NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources. ...
somewhere around 2013 (and precisely - for ‘small’ Santa Claus, so 6th of December), OpenSSH was extended to provide new way of storing keys. it’s important because the old format - MD5 hash - can be cracked veeeeery quickly. developers decide to use modification of bcrypt, that will slow down GPU-assisted cracking attempts in hashcat from gigahashes per second, to at most kilohashes. what you need to do to upgrade your defenses? first of all, take care of the keys themselves. i’m using 2048 bit long RSA keys, and because some of the older equipment can’t handle more, i have to stay with that. my private key looks like this today: ...
FreeNAS is special edition of tuned-up FreeBSD, with GUI available over WWW to enable easy setup and maintenance. i had to migrate recently my old Synology 1815+ thanks to well known Intel SNAFU with Atom CPUs. interestingly enough, even Synology own service department declined to RMA the NAS, without even discussing the situation. so i managed to setup quickly 12x 3.5" bay server. i had five 3.5" 8TB HDDs from Synology that i wanted to rescue data from. the server itself is kind of old one - but solid. it’s a dual Intel L5100 series chassis (with sadly one CPU only), 64GB of RAM, LSI/Avago RAID card and Intel twin 10GE NIC. for ‘fast & dirty’ hack it was more than enough. ...
getting grip of reality after moving is not easy in some situations. when everything is still fresh, and on the other hand - so well known :) you know obviously that stopgaps tend to last for years after they were put “just for a moment”? my december cleaning started with true horror of moving my emails server from FreeBSD 9-STABLE (just EoLed) to 11-STABLE. traditional make buildworld; make kernel KERNCONF=server; mergemaster -FiU; make installworld; reboot didn’t work, but (WTF?!) the same sources were able to give me working build when i did make buildworld buildkernel; make installkernel and so on. for some reason, with the first sequence - cam.c dropped multiple warnings treated as error. and build failed. ...
OpenSSH 7 among other things discontinued older key exchange protocols for Diffie-Hellmans group 1 (diffie-hellman-group1-sha1). we already know that it can be compromised by executing attack known as Logjam. that’s all good and nice, until you try to connect to such device using newly upgraded SSH. if your device doesn’t support DH group 1 key exchange, you need to upgrade software. if you already have software capable of doing so, it needs to be configured on the box. ...
i was travelling recently to US and back, essentially sitting for a 10+ hours in planes each way. i decided to invest in myself, and bought myself a gadget - my friend praised it years ago. i’m talking about active noise cancelling headphones - Bose QC35. after 10 hours of listening to music and podcasts and NOT listening to engines, people, coughing, snoring and other traditional noises during transatlantic flight… i have to say, this is technology that really makes a difference. and battery was still at 60% full! ...
…and that’s good thing. with only two weeks to seventeed edition of PLNOGa we have bunch of interesting news. conference, that we started by discussing BGP, MPLS-TE and RSVP and role of 10GE interfaces (we’re in Europe and that was 2009!), today focuses on deploying SDN, and influence of IoT to service provider networks. we’re also discussing public cloud, hybrid cloud, software defined data centers (SDDC) and consequences of proliferation of overlay networks. our beloved MPLS OAM discussions slowly drop from spotlight in agenda - because again, world is changing. ...
it’s hard to disagree with Bruce’s article. would blockchain-based solution be the best approach here for accounting? accounted access to data, accounted transactions … something must change. we can’t deal properly with data.
how bad our current patent system needs to be broken, to allow building companies just to do business on patent trolling? we see more articles about it but capitalsm doesn’t care. even when law enters the game, there’s often nothing that can be done having SDN in mind, and developers influence on how todays internet works, i’m thinking what we’ll be doing in couple of years (and how pitfully unprepared are companies today to defend any sensitive data - financial, biological - in “web 17.0” world). will we be able to sustain development as a society, or it will be reserved only for those rich, at the helm of big corporations? ...
…resent encryption. in particular those that were caught red handed doing mass surveillance of its own and foreign citizens. it’s worth to read this article to understand how PR (written by Camerons speech author) is trying to turn everyone using security and encryption to those helping terrorist. it’s enough today to name somebody ’terrorist’ and suddenly every option is on the table. interrogation, wiretapping, dropping bombs or simply investigating without any specific reason is fair call. ...