SolarScale Blog

Old code from the past

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.

• Here is my implementation of pflogd

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!

Random Hackepedia

This weeks RH is mount.

Sun is no more

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.

News (natally & proteus)

• proteus the main solarscale.de VPS has an uptime of 1 year today, so far so good
• natally, the tunnel/VPN server that I programmed has a fix where the key for 256 bit AES is now full 32 bytes long instead of 16. This may make it stronger from crypanalyses

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is Locate.

Orion's belt led me to it

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.

Hackepedia, making hyperlinks

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

Congratulations Wikipedia

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!

New Project: cryologd

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.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is DragonflyBSD.