So, I just returned from Tunesia with Denise and we both will be flying out to Canada within 2 days to visit BSDCan. We will be joining Ed Schouten (mpsafetty, facilitated by Snow BV) and Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson in the plane towards Canada. Denise, Ed and myself will be flying under the Snow BV waiver, to show a bit of presence there 
Ed will also be doing a talk, and I am sure that will go just fine.
BSDCan updates to follow when possible
Well well, All my services are migrated from the We-Dare colocated facilities to Germany, where I obtained a couple of accounts through hetzner.de, delivering me faster machines, more bandwidth, better agreements etc, for more or less the same price. I found myself a fool if I wasn’t going to persue this. So my personal colocated services and JR-Hosting colocated services moved over to Germany now, residing on dual core machines with a bit more ram then before, a lot more diskspace, and better bandwidth agreements.
Everything had been moved over now; so if you spot something interesting, please let me know so that I can fix it.
Sadly this will also call the end of the days for a couple of websites run by friends of mine, whom didn’t want to move over to Germany, so they will be resting in peace soon (since the contracts will be terminated at We-Dare), they are www.grunn.org, and www.elarial.com , with all attached subdomains with them. I think the three of us learned a lot with those mentioned websites, and I would like to thank HuMPie and Kees (Elarial founder) for their continues support and trust in me maintaining our shared colocated machine. I’ll post updates about the new machines soon (in the my machines list) and mark the soon to be dismantled onces as *A(rchived).
On a work related note: I obtained my CCSA exam today. I passed with 81% out of the required 70%, so this is a nice start of the weekend!
So, Saturday and today I spend a bit of time updating my honeynet check mirror application, which retrieves information from various mirrors to do an educated guess on when the mirrors did a last sync (all in perspective ofcourse because it doesn’t tell the actual status, but at least it’s a guide, and if properly done, we can see what happends).
That ofcourse doesn’t mean the tool is honeynet only, you can easily change it for your own needs to enlist several own mirrors etc. It’s just that I named it for the honeynet project: check_honeynet, one could argue to name it “evil-mirror-validator” or something (evil- are prefixes of most of my projects).
Anyway: back to the discussion: v1.7 has a new way of parsing configuration records which is rather straight forward. I will be implementing the same for 2.0 (which is actually just a continued development on top of 1.7). This makes use of the Config::Simple module, which enables me to write it all ini-style based (it was already like that, but then resolved more ugly then it is now).
If you browse to the downloads section, you will find it there, with a published web-frontend and so on. If you have any comments please let me know. From what I saw from my local tests this just works fine.
For 2.0 I will be issueing a seperated statistics file, which I will write ini based (from the application) to gather statistics about [ok] [bad] [banned] hosts. This way we can more selectively send messages to the bogus mirror, and even ban them (which could result in an automated removal from the main site for example) if they trigger the (adjustable) thresholds.
Hello,
It was a time ago already that I posted some updates to the site, I had been very busy with work and things around that, so E_NOTIME to bring in updates. Because I dont see that change anytime soon, I’ll stick with some Technical Contributions to the internet. I am playing a lot with Checkpoint at the moment, and I would like to document some trivial things, as well as some other things that are not as trivial as they seem. I know that others can use the information (hence even Elsevier contacted me recently to help write a book about Checkpoint NGX) so lets try to share and document it properly.
In the menubar you can see that I moved a lot of technical items to the “Technical” menu, I’ll place nice information there. I will probably bring in a seperated category for Checkpoint under the FAQ as well so that it’s even easier to spot.
I am also writing up more for FreeBSD in the near future (if time permits) and I am pondering in documenting a few PoC’s that I did recently.
So expect information back on the board soon, but not regarding my private life anymore, I just dont have enough time to do so.
Allthough I am a die-hard FreeBSD enthusiast, lets congratulate the NetBSD group with it’s 15th anniversary!
FreeBSD and NetBSD always have had a friendly competition with regards to implementing new technology, I hope we can both learn and adopt from that for at least the next 15 years
For more information about the NetBSD Operating System: www.netbsd.org
For more information about the FreeBSD Operating System: www.freebsd.org
And another version had been released; 1.6.2. This contains updates to the mailer code, from Net::SMTP to Mail::Sendmail (as suggested by Richard Arends <richard at unixguru dot nl> (one of my collegues)). This made the script capable of sending out emails in case there were problems, which didn’t work very well in the previous release. Well it did at my host, but apparently Lance’ host got into troubles with this. Please test and report to me when things are not working. You can find the latest script here. Continue reading »
Hi there, Just returned from holidays a couple of days ago and already a new version of the honeynet check script. I had enough time while the girl was showering to rewrite some parts (ofcourse I rewrote some parts at home as well). It finally evolved in a new version called 1.6.0 which offers different options etc. The major changes taken from the download item:
"
There are a few changes though:
- It checks for version numbers now,
although that needs cleanup and adjustment, but now we can check
whether the configuration file is good enough to process for the
current version of the script.
- The email handling had been improved to actually work (could be important ;-))
-
The mirrorprobe parse part had been improved to work with a new style
(it is also generated in human readable format for the administrator
now; both are in the same file as before). This also prevents bogus
output to match so that we can actually check the real status instead
of checking strange output.
- Major cleanup of the code, I cleaned
up the code and structurized it as much as possible. Parts were
rewritten but the old foundation still holds.
"
Please click here to find out more about the script.
Lance Spitzner requested some additional features for the check honeynet script which I implemented. To sum up: Fetch the mirrortime of the specified mirror, convert a timestamp into human readable time, or do both things in one go. You should really checkout the script when you have the possibility:) Continue reading »
So, I have an active weekend again! :-). Friday Luca was at my place and we decided to redo the backgarden with the three of us (My father, Luca and myself). Luca loved the broom and seeing everyone work in the garden, he loved it when we gave him the opportunity to helpout, which resolved in a very neath and clean path behind our garden (it was almost a jungle if you would have seen the mess). So very productive, luckily there was not much sun since that could have spoiled all the fun. We also went to see my grandmother and she liked seeing Luca again. Four generations with eachother at that moment. Very beautiful to see. Especially when Luca hid in the closet again (he seems to like that, he can be very silent when he does so and does not move) :-). When I brought him home there was no one at the house yet, but before I had my mobile, his grandparents were already driving up the lane so that was a great timing :-)Yesterday my dad and I redid the front garden, removed all junk and cleaned the path in front of the garden, I also took the path of both my neighboors and it looks very clean now I liked it.Today my dad and I will cleanup the backgarden itself, so that we match the path behind the garden. It will be a long day today hehe, we also noticed that probably the weather will change, so we hope to be done before the weather is going bad.And last but not least; I worked on check_honeynet and it seems to finally work now I got some weird little bugs which I will resolve on the site later on today, but they were fixed now. Lance used the script in production and we removed some outdated mirrors already. We also got some feedback which was good! And I got feedback from Arjan de Mol for the hashes I use, I will probably implement those today. For my FreeBSD items please see my “FreeBSD blog”.I am pretty sure that I have a rather big announcement to make in the near future… Continue reading »