Vorlon's Blog » English

Katzenjammer…

vorlon — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:33:17 +0000

Today I stumbled upon an interesting band from Norway: Katzenjammer (MySpace, last.fm). They got an refreshing mix of genres combined with great vocals and quite some instruments. Besides that they are currently on tour and selling their debut album (Le Pop)… Definately worth to check out…

“Picard, Jean-Luc Cpt.” living in Göttingen!?

vorlon — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:59:58 +0000

Found in the local phone book. Picture taken from telefonbuch.de:

And I believed he would be living in France…

Searching for the number with Google brings up the website of a Music Production Company which lists the number as their fax line, although I haven’t tried to call.

Network Security Breaches at NASA

vorlon — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:08:24 +0000

Bruce Schneier points to an article at BusinessWeek about repeated attacks on the NASA networks and successful intrusions. The article also mentions a possible connection of the problem of ROSAT pointing too close to the sun in September 1998 to such attacks.

Thunderbird: Reply to List

vorlon — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:57:26 +0000

Mozilla Thunderbird lacking a reply-to-list function is quite annoying sometimes and is often worked around by using a patched version with an extension.

Recently while looking at extensions, I came across one which does not require a patched version, but also works with the regular binary. It is still considered experimental, but has worked well for me on one binary installation of Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 I’m using.

IT Cheat Sheets

vorlon — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:17:12 +0000

Found some useful IT- especially network-related cheat sheets over at Packetlife

[via ISC]

Stop Software Patents

vorlon — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:15:32 +0000

Serious DNS vulnerabilities – update for bind available

vorlon — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:24:28 +0000

In the light of yesterday’s large coordinated release of DNS related updates to various products, I would like to point you to the updated bind packages in the portage tree.

net-dns/bind-9.4.2_p1 is currently being marked stable on all supported architectures
net-dns/bind-9.5.0_p1 has been committed with unstable keywords

Nameservers should be updated quite soon, since this issue should be considered serious.

A GLSA will be published after all security architectures have marked the affected package stable. The progress can be followed in bug #231201.

For more information have a look at the following links and the references therein:

Also note that if you are restricting the used outgoing ports of your nameserver by a firewall for example, this policy should be revisited.

Update 2008-07-11:
GLSA 200807-08 has just been released to address this issue.

Ma(r)x Planck!?

vorlon — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:30:50 +0000

Yesterday was the 150th birthday of Max Planck, one of the probably most famous physicists. But was his name really Max or was it actually Marx, as Spiegel Online reports. According to an old church book, it appears to be Marx, which is said to be common for the latin name Marcus. Let’s wait what even more experts say… and the Max Planck Society, which reportedly only heard about it by a phone call from Spiegel.

Personally I don’t consider this such a big issue, but a funny story

UPDATE:
Searching the web for “marx planck” or even “marx-planck-institute” gives actually quite a few results from non-german sites/publications mentioning Max Planck institutes. That makes me actually wonder how new this ‘discovery’ even is or if it is just some kind of a typo or something on those sites.

UPDATE II:
The director of the archive of the Max Planck Society comments on the name question in a press release. Really no big issue here.

etckeeper – keeping /etc in a git repository

vorlon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:35:25 +0000

When having a look at git yesterday, I stumbled upon etckeeper, a tool to keep /etc in a git (or mercurial) repository and also keeps the metadata (file permissions, …) in the repo making use of metastore.

It hooks into apt but I used /etc/portage/basrc to call it before and after installing a package:

case “$EBUILD_PHASE” in
preinst)
elog “Running etckeeper pre-install…”
/usr/bin/etckeeper pre-install
;;
postinst)
elog “Running etckeeper post-install…”
/usr/bin/etckeeper post-install
;;
esac

One could also modify /etc/etckeeper/post-install.d/50vcs-commit to include the package name etc. in the commit message while emerging:

— a/post-install.d/50vcs-commit
+++ b/post-install.d/50vcs-commit
@@ -2,5 +2,12 @@
set -e

if etckeeper unclean; then
- etckeeper commit “committing changes after $HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER run”
+ case $LOWLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER in
+ portage)
+ etckeeper commit “committing changes after $HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER run ($CATEGORY/$P)”
+ ;;
+ *)
+ etckeeper commit “committing changes after $HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER run”
+ ;;
+ esac
fi

There are probably other/better ways to accomplish this and more…

Anyways… etckeeper looks like a nice and very flexible tool to keep /etc in a repository if one wants to.

2009 – The International Year of Astronomy

vorlon — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:47:45 +0000

Earlier this week the UN has declared 2009 the “International Year of Astronomy”.

Information can be found at http://www.astronomy2009.org/