Peregrine

It’s been bugging me for months that I had Adobe Flash in Konqueror (my favorite browser on Linux) working just fine under openSUSE 10.3 and 11.0, but with 11.1 it just couldn’t find the plug-in. I’ve just never had the time at the moments I ran into it to go hunting down a solution, until the other night. Some Googling didn’t help at all, just people saying that it wasn’t working in Konqueror although it was just fine on other browsers. So I left it for later.

This morning, at work, I’ve had a quiet moment so I thought I would open up my notebook and look at some code. When I woke it up, there was Konqueror (I was upgrading blogs last night). So, I thought, oh, let’s look at the list of plug-in directories. There was an entry for /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/wrapped/ which doesn’t exist, but not one for the /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/ directory, which does. I added an entry for /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/, clicked the Scan for New Plugins button and restarted Konqueror.

That’s all it took. It works.

Now, I just have to go file a bug report with a fix in their bugzilla. I love Free & Open Source Software.

It’s been only 3.5 weeks since I upgraded this blog to released just a few days ago. This one is “simply” a hardening release, as they are now preparing for 2.9.

This time, I decided to see if I could simplify the process a little bit. Instead of reassembling the content by moving the previous version out of the way and then cherry=picking the right files and directories to copy into a fresh extract of the new release, I decided to make a backup copy of he current directory (and the DB) and then copy the extracted files of the new release over the top of the existing install. In this case, there were no DB changes to process, so it didn’t even ask me to “Upgrade the Database.” In fact, after the copy command was done, that was it.

I like it simple.

Still, I need to sit down and work out just how to reorganize the layout of a few things, since there are features that now better support much of what I want to do to better secure and simplify the running of my blog. Perhaps a project for this weekend?

Oh, well. That was mostly a bust. There were only twelve people in the room at the peak of it and only 7-8 traded keys. With all the last minute work going on, the Utah Open Source Conference 2009 organizers didn’t have the chance to get the word out from my post on doing the keysigning party.

FYI … I took down the “keysigning” email address from my domain a couple of days ago (after I got an email from someone whom I was expecting to send me their key).

I’ve already asked the UTOSC folks to plan on me doing two (or more?) sessions for the keysigning party in 2010. For next year, I plan on doing a presentation session, where I will talk about the reasons why keysigning is so important, how the system as a whole (the web-of-trust, the keyrings, etc.) works and provide a brief introduction to the actual protocols and algorithms used. The idea is that someone can come away from that session able to do three things:

1. Make a well informed decision to participate in the web-of-trust.
2. Explain just enough to help their friends also understand it.
3. Understand it enough to trust it based on their own understanding, instead of just entirely on the word of us “experts” who have been using it for years.

The second session would be the keysigning party, itself. Perhaps there could be two of these? The main one would be in the second evening and the second keysigning party could be a family-day thing.

Anyway, we’ll all be much better prepared for next year.

One thing that has bothered me for years is when people refer to SQL but pronounce it as “sequel.” There is a different database language called SEQUEL. They are not the same thing. They are both database languages, but pretty much have nothing else in common.

I first remember hearing SQL mispronounced as “sequel” from Microsoft back in the 1990’s shortly after a release of Microsoft SQL Server. I can not say with certainty that Microsoft did this on purpose in order to spit in IBM’s eye, but if you search for IBM sequel database language (for example, on Google), you’ll see that Microsoft still advertises that you can “Learn Sequel”.

Please, people, can you pronounce SQL as S-Q-L? After all, IBM invented both SEQUEL and SQL and they said that this is the correct pronunciation. Thank you :) .

Visit [ http://www.utosc.com/ ] for the details.

This year, I’m not doing any presentation. I have some ideas for next year.

I will be running the keysigning party on Friday, October 9 at 7:15pm at the conference. I’m stepping into doing this a bit last minute, so we’re going to provide some additional info and the instructions for the keysigning party on the UTOSC website should be updated very soon.

To participate, just show up. If you want help generating a key pair and getting started, there will be several people there who can assist you, just be sure to bring your own notebook computer. If you have keys, please, email me your full key ID (not a short or medium) at keysigning@openbrainstem.net. It is a good idea to digitally sign that email. If you have multiple keys, include them all. I actually have three separate keys these days and 2 of them have multiple IDs associated with them.

(and PGP) allow us to digitally sign messages (usually email, but can be used with other communications systems, too), code and other documents. It also let’s us encrypt files, emails and just about anything else. This is an extremely important technology for a lot of reasons, some of which I’ve discussed in past articles on this blog (and others). Defending our privacy and ensuring the integrity of our personal, family and business communications is vital. We sign each other’s keys to build a “web of trust.” This is the critical step that makes the whole thing usable.

If you have never used PGP or GPG (a.k.a. GnuPG, Gnu Privacy Guard) before, visit the GnuPG website for a basic description of how to generate your key pair.

If you have never participated in a keysigning party, check out the Keysigning Party HOWTO and/or [ http://keysigning.org/ ].

Immediately following the Utah Open Source Conference 2007 keysigning party, I wrote a simple script to help help you sign-lots-o-keys. You can download the script from [ http://www.openbrainstem.net/download/sign-lots-o-keys ]. If I have time before the keyparty in just two days, I have some little updates that I would like to implement in that script. But don’t hold your breath. Perhaps there will be time at the conference on Saturday?

So, please, plan on joining us on Friday. These are always good fun.

This blog was running under Wordpress 2.3.2 for far too long. I had put in some patches, and there were security announcements about problems that wouldn’t affect this blog, since I didn’t use or enable the affected features. With the systems and application monitoring that I have in place, I wasn’t that worried. Still, I had started to update to 2.5.1 and 2.6 and 2.7 following their respective releases. Today, I finally took an hour and did the upgrade to the currently available version. I know, I know … that probably means that 2.8.5 will come out this afternoon.

The reason that it took an hour was that I was forced to upgrade several plugins and fix a couple of configurations. No big deal. It went pretty smoothly. Here are the basic steps that I go through:
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We have published the first episode of the Stone Patrolmen podcast. The website is at [ http://stonepatrolmen.com/ ].

My dual Opteron workstation has been around for nearly 5 years now. It’s had some bumps and bruises along the way (some of which were due to my own actions), but has been a great machine. It still has very good performance, especially given it’s age.

When I first built it in May of 2004, Fedora Core 2 was barely out and was the first Fedora to sport an AMD64 (x86_64) 64-bit version. That was the first and last time that I installed Linux on this box, from scratch. Since then, I’ve upgraded it to FC3, FC4, FC5, F6, F7, F8 and now F9 (I will upgrade to F10 in a week or so).

When I installed FC2, I used the ext3 filesystem for the root volume (I use LVM). I "converted" the root volume to the XFS filesystem on 2006/08/03. I also created a few volumes using XFS and reiserfs (v3.6) filesystems.

Over time, I’ve had a few minor problems with XFS. Recently, those problems grew in regards to the root volume to the point where I needed to convert it to something else, which I did the other day. The root volume is now on reiserfs. That leaves just 3 volumes that are still XFS.

After upgrading to F9 and installing updates, there were a couple of weird issues that I was dealing with. I also kept seeing some filesystem corruption messages (on the terminal, in the logs) for XFS volumes (but they don’t tell you which one). That’s it, I’m done with this XFS thing, so I’m going to convert those filesystems over to something else and get rid of XFS on this workstation.
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A few weeks ago, I was looking through some Netfilter documentation, just poking around, looking at some modules I’ve never seen/played-with/hear-of and I came across the recent module. I decided to try it out on one of my servers that gets anywhere from zero (0) to tens of thousands of crack attempts via SSH per day and see if I could weed out some of these bot-nets. It also occurs to me that this could help fight email SPAM-bots, too.

Of course, it’s very important to have good, strong password security practices. If you have poor passwords, none of this will matter, as you’ve probably already been compromised whether you know it or not. This means that all users have to have strong passwords. Techniques for helping users to create and use strong passwords are beyond the scope of this article, but I will write about these things in the near future.
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USA Today carried this story on the front page, Tuesday, (2007/12/04). It’s interesting that the headline for this story in the print edition and the online version are not identical.

The crux of the story is that the major U.S. airlines are shifting their schedules a little so that there will be fewer overall seats available throughout the U.S., despite stronger demand than last year. Such changes are not being made in their International schedules.

Part of the numbers come from switches to smaller aircraft, some are from schedule changes that will have a smaller total number of flights on some routes and other routes may be eliminated.

I also found it interesting that Delta Airlines, which I fly more often than all others combined, is the only major airline that is leaving their capacity and schedules virtually unchanged, with only a 0.6% overall U.S. routes capacity decrease planned for January 2008.

The biggest problem that could occur, whether you are flying with an airline that is making large changes or small, is that hiccups could take a day or two, rather than hours, to resolve. Such issues could bleed into other airlines, as cross-pollination can and does quickly fill the few available seats still open on all the other airlines. Given all of the problems that Northwest Airlines has been experiencing this year, I would hope that they don’t cut back too far. Granted, things are better at Northwest than they were in June of 2007, but the end of November continued to show larger numbers of cancellations than should normally be expected.