Dave's Blog

Debian: Update those keys!

2008-05-15T09:15:00.002-04:00

A vulnerability was found in OpenSSL in Debian-based distros, so you'll want to do your apt-get update && apt-get uprade as soon as possible.

You'll also need to update your OpenSSH keys as well. The Ubuntu packages look like they will re-generate all the keys in /etc/ssh.

This bug probably shouldn't have happend, but at least the response has been quick. The same can't be said about certain other software companies.

Rochester Hardy Heron Release Party

2008-04-23T12:30:00.000-04:00

The Rochester chapter of the Ubuntu-New York LoCo will be having the Hardy Heron release party on Saturday, May 3. We're holding it at The Distillery at 3010 Winton Road South and meeting at 1pm at the bar.
If interested, please RSVP to hardyheron@nerdsonlinux.com so that we can get a general idea how many people to expect.
Hope to see you there.

2007 In Review

2008-01-02T15:26:00.000-05:00

Wow, I have been horrible at updating this. I figured I would move this to a full blogspot.com address as my ISP's web space is severly limited.

In my last posting last year around this time, I was debating whether or not to put together a MythTV box. Well, I have and here is my setup: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:BigDaveyL

In October, I attended Ontario LinuxFest, as I could not make it to Ohio LinuxFest this year.

MythTv or not to MythTV?

2007-01-19T20:40:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking of having a MythTV box. Just a few thoughts:

I'm considering using one of my big, ugly boxes for this purpose. This will be ugly in the living room. I'd like a box that runs horizontal so I can easily put it in my TV stand
I have a network connection that comes up through the floor behind the TV. However, I can slide it back though and get it behind my basement TV.
My living room TV is an HDTV
My living room has the receiver, for surround sound. But, it is running out of ports.
No cards that I know of support the Time Warner Digital cable directly.

Ohio Linuxfest

2006-10-02T16:42:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I attended Ohio Linuxfest. Here is the list of topics and presentations I attended:

Mysql optimization
Postgresql
"20 things you can do with Apache webserver"
Openldap
Google and open source
Ubuntu and Gnome
Securing email
"Open source: The next steps" - A talk given by Jon "maddog" Hall

Overall, it was a pretty good conference and woth the 14 hours of driving.

What's Your Beer Personality?

2006-05-05T11:14:00.000-04:00

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world.Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them.When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well.But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What's" Your Beer Personality?

How extroverted are you?

2006-05-04T21:36:00.000-04:00

Your Extroversion Profile:

Sociability: Medium

Activity Level: Low

Assertiveness: Low

Excitement Seeking: Low

Cheerfulness: Very Low

Friendliness: Very Low

How Extroverted Are You?

Open Firmware evilness

2006-04-16T21:29:00.000-04:00

I finally got this beige G3/333 with 160MB RAM to boot off an older Gentoo CD - On to the next problem- trying to get the Open Firmware on the box to point to the right drive/partition and get the best to boot. I spent the better part of the day trying this, but it has been a big pain.

Haven't been good with this thing, have I?

2006-03-28T21:41:00.000-05:00

Sorry, for the one confirmed reader of my blog I haven't update this thing more often. Here's what I have been up to lately:

Gentoo Linux on a Pentium? Yes! I built the system on my main computer, a 2.8 GHz, now with 2.5 GB RAM, mainly because I'm not that much of a masochist. Unfortunately, I fubared the kernel and I am rebuilding it. I did not enable xfs support. I had Ubuntu on these boxes, but the amount of bloat (i.e. unnecessary packages like Bluetooth support) made me switch to Gentoo. Since hard disk space, RAM and processor speed is very limited, I have more value (i.e. things I want vs. things I don't need) per byte with Gentoo.
I acquired a beige PowerMac G3. Trying to get anything other than MacOS to boot on the thing is a pain.
Hard disk failure. Looks like my attempts to revive a disk on one of my workhorse boxes, even using the disks low level utilities. I'm going to have to do some swapping and an OS rebuild.

They killed Edgar Styles!

2006-03-07T20:46:00.000-05:00

How could they?

Ubuntu Network Problems

2006-02-25T21:56:00.000-05:00

I recently decided to install Ubuntu on some older computers just to run some small tasks/daemons.

One odd thing - on one of them, the network wouldn't come up. I do have a work around - I added a line above "iface eth0 inet static". It is:
auto eth0

Moore's Law as an excuse to slack?

2006-01-28T14:58:00.000-05:00

An interesting article was brought to my attention. A paper entitled The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations proposes that it may be more efficient to wait until faster computers can tackle the problem.

The author proposes, that if you have a significantly large computation to do, it may be better to wait some amount of time before the hardware is purchased. Then the computation will take less time (and you may be able to do more work with the hardware than initially anticipated) and still meet a deadline. This may be beneficial to departments and projects where money may be an issue.

However, your boss may not like this arguement.

Success!

2006-01-14T18:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I mentioned that I could not compile gaim-blogger on my Gentoo system. The quick and dirty hack I came up with was to create a symbolic link called /usr/include/cairo.h to /usr/include/cairo/cairo.h.

Argh!

2006-01-13T09:27:00.000-05:00

gaim-blogger doesn't compile on my Gentoo system. It would be cool to update my blog directly from gaim. It appears that there is some missing C header file somewhere, because I see this message fly by:

/usr/include/gtk-2.0/gdk/gdkcolor.h:30:19: cairo.h: No such file or directory

Which obivously causes the build process to puke because there are undefined structures and functions.

Maybe I'll have to do some searching tonight and this weekend, and I won't have to bust out too much C.

Secure those wireless networks!

2006-01-12T20:40:00.000-05:00

I heard about a program last night called EtherPEG. It is a program for MacOS X that sniffs traffic and displays images that go by. Personally, this should scare you if you have an unencrypted wireless network, since all traffic can easily be sniffed.

Back from vacation, folks

2006-01-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't blogged much the last few weeks, but between the holidays and vaction...

Just a few tech observations from my trip...

For you laptop carriers, Royal Carribean's Soverign of the Seas offers wifi access in may places around the ship as well as many public terminals, but getting out to the Internet carries a $0.50/min charge which is probably the most expensive I've ever seen.
At a Hampton Inn, I saw public terminals running Linux (Linspire). Only caveat - these terminals were logged in as "root".
The restored Saturn V rocket at Cape Canaveral is pretty impressive!

Pentium 4 Hyperthreading problems?

2005-12-10T22:28:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was having problems booting my main computer. I had problems booting an SMP kernels with Hyperthreading enabled in the BIOS (a more formal description of the problem is here on the Gentoo Forums). However, Windows XP Professional detected everything ok.

Seems that, for some odd reason, the culprit was loose cables in the back of the box.

Shell utilities

2005-12-05T21:40:00.000-05:00

Linux magazine is running a series of articles called "What's GNU in Old Utilities." Part three deals with cp, mv and ln.

KDE 3.5 and Wiring

2005-11-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

Another "vintage" computer for running Linux has been added to the arsenal. Originally, I thought my power supplies were bad, but it helps if you wire things right. I guess you just got to rtfm.
Another feature neglected from my KDE 3.5 review was "autorun." Whenever new media (i.e. CD, DVD, etc.) is inserted, it prompts you, asking what you would like to do (i.e. play it or open a window showing it's contents).

Wiping out all data on a hard disk

2005-11-22T23:31:00.000-05:00

Recently, I had someone ask me to wipe the hard disk on her old PII Compaq laptop. I wanted to do this in a secure fashion. The UNIX program dd will allow me to write zero's or random data to every byte on the disk.

Since the computer had only 32MB of RAM, many modern Linux LiveCD's would be extremely sluggish. I decided to try a floppy distro called bootE Linux. Download the binary image file. In order to make a floppy disk out of this file, I ran the command:
dd if=bootE-0.20-r2.img of=/dev/fd
will write the image to the floppy. This assumes that the device of the floopy disk is /dev/fd0 and the image I downloaded is bootE-0.20-r2.img.

Next, boot the machine you would like to wipe with the floppy you created. It will boot you into a shell, where you can execute:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
will write zero's to /dev/hda (assuming this is the hard disk you would like to wipe). This will take a bit (patience is a virtue).
For the ultra paranoid, execute this several more times, using /dev/urandom.

After this completes, the drive is completely wiped, and then can be trashed, or partitioned, formatted and your OS of choice installed.

KDE 3.5 Review

2005-11-22T22:02:00.000-05:00

I've been playing with KDE 3.5.0 RC1 on my Gentoo box. A few small things I've noticed:

About the same speed/responsiveness as KDE 3.4
Random freezes when try to logout (but the "Restart" and "Shut Down" buttons work
Different animation in the task bar
Can't seem to get GAIM to play nice with Arts

The experience is about the same as 3.4, but 3.5 is slightly more polished. KDE 4.0 seems to have some new features - a feature list is here