Centroid.EU Blog

Sticker time!

February 13th, 2012

I opened my OpenBSD 5.0 CD set today. I was going to give it away/trade it away but noone was interested. 90 days on offer went past and so I opened it today. I put the stickers on mars and saturn.

I think it looks stunningly good. Mars has a lot of goo over it from previous OpenBSD 3.0 stickers that were on its casing that were removed for a bit, but the goo didn't disappear. Just goes to show you going with OpenBSD is a one way street :-).

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Information and its exchange

February 13th, 2012

What is information? It's data. It's written symbols or spoken words that are encoded/recorded somehow. In the 80's when I was a child we had several means of getting information. We could buy books. We could buy a vinyl record or a cassette tape. Information intended for the masses was spread by radio and television. Usually the radio stations were government run or were independent private radio stations that were approved by government who listened like owls for any "message" that did not fit a strict guideline. If someone disregarded these guidelines (like saying F.U.C.K. on-air) would get penalized or even turned off completely.

So what if you wanted a more relaxed medium to listen to? Well what we did in the early 90's was share cassette tapes with spoken word over music (hip-hop). The drawback was that you had to make a master copy and copy from it because every time you copied the analog signal on the tape would get ever so distorted. Also with more usage the tape would get worn. It was fairly frustrating. When I then attended College for computing engineering technology I was told that digital is a cheap way of exchanging information. The digital circuitry didn't care if the voltage was 0.5 volts off what it really was, which meant you could now share the SAME data over a medium that would have been impossible if it was over analog. Digital communication meant that every time you did a copy of a copy of a copy the data would not degrade in quality.

So then eventually the Internet became popular and spread. First it was slow and the information exchange was probably in 8 bit ascii (e-mail, usenet) which was fine for a 28.8 Kbps analog modem. Then came the DSL revolution. ISP's who established themselves from BBS's were bought out or were forced out of business as the Telco companies once again dominated in the Information exchange. But how that went down is irrelevant, what is more important is that Information exchanged could now be sounds as in music and it could be spread en-masse. Formats such as podcasts came. Podcasts are large MP3 files that are stored on a server and can be downloaded via a server or a bittorrent network for people to listen to a message.

So now we have a problem. Someones information is copyrighted, this means that they wish to make money off the message. In the 80's this was easy they'd get a distributor who printed records and people bought this in the store and took it home. They did not worry about piracy because if people wanted to spread the information the message would be distorted after so many copies. Today in the 2010's the message can be mass-spread with no quality degragation. The powers that used to make a good buck off the 80's method are now out of business or on the verge of. At the same time we've never had a better way of spreading information on a personal level than now. I can send a song to all my friends at fair quality. We've been liberated by the Internet. And as a closing statement any attempt to take quality sound reproduction from us is sheer censorship. The thought has already been planted that we can do this, we're not talking about what if's anymore.

We're not out to do harm, and we know that this is just a step between now and then. What's next is anyones guess but the Internet keeps changing us. We learn, and the Internet is the teacher. We are transitioning. We are as curious what's next as the next one. Some people fear change because it uproots their previous power structure. But let me ask you in all honesty is it not fair to give everyone the same outlet as an elite bunch once had? This is what (r)evolution is about and we are still evolving. One more observance is that we're becoming more seclusive in our own homes due to the Internet. This takes away some of our unity, that's the drawback. We don't need laws like ACTA to draw us further back.

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Change is in the air

February 2nd, 2012

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.

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Wildcarddnsd fixed on big-endian machines?

January 28th, 2012

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.

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My dream Smartphone (Computer)

January 27th, 2012

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.

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Removed web mirror on uranus.centroid.eu

January 18th, 2012

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.

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FreeBSD 9.0 Released and PC-BSD 9.0 Released

January 15th, 2012

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.

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2.97 euros for Jamaica (iTunes)

January 14th, 2012

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.

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Setting up iked on OpenBSD (my story)

January 9th, 2012

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

I want to encrypt communication with IPsec between these two hosts. Here is what my config (/etc/iked.conf) looks like on dione:

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!"

Here is what my config (/etc/iked.conf) looks like on mars:

# 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!"

I also set up the following commands on dione in reference to the ikectl manual page:

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

Then I started /sbin/iked on both machines and typed:

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

Also tcpdumping shows that the traffic is encrypted:

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

If that procedure doesn't work for you I also copied the .pub key of each respective hosts and stuck them into /etc/iked/pubkeys/ but I doubt that made a diff. Have a lot of fun (I only wasted 4 hours on this). Another thing worth mentioning is that the certificates created are self-signed. Iked as of 20120109 does not support self signed certificates so the PSK method seems to be the only way. Suggestions on how to better this always welcome.

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New Comment System

January 6th, 2012

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

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