Recent blog entries for fpmip

Well, I'm delighted to see that even The Register has an article describing how "Microsoft's anti-Unix campaign backfires"...

For more (but cheap and easy) fun, you can see here. Make your own decisions on the trustworthiness of all these sites of course.

WTF ? Microsoft is solidly becoming numero uno on my personal Fucked Company(TM) list. Why ? Go and read this Advogato article, and please don't forget to inform your local Microsoft representatives and government about how you feel about this (just be as polite as possible though !).

Yet another release of IPFC... The most important change is better modularization (viva OO perl programming ;-) ... Documentation, however, is still sorely lacking :-(

Unisys and Microsoft say, "We have the way out", and I wish them the best of luck on their way out.
Personally, I'd say we have the way IN.

The sun is shining and that's good news for once, what with all the shit going on in Israel and Afghanistan ... Jeez, why can't everybody just get along ? - give and take, that's what it's all about ... and, most importantly, nonviolence.

Last weekend I went to F*SDEM in Brussels. It's always nice to see RMS with a hard-disk on his head (no pictures, please ;-).

I did a more or less technical presentation on IPFC on saturday, which I put on my website http://www.fruru.com/.

We're working on getting some useful data abstraction layers in IPFC to allow people to use a stable programming interface to write their plugins to, but it's more difficult than first imagined (well what's new ;-) ...

In 1 to 2 weeks, IPFC 1.0.4 will be released, with a whole new database schema - to get maximum flexibility while keeping speed and space usage acceptable.

The car is doing fine now. No strange noises except for the usual ones.

Things are speeding up on the IPFC front. The frontend is advancing steadily ... I realise now that I'm not a web-developer at all... Alerting infrastructure is being put in place ... Things really are speeding up ;-)
But there is not only work ... soon there is the F*SDEM event, a splatterfest of Free Software things and people.
User-Mode Linux is giving me serious headaches, but I've found a new toy for my intra-server compartimentalization needs : vservers.
Tomorrow there are 2 important presentations to make, it's 1:36AM and I'm still not in bed. Life is tough.
Just FYI, it is possible to blow up a car's turbo, even without trying to do so and after only 14000km (less than 10000mi) ! Good for me (well ... the leasing company ;-) that the car is still under warranty !

Yay, new version of IPFC (together with adulau) ! This time with exclusive new features such as HMAC-SHA1 XML authenticators and a mon wrapper. It seems that as we release new versions, we get more ideas on how to continue development. But for now, we are going to focus on a nice graphical user interface, integrated with cacti.

I'm also going to play a bit with a cool emulator called Hercules, as well as do some experiments with User-Mode Linux.

In the previous diary entry, I was right : the sweating was only beginning with the 1.0 release.
We just released IPFC v1.0.1, which changes lots of things (for the better, of course ;-).
I expect the release frequency to remain about the same for the near future, but I hope we can cut down the non-backwards compatible changes somewhat...

It's been some time since the last diary entry ... and with reason ... We just released IPFC v1.0 after lots of sweating (I guess that the sweating is only going to begin for me right now ;-)

Anyway, holiday season is here and if you're up to having a nice little present to manage your security infrastructure just give IPFC a look and give me your feedback. It's not very polished and finished but hey, that's life (and version 1.0) !

Watch out for new releases early and often :-)

I've also got a nice ZoomAir 4100 prismII wireless card for which the Linux drivers are giving me a headache. The SSH Prism2 one works but does not support signal strength monitoring, the wlan-ng one sort of works but doesn't want to interoperate with OpenBSD ... sigh ... and apparently the piggyback PCI/PCMCIA thingie delivered with it is consistently screwing up my neighbour's computer so I'm not touching it with a 10-foot pole ;-) Those are the wonders of driver development I guess ...

SecIDS seems to be working ok ... but it is still based on 2.4.9 + lids + grsecurity. I wonder when the guys working on LIDS put out a version for 2.4.11 ... As soon as lids/rsbac + grsecurity are supported on 2.4.11 I'll put a new secos patch on my site.

Last monday I gave a presentation together with adulau on "forensic analysis" at the clussil. You can find his slides on http://www.foo.be/gt/forensic/ and mine on http://www.fruru.com/forensic-20011008. Both presentations are in french (or at least some of it is...)

Future topics of interest might include some wireless stuff or secured operating systems.

Time has told ... I went there on a calm evening ... a very calm evening even ... so not much to tell. This does of course not say anything about the quality of the event, which I've heard is quite OK !

Anyway, I've been looking into Linux From Scratch. Seems a relatively simple thing to make one's own distribution. I won't have time to follow this trail, unfortunately, still going the RedHat route for SecOS.

I hope that something releaseable (what a word) will be ready by tomorrow evening.

Oh yes, I've also decided to move. In 11 days. The joys of renting a house ! The numerous phone-calls to make ! The approaching deadlines ! ;-)