Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

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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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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