Category: Tech

subversion endianness and xbox

It turns out the Berkely DB format that Subversion uses (or subversions use of it) is Endian specific. This means I can’t just move my repository from my PowerPC to my x86. I needed to dump it on my ppc (svnadmin dump ~/subversion > svn.dump) and load it into an empty repository on my x86 (svnadmin load ~/subversion < svn.dump). Bleh.

I've been fiddling with my Microsoft subsidised games console. I've cleaned up the code provided by the xbox-linux project to create a Linux kernel with xbox partition and file format (FATX) support). The patches for 2.4.22 and some RedHat 9 RPMS are available. I'll write it all up soon and provide 2.4.23 patches.

3/1/2003 Add Comment

Liverpool and Firestorm NIDS Ethereal support

I’ve been down near Liverpool for the last few days, but I still found time to work on my latest project, adding support for Firestorm NIDS alert elogs to Ethereal 0.9.8. See a screen shot. Ethereal seems nicely written and I’m not having too many problems adding support for new file formats and protocols.

19/12/2002 Add Comment

Linux 2.4.20, Clockspeed, Firestorm IPX and Macrostupid Coldfusion

Upgraded to Linux 2.4.0 with a few patches such as Gianni’s ECSC security patches, FreeS/WAN IPSEC, CPUFreq and more. Now I’m losing time again on my Dell Inspiron 8200. Dan Bernstein’s Clockspeed isn’t helping; I don’t think it’s meant for drift such as this (caused my frequency scaling I think).

I have also been putting some time into the IPX support in Firestorm I originally started. I’ve fixed a couple of things Gianni broke during his clean-up, and have begun work on a matcher. This adds support for IPX in snort signatures, which is kinda cute.

Having lots of trouble getting Coldfusion “MX”(tm) to work on Linux for a client. It is invariably unstable and crashes thousands of times a second (see diary: Nov 25 2002). Macromedia want to charge us $500 to report this. Apparently we’ll get our money back if it is confirmed as a genuine bug. We’re considering billing for the bug hunting we’re doing for them instead. With the tens of thousands of SIG4 and SIG11 crashes we’d be quids in charging per bug. Now if only an open-source project such as PHP existed.

9/12/2002 Add Comment

Optical Mouse and Trying to see webSENSE

Why is it that my new Optical mouse has red light beaming out of every part of it? Is the translucent base vital to its operation? I would have hoped that, by now, people would have got over the excitement of a ball-less mouse and got down to business. Do people still buy things just because they can see that they are still there when then turn off the lights? I thought object permanence was something you learnt at quite a young age.

Websense weren’t too happy when they found out we’d reverse engineered their WISP protocol. I’m not sure whether it was because we did it in 10 minutes yet though. They’ve sent a letter suggesting we take it down. Gianni has currently taken the source down and put a transcript of the letter up online whilst we attempt to sort things out.

26/11/2002 Add Comment

Coldfusion MX on Linux

SECURITY WARNING: SIG 11 sent to [cfusion:19752]...
last message repeated 32187 times

25/11/2002 Add Comment

mp3blaster rpms

Just tidied up and rebuild a RedHat 8.0 rpm for mp3blaster (http://www.stack.nl/~brama/mp3blaster/) which I’m currently tinkering with for ain mp3 jukebox. The one from the website didn’t play ogg files on RH8 for some reason. This works fine now. See the downloads directory.

2/11/2002 Add Comment

Compaq troubles

More Complaque problems. Faulty hardware or a faulty driver? We’re not sure. “Invalid Operand” – Some might say a RedHat compiler is at fault (not the first time) but we’re still not sure

1/11/2002 Add Comment

Advanced routing with FreeSWAN IPSEC

We had advanced routing working with FreeSWAN on Linux. I’m amazed it works, especially with the bridging we had in place between 2 other interfaces on the same box (I’m just a tad cynical about the FreeSWAN stuff sometimes) (read: all the time).

17/10/2002 1 Comment

SpamAssassin,Qmail and Vmailmgr

I have finally gotten SpamAssassin to play nice with Qmail/Vmailmgr on a per user basis without using any ugly Qmail patches. I’ll work out the details with Gianni and present my findings here soon.

Also, I’ve rewritten my diary in xml with xslt, so if you’re using a browser capable of understanding these formats properly you should be able to see a relatively nicely laid out diary. For those of you without this support you can still view the text version, which I create manually with a different stylesheet and command line xslt parser. All the source is here, and the xslt code is in site/.

13/10/2002 Add Comment

Websense WISP and IPX updates

Gianni, Matt and I spent a little time poking around at the Websense WISP protocol to see how likely it would be to get Squid working with it. We observered a Cisco PIX communicating with a Websense service running Linux. It seems pretty easy (which was strange as we’ve heard to the contrary from Websense themselves). Gianni has knocked up a tool that can query a Websense server with a url to see if it is blocked. If we need it we’ll build a squid redirector. (see http://www.scaramanga.co.uk )

New patch for IPX support on Firestorm. Fixes a few lame bugs and possible remote DoSs Gianni pointed out to me. Also improved the SAP support a little.

27/9/2002 2 Comments

Firestorm IPX support

Posted my patches to the Firestorm NIDS (http://people.ecsc.co.uk/~gianni/firestorm) which add IPX protocol decoding. I also threw in an example SAP child decoder, but it is far from complete. I’ll polish off the SAP code and add IPX matching over the next few weeks. I think I may look at Netbios decoding and matching support. I’m very interested in instant messaging decoding (for big brother stylee logging) but I’ll have to see what direction Gianni wants to go in.

19/9/2002 Add Comment

Company Funding

WHOOP! Got the work I needed to get done on time, with the help of Scaramanga. I love him, all of him (and thats a MEAN feat in itself.)

Ok, had some cool news about the company I’m involved with starting, sounds like the bank is gonna give us the money! Wahoo. Loads too. So we should have offices by January, and me and Scara can set our Beowulf Cluster up (well most likely MOSIX now instead)

Off to Sheffied tomorrow to see my bestest mate James, and if all goes to plan (which it invariably doesn’t) meet up with Little Elf.

16/11/2000 Add Comment