SolarScale Blog

Change is in the air

I've done some changes and I'm planning to do more changes. What I've done is I increased my BOINC load from 1 core (25%) to 2 cores (50%). It will run like this until May.

Why? What's in May?

Well, that is when OpenBSD 5.1 comes out and I've decided I'm going to make OpenBSD 5.1 my host operating system. No more vmware, it won't run on it. Also it may mean no more BOINC so that's why I'm doubling the load now to leave them with something. Also means no more windows 7 vm, and the other vm's that run FreeBSD and NetBSD I'll have to switch over to QEMU. What I'll do is get a new backup harddrive and start converting vmware containers to a format that I can play it back on QEMU. Much of what prompted me to design this thought is that youtube now works with an OpenBSD browser. This makes OpenBSD ready for the desktop for me. And it's not the first time I ran OpenBSD as a desktop, it's just that I had a breather.

Wildcarddnsd fixed on big-endian machines?

Ever since I resurrected my G4 Cube and put OpenBSD on it I was dying to know if wildcarddnsd works on this platform. I copied uranus's configs to it (it's called mars) and ran a few queries. It was then a surprise a few weeks later that I tried an AXFR and it came back as a hexdump in dig. Not good. With gdb then I finally found out what caused the mangled packet, the nameserver and responsible person fields were of length zero, and were skipped in the SOA answer. I traced this to an integer overflow right at program start at the config file parser. Well I fixed this now in HEAD yesterday and in the upcoming release for BETA7 it will be working on big endian machines.

I also tried compiling wildcarddnsd on OpenBSD/amd64 5.1-beta and got a compiler warning. A nice developer helped me out and a second pointed to another possible problem. So I have the fix for silencing this compiler warning but I haven't committed it yet. I want to play with this a little first before I do so I know that it doesn't cause any problems.

My dream Smartphone (Computer)

My dream smartphone would be small like an iphone. It would have USB ports for keyboard and mouse and perhaps a VGA port for external monitor. It would be running OpenBSD without locking or restrictions. What's really important to me is that I can program the OS on this phone. The phone functions can be proprietary without source code but they must be installed in a way that it allows the rest of the system to function with it. Perhaps an asterisk server built-in so that it can do programmable voice mail or something. There wouldn't be a harddrive in the phone but rather an SSD. What's really important to me is that I can develop applications on the phone for the phone, and not have to buy a proprietary laptop to use some application which is the only one that can do so. It may have a GPS and/or Galileo/Glonass/whatever geopositioning chip in it. But this should be readable by an open driver on OpenBSD and through an ioctl into userland or something. I want to make use of the Geolocation too. It should have Wifi and bluetooth and if I want to allow tethering I should be able to program it in. I should be able to compile the kernel on this smartphone and run that instead. Really. I really want this to be MY phone not THEIR phone that I am allowed to use. Currently I have no cell phone at all because what I just described doesn't exist. Hmm how much would I pay for what I just described? Perhaps 400 euros at max.

Removed web mirror on uranus.centroid.eu

You may not have known it but uranus.centroid.eu was serving this blog for well over a year. I have now killed the rsync job and erased the mirror. Uranus will do other tasks in the future, stuff I don't want to go into just yet. Here is an mrtg yearly graph that I was hosting on uranus that doesn't run anymore.

As you can see uranus did quite a bit of traffic every month. (about 15GB per month on average). If you used to go to uranus.centroid.eu to get whatever you can still get it on ipv4.goldflipper.net for the time being.

FreeBSD 9.0 Released and PC-BSD 9.0 Released

The wait is finally over! FreeBSD released its version 9.0 a few days ago and dedicated it to Dennis Ritchie. Here is the 9.0 Release announcement.

Also PC-BSD (which is forked from FreeBSD) released it's 9.0 version. Here is the release pages from its blog.

2.97 euros for Jamaica (iTunes)

Today I bought 5 songs off iTunes. 3 songs hail from Jamaica with the artists Chuck Fender, Movado and Fantan Mojah who I have heard on Youtube long enough to warrant putting some money in their pocketses. The other two songs are from Stratford, Ontario artist Nukky Grissom who was featured on SVPRadio last week. Good stuff. I lived in Stratford for 7 years so I know what he talks about in his songs (especially Small Town which was one that I bought). I can relate. I'm overall happy with the purchase.

Setting up iked on OpenBSD (my story)

I have two hosts. One is a vmware workstation vm called dione. The other is an OpenBSD/macppc G4 Cube called mars. Both are seperated by a router called uranus. In ascii it looks a little like this:

+---------+                +---------+               +---------+
| dione   }----------------{  uranus }---------------{  mars   |
+---------+                +---------+               +---------+
2001:a60:f074::30               X                       2001:a60:f074:5::2

dione# grep -v ^# iked.conf

ikev2 active esp from 2001:a60:f074::30 to 2001:a60:f074:5::2 srcid "2001:a60:f0
74::30"  dstid "2001:a60:f074:5::2" psk "swearword!"

# grep -v ^# /etc/iked.conf

ikev2 active esp from 2001:a60:f074:5::2 to 2001:a60:f074::30 srcid "2001:a60:f0
74:5::2" dstid "2001:a60:f074::30" psk "swearword!"

dione# ikectl ca vpn create
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074::30 create
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074:5::2 create
dione# ikectl ca vpn install
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074::30 install
dione# ikectl ca vpn certificate 2001:a60:f074:5::2 export
dione# scp 2001_a60_f074_5__2.tgz mars:.
mars# tar -C /etc/iked -xzpf 2001_a60_f074_5__2.tgz

dione# ipsecctl -sall
FLOWS:
flow esp in from 2001:a60:f074:5::2 to 2001:a60:f074::30 peer 2001:a60:f074:5::2
 srcid IPV6/2001:a60:f074::30 dstid IPV6/2001:a60:f074:5::2 type use
flow esp out from 2001:a60:f074::30 to 2001:a60:f074:5::2 peer 2001:a60:f074:5::
2 srcid IPV6/2001:a60:f074::30 dstid IPV6/2001:a60:f074:5::2 type require

SAD:
esp tunnel from 2001:a60:f074:5::2 to 2001:a60:f074::30 spi 0x1ee7655a auth hmac
-sha2-256 enc aes-256
esp tunnel from 2001:a60:f074::30 to 2001:a60:f074:5::2 spi 0xa0f22d34 auth hmac
-sha2-256 enc aes-256

mars# tcpdump -v -n -i gem0 -p -X ip6 and not port 22 and not port 9999   
tcpdump: listening on gem0, link-type EN10MB
22:25:09.875931 esp 2001:a60:f074:5::2 > 2001:a60:f074::30 spi 0x1ee7655a seq 24
7 len 200 [class 0x10] (len 200, hlim 64)
  0000: 6100 0000 00c8 3240 2001 0a60 f074 0005  a....È2@ ..`ðt..
  0010: 0000 0000 0000 0002 2001 0a60 f074 0000  ........ ..`ðt..
  0020: 0000 0000 0000 0030 1ee7 655a 0000 00f7  .......0.çeZ...÷
  0030: 9de0 df93 049b bddc 5c94 936c 7352 d89f  .àß...½Ü\..lsRØ.
  0040: 982a 9497 c2a7 3117 930b 853b a69d 89ef  .*..§1....;¦..ï
  0050: 94a0 a7b8 9bce fa26 339b 1845 ad7f 8637  . §¸.Îú&3..E­..7
  0060: 27c0 f679 6eb9                           'Àöyn¹

22:25:09.876728 esp 2001:a60:f074::30 > 2001:a60:f074:5::2 spi 0xa0f22d34 seq 28
1 len 120 [class 0x10] (len 120, hlim 62)
  0000: 6100 0000 0078 323e 2001 0a60 f074 0000  a....x2> ..`ðt..
  0010: 0000 0000 0000 0030 2001 0a60 f074 0005  .......0 ..`ðt..
  0020: 0000 0000 0000 0002 a0f2 2d34 0000 0119  ........ ò-4....
  0030: 3ca6 1eb5 81c0 f64a b5a8 b2c3 b933 c896  <¦.µ.ÀöJµ¨²Ã¹3È.
  0040: fa73 17cd a054 5ff9 151e b781 3b50 5972  ús.Í T_ù..·.;PYr
  0050: 1d7d 2709 7dc8 c36c 8dcc e42b 0c86 e186  .}'.}ÈÃl.Ìä+..á.
  0060: 927b a804 50bd                           .{¨.P½

New Comment System

I've put up a new commenting system and fixed the io.solarscale.de instance for commenting. Hopefully this is useful.

470:1 where my money goes...

Wikimedia has broken off the fundraiser. 1 million donors donated on average 20 dollars for the 470 million visitors that wikipedia gets. My contribution (25 euros) was slightly above average then, I'll keep that in mind for next year. If you donated, congratulations you too support 470 others on wikipedia.

Turning off WPS

According to this article (german) and a CERT advisory the key to a WPA2 network can be broken within 11,000 tries. In computers 11,000 tries isn't much.

I've found and turned off WPS on my parents problematic Speedport W303V Type A router which had it set in the pushbutton method by default. Now it's off. At home I don't use Wifi so that's safe (I have cat5 cable everywhere though).

Happy New Year 2012 everyone.