Advogato blog for redowl

12 Dec 2001

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 10:55:29 GMT

Just upgraded my Debian (potato) box to woody. Went well with only one minor scrape which broke X on startup, but was easily fixable. After the dist upgrade the /etc/X11/X symlink pointed to usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_Mach64 instead of to /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA. This was fixed, and it's running smoothly.

Finally dumped Netscape for Skipstone.

9 Dec 2001

Sun, 9 Dec 2001 02:57:24 GMT

The Heathmount vs. Technodome.com case.

If domain owners are forced to defend their domains in Virginia
(this has the legacy shadow of NSI all over this.), this could allow
for a corporate juggernaut to cripple a small business, perhaps a
competitor. A small business could find that it's financially difficult
for them to defend their domain name which they've legitimately registered ,
especially if they're located outside the U.S.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

-t

6 Dec 2001

Thu, 6 Dec 2001 03:25:53 GMT

Well according to the Commerce Dept.: "The DES is dead. The AES will take its place". Look here.
Possibly another contest to add to Distributed.net?

Let's get crackin' !! :)

Also, submitted two new Window Maker themes to themes.org, based on Myst III: Exile.
They haven't posted to themes.org yet. One of them called "Greenhouse" is my current
desktop theme. Here's a screenshot.

19 Nov 2001

Mon, 19 Nov 2001 22:49:23 GMT

Got back in the running for cracking RC5-64
(I am sooo far behind) and posted my graphed individual results:

Distributed.net stats

The Perl script graph generator is written by Dominique Pelle
and can be found here. Gnuplot is required.

Now..if I can just get some more machines...

14 Nov 2001

Wed, 14 Nov 2001 04:05:28 GMT

i finally updated my website...

9 Nov 2001

Fri, 9 Nov 2001 12:25:09 GMT

It's 4am(PST)...do you know what your firewall is doing?

Well, I was wondering why my internal net boxes (such as my whinedoze box) couldn't get to the net, but all outside requests could get in with no problem (i.e. my website).

<yawn> answer...I forgot to bind the iptables PREROUTING chain to
my external interface only. So this:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.0.3:80

was changed to this:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i $EXTERNAL -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.0.0.3:80

Before the change, PREROUTING the chain, by default, was applied to both interfaces. Thus, all incoming port 80 requests on my internal interface were connecting to itself. I didn't see this until I ran 'tcpdump -i eth1'. Since my workstation is my gateway (for now...), I didn't notice this problem until I tried accessing the web on my internal LAN.

Ah well, case solved.

Good night.

8 Nov 2001

Thu, 8 Nov 2001 21:14:04 GMT

I'm glad to see that the EFF has joined the Morpheus defense team in the complaint against file sharing companies.

The case description for MGM v. Grokster can be retrieved here:

MGM v. Grokster [pdf]