Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Got this new book

April 29th, 2012

Yesterday Amazon delivered this new book for me that I need for work..

Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol by Alan B. Johnston.

Partly good is that I can read this on company time.

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I have switched jobs and I want to tell about it so far. I think it's an awesome job because it's 100% remote. But like any office setup I have a voice over IP (VOIP) phone where I stay in contact with the staff and it's routed entirely over the Internet. The phone I had from before because I had contracted (technically I'm still a contractor) from this company in the past and back then we got the SIP Phone for me. The pay is sufficient for me to move out of my 1 bedroom apartment and I'm eyeing January or February of 2013 for the move. I'm hoping to get an apartment where I can dedicate 1 room to the office so that I can close the door at the end of the day. My hours are spread more over the day since work is also in north america and I'M in europe. So I have the benefit of being able to conduct maintenance on the computer systems while everyone sleeps and I'm also available during the morning hours to the company. Our systems were designed for remote consoles since that was the idea of the system architect, and it suits me 100%. I'm glad I got this job since I'd likely be unemployed again if I didn't have it. well that's all so far, but I also want to say that I'm 100% impressed.

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Jupiter needed an operation

April 19th, 2012

Today I looked how hot Jupiter was and with horror I noticed the CPU was at 81 degrees Celsius. A few more Centigrade and it would have turned itself off from overheating. So I decided to clean the heatsink from dust again. See here . To my horror and after reseating the heatsink 4 times it didn't have any cooling effect. So I had to go out and buy a new heatsink/cpu cooler. I bought a Cooltek Coolforce 2. I had to unmount the motherboard from its back-panel today to install the new CPU heatsink/fan. Before

After

To my suprise the CPU is now 25 degrees cooler and the CPU fan is not as fast and loud. Very cool!

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26 Years of Personal Computing History

April 18th, 2012

In a previous article I listed all the computers I had, by now 2.5 years later 3 more have been added. Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn. I'm going to give a rough outline of them.

year  , computer type       , Mhz     ,acc. Mhz , RAM        ,accumulated RAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1986  , Sinclair ZX-81      , 1    Mhz, 1    Mhz, 4        KB,  4         KB
1988  , Commodore C-64      , 2    Mhz, 3    Mhz, 64       KB,  68        KB
1992  , IBM-PC 386-SX25     , 25   Mhz, 28   Mhz, 4096     KB,  4164      KB
1994  , IBM-PC 486-66DX2    , 66   Mhz, 94   Mhz, 8192     KB,  12356     KB
1996  , Intel Pentium 120   , 120  Mhz, 214  Mhz, 32767    KB,  45123     KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 564  Mhz, 131072   KB,  176195    KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 914  Mhz, 131072   KB,  307267    KB
2000  , AMD Athlon 1000     , 992  Mhz, 1906 Mhz, 262144   KB,  569411    KB
2001  , Apple G3 iBook      , 500  Mhz, 2406 Mhz, 131072   KB,  700483    KB
2001  , Apple G4 Cube       , 450  Mhz, 2856 Mhz, 131072   KB,  831555    KB
2003  , Intel Pentium 200   , 200  Mhz, 3056 Mhz, 65535    KB,  897090    KB
2005  , AMD Athlon64 3500+  , 2200 Mhz, 5256 Mhz, 4194304  KB,  5091394   KB
2010  , Intel Core i7 4core , 9600 Mhz,14000 Mhz, 8192000  KB, 13000000   KB
2011  , Intel Atom N270	    , 1600 Mhz,15600 Mhz, 1024000  KB, 14000000   KB
2012  , AMD C-60 "Ontario"  , 1000 Mhz,16600 Mhz, 4096000  KB, 18000000   KB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hard to believe that 18 GB of RAM have been accumulated in all my computers. In 2005 it was just 5 GB. Yup I'm spoiled and I'm worried about overspending. One positive factor however is that the Atom and C-60 don't use up very much electricity so I can keep them on overnight, and since Saturn (the C-60) is running windows it goes into sleep mode after I close the lid of the netboook. I haven't checked but I would assume the energy draw is little then.

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Added a robots.txt file

April 8th, 2012

I want to see how much my traffic drops with this, this is what I got..

%more robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/

in the future people can still reach my /private and /public folders through google.

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Ordered three books

April 6th, 2012

I ordered 3 books from Amazon...

"The Art of Assembly Language"
Hyde, Randall; Taschenbuch; EUR 36,95

"Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering"
Eilam, Eldad; Taschenbuch; EUR 30,40

"Hacking: The Art of Exploitation"
Erickson, Jon; Taschenbuch; EUR 40,14

I'm hoping to reach an excitement factor in the future with these.

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SVPRadio - One Year Anniversary

April 4th, 2012

Today marks the one year anniversary of SVPRadio, Stratford, Ontario's underground radio station. It streams from 6PM to 12 Midnight every wednesdays to people who can receive online radio. I have been given some inside photos of the studio and people involved.
It was a little over a year that we came together and decided to stream a radio format. With the guidance of DJ Jaz and help from a whole bunch of DJ's they made an entertaining wednesday every week for 52 shows so far.
I personally listened to every show that was streamed and was delighted every time. Everytime there was something new on at least one or two shows.
Congratulations to SVPradio! And good luck on your second year!

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Exclusive view of my workbench

March 31st, 2012

I know it's a little dusty...here is my home workbench.
Below is the lanner that I bought last year January other than a little dust it looks marvelous to me.
all ports used up so far.

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Interesting findings about older Airport Express Access Points

March 30th, 2012

My parents use an Apple Express AP for a print-server on their NAT'ed network at Deutsche Telekom. I configured this access point to have the domain name as "centroid.eu" and I noticed in my DNS logs that occasionally the access point would "search" for the time server called "time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu" , here is a log:

Jan  8 15:00:49 uranus wildcarddnsd[14573]: request on descriptor 85 interface 
"gif0" from 2003:180:2:7000:53:1:6:1 (ttl=0, region=255) for 
"time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu." type=AAAA(28) class=1, answering "NXDOMAIN"

So today I wanted to play. I wanted to find out if I can reveal the IPv4-only network of my parents. So I mapped the AAAA RR of time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu to ::ffff:1.2.3.4 where 1.2.3.4 is really the address of uranus.centroid.eu my home server. Here is how it looks like:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu. IN    AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION:
time.euro.apple.com.centroid.eu. 86400 IN AAAA  ::ffff:212.114.251.91

My hope was that the AP would try to connect to the NTP port of uranus and thus be logged by my firewall. And guess what?

tcpdump: WARNING: snaplen raised from 116 to 160                                
13:10:49.833022 84.170.XXX.XXX.1052 > 212.114.251.91.123: v1 client strat 0 poll
+0 prec 0 dist 0.000000 disp 0.000000 ref (unspec)@0.000000000 orig 0.000000000 
+[|ntp] (ttl 56, id 118, len 76)

And it reveals the IP of the NAT gateway of my parents. (I XXX'ed stuff out to protect the innocent). Now I wonder what I can do with this or how this can be maliciously used. Obviously putting the domain name cia.gov into an apple access point is NOT a good idea if you want your privacy, not even as a joke, because I've proven now that they'll find out who you are.

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Who watches the watchers?

March 28th, 2012

I did a whois of my brothers domain:

dione$ whois skpegasus.ca|more
Domain name:           skpegasus.ca
Domain status:         registered
Creation date:         2011/10/23
Expiry date:           2013/10/23
Updated date:          2011/10/25

Registrar:
    Name:              DomainsAtCost Corp.
    Number:            45

Name servers:
    uranus.centroid.eu
    cirabug.goldflipper.net

% WHOIS look-up made at 2012-03-28 10:06:26 (GMT)
%
% Use of CIRA's WHOIS service is governed by the Terms of Use in its Legal
% Notice, available at http://www.cira.ca/legal-notice/?lang=en
%
% (c) 2010 Canadian Internet Registration Authority, (http://www.cira.ca/)

I was shocked to see a lookup stemming from a CIRA contractor of this domain in my DNS logs. Apparently I must have tripped a wire with the innocent WHOIS lookup. Here is the log. Notice the lookup from viagenie came 2 hours after my initial WHOIS, so they do follow up on domains that are logged.

Mar 28 14:42:05 uranus wildcarddnsd[23167]: request on descriptor 21 interface 
"em0" from 206.123.31.9 (ttl=49, region=255) for "www.skpegasus.ca." type=A(1) 
class=1, answering "www.skpegasus.ca."

I'm thinking of expiring the .ca domain as my brother is too internet illiterate to make use of it. It's basically just sitting there taking in mails from spammers.

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