Last weekend, we’ve been with 2 doggy trainers in Bochum, Iris and Ralf. Iris was the one who introduced us to Eddie, and Ralf knew Eddie too, so they invited us to attend at their weekly doggy meeting, where they show other dog owners how to deal with their buddies without beating, as this is still frequently practiced.

We learned quite a lot of things that we both intuitely would have done wrong, as e.g. Happily greeting your dog once you come home after you left it alone for a while. This, we learned, is an absolute nono, since the dog expects this greeting and so suffers the more, the longer he has to wait for it. The right thing to do is to more or less ignore the dog before leaving and also ignoring him for a while when coming back, to avoid making either of both moments special for the dog.

This weekend, we went out with Eddie again, and his current parents made the suggestion to do a testrun. We should take Eddie with us for the weekend to see how the cats and Eddie would behave. Eddie couldn’t await to get into the car, which is good news, since we want to attend the doggy meetings, and that happens some 80km from Cologne. Once in the house, we kept Eddie on the leash, leading him all through the flat. The cats were completely confused between terror and curiousity, but we kept talking to them to assure them that everything is ok…

After a while we took Eddie off the leash so he could walk about and sniff around some more. The doggy basket we showed to him wasn’t the least interesting, so Eddie sometimes lay in front of the couch, then between us, then either on Kerstins or my lap, then again in front of the couch… All in all, he didn’t look as if he was missing home and made the overall impression he’d find us pretty much ok. We took care of the cats in exchange, always one of us with Eddie, and the other one making sure the cats weren’t too terrified.

Throughout that day and the next morning, the cats hid away most of the time, only once in a while sneaking around a corner to see what’s happening. Eddie, although living among cats all of his life, made a bit of a bad habbit barking at Pucky, and we weren’t sure if to intercept or not. The overall suggestion in the texts we found on the internet was “let them sort it out by themselfes”, but we couldn’t tell were the border is. To state that clearly: Eddie was not aggressing the cats, since he was wagging his tail, ducking and jumping back and forth. That was playing and not aggressivity, but a dogs and cats body language is completely negated, which makes it hard for the other to interprete the real meaning. Only time will show how things work out, but actually, I haven’t heard of any case were things didn’t work out.

The night was suprisingly calm. We showed Eddie his pillows that we arranged besides the bed, and he happily rolled himself into a furball and slept the whole night besides us, snoaring more or less loud.

He woke us at around 7am. but agreed to sleep some more when we sent him back on his pillows. 10am is his usual first walk hour, so he got back to us at 9:30am which is still terribly early for me, but I’ll get used to it. Walking with him was a refreshing experience, since it was about the first sunny morning since 2 month or so. The other dog walkers in the park around the corner were all very friendly, despite Eddies race which is getting more and more bad press here in germany. Getting home and having breakfast we were up for another nice suprise. Eddie doesn’t sit there looking all hungry when you’re eating. He had his bowl and left us more or less alone eating our own stuff. That is good news, since I’m not good with keeping my food for myself, and denying it to a cat or dog is really difficult for me.

About 3:30pm we took Eddie back to his current home after taking him for another long walk in the forest that begins in the direct neighbourhood where Eddies living right now. He couldn’t really decide if he wanted to come with us again or was happy to be back. Taking the above learned experience serious we went away without much of a good bye. The rest of the day, we spent tired in front of the TV, since we had far too much fresh air and walks for our soft citizen bodies. The cats were a lot happier too…

Next monday’s the day. I have 2 weeks off and we’re getting Eddie permanently. I hope the cats and Eddie will arange pretty fast, but I know that we definitely can’t hurry that…

In other news: Another Big downtime, lion worm…

More or less a week after the first downtime, the server is down again. It looks as if somebody got the lion worm, and in the time between the reinstall of the machine and having it patched to the latest release, it got reinfected again. This time, Christian came over with the machine and we did the reinstall completely away from the net - last time that was not an option since Christian did the reinstall in the office of his provider. We plugged the machine with an RFC address into my private home network and pulled all the patches through my own proxy, so the machine was more or less secure until it was finished.

Having a hand on the machine also made it possible to migrate all the cobalt stuff, so Christian didn’t need to recreate some 75 websites by the sucking click-and-go tools. I mounted the old harddisk, copied an uninfected shell onto that disk and took the old database up in a chroot environment. From that point I could dump it to afterwards reimport that dump into the new system. After that, I cleaned up and migrated some old configuration files - mostly sendmail and apache config, passwd, group, quota - and the machine came up with all sites again.

There were some smart things left to do, but mostly the process was quite painless. We have, however, still some problems left from the reinstall after the first hack, since users and groups were created in a different order, and thus there are still a lot of file permissions set wrong. Christian is fixing that himself on demand…