RedHat have reannounced the dropping support for some old versions (ands April 2004, still lots of warning). I say reannounced due to the fact they originally announced this December 2002. And have had it on their website ever since (very clearly). If you want a supported RedHat distro now (by supported I mean the fixing of security and functional bugs) you either neeed to pay for and use one of the RedHat Enterprise Linuxes, or use the Fedora Project distro. The RHEL versions are released every 18 months and supported for 5 years. Fedora looks to be an ongoing thing, but community supported. Lots of freeloaders are moaning and complaining. They don’t seem to understand that if you don’t have the skills to pay the bills (and patch, fix and recompile software yourself) you pay somebody else to do it for you. This support system is how people are expected to make money from GPL/open source software (and yes, people ARE allowed to make money). It sounds like it’s mostly coming from morons who list “cost” as the main benefit of using GNU/Linux as a server operating system. Get a clue.
Category: Tech
Subversion
I’ve upgraded to subversion for version tracking of source code instead of moudly old cvs. I had a little trouble keeping my old modification history but don’t really care. The only feature I’m missing is the Log keyword that I used to add to the bottom of my html pages as a comment. Otherwise I’ve been very impressed. I’m working on getting a viewcvs interface up for a remote copy of my repository soon.
Artificial life: Virtual Snails, New server
I have a screen shot from my latest A-life project which features a tile based environment that grows, and some little snails that crawl (only in one direction currently).
The johnleach.co.uk site (and all the other sites I host) has moved to our new server hosted at the very cool and expensive InTechnology in Harrogate. See trantor.org.uk.
MegaNET 1 million bit encryption ROCKS!
“If [our encryption algorithm] is so bad, then how is it that [it] has now been acquired and is available for use in thousands of U.S. Government computers and even by more corporate users worldwide?” -Saul Backal, Ralph Lotkin, Meganet.
These guys are right. Instead of rigorous open analysis of crypto algorithms, we should just make a list of who have already bought it and make our decision based on that. We could do the same for choosing an OS.
RedHat Advanced server patches
I’ve added a page documenting and providing my patches to the RedHat AS OS. Check it out
Debian ipsec-tools for 2.4 kernel
The Debian ipsec-tools package doesn’t work properly with the Debian 2.4.21 kernel (you can’t specify “ipsec” as policy, it only recognises “discard” and “none”). Herbert Xu helped me out and I’ve rebuild the packages against the 2.4.21 kernel sources, and now it seems to work ok. I’ve made the packages available here.
RAID benchmarks
I’ve been benchmarking EXT3 and ReiserFS on RAID 5 and RAID 10 (1+0). You can see my results so far online.
I’ve also been fiddling a bit more with OpenGL, but the vector maths are slowing me down at the moment.
I also bought an Xbox, which has slowed me down even further. It’s now chipped though so I’ll be fiddling with Linux on it. I love things with ethernet ports.
Firestorm ethereal and RedHat Advanced Server
I’ve ported my Ethereal ELOG patch to the latest version (0.9.14) and fixed a bug handling pcap captured alerts. Created Debian debs for powerpc and i386. Matt is working on some RPMS for RedHat 9
RedHat’s latest change of support plans for RedHat Linux seems to be doing what was intended, getting more people to purchase Advanced Server (and the new Enterprise Server and Workstation) rather than leeching off them. Good for RedHat. There have been too many idiots selling RedHat Linux-based solutions expecting the coloured headgear company to do the hard work of beta testing, bug fixing etc.etc. for free.
greenfly in my powerbook
I have greenfly crawling into the vents on my powerbook. This is because I am sat in the park and connected via wireless ethernet. My access point seems to waver in and and out of range, but a steady 30% signal seems to be maintained. With an external antennae on the house I could sit even further away. I’ll be fending the war-drivers off with sticks though. I need an EMP gun.
gthumb diff and website changes
I’m back from my holiday in the Czech Republic.
I’ve rejigged my website a little to make it easier to see where things are on the front page.
I produced the web albums using Gthumb by Paolo Bacchilega. I need a little feature it seemed to lack (or a bug prevented it) so I wrote a patch to add it. This patch changed the behaviour of the Tools->Change Date tool. For each file that it changes the last modified date, it now also sets the comment date. You should be able to do this in Properties but a bug causes all images to be set with the first image’s date. I couldn’t see how to add this functionality there anyway. According to Paolo, this is now fixed in ver 2.1.3 so this patch is redundant.
air gap switch security
Whale communications have invented something very secure, and very special. To the naked non-technical eye, their marketing material seems misleading and misguided, but this is the state of the art of security technology. It does some stuff to ensure undefined things do or do not happen.
Quote: “The patent-pending air gap switch keeps sensitive systems and data physically disconnected from untrusted networks and users, and transfers application-level data in real time. It is a high-speed, solid-state analog switch that connects a 512K memory bank to one SBC at a time via a SCSI interface. The air gap switch contains no Operating System, no TCP/IP address, no programmable units, all of which protects the appliance from being compromised. It hides internal addresses, preventing hackers’ mapping of internal network and any tunnelling threat. It protects confidential information such as private keys and configuration data by placing them behind the “air gap.”
It’ll also apparently cure all known ailments, gives you a full head of hair, and a long life free of pain.
Linux Access Point
Most 802.11g cards allow only Managed or Ad-Hoc modes. With the hostap Linux driver for Prism based wireless cards, the Master mode becomes available, allowing to run your own access point. I now have my central box (babaracus) as an access-point and the client laptops in Managed mode. This has severly increased throughput as I could usually only manage less than 1Mb but now can utilise the full 11. Using the userspace hostapd you can do clever things like Radius authentication and dynamic WEP keys, but I’ve not played with that yet. I’ve had a few problems (lock ups on an SMP and loss of clients after restarting the AP) but it’s early days yet.