Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

DECnet Now Orphaned in the Linux Kernel for 2.6.33

Posted on by

For those computer history buffs it is sad to learn that the Linux kernels DECnet code is going to be orphaned in 2.6.33, the git commit by Christine Caulfield says:

Due to lack of time, space, motivation, hardware and probably expertise, I have reluctantly decided to orphan the DECnet code in the kernel.

Judging by the deafening silence on the linux-decnet mailing list I suspect it’s either not being used anyway, or the few people that are using it are happy with their older kernels.

To be honest I’m surprised it’s lasted this long, the last time I used DECnet in anger was around 1997 I think..

UK Academic Network JANET to Close Usenet News Service (Updated)

Posted on by

This is a great shame, though probably not that surprising these days, but the UK Joint Academic Network (JANET) is going to pull its Usenet News service on the 31st July 2010. Basically I suspect the ever declining SNR has put people off, and these days everyone knows the web and the closest they get to knowing what Usenet is (or maybe was) Google Groups. JANET says:

There are now few active registered News Feed users and News Read users and the current infrastructure is nearing its end of life. JANET(UK) have therefore decided that it is no longer economically viable to run the service, especially in the current financial climate. We therefore will cease to offer the service when the existing contract expires on July 31st 2010.

Especially sad for me as I cut part of my first real sysadmin job at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was working on the Usenet news system that had been set up originally by Alec Muffett and I was for quite a while the maintainer of the UK.telecom newsgroup FAQ and the alt.config guidelines.

Update: I’ve been digging through some old email – here’s one from 4th August 1993 giving an idea of what we had to struggle with:

OK, I deleted all binaries under alt.binaries, all of junk and all of control. That, coupled with the AEM_TIDY got us about 27 meg back. I then ran a doexpire, whch took a long while but we’re now up to about 53 Meg free, or about 85% of the 400 Meg partition.

Yup, the entire university news spool at that time was a whopping great 400MB. 😉 We were using nntplink with CNews for the time (this was before we knew about INN).

The Sun Has Gone Down

Posted on by

It’s hard to believe that Sun Microsystems, on whose workstations in the Computer Science lab at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth I first really learnt to hack^W play with UNIX systems (and no, I wasn’t studying CompSci!), is passing into the annals of history to become just another brand in the Oracle monolith. They’ve even delisted there SUNW^W JAVA symbol from NASDAQ (hat tip to Arjen for the link).

As Alec’s wonderful filk said:

We had Joy, We had fun,
We were fork()ing on a Sun,
but the joy is all gone,
’til the processes are Done [1].

shutdown -r now

Great Filesystem Quote

Posted on by

From Valerie Aurora on POSIX semantics:

It may not be POSIX, but the programmer’s intent is clear – no one ever, ever wrote “creat(); write(); close(); rename();” and hoped they would get an empty file if the system crashed during the next 5 minutes. That’s what truncate() is for.

🙂

Joining the Australian Internet Blackout

Posted on by

Along with folks like the Samba project I’ve joined the Great Australian Internet Blackout, so the first time (and only the first time) you visit the site you’ll get the notice about the protest. Here’s why the proposed mandatory filtering is a bad idea from the Great Australian Internet Blackout website:

  • It won’t protect children: The filter isn’t a “cyber safety” measure to stop kids seeing inappropriate content such as R and X rated websites. It is not even designed to prevent the spread of illegal material where it is most often found (chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing).
  • We will all pay for this ineffective solution: Under this policy, ISPs will be forced to charge more for consumer and business broadband. Several hundred thousand dollars has already been spent to test the filter – without considering high-speed services such as the National Broadband Network!
  • A dangerous precedent: We stand to join a small club of countries which impose centralised Internet censorship such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The secret blacklist may be limited to “Refused Classification” content for now, but what might a future Australian Government choose to block?

If you’re using WordPress with a theme that supports widgets then participating is as easy as adding a text widget (or using one you already have) and add the single line of HTML to activate the blackout.

To paraphrase Kryten from Red Dwarf, it has just two minor flaws. One, it won’t work, and two, it won’t work. Now I realise that, technically speaking, that’s only one flaw but I thought it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice.

SpamAssassin Y2K10 Bug

Posted on by

Update: removed the link to the SpamAssassin announcement as the link isn’t permanent! 🙁

In case you’ve not noticed – SpamAssassin had a nasty Y2K10 bug which had been fixed months ago but the fix never got pushed out into a release or updates. 🙁

Those of you using SpamAssassin to filter your mail may want to watch things a bit more closely than usual; it seems that current versions still include the rule known as FH_DATE_PAST_20XX, which adds 2-3 points to any message with a 2010 date in the headers. Surprisingly enough, such dates have suddenly become common, with the result that SpamAssassin may be generating more false positives than usual.

The fix is now included in the updates pushed out by sa-update, run it with -D to get debug output and check you’ve picked up 895075 or later. You’ll see it say:

[4096] dbg: dns: 5.2.3.updates.spamassassin.org => 895075, parsed as 895075

If you’re running Zimbra then you’ll need to fix this manually, in the VPAC install (5.0.x) I changed a line in /opt/zimbra/conf/spamassassin/72_active.cf from:

header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]

to:

header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]

The other alternative is to set the score of the rule to 0 in your local.cf file:

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

Then go hunting for legitimate email in your spam folder (I’m lucky enough that none got picked up).

Moving from VPAC to VLSCI

Posted on by

After almost six and a half years working at VPAC it’s time to move on, in January I’ll be taking up the position of Senior Systems Administrator in the University of Melbourne for the Victorian Life Sciences Computational Initiative (VLSCI). For those who’ve not come across the VLSCI it describes itself thus:

Under the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, The University of Melbourne will host a $100 million supercomputing program and facility, with $50 million provided by the State Government. The goal of the initiative is for Victoria to retain its standing and enhance its leadership in world life sciences. This will lead to major improvements in public health outcomes in the areas such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurological disease, chronic inflammatory diseases, bone diseases and diabetes.

Their ambitions aren’t what you could call small, they want to be a supercomputing facility ranking in the top 5 in life sciences world-wide. It’s going to be a fun ride and a lot more than just going from a 4 letter acronym to a 5 letter one. 😉

I’ve really enjoyed my time at VPAC over the years and I’m really going to miss the people there, but it’s gotten to the point where I want to be able to focus on running large HPC systems without distraction and the opportunity at VLSCI was too good to ignore!

Nokia N900 Finally Shipping According to Reuters (Updated x 2)

Posted on by

Finally we have some good news about the Nokia N900, according to Reuters!

HELSINKI, Nov 10 (Reuters) – Nokia (NOK1V.HE) has started deliveries of its new top-of-the-range model N900, a key product for the world’s top phone maker in its battle against rivals iPhone and Blackberry.

Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a speech the company started deliveries of the phone on Tuesday.

The Nokia press site has not yet been updated, but hopefully soon..

Update: The Nokia Conversations Blog is now covering the shipping, saying:

Today sees the first batch of Nokia N900 handsets boxed up and shipped out on their maiden voyage into wild.

Hooray! Now does this mean that they are being shipped from the factory to the resellers, or are already at the resellers ready to go to customers ?

Update 2: Well it appears, according to this blog post, to be from the factory to resellers..

The shipments of the Nokia N900 have now started. The factories are now working full speed and the devices are on their way to distribution.

So it does look like Amazon won’t have theirs to ship to my friends in the US before I get to LA, so I’ll miss the chance to play with it for a while. Oh well at least they are shipping! 😉

Serious SSL Renegotiation Problem

Posted on by

This just in from Ben Lawrie:

For the last 6 weeks or so, a bunch of us have been working on a really serious issue in SSL. In short, a man-in-the-middle can use SSL renegotiation to inject an arbitrary prefix into any SSL session, undetected by either end.

But wait, there’s more..

To make matters even worse, through a piece of (in retrospect) incredibly bad design, HTTP servers will, under some circumstances, replay that arbitrary prefix in a new authentication context. For example, this is what happens if you configure Apache to require client certificates for one directory but not another. Once it emerges that your request is for a protected directory, a renegotiation will occur to obtain the appropriate client certificate, and then the original request (i.e. the stuff from the bad guy) gets replayed as if it had been authenticated by the client certificate. But it hasn’t.

Ben has a patch against the current development head of OpenSSL to ban renegotiation, but for most people it’ll need backporting to their current OpenSSL versions..