codeblog

While I had tried the Alt-F2 “gegls from outer space” easter egg, I’d never done the “free the fish” one. It was fun, but while looking around for how to disable it (”killall gnome-panel” — there is no programmatic way to stop the fish), I found another egg that I don’t think any one has mentioned before. It re-uses the goat from the gegls game:

1. Right-click an open panel area
2. Select “properties”
3. Right-click on a notebook tab 3 times

The Call for Speakers (and registration) for the Linux Plumbers Conference is open! Get those proposals in, register, and come join us in sunny Portland, OR.

The Linux Plumbers Conference was created to bring together the key developers involved in Linux plumbing - the “Linux plumbers” - and give them an opportunity to discuss problems face-to-face, both within subsystems and across subsystems. Participants include invited attendees, speakers selected through an open, competitive review process, and students. Registration is open to the general public as well.
…
The goal of the Plumbers Conference is to solve problems. The conference is arranged as a series of microconferences, each on a topic that is narrow enough to identify specific problem areas and brainstorm workable solutions. Each microconference is led by an expert in the field and organized to encourage discussion and problem solving.

Tollef posted a fun (and short) Zombie mem:

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

I can’t resist.

1. BFG9000: ranged weapon that vaporizes multiple zombies at once. I should be out of the mall before I’m out of ammo.
2. “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys: up beat and a little silly.
3. Jet Li: he could totally handle the zombies within slicing/kicking/clubbing range.

Edgy is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 55 hours, 14 minutes, and 3 seconds on 406 builds related to edgy-security updates I was involved in publishing. These times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc. Comparing to my prior post on this topic, here are the standings for other releases:

dapper: 44:48:24
feisty: 58:49:04
gutsy: 37:06:08
hardy: 86:25:58

Hmm… I think my hardy numbers include devel builds times… I’ll have to sort that out. :)

Thank you Edgy! I will remember you for your wonderful default -fstack-protector.

Apress was kind enough to send me a copy of their new book “Beginning Ubuntu Server Administration: From Novice to Professional” by Sander van Vugt. Overall, I was very impressed with this book — it was well written, filled with applicable examples, covered a wide range of topics, and provided background for people new to Ubuntu or Linux in general. The book was written to Ubuntu 7.04, so there are a few places where 8.04 will make for an improved experience without having been changed too drastically. All through the book I was pleased to see various slightly advanced topics covered well enough to get a reader started down the right path without getting them lost in the details. I think this was especially true in the command line and scripting sections which were great for someone unfamiliar with what can be a daunting experience.

In disk management, a lot of time was spent discussing LVM, which I’m very fond of myself. (Even LVM snapshots were covered!) I have a hard time imagining running any computer without LVM, so it was great to see it get a solid chunk of attention. The only thing I felt was missing from disk management was a discussion of RAID (md). For server environments, I think this is a critical topic. Providing redundancy against drive failure is, I think, even more important than demonstrating how to easily manage partition layouts with LVM.

In filesystem management, basic ACLs were covered as well as quota management. I think quota management is an often neglected part of administration, so I was glad to see this covered. In network management, basic iptables were outlined with good examples. (Hardy’s “ufw” will help make this section even simpler in future revisions of the book.) IPv6 was touched on, though I would have liked to see slightly more details.

Under service management I enjoyed the introduction to PKI, which is critical to understanding the basics of SSH and other services using SSL. The examples for DNS, DHCP, NFS, and Samba were all very well done. I think they make handy references for how to get a network or file-sharing server up and running in short order.

As another Hardy feature to call out, the addition of “virt-manager” will make the Virtualization section on KVM much nicer to deal with.

I took some notes for ideas and corrections that may be a benefit to other readers of this book:

• I personally like suffixing VG and LV names with “vg” and “lv” just to be able to quickly distinguish them when looking at device names.
• Administrators watching long-running “tail -f” output would benefit from using “tail -F” for when log files are rotated.
• In the section on “Finding Files” I was expecting to see mention of “locate”.
• When viewing compressed files: “zless” instead of “zcat FILE.gz | less”.
• When discussing Job Control, I would have liked to see a mention of “screen” for managing long-running processes (kernel compiles, “top”, etc). Not enough people know about “screen”. :)
• While the book was written to Feisty, it would be nice to have a short section in future versions on how to generate and use AppArmor profiles for the various running network services.
• Instead of the manual symlink management for Apache modules and sites, administrators can use the “a2{dis,en}{site,mod}” tools.
• Typos I saw: tailing “sudo” in mysql db creation example, “_netdec” should be “_netdev” in NFS fstab example.

As I mentioned at the start — I think this is a great book for someone either new to Ubuntu server management or looking for simple service configuration references in a single place. Thanks again to Apress for sending me a copy; I tried not to be too biased. :)

As a quick break from software, I spent a little time this evening soldering together my TV-B-Gone Kit. It was way fun to break out all my microelectronics gear. Gave me an excuse to clean up my desk. This thing is the silliest tool ever: it’s programmed with a mess of TV remote codes — but only those to turn off TVs. So, just point at a TV near you, hit the button, and it’ll almost certainly turn off.

For people using VMware, the new Hardy kernel requires updates to the source module tarballs that live in /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/

Grab the three updated tarballs from the “vmware-any-any” tar.gz here. Currently update115 works for me just fine.

I’ve been using xterms forever. Whenever I try to switch to using a terminal with a true-type font, my eyes hurt after a few hours. I’ve tried changing the various font-rendering options, and gone through lots of monospaced fonts — nothing gives the same clarity as the fixed raster fonts. I suspect this is basically the same problem as Icon Scaling. Things don’t work correctly when trying to line up a vector image against hard pixel edges. I wish I could find a workable fix for this.

Breezy is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 18 hours, 49 minutes, and 4 seconds on 108 builds related to the roughly 64 breezy-security updates I was involved in publishing. So far, Dapper is at 132 builds totaling 19:59:40, and Edgy is at 142 builds totaling 23:32:28. These times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the PPC machine, etc. Even if it’s a bit incomplete, I think it’s fun to be able to point to some hard numbers about CPU time spent on Breezy updates. :)

Thank you Breezy! You have housed my MythTV installation very nicely, but now it’s time for some long over-due upgrades…

I’ve been having fun fighting religious battles and confusing people with in-jokes at jyte.com. Other good claims:

• Inkscape rocks!
• Ubuntu is the best Linux desktop
• Duran Duran was neither Duran nor Duran

Or just see what’s been claimed about linux in general. Yay for silly social networking sites! :)

I spend a good bit of time reading CVEs but their entries are plain text, without links associated with their various recorded URLs. I’m annoyed at having to select/paste to load a URL, so I had to go code a work-around. :)

Since MozDev’s “linkify.user.js” was a bit heavy-handed, I wrote up a quick hack based on similar code to only look at mitre.org’s LI tags: “cve-links.user.js“.

Linden Labs released their Second Life client under the GPL, so I figured I’d have a go at getting it compiled on Ubuntu. Three libraries weren’t already packaged, so I threw together some initial attempts at getting them usable (libelfio, libopenjpeg, and libxmlrpc-epi). I think the long-term approach will be trying to convince Linden Labs to use stuff that is being actively maintained.

One big hurdle is audio, since FMOD doesn’t have a Free license. I hope it can get replaced; I’d be curious to hear what Second Life needs from FMOD that some of the other Free stacks can’t do.

So, if you’re in a mood to play with getting the Second Life client running, hopefully my stab at packaging can help (I’ve solved a number of gotchas in the assumptions their build system made), and so far it built:

$ ls -lh secondlife-x86_64-bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 kees kees 34M 2007-01-10 05:33 secondlife-x86_64-bin*
$ ldd ./secondlife-x86_64-bin | wc -l
77

Unfortunately, it immediately crashes when I load it. :)

It’s not quite the end of the year yet, but here are Kirsten’s top 6 books from 2006:

1. The Great Influenza
2. The Devil in the White City
3. Cloud Atlas
4. The Fortress of Solitude
5. It’s Superman!
6. Welcome to Our Hillbrow

(Also, figured this would be a good test of the WP plugin for Amazon, which is very handy. I’m going to see if I can patch it to hook things to my blog roll “Reading” category.)

˙ǝɓuɐɹʇs ʎɹǝʌ ʍoH

‮Unicode is so odd.

At UDS, I learned that I am a poor frozen-bubble player. After getting repeated trounced by pitti, I decided I had to find some way to level the playing field. I was my own worst enemy due to my bad aim, but all the malus (as in, the opposite of bonus) balls were clearly causing me greater pain. I wrote a patch that creates a new key binding “b” to toggle the blocking of malus balls. Using this made things a little more even, and after a week of practice, I was a much better player (and quit using my cheat).

Since frozen-bubble depends on a shared game state between all players, everyone will notice if you’re using a mod like that, since they will just queue up on your malus post:

So be sure you’re playing with people you know. :)

Gib started a meme I think sounds like fun. If you’re one of the first 5 people who comment on this post, I’ll create an original piece of art for you, but only if you promise to offer the same deal in your own blog. (And I urge you to release it under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license while you’re at it.)

I’ll likely be using inkscape to get it done, since I need an excuse to play more with the tile cloner and tessellation filters.

Thanks to Jon, I had to see what public transit systems I’ve been on. They didn’t have Portland’s TriMet, so I sent them their logo. :)

Got at b3co.com!

Like I mentioned before, I’ll be in San Francisco at Linux World Expo next week. Besides presenting, I’ll also be at a Birds-of-a-Feather on “Network, Device, and Environment Monitoring” on Wed (8/16) at 6pm in Room 309, where I’ll be talking about Sendpage. I’ve been told this BoF is open to anyone with an “exhibits” pass which, prior to LWE starting, is free! So, if you’re in the area, come hang out. :)

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!

Every once in a while, I hear something in a movie and yell, “Hey! That’s in a Frontline song!” This time it was while catching a portion of the The Abyss, where a big chunk of gear misses falling on their habitat, and they kind of laugh nervously. Well, that nervous laugh was looped for about for about 30 seconds at the start of “Victim of a Criminal” from Millennium. I found it at about the same time I thought to put “Frontline Assembly samples” into Google, which gave me this page, which is a list of all the samples that they used. Robocop, Aliens, and the one that haunted me for a while before this Abyss incident: Stargate and “send in the probe”.

This is what my brain is filled with: sound effects. Great. :)

After getting about 40 moderation requests a day, I figured I should spend some time finding some anti-comment-spam plugins for WordPress. After digging around a while, I found one that doesn’t require JavaScript, doesn’t perform vision tests, but works just fine for the kind of comment-spam-bot that seemed to have taken a liking to my blog (even though no spam ever appeared in my comments ever…)

I found lr2Spam which has a great setup, but an incomplete final step. I merged it with ideas I saw in the RBL measures plugin, and got some good results. By replacing lr2Spam’s comment_post with pre_comment_content (see the WordPress Plugin API), I was able to redirect spammers away from from my site with PHP’s header("Location: [URL]") technique. (This is what I borrowed from the RBL plugin.) The patch is almost as big as lr2Spam itself (both are very small). Honestly, I’m surprised it works at all. Someone wrote a comment-spam bot that can’t correctly parse a totally valid HTML form, but does correctly handle a 302/Location redirect. Weird.

I thought briefly about redirecting all the spammers to http://fbi.gov/i-am-a-spammer/?ip=[IP] but then realized their requests’ referer header would show my URL still. On further thought, I realized that comment-spam is very different from email spam because the bot has to implement a much larger set of protocol elements. Since they must respect the 302/Location redirect, someone who is getting hit really hard with comment spam could effectively DDoS somone’s link by redirecting to somewhere with big files. Say, for example, instead of using fbi.gov above, I used http://mirrors.example.com/iso/DVD-distro-image.iso. Every spam bot in their network would start a giant-ass download from example.com after hitting my anti-spam system. Ewww.

Implemented early on May 20th, after 4 days, I’ve seen 250 comment spam attempts from 162 unique IP addresses (most in China — maybe they need to turn their firewall around). The volume of spam isn’t big when compared to my daily email spam statistics, but each one of those would have been an email in my inbox, asking for moderation. Interestingly, they all stopped on May 23rd. Maybe they got a clue.

I’ve been catching up on Stargate SG-1 ever since Bryce recommended it. I’d been resisting it, but with no more Firefly, Farscape, or StarTreks left to watch, it was inevitable.

At one point during my catch-up, I realized that I was watching 4 separate time-lines of the show. SciFi was showing new episodes on Fridays, a set of 3-in-a-row on Mondays, and a third chronology running Tue, Wed, Thu. On top of this, Fox(?) was playing re-runs on Fridays as well. About 30 episodes in, I totally lost it, and could not keep things straight. (”What? Where’d Daniel Jackson go? Who’s this guy?”)

To my rescue was my ever-faithful epguides.com to serve as a base check-list for which shows I’d seen already, and the fantastic Stargate Wiki Episode Guide to help me remember which I’d already seen. (They even have full transcripts of the episodes! That’s dedication!)

It looks like very few of season 2 has aired, so I will have to turn to either the library or Netflix to fill the gaps. Once SG1 is gone, I will have to switch my daily exercise routine back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :)

SourceForge migrated to their new CVS server infrastructure recently (due to a catastophic disk failure of the old system), and told everyone that they had to re-check-out all their trees:

Hostname for CVS service
Old: cvs.sourceforge.net
New: PROJECT_UNIX_NAME.cvs.sourceforge.net

This change will require new working copies to be checked out of all
repositories (so control files in the working copy will point to the
right place). We will be updating the instructions we supply, but
instructions that your team has written within documentation, etc. will
need to be updated.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim

would be changed to

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@gaim.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim

With 14 projects hosted there, with potentially multiple CVS modules in each, this wasn’t the best way for me to deal with the change. I had relocated several CVS trees at OSDL last year, so I went digging for my command line to do the updates. I was disappointed they didn’t suggest it in their email, so I offered my solution via their Tracker. Someone else (on Cygwin even) confirmed that it worked for them, and SourceF orge summarily closed the ticket (hence making it disappear from the Tracker where other people were seeking help). I can find no record of a change made to their documentation. In effect, they just eliminated my help (though they did thank me first).

It would be nice if SourceForge ran some kind of forum or Wiki on their site so people could help each other. I’ll have to remember this for the next Advisory Council.

While I can’t log into NetFlix or Amazon with OpenID (or other federated login systems), I still wanted to try it out. The goal is to easily write comments on people’s blogs, edit Wiki pages, etc, all without having to keep logging in every time. So far, so good.

First step was to decide between running my own OpenID server or not. I went with “not”, since there really isn’t an installable OpenID server yet (there are only support libraries, it seems). Since I was given a permanent account with LiveJournal for some XSS testing I did for them, I figured I’d just use their stuff. I wanted to use “outflux.net” as my login everywhere, so I just added two lines to my outflux.net HTML source:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://keescook.livejournal.com/” />

Poof. Done. I used Videntity to verify that it was all working. Nifty stuff.

My only complaint is that it’s not clear how to get an end-to-end secure login. I can log into LiveJournal securely, but the OpenID server they run doesn’t seem to operate over HTTPS. Future study is needed. :)

On Wednesday I attended Bruce Schneier’s short talk about the trends of online attacks. I figure I need to take his talk with at least a small grain of salt. While he has a reputation to maintain, he also works for a security outsourcing company. That in mind, I still like reading his blog, and I enjoyed hearing him talk.

The main take-away from his talk was that attackers are more rarely “hobbyists”, and more commonly criminals. (i.e. there is profit motive rather than an interest in boasting rights.) In the same vein, worms are becoming more sophisticated, quieter, and increasingly effective, while losing their cleverness. (Criminals don’t care if their worm is lame, they don’t care if they ripped off someone else’s worm, they care that their worm is staying undiscovered and is making them money. As a result, whole families of slightly different worms are appearing.)

One thing he said, that I have a hard time believing, and if true is pretty scary, is that cyber-crime profits are now exceeding drug profits. I would love to understand what the sources for that statistic are. Beyond just phishing, beyond worms waiting for you to authenticate to banks before emptying your wallet, there is even small-scale Denial-of-Service extortion. Generally, it’s against places that are themselves on tenuous legal ground, like offshore gambling sites. “If you don’t pay us $X, we’ll DoS you again!” It’s protection money online. Wild.

The market for blackhat exploits is growing. This is reducing the time between vulnerability announcement and exploit usage. Unfortunately, in the Microsoft world, an opposite trend is happening: patch speed is slowing due to their needing to test more and more configurations, staying infinitely backward compatible. At least this has an upside that their patches are generally better and corporations are learning to trust auto-update systems. (And I think this kind of brain-share is actually good for all OS vendors.)

The commoditization (and therefore homogenizing) of hardware and software means that everyone runs the same stuff. Even the criminals. Before, generally only the various corporations had old AS/400 machines and no one really wrote attacks against them. Now stuff runs on PCs.

Overall, the attacks online are becoming increasingly more damaging financially (”criminals are good at what they do”). The volume of attacks come from the open Internet, but the more successful attacks come from inside a private network. More worms are simply waiting for opportunity instead of beating on a network.

While some of the crime organizations have been taken down, there are still large bot networks that are continuing to grow in size even though they have no controller any more. This is truly something out of dystopic sci-fi. I don’t know why, but while I find the idea of full AIs reasonable, and totally non-intelligent systems reasonable, I find half-AI systems really creepy. They just keep doing some semi-smart thing over and over waiting until mommy comes back to tell them to do something else now.

He wound down discussing his worries for the future. He wants people thinking about VoIP security now. (Worms sniff your typing and packets already, soon they can sniff your voice.) He hinted at Digital Restrictions Management without actually saying DRM. (”Who owns your computer?” To which I thought, “I do. This is why Free Software is so important.”)

In closing he talked about security being more about usability than technology. I took that to mean “the Art of security is more about usability than technology.” I can have infinite security by just unplugging something. But that’s not very artful. Towards the goal of successful (artful) security, he wants to see service providers be ultimately liable for the financial damage. He figures this puts the motivations in the right place. It seems like the right thing to me (if credit card companies want to avoid it, it must be good for me) but I suspect there is something hidden deeper that may cause greater harm. I can’t put my finger on it, so for now, I’ll agree. :)

At one point he gave a nice view into his own world, in which he has to go twice a year and disinfect his own mother’s computer of worms. The cobbler’s childrens’ feet…

The end of the session was a book signing (Counterpane gave out gratis copies of Schneier’s new book “Beyond Fear“). I showed my geek by having brought a copy of “Applied Cryptography” for him to sign too. For which he was geek-prepared, and tossed in a cryptogram. Even though he does this for lots of people (Google told me later), it was fun to see it in my book; I wasn’t expecting it.

Since I’ve lost an hour to Daylight Savings Time, I thought I’d record a list of links to Alternate Star Wars Theories.

• Vader is Kenobi (which fell apart after Ep II, though, too bad).
• I always knew R2-D2 is the most important character.
• My personal favorite, to which I am a total convert: Vader is the real hero, C3PO has Jedi training, and Luke is psychotic.

Woohoo! I got accepted to present at OSCon again! I’m really excited about this one, too — I get to present about something non-work-related. The title of my presentation is “DVR Happiness: Gluing MythTV and TiVo together with Galleon“. Here is my proposed outline:

1. Intro to DVRs
• TiVo: have you been under a rock?
• MythTV: learn all about video standards.
2. TiVo Gets You A Lot
• Hacked TiVos can do great things

Is your TiVo a tool or a toy?

• Stock TiVos can do cool stuff too

ToGo: move video from TiVo to PC

GoBack: move video from PC to TiVo

MP3s: streaming from anywhere

Image Galleries: beyond just snapshots

• Galleon Gets You More
• Implements the server-side of TiVo features
• On-the-fly format conversion
3. MythTV Gets You The Most
• Making Tivo recordings available to MythTV

Format conversion

• Making MythTV recordings available to TiVo

Mounting a MythTV filesystem with FUSE

• Making your MythTV remote make noises

Short-cuts with the Linux IR daemon

EDIT: WordPress pisses me off so very much when it comes to lists, indenting, and code snippets. Some day, I will switch to something that just lets me type in HTML and doesn’t try to “fix” it for me afterwards. *fume*

This has got to be the coolest use of an animated GIF ever:

Even crazier, in Firefox, if you right-click to “View Image”, the favicon shown in the tab is animated too! I smell code re-use! That kicks ass. I wonder what level of hell I’d burn in if I made the favicon for my site animated.

Technology is a beautiful thing. Right now, I’m on the passenger side of a vechile purchased in Pennsylvania, over EBay. The new owner is driving. This post is being made via a transparent proxy (via iptables) to Squid running locally on my laptop. Squid then forwards the proxy on to the SSH tunnel I’ve got up, which lands on a server in Texas, where another Squid is waiting for it, and handles the request. The SSH tunnel is set up over a PPP connection on top of Bluetooth to the driver’s cell phone, which is sending traffic via GPRS to his provider. I can hardly believe it works, but it’s actually rather quick.

Additionally, I’ve got my wireless card scanning for networks in kismet, with a USB-to-serial converter plugged into my GPS, with gpsd running, and gpsdrive telling us where we are. (And, of course, we’re downloading maps for gpsdrive via the previously mentioned abomination of a network connection.)

We just finished searching for hotels on the western edge of Nebraska that have free wireless Internet access.

Kick ass. I am such a geek.