I’ve build the Polyester theme in the openSUSE Build Service for KDE4 and Qt4. krusader for KDE4 is available too, here.

Now the time has come to introduce Roaming Home Directories for Linux. Yesterday I’ve released a new version of csync and the first version of pam_csync. With both components you’re able to use an Active Directory environment to share your data between workstation and notebooks and work offline.

Currently only the SMB protocol is supported but I will write more plugins for other protocols in future. I have sftp and rsync (if doable) in mind. So you will be able to use it at home with you’re small NAS or in a Linux only company environment.

This is not the only use case. If you have a USB disk with your music collection. You can can attach it to PC1 and synchronize it with your local collection. Go to the next computer and synchronize it there again. As csync is a bidirectional file synchronizer the collection on PC1 and PC2 will be the same.

http://www.csync.org/

More at http://www.csync.org/

If you want to help to test click here. Packages for openSUSE are available in the Build Service, here.

A Red-Black tree has a lot of cases you have to consider, especially if you delete a node. This makes the code complex. Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees are a simpler variant of Red-Black Trees. They are simpler to implement (less code) while maintaining the nice features of Red-Black Trees. Less code means faster insertion and deletion, but there are no benchmarks yet.

Once Bob released his new book this would be a nice improvement for csync in the future. You can take a look at the slides of his talk.

Visit the homepage or the trac system for more information.

You can checkout the code with git:

git clone git://git.lomoco.org/lomoco.git lomoco

This is the dovecot dspam plugin that watches a special folder, the SPAM folder. When the MTA delivers a message to the user, it’ll first run it through the spam classifier. If it is classified as spam, it’ll be delivered to the SPAM folder instead of the normal filtering file the user may have (maildrop, sieve). Now the user has everything classified as spam in his SPAM folder. Everything else wherever the users wants it.

This is not enough cause our spam scanner needs training. We’ll occasionally have false positives and false negatives. Now this is the point where the dovecot dspam plugin comes into play. Instead of moving mail into special folders, the user has two actions available:

1. moving it out of the SPAM folder and
2. moving it into the SPAM folder.

The dovecot plugin watches these actions (and additionally prohibits APPENDs to the SPAM folder, more for technical reasons than others) and tells dspam that it made an error and needs to re-classify the message, depending on which of the two actions the user did. The user can now move the message directly into whatever folder the user chooses, and it all works.

*UPDATE*

Johannes has written a new plugin and we have merged pieces of the code, please check:

http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/Projects/dovecot-antispam

               HOST            QEMU GUEST1
        +---------------+   +--------------+
        | 10.10.5.158   |   |              |
 LAN ---+---- eth0      |   |              |
        |               |   |              |    QEMU GUEST2
        |   +------+ +--+---+---- nic0     |   +--------------+
        |   | tap0---+  |   |192.168.100.5 |   |              |
        |   | tap1---+  |   +--------------+   |              |
        |   +------+ |  |                      |              |
        |     br0    +--+----------------------+---- nic0     |
        |192.168.100.254|                      |192.168.100.1 |
        +---------------+                      +--------------+

Needed packages:

uml-utilities
bridge-utilities
kvm

Setup the network:

Create a file call kvm-network with the following content and make it executeable.

#!/bin/bash

# id of the user running qemu (kvm)
USERID=1000

# number of TUN/TAP devices to setup
NUM_OF_DEVICES=5

case $1 in
        start)
                modprobe tun
                echo -n "Setting up bridge device br0"
                brctl addbr br0
                ifconfig br0 192.168.100.254 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
                for ((i=0; i < NUM_OF_DEVICES ; i++)); do
                        echo -n "Setting up "
                        tunctl -b -u $USERID -t qtap$i
                        brctl addif br0 qtap$i
                        ifconfig qtap$i up 0.0.0.0 promisc
                done
        ;;
        stop)
                for ((i=0; i < NUM_OF_DEVICES ; i++)); do
                        ifconfig qtap$i down
                        brctl delif br0 qtap$i
                        tunctl -d qtap$i
                done
                ifconfig br0 down
                brctl delbr br0
        ;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: $(basename $0) (start|stop)"
        ;;
esac

br0 is the gateway to the external network.

Setting up the firewall:

Edit /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall and set the following variables:

FW_DEV_INT="br0 qtap0 qtap1 qtap2 qtap3 qtap4"
FW_ROUTE="yes"
FW_MASQ_NETS="192.168.100.0/24"
FW_PROTECT_FROM_INT="no"
FW_FORWARD_ALWAYS_INOUT_DEV="br0"

If you don’t run a SUSE system use the following lines to setup masquerading:

echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

On the guest you have to set the default gateway to 192.168.100.254 which is the bridge br0 and take a look in /etc/resolv.conf to get the name servers. I run a Windows 2003 Server as a guest which is the dhcp and name server for the other guests (Vista, several Linux installations).

Setting up qemu

Guest 1:

#!/bin/bash

qemu-kvm /path/to/vm.img \
          -net nic,model=rtl8139,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:56 \
          -net tap,ifname=qtap0,script=no \
          -m 256 \
          -smp 1 \
          -usb \
          -usbdevice tablet \
          -localtime

Guest 2:

#!/bin/bash

qemu-kvm /path/to/vm2.img \
          -net nic,model=rtl8139,macaddr=52:54:00:12:34:57 \
          -net tap,ifname=qtap1,script=no \
          -m 256 \
          -smp 1 \
          -usb \
          -usbdevice tablet \
          -localtime

Note that the VMs have different MAC addresses. It took me a long time to find why I couldn’t ping from one guest to another By the way, one of the guests is running Vista, which runs smoothly on my machine with KVM.