Older blog entries for mjcox (starting at number 62)

23 Jan 2002 (updated 23 Jan 2002 at 21:38 UTC) »

So having cable internet throughout the house is cool; having water coming in from outside through the plasterboard is not so cool. A highlight of my week in North Carolina was meeting up with some of the IBM Apache folks, especially RoUS, almost made the 4 hours stuck in Newark airport worthwhile. Also got to spend some time with Bryce, shopping, and other Red Hat folks.

32 snagging list items left for the builder to fix (down from nearly 200). Never buy a new house, not if you are already working >>40 hour weeks.

Continuing my quest to add CVE details to all Red Hat security advisories, working my way through 2001.

4 Jan 2002 (updated 4 Jan 2002 at 12:42 UTC) »
ScrewfixDirect say "every item in stock - if it's in this catalogue we will despatch it today, without delay". Except if you're me when you order on Wednesday and due to items being out of stock I won't get my order until Monday at the earliest. Meanwhile the toilet stays broken....
house: Moving in on Friday, finally. Not everything is 100% finished, but I spent a couple of hours wiring in the patch panel and a couple of hours working out which socket was which. Note: if you ask your builders to install CAT5 for you remember to also ask them to label the ends. I kind of assumed they'd do that. I also made the incorred assumption that when the spec said "aerial points in every room" it meant I got an aerial. No, I get a whole load of cables in the loft ready for an aerial and distribution amplifier to be installed. I'm finding it really hard to find everything I want for the new house; I want some X10 light switches (fairly easy to find except I need one to control 500W and they look cheap and tacky in white plastic), a couple of sets of motorised curtains (harder to find, impossible if you want to do >2.5m lengths), automated heating control (found a couple, nothing perfect)
security: So finally the stuff I've been working on for the last few weeks, a security resource center for Red Hat went live, but no rest for me as I get signed up to write a webcast for later this month. I got quoted in a few news articles after giving interviews about the Red Hat wuftpd security release, not all the quotes were 100% accurate, but in the whole it was better than any other time I've given interviews.

house: Gave up trying to find an f-connector (or even bnc) patch panel, looks like I'll have to buy a drill and make one. Planning how to deal with various cool home-automation stuff for the house, but now wishing that I'd taken more time to help out and plan when they were doing the wiring; would have saved a few of the bodges that are going to be necessary. Hopefully in by Christmas!

Not much exciting development wise, I've been working on a new project for Red Hat (details in a few weeks). Spent a weekend researching home networking and found some cheap and neat single-gang triple RJ45 outlets (Alphasnap, www.bka.co.uk). Installed half of them in the house this morning. Bid on a couple of 19" rack cabinets on ebay, but these things are *really* expensive. Decided instead to use a 19" rack wall frame (www.minitran.co.uk) at a tenth the price.

closure: ebuyer.com said they'd refund my postage and my money, so I'm happy with them again. Telewest have agreed to install cable internet to my new house, it might take them a couple of months, but better than the 31200 baud I'm currently getting. My girlfriend is fine after 3 nights in the hospital. And finally I moved up to Scotland yesterday, after being quite impressed with the removal firm (If you want a good removal firm in Berkshire mail me for details)

Red Hat Linux 7.2: Had some issues with openssh-gnome-askpass (theres about five places you could get it to run ssh-agent, but only one is the right location), but generally been impressed. It even detected my obscure cheap Memorex USB smartmedia reader!

CVE: The experiment with the Mitre CVE vulnerability dictionary went well, but it's going to be difficult to get it working for every security errata. Need to think about that some more.

perspective: My girlfriend spent the night in hospital; it looks like she'll be okay, but i'm not going to get stressed about stupid computer hardware companies this week.
ebuyer.com. Well their Terms and Conditions state that if the item is broken you have to pay the costs to send it back to them, say what? But their Terms and Conditions also list their registered office as a PO Box, something thats actually not allowed under the Companies House rules :) Since they're not replying to my email anymore the next step will be to contact American Express. Thank goodness for consumer credit acts!
ebuyer.com: Too much hassle. When my last hard drive failed the company arranged to have one shipped the very same day and collected the broken drive at the same time. When a drive bought through ebuyer.com broke I had to wait 6 days (and then 25 minutes on hold) before they issued a returns number, I have to ship the drive back to them myself at my expense, and then they'll ship a replacement 3-5 working days after that. So that adds up to about 3 weeks. It's a shame that in an effort to cut costs these online retailers reduce the things that are essential to their repeat business; good customer service. Do any companies give good customer service anymore? It's easier to blame poor sales on the current economy, but I bet half these companies are failing because they're not giving people what they want.
apache Ploughed through the cvs commits and created a plausible Announcement file for Apache 1.3.22. Held off releasing Apache Week until the mirrors caught up, but /. found the tarballs so released it a little early. Took some time to write some scripts to tidy up the past 265 issues for bad tags, all modules and directives are marked as such

CVE Worked with the Mitre guys so that the Apache vulnerabilities in 1.3.20 get described correctly, all went rather smoothly.

Security Found a couple of security information leaks on a site and a cross-site scripting (css) issue in a product mostly by accident. It probably wouldn't be too hard to write a robot that scans for css vulnerabilities across a site

telewest So according to my builder Telewest ran cable right past my new house last year. But they still refuse to connect me, saying that they've run out of construction budget for this year. I wrote to them in the hope that I can convince them to connect me, it's my last chance at getting anything other than a modem or dodgy ISDN connection. My whole new house is networked, all going through a 56k modem, sad. Unfortunately Telewest and Blueyonder are 30% owned by Microsoft and they use Zeus not Apache, so no chance of getting any favours.

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