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photo, a photo by bostonlinuxandunix on Flickr.

BLU Meeting: Whole Disk Encryption

This month's meeting is a series of "lightning talks" by several speakers.

First off was Jerry Feldman's presentation, which lasted about 15 minutes.
Jerry's talk was about general issues common to all whole-disk encryption
software.

Next up was Ned Harvey, from 7:15pm to 7:58pm, who compared a number of
disk encryption suites:

1. TrueCrypt
2. Microsoft'd BitLocker
3. Apple's OSX Encrypted DMG, SparseImage and SparseBundle
   
4. Apple's FileVault 1 and FileVault 2
5. EncFS, Boxceyptor, Encfs4win, CryptKeeper
   

Some of Ned's discussion:

• how hardware AES crypto chips improve performance
• biometrics and TPM
• need to save TPM's 40-char key -- needed e.g. when motherboard gets replaced, to activate new TPM hardware on the new motherboard
• impact on backup/restore
• using crypto with DropBox to share with coworkers

next up was Bill Ricker, from 8:01pm to 8:29pm, discussing a new paper on a weakness in RSA public key generation

"Ron was wrong, Whis is right" (Arjen K. Lenstra and James P. Hughes)

New research: There's no need to panic over factorable keys--just mind your Ps and Qs

Impure Math

(an old classic I ran across on USENET in 1983)

Once upon a time (1/T), pretty Polly Nomial was strolling

across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a

singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had

made it an absolute condition that she never enter such an array

without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed variables

that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this

condition and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents

approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite

suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point.

She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went

completely divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped

over a square root that was protruding from the Erf, and plunged

headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she

found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was

lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear

coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was

she convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a common fraction behind her, polly rotated and saw

Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could

see at once by his degenerative conic and his dissipative terms that

he was bent on no good.

"Arcsinh", she gasped.

"Ho, ho", he said. "What a symmetric little asymptote you

have. I can see that your angles have lots of secs."

"Oh, sir", she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got

my brackets on."

"Calm yourself, my dear", said our suave operator. "Your

fears are purely imaginary."

I, I, she thought, perhaps he's not normal but homologous.

"What order are you?" the brute demanded.

"Seventeen", replied Polly.

Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on?"

"Of course not", Polly replied quite properly, "I'm absolutely

convergent."

"Come, come", said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I

know and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never", gasped Polly.

"Abscissa", he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His

patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until

she was powerless Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her

significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection.

Poor, poor Polly. The algorithmic method was now her only hope. She

felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would

soon be gone forever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a Heavyside operator.

Curly's radius squared itself. Polly's loci quivered. He integrated

by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored,

he performed Runge-Kutta on her. The complex beast even went all the

way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity - to be

multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating

until he had satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and

became completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she

was no longer piece-wise continuous, but had been truncated in several

places and it was to late to differentiate now. As the months went

by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally, she went to

L'Hospital and generated a small but pathological function that left

surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.

The moral of our sad story is this:

"If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a

single degree of freedom."

-the end

-Aunty Derivative

Sad Story

A woman had 50-yard line tickets for the Super Bowl. As she sat down, a man came along and asked her if anyone is sitting in the seat next to her. "No," she said, "the seat is empty."

"This is incredible," said the man. "Who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the world, and not use it?"

Somberly, the woman says, "Well... the seat actually belongs to me. I was supposed to come here with my husband, but he passed away. This is the first Super Bowl we have not been to together since we got married in 1967."

"Oh I'm sorry to hear that, that's terrible. But couldn't you find someone else - a friend or relative or even a neighbor to take the seat?"

The woman shakes her head, "No, they're all at the funeral."

(Reposted from Mike Lindsay on FB)

Christopher Hitchens RIP

Christopher Hitchens, champion of rational thought and vocal opponent of superstition, lost his battle with cancer on December 15. He will be missed.

Sam Harris expresses it better than I could: The Blog : Hitch : Sam Harris

Union Rules Hookers

(Originally heard this from a college buddy back in 1983)

A dedicated Teamsters union worker was attending a convention in Las Vegas and decided to check out the local brothels. When he got to the first one, he asked the Madam, "Is this a union house?"

"No,' she replied, "I'm sorry, it isn't."

"Well, if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?"

"The house gets $80 and the girls get $20", she answered.

Offended at such unfair dealings, the union man stomped off down the street in search of a more equitable, hopefully unionized shop. His search continued until finally he reached a brothel where the Madam responded, "Why yes sir, this is a union house. We observe all union rules."

The man asked, "And if I pay you $100, what cut do the girls get?"

"The girls get $80 and the house gets $20."

"That's more like it!" the union man said.

He handed the Madam $100, looked around the room, and pointed to a stunningly attractive green-eyed blonde. "I'd like her", he said.

"I'm sure you would, sir", said the Madam. Then she gestured to a 92-year old woman in the corner, "but Ethel here has 67 years seniority and according to union rules, she's next!"

An Amazing Deal On IPads!

http://www.jumbojoke.com/an_amazing_deal_on_ipads.html

I've always wanted an iPad, but could never afford one. Now this is an amazing deal! Just $1, and it's totally legitimate! I already have mine!

If you are interested in getting an iPad I know someone who has a bunch that he has to get sold off immediately.

These are legit -- not off the back of a truck! They are from a canceled hospital contract due to Government cutbacks in health care.

Obviously, the numbers are limited -- he has just 20,000 iPads, and at $1 in original packaging, you know they're going to go really fast.

I got mine already -- the photo of one satisfied customer is below!

Get back to me as quickly as you can if you want one too.

We can show kids how to really save money. Who doesn't have a buck lying around to get in on this great deal?!?

- - -

- - -

- - -

What?

Oh, "iPad", "eye pad" -- what's the difference?

Coat of Arms finalized!

At long last, after learning all sorts of cool things I can do with the Gimp,

I finally completed the design for my personal Coat of Arms!

Hooray!

Now I need to find a place that will produce a nice hand-painted plaque with

a customer-supplied design. The services I've run across have no mechanism

to handle a customer-supplied design; they only offer packages where they

design the thing themselves based on the customer's last name.

My research into heraldry traditions revealed that a coat of arms was supposed

to be different for each individual, though each son's version was based

on his father's (and grandfather's, great-grandfather's, etc.) design in a specific

manner. Then when the father died, the eldest son adopted his father's design

but the other sons continued to use their modified versions.

The various traditions also morphed over time and weren't really followed

consistently in many cases, so ultimately I decided that it's entirely appropriate

for me to design my own coat of arms based on my ancestral lineages, and

to evolve the heraldric traditions in accordance with societal evolution that

has occurred since medieval times.

In today's society, women are no longer thought of as second-class citizens.

In light of that, I've incorporated both my father's (Abreau) and my mother's

(Moran) family crest designs into my shield, in the manner commonly used
when two different kingdoms were joined together by marriage. I've affixed
a "mullet" (5-point star) to indicate that I'm my parents' third son; I've replaced
the armored helmet with a blue fedora; and instead of choosing an animal to
represent my basic virtues, I chose instead two of my intellectual heroes:
Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Darwin.

Blink, and you miss it!

Well, it finally happened. On October 31, when I was distracted and didn't think to check the clock, the official headcount of the population of our planet crossed the 7 billion mark.

There are now more than 7 billion human begins living on the third rock from our Sun!

We passed the 6 billion mark on October 12, 1999. The 5 billion mark was crossed on July 11, 1987. The 4 billion mark is estimated to have been reached in April 1974, and the 3 billion mark in July 1959.

Pretty soon it will be standing room only!

Introducing: Plato's Magical Mystery Cave

Time for a fresh new perspective! "Perdition's Obsessive Compulsion", an oblique reference to the legend of Captain Van der Decken and the "Flying Dutchman", has now been renamed "Plato's Magical Mystery Cave"! Hooray! :e

On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan - O'Reilly Radar

On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan - O'Reilly Radar:

'via Blog this'

Dennis Ritchie Day - O'Reilly Radar

Dennis Ritchie Day - O'Reilly Radar:

On 10/30/11 let's remember the contributions of computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie.

I don't have the convening power of a Governor Brown, but for those of us around the world who care, I hereby declare this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day! Let's remember the contributions of this computing pioneer. (Tim O’Reilly)

'via Blog this'

IPv6 Baby Steps

Been doing some research on how to proceed, now that my first IPv6 tunnel is working.

The "Seven Deadly Traps" whitepaper recommended finding an IP address management (IPAM) tool to manage allocation of IPv6 addresses. After installing and testing several opensource implementations, I found that phpipam works well.

Tried installing OCS Inventory NG, too, but I'm having some difficulties getting it running properly.

Checking out some IPv6 info resources at ARIN.net. Found the following checklist at First Steps for ISPs

Work Toward Native IPv6

After you have accomplished this, it is time to begin the planning and education process which will result in offering native IPv6 Internet access services at all PoPs where you currently offer IPv4 Internet access. You will need to run dual-stack on your backbone and servers, and will need to push IPv6 all the way to the edge. Here are some pages which will help with that.

• Implementing Dual Stack
• Educating Yourself about IPv6
• Planning IPv6 Deployment
• Designing an IPv6 Lab Environment
• DNS and Naming Issues
• Troubleshoot IPv6 Issues
• Implementing 6PE
• Investigate Middleboxes
• Article on ISP IPv6 planning

Who says men don't have a sensitive side?

Teddy Bear Collection

A woman meets a gorgeous man in a bar. They talk, they connect, they end up leaving together.

They get back to his place, and as he shows her around his apartment, she can't help but notice the soft, sweet, cuddly teddy bears in his bedroom!

There are three shelves with hundreds and hundreds of cute, cuddly teddy bears, carefully placed in rows covering an entire wall! It was obvious that he had taken quite some time to lovingly arrange them and she was immediately touched by the amount of thought he had put into organizing the display.

There were small bears all along the bottom shelf, medium-sized bears covering the length of the middle shelf, and huge, enormous bears running all the way along the top shelf.

She found it strange for a young bloke to have such a large a collection of teddy bears, especially one that's so extensive, but doesn't mention this to him, and actually is quite impressed by his sensitive side. All the while thinking to herself, "Oh my! Maybe this guy could be the one! Maybe he could father my children!"

She turns to him. They kiss... and then they rip each other's clothes off and make hot steamy love.

After an intense, explosive night of raw passion, the woman rolls over, strokes his chest and asks coyly, "Well, how was it?"

The guy says: "Help yourself to any prize from the bottom shelf."

Reinstalled RequestTracker

Back in the spring we had a disk failure on the BLU server, and I never reinstalled a few of the subsystems that had gone unused for a long time. One of these was the RT helpdesk system.

I needed RT again for the IPv6 project, so I reinstalled it yesterday afternoon. Couldn't get the dependencies working for the latest tarball (version 4.0.2) so I ended up using the pre-built package (version 3.8.8) from the yum repo.

Alas, there's a boatload of new features in 4.x that I'd like to use, but I needed something operational immediately. Hopefully the newer version will get packaged for EPEL in a few months.

The Science Channel Videos: Through The Wormhole: Machine Planet

Machine Planet (video hosted by Morgan Freeman)

Baby's First IPv6 Tunnel

Yesterday I registered for an account at SixXS, got the account details, and then requested a heartbeat tunnel.
This afternoon I received the config details for the tunnel. I set up the tunnel on Lachesis and was then able
to successfully ping6 a few IPv6 addresses and browse a few IPv6-only websites.

Woo-Hoo!!!

(Apologies to any Minbari who may find that expression offensive or confusing :)

-------------------------------

Details:

1. Installed the AICCU software on the CentOS 6.0 server: "yum install aiccu"
2. Edited the config file "/etc/aiccu.conf" with my tunnel config info. Set the username, password, protocol (tic), server, and tunnel_id. Left the rest of the file as-is.
3. Ran "chkconfig aiccu on" and "service aiccu start" to bring up the tunnel.
4. Ran "ping6 ipv6.google.com" to ping an external IPv6 address. Success!!!
5. Connected to the server via vnc over an ssh tunnel, and started firefox.
6. Did a google search for IPv6-only sites.
7. Browsed to "http://ipv6.cybernode.com/list-of-ipv6-only-sites" for a list.
8. Tested connection at "http://v6.testmyipv6.com". Success!!!

The site linked to a free whitepaper: "The 7 Deadly Traps of IPv6 Deployment and How to Avoid Them". Next step is to read through this.

Progress on IPv6 project

Status so far:

1. Allocated a server for a BLU IPv6 testbed at our colo facility. Needs hard drives.
2. Talked to colo customer support; turns out they don't provide any IPv6 support.
3. Asked for recommendations on BLU discussion list.
4. Recommendation #1: Do a hybrid IPv4/IPv6 system, instead of a pure IPv6-only system
5. Recommendation #2: Use the SixXS.net tunnel broker to connect to the IPv6 Internet
6. Registered for a SixXS account for the project
7. Requested a heartbeat-type tunnel from my SixXS account

--------------------

Details:

1. Browsed to https://www.sixxs.net/main/ and read through the "10 Easy Steps to IPv6" page. Determined that the best type of tunnel for my purposes is a Heartbeat tunnel.
2. Used the SixXS direct signup link to register for an account.
3. Once I received the account, I requested a heartbeat tunnel.

Red Hat Takes Its Hat Off to Dennis Ritchie

Red Hat Takes Its Hat Off to Dennis Ritchie

October 14, 2011

by Tim Burke, Vice President Linux Engineering

It is with sad hearts that the Red Hat community mourns the passing of computing pioneer Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. Dennis Ritchie was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.

Many of us have a proud history of involvement in the UNIX operating system well before the emergence of Linux. To the UNIX world, Ritchie and Thompson were as influential as Linus Torvalds is today to the Linux community. Unix and C's direct and spiritual descendants cannot be counted, but include Linux, Android, Mac OS, iOS, JavaScript, C++, the genius of the internet, and a planet of developers. The major impact of UNIX is not so much in the elegant code itself but rather in the culture of sharing work across industry and academia that became UNIX’s hallmark. Prior to UNIX, operating system code was locked in corporate vaults – inaccessible to the masses. UNIX flung open these doors by allowing code to be shared among software engineers across the nascent computer industry, ushering in an unprecedented wave of collaborative development – and, at the same time, liberating many applications from being locked into a single proprietary hardware vendor.

UNIX code was also shared with universities where it became the foundation of the learning and advancement of operating system practices. Similarly, the C programming language became a staple of the computer science classroom. Many of us literally grew up in Dennis' technical shadow and still have his book, The C Programming Language, co-authored with Brian Kernighan and more fondly referred to as K & R, on our shelves. It remains a source of inspiration and practical help to programmers to this day.

Most of what we do is heavily influenced by Dennis’s outstanding contributions – both in the technical arena and as a founder of the concept of community development. We at Red Hat look with awe and reverence on his legacy.

PXE Dust at Midnight

The new PXE install server is finally working! The final problem turned out to be an SElinux issue with Apache.

It seems Apache doesn't like to serve files from an iso image mounted on a loopback device, unless you set the SElinux context in the mount options:

mount -o ro,loop,context=system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t Cent OS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso dvd1