codeblog code is freedom — patching my itch

July 30, 2006

jabber to IRC bridge

Filed under: Inkscape,Networking — kees @ 11:16 am

I wrote a Jabber to IRC bridge a while back. It’s currently being used to bridge communication between the #inkscape freenode channel and the inkscape Jabber conference room. I’ve finally gotten around to cleaning up (read: getting configurable variable out of the script into a .conf file) and publishing it.

It’s a bit fragile since the POE/Jabber code seems to explode once in a while, and it doesn’t like losing connections with the Jabber server, but it works most of the time. Several people had asked me for copies of it, so there it is. Please don’t laugh at it/me too hard. Just send me lots of patches. :)

© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

July 29, 2006

encrypted network filesystems

Filed under: Networking,Security — kees @ 11:59 am

I run a machine in a colo across the country from me, and I wanted to have some backups closer to the machine. So I signed up for a NAS login with my provider. Since I didn’t want to leave all my files sitting on their disks in the clear, I built up an encrypted volume over the network. It’s not fast, but it works.

Here were the setup steps:

  1. mkdir -p /mnt/nas-raw /mnt/backups
  2. smbmount //backup.server.at.my.isp/mount.source.path /mnt/nas-raw -o username=myaccount,password=mypassword
  3. modprobe loop && sleep 2
  4. dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/nas-raw/volume bs=32k
  5. losetup /dev/loop0 /mnt/nas-raw/volume
  6. cryptsetup create crypt-backups /dev/loop0 –cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256
  7. Type volume pass-phrase
  8. mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypt-backups
  9. mount /dev/mapper/crypt-backups /mnt/backups

To unmount it:

  1. umount /mnt/backups
  2. cryptsetup remove crypt-backups
  3. losetup -d /dev/loop0
  4. umount /mnt/nas-raw

And then to remount it later:

  1. smbmount //backup.server.at.my.isp/mount.source.path /mnt/nas-raw -o username=myaccount,password=mypassword
  2. modprobe loop && sleep 2
  3. losetup /dev/loop0 /mnt/nas-raw/volume
  4. cryptsetup create crypt-backups /dev/loop0 –cipher=aes-cbc–essiv:sha256
  5. Type volume pass-phrase
  6. mount /dev/mapper/crypt-backups /mnt/backups

By scripting the “remount” steps, I can actually echo the volume password into an ssh connection:

echo ‘my volume pass-phrase here’ | ~/bin/do-crypto-mount
ssh root@colo.machine.isp “/etc/dirvish/dirvish-cronjob && df -h /mnt/backups”
~/bin/do-crypto-umount

Very handy!

Update: I added the --cipher option to include the essiv type, which should be used.

© 2006 – 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

July 28, 2006

airodump channel hopping

Filed under: Networking,Security — kees @ 7:14 am

The “airodump” tool, part of the aircrack wireless analysis suite, is like “tcpdump”, except that it can perform channel hopping. Since channel hopping is a “lossy” way to do wireless sniffing (you’re only listening on each channel for a few hundred milliseconds before moving on to the next channel), it doesn’t make sense to listen to channels that you know will contain no traffic. However, there was no way to specify a range of channels. airodump would either listen on 1 channel or hop across all channels.

I wrote a patch to allow for a comma-separated list of channels to be specified. Now I can tell airodump to spend all of its hopping time on 6, 11, and 1, for example:

airodump ath0 /tmp/ath0-logs 6,11,1

UPDATE: Here’s a patch that does that same for aircrack-ng.

© 2006 – 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

July 27, 2006

I love Open Source Software

Filed under: Multimedia — kees @ 12:45 am

Today, Randy let me borrow his awsome presentation remote. It’s basically an RF remote, whose other end is a USB fob, that acts as a keyboard. The two “next” and “previous” buttons on the remote map to “PageUp” and “PageDown” keys, which worked great for the Crucible and Xen presentation Bryce and I gave this afternoon.

Tomorrow, for my MythTV presenation, I’m using OpenOffice.org, which makes a distinction between “Space” and “PageDown”. “PageDown” goes literally to the next slide, where as “Space” triggers the next animation within a slide. Since my presentation slides have a ton of “reveals”, I need to be pressing “Space”, not “PageDown”. A search of the Logitech page yielded no info on changing the remote’s config, so I opted to using “xmodmap” to get the job done for me.

Using “xev”, I found that the keysym for “PageDown” on my keyboard is 0xff56, and the keysym for “Space” is 0x20. So, I blew away my PageDown key, and replaced it with Space:

echo keysym 0xff56 = 0x20 | xmodmap –

Now the remote works just how I need it. :)

© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

July 19, 2006

Linux World Expo

Filed under: Blogging — kees @ 7:09 pm

I will be presenting! I’ve never been to LWE, so I’m really looking forward to the trip. It’s also another chance to hang out in the Bay area and visit with people. Whee!

© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

Powered by WordPress