My issues with Strongswan in the OpenWRT trunk are now resolved. Strongswan 4.5.1-1 is available.
May 23, 2011
April 5, 2011
StrongSwan on OpenWRT
I recently purchased a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH router and installed OpenWRT on it. I used the trunk version, but found that StrongSwan4 did not allow me to pass traffic, despite an identical configuration to my working Trendnet router. I can successfully connect, but my log files show an error “unable to add SAD entry.” My client indicated no proposal. Though I have not discovered the full nature of the issue, I did notice that the current OpenWRT trunk does not include the kmod-mod-imq module. Since the networking component has changed, I wondered if that might be related. When I installed the 10.03.1-rc4 version of OpenWRT instead, things worked again.
February 22, 2011
November 6, 2010
Noscript And Zimbra Problem
I log into a Zimbra server for email. I may be logged in on the local network, from outside, over the Internet, or across a VPN. The hostname is always the same. I found that I would have to actually quit Firefox in order to log back into Zimbra if I initiated a session over the Internet, and later made a VPN connection. I would see a white screen with a link in the upper left corner which said [Sign Out]. Clicking it did nothing. I actually had to restart Firefox. I discovered that this happened because of Noscript’s ABE protection. I did not wish to disable this, as it is a useful security feature. The solution is to go into the NoScript options, under ABE, and edit the SYSTEM settings. It normally says
# Prevent Internet sites from requesting LAN resources.
Site LOCAL
Accept from LOCAL
Deny
I added this line after the Accept lin:
Accept ALL from *.<mydomainname>
That fixed the issue. It might be advisable for people who use Noscript in a corporate environment with VPN access to add this to their ABE settings in order to prevent web application failures.
October 13, 2010
Sexuality, the State, and the Death of Black Manhood
Recently, my college friends and myself were discussing a recent article in Vibe magazine on the experiences of a flamboyantly gay man at Morehouse College, and the response of the school’s president. I shared the two articles with family and friends, and the inevitable question “what has happened to black men?” came up. It seems clear to me that the main things which have happened are the reasons I despise Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan. The war on poverty brought us welfare, which pushed a lot of black men from homes in the name of easy (or easier) money. That was Johnson. Reagan escalated the war on drugs, which further devastated the black family, especially the black males. Can anyone really claim that it is better for a black guy to be locked up for smoking or selling weed, rather than going to a community college and getting himself a job some day? Is controlling what someone does with his own body so very important? Is promoting the creation of drug gangs, then promoting the increase in the intrusiveness and violence of policing something we can really describe as “good?”
Because of these two factors, black men have fewer male role models. Many men emulate their mothers, unsurprising, as so many men are reared without fathers. Some of those mothers are educated, so that is fine as far as education goes. These men will pursue education. But they do not act like men. This is true even of many heterosexual men. Among any sufficiently large population, a number of gay people is to be expected. I do not find it surprising that a segment of the gay population would take emulating their mothers to an extreme that the straight men would not.
I predicted years ago that black higher education would become increasingly gay, and specifically, effeminately so. The war on drugs has devastated the ranks of black men in black communities to such an extent that female role models are, all too often, the best role models for success that black boys have. The testosterone has been depleted from the segments of black society most in need of it. This is one of the many tragedies brought to neighborhoods across the nation by the desire to force moral choices on others “for their own good.” And, while I targeted those two presidents for specific criticism, we can hardly “blame whitey” for this one. There are lots of people who are black drug warriors. Pretty much every black politician, including Obama, is a drug warrior. Eric Holder, his pick for Attorney General, is an especially fervent drug warrior. As far as I am concerned, we should treat blacks who support the war on drugs the same as we would treat a black guy doing a minstrel show in full blackface at an NAACP meeting. They deserve nothing but derision for being essentially black slave overseers. They profit from promoting oppression.
(Crossposted at The Libertarian Standard)
October 12, 2010
Twitter’s Pro-Freedom Terms of Service
Over at the online photography magazine, Photofocus, Scott Bourne warns photographers of the terms of service they may unwittingly agree to by posting a picture on Twitter. From the article:
Ask a real lawyer (not some guy named Larry who plays one on your local camera club forum) what this means. I did. My lawyer says it means that Twitter can do pretty much anything it wants with my photos (other than claim actual Copyright to them) and there’s nothing I can do about that. Is that an issue for you personally? Maybe not. It’s unlikely it will impact you if you aren’t trying to sell your photos. But if you are, read on.
As a professional photographer, I can’t sell “exclusive” rights to any image I decide to publish on Twitter. The reason is that once it is published on Twitter, there is no exclusivity left. That could be expensive. As professionals, we need to decide whether the exposure we get via Twitter is worth that trade off. For some of us the answer is yes – for others the answer is no. The purpose of this post is to get you to understand that you will have to make some hard choices. I am hoping they are informed choices, no matter what you decide.
In the case of the Twitter TOS, it seems that the terms Twitter stipulates are exactly the pro-freedom position: you can do whatever you want with the stuff you own (stuff, not ideas) unless you have contracted some other arrangement. Twitter owns the servers. You own the photo, sure, but you still have the photo after you uploaded it. What the uploader is actually doing is using Twitter’s stuff to create a copy on Twitter’s servers. For the photographer to then claim that he has the right to determine what Twitter does with it is like going to someone’s house and using a dollar bill left on a counter to make origami, then demanding the right to determine what happens to it as a result of your pattern rearrangement. It is nonsense from the start.
July 19, 2010
Automounting Truecrypt in Linux
I have a dual boot system with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. In order to secure the system, I have system encryption with Truecrypt and encrypted LVM in Ubuntu. I need to access my Windows files from within Ubuntu. After a bit of searching around the Internet, I pieced together this command line, which I put in /etc/rc.local. Since my system is fully encrypted and used by only me, I’m not concerned about the password being in /etc/rc.local. I installed the Truecrypt console version.
I added the following line to /etc/rc.local:
echo “MyTruecryptPassPhrase” | /usr/local/bin/truecrypt -t -m system -k “” -p ”” –protect-hidden=no –fs-options=rw,noatime,umask=000 –filesystem=ntfs-3g /dev/<windows partition> /<local mount point>
By echoing the passphrase and piping it to the Truecrypt command, we avoid having it show up in the ‘ps -ef’ command. The filesystem will be mounted with 0777 permissions.
I have found that it is even possible to mount outer partitions (with hidden partitions inside) using this method, and protecting the hidden partition. The command is as follows:
echo “HiddenPartitionPassphrase\n\nOuterPartitionPassphrase” | /usr/bin/truecrypt -t -k “” -p “” –protect-hidden=yes –fs-options=rw,noatime,umask=000 /dev/sda2 /windows
By using the hidden OS feature in Truecrypt, it is possible to triple boot your computer, with all data on the drive except for the /boot partition in Linux being encrypted. Since no secret information is stored in /boot, this is not a problem.
April 22, 2010
Ubuntu thumb drive
I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2 (Lucid Lynx) on an Imation 4GB thumb drive. Ubuntu has a feature to install the live CD onto a thumb drive, but I have always found that solution a bit unsatisfying. I wanted an installation which could be updated and modified as I see fit. So, I wanted to use the thumb drive like a hard drive. Most of what I do allows me to forgo persistent local storage, but I did want that option, so I encrypted my home directory, which is an install option. One of the potential problems with that plan is the fact that flash storage, especially cheap flash storage, like the kind in a thumb drive, has a limited number of writes before it fails.
installing Ubuntu onto a thumb drive, using it like a hard drive, is simple. Just run the normal install, clicking on the “Advanced” tab on the screen prior to the beginning of the actual install. The subsequent screen allows you to choose the location for the boot sector. Simply change the boot sector to the thumb device, and you are done there. For further details, go here.
After the install, you can update your Ubuntu install as normal. Now, the next step is to do things which will extend the life of your thumb drive. Obviously, you do not want to have a swap file. I formatted the swap partition which Ubuntu automatically created and mounted that partition as /home. I also made use of tmpfs to mount some of the more heavily written areas in RAM, discarding them on each reboot. Here is what I did in /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs noatime,rw,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs noatime,rw,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/cache/apt tmpfs noatime,rw 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs noatime,rw 0 0
Additionally, I added this to /etc/rc.local:
mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
mkdir /var/log/apt
This means that the heavily written stuff, like logs, and the update cache for software, are written to RAM and discarded. The /etc/rc.local line is needed because apt-get requires both the archives and archives/partial directories to function correctly.
Once I had the system up and running, I found Firefox performance to be bad. Using the ever-trusty lsof, I found that Firefox uses multiple sqlite databases to hold stuff like preferences. The solution I decided on was to move my home directory onto a ramdisk. Since I had a small /home partition, I added the following things to my /etc/fstab:
UUID=f39t7wj8-v872-4dc9-ik47-nve73hv923nbsw1 /home2 ext4 rw,noatime 0 2
tmpfs /home tmpfs noatime,rw 0 0
Your uuid will differ, but the idea is to mount your original /home partition on /home2 instead, and mount /home as a ramdisk. I also added the following to /etc/rc.local:
rsync -a /home2/ /home/
This syncs the contents of /home2 (which is on the flash) with /home (which is in ram, and discarded at every boot). If I make an important change to my home directory, I log out of my GUI session, open another virtual terminal (by pressing ctrl-alt-F1), log in as root (you will need to set your root password to allow this), and run:
rsync -a /home/ /home2/
This will sync the changes you made back to the flash card. You should only rarely have to do this. One useful way to save files is to use the free Ubuntu One service which is included with Lucid. That makes it easy to save small files and sync them to the cloud, which ends the worry associated with having your home directory in RAM. Save any files you want to the Ubuntu One directory, and they will be saved offsite.
If you have any issues with doing any of this, feel free to contact me at robwicks@gmail.com. Also, I would greatly appreciate corrections and suggestions. I may experiment with AUFS in the future. That may be a good alternative to tmpfs alone on some of the filesystems.
April 1, 2010
The Libertarian Standard
Check out The Libertarian Standard, a new blog for which I will occasionally write. We will cover government, technology, and anything else which interests the motley crew of contributors.
January 29, 2010
What I’d Like to See Google Do in Response to the iPad
Apple recently unveiled the iPad, a device with which I am more impressed than I expected. It is less expensive than I thought it would be, and it has the kind of functionality it needs to have. It has the potential to be a wonderful book, magazine, and newspaper reader. It is not without its flaws, but it absolutely has the potential to revolutionize how we read, and how we access information. It is not difficult to visualize iPads in use in doctors’ offices, libraries, and various businesses for any number of purposes, both obvious and innovative.
Google is heavily invested in Android, an iPhone OS competitor in the smartphone market. Since the iPad uses the iPhone OS, it is only natural that Android competitors to the iPad emerge. And they have. Indeed, There were Android tablets already on the market before the iPad debuted, such as the Archos 7. None of the Android tablets I have investigated so far have the appealing form factor of Apple’s however.
Google sells the Nexus One directly to customers. It essentially competes head to head with Apple in the phone market, though “compete” is taking a bit of literary license when we consider the relative sales of the two phones. Still, Android phones are increasing in popularity, and the platform is evolving rapidly. I think Google could make a real play to compete head to head with the iPad as a portable reader. Google has poured huge sums of money into digitizing books and now has a considerable library of classic works. It should leverage this by developing an Android book reader optimized for a 10 inch tablet. Then, Google should practically give them away to libraries and schools across the world. Discount them heavily, just get them out. Google should make it a corporate mission to get every middle school, high school, and college student reading books and using textbooks on an Android device.
By getting students and readers used to reading on Android devices,, Google can fuel demand for its web services and get young people accustomed to using Android as their preferred platform for accessing information. Tools are difficult things to change. Get a young person used to your tool, and you probably have a customer for life. One of the major advantage Android could offer to libraries and schools is low cost. Since Android is an open platform, other manufacturers would naturally make competing devices and compete with Google in this push into the youth market. This would drive up quality and drive down costs. A few shortcomings in the iPad which could be immediately addressed are:
- Lack of a front facing camera. With a front facing camera, an Android tablet could be a nice Skype/IM machine.
- Multitasking. This is an easy one, and is already present in all Android devices. Being able to use streaming audio while reading email or surfing the web is an advantage over the iPhone.
- Flash support. Being able to use services such as Hulu and various Flash gaming sites would provide a further advantage to an Android tablet.
Make no mistake. None of these things would “kill the iPad.” Just as in the case of the iPhone, I don’t want to see them die. They are innovative products which have forced others to respond to customer demand and improve the customer experience. Even if Google did all these things, and was successful with them, I’d love to see Apple come back to outdo them, point by point. You and I are would be the biggest winners.
addendum:
Friends have pointed out that this plan could be prohibitively expensive. Looking back over it, I have to agree. The educational models should ditch the camera and Google should sell the devices at cost. Later manufacturers can come along with faster processors and additional features. And Google might actually be able to get Adobe to help defer some of the cost in exchange for promotional considerations. Adobe is desperate to have Flash on mobile devices since Apple is consistently snubbing them.
Slightly less Random Ramblings 