School

Car crash 02 - It's just Jack

Being the last few days of our schooling life the school has gladly provided us with some useful talks on Sex, Drugs, Alcohol and Driving. In the three talks we had for the day they used a technique that I was first introduced to in English, and researched a little more about. It's hard sell. Think of the smoking packets that contain the bad teeth or ads that contain gore. This is hard sell and it differs from soft sell because of they way the message is conveyed.

First I would like to thank the speakers for taking the time to come and talk to us, and it does help us. Although the problem I found with all three talks is that it was hard sell. The problem is, it is shown that hard sell does not work for our age group (15 through to 30) as effectively as soft sell.

We were shown car crashes, statistics and the works, however in the afternoon when it was time to go, a large number of people still left the school speeding, music blaring or driving dangerously.

It's a shame to see all the effort of the talks being wasted, and no message being conveyed, so I think they need to work on their act a bit. If I had to make a clear judgement, I think the hard sell technique made a negative effect.

ADSL 2+ and Valve

Wireless/Mindless Internet Point - NaOH

So I decided to get ADSL 2+, at a discounted price of 50% (<3 parents), and I'm loving. Despite the fact that I had to ring up, and had all sorts of problems in their tech support center, People Telecom ADSL 2+ has been awesome so far. The setup was very quick, however they decided to send us the login details via email, after we had lost our internet. Kinda stupid right? Since I don't really trust my modem with being able to handle all that many connections, I decided to turn it into a bridge and let my server do all the work. It's pretty awesome, once I got the kernel compiled right, and iptables done, everything works nice a fast now. I am planing on getting a block of 8 IPs from People Telecom, so having setup like this will be good. Also with the help of Hamzah I got e-mail setup on my server, which is quite a bitch to do usually. After changing from Optus, I can now use port 25 and 80. As another addition I've decided to use Lighttd over apache, just for shits and giggles, and it's pretty damn good.

Now, I really wanted to test out my new Linux router and ADSL 2+, what better way to do it than games. Jack was able to lend me some PayPal monies, and I bought the Valve complete pack, which was 99 USD. It contained all the games I wanted to play, and a few others. (It also contained a few games I pirated and wanted to pay for, since they are awesome, esp. Portal). I would have bought the orange box, but it was missing a few games I wanted.

Other than that, I'm starting the last week of school, so I'm basically just been having a rest from work and school, and just doing things I either enjoy or would like to get done.

Zenoss + gnokii

Zenoss + gnokii - TheSkorm

Zenoss is a wonderful piece of software (once installed) that allows you to monitor devices and programs. It's really nice at keeping a history of events and the like.

It grabs data via snmp (or a few other methods) and monitors them, creating graphs and status reports. It'll even map out your network for you. It's fairly basic software, but it does wonderful things.

So I've wanted to do this for awhile, but now I've got all the bits together. A friend has given me a Nokia phone with a broken screen, and another a sim card. I was able to "borrow" dads bluetooth dongle that he never uses, and hook up gnokii up to my zenoss.

Now whenever a device dies, I can get a sms alert about it. Pretty nice stuff :>.

Amateur Radio Meetup

My APS-13 Antenna and Triband vertical - mts83

On Monday night I went to my first amateur radio meet up. It was really good to see some of the gear, and read a few books on amateur radioing.

I really want to get into amateur radio, however the cost seems kinda high. I'm strongly interested in packet radio which is basically like using the radio as a 56K modem. In some places they have routers, that route data between the radios and the internet, which is really cool.

John showed me IRLP, which links repeaters with internet voip, allowing you to basically call anyone around the world.

First I have to get my foundation lic. and then I have to get some gear. Seems like a very lengthy process, but I'm sure it'll be fun.

73

Openfiler

Openfiler - TheSkorm

So I've wanted to setup a file server for home to backup two laptops, and a desktop machine and to store data like Music and Movies (Mum has the whole Stargate collection now on DVD and I'm thinking of ripping them for a backup copy). Previous servers I've made or setup have been loud, noisy and chew lots of power. This server is actually a Dell Optiplex that was on death row (ready to be sent to the dump) that I was able to rescue.

Hardware wise it's just a 1.8ghz, 512mb of RAM, gigabit network card and 20GB hard drive. I've added a 40GB hard drive and a 320 GB hard drive for the moment to play with.

It's quite a nice and quite server and I have ordered a 1TB hard drive and SATA card for the server, from Jack, which will provide me with a decent amount of storage.

Software wise I've been trailing Openfiler for the server which is an amazing file server bundle that runs on rPath linux. It uses all the new linux hard drive stuff, like LVM and software RAIDs, and has HTTP, NFS, RSYNC, FTP and SMB support for protocols, which is really nice.

The interface for openfiler is just awesome. You can easily add new partitions, and take snapshots of drive. You can manage all the access rights and everything from the web interface. It's really really nice.

It still needs a bit of work, I had to hit the terminal a few times to fix some bugs, add new users and resize some partitions. The instructions for install are a littler unclear, like when your partitioning, I don't think you are ment to partition the parts you want to share.

I don't like the fact it runs on rPath linux and the way it's made only for rPath, as this means that you have to have a dedicated server for files and nothing else. Most of the time my file server will be idle so I may aswell make it do something else.

It'd be really nice if it was just a package like software, like a gentoo ebuild or a deb package. That aside it's really nice software and worth a look at.

As for backup software for Windows Vista, it really does suck. The Vista backup tool tries to backup your whole drive, which I don't want it to do, and it doesn't back up everything, just documents and the like, which is really annoying. On the other Vista machine I've used SyncToy from MS which is a nice piece of software, and so far it has been working well.

I'll trial these and report back at the end of the testing period.

Ekiga

Screenshot-7 - TheSkorm

Last week I have been messing around with Ekiga 2.8 (or something) calling and video calling people. It was loads of fun and it ran well. The interface however was lacking awesomeness for its day and I was really surprised to see a wicked looking GUI on the Ekiga website. This is where my adventure began.

I first tried the released beta, and after figuring out how to compile (which was clearly stated on the wiki, however the documentation included within the package said the opposite) i attempted to compile, which failed, I then tried the latest snapshots which also failed. I ended up getting a combination of the 15th and 17th snapshots compiled, however it would segfault straight away. I also found out the hard way that there configuration scripts are dumb, and all previous signs of old libraries must be burnt in a fire and that make clean doesn't actually work.

I then got some other snapshots to compile, although video support would not work, and it was only today when they released the 3.0.1 beta was I able to get video support working.

I've included a screenshot of me talking to Hamzah, although his Cam wasn't included in the screenshot due SDL (from what I gather). Ekiga 3.0.1 seems more stable and nice to use, and feels more skypey. It also ties into libnotify or libsexy (I can't remember which is which) and does a good job when people are calling you.

Really really nice, and for all you's wondering my sip is sip:TheSkorm@ekiga.net . ekiga.net provides the best steaks in town, erm, I mean they provide the best STUN service around.

Board

Sophie In The Bubble Wrap. - meg_nicol

I'm the idiot who would break into the post office to pop all the bubble wrap.

I'm the idiot who would break into a hardware store to zip all the zippy ties.

Not many days of school left and I'm trying to keep motivated. Currently struggling in Physics, this relativity stuff is horrible. You know the whole "If was standing on a bus that was traveling at the speed of light, what happens if I walk forward" and "If I'm traveling at the speed of light and I look in a mirror what will I see" type of stuff.

I'm struggling to understand and use the provided formulas correctly. Hopefully I'll get this sorted before the final exam -_-.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share what's happening with my life and school.

I'm Pretty Sure I'm Unauthorized

I'm Pretty Sure I'm Unauthorized - llimllib

zzap has posted a very in-depth article on why the proposed internet censorship sucks. I agree with zzaps post completely and here are my issues and thoughts with the internet filtering.

ISPs should provide filtering by law to all customers, however, it should be a opt in case not opt out. Filtering customers, destroys privacy, impacts on security and speed and doesn't work

Filtering cannot stop porn sites from being accessed, and filtering can also trigger false positives.

Filtering provides another place for man in the middle attacks, allowing hackers to gain access to where you go, passwords and usernames by sniffing.

Filtering doesn't work under encrypted connections making is even more useless.

Filtering all of Australia's internet, which is already horribly slow, will make it even more slower. This is no way to create a "world class broadband network".

I love my ISP at the moment, because I know that my data gets from one place to another without being Fold, Bended, Mutilated or Spindled. Packets get from one place to another without going through http proxies or the like.

I can see this ISP level filtering masking my IP and most likely will cause problems with shared sites, that block by IP.

I would like to apologise for this shittyness of this post. It's taken me 30 minutes to write this, and I can't seem to stay focused.

This also goes against the idea's of the Internet. It wasn't designed to be destroyed like this.

Lan Party

img_2950.jpg - TheSkorm

Had a pretty decent LAN Party last weekend. We played TF2, BF1942, CS:S, Diablo 2 LOD and Warcraft 3 FT. The LAN started at 12:00 and went to 12:00 the next day, and the amount of people varied between 2 and 11, although the average was 9 (Damn people needing to work). The flickr stream starts here.

All in all it was pretty good, 8 pizzas, soft drink. Could have done with some more nachos, but meh. Pretty damn good.

When people aren't playing games it's a good chance to trade Creative Commons music and the like. I have 50gb of music now that I'm sorting through. This also gave me a chance to test out the new iTunes 8 and I have to say, it hasn't changed much. It looks a little nicer IMHO.

The LAN also allowed me to test out my new Nvidia 8600GT graphics card, which done wonders. Since my computer naturally runs hot, I under clocked it, and still managed to get over 50 FPS in most games.

This is also the first LAN where I have been able to stop people from using all my bandwidth, by blocking all ports but HTTP, MSN and the like. This stopped torrents and people playing WOW (which I think is a stupid thing to do at a LAN anyway). To do it using my approach you must have a modem / router running and it must have iptables.

Yours will be different depending on the model and brand of modem, but you can have a look at the script I used to block everything but the stuff I wanted.

iptables --delete FORWARD 1
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 6667 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 6667
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 9002
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 9002 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 6697
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 6697 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 443 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 443
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 53
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 53 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp --destination-port 53
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp --destination-port 53 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 80
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 80 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 1863
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 1863 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 21
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 21 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp --destination-port 1863
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp --destination-port 1863 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp --destination-port 3388:3390
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p udp --destination-port 3388:3390 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 3388:3390
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 3388:3390 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 27030:27039 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 27030:27039
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 110
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 110 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 25
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 25 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 465
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 465 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 993
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 993 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 995
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 995 -i br0
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 5900
iptables --insert FORWARD 3 -j ACCEPT -p tcp --destination-port 5900 -i br0
iptables -A FORWARD -j DROP -i br0

The Big Blue

nemo - The_Smart_Snake

So what's the big blue like? It's big and it's blue. This is the only description I can think of for the quick theme I whipped up in blogger. I hope you like it, it feels like a nice change from the red background.

Hi5 goes to the photographer of the photo, it's really nice.

Nothing else to report on really of particular interest.

eBooks

Cybook Gen3 - eBook - PPL 2A

I hate ranting on the internet, because it only gets me into trouble, so I'm gonna keep this bitch session short and simple.

I like to read a good e-book now and then, and I find much better than reading a normal book. I read them on my MacBook, rather than on an EBook reader, as it's cheaper and suits my needs quite fine. I usually download my Ebooks in PDF format as I can read it on most machines without a problem, and it allows for graphics and the such. Where the problem occurs is that out of the three E-books I've read, all of them come in a 2 column format, making it annoying to read. I like the single page format, because it allows me to read continuously without having to scroll back up. I like my font big when I read E-Books.

Also for the really anal retentive people, yes I did write the word EBOOK differently 6 times, err, wait 7 times now.

Last weeks of school

Revenge of the nerds - trashman4130

First day back from a so called 2 week holiday, which I really hated. I hated even more than usual. Over the 2 week holiday I worked for Data #3, for RTSS (Rio Tinto Shared Services) at BSL (Boyne Smelters Limited) for a much large pay than you typical KFC shift. Which is why my blogging rate has declined. It was nice working, compared to the usual grind of school.

The thought of how annoying school is compared to the work force killed me the whole time, although the day wasn't all that bad. For school I have an English assignment that requires reading a biography about a person and then using that info to create a radio broadcast like clip. I've decided to do Richard Stallman, which is the creator of GPL and GNU and stuffes. His Bio is awesome so far and loving it, half way through chapter three and can't wait to read the rest.

I suggest you have a read and check out his driving force to defeat closed source operations.You can get it here It's a really good read and it's released under GPL so you can download it for free :>.

In other news I got a Nvidia 8600GT graphics card, which I've put in my dads computer so I can play these new games, that my Macbooks Intel GPU couldn't cope with. This calls for a LAN party to test it out, which will occur this weekend. We have aircon in the house now, so keeping the rooms cool will be easy now.

Swam in the pool today for the first time this season with a few of my mates. It was good fun and a good cool down. I expect it to get very hot this year.

Over and out.

HTTPS and SSH on the same port

ssh kickz - blueDonkey

I like SSH and I like HTTPS, but some times I want SSH to run on port 443 (HTTPS port) so I can use it to get over corporate firewalls and/or school firewalls, depending on the time of year, which used to mean getting https, taking it up a steep hill and sacrificing it to the gods, while SSH was taking a spa in it's $1.2 Billion luxury apartment.

Although today SSH and HTTPS have become friends with the help of sslh, which allows you to take the best of both worlds and run SSH and HTTPS on the same port with a little bit of haxing.

sslh can be downloaded from http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh.shtml and there is also a perl one, which isn't all that good, that can be downloaded from http://search.cpan.org/~book/Net-Proxy-0.07/script/sslh .

The setup was pretty easy, however I did have a problem that took me longer than it should have to fix. I used my modem to change port 443 on the outside world to port 22 on the inside world and forgot to remove that rule, which ended up confusing the shit out of me.

Problems aside I now have SSL and HTTPS runing side by side without a problem and for a final note, yes this has been the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the last week, not including the job of installing and configuring 27 Cisco 8 port 3560 switches.

No MSN

MSN Butterfly Ladies - Canadian Veggie

I don't mind MSN, I like to use non Microsoft clients, as they have no ads, and they're generally easier to use. I typically used Pidgin, but Pidgin has started crashing on MSN, so I thought it's time to ditch the closed source protocol and start actively using XMPP. The best part is, I use GMail, so I already have a XMPP account and server.

I'm currently using Gajim and I've placed it on the Compiz Fusion widget layer, which makes it even more nicer.

I've also installed a VOIP softphone, however I don't think it'll run all that well through my throttled internet.

Truths

Apple II Code - A Karbassi

So deep down I've wanted to increase my leet points by learning the legendary ASM. While I have learnt a lot of commands and how they work previously, it was mainly for the purpose of working out how a program works and/or breaking it (mmm ASM hacking).

With NASM installed, and a fairly large ebook downloaded, I was ready to go on the journey to increase my leet points. I read A few chapters, about how stuff works, and the basic principals of how computers and memory works, which I already knew was a big part of ASM programming.

I had always wondered how Inputs and Outputs happen in assembly, and I thought this first example was going to show me. To my horror I got (indirect quoting) "It's to hard to Input/Output in ASM, so we just use a C function that we interface with."

My instant response was, why should I bother learning ASM, if it's too hard to interface with Input and Output and requires me to use C anyway. I may as well re teach myself C than ASM.

I'm sure ASM is useful for smaller projects like PIC type of stuff, but I don't have the hardware for that, so I find no point in learning ASM. I might catch up on some C in the near future though.

Macbook

Screenshot - TheSkorm

After a few troubles getting Gentoo I finally done it. It took me about 9 kernel recompiles, 5 fresh starts. Nevertheless the reward is awesome. I know have lots of HDD space to play with, and really fast machine.

That's right, no more OS X or Windows, the software I run on my Macbook, is 100% running on free software. Everything (with the exception of flash) has been compiled for my system.

I've created a few scripts, such as switching the fan speed from high to automatic and back again, because I want my lap cool, but I also want to save battery and not make too much noise.

Everything is working really nicely, except for the intel driver forcing me into 1024x768, instead of 1280x800, unfortunately the new intel drivers break for me so I'm stuck -_-.

I've been taking some time lapse sun sets, and hopefully tomorrow I'll get a good one. Today I set the timer to short, so it was very jumpy. We'll see.

Project Old Box

impdclient - TheSkorm

Striped of resources and money, we tend to look at DIY and recycling to fund projects. In this case, I wanted a computer that could surf the net, pidgin, email, youtube and play music. I hoard junk like some old granny and her records, so I had some stuff laying around to make up a fairly old PC. What I ended up with was, 800mhz, 512mb RAM, 32GB hard drive, Geforce 2 MX 400 (32mb), RaLink RT2500 wifi card, cd burner (which has now failed after the install). I haven't spent a cent on this box, it's just pieces from PCs that would have been thrown out.

You're thinking, 800mhz, that's Windows ME old, there's no way you could possibly do all that on such an old box. Well I can, and I'm doing it right now. Sure it isn't a speedy box, but with Gentoo on it, it accomplishes all this with easy, I can surf, check my mail, IM, irc, and listen to music at the same time with absolutely no problem.

This is with the help of Gentoo. The way Gentoo is made, it's made for speed and performance. No two Gentoo installs are the same, everything is compiled (with the help of emerge) for your PC and you choose exactly what you want installed. The smallest Gentoo install only includes the bear minimums, for the machine to boot.

Sure it's a lot of compiling, but emerge does it all with a breeze, and you just set a few things to compile and goto bed. With the use of CCACHE you can speed up recompiles easily and if you're lucky enough you can get distcc to use other computers to help with the load (I couldn't do this).

The Gentoo install was pretty easy and the thing that usually takes me weeks only took me 30 minutes including compile. Wifi, the Wifi card installed a breeze and it only took me a bit of reading before I worked out howto hook it up with my WPA PSK enabled home network.

I'm using xfce4 as it's lightweight and powerful, and is really nice to use. It's like gnome without the fat. Xfce4 took the longest to compile but it was worth it.

If you ever have the time to setup a full blown Gentoo setup, I really suggest it, it's a really good desktop Linux distro. I wouldn't really use it for servers (I'm a FreeBSD fag) but I'll be using Gentoo a few times in the future.

Now I wanted to share some of my favourite Linux apps:
- MPD (Music player daemon), I finally got around to installing this nicely and it's great to use with gmpc. I also found impdclient (shown in picture), so I can use my iPod Touch to control the music on my nix box.

-gkrellm, As ugly as it looks, it's really nice to have to see stats.

-xchat, has really picked up it's game the last time I used it, and looks like a really nice client now. Still needs some stuff smoothed out

-Thunderbird, Very nice email client.

-Transmission, Perfect for torrents. (sharing linux distros)

-Gimp, great for image editing

A few more obvious ones that I use a lot are, Firefox and pidgin.

Gentoo

Screenshot1 - TheSkorm

I've had a shit box laying around (800 mhz) for a little while that I haven't bothered to use. I usually use it for a temporary server or to mess around with. Since I've started to get back into playing Americas Army, I've wanted to be able to IRC and MSN while I'm dead easily. Sp O decided to setup Gentoo on this box and mess around.

After a day or so of waiting for stuff to compile (<3 emerge, hasn't failed me yet) I have a working box, with xfce4 and that. So far I'm really like gentoo, everything has been easy to setup, and once you become patient and wait for things to compile it's really nice. It's good having only the applications you need, and not any other junk