boklm's weblog

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.

From: Marc Nause <low012@gmx.de>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: new to the internet
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:52:00 +0200
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References: <slrndb9dgg.mun.boklm@h4x0rZ.mars-attacks.org>
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kob dolom wrote:

> And if you have some good gopher addresses, don't hesitate to share.

gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/ (They also offer Gopher hosting)
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/


> I've also heard about an other technology they call "the web" but didn't
> have the occasion to try it yet

I heard about it aswell, but I don't think it will last and I don't think
you should follow every hype. There is much talking about it right now, but
I guess it will stop once the first excitement is over. I have tried the
web, but it is just too complicated for the average user to use
efficiently. If you want to try it, be sure to have a sound knowledge of
the concept of hypertext as it is the basis of the so called web (or world
wide web). There seem to be a few newsgroups dealing with this new
technology: comp.infosystems.www.*

HTH

Marc


From: kob dolom <kobdolom@yupi.pewz.net>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: new to the internet
Date: 19 Jun 2005 00:02:30 GMT
Organization: WorldComere !
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <slrndb9dgg.mun.boklm@h4x0rZ.mars-attacks.org>
User-Agent: slrn/0.9.8.1 (Linux)


Hi !

I am new to the internet, and I heard about this new service called
Gopher. I have a gopher browser, and I found some very interesting texts
and images. I'm looking forward to create my own gopher space, in order
to share some files, but I don't have any server where I can host thoses
files yet. Any idea where I can find that ?
And if you have some good gopher addresses, don't hesitate to share.

I've also heard about an other technology they call "the web" but didn't
have the occasion to try it yet (I was told to install a program called
lynx that I heard support it, but didn't have time to do it yet). Any
one knows about that, aldready tried that ? How do you compare it to
Gopher ? Do you think it's worth the time spent compiling that program
called 'lynx' ? I've also heard about that program called "Mozilla",

but I'm not sure if it will work on my 486 as I only have 8Mb of RAM.

Thanks !

Kob


11:34 <@DarkSoul[oTaf]> le réseau d'epita vient de tomber ?
11:34 < boklm> vient ?
11:34 < Kryczek> nan
11:34 <@DarkSoul[oTaf]> façon de parler
11:34 < Kryczek> il vient de marcher
11:34 < boklm> moi ca fait pas mal de temps que j'arrive plus a me connecter en ssh :)
11:34 <@DarkSoul[oTaf]> j'arrive pas à aller sur la gate ssh
11:34 < Kryczek> ah nan, fausse alerte
11:34 < Kryczek> le réseau epita ne marche pas
11:34 < Kryczek> tout est normal

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 :)

There's a website called No France, and they had a very good idea. At least, it's funny :)

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 added a few pictures. Thoses from one night we was going to Ashland. An other day when I was walking in grants pass, and today in grants pass.

Christopher is working.





And I'm working too, of course.

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, a very interesting website about spam filtering ...
Currently I'm only using bogofilter bayesian filter, and still receive a few spams per day even if 90% are filtered, so it's time to add something else :)

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.

Hmm, looking at http://debian.org/ I see The latest stable release of Debian is 3.1. Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 released !
Eventually, it is done :)

Hmmm, c'est marrant ca.

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.

New Debian Stable is coming soon ! Maybe next week.