrant Name .................ANIC NetWork
Registrant Organization .........ANIC NetWork
Registrant Address ..............HongKong
Registrant City..................HongKong
Registrant Province/State .......HongKong
Registrant Country Code .........CN
Registrant Postal Code ..........310003
Registrant Phone Number .........+86.82617730
Registrant Fax ..................+86.82617730
Registrant Email ................DomainAdmin@Sina.com

The automatic updater for WordPress uses FTP to upload data (which is generally a good idea because of safe mode). However, it fails if the FTP account is chrooted (i.e. you cannot change to directories below your home directory).

This is bad, because most, if not all shared hosting servers have chrooted ftp accounts. There is, however, an easy fix. You just recreate the root directory structure within your home directory.

If your home directory has the physical directory “/www/12345/mydomain.com/” and your wordpress is in the “./wordpress” subdirectory, you can just log in with ftp and do this

mkdir /www; 

cd /www; 

mkdir 12345; 

cd 12345; 

mkdir mydomain.com

Then you can use a PHP one-liner to create a symlink to your wordpress subdirectory:

<?php symlink(“/wordpress”, “wordpress”); ?>

After this, you should verify the directory is created OK and can be changed into via ftp:

cd /www/12345/mydomain.com/wordpress

After this, the automatic update worked, at least for me.

I have a little story from an administrator’s life for you today.

Today at around 1pm CEST, our mail cluster started behaving very odd. Although SMTP ports were open, establishing a connection to the initial server greeting took around 30 seconds on each of the 8 nodes.

Long delays normally indicate DNS problems, so I checked if the resolvers were b0rked. Both were working fine and DNS lookups on the command line on each of the mail servers were blazing fast. Ho-humm... stracing the qmail-smtpd processes showed that my assumption was correct - the delays were definitely caused by DNS lookups to our resolverss being slow. Just to be on the safe side and to rule out firewall or routing issues between our networks, I used the OpenDNS resolvers on one node - nothing changed.

My next guess was: Maybe a RBL shut down?! We are only filtering against XBL and the iX blacklist and both were up - I tried anyway. Still, SMTP was slow on every mail server.

We are using qmail with rblsmtpd, so I could quickly disable the rblsmtpd service altogether. Suddenly, the connection speed was up to past standards again. So it had to do with rblsmtpd, but with none of the RBLs it is filtering against. Weird.

I went to the resolvers and checked which queries were actually performed during a smtp connection initiation - and to my astonishment, I saw that queries to resolve 1.2.3.4.rbl.maps.vix.com were used during each connection initiation. I googled a bit and read that the long defunct MAPS RBL was the fallback blacklist that was used by rblsmtpd when no other RBLs were specified in the configuration.
However, I had two blacklists in the config - yet rblsmtpd tried to look up at the MAPS RBL, too.

It seems someone disabled the nameservers for the vix.com zone, so I took the liberty of telling my resolvers to serve it to all clients - empty, of course. Now, everything is back to normal. It cost me about two hours to solve that problem.

I’m kinda cleaning out my closet (IRL, not metaphorically) and am facing a dilemma right now. Over the years, I have collected quite a bit of band shirts, and although I outgrew some of them (and some others are only holes with a backprint), I don’t want to throw them all away. After all, there are memories connected to all those festivals and concerts. I know I’ll never wear a Wacken shirt ever again (to be honest, they are butt ugly), so should i cut out the print and make an album? What do you suggest?

Over the last months, a drought has started in this blog and the two or three readers that might still be left deserve a status update. In fact, I would like to recap the last couple of months to get my head clear and tell all of you what’s been going on.

If you’re interested in what I’ve been doing these past weeks, just click on the extended entry and you shall be enlightened.

I rarely get spam that’s really weird, but this (probably a filter evasion or mal-training attempt) is really... WTF?!

Mon May 04 17:29:27 2009: Request 78291 was acted upon.
Transaction: Ticket created by lamb.helene@google-mailing.com
Queue: [de-punkt]info
Subject: ein kleines blaues Ma:dchen aufgeschnallt.
Owner: Nobody
Requestors: lamb.helene@google-mailing.com
Status: new


Dann darfst du gehn nach der Hallig.
Die Luft geht fremd und rein.
Bernhard Suphan. Neudruck, Hildesheim
dann begann das grosse Massensterben.
Es war einmal ein Mann,
dass er nicht, ihr letzter Hort noch, geht:
verbreitet haben.
eines deutschen Sa:ngers
Der wackre Schwabe forcht’ sich nit,
Und seine Glocken klangen


I’m off to the Ragnarök Festival 2009 in Lichtenfels, Bavaria. This will probably be my only festival this year, so I better make it count.

I will posst occasional updates and ramblings on my Twitter account, so feel free to follow me.

On my work laptop, I was plagued by a BAD_POOL_CALLER BSOD after reactivating the machine from standby and I couldn’t really get to the root of the problem. The laptop runs Vista Business, 32bit, SP1.
Thanks to someone at Dell Business Support, I found the reason (which is still not really well-documented at Google): It can be caused by a bug in old versions of VirtualBox, as documented in this bug report.

A good fix for that BAD_POOL_CALLER bluescreen is simply downloading and installing the latest VirtualBox version, which at the time of writing is VirtualBox 2.1.4.

Die Karte ist verkauft!

Leider kann ich aufgrund einer beruflichen Verpflichtung dieses Jahr nicht aufs With Full Force fahren. Ärgerlich. Daher verkaufe ich das Ticket fürs WFF 2009 zum selben Preis, den ich auch bezahlt habe:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
1 WFF-WEEK-09 WFF-WEEK2009 79,90 EUR
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Summe: 79,90 EUR
Versandgebühren: 6,00 EUR
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Gesamtsumme: 85,90 EUR

Das Festival (WFF 09 - With Full Force 2009) findet vom 03.07.09 bis 05.07.09 am Airport Roiztschjora in Löbnitz bei Leipzig statt. Mehr Infos im erweiterten Eintrag.

Wer das Ticket kaufen möchte, schreibt mir bitte eine E-Mail. Ich verschicke die Karte per Einschreiben.