2007 & The year of the Pig

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Year of the Pig (Fire)Happy New Year 2007.

The Christmas period and the days after them, where rather quiet, and we took our time to adapt and clean-up the flat. We took advantage of the R&R we earned during the course of 2006.

This coming year will be very important for me and Jackie. In only three months we are expecting our family to grow by one member. We are very happy and looking forward to this coming event.

2007 is also the year of the Pig in the chinese horoscope. “The Pig is a fun and enlightening personality blessed with patience and understanding. People born under the sign of the Pig enjoy life and all it has to offer, including family and friends. They are honest and thoughtful and expect the same of other people. “.

Just like in 1947, 2007 is the year of the Fire Pig. “Active, outgoing and extroverted, Fire Pigs breathe new life into everything they do. These Pigs are vivid, motivated individuals who cannot be deterred from a goal once they have set it. They are emotional and passionate about their loved ones, their occupations and their objectives. They are bold and vivacious, unafraid to take risks despite the consequences. They make great bosses because they do work so hard and because they are so spirited. But don’t doublecross a Fire Pig. They have the ability to be quite abrasive when things don’t turn out as they planned.”

Moving out after 11 years…

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Well after 11 years (1996-2007) living at the same address by myself, I’ve finaly moved out… Earlier tonight I gave my last key set back to the landlord. It was with a tear in the eye that I drove off to my new accomodation. I’ve had some excellent times and will keep great memories from my appartment. The datacenter room (which took me a few days to empty, sort, purge and clean), the lounge with it’s huge beamer, where I watched so many films and TV series.

2006 November Computer Room

The Great 2006 IT Purge… 🙁

2006 November IT Purge

Most of my stuff has now been stored in a Maritime container for future use.

Storage

I’ve now moved in with Jackie in Versoix. We will be more cramped, but we hope to get something larger in 2/3 years when we will need the space. In the meantime we enjoy the beautifull view of the Lake Leman and the Mt Blanc in the farground.

Using offline tools to prepare my entries

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Getting WordPress running on my web server was easy, now I’m looking and testing at using tools to more easely upload content to the blog. I looked up what kind of tools existed, and I’m now giving my first try. Being able to create offline content and later upload it might be interesting, as I’m not always connected to the Internet.

Well… that didn’t seem to work…

A new beginning…

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Okay, this is my first test of using a blog. Yes, I haven’t used a blog until now, because… well I just didn’t take the time. Yet, I’ve been putting comments online on the Internet since 1991. It was first called the USENET, later I used a simple web site from 1995, and I moved to online rant’s (before the name weblog/blog was used) on this website. Now it’s time to embrace yet another change. Using a nice What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) style system to put my comments online.

So this is a new experience for me. In the past, I never gave my readers the opportunity to reply to my comments. So let’s get started and see where this can lead us.

Cloning Servers in VMware

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On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 16:29:18 -0500, “Rob” <m…@me.com> wrote:
>I am wanting to create 5-6 virtual servers running Windows 2000. Is there an easy way to set up and configure one and then clone it?

Create one good Windows 2000 template (called a Gold Master at VMware)with all the drivers, tools and utilities (winzip,acrobat,newsid) and patches (sp4, WindowsUpdate), but do not include it in a domain.Then you simply copy your Gold Master to another directory, start that system, newsid it, and then only insert it into your target domain.I always keep an updated copy my Gold Master around, so I can get a new server up and running in just the timeframe of copying one directory to another.

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Airsnort & VMware

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On Fri, 18 Apr 2003 20:13:22 +0900, “nightmare” <nightm…@hotmail.com> wrote:

>How can I setup airsnort with a wireless card ( orinoco ) on linux under vmware? (windows XP : host operating system Redhat Linux 7.3 : guest operating system)

 

It’s going to be difficult as VMware does not pass PCMCIA Devices over to the Guest VM machines (unless this is now supported in VMware WS 4 which I haven’t tested). Your only luck would be to have the Orinoco Wireless card on the PCI bus…

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SSL cert request signed by Microsoft CA for Exim 4.10 with TLS

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Here is a post I made to the Exim mailing list, on how to configure secure connectivty with TLS using a Microsoft Windows 2000 Certificate Authority. It’s a combination of using both an Open-Source application and an integrated Microsoft CA.

This is a bit off-topic, but I could not find much information about signing OpenSSL generated certificates with a Microsoft (Win2000 server) Certificate Authority and using these signed certificate for the TLS support in Exim 4.10. So here are the steps I followed to get a successfull result. There might be a better way, or easier one, but this has worked for me. I found myself in the situation of wanting TLS support for Exim 4.10, yet wanting to leverage the Certificate Authority in use in my company. This Certificate Authority runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server (SP3), and is in use for Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL) and Encrypted File System (EFS) recovery agents.I proceeded to generate an OpenSSL (0.96b) RSA key. I then moved the certificate.csr to the Microsoft CA and signed it [out of the scope of this email]. I then exported the signed certificate using the Base64 setting and with the Certification Chain (saves the information in the PKCS#7 format). Having moved the certificate.p7b back to my mail server, I used the following command to extract the information from the PKCS#7 to a temporary file and edit it to fit the parameters of a .crt fileopenssl pkcs7 -text -inform PEM -in certificate.p7b -print_certs > certificate.crt

I then edited the certificate.crt file to remove the CA’s certificate information and public key, leaving only the parts between CERTIFICATE and END CERTIFICATE. Extract of certificate.crt is below:

Certificate:
Data:
Version: 3 (0×2)
Serial Number:
12:21:1a:14:00:00:00:00:00:05
Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption
Issuer: Email=someone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, O=John Doe, CN=Doe CA
Validity
Not Before: Sep 9 08:57:19 2002 GMT
Not After : Sep 9 08:57:19 2004 GMT
Subject:
Subject Public Key Info:
Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption
RSA Public Key: (1024 bit)
Modulus (1024 bit):
07:ec:a3:9a:4f:50:9a:a1:f2:eb:f9:ef:3a:8b:44:
…
hu6z5Lm8nkY=
—–END CERTIFICATE—–

One question I’m still considering, and I haven’t found on this mailing list or in some documentation, would it be possible to get EXIM to TLS encrypt outgoing SMTP connections with remote SMTP servers ? I understand that my EXIM server will not have the remote’s
TLS certificate, but does it really matter ? I think encrypting the SMTP traffic would be a nicer than having normal cleartext traffic.

xntpd with external DCF77 receiver problem (/dev/cua00)

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I’m trying to install the xntpd3-5.93e-export package on a
OpenBSD 2.7 (i386) system, using a external time receiver
Expert mouseCLOCK using the DCF77 Clock from
[http://www.gudeads.kud.com/emc-e.htm .

I’ve configured it with the –enable-RAWDCF option and
connected the external time receiver on the serial port 0.

I tried /dev/cua00 and /dev/cua01 and I get the following
message :

Nov 10 17:18:41 hostname xntpd[pid]: xntpd 3-5.93e Sat Nov 10 17:13:31 CET
2000 (1)
Nov 10 17:18:41 hostname xntpd[pid]: tickadj = 40, tick = 10000,
tvu_maxslew = 3960, est. hz = 100
Nov 10 17:18:41 hostname xntpd[pid]: fcntl(F_SETOWN) fails for clock I/O:
Inappropriate ioctl for device
Nov 10 17:18:41 hostname xntpd[pid]: PARSE receiver #0: parse_start:
addclock /dev/refclock-0 fails (ABORT – clock type requires async io)
Nov 10 17:18:41 hostname xntpd[pid]: configuration of 127.127.8.0 failed

I’m a bit stuck, reading the documentation for xntpd doesn’t give me a clue
on how to proceed right now. Any pointers ?

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MicroVAX II : UNXINT error msg at boot

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On Tue, 9 May 2000, Erik Bussink wrote:
> I got an old MicroVAX II (KA630) system that hangs at the end of the CPU/MEMORY test process, And I get the UNXINT msg at the 6 countdown. Any ideas what the UNXINT means ?
Either it has detected unix on the internal disk and refused to run it… 😉 or that’s the “Unexpected Interrupt” error.  It means just that, and could be a symptom of more problems than I care to guess at.
Since this is a microvax II, I’d suggest first off that you remove all unnesecarry components, and try booting with only the cpu board. (obviously it won’t boot, but it should get past the self-test)
It the problem is on any other board you’d be able to work it out by process of elemination this way. (remember that qbus is very picky about the order of boards and leaving blank spaces…)

> and it freezes. I haven’t yet started poking inside the system to unplug a device or two to see if one is broken or not, but I surmises that the T?50 is broken.
Again, that’s the best way to do it, I’d guess.  Clean all the contacts while you’re at it… never hurts.Regards,  Christopher Smith

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