Centroid.EU Blog

OpenBSD 5.2 Release day!

November 1st, 2012

Today OpenBSD 5.2 gets released. Because it is headquartered in Canada the announce may come a bit later as here in Europe we're a few hours ahead of them. Here is the release page, it has all information that you need to download or order OpenBSD 5.2. I personally have used and bought OpenBSD since the 2.5/2.6 days where my personal OpenBSD workstation was called geeklab.globalserve.net in 1997. Today OpenBSD is much more secure than it was back then which is good since OpenBSD focuses on security (but not just! but also functionality and openness). Why is it important to be secure, yet functional? Well when you're faced with securing something often you disable the service completely which is the opposite of functional. In OpenBSD services are secured by a multitude of attack prevention mechanisms. You may want to look at strlcpy/strlcat which was among the first changes that OpenBSD did. And then there is W^X (W xor X) and ottomalloc which are supposed to prevent stack and heap overflow attacks. Before I bore you, I'll just say "It's celebration day!" and leave you with that. Finally congrats to the OpenBSD'ers who made it all happen.

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Halloween Germany 2012

October 31st, 2012

Hooooooooo! Hooooooo! Scary movie! No! It's Halloween in Schweinfurt. Here is some pictures, including our first trick'o'treaters.

These guys look pretty scary!

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Big Donation to OpenBSD

October 28th, 2012

OK, this is the big announcement, it's a bit early but I need to visit my bank tomorrow so I want to give them the transaction then. Call this the Halloween donation just in time for the November 1st OpenBSD 5.2 release. The amount is for a staggering 411 Euros. This brings this years donations to 511 euros. I don't want anything in return other than the recognition on the OpenBSD donations page, which I'm already listed on so this doesn't make a change. Take it this way. I use OpenBSD at work, and without OpenBSD I would have no work, so this is justified to me. Thanks OpenBSD. Future donations will be more or less depending on my income.

I put OpenSMTPD on the purpose of the transaction, because they have been very kind with me, but this money isn't solely for them but OpenBSD in general.

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In five days I'll be making a great announcement

October 26th, 2012

I'm not going to go into details but I can hardly wait in anticipation. I have told a few people already and some think I'm nuts and others think I'm brave.

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Very satisfied with the new Mac Mini (not bought yet)

October 24th, 2012

Yes, Apple has released a new Mac Mini. It has USB3 and a more powerful processor. Both I like. It also accepts 16 GB of RAM. That I like and I want to max my Mac Mini when I get it.

Mac mini specs

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FreeBSD repository now has CSRG in svn

October 20th, 2012

The FreeBSD repo now has the CSRG revisions in it's SVN. And they made a blooper. If you're interested in what peoples first dogs name was then you can crack these passwords. Remember this is from the late 80's and early 90's where people still thought DES was secure or didn't understand that their password would follow them to 2012 where cracking with dictionary attack tools such as John the Ripper exist, and were are widely successful. Now I'm not saying you should crack these passwords but if you wanted to then you could.

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EuroBSDCon 2012 starts tomorrow

October 19th, 2012

EuroBSDCon 2012 starts tomorrow in Warsaw, Poland. I won't be going there this year but it's hard to believe that it's been a little over a year since EuroBSDCon 2011 near Amsterdam.

OpenBSD will likely add a few more papers of talks held at EuroBSDCon 2012, and I always check for those, as they're usually interesting.

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NetBSD 6.0 was released yesterday

October 19th, 2012

Congratulations to that team. R.I.P. to who it was dedicated to. Here is the NetBSD home page or just follow one of the links all over this blog.

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Digits of Pi

October 18th, 2012

I wish they would have explained how to calculate the digits of Pi. Because who can remember a constant number? It would have made a great computer class.

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A Planet around Alpha Centauri-B

October 18th, 2012

News reached us of a planet around Alpha Centauri B with a few properties. It is around 1% of one AU far from AC-B. That makes me think it's tidally locked. Tidally locked means that only one part of the planet faces the star. Sorta like our moon is tidally locked with our earth. So then they say the surface temperature is 1200 degrees Celsius. But what's the temperature on the far side? Since Alpha Centauri is a tri-star system there is 2 more stars that can light the far side. However AC-A and Proxima Centauri are too far away (over 11 AU) and would probably not heat the surface much. So then the questions comes up, if there is an atmosphere because an atmosphere could spread heat around the far side, kinda like what's happening on Venus. If there is no atmosphere there is probably not life as we know it but the far side could be cool(er). Because the orbit is 3.2 days around AC-B , the far side would be in view of AC-A 50% of the time, meaning there is a day-night cycle every 78 hours or so, so 38 hours day and the rest night. I think this is an interesting exoplanet, and we can only hope to see more about it in the news to come.

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