OpenBSD v4.7

OpenBSD is a multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system, and is fast, simple to install and secure “out of the box”.

1. Download installation files
2. Read the Installation guide
3. Read the Frequently Asked Questions

A good introductory book for OpenBSD is the “OpenBSD Command Line Companion” by Jacek Artymiak. It walks you through an install and an intro to OpenBSD.

Other books on the OS are:

• Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the Practical Paranoid
• The Book of PF: A No-Nonsense Guide to the OpenBSD Firewall

one of my external hard drives, the one with EVERYTHING I REALLY, REALLY WANT on it has died…

Im sure this happens to many people, and often. What is one to do in a case like this?

Did you backup?

• OPTION 1: If it’s your backup drive that failed, the data will most likely still be on the related computer. Make another copy or backup. Problem solved.
• OPTION 2: If it’s not a backup drive that failed, do you have a backup of it? If not start backing up in future. Think about your recovery options, and the cost involved.

Data recovery options

Ok so you didn’t have a backup, and it’s critical data. If you manage to recover your data, you should consider that prevention is better than a cure.

• OPTION A: If it’s a mac, I use and can recommend Data Rescue by Prosoft Engineering. This software allows you to recover data from the HDD and costs about USD$100. You will need another external HDD (preferably two to clone your corrupt drive first) to recover data to. DON’T use the broken hard drive until the software and new HDD(s) are ready to go. This will cost about $300 for two new disks and the software but has no guarantee it will work, especially if there has been a catastrophic hardware failure.
  • if it’s windows, I can’t and/or wont be able to help or give free advice. Try a windows data recovery program as per option 3. If you want to engage the services of a professional to recover on windows expect $150 per hour.
  • Is it Linux, BSD or UNIX? If you disk is unmounted then try fsck -fy <yourdiskdevicename>
• OPTION B: Pay a professional data forensic service company upwards of $1000 to recover your data. Some companies, such as Prosoft Eng, may perform this task at a budget rate.

How much is the data worth to you?

If it’s not worth between $300 (for the software + new disk solution) to $1000+ then a last ditch effort is put the HDD in the freezer for 10 mins and see if it works long enough to get your essential data off it. Freezing it may permanently destroy the disk so I accept no liabilty for offering this advice.

Future prevention

Disks fail, it’s just a matter of time as to when. Always have at least one backup of ALL your data you can’t afford to lose. On a Mac, it’s as simple as buying an external disk that is about 1.5 times the size of your computers Hard drive, and plugging it in. The Mac will ask if you want to start backing up – and all you have to do is leave it plugged in when you use your Mac.

Even better is to backup in duplicate or triplicate with a copy “offsite“, e.g. at another location. Update backups regularly, with time between backups as long as you an afford to miss data. On a Mac, you can have one hard drive always plugged in, backing up with Apple’s Time Machine. Introduce a second Hard drive that you “clone” once a week using Carbon Copy Cloner, and leave that drive locked up at work. Now you have a primary backup and an offsite secondary backup.

Use paid “cloud” backup services such as dropbox (which I use for free), mozy, BackBlaze or iDrive. These will sync or backup your valuable data automatically into the “cloud”, and even in some cases between computers.

Good luck!

I have previously setup the port forwarding, etc. according to Apple, but never could get a successful connection using video or audio (or screen sharing).

After reading a post on the OpenBSD misc mailing list I went back and read the OpenBSD 4.5 pf.conf man page.

There is a section of the man page that states (my emphasis):

fragment reassemble
Using scrub rules, fragments can be reassembled by normalization.
In this case, fragments are buffered until they form a complete
packet, and only the completed packet is passed on to the filter.
The advantage is that filter rules have to deal only with complete
packets, and can ignore fragments. The drawback of caching frag-
ments is the additional memory cost. But the full reassembly
method is the only method that currently works with NAT. This is
the default behavior of a scrub rule if no fragmentation modifier
is supplied.

My scrub settings were such that I was filtering not complete packets, but fragments. The moment I changed the scrub settings to this:

scrub in on $ext_if all fragment reassemble

All worked perfect. I can initiate iChat calls and receive them too. Desktop sharing now works as well. All using Google talk (jabber) in iChat.

Note that in OpenBSD 4.6 or current there have been PF changes, so the wording of the scrub rule may be different. Always read the pf.conf man page for the release you are on.

As I had used the Apple migration tool to move everything across to the new laptop, Translation Service stopped working. I dropped an email to the developer and literally got an email response 60 minutes later with an updated licence.

Now that’s customer service! There is nothing like a Mac application developer to renew your faith in customer service. After dealing with so many large companies for other IT support issues (Telstra I’m looking at you) – it is very refreshing to get such a favourable response. I’m a happy user and can still translate the odd French or Italian comments on flickr photo-streams I look at.

There is an updated version of Translation Services called KavaServices which sells for $20 and it does a whole lot of other conversion as well. I’m nothing more than a happy customer. The application is perfect for quick on the fly internet based language translation, and even translate right in the browser. Seen here are before/after shots from a flickr photo page.

Before Translation

After Translation – directly in the browser!

Thanks Kavasoft for the enjoyable support experience.

I’ve actually had to decommission my 19″ server rack and the multiple servers I had for Tech Debug. There was a DNS server, kerberos, Database and web server. All the separate functions are now hosted on one OpenBSD VM that I’ve built recently. It’s running on the only remaining “non-laptop” left in my residence, which runs 24×7.

The only delay in getting back online in the last 48 hours was the MySQL data export and import. It’s a bit convoluted, and not documented in entirely one place on the MySQL documentation site (backup here, restore here), however once done once it will be easy to repeat. I still like the simplicity of PostgreSQL administration. Specifically the backup and restore:

Backup:
pg_dumpall > savefile.dump
Restore:
psql -f savefile.dump postgres

Well, there are some prep steps you should do; but it is all in one place on their documentation page.

Let me know how the site performs on the VM.

I’m not posting much these days since I’m currently heavily involved in a current development and build effort for a Client. (Solaris platform with Oracle 10g)

All other hours are either commuting, sleeping or playing WoW. Look forward to a number of upcoming posts on Dansguardian SQL logging, OpenBSD and of course Apple and the iPhone.

Zug Zug…. you WC3 fans will know what I mean.

As a ‘paranoid’ geeked I’m hooked on Little Brother, and if you like tech, geek and drama you should check it out as well.

Update: I went to buy a copy from a local bookstore, but it is not released in Australia yet. You can read the ebook or buy it from amazon.

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
#prevent slashdot effect
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blogspot\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} reddit\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} news\.slashdot\.org [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} slashdot\.org
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1 [R,L]
#Rewrite images to allow CDN to serve them
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*\.(gif|png|jpe?g))$ http://techdebug.com.nyud.net/$1/$2 [R,L]
#Wordpress rewites
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</ifmodule>

A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need. You either work with the (often times) limited and expensive tool, or you extend the functions using your own coding and software.

You can keep up with 90kts and his Open Source load testing efforts on his blog.

Everyone likes free stuff.

Incidentally, the developer is offering this software for USD$19.95 (and there is a very good USD->AUD exchange rate) for a limited time.
Disco has the following features:

• Disc spanning – if the total size of the files you’re burning is bigger than the disc, it tries to divide them amongst multiple discs
• Discography – it catalogues all the discs you have burnt for quick searching
• Multi-session
• And a pledge to support Blu-ray as soon as it is available on Macs

I’m not affiliated, just a happy Disco user (Thanks Mac-Heist!)

As you may have noticed if you subscribed to my feed, or read this site, my posts have been minimal.

Yet after having caffeine on the weekend in an energy drink, and subsequently picking up where I left of with decent illy coffee, I have had the urge to blog again. Nothing tech yet – but here I am.

I’m back baby!

On the same theme, here has been a lot of talk lately about Input Managers and whether they will be completely removed in Leopard. Just recently David Watanabe blogged about the uncertain future of Inquisitor.

It would be a shame for such an awesome Safari extension to become extinct, but thankfully Input Managers are not the only way to skin this cat.

read more | digg story

He shows himself as some crazy evangelical feeling he has to save everyone to be saved himself, which shows him as being in the final moment only concerned with his own welfare. The thing I hate is that my own background and parental teachings (Hi Mum!) about religion gave me, at that moment, a gut wrenching nagging feeling. Its the polarisation of these issues – Heaven/Hell that get on my goat. I won’t do this guy the justice of linking to his website shown on his card, as it’s full of religious ideology.

Keep your beliefs to yourself people, and I will do the same (unless you ask).

This message is being sent to confirm that all credit card information has been removed from the World of Warcraft account ********, effectively cancelling its recurring subscription as of September 23, 2007 5:47 AM UTC. The account will not bill or renew any further unless new payment information (credit card or game card) is manually entered in.
The account will remain playable for the remaining time it has already paid for.

So I did it… again. Cancelled. I was wasting money. Hadn’t played the game in weeks, and when I got on even with my mains and alts it was boring. I have BC expansion, but still am lvl 51 on my main, so I’ve never seen the new content except on the public test realms. Its all a pretty useless game at the moment. Having no one else I know who plays doesn’t help either.
They do say:

At this time, Blizzard has no plans to delete or “expire” characters, even if an account is deactivated

which means there will always be the nag in the back of my mind that I could go back – in fact they are betting on it. I think I’ll trade one addiction (WoW) for another (exercise) and I’ll be a lot healthier for it.

Any other policing on Melbourne trains is done by the internal security of Connex Melbourne. Their main focus appears to be revenue gain by ticketing as many people as they can. I have had them stand on a carriage watching the crazies in the next carriage, and do nothing. It was my action in initiating a 000 call that got something done about it, but as I said previously the Police were able to do little. I don’t blame the Police here, I think they do the best with what resources they have. It is the engagement of Connex and Police that is lacking.

Trains are dirty. Seats stained with whom knows what. Barrier jumping graffiti taggers get away (the ones I see and report). Why is it that I have to call 000 to report graffiti? I think an SMS/Text reporting number would help, so the train cops could respond.

The reason I care to blog about all this? The train driver was smoking on the train this morning. I had to move carriages, and will raise a complaint today. How do you police that? Had I been smoking (I don’t smoke, but hypothetically) then I would have the full extent of the transport law applied to me to prosecute or fine me. What happens to the driver? Nothing, Nil, Nada.

Ultimately, Melbourne transport is an undesirable necessity.

Now apple have released a (so far limited) portion of their catalogue, being from EMI at 256Kbps, and DRM free to top it off.

This audio review on digg says “Comparing these two compression rates was tough, even when using a pair of state-of-the-art Ultrasone headphones. In our decidedly unscientific comparison, we listened to all the tunes at both compression rates in A/B comparisons with those phones, with iPod stock earbuds, on our kick-ass car stereo, and on our reference Dolby 5.1 system.”

Will this be enough for people who previously avoided iTMS to give it a go, maybe not for whole albums, but for the one or two songs they might want to buy in a pinch? Will this be just easier for people to purchase a single song at a decent quality, instead of wasting 1/2 an hour searching through limewire or other sites for the song they want?

Time will tell.

read more | digg story