Ok, polls are now available. Let’s check how it works!

After having a quite depressing discussion about how Tor will evolve in Germany considering the data retention laws, I met a guy on IRC who told me about his new really cool project.

Camilo Viecco, who’s just doing his PhD in CS at the Indiana University, developed a naive UDP-implementation of the anonymisation-principle known as onion-routing from scratch. It’s far from perfect and it wouldn’t meld with the Tor-code easily, but it’s a first approach to improve latency for anon-services.

Tdor is an anonymisation-software to be installed on your local PC. It enables you to use the internet anonymously by configuring tdor as a proxy in your webbrowser. By using this software, no one can find out your IP-address, effectively resulting in an obfuscation of your identity.

The software is available on his homepage and is currently compiling on unixish systems.

What’s different about this project compared to regular anonymisation-systems is that tdor is using UDP instead of TCP, dramatically improving the well-known latency you suffer off when you’re using regular TCP-based anon-systems.

The project didn’t even release it’s first alpha-version, but the version I tested was usable and quite fast. I couldn’t make a difference of regular internet-connections and Internet over tdor.

Though where’s light, there’re shadows: The whole tdor-network only uses six nodes at the moment. It’s not meant to be used for real productive use, it’s only for testing - though it works cool!

At the moment the whole project consists of just a handful of people, but I bet Camilo appreciates any help he can get.

So. If you wanna participate in a really cool fancy brand-new cutting-edge anonymisation technology, grab the sources, compile it, run it and report bugs and issues!

A formal description about tdor is available here: http://petsymposium.org/2008/hotpets/udp-tor.pdf

Since a couple of weeks my Visio is seriously borked:

If you were in the middle of something, consider yourself screwed.

Man, what the hell is wrong with those people from the ergonomic quality-control department at MS.

OK, every now and then I’m checking the search engine terms people use. A few of them explainified.

1) tor exitnodes
If you just want to see a list of Tor exitnodes, you might want to see this list.
If you want to ban Tor to access your services, you want to read the Tor Abuse FAQ.

2) putty f-secure key authentication
Now that’s an interesting question, I haven’t thought about this. I know that F-Secure’s implementation of SSH has a totally different key-format than Putty has. Also, Putty has by default a different format than OpenSSH! That’s a topic worth to investigate.

3) it project scope sample
I bet you found this. And yes, I know, I should be writing the rest of the series.

4) siemens primecenter rack 38he
Those are cool. Though they’re made by Fujitsu-Siemens :) Datasheets are here: PRIMECENTER 12-46U Rack

5) capsicum chinense plants
My Bhut Jolokias finally have fruits! Will post pictures later.

6) how to discover tor nodes
Easy way is to check the IP-address against the list of known Tor-nodes. Check the document about the public TorDNSEL service.

7) kvm on gfs
Hm, should that be “GFS on KVM”? Not sure what that means. If the original researcher reads this, drop me a line :)

8) torbutton on firefox 3
Yes, it works. See Mozilla’s plugin-page about Torbutton.

9) wow authentication keys
No, I don’t do World of Warcraft.

10) wer weiß was über p2p anonym
That’s german and means “Who knows what about anonymous P2P”. Hm, whatever the question is - there are several people who know about it :) Got a specific question?

Finally a live webcam of LHC’s CMS experiment.

Clicky.

Ever since I migrated to Fedora Cora 8 I was really disappointed that Firefox-Profiles stopped working as I was used to them in Debian. I used different Firefox-profiles to run concurrent instances with other settings - like “regular web-surfing”, “Tor”, “English proxy for BBC iPlayer”, “test-this-random-plugin”.

But not with Fedora. I tried debugging the script, found a multitude of bug-reports against that, with now results.

Today dr|z3d from #tor pointed me to the correct answer: You have to apply the “-no-remote”-command to Firefox to get it working. Unfortunately, this option isn’t mentioned in the manual page to Firefox on Fedora Core 8.

So, if you want to get multiple profiles running: Add a -no-remote to the command-line. That should do the trick.

dr|z3d: I owe you a beer.

I recently read about the Minix3 release so I thought I’d give it a try. Since I got a wee new machine which can do real hardware-virtualisation using kvm/qemu, which works pretty fine with Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD, I thought to give that new setup a really hard time. I started off installing GNU/Hurd which was a bit of a pain; when I first tried to install it I *really* thought I was installing GNU/Linux - the HURD installtion-routine was even showing off with Tux, the Linux-Penguin! That was kinda… odd.

However, I wanted to give Minix3 a shot and downloaded the official release from their website. This was version 3.1.2a and I thought kvm would do just fine. Unfortunately I ran into the same problem over and over again, trying to give kvm several different parameters all the time.

Thing was that I always got this “Floating exception”-error. After searching on the net quite a lot I basically found out that the new version - 3.1.3a - solves those kvm-related problems.

At the moment it’s still installing - doing a bloody badblocks-scan - but later I’ll post more details.

Oh, also, on a related note: I had quite some nice vacation the last weeks.

Update: Base installation works. Networking doesn’t. It’s 2AM now, so I’ll check that out later.

Hi all, as you might know I’m with the FOSS WW2 submarine simulation called “Danger from the Deep“. We’re heading straight for the next release 0.4.0 which will hopefully be released later this year. New features include new physics, better graphics and new submarine models.

However, we’re currently doomed with a Windows-only bug. It seems to be some kind of multi-threading problem, but I wasn’t able yet to track it down.

That’s where you step in. I compiled the latest development-snapshot of the game for Win32 and put it up for download. If you’re a seasoned Windows-hacker and like to help in development, or if you’re just a gamer who want’s to try out the game and report some bugs - you’re all welcome! Any help is appreciated.

My posting on the Dangerdeep-Forums:

Hi all,

I’m just at the stage of finding a bug on Win32 with the latest svn-Snapshot of the game.

Essentially, the game sometimes crashes during starting a new mission, always in the thread coastmap.
Guess what: If I start the game under gdb-control, the error doesn’t occur! It’s really driving me nuts for Windows doesn’t have coredumps for later debugger inspection.
Wonderful!

Anyone willing and able to give me a hand? At the moment I’m the only tester reporting and hunting bugs, but I really really suck at Windows.

A bug-description can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2023975&group_id=71244&atid=535546

Download
Any takers? I compiled the latest SVN snapshot (r2646) for x86/Win32 with debugging symbols. Download it here:
http://yalla.ynfonatic.de/tmp/dangerdeep/dangerdeep-x86-win32-r2646-UNOFFICIAL.zip
(It’s currently still uploading. As long as you get 404, wait until 22:00 MEST.)

How to install?
Just unzip the directory to some place.

How to run?
Just start the provided batch-file dangerdeep.bat or set your PATH to include the directory “DLL” which is provided by the ZIP-file.

Legalese
All licences can be found in the LICENCES folder.

How to check if my graphic card is good enough
Along with the ZIP-archive, there’s a programm called gltest.x86.exe. Just run it and it tells you if everything’s ok. If that tests fails and the game doesn’t run, you need to upgrade either your drivers or even get a new graphic card.

Good hunting! And thanks for the help in advance!

Cheers,
Alex.

Now to you Linux-people: Yes, I also made a snapshot for you - and contrary to Windows, the games works flawlessly here :-) Grab a copy for x86_64 here: http://yalla.ynfonatic.de/tmp/dangerdeep/dangerdeep-x86_64-linux-r2628.tar.bz2

Good hunting!

Alex.

Heute mal ein Posting auf deutsch.

Gerade Niederlande : Italien geschaut.

Der amtierende Weltmeister wurde nicht nur deklassiert, besiegt, platt gemacht sondern auch so richtig blamiert. Oh Mann!

Als das zweite Tor fiel, dachte ich: Das ist das schönste Tor der EM bisher. Volle Kanne drauf, ja hallo Herr Gesangsverein ich meine, äh, Snijder! Voll auf die Fresse!

Aber dann kam der Hammer: Irgendwo um die 78. Minute, Schuss auf’s niederländische Tor, abgewehrt - dann Tempo Gegenstoß so richtig wie beim Handball - und dann dem Buffon voll aufs Maul! Van Bronckhorst hurra!

Unglaublich. Ich bin schwer begeistert!

Ich hätte nie gedacht, daß…
1) Ich jemals für die Niederländer miteifern würde
2) Ich die Italiener trotzdem weiter sehen möchte (siehe 3)

Lieber Weihnachtsmann, ich wünsche mir…
3) Die Italiener mit uns im Halbfinale, um das 2006-Hühnchen zu rupfen
4) Die Niederländer mit uns im Finale, um es ein für alle Mal zu klären!

Und wenn NL-DE im Finale zustande kommt, werde ich nach Köln fahren um es gemeinsam mit meinem Kumpel Edwin zu schauen!
Und *das* soll was heissen.

Alex.

P.S.: If you didn’t understand a damn thing, you don’t grok German. If you grok German, you don’t grok football. If you don’t grok football, you’re probably Italian.

This is part #2 in the series of postings “Planning IT Installations”.
Part #1 was the Introduction to the series of this postings: Planning IT-installations - Abstract (#1)

Introduction

OK, so you were assigned to this cool new project.

So what now?

First you have to check what exactly your scope of work is. In this series I’ll use an example project, consisting of a Fujitsu-Siemens Primepower 650 cluster in a high-available environment. The purpose of this cluster is to be a database-cluster, serving your company’s most precious secrets.

It’s your task, as the responsible planning-engineer, to make the best possible database-solution of the sold hardware, sail around the problems your sales-department created, deal with all those customer-requests, do all the work which is required so that the installation-staff can build this mother and be responsible for all IT- and engineering related problems which might occur.

Your Mission

You are the responsible planning-engineer for the project “A new high-available database for Antarctica’s ice-core samples“.

You boss gave you the following tasks:

• A dual-node, Fujitsu-Siemens, Primepower 650 cluster with two EMC CX300 Fibrechannel Storage cabinets was sold to the customer as the cutting-edge database-solution ever. The solution shall be high-available.
• Go and talk to the customer and check, if the sold solution will really work as sold.
• Plan and implement the cluster with the delivered components
• Make it work
• Make the customer to sign the acceptance-test handbook
• …profit!

Meet the customer

You need to do two things:

1. A site-survey to check, if the cluster you’re about to plan, really fits into your customer’s environment
2. A customer-workshop to sort all all requirements which have to be met

In what order?!

OK, you got lot’s of things to do. What to do first?

1. Evaluate the bill of materials to see how your hardware really does look like
2. Think about, how you assemble the racks with all the material you have
3. Make a questionary for the customer, if the racks, you planned, fit into their data-center.

Evaluate the bill of materials #1 - what did you get from sales?

You really want to know what was sold, don’t you? So the first thing is to get a bill of materials from your sales-department to check out what was sold. Be sure to get the real list. With all details. Up to the last cable.

Your list - or better, the list in our example - looks like that:

Partnumber D:GPS65-GM21-K01 - PW650 2 node, 4×1,89GHz, 8GB, Sol9:

Partnumber D:GPSRC-CX3B1-K01 - 2x CX300_S per 15x 73GB 15k

Evaluation the bill of material part #2 - So what do we have?

The first list, about the machines, tell us the following facts:

• We have two 38-RU racks (Pos. 40 and 390)
• We have two Primepower 650 machines with 8 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM each (Pos. 270 and 600)
• Those PW650 machine were ordered with the dual-power feed option (Pos. 340 and 670)
• We have two DN30 SCSI-cabinets (Pos. 200 and 530)
• We have one dumb Ethernet-switche for networking (Pos. 190)
• We have, for each rack, an IEC320 8-port power-outlet (Pos. 130) and a 3-port Schuko power-outlet per rack (Pos. 120)
• Lot’s of misc. stuff

The second list, about the EMC Clarions, tells us:

• We have two CX300 base-cabinets with 15×73GB (Pos. 50 and 150)
• Both cabinets have reduntant FibreChannel ports (Pos. 110)
• Everyhing, like cables and licenses, is included

Bringing it all together

Now that you checked what sales sold and groked, what’s really going to be delivered, you have to make up a rough proposal which you can present to the customer. You have to make up an idea how the racks exactly have too look and what components are included.

Now you have to figure out what exactly you have to do.

What Do you have?

The bill of materials tells you a lot of things. It tells you that you have…

• Two racks where your two cluster-node will be builtin
• All the necessary components to power up the system when thinking of electricity (Pos. 130 and 120)

All those facts tell you that you’re pretty much independant of all the problems which might occur.

What do you need?

In this certain case, you, as the planner, are pretty much independant now. But yet you need to persuade the customer to include your two racks into their datacenter.

So, when talking about those requirements, you need to check out what exact things the customer has to provide to meet your expectations to make the cluster running.

That include things like:

• How many power feed to provide?
• What’s the footprint of my racks? How heavy are they? What’s the maximum heat-dissipation - can the customer’s air-conditioning cope with our system?

The scope

Now that you figured out what was delivered and got a basic idea of what you have to do to implement this solution on your customers’s site, you have to define the scope of your project.

• The scope of your project is your assigned mission.
• The scope includes to evaluate, if the given hardware is enough to be set up in your customer’s datacenters.
• You need to check if the hardware is good enough to be set up in your customer’s datacenter; (Example: You’re about to set up two cluster nodes in two different server-rooms. Those rooms are 100 km apart. Implicite action: Go and persuade project-management ro buy FC-switches and LAN-Switsches witj LH-modules.)
• You’re responsible to get the cluster working.

This is the end of this posting. All remaining questions will be answered in the next postings.

The next posting is due by this Sunday, July 1st.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with me.