Centroid.EU Blog
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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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Remember the Venus Glider?
March 24th, 2012
A long time ago, the centroid.eu blog featured my idea of a venus glider.
It's not even in the archives anymore but I wanted to touch on the idea
again. Basically the planet venus rotates very slowly around its axis.
This makes a glider possible that can loiter around the terminator
(line between night and day) of venus. It could have payloads such as
radar and UV and IR spectrometers. It would likely be somewhat high in
the atmosphere due to the atmospheric pressure and more updraft higher
in the atmosphere. It may even have a backup propeller that is foldable
into its fuselage, this is when mistakes are made in catching sufficient
thermals. Solarpanels that are embedded in the wing area can then
recharge the batteries when the glider is high above the clouds and on
the day side. One good thing about a glider that is falling on venus is
that the atmosphere becomes so dense that its rate of descent will slow
as it gets lower towards the surface. This
venus glider would not be
carrying astronauts but rather be entirely electronically and computer
driven.
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Checking Randomness on Debian
March 23rd, 2012
I noticed that /dev/*random on Debian and Ubuntu were mode 666. I found a
bug report about this too in the debian archives. But I wasn't convinced
to prove a point you have to do some work. So I remembered
this article on XOR encryption and I thought it could help
me with my randomness plotting as well. If there is a pattern I'll see it.
Basically randomness should be evenly spread out in a X,Y,Z plot.
So I wrote the program to get the random data from Debian but I first write
a string to its /dev/urandom before waiting 10 seconds and reading 512
bytes, here is the program for this:
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
int
main(void)
{
char buf[512];
char *string = "OrpheanBeholdersCryDoubt!";
int len;
int fd, output;
fd = open("/dev/urandom", O_RDWR, 0);
if (fd < 0) {
perror("open");
exit(1);
}
len = write(fd, string, strlen(string));
if (len < 0) {
perror("write");
exit(1);
}
sleep(10);
output = open("cryptfile", O_APPEND | O_CREAT | O_WRONLY, 0644);
if (output < 0) {
perror("open");
exit(1);
}
len = read(fd, buf, sizeof(buf));
if (len <= 0) {
perror("read");
exit(1);
}
if (write(output, buf, len) < 0) {
perror("write 2");
exit(1);
}
close(fd);
close(output);
exit(0);
}
On OpenBSD then I did the same program with the write to the device disabled
since its permissions are mode 644. The data I gathered I then put through
another program that looks like this:
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
char buf[512];
char *file;
int fd, len;
u_int16_t *array;
if (argc != 2) {
perror("arguments");
exit(1);
}
file = argv[1];
fd = open(file, O_RDONLY, 0);
if (fd < 0) {
perror("open");
exit(1);
}
while ((len = read(fd, buf, 6 * 2)) > 0) {
array = (u_int16_t *)&buf[0];
printf("%d, %d, %d\n%d, %d, %d\n%d, %d, %d\n",
array[0] - array[1],
array[1] - array[2],
array[2] - array[3],
array[1] - array[2],
array[2] - array[3],
array[3] - array[4],
array[2] - array[3],
array[3] - array[4],
array[4] - array[5]);
}
close(fd);
exit(0);
}
The instructions on the math involved I got from the article I mentioned
above.
I then ran it through gnuplot with the data by calling splot, like so:
gnuplot> splot 'cplot.dat'
And here is the graphs this produced:

OpenBSD (above)

Debian with write to /dev/urandom (above)
All in all this was a very educational event for me, I hope you like the
article too!
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Bought Saturn (ACER Aspire One)
March 16th, 2012
It's my birthday. I bought an Acer Aspire One 722 for my family and me. It has
4 GB of RAM and an AMD processor (C-60 1 GHz, 1 MB L2 Cache). I named it
saturn. It'll be running windows 7 for a while until next year perhaps when
I give it a facelift. Guess what OS I have in mind for it? :-).
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Equinox in 5 days
March 15th, 2012
Equinox is a terrestrial
event. It is on this day that the earth's equator is exactly aligned with the
sun in a perpendicular fashion. Read more about equinox in the previous
mentioned link.
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OpenBSD pre-orders are up!
March 14th, 2012
I just pre-ordered my 5.1 CD set from
OpenBSD Europe. Here is the
OpenBSD 5.1 Release page, it's a work in progress. The artwork and
lyrics for the song are out but I haven't heard the song yet, I can't
download it for some reason. Oh well in due time. This time the theme
of OpenBSD seems to be Ghostbusters. Only they are Bugbusters. If memory
of cartoons serves me right Ghostbusters had a pet ghost called slimey or
slimer...guess the OpenBSD team have a pet bug called ... I dunno.
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Looking for work
March 2nd, 2012
I got notice today that I won't get a contract extension come April 30th, of
this year. So I'm looking for work again starting May 1st, 2012. I'm willing
to do remote sysadmin work for *NIX systems and/or programming on *NIX systems.
Why remote? Because I'm unwilling to move away from my family and they never
heard of *NIX around here (it seems). Please have a look at my
resume. If you know
of companies hiring remote employees it would be nice if you let me know.
Due to health issues I'm only able to work 20 to 30 hours weekly max.
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