Checksum Arcanius

My current web browser is Mozilla Supervulture. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s a great web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Actually, Supervulture is Firefox, but with a plug-in. You see, Mozilla’s sleek browser project has undergone a name change in each of the last two versions. Firefox was formerly known as Firebird, and before that, Phoenix. Each of the previous names was objected to by other software groups, but regardless of the reason for the change, its kind of funny that the name has changed so much. So someone went ahead and used Firefox’s excellent extensible architecture to make a plug-in that randomly changes the name for each browser window you open. The plug-in is called Firesomething, and a Google search will find it for you. This never would have happened had Bernie Zimmerman’s not posted about Firesomething in his weblog. Google it, I’m too lazy to put the link in myself (I’m thinking of switching blogging software again — maybe to b2 or a modification thereof that makes links easier for me to put in.)

By the way, Firefox (or whatever its nom-de-jour is) is an excellent browser, and I would suggest changing to it from any other web browser.

As promised, my adventures with my computer from Friday… Working at accomplishing one of the items on my to-do list, I was turning oasis, my former desktop machine, into the replacement for the current silverfir.net server. I’m now giving the different incarnations of silverfir.net version numbers… wadi was v1, currently you are being served by v2 (named sf2) and soon you will be served by oasis (v3). Well, I wanted to test out the SCSI drives from the dead-by-power-supply as-of-yet unnamed dual P-II 300 machine. So took out the 13.6 gb hard drive that will still (theoretically) boot win2k with all sorts of useful utilities, and put in the two SCSI hard drives. I installed the PCI SCSI adapter in oasis and started the machine up. It froze in the middle of the boot-up screen. I rebooted, took the card out and rebooted. Things started up fine (with the exception of anything actually booting, since it had no bootable devices connected). I turned it off, put the card back in, and it froze in the same place as before. Resigned to the fact that the system wouldn’t accept the SCSI card, I took it out again and took out the SCSI drives as well, putting in the two 80 GB drives I got from Fry’s last year. Then I booted the machine again, with the Gentoo 1.4 LiveCD in the CD Drive… but this time, the machine froze in the same place as it has with the SCSI card. I rebooted, and then the CMOS setup screen came up, saying that the system had frozen last time because of an incorrect frequency configuration. So I set the proper settings and rebooted again, and then nothing showed up. I was beginning to get worried, and at the advice of Dan, I started stripping the computer down to find out where the problem was. I got to the point where all I had installed was the graphics card — and I even tried a PCI graphics card. Everything else was unplugged. And nothing showed up on the screen. I tried a new power supply, reseating the processor, memory, dusting, and everything else I could think of, and I was ready to declare oasis deceased. In frustration, I began doing things that make no sense to anyone but me — including a little prayer. Apparently that worked, since the next thing I tried was plugging the floppy drive back in — and on the next reboot, things started working again. It’s the most valuable floppy drive ever — the one that makes the computer work. Also, thanks god, if you’re up there, for giving life back to oasis. I proceeded to put cards and everything else back in. I even put the SCSI card back in and it worked without any problems. I do not, however, understand SCSI and how it works in Linux well enough to get those drives working under Linux right now.

So, that was the computer adventure of Friday. It continued today as I shutdown sf2 (silverfir.net server v2) to liberate a cd-writer from it to give to Virginia Tech’s division of Society of Women Engineers along with the ide zip drive already liberated from sf2. I took the chance to further liberate sf2 of wadi’s old hard drive, which had been piggybacking in sf2 while I switched everything over after the hack, or whatever that was.

I quickly had sf2 back up, with minimal downtime. Then I put the 30 gb drive into oasis and started setting up Gentoo Linux on it, with remote help from Bobby. We started from stage 1 and currently oasis is bootstrapping, released from any shell and redirecting its output for future reference. Tomorrow we’ll continue the process. Gentoo is fun, powerful, and cutting edge, but setup is lengthy due to all the compiling involved. Of course, that’s because we’re starting from stage 1, the most basic place to start, but since don’t plan on doing this again on this machine, I think its well worth the extra performance and customization we’ll be getting out of the system. Thanks for your help Bobby.

Also today, I helped Adam set up PHP-Nuke over at http://adam.silverfir.net/. Go check it out if you have time. Today was good, even though I missed robotics. I’ll make up for that on Monday.

I was reflecting recently on my short-term plans, so I thought I’d enumerate a list:
1. SilverFir.net
a. Decommission oasis as my desktop machine (I haven’t actually turned it on in weeks).
b. Remove the S.B. Audigy II Platinum and CD-RW drive from oasis and store for next desktop machine.
c. Move the SCSI cards and drives from the dead-by-power-supply server machine to oasis.
d. Install Gentoo Linux with EVMS (?), Apache, PHP, Tomcat (?), MySQL, Exim, ProFTPd, and maybe a few other services — all secure as needed.
e. Move oasis back to a higher bandwidth location, switch SilverFir.net DNS resolution back over as well.
f. At some future point, set up VPN or otherwise secure file sharing on SilverFir.net so I can access my [mp3’s | documents | videos | other files] from anywhere in the world with my laptop and an internet connection.
2. Other stuff
a. Research and purchase a digital video camera before the FIRST Pacific Northwest Regional on March 5-6.
b. Get 2001 TRC thank you awards that are sitting in Tim’s house to proper people.
c. Research and purchase components to build a new desktop.
i. Better than P4 2.8 Ghz (Current laptop)
ii. High end graphics card
iii. Flippin’ fast disk arrays — perhaps software RAID 0 for video editing.
d. Help design of kitchen remodel at my house
e. Talk to International School principal about keeping portables around after this year for use by TRC.
f. Finish writing thank you letters to the rest of my hosts on the road trip (Better late than never).
g. Study for math, so I can ace my next midterm, so I can play CS again.
h. I keep thinking of more things, but I’ll stop there.

Notice the order. This is why I’m not doing so well in math.

One nice thing about this computer: While its DVD reader only gets about 2x on rips, I don’t even notice any latency anywhere else on the system. I actually rather prefer it this way — multitasking as it was meant to be.

Well, today was rather uneventful. Math didn’t have enough content, I studied with Amanda for the test; consequently, we both did well. I then finished my second roll for the assignment due Wednesday, then developed it after quick lunch and picking up the DVD I am currently ripping (TRC’s 2003 Pacific Northwest Regional Matches) and dropping that off to a waiting Chris and Tim at BCC. Then I went to my mom’s office and helped her with some Word Page layout, then it was off to Tim’s to check on progress of the TRC’s video for the assembly on Wednesday. I also bid on a ATI Radeon 9700 Pro — but he decided a 240% annualized rate of return wasn’t enough for him, so I didn’t get it. Yet. But it did get me to thinking about getting a new computer, thus (1) and (2c) above. After that it was a quick jaunt home for dinner (Corn tortilla chips, cheddar cheese, and chili) before heading to the Walt and Karen’s place to carpool to Benaroya Hall in Seattle to listen to the Archdiocese of Seattle’s Catholic School’s Choirs perform. It was mostly good — my favorite of the night was Sacred Names school’s “Three Ways to Vacuum a House” which featured a vacuum cleaner prop and no director. Then it was back home to blog. A good day.

Now I just hope the nice nested lists copy over to Greymatter alright.

Multitasking is great: I’m chatting, administering SilverFir.net, watching a movie, and writing up the latest entry to the blog all at the same time. Well, I’m mostly watching the movie and chatting, which is why after an hour I’m only on my second sentence here. Two hours. Three� ok, maybe multitasking isn’t so great :-p.

…

Well, The movie was good, and the problem with SilverFir.net was extremely obscure. Somehow, the loopback interface wasn’t up — so “localhost” and 127.0.0.1 would give different results, and I couldn’t ping myself. Thanks to a user (see http://moretti.silverfir.net) wanting to install Uberblog (see http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/) the problem started showing symptoms, and after hours of struggle, was figured out and (hopefully) resolved.

I’m thinking I need to get the next version of SilverFir up real soon, because the current one is going haywire pretty quickly. Gentoo is looking like a good option. Now I just need a way to upgrade with minimal downtime.

Since I am thinking about it now, I have thought of an ideas that I think should be considered for Linux distributions: instead of putting files all over the filesystem when installing things (as Debian and Gentoo do), why not put all the files for a particular program in a single directory (say, /usr/local/programname/ just like apache and mysql default to), then use simlinks for everything else — logs, config files, binaries — just put simlinks in the “regular” places – /usr/bin or /etc or /var/log, etc. That way, when a program is deinstalled, a cron job can go by and neatly clean up all the simlinks and there is no residual from the program. And deinstallation involves one rm command. Very clean, very simple. Maybe someday I’ll suggest this to someone who knows what to do about the idea.

Well today I made it to Larry’s about 10 — only Hilary and Eric were there. I stayed until around 5, by which time the mast of the arm was maybe complete. I wish I were better at doing the arm project myself, but there are so many things that I just don’t think about yet. It’ll just take time I guess. After leaving Larry’s I made my way to Sammamish — stopping by Amanda’s place. She was at work, so I stopped there and let her know about the test on Monday. We’ll be studying before class Monday. o.O

I recently shifted strategies on my usage of Gentoo Linux on my laptop. Before, I was more worried about the fact that Linux didn’t seem to support my PC cards for war driving, that the frame buffer wasn’t working properly due to the infamously unsupported ATI Radeon IGP series. Then I realized that I was missing the point. When I got my first laptop, an antique Pentium 90, from my dad a year ago, linux was the only modern operating system that would work. And on that computer, the framebuffer was impossible (although PC cards did work) — but it was an excellent computer for me. It got me so familiar with Debian that I was able setup what is now running silverfir.net in about an hour — plus some tweaks since then. What I am now using Gentoo on Kleinoscope for is to become as familiar with Gentoo as I became with Debian, so that I can feel comfortable switching over. Already, I am pretty happy with Gentoo�s system. It looks like I can easily get not only Apache, MySQL, and PHP up quickly, but that other things I had wanted to do for friends, such as Tomcat (for Clifton at www.InLag.com), are going to be incredibly easy. Now I’m itching to get sf2 back offline (ie, use wadi to serve again) so I can set up gentoo on the faster box. Sure, I’ll have to compile everything, but I did that with all the important stuff in Debian anyway, since everything tends to be so obsolete. With Gentoo, cutting edge stuff is available, but its also much easier — and the defaults seem to work well with me, so far at least, so I won’t have to move outside of the wonderful package system that Gentoo has. And it’s a Linux, so the things that bug me about the BSDs aren’t an issue — such as the behavior of arrow keys in vim. I’ll let you know how things progress.

I was feeling a bit down yesterday and forgot to blog. But with the length each entry has grown to, maybe you all (whoever you are) needed a break. As for today, math was uneventful, and in photography we covered what will be on the test on Monday. Since Amanda wasn’t there, I am considering a trip to Sammamish — might lift the spirits a bit. Once I got home I vacuumed the truck — it was badly needed — and I felt good. Then I came back and spent some time on the computer, and I starting feeling a little down again. I think I need a little bit of time off the computer (except for blogging, this makes me happy, remember?) So here I go to suck the marrow of life. Wish me luck. =D

Linux kernels before version 2.4.23 had a security hole that would allow a non-privileged user to gain administrative privileges on any Linux system. Version 2.4.23 was released on November 28, 2003. Silverfir.net had been running with no significant changes to its setup since May, 2003. The kernel hole, along with a security hole in the gallery software I use on this site, PHPix, allowed attackers to gain privileged access to the silverfir.net machine. Apparently, one succeeded. But whoever it was, the attacker must have been disappointed at the level of machine he or she gained access to. A Pentium Pro 180 with a nice but unremarkable Internet uplink isn’t exactly a conquest worth bragging about. Furthermore, nothing even remotely commercial happens on the machine, and all of my email is boring. Besides, something seems to have gone wrong: with the privileged status, the attacker seems to have replaced my INIT — the program that starts up before all other programs and guides the system though its startup routine — a common first step once a root kit (the tools used to crack open a system once administrator privileges have been gained) has been installed. However, this seems to have made my system quite unstable, and with several convenient power outages (thanks Amy, and Puget Power), the problem soon manifest itself with silverfir.net becoming unstable and generating all sorts of errors. In due time, after I got around to reading the logs, and reading security news bulletins, I was able to piece the story together. Of course, I am dumb, and I haven’t updated my (extremely changed by me) version of PHPix yet, but I figure as long as users can’t gain root with a kernel exploit, I�ll let them run strange commands on my system until I get around to getting the real replacement server working (probally FreeBSD or OpenBSD on the dual Pentium II). But at this point, that is a ways off.

After watching the movie last night, I stayed up even later to, among other things, update this site. The result is that I slept in until 1:00pm today, just long enough to completely miss church. That wasn’t planned, mind you. I had breakfast, read some, and then watched the New England Patriots narrowly defeat the Carolina Panthers in Superbowl XXXVIII. I was cheering for the Panthers simply because they were the underdogs; things looked grim in the first quarter for them, but both teams picked up the offensive pace towards halftime…

Another aside: At BYU, I took an introduction to economics course that covered basic micro- and macroeconomic theory. One of the books I read for the class was called “Hard Heads, Soft Hearts.” Written by Alan Blinder, a liberal economist from the Clinton administration, the book is about how liberal fiscal policies could also be economically grounded. I hope that all politicians in this country, both “conservative” and “liberal” (although the differences these days are slight) would read the book and follow the advice. The reason I think of this now is that in the introduction to the book, Blinder declares that you can tell if someone is liberal if they root for the underdog team in a sports contest when they have no personal loyalties to either team. But he is wrong. I am one of the least liberal people I know (not necessarily to be confused with classic conservatism), and I enthusiastically root for the underdogs, as long as the one projected to win is not the UW, BYU, or a Seattle team. Take that, Mr. Blinder! But seriously, especially if you are liberal, read the book, then we can have a decent conversation about our politics.

And back to the main story: despite the slow start, the game turned out to be quite good, except for the fact that we had the same ending that we had two years ago (although I did not watch that game, to be honest) and the fact that the Panther’s should have tried something really wild on that last play. Getting tackled should�ve been the last thing they let happened � I mean, seriously, who cares if you let the Patriots score again, you still loose, but try some laterals and pull your entire team back for some voodoo magic and at least make the final moments an exciting bang instead of a lackluster whimper. Oh well, I guess that’s what we have college football for.

Check out the page of Bernie Zimmermann at http://www.pleasureunit.com/bernie/. He is the writer of the only comment (so far at least) on my last post. Seeing websites that are pretty like his gets me to thinking about making my website pretty. In fact, it reminds me of a story about my early days with the Internet. And since I am in the mood, I will share the story with you�

My first website ever was titled “The Realm of Arcanius.” The name remains to this day — check out the title of this page. My brother was becoming interested in graphic design at the time (he was doing his senior project on computer aided graphic design, in fact) and he made me the logo, which really was the prettiest part of the site. And prettiness mattered, since I was locked in a battle for votes with my friend Dan�s “Lagomorph’s Lair” and he always seemed to be winning. I had decidedly more content in the form of stories, poetry, pictures, photos, and jokes, for what that was worth. But he had style. I have similar problems today. I am able to update this site fairly regularly (although I admit the pictures are getting stale), but I still have trouble making my sites all that pretty. I can make what I think are good looking logos and designs using Photoshop and freehand, but putting them together to make a good website had never been my strong point. My most successful websites have always been very simple, come-for-the-content websites. Of course, Mr. Zimmermann is a professional web developer — so I shouldn’t feel too bad that my site isn;t as good-looking as his.

So the story part of that (I know it wasn’t too clear) was that I made a website when I was in the eighth grade and I lost a competition to my friend. And I;ve kept the name ever since. So now, I might as well talk about how I picked up the name “Arcanius” anyway. Actually, I think I already talked about this (if you go to the first posts in the archives). But here it is again for those of you too lazy to go back (I would be too, so don’t feel bad). There was a game I played back in sixth grade called “Master of Magic.” It was fun, and it had two worlds — one called “Arcanus” and the other called “Myrror.” I took the former name, added the ‘i’ (because I’m cool like that) and adopted it as my online name.

And I might as well keep on going; it is good to remember. Well, the Lagomorph who always beat me in website design now attends the University of Washington — where I will probally be going by the end of the year. It is somewhat sad that we have drifted apart. We still get along, but we really don�t see each other much anymore — no real reason to, I guess. The same thing happened to Alex, another friend from high school, and countless others as well. But some people I have continued to hang out with regularly — Scott, Maneesh, Amy. The difference is that the ones I have drifted away from don’t tend to find the time to do things with me, while the ones still in my life seem to always be willing to do things still. So it leads to a very simply but very important conclusion: continued close friendship takes continued inputs of time. There is simply no way around it. I will always be cordial with Alex and Dan, but already, I have nothing to talk to them about — they come online and I don’t message them, because I don’t have anything to say.

Now for an update on more current history: today. First, I did the Robotics thing, picking up a breakfast burrito as Casa D’s Tacqueria on Bellevue Way on the way to Larry�s house. Once there, Bobby and I worked on the design of the arm (we think it is pretty much finished now), participated somewhat in the betterment of the ball scooper-upper, and generally had ourselves a good time, before returning to 8, the eight-restaurant cafeteria in the basement of McMahon Hall. We seem to be eating there a lot, but Bobby does have 900-some dollars he needs to burn through before the end of the term, and I’m willing to help him as long as its not taking anything away from him. While eating and finalizing details on the arm, we watched the UW men’s basketball team put the spank on the Arizona State Sun Devils. Then we watched the Montlake parking area’s black of asphalt turn into glowing red of brake lights as thousands of fans exited the arena only to sit in their cars waiting to get out. Once the traffic had subsided, I returned home before running out to apply for employment at the low-risk, low-stress local Blockbuster, and to grab a movie and some groceries. I highly recommend the movie “Antwone Fisher.” I can’t say I cried, but my eyes did get damp. Of course, I’m pretty emotionally detached, so that’s a pretty good effect.

I’ll work on new pictures, and probably fix the error in PHPix which has hackers still attempting to compromise my system. Of course, I’m not sure if the hackers were directly related to Wadi’s crash, or if both events just happened to occur at the same time. In the meantime, I’ve thought of many ways that OS’s could be made more secure by default: some of these ideas are already implemented by Immunix, Inc. (www.immunix.com / www.immunix.org), although they use older technology. I’m too cutting edge (not quite beta, but everything up until thing pretty much) to deal with gcc < 3.0 or Apache < 2.0. so while maybe its flawed in security, I get to learn and it�ll make me a better sysadmin in the meantime.

Well, the title says it – I was hacked. I supposed it was going to happen sooner or later – I didn’t check my logs, installed insecure software, used insecure installations, and well, I guess I showed up on someone’s radar. Which is kind of flattering actually. Whoever you are, theo, admin of xboxevolution, email me – I won’t press charges or anything, but I would like to hear from you.