Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Randombot is off

September 8th, 2010

Well I got a cryptic email from the abuse department of my provider. Apparently I tripped over some honeypots and they thought randombot was a conficker.c type program. There go my plans on providing a search engine similar to Google! :-(. Randombot is off indefinitely.

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God didn't create the Universe?

September 6th, 2010

Stephen Hawking says god did not create the universe. I'm not such a believer in god. I'm not even sure if god is still alive. But I do believe that god created the universe. It may have been a lot smaller back then, but it had to be a mechanism that created it. And I call that mechanism god. God doesn't look like us I believe and I surely don't think god chose our earth to live out his days with us. No. God is somewhere else or dead, but what we have, the laws of nature, the universe and the possible multiverse were all created by this creature. If god didn't create the universe then I don't think it's a true god, but rather a steward to the creator. Not quite the same thing. Peace.

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Randombot beta

September 5th, 2010

One reason why Google has so much market share is that other people who don't use advertising don't use their resources to their fullest. Even though this blog has advertising it advertises on a voluntary basis and only for the open source projects (*BSD's). I looked at my server habits and noticed that I was using only 5-15GB traffic out of 512GB alloted to my vps plan. That's only 3%. I decided that I wanted to raise that traffic a little to perhaps 33%. Some people have suggested I put some porn on my website, but I don't have any porn to put up nor do I really want to serve pornography.

So I've written randombot. Randombot is a web spider that instead of looking up Internet names it just queries IP addresses and looks for default web pages. I've been running it 3 days now and it looks promising in raising my traffic. It also caches the content given to it, so far I have several hits on business sites to a farm sitter operation in australia. It delights me seeing someone elses website that randombot found, even though I can't use someones small business in virginia or somewhere. And I would have never _ever_ come across these sites if I were to google. Anyhow so far randombot is found at solarscale.de/randombot if anyone wants to check it out they can.

I do realise that there is a lot of websites that can't be reached because they don't use an IP solely for their website. That's tough. Also if you happen to come across porn with randombot please report it, I'll remove it, I've found some shocking stuff with randombot that I've deleted already.

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Random Hackepedia

August 28th, 2010

The RH for this week is manual.

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Windows 95 turns 15

August 24th, 2010

This story was written August 25th, 1995. Windows 95 is now 15 years old. I never had Windows 95, 98, 2000 but skipped them all other than XP and Windows 7. Back in 1995 I chose another true 32 bit Operating System. It was called Linux and I got it in spite of Windows 95. I think I made the right decision even though I switched to FreeBSD half a year later. It took only 2 odd years after this feat that I got a System Administration position at an ISP. I don't think I would have been a UNIX sysadmin had I installed windows 95 back in 1995, it was a turning point.

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Worry about IPv6?

August 22nd, 2010

Someone (tydel) made me aware of this article named Why you shouldn't worry about IPv6 just yet. I'd like to counter-argument this article somewhat. I'll focus on the highlights.

Cassidy says that "According to these networking experts, we're only a matter of months, or maybe weeks, from network Armageddon".

What you have to realize is that converting to IPv6 on the server side isn't the end of the migration. All your customers will have to move to IPv6 as well and some will be left behind because some owners of networks are probably a bit lazy to do a migration. So that means that if you want to run your business online, in order to get the full potential customer base you'll have to run IPv4 and IPv6 dual stacked so that you can satisfy both, until everyone is speaking IPv6. And since space is running out on IPv4 an IPv4 address may be a lot more expensive than an IPv6 address due to scarcity. Eventually there may not be any more IPv4 addresses to give out so this is the reason for dooms day calls.

Cassidy goes on to say "In fact, IPv6 starts to look a lot like IPv2 if you consider that the default v6 address for your machine finishes with its MAC address".

So I'm unsure what he means to say here. Perhaps he's worried that a MAC address is a secret thing and that if you know the MAC address you can use the MAC restricted access point? AFAIK an 802.11 packet encrypted or not still has 3 MAC addresses in its header (see /usr/src/sys/net80211/net80211.h) so these aren't secret to someone close to sniffing the radio. So he has no point really.

Cassidy goes to conclude in the second last paragraph: " Is there an IPv6 "killer app" yet for smaller networks? No. Is there any reason based on security or ease of management - unless you're running a 100.000-seat network or national-level ISP - for you to move up to it? No.".

I think he's wrong there. Sure there is no "killer app" unless you call facebook a killer ap (but facebook runs on IPv4 as well). But it's especially the small ISP's that could benefit from a migration to IPv6. National level ISP's have huge resources and are out to compete with small ISPs and steal their customers, and IPv6 means independence from these large networks. It means that small ISP's keep their customers from switching to large ISP's that have IPv6 enabled. This is a bonus. Plus, being on a small ISP means that they give you something that the large ones don't and not usually the opposite.

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Stupid Nettricks

August 21st, 2010

On February 24th, 2009 I blogged about the traceroute tricks. Here is the link. I've updated this to include IPv6 now and I've written a small hackish program that does this as well. This took up 1.5 days of mine for a show such as this:

cordelia$ traceroute6 mimas.centroid.eu 
traceroute6 to mimas.centroid.eu (2001:a60:f074::20) from 2001:a60:f074::1, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
 1  xxx.hello.xxx.centroid.eu  1.066 ms  0.269 ms  0.378 ms
 2  xxx.why.xxx.centroid.eu  0.464 ms  0.503 ms  0.358 ms
 3  xxx.are.xxx.centroid.eu  0.614 ms  0.658 ms  0.897 ms
 4  xxx.you.xxx.centroid.eu  0.556 ms  0.361 ms  0.338 ms
 5  xxx.tracerouting6.xxx.centroid.eu  0.472 ms  0.499 ms  0.411 ms
 6  mimas.centroid.eu  0.3 ms  0.478 ms  0.318 ms
cordelia$

It's just vanity. It's a net-trick. Well at least I didn't play civilizations and waste time. In the meantime I've learned about divert(4) sockets in OpenBSD and even submitted a documenatation fix for pf.conf(5).

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Random Hackepedia

August 14th, 2010

The RH for this week is One Way Hash.

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Cryologd fixes a memory leak

August 10th, 2010

The program in cryologd with the name of "cl" had a memory leak. It wasn't apparent when there was little data that it processed, but with lots of concatenated encrypted data which it decrypts to plaintext, the memory leak was apparent. 2 lines change, here is the source.

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