October « 2008 « codeblog

October 30, 2008

how to drain your entropy and have fun with ssh fingerprint ASCII-art

Filed under: Blogging,Debian,General,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 10:48 am

SSH’s new “VisualHostKey” option (in Ubuntu Intrepid and Debian Lenny) is great fun. Normally it is disabled, but it seems that “ssh-keygen” turns it on when generating new keys. In celebration of the Ubuntu release, here is a script to entertain yourself with RSA ASCII-art, care of SSH and your system’s entropy pool:


#!/bin/sh
set -e
DIR=$(mktemp -t -d rsa-art-XXXXXX)
trap "rm -f $DIR/key*; rmdir $DIR" EXIT HUP INT QUIT TERM

while :
do
    ART=$(ssh-keygen -t rsa -f $DIR/key -N "" | tail -n 11)
    rm -f $DIR/key
    /bin/echo -e "\x1Bc"
    echo "$ART"
done

Makes me feel like I’m watching Life. (Use control-C to stop it.)

Comments (2)

October 22, 2008

using hdhomerun IR with lirc

Filed under: Debian,Multimedia,Ubuntu — kees @ 5:18 pm

Followed the instructions and got lirc configured with my HDHomeRun’s IR:


# ID=$(hdhomerun_config discover | cut -d" " -f3)
# hdhomerun_config $ID set /ir/target "10.0.0.100:5000 store"
# echo 'REMOTE_LIRCD_ARGS="-H udp -d 5000"' >> /etc/lirc/hardware.conf
# /etc/init.d/lirc restart
# /etc/init.d/gdm restart

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October 21, 2008

Feisty Finale

Filed under: Blogging,Security,Ubuntu,Ubuntu-Server — kees @ 3:59 pm

Feisty is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 34 hours, 44 minutes, and 46 seconds building 255 security updates. (And 25 hours, 40 minutes, 13 seconds doing 249 builds during the Feisty devel window.) As before, these times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc.

As a correction to the Edgy EOL post, my desktop actually spent 50:59:40 doing 322 security builds and 04:14:23 doing 84 devel builds.

Current standings:

dapper: 49:42:36
gutsy: 43:14:36
hardy: 166:11:15
intrepid: 70:24:52

As mentioned, these numbers are mixed devel/security times.

Thank you Feisty! You were much more stable than Edgy, even if we didn’t see eye-to-eye about wifi connectivity.

Comments (1)

October 14, 2008

RCS keyword expansion in BZR

Filed under: Blogging,Ubuntu — kees @ 6:04 pm

I’m going to need to look into keyword expansion in bzr. I use $Id:$ and $Revision:$ headers in a bunch of the files I shove out to web servers. Switching to bzr has caused me to lose that for the time-being. I probably don’t want it enabled in all my repositories, so this is really just a reminder to my future self to investigate it further.

Comments (1)

October 10, 2008

the goal is freedom

Filed under: Blogging,Ubuntu — kees @ 10:37 am

I’m proud of Ubuntu, but I’m always a little sad when I see news items like this.

I don’t want to see everyone who contributes to the World Resource Institute and the Conservation International Foundation to start giving entirely to the Greenpeace Fund. They’re all doing fantastic work and doing it in slightly different ways. Changing allocation between these organizations doesn’t have any real benefit.

I want to see the news of everyone moving their money out of Exxon and General Motors and putting it into the things linked above or anything like them. Then big stuff starts happening; multinationals have less to work with and environmental groups have more. That’s a win.

Organizations moving from Free Software to Free Software is a distraction. There is no net gain; there is no more freedom; there are no more users and no more chances to create new Free Software developers. It is news when an organization moves from proprietary software to Free. That’s important, and we should stay focused on that goal.

Comments (4)

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