boklm's weblog

Today is my birthday. I'm 24.

Quand on hésite entre "Comment cela va il ?" et "Comment vas tu ?", la solution c'est "Comment cela va tu ?".

I just saw on TV an absolutly fascinating debate, talking about french WC vs german WC. They explained that when you put something in the french one, it falls directly in the water, while in the german one it falls in a bowl and stay there, so it may smell very bad. But the danger with the french one is that you can get splashing of water (or something else) on you. That was really interesting, I love when I see such interesting debates on TV, this makes me want to watch TV more. Of course it was on ARTE so it was something serious, not a joke.

I found this page from someone having a trip to southern oregon. This is actually places I've been not a long time ago. There's also this one.

Nice pictures on this webpage.

I like pictures like thoses. Very nice.

I want this keyboard ! Having a keyboard with nothing written on it is good, they should do all keyboards like that, so that people don't look at their keyboards :)
I stopped looking at my keyboard since I started typing in dvorak on an azerty keyboard, it's worse than having nothing written on your keyboard because here you have something written which is wrong, so you really should not look at it.
By the way everybody who use a keyboard for the first time should use dvorak or something like that, it's much much much better when you can type very fast without moving your fingers a lot. And anyone who can spend one month typing more slowly should also learn dvorak.

Today I did my monthly visit to linuxfr. And I saw this article about lighttpd. I didn't know this web server, and it seems very interesting, something that could replace apache maybe. However there's still a few features missing like suexec or suphp, that are very usefull for a shared web server. I've been busy doing nothing for the last 2 months, maybe it's time to start working on something on my free time.

I should have been there.

They have some quite good tshirts on tshirthell.com:
"If Jesus comes back we'll kill him again"
Let's buy one and go to church with that !

Google just released Google Talk, their new IM service. But instead of using a proprietary protocol like MSN, ICQ or Yahoo, they choosed to use the Jabber/XMPP protocol. This mean that we can use whatever jabber client we want to connect on google talk. The only problem is that they did not enable server-to-server communications (or only for some selected servers). I hope they'll change that !
And some day, maybe peoople will stop using MSN and their closed protocol ...

Hmm, some people are still running a minix web server on a 286. That's interesting. I installed a few years ago minix on an old 286 I have, but unfortunatly I don't have an ethernet card. Maybe I could use the serial port. That would make a good web and mail server. I could also compile an irc client on it. An other thing would be to install a linux or netbsd on an old mips I have, but I need to find an adaptator to connect the screen to install it.

So it's been almost one week since I left the USA. One week ago I was still in San Francisco, going soon to the airport. And leaving at the airport was not easy :(
Now I'm back in France (and it's hard when you're still used to be in the usa, and you can't see the people you was seeing one week ago, but the good thing was that I could see my family again). I didn't do a lot last week, except this thing for school I had to do. Now I'm in holyday, looking for a new job :)
And I hope the next 3 months will go fast ...

So I'm finally back in France.

This is my last day in Grants Pass. Today I've been to Ashland with Tiffany. This was fun. Tonight I'm going to Chaos Comedy Night at the green room. Then we'll leave, with Tiffany and Jacques, at 3 or 4 in the morning, going to San Francisco by car. I have my plane at 4. This is kind of sad.
It's 6:52, now I have to finish packing.

In only a few days, I'm leaving this town. I'll go to San Francisco, from where I'll fly to Paris.
And I'll be back in France ... I don't realise yet that next week I'm in France.

I found this OpenBSD poster. This is funny because it's almost as stupid as the OpenBSD slogan "No remote hole in the default install ...", or the interviews from theo.
The truth is that even if it can be usefull sometimes, OpenBSD is far from beeing a good operating system for everything (but for a router or firewall it's ok), and contrary to what many people say (because they read that slogan or heard stupid rumors ?), OpenBSD is not really more secure than any other good operating system.
I used to like OpenBSD, but I don't use it anymore because I don't like to reinstall everything 6 months or year in order to upgrade to the new version (that's why I use Debian Stable when I can), because there's no good package system (I have to apply patches myself and recompile when security fix are released), because there's much more patches for anything you want to do on Linux, and because Theo is really stupid.

It's on slashdot, OpenSolaris Code Released. This seems interesting, but I really don't have time now to look at that now :/
Other important things to do ... And that's always when I have important things to do, that I find other things to do :)

After looking at some apache logs the users agents of who access robots.txt I see there are quite a few different web crawlers, so a lot of different search engines. dir.com, ask.com, altavista.com, alltheweb.com, yahoo, WiseNut, amfibi.com, baidu.com, gigablast, foviconz, voila, Nutch, picsearch, rambler, entireweb, become, nusearch, walhello, sogou and a few others. But most people use google.

I had for my work to administer an IMail v8.05 mail server, from Ipswitch, and I can say now that I've seen that, that no one should use that program in any as it is the worst email server program I've ever seen or imagined (however I have to admit I never saw the IIS SMTP service from Microsoft). Here are the main reasons why this program should never be used :

• The developers obviously didn't read the RFC 1893 or 3463 when they created the IMail program, and they didn't understood that when a server answer with an Error code starting with the number 4, it is a Persistent Transient Failure, not a Permanent Failure, and sending again in the the future the same message may be successful. Due to their poor error handling and their misunderstanding of the RFC, the only action they take when they encounter this kind of error is to bounce the message to the sender with a stupid "user unknow" message, without any other detail of course and no retry. Knowing the fact that most spammers won't take the time to send again their message when they receive a temporary some people had the idea to use a method called Greylisting to block a significant amounts of spam by first rejecting an email from an unknown server with a temporary error, accepting and adding the sending server to a whitelist when it try to send again the same email after a certain amount of time. The spams are then rejected while the emails sent using a regular email server are received. The problem is that the IMail server doesn't handle this correctly, this means that you won't be able to send any email to a server using greylisting.
• When an email cannot be delivered, for any reason, the error message sent to the sender is always the same : "unknown user", even if the error has nothing to do with an unknown user (timeout connecting to the destination server, over quota, etc ... there can be many reasons why an email connot be delivered). As a result it's difficult to know why you receive an error message.
• The server crashed for no reason and needed a reboot very often to fix some problems.
• All the configuration and management of accounts is done using a Graphical User Interface. The configuration is saved in the Windows Registry or binary configuration files. As a result it is very difficult to write a script to make changes on an important amount of accounts or parameters at the time, you have to do it using the GUI, one item at the time. It makes it also very difficult to keep backups, or prepare a migration to an other email system. But it seems actually to be the regular things for a Windows program.
• The GUI program allow you to crash the whole mail server in a few clicks if you don't take care, without any way to come back using the GUI options. It happenned to me once, and I had to modify some obscure undocumented parameters directly in the registry in order to fix the problem (I was lucky to find this, most people just format and reinstall).
• The program lacks many options, and is not modular. For example it is not possible to add external spam filters, add special routing instructions, add greylisting. You are limited by the features the developers of the program decided to include (but it seems to be also the case for most Windows programs I saw).
• It's completly unreliable
• And of course this shit is far from being free !

So unless you want to lose mails, have something completly unreliable, don't want to be able to keep backups easily or to be able to migrate you config to an other server easily, I strongly discourage you to ever use IMail ... 5 months ago I couldn't imagine something like that could exist.

(this text is a part of my internship report)

I know writting suid script is a very bad idea (and is not at all possible on linux for security reasons), but I need to do something like that. So writting a small wraper in C, or using suidperl might be a solution. The problem with suidperl is that I couldn't find any documentation about it anywhere.
After doing a few tests I could only get this error message: "suidperl needs fd script". Maybe I'm not using it correctly, but I can't find any doc anywhere about how to use it. No one seems to know how to use it on perl's irc channels I've been, and the only things I can find on google about it are security vulnerabilities so that doesn't seems to be a good idea to use that actually :) I don't want to waste too much time on this, and using sudo is probably a better idea after all so that's not really important, but that might be usefull in the futur, so if anyone find anything about suidperl, please tell me :)

Hmm, so I have to migrate an IIS server from a computer to an other one. This is amazing how such simple tasks can be complexe on Windows. First thing, as with most Windows programs, they don't use a simple text (or xml) configuration file as any serious program should use. No, they save their configuration in the registry or other binary files hidden everywhere on the system. So you can't handle that yourself, you HAVE to use the config programs they give you. That could be ok if they gave you some small programs to access/modify the config, for example using a script that call theses programs. But no, the program they give you is a GUI, where you HAVE to use your mouse, and click click click click on each items you want to change. How do I script that ? When you have a few hundreds virtual hosts hosted, that means a few hundreds clicks doing the same thing, to change the same parameter, with a risk of error. And a few hours lost doing this ... When you think it would take only a few seconds to do it if the config was stored in a simple text file.
So they don't want you to access/modify yourself the config (except with their stupid GUI). So how do I migrate my server to an other computer ? Their solution to this problem is to provide you a specific program they have written for that. That means that :

• You depends on them to write this program.
• They don't know exactly your specific problem, so this is not really adapted to your case.
• You have to use (and find) a specific program for each problem.
• Of course, it's not always free.
• They do not have a program for every situations. What about backups for example ?
• Their programs is buggy. And keep some mistakes hidden in the config ... But as you don't really have access to it, it's hard to find them and correct them. Then you have all thoses problems for obscure reasons.
• It's Microsoft, they don't really care about security. Installing the IIS Migration Wizard open big holes on your server, and everything is transfered on an unencrypted connection of course. They don't let you choose how to do things, they do it for your (and as usual they don't do it well, but you have no choice).
• When it doesn't work (and it often does), you can do nothing.
• Of course, this program won't allow you to export the config to anything else than IIS. And this is probably the main reason why they do all that, because they don't want to allow you an easy migration to something else.

So why do they make things as complexe ? There is no technical reason for doing that. The only use for that is to prevent you from moving away from IIS. And people continue to use that ?
I don't understand how someone can use IIS (or any of the Microsoft products I've seen in the last 5 months) for something serious. It's completly fucked up so you can't do anything by yourself, so that it is harder to move away from them. They make your life harder for stupid reasons (to prevent you from moving away from them). And some people don't say anything and continue to use that ... They probably don't know.

I really hate using thoses programs (that's why I don't have Windows on my computers), but unfortunatly sometimes I'm asked to use them because other people made the wrong choice ...

At least I learnt something doing this internship : using proprietary software for serious things is almost never a good choice. That's what I was thinking, but now I'm sure.

Looks like google is more and more in opensource. After releasing some open source projects, now it's time for summer of code, $4500 for the students who complete an open source project by the end of the summer.
And their new protocol is released under the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.
Hmmm. Maybe an other company that understood that you don't need to be evil to be successfull ? We'll see.

A few years ago, after going in Paris looking for wireless access points and taking some pictures, I made this bank hacking page with nothing serious on it. Now google knows this page, and there are people coming everyday looking for informations about bank hacking :)
A few days ago, I wrote on a page "Je vais devenir millionnaire", and now there are people coming everyday looking for informations about how to become millionnaire :)

2 days ago (monday night) I went to Abby's with Christopher to eat a pizza. Christopher insisted to take a giant one, and that was really too much. I ate too much. Yesterday night I ate a pizza with Tiffany. I was not very hungry, so I didn't eat too much, that was ok. This morning a customer bring us some donuts. I ate 2 of them. At noon (usually we eat at 2 or 3pm) Jacques decided to buy some pizzas, one giant, one large. And again I eat too much. Thoses pizzas with pepperoni or bacon are disgunting. It's hard to find good food here, everything is full of fat and oil :/ And everything is big.

Looks like everything at epita is unreachable. I asked someone there, and there is a power failure, so everything is down :) Quite funny (it's much more funny when it happens to others).
The good thing is that I'll probably receive a lot less spam today.

defcon 13 in Las Vegas, July 29-31. Or What The Hack in The Netherlands, July 28-31.
The Netherlands is the nearest from France I think.

Tiens, en lisant ce message, j'apprend qu'il est interdit de diffuser "tout message ayant le caractère de propagande électorale", "à partir de la veille du scrutin" donc aujourd'hui. Par exemple, si on ecrit VOTEZ NON, c'est illegal.

Penser a voter non le 29 Mai.

I'm back home, and it's 2:50am, I have to go sleep. I was with Tiffany tonight, and I hope I'll see her again very soon.

Témoignage d'un revenu du Oui.

Less than a month now to write my internship report. I'll have to be fast ... but that should be ok I hope.

In less than 2 months my internship will be finished :/ That's bad (because I'll have to come back in france, and I like beeing here) but that's also good (because I also like beeing in france, and see the people I know in France). So I'll have to find something else to do after that. Or maybe come back here if ever I can ? I don't really know. I didn't write a lot of code thoses last 6 months (except scripts and that kind of stuff), and I miss that a little. I think my next job should be half writting code, and half system administration. But I should avoid as much as possible thoses big Java programs, or php scripts, because it's not fun :) I don't like to write thousands of lines that do nothing complexe, that's really boring.
What would be great would be kernel programming ... but I have to find that (and first, start looking).

I'm back from Holiday (actually one week ago). With my parents and my sister we have been travelling in Oregon, California, Nevada ...
And I'm uploading the photos :)

Today we've been to Crater Lake. Some photos. The weather was not very good so we don't really see the lake. There is still a lot of snow, and it's still very cold there :)

Tomorrow morning I'll drive to Seattle. And I'll come back on Sunday...
That's cool, I've never been to Seattle or Portland yet. And I like travelling.

If you're looking for a cheap dedicated server in the USA, look at vrtservers.net. It's cheap, you can choose your OS (Debian, FreeBSD, Fedora Core, CentOS ...), and it's working quite well (at least the one I've been using for one month now).
In France, Lost Oasis is quite good too.

It's too bad we have to close wiki and blog comments because of spammers.

Let's ask the death penalty for spammers. And before we can kill the spammers, start by killing their servers (they give us the links to their websites).

Happy new year !
Now I'm in Grants Pass for my internship. I took a few photos on the road yesterday morning (I'll take more soon).
I arrived on thursday afternoon in San Fransisco then came by road to Grants Pass the next day. It's a lot different from France here, but I like, and people are very sympathetic :)

This is christmas today. And one of the last days in France for me (before I come back in July 2005), I'm leaving Paris to San Fransisco and Oregon on the 30th of December this year.

Tomorrow is the last day at school ! We have a last project to finish for tomorrow (a free project). Our is a versionned file system for Linux. Each time you modify a file, a backup is made, and you are able to come back to any previous version of a file. Then when we have finished it and presented it, it's hollyday, after a long week of exams !! Until January when I'll start my internship :)
And I can't really believe that tommorrow I have finished school :/
Anyway, because I'm leaving in January, I closed my phone line, and no more have an internet access at home, and have to go to school when I need one :)

The MarsAttacks wiki is openned !
It's still a little empty for the moment, but when I want to write something interesting, I'll add it on this wiki now :)
However I have a lot of work now and for the next month, and will not have a lot of time for that.

Hmm, I just looked at the date, and I see that today is the 5th of november. That means that tomorrow I'm 23. Wow, I'm getting old !

I added the "whoami" page on my webpage. Nothing special about it, just a page describing me and a picture :)
I also added a page about Jabber.

I installed MHonArc on my computer so that I can use it now to archive some mailling list and blogs with an RSS feed.

Yesterday (Sunday) I thought about this. I really don't like credit cards : It is not secure at all. When you want to give money to someone, you have to insert your card and enter your key on his computer. You have to trust him for not stealing your key code and card number. And you don't really know how much money he takes. On the internet this is the same, when you give you card number to someone, he can take all the money he wants from your account. Also, who really knows what a credit card is made of ? They don't want to tell us how everything work (security throught obscurity). You have to trust something, but have no proof that it's working (actually some had proof that it's not, but got in trouble for this). And it's not flexible at all.
I hope that some day all of this will be replaced by a pgp key (or equivalent). Everybody has a public and a private key. When you want to open an account at the bank, you give them your email (which is like an id) and your pgp public key. Then you save your private and public key on your PDA. When someone ask you some money, you plug your PDA to his computer (it's also possible with a remote computer throught the internet for exemple). Then his computer sends to your PDA a message like "give $100 to me@me.com". Your PDA display the message, then if you accept, it will sign a message like "I give $100 to me@me.com" and send it back to the other computer. But of course, your private key always stay inside, and there is no way that someone could steal it when you plug your PDA somewhere (if there is no hole in the softwares of course). You gave him a signed message, then when that someone brings it to your bank, they will take the money from your account. That way, you can control the hardware and software that will sign your messages and allow you to identify.
And maybe everything will use this. For exemple when you want to take the train, you buy a ticket, but instead of giving you a paper, they give you a signed message. Or they just rememeber you and ask you to sign or decrypt a message when you enter the train as a proof that it's really you.

Anyway, it's time to go to sleep now :)

Hmm, I started this blog a few days ago, but didn't speak yet about myself and what I'm doing (this is what most blogs are supposed to be about). So let's start by telling what I did this weekend :)
Yes, this was a good weekend. On saturday I came with my parents to visit some friends we hadn't seen for a long time. This was really good. And today nothing special. I spent some time burning some CDs so that I can listen to them this week (maybe a portable ogg player is something I could buy, but it's too expensive for me at the moment). And now this is the end of the weekend. I'll have to go to bed soon if I don't want to be too much tired tomorrow. I'll have to get up soon. And I'm not really happy to come back to work this week :/
But this week I'll have to start all the papers to prepare my internship. I hope it will be ok (and I'm a little impatient to do it in January).

Next week at school, we have a full week with courses about kernel development !
I'm happy as it is a subject that interest me :)

I'm thinking about openning a new website soon. It will be called linuxrulez.info and it will be a wiki about Linux in general. At the moment I'm looking at what might be the best wiki for this. I looked at plone and zope (this is big), tikiwiki and moinmoin, but I don't know yet (moinmoin semms to be the most simple and easiest to maintain).

Hello ! This is the first post on this blog :) Yes, I decided to start a blog.