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Få no ein gong dette hakekorset til å gå rett veg, da.

Ormset i Noreg - 4 January 2009 - 2:45pm


Sidan eg ein gong på ungdomsskulen skreiv ein stil om okkultismen i det tredje riket (veldig interessant emne som viser at Adolf og gutta var enno meir klin gærne enn det ein vanlegvis går rundt og trur, JFGIT) har det irritert meg litt kvar gong nokon liksom skal bruke svastikaen som symbol på nazismen - og så klarer dei å få retninga feil veg. Nazistane sitt hakekors roterte altså motsols, IKKJE medsols, slik som hakekorset i denne reklamen. Greitt nok, ein skal kanskje ikkje forvente all verda av nokon som lager horror-komedier, men likevel

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Bambus-sverd eller shinai - ikkje eit fullverdig sverd.

Ormset i Noreg - 2 January 2009 - 1:52pm

Dagbladet er i gang med sine tabloide saker igjen, krigen på Gaza har vel blitt kjedeleg allereie. I saka om den utviste fotballspelaren som kom tilbake med eit sverd har dei brukt eit bilete av Prins Charles som held eit bambus-sverd, eller meir rett ein shinai, som illustrasjonsfoto. Biletteksta er "Prins Charles og kona Camilla med et sverd prinsen fikk i gave i Japan i oktober." Det hadde jo vore kos om "journalisten" i etterrettelighetens namn hadde orka å gjere dei 30 sekunda med research som eg gjorde, nemleg å søke etter "prince Charles japan sword" på Google Images og dermed finne ut at nei, det er ikkkje eit ordinært sverd, det er bambus - og han leverte det tilbake etterpå.

(Bilete frå Wikipedia)

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The secret CLI of the SRW2016 switch

Nicolai Langfeldt - 31 December 2008 - 4:23pm
I wrote earlier about my new switch. I've now gotten time to play with it - and started testing munin with it. Munin now has a very nice Munin::Plugin::SNMP module to support SNMP plugins - and just minutes ago I managed to verify that it works correctly with authenticated SNMPv3. My main problem was that I didn't specify '-l authNoPriv' on the snmpwalk command line. When I tried the snmp__uptime plugin with SNMPv3 configuration it worked at once. I spent *hours* figuring that out.

It turns out that the web view for the switch really only works with IE on Windows (not even Firefox on Windows) and even uses a ActiveX plugin. This sucks. BUT, the switch has a s3cr1t cli! Firstly telnet to the switch and enable the ssh interface by navigating the menus.

Then ssh to it, log in on the screen and at the menu screen press ^Z. You get a ">" prompt at which you can type "?" or "help" or "lcli". Lcli will ask for your username and password again. And then you're in a IOS look-alike cli interface. There is a wiki for it here with some articles on different things. It can clearly benefit from your contributions.
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SHADOW IDS

Edward B Fjellskål - 29 December 2008 - 1:51pm
This post is mostly for the archive. When digging into the history of Network Intrusion Detection Systems, I found that SHADOW was the first open source IDS out there to my knowledge. I looked around for the source code, but found it hard to find the latest version (1.8). I finally got it, and here it [...]
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Pulse-audio rant

Nicolai Langfeldt - 25 December 2008 - 1:05am

I have always found that audio works better if I disable sound servers. So in KDE I have always disabled artsd. In F10 everything seems to be compiled to first use pulse-audio-server (se amazing architecture diagram on the right), a gnome desktop sound server, and then, perhaps, the ALSA device driver. After my upgrade to F10 it was first only half installed and impossible to get working. After intensive use of strace and google I figured out that installing pulse-audio-utils and rebooting to reset whatever erronous state the machine was in fixed that.

Now that I got Amarok working too I finaly found that everything but the flash plugin in Firefox supports pulse-audio. Wouldn't play Money For Nothing off YouTube. Somehow flash and pulse-audio/amarok excludes each other. Quitting Amarok (small click in the speakers as it shuts down - I've not heard that in ages...) and restarting Firefox took care of that, but what a bother.

Out goes pulse-audio:

# rpm -qa | grep pulse

Find list of offending packages. Then:

# yum remove pulseaudio-libs-glib2 pulseaudio-core-libs pulseaudio

And yet again Alsamixer will show a sane selection of mixer levers. I'm probably some kind of dinosaur but why are the young 'uns keeping up this crap? ALSA is all we (I) need! Go away! In the future George Bush will be dead (he said so himself) and the rest of us will use laptops. We don't need no steenking network sound daemons.
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Mp3 support for Amarok in Fedora 10

Nicolai Langfeldt - 25 December 2008 - 12:15am

I recently upgraded my one Fedora machine to f10. Being a KDE user I was forced to switch to KDE 4 on yet another machine. I must say: f10 with KDE is very nice looking. I've also been forced to this with Ubuntu 8.10 (U810). The KDE 4 in Ubuntu 8.10 is not as nice looking - mostly thanks to the way cool solar background image in f10.

And that 3D acceleration works on my f10 box (old ATI card) and not on my U810 machine - for reasons unfathomable to me. So finally my KDE has native fadey and wobbely windows without requiring the ingestion of intoxicating substances. Clearly the twenty-ohoh's have reached my desktop too.

Which just leaves me with the need to make my point: F10 comes with Amarok 2. As usual mp3 is not supported but the old ways to fix this are obsolete. Working instructions for f10 was not so easy to find. The Fedora Wiki directs it's readers to buy a gstreamer plugin to enable mp3 playback.

In the end I found instructions for getting the support from rpmfusion - yet another addon repo for Fedora. I had to do this:

# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

# yum groupinstall sound-and-video

To paraphrase Dire Straits (first big release on CD way back then): All I want is my MP3! --- I have no idea which one - or ones of the packages were needed to fix the mp3 support.
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All I want for Christmas is...

Nicolai Langfeldt - 24 December 2008 - 11:17pm

Today (24th) was Christmas in Norway. Just one of the ways Santa manages to get more time to deliver the packages - I'm sure he has lots more coping strategies.

My wife and I are building a house. It'll be done come summer (the roof is on now, roofing tiles and all :-). So I've started to plan ahead for the machine room. The house will have pretty good wiring potential - we'll be able to wire at need (if I have forseen our needs and specified sufficient tubing for wiring). So next obvious need is a switch. Need one with management, VLAN and SNMP support of course; to be able to do interesting things. So my Christmas gift to myself is a Linksys SRW2016, a 16 port 10/100/1000Mbps switch. Way cheap. The management is of the "webview" flavour, but what the hell, it was cheap at the price and has good capabilities. The VLANs will enable me to use as little wiring as posible. The SNMP support will hopefuly motivate me to make Munin a fully fledged MRTG killer (it's important to have dreams! :-) I'll just have to cope with the "webview", whatever.

Best of all, it's fan free and rack mountable. In a few months I'll have to find a cheap 19", 80cm-1m deep rack. If anyone in the Oslo (Norway) area has a rack to spare please write (or call or SMS or MMS)! In the mean-time I have a toy :-)

God Jul!
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Basic munin plugins for Snort

Edward B Fjellskål - 17 December 2008 - 11:45am
I dropped by the snort forum and couldn’t keep my hands off.. Here are some basic munin plugins for snort using perfmon (Enable preprocessor perfmonitor in snort.conf) The snort.conf entry should look something like: preprocessor perfmonitor: time 300 file /your/path/to/snort.stats pktcnt 5000 (Read the snort docs for more info on performance issues etc.) Drop Rate: http://download.gamelinux.org/snort/snort_drop_rate Pattern Matching: http://download.gamelinux.org/snort/snort_pattern_match Traffic speed: http://download.gamelinux.org/snort/snort_traffic Alerts: http://download.gamelinux.org/snort/snort_alerts Avg KBytes/pkt: http://download.gamelinux.org/snort/snort_bytes_pkt Avg Pkts/sec: http://download.gamelinux.org/snort/snort_pkts Edit any [...]
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Linux and Brother MFPs

Nicolai Langfeldt - 12 December 2008 - 8:03pm
I've spent some time at my parents' lately. My dad has a huge beast called Brother DCP-9045CDN in the basement office. It's a "MFP", or multi-function printer. It's a scanner/colour printer combo that can also copy. It has a 35 page automatic paper feeder tray.

Ages ago when multifunction devices were introduced it was the age of "winprinters" and "winmodems" - dumb printers and modems that needed pretty advanced and hardware close drivers to work. The multifunction devices were exactly the same. Some of these worked with Linux but everyone were better off avoiding the win* hardware. Winmodems have since gone the way of the dinosaur it seems. I've not researched MFPs in general but this Brother device is very Linux friendly. So friendly is that Brother provides drivers in both RPM and DEB formats.

I'm plesantly surprised and happy :-)

Looking into this device I found that the printer supports PCL and BR-Script. BR-Script seems a very capable Postscript clone. No need for downloading drivers: just open your CUPS (the Linux/Unix/OS X printer software) configuration interface and configure it as a br-script brother device. This printer has the IP address 192.168.2.45, so I tell CUPS the printer URL is lpd://192.168.2.45/AUTO/ (does anyone know what the IPP URL for these devices are?) CUPS has a good set of Brother drivers and I selected the one described as "Brother DCP-8040 BR-Script3". Once set up it printed at once.

To use the scanner I needed to go to Brother.com and follow the links do support/download drivers and select Linux. I downloaded the .deb package, ran dpkg -i on it on my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) machine. I guess if I hadn't fiddled with this Firefox would have run a GUI installer on the package for me so I just would have had to click "OK". The package contained SANE drivers. SANE is the standard scanner framework on Linux. I just had to run "brsaneconfig2 -a name=dcp9045 model=DCP-9045CDN ip=192.168.2.45" as root - very clearly documented on the site. Then I ran "kooka" (KDE scanner program) from the KDE menu, it asked me what scanner I wanted to use, I selected the Brother one. Insert paper in the scanner press "scan" and it just worked.

*grumble* When Linux is as easy as 1-2-3 - where is the fun in it? >:-)
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Neonode goes bankrupt

Nicolai Langfeldt - 11 December 2008 - 10:47pm
If you read my previous posting about the current state of phones you may have been worried for me. Or not. I ended up getting a Neonode N2. For the size, not for the feature list. The feature list is sort of lacking, but they made up for it by very nicely and thoughtfully solving a gaggle of other things.

The one item I've ever owned that got the most "what the hell is that?" or "that's some small phone!" comments. That quite popular phones were this small around 2001 is clearly forgotten.

I like it for it's logical and direct interface. I would have bought their next model. But they went bankrupt. I wonder where I'll have to turn for my next phone.
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rudd-o

Per Andreas Buer - 8 December 2008 - 9:07pm
perbu@thimk:~$ GET -Used http://rudd-o.com/ | grep Varnish X-Varnish: 301823638 perbu@thimk:~$
Who would have thunk it?
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Sharifs geniale PR-kupp?

Ormset i Noreg - 8 December 2008 - 8:16pm

Eg er vel ikkje heilt oppdatert på denne saka, men sidan eg har fått ho i trynet via nettavisene såpass mange gonger lyt eg nesten kommentere litt likevel.

Dei reiv altså den gamle hopp-bakken i Holmenkollen. Ein skulle tru denne var eigd av ein eller annan offentleg instans. Skimuseet ligg visst like i nærleiken av denne hopp-bakken. Det burde vere nærliggjande å tru at skimuseet var interessert i den her "diamanten" - altså huset på toppen av bakken, og at dei stort sett berre kunne heise han ned, sette han på ein lastebil og gje den bort til dei som så kunne ta vare på minnet om Holmenkollen, som visstnok er ein stor del av norsk idrettshistorie.

Kvifor i all verden kunne det da ikkje det vere ein del av kontrakta med entrepenøren at skimuseet skulle overta greiene? No ser eg at entrepenøren la "damanten" ut på ebay, der han vart kjøpt av Tommy Sharif, for så å bli gjeve bort til Kultur-departementet som så ga den til skimuseet…. Veldig snodig opplegg.

Faktisk så snodig at ein skulle tru det var enno eit PR-stunt frå Tommy Sharif si side! Ein mann som kan kjøpe ein bil til 7 mill for så å lage ein genialt regissert føljetong med stadig forvikling rundt grøftekjøring på Rudskogen og tilbakekreving av bil og manglande økonomisk oppgjer vil utan problemer klare å få til noko slikt som dette diamant-stuntet også!  Dagens dårligste konspirasjonsteori, sjølvsagt, men ein veit aldri med Mr. Sharif

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Basic discovering of #BAD THINGS# on your *NIX system…

Edward B Fjellskål - 8 December 2008 - 2:32pm
You might think that you are safe, but something might be lurking on your system… There are several ways to protect you from being 0wned by 5kr1p7 kiddies or more 1337 crackers. But still, your system might get 0wned, and you might not know it… First, you should have a system that can update it self with [...]
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Norways largest online newspaper rickrolls all it’s readers

Ormset i Noreg - 1 December 2008 - 2:18pm

However subtle, it must still count as a rickroll. The actual rolling is performed by inserting the response header X-Rick-Would-Never, with a content of "Run around and desert you" or "Give you up".

How to test on Mac OS X or Linux:

oo@probo:~$ curl -s  –head http://www.vg.no | grep X-Rick
X-Rick-Would-Never: Run around and desert you
oo@probo:~$ curl -s  –head http://www.vg.no | grep X-Rick
X-Rick-Would-Never: Give you up

Kind of hilarious, imagine all the hundreds of thousands of people being rickrolled every single day!

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Making ones own modules in the Metasploit Framework 3.3-dev

Edward B Fjellskål - 1 December 2008 - 7:59am
I have been spending some time, digging into the Metasploit Framework the last two days. I first downloaded Metasploit in the beginning of this year, and simply used/tested it at home or in the lab at work. Metasploit is under rather rapid development, and I don’t know how the lads developing Metasploit, have time too [...]
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tar vs. dump

Per Andreas Buer - 23 November 2008 - 1:29pm
Some people claim dump is irrelevant. Linus Torvalds claimed at some point that dump was a relic of the past. The real issue was that there was no way in Linux to synchronize a file system at the time due to a silly bug in the kernel.

Well, a lot of people still find dump a useful tool. Its easy to use and its fast. In fact its really fast. tar and just about every other backup tool accesses the filesystem through the directory structure. The filesystem on disk is not ordered in the same way as its directory structure and the result is a lot of time spent seeking. dump opens the underlying device and accesses the data in its native order.

I ran a primitive benchmark just now:
  1. sync the filesystem (an ext3 filesystem on a encrypted volume).
  2. flush out the page and dentry caches (echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches)
  3. run the backup
I did this for four different backup jobs:
  1. full backup with tar
  2. incremental backup with tar
  3. full backup with dump
  4. incremental backup with dump
The results:
resultsCommandTimetar cf - /home/perbu37m 55star --after-date 2008-11-01 -cf - /home/perbu
 3m 59sdump -f - /dev/vg0/perbu13m 22sdump -f -T 'Fri Nov 01 00:00:00 2008 +0100'   /dev/vg0/perbu2m 22s The results are quite clear. Dump is far superior to tar performance-wise.  A lot of sysadmins have problems making the backup stay within its window and dump is a very useful tool to those people.

I would guess that on a SSD the results would more or less be the same as the seek times are more or less zero. If someone gets me an SSD I'll make a post abount it. :-)

However, there is a price for this performance. If your filesystem is very active there might be changes that are not yet flushed out to disk - these data might not be backed up completely. To be 100% sure everything is backed up you might want to take a snapshot of the devices and dump this.For a personal computer however, the risk in negligible.

Happy dumping!

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Kva anna kan ein eigentleg forvente?

Ormset i Noreg - 21 November 2008 - 7:11pm

Etter ein lengre føljetong med massevis av oppslag i media kjem det no fram at eit bilete som viser den nakne kroppen til Mauseth oppe i ein båt full av fisk har hamna på ei pornoside på Internet.

Agnete Haaland i Norsk Skuespillerforbund seier til VG at "- Jeg var ikke klar over dette. Vi trodde faktisk ikke dette bildet hadde blitt spredd. Det er veldig beklagelig og mest av alt trist. Dette er dypt krenkende for Gørild. Ligger det der, kan det også ligge tusen andre steder"

Og ja, SELVFØLGELIG ligger det ute masse plasser. Dersom du verkeleg trur at dersom du let nokon FILME deg naken så vil det aldri komme ut så er du egentlig i overkant naiv - kontrakt eller ikkje kontrakt . Og når det i tillegg er ein film som du faktisk veit at skal både på kino og video-marknaden så er vel ikkje naiv spesielt dekkjande lenger når du framleis synes det er fælt at den nakne kroppen din befinner seg i det offentlige rom.

Gøril Mauseth var i alle fall i 1996 ei rimelig sprek dame, og ho burde heller feire at ho har sett så bra ut ein gong enn å sutre over at folk har sett henne uten klede slik som ho gjer no.

Medierådgjevar Beate Barth Nossum seier til Dagbladet at "Hennes måte å forholde seg til bildene på, er med på å eskalere sakens interesse på den måten hun selv ønsker å unngå" - og det trur eg nok er heilt rett

Eg er lei av å lese om dette, håper media slutter å piske denne daude hesten her snart.

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Wrapping an iPhone script in beautiful colors

Ingvar Hagelund - 21 November 2008 - 5:20pm

I found somebody had got perl in a more or less usable state on the iPhone fw 2.x. So I was able to make my calendar sync script work again. From the command line. Now what about wrapping your shell or perl or [insert your favourite scripting language here] script with a beautiful splash screen and an icon to start it from the SpringBoard.

Easy! You need

  • A graphic designer, who can produce
  • an icon.png, and
  • a splash screen saved as Default.png

Stuff these, (no, not the designer) together with your somethingnice.pl in a new directory /Applications/SomethingNice.app. Than add an XML file called Info.plist. There’s a boilerplate below, shamelessly stolen from a reply on this blog post. Finally, use for example BossPrefs to respring, and you’re done. Tap the icon and watch the splash screen while the script runs in the background.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key> <string>English</string> <key>CFBundleExecutable</key> <string>Nameofscripthere.sh</string> <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key> <string>com.authorsname.ProgramName</string> <key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key> <string>6.0</string> <key>CFBundlePackageType</key> <string>APPL</string> <key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key> <string>1.0.0</string> <key>CFBundleSignature</key> <string>????</string> <key>CFBundleVersion</key> <string>1.0</string> </dict> </plist>
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Henning Mankell: Kennedys hjerne

Ingvar Hagelund - 21 November 2008 - 5:03pm

En middelaldrende kvinne kommer hjem fra arkeologiske utgravinger i Hellas, og finner sønnen sin død i senga. Politiet antyder selvmord, men det viser seg at det kanskje ligger en kriminell handling bak.

Dette er egentlig en bok om det svært viktige, og alt for ofte glemte emnet her oppe i Norden, Afrika og AIDS. Det virker også som om den er skrevet av en sinna forfatter som har kjørt for mange flyturer. Han forsøker å tegne et bilde av en fortvilet kvinne som har mistet sitt eneste barn, men han klarer ikke helt å gripe meg. Det blir litt for påklistret. Og så kunne jeg tenke meg en mer lukket avslutning av boka. Terningkast fire eller så. Ikke Mankells beste.

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Metasploit Framework 3.2 Released

Edward B Fjellskål - 19 November 2008 - 3:46pm
Today, H.D. Moore announced the release of The Metasploit Framework 3.2. You can get it at http://metasploit.com/framework/. There are lots of cool new stuff in this release, and the best part might be that its now provided under a true open source software license (BSD). Read the whole release note here.
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