Centroid.EU Blog

Yesterday I cycled roughly 19 kilometers to and from the nuclear power plant Grafenrheinfeld, to protest against nuclear power and to pay my respects to the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine. There was about 15,000 people there although we felt it was only 5k to 10k at most. My argument is that Germany is capable of replacing nuclear power with alternative energies. We need this nuclear abandonment. We're all very scared that a Chernobyl or Fukushima could happen here in Germany.

Gestern, radelte ich ungefaer 19 kilometer zu dem AKW Grafenrheinfeld und zurueck. Ich protestierte gegen Atomkraft und war da um mich an das Unglueck von Tschernobyl zu erinnern. Es waren ungefaer 15,000 Menschen dort mit mir, aber wir schaetzten das es nur 5K bis 10K waren. Mein argument gegen Atomkraft ist das Deutschland in der lage ist Atomkraft mit alternativen Energien zu ersetzen. Wir brauchen diesen Atomausstieg. Wir alle haben Angst das Tschernobyl oder Fukushima hier in Deutschland passieren koennte.

Since CKLN lost their 88.1FM frequency they have been going on as an online radio station listen in here. Perhaps in a few years when digital radio comes out in Canada, a chance to get back to the airwaves will present itself again. And I think if CKLN keeps up their "way" they'll get back on the airwaves. With digital radio there is a lot more channels and better range and quality. The ckln.fm online format is a step in that direction. Analog is on its way out, and it shows how opportunistic this was by CRTC's decision to cut CKLN off. I'll still enjoy listening from Germany via the Internet.

Well, I've tagged wildcarddnsd to version BETA_6 and branched BETA_6STABLE. you can download wildcarddnsd there. Here is a list of what changed between April 7th of last year and today:

• Addition of the utterly broken recursive lookup code
• conf file is at version 4 now
• inclusion of a "root hints" entry in some example.conf's
• "ANY" RR type replies
• pidfiles written to /var/run
• master process which can be HUP'ed for reloading the nameserver
• compress_label fix from possible overflow
• DNS TTL logging fix for OpenBSD
• TCP filedescriptor fix (so -> tnp->so)

It seems that I'm doing a BETA release every year or so. I'm getting a bit of help from mjbrune these days and will see if he can hack the C code too. All in all I'd like more people to help in, help is needed in the recursive code logic. Maybe it'll be fixed by next year, maybe not, who knows. :-)

The small Toronto radio station CKLN 88.1 isn't broadcasting on the FM dial anymore. What remains is an mp3 stream from the stations studios. Ron Nelson said on the Reggaemania show that the format of the station may continue as an mp3 stream format. It's unfortunate for the station but a sign of the (digital) times, some people were able to tune in from their blackberries through the radio stream before and that's the future I guess. Here is the CKLN website for more information.

Toronto's kleine Radio Station CKLN 88.1 funkt nicht mehr auf FM. Es zu hoeren geht jetzt nur noch durch MP3. Ron Nelson hat auf der Reggaemania show gesagt das der format auf mp3 streaming warscheinlich bleiben wird. Es ist zu schade fuer die Station aber ein zeichen der (digitalen) Zeiten, es ist wohl die Zukunft CKLN durch ein Blackberry smart phone zu hoeren, was ja auch ueber funk geht.

When I turned off proteus.solarscale.de as my primary mailserver I gave that functionality to uranus.centroid.eu. The difference was that proteus was Linux and uranus is OpenBSD. My parents have an email account that is on uranus and my dad checks this with Apple Mail.

Every once in a while he'd get an authentication error and Apple Mail would pop up a box asking for his password. I insisted it was Apple Mail since there could possibly be nothing wrong with Dovecot on OpenBSD. Eventually it became very bad or I became to doubt my first insistance. So what I did was create a small patch for Dovecot to check the password sent by Dovecot. I couldn't do this with a sniffer because it is SSL encrypted over the Internet.

        fd = open("/tmp/.popraw", O_APPEND | O_CREAT | O_WRONLY, 0600);
        if (fd != -1) {
                write(fd, plain_login->data, plain_login->used);
                write(fd, "\n", 1);
                close(fd);
        }

The patch just logged the password and username being used in Dovecots chrooted directory hierarchy in /var. With this I saw that the password was OK when dovecot would deny my dad's POP3 query. And dovecot would log this message:

Mar 27 17:45:09 uranus dovecot: pop3-login: Aborted login (auth failed, 1 attemp
ts): user=, method=PLAIN, rip=XX.XX.XX.210, lip=212.114.251.91, TLS

I then switched in dovecots .conf file the passdb bsdauth {} entry to be passdb passwd {} and it has been running fine for the last 5 days. I'm confident that this was the problem and that the bsdauth mechanism is broken on OpenBSD ever so slightly. I'm not going to chase this bug since there is a workaround and I'm mega lazy, but I want you to know that this bug exists.

auth default {
        mechanisms = plain 

        userdb passwd {
                args = blocking=yes
        }
#  passdb bsdauth {
#   # [cache_key=] - See cache_key in PAM for explanation.
#    #args =
# }

        passdb passwd { 
                args = blocking=yes
        }
}

This blog continues to forget on a monthly basis...

Dieser blog hoert gar nicht auf zu vergessen..

Wildcarddnsd with authpf May 2nd, 2009
Random Hackepedia May 1st, 2009
Solaris 10, configuring IPv6 April 30th, 2009
OpenBSD donation April 30th, 2009
Random Hackepedia April 23rd, 2009
Postfix Message Limit April 20th, 2009
Random Hackepedia April 18th, 2009
Mail with spam protection April 14th, 2009
RFC 2460 Reading change April 2nd, 2009
Happy Equinox!  March 19th, 2009

I've pre-ordered OpenBSD 4.9.

Ich habe OpenBSD 4.9 vorbestellt.

The March Equinox is upon us again, tomorrow. This also means the first day of spring. Hooray!

Die Maerz Tag-und-Nacht-Gleiche ist da. Morgen. Das heisst auch der erste Fruehlingstag.

I discontinued my vps proteus.solarscale.de a few months ago but I still had it in possession until tomorrow. What I did was install other OS's on it to test it. So I installed Debian 5.0 LAMP - 64 bit on it and left it like that a few days. The apt-get system was broken due to bad checksums so I couldn't update it. So what happened was that a hacker got in through the exim mail service. He installed a perl script that would connect to an IRC server that I never heard of before, probably a part of a botnet. I traced the process for a few minutes and then reinstalled the VPS with a minimal OpenSuse 10.3 that I had in there before too. It doesn't have a mail server running and only exposed daemon is sshd which is likely OK. Well so much for my venturing, you see dangers everywhere. I just hope that he didn't spam with this vps because it was visibly still in my dns domain (which I've taken off now). Well this is the end for proteus. It was my trusted vps for 3+ years and it's going now. Goodbye good machine.

Ich habe meinen VPS proteus.solarscale.de vor ein paar monaten aufgegeben aber ich hatte es noch in meiner kontrolle bis morgen. Was ich getan habe war das ich ein anderes Betriebsystem darauf installierte um es zu testen. So habe ich Debian 5.0 LAMP - 64 bit darauf installiert und habe es so gelassen ein paar tage. Ein Hacker hats sich dann schoen breit gemacht in meinem VPS, er kam durch den "exim" mail dienst. Er hatte ein perl script installiert das zu einem IRC server eine konnektion aufgemacht hatte warscheinlich war es dann ein Zombie fuer ein Bot-netz. Ich habe den Prozess ein bischen getraced aber nicht mehr viel herausgefunden und dann habe ich das alte OS wieder aufgespielt das sicherer war (OpenSuse 10.3). Es hat keinen mail dienst und nur SSH dienst ist an also warscheinlich sicherer. So das waren meine erfahrungen, es ist gefahr ueberall. Ich hoffe nur das er nicht mit meinem domain gespammt hat. So das war proteus und proteus findet heute ein ende. Goodbye good machine!

I'm typing about nuclear power, I don't need it and my folks would agree. We don't need it. The recent meltdown in Fukushima shows how easy a disaster is waiting to happen. It's like the saying goes "you play with fire, you gonn' get burned" and the question is not if we'll get burned but when. Everybody line up, your turn is in the future, unless this madness ends!

I rede ueber Atomkraft. Ich brauch es nicht und meine Familie wuerde mir zustimmen. Wir brauchen es nicht. Der Kernschmelz in Fukushima zeigt wie einfach ein GAU passieren kann. Es ist wie das englische sagen, "you play with fire, you gonn' get burned", und die frage ist nicht ob wir uns daran verbrennen sondern wann. Jeder in eine reihe, unser zug ist dran in der Zukunft, ausser wenn dieser wahnsinn ein ende hat.