Patrick McHardy's blog

These two kids were looking for something fun to do on Saturday evening. They first tried to climb the wall of the Freiburg theater (visible in the back of the picture), but the left one only made it half way up. Very disappointed, he stated he felt emasculated and both of them left. He tried to regain his manliness a few minutes later when they returned with a stolen table from the bar next door and used it to slide down the stairs.

Getting ready to launch ...

They made it down the stairs. The left one is really having fun, the right one is also beginning to feel like a man again.

End of the ride.

Also don't miss out on the movie of the waitress slapping them around and their flight.

Thanks to Elena for the pictures and redacting the face of an innocent bystander :)

Warning: long rant. Note to any company mentioned below: this is *my* opinion and my opinion only.

Just added Lenovo to the list of companies I won't buy from anymore. I got a Z61p about 9 months ago and had nothing but trouble since. Air circulation seems to be broken by design, from the beginning the graphic card overheated to over 100° celsius, then starting makeing squeaky sounds and showing flickering moving lines across the entire screen, before shutting down completely (not the notebook, only the card). There are plenty of reports on the internet of people having similar problems. The processor also often heats up until it reaches the shutdown temperature when doing CPU intensive work. A technician tried to fix it by replacing some parts, but without any success. Additionally on my travel to LinuxTag, the fan broke and it would refuse to boot. This cured itself a few days later, but now it sounds like a rusty lawn mower. Since last weekend, it doesn't detect the battery anymore, even though a voltmeter shows its working perfectly fine. Sad, back when IBM was still producing ThinkPads I never had trouble.

The other two companies on this list of pride are (there are more, but most of them are irrelevant since they are either almost broke or small enough to avoid easily):

- Deutsche Telekom and all their subsidiaries. This is the most ridiculous company I've ever seen, the highlights of their doings include:

• When installing a DSL connection in my appartment, the technician (also known as Telekomiker, roughly translated as Telekom commedean, but more funny in German) wasn't able to locate the wires in the switch cabinet. So since there was no way to test what we was doing, he apparently decided not to do anything at all and just left the wires in the socket unconnected, after which he told me "all done" and left. I managed to get him on the phone personally by calling a hotline, telling them my story and being forwarded like eight times. He showed up again two hours later and did it properly :)
• Delay and displace contract changes and cancellations, not sending confirmations and so on. The most recent incident was billing us for months for a canceled telephone line, which numbers were already ported to a different company. On every call to their support, they promised to look into it, only to send a new invoice a few days later. Most ridiculous, when calling their business support late at night, we reached a call center, with a friendly telephonist who told me she was unable to even take a message, the only thing she was there for was for telling us we were calling outside business hours. At least the amusement made up for it a bit :)
• Sending incorrect invoices over months for some equipment returned to them within the deadline for returning it. As usual, their phonebots proved to be completely incompetent and weren't able to correct the mistake. It went the usual way to their law firm, Seiler & Kollegen, who did correct the mistake after we sent them the a copy of the receipt. So what Telekom did after that was "correct" their invoice, remove the incorrect position, but left all the reminder charges (for an *incorrect* position to begin with) on it. They continued sending invoices with increasing reminder charges (1 euro per invoice) for over two years. Not sure if they're still sending them, I stopped carring.

- HP, for not fulfilling their service obligations for fixing my notebook. They first sent some clown from Deutsche Telekom to fix it, who broke it even worse. His second attempt was also unsuccessful, after which HP simply closed the request. Every time I reopened it, it was closed again without further comment. They even had the impudence to ask for my satisfaction with their service - which was pretty obvious from looking at the request. Also sad, because I liked the notebook and there are not many alternatives if you want a big display, but such behaviour is inacceptable.

Since I've been slacking with updating this blog lately, and probably will continue to do so for the next week, here's another drawing from Elena from a couple of weeks ago.

Just released iptables 1.4.1.1, a pure bugfix release for regressions reported against 1.4.1. Besides this, I'm mainly in bugfix mode for 2.6.26 currently, which is keeping me pretty busy.

Finally released iptables 1.4.1 this morning. I had the impression the -rc phase worked pretty well this time and hoped we had shaken out all the bugs. Unfortunately this hope wasn't fulfilled, the first regression report came in only 5 hours later. Its nothing terribly important, just a cosmetic problem when printing IPv6 masks, but I guess I'll release a 1.4.1.1 bugfix release in a few days.

The iptables 1.4.1 release got delayed a bit by my notebook breaking 5 minutes after getting on the train to LinuxTag, so I couldn't do any real work the entire last week. I hoped we could test the header fixes last week and release on Monday, but they really need some wider testing, so I'll release another -rc today and hopefully the final release in about a week.

On the kernel side, I'm working on getting the things I would like to merge in 2.6.27 into shape. The netfilter things in my queue so far are mostly minor cleanups and feature additions, with the exception of ebtables IPv6 support from Kuo-lang Tseng.

The non-netfilter things are:

• A GARP implementation with a GVRP application on top. Maybe I'll also add GMRP support.
• Some VLAN patches to fix inconsistencies related to hardware tagging/stripping/filtering and packet sockets.
• A DRR packet scheduler.
• Some patches for dynamic packet scheduler class hash sizing for better scalability that I've been carrying for at least a year.