Evilcoder.org

So as people might have noticed; I did some active things in the FreeBSD region again, special emphasis on VuXML. I did some entries again and showed that I am still here I am also challenging people to work ‘against’ me in this case, please overtake me in the amount of entries; the FreeBSD-Security will surely improve because of that and that means our users are more aware of security issues, have a better chance at running secure applications [ or at least, fixing known issues, the unknown ones are always upcoming ].So far nobody really could get near except for Martin Wilke, who is doing a lot of entries as well; but not that near yet (come on Martin!).Next week [ and perhaps this weekend ] I will do some more entries and outrank nectar@ and after that ofcourse the biggest committer for this simon@ :)Let the challenge begin, and improve the FreeBSD Security!  Continue reading »

written by Remko

Recently I posted some news about EuroBSDcon, but the planet aggregator choked on Python 2.5 so the idea behind it was lost :(You can read about it here , and especially dont forget Tom Scholten’s wiki page  where he placed a few mindmaps of talks he visited, they could be very helpful for you!  Continue reading »

written by Remko

Jikes! I upgraded my fileserver from 6-STABLE to 7-CURRENT. Everything still works fine The only thing that stopped working is my Highpoint controller; which does not yet support 7-CURRENT (hey, highpoint people, please look into this :-)). FreeBSD happily sees this as a raid array though and uses ar0 to get to the data, which means all my data is still accessible etc.Ofcourse to prove this, my dmesg below for my fileserver, and indeed I now have two important machines running on FreeBSD CURRENT, my soekris firewall (5501) and my fileserver. The reason I can do this is because the system is fairly stable already! and has a bulk of superinteresting features like ZFS and better TCP stuff. So please try this at home!

written by Remko

Heh, well yeah a lot of new posts in one go. I found some time to actually write them so lets go :-)I am currently doing a new project in between, recently we disconnected our old VCR player at home. We never used it much and old VHS tapes are guaranteed to break at some point. So we decided to cleanup etc. Now we have just a few (50 or so) VHS tapes lying around doing nothing. Amongst them are a few videos of when my brother and I were young, oh those good old days :p

Since I do not want to loose those videos and preserve them on recent modern equipment, I am transporting them to DVD, which is an timeconsuming job, but seems to work very well so far. The first test I did was with a cartoon of Robin Hood, (A fox in the cartoon version), which looks OK enough on TV, ofcourse it copies the video quality so it wont improve much from that, but at least it's digitally stored now. I need to make sure to regulary copy them over again so that the DVD's remain healthy (burned DVD's will ofcourse fade away at some point). When this huge project is over, we can safely store our VHS tapes in a closet or somethign and use the DVD's from now on.

Now only to persuade my parents to buy an DVD / HD recorder to grab TV broadcasts so that we really do not need to VHS tape thingy any longer

written by Remko

Recently I had some feedback from Lance Spitzner about the Honeynet mirror check tool; he was very happy that it finally worked well :-), we are currently using this on a day by day basis to check the status of our various mirrors. We already dropped a few hosts and added a few new ones, all because of the mirror check tool (or because of the interest ofcourse). So I can safely assume that it is an success so far.

There are a couple of ideas to improve the tool a bit more, like timeout values for alerting so that you are not covered in alerts day in day out, propagating the output to an db so that you might generate more usefull information from it (mostly reporting) and a few more. Ofcourse I want to update the perl code itself to be more cool (it's just very basic at the moment, effective but basic :-)), if you have good suggestions for this tool, please comment on this item and I Will see what I can do

written by Remko

As most of you might have noticed I had been slacking again lately for FreeBSD work. Problem for me is that I need to find a serious way to handle my groups, they aren't too many, but I have a problem giving groups Priorities, because I want to be active in all my regions and not in just one

I think I figured out a way how to handle that now, in front of me is  a little note that devides my time each day, for Secteam, Source committer team, bugmeister team, doc team and doc-nl team. These days will be processed and delt with in a work week (monday till friday) so that I have dedicated time available for those regions. Whenever time permits or inactivity occurs in one of the specified days, I can always do something else (perl coding, maintaining one of the other groups, etc.) I think and feel this will work now that I have visited EuroBSDcon again, this inspired me to do a lot as I used to do :-), now bear with me and give me ideas if you think I should do better at some front!

written by Remko