Computer

Undeadly.org anounced that the (for BSD fans) well known developer Damien Bergamini, who wrote a lot of wireless device drivers for various BSDs, took a break from his reverse engineering efforts and commited some code magic to finally support WPA PSK & WPA2 PSK in OpenBSD. As always, this commit is done on "current", so it will not be available for the next release 4.3, which is basically only a few days away. However, if there are no major issues with this implementation, which from my previous experiences with software, done by Damien, is not very likely, this will be part of the next release 4.4, which will then be published in 6 months.

All enthusiasts, who are not willing to wait until the next release and are capable of running "current" are encouraged to give this a try. Thank you Damien, for realizing this very often requested feature for the OpenBSD community.

Karl Klammer is the German name for that dumb office assistant resembling a paper clip and trying to guess what you are currently doing. It usually starts annoying users soon and gets switched off faster than the Lollipop colors of the MS OS default installation.

Now imagine, Microsoft had developed the worlds most famous editor. Can't imagine that ? Here is what it would look like.

For people, who are still willing to risk getting addicted to vi. Here, is where I found that juwel. But be warned the learning curve is steep !

via XKCD - the funniest comic blog ever (TM)

via XKCD


Actually this is how I feel right now, trying to track my Thinkpad online, while they just packed it up.

+ no data
+ still no data
+ yikes, still no data .......

via XKCD - the funniest comic blog ever (TM)

Ars Userfriendly comic

http://www.wordperhect.net/ allows you to write on a receipt, some old trainticket or whatever you might have in the pocket, online. Nicely drawn and funny to play with, but useless in the end. Requires flash to load.

NOTE: This is for myself rather than somebody else, but you may use it as a starting point when searching for something specific.

Blogposts
http://www.kungfu-hackers.net/index.php?/blog/OpenBSD-on-HP-workstations.html
http://www.kungfu-hackers.net/index.php?/blog/My-Software-Wishlist-for-OpenBSD.html
http://www.kungfu-hackers.net/index.php?/blog/Installing-the-encrypted-file-system-CFS.html
http://www.kungfu-hackers.net/index.php?/blog/Using-the-encrypted-file-system-CFS.html

Articles
http://www.kungfu-hackers.net/index.php?/articles/tracking_stable.html
http://www.kungfu-hackers.net/index.php?/articles/network_tools.html

A friend of mine recently sent me this via MMS.

This shows OpenBSD running on a HP Visualize workstation C3600, which he found somewhere collecting dust.

Not long ago, Debian and Gentoo linux were the only ones supporting these once powerful graphics workstations, more or less broken, with quite a few kernel panics every now and then and no application really working properly.

Now this beast runs happily under OpenBSD, increasing the noise level in their office :D

In case you want to create firewall rules and don't know what type of traffic you have in your network, you will need to find out by sniffing it off the wire. This article outlines a very basic, but also very easy method to summarise your network traffic by looking at the TCP SYN ACK packets. Obviously, this doesn't catch everything you might have in your network, but if you need more, you can easily adapt this method to fit to your requirements.

'Therefore the uncertainty has erroneously been mapped to level of confidence instead of horizontal accuracy'

Mark Minasi is presenting a some features of the new Microsoft OS Windows Vista. He talks about not to use pagefile encryption :

You can encrypt your pagefile

Here's good news for the completely paranoid: You can encrypt your pagefile. Just take my advice…don't. Not unless you want to wait, say, an hour or so every time you turn your computer on while you wait for it to decrypt a gigabyte or so of pagefile.

Since I am so used to encrypt the swap file in OpenBSD, I am asking myself two things. First of all, shouldn't the swap be encrypted anyway ? And the more important thing, what the hell should windows want from the pagefile during the boot process? I can't think of anything useful in the swap at boot time.
So either Microsoft engineers smoked some really heavy stuff, while they were implementing new cool security features or Mark Minasi is simply assuming the worst of them. If you know, which way it is, please let me know.

A while ago, I installed an OpenBSD gateway router for accessing a private network via a single IP address, which inspired me to write this article. Today, this router is up and running flawlessly for 100 days. This is, in my mind, worth noticing. Thanks to the OpenBSD team for providing me with such a decent operating system, that makes my life as a networker so much easier.

# uname -a
OpenBSD gateway 4.0 GENERIC#625 sparc
# uptime
12:07PM up 100 days, 23:07, 1 user, load averages: 0.13, 0.10, 0.08

via XKCD

OpenBSD server full story

>>> becoming the testuser

# su - testuser

>>> creating the encrypted directory (this is where the encrypted content is stored, you will not directly write to this directory). The key will need to be at least 16 characters long.

$ cmkdir cryptotest
Key:
Again:

>>> attaching the the encrypted directory. You will need to enter the
key used during the creation of it.

$ cattach cryptotest
Key:

>>> The directory will be mounted under /crypt/yourdirectoryname

$ ls -l /crypt/
total 4
drwx------  2 testuser  users  512 Apr 24 17:52 cryptotest

>>> It is handy, to have a symlink to /crypt/yourdirectoryname in your home folder in order to easily access it.

$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxr-xr-x  1 testuser  users   17 Apr 24 17:51 crypto -> /crypt/cryptotest
-rw-r--r--  1 testuser  users  473 Apr 24 18:05 cryptodemo.txt
drwxr-xr-x  2 testuser  users  512 Apr 24 17:52 cryptotest

>>> you can now use the attached directory similar to normal
directories. All files and folders will be displayed normally.
>>>> listing and display files

$ ls -l crypto/
total 4
-rw-r--r--  1 testuser  users  28 Apr 24 17:53 testuserstest.txt
$ more crypto/testuserstest.txt
coolio
testing cfs 
blabla

>>>> creating new files

$ echo "Here is the testtext" > crypto/anothertest.txt
$ ls -l crypto/
anothertest.txt     testuserstest.txt   
$ ls -l crypto/anothertest.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 testuser  users  21 Apr 24 18:06 crypto/anothertest.txt
$ more crypto/anothertest.txt
here is the testtext

>>> Detaching the encrypted folder

$ cdetach cryptotest

>>> displaying the content of the encrypted folder

$ ls -l cryptotest
total 8
-rw-r--r--  1 testuser  users  36 Apr 24 17:53 3cf0c57e1d05151c8411060c4df1079571f930e52a540d56
-rw-r--r--  1 testuser  users  29 Apr 24 18:06 4a70ceadb5cd9a19adcca8ae12994c41

>>> Displaying Files in the encrypted folder

$ cd cryptotest/
$ more 3cf0c57e1d05151c8411060c4df1079571f930e52a540d56
somescrambledtext