Nix Bits » Internet

Linux with encrypted root and swap with working hibernate to disk

scotth — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:52:29 +0000

I recently installed Linux Mint (ubuntu with some goodies) on a laptop and wanted an encrypted whole disk. In order for this to be truly secure, you need encrypted swap. Well most of the HOWTOs for encrypting swap use a randomized key. This breaks hibernate to disk for laptops because the linux kernel has no way to decrypt a randomized cipher (of course). So I referenced a separate howto and combined the two approaches. I can now hibernate to disk using an encrypted swap partition that is protected with a passphrase in the same as way as root and home partitions.

It should be apparent this howto is non-trivial. The config file changes I supply in it are in diff -u format so this is deliberately written for a technical audience. My research indicates that there is some interest in getting this into distributions in a more elegant fashion, but that kind of deep integration takes time. I needed something that works for me now.

Anyway, here’s the link in the Linux Mint user forums:

The internet as platform?

scotth — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:11:00 +0000

Everything is Crazy has published an article that asserts that ever increasing bandwidth will eventually overcome Microsoft’s Operating System monopoly. In other words, the application platform moves from the Operating System to the Internet itself.

There is some evidence to support the notion that Operating Systems will matter less and less. Google’s Gmail is a tantalizing, but relatively simple glimpse. Mozilla and Firefox have oft been presented as application platforms in their own right. Certainly the browser is one of the most utilized components for any computer user. And while the old “the network is the computer” campaigns ultimately fizzled, as Everything is Crazy’s author notes in a followup, the bandwidth simply wasn’t there.

Here’s where the argument falls apart a bit for me:

Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee. As bandwidth increases, telcos, cable companies, and others will be in the perfect position to become application service providers for the average home user, and said average home user will gladly accept this, as long as the price isn’t too high. I see this as almost inevitable.

It’s true, average joe users are struggling with security pains and becoming less than happy system administrators. But I just don’t see cable companies and telcos stepping up to this plate. The bottom line, as always, is the bottom line. The investment to become an application provider would be substantial. This is particularly evident when you factor in the support costs. Telco’s and cable companies have not been particularly good at consumer tech support and satisfaction so far.

And I don’t see there being a viable return on investment any time soon. Providers are still looking to maximize their initial investments building and launching broadband. They are spending most of their time and dollars getting ‘triple-play’ going to compete with one another while fending off interlopers such as Vonage and AT&T for voice. The only provider that might have some ability to test these waters as a variant of the Application Service Provider is Time-Warner with it’s AOL division.

Otherwise, third parties probably have the best possibility of getting into this sort of game. Will we one day do all of our word processing and spreadsheet work in a browser rather than a traditional desktop app? Maybe. Or maybe in two or three years things will be far more different than we imagined presenting other possibilities for people to get (over)excited about.

Asking the wrong questions

scotth — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 23:47:00 +0000

is the leading cause of wrong answers.” That’s what my .sig says. Here’s a well-written page on researching and asking technical questions. The insights esr provides can be applied in other ways as well. Click here for more.

TCP/IP class

scotth — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 21:31:00 +0000

Way back in 2001, Barry McCormick and I wrote up this document and taught a two session class for NOLUG on the basics of TCP/IP. Looking at my web stats lately and after doing some googling about, I’ve found it’s quite a popular download. Since my site has been rearranged often, I’m just posting this so it can be found again easily. While some of the material is slightly outdated, it’s still a solid introduction and Barry and I are pretty proud of the work we put into it.

Using OpenBSD CARP and pfsync for inexpensive firewall/router redundancy

scotth — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 23:28:00 +0000

Enterprise network admins are probably familiar with Cisco’s HSRP which allows for router redundancy and VRRP for firewall redundancy. This article describes a way to achieve the same thing using features in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.5 release . Other commercial firewalls certainly have similar capability. However, OpenBSD’s feature set is becoming rather compelling.

Smaller businesses can certainly find value in such an approach, keeping their network available and secure at a fraction of the cost. Evening paying an outside consultant for installation and ongoing support would be cost effective. Deploy something like this and things remain comfortable for your cisco-trained network admins.

All of this of course reminds me that I really need to schedule some time to upgrade my own OpenBSD firewall.

Patent Nuttiness

scotth — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 20:23:00 +0000

This is a truly rediculous patent. Apparently a company called ideaflood.com has managed to patent subdomains.

*boggle*

So if I decide to set up, say, Jennifer.scottharney.com, I’m supposed to pay a licensing fee to this company. How did they get this patent in the first place?

Christopher Falkowski, a legal specialist in these topic areas for Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Rader, Fishman and Grauer (raderfishman.com) says a number of key requirements must be met to obtain a patent, whether that patent is in the area of Web hosting operations or any other technical field: The invention must be new or novel. It must be non-obvious. The persons claiming the patent must be the inventors. And the patent application must be filed within one year of a public disclosure or sale.

The patent was apparently issued in 1999. One of the first relevant RFC’s I could find is RFC 805 dated 8 February, 1982. Here’s the introductory text:


Introduction

   A meeting was held on the 11th of January 1982 at USC Information
   Sciences Institute to discuss addressing issues in computer mail.
   The attendees are listed at the end of this memo.  The major
   conclusion reached at the meeting is to extend the
   "username@hostname" mailbox format to "username@host.domain",
   where the domain itself can be further structured.

Hmmm. Besides being an obvious idea, there’s clearly prior art. That’s just one RFC out of many and I’m certain there are hundreds of examples of this use of subdomain naming. Perhaps a search of The internet archive will provide some examples.

making picture albums.

scotth — Tue, 20 May 2003 21:45:00 +0000

I like to use album to make my picture albums The command to generate the static picture pages is:
~scotth/album/album.pl -medium 50% -medium_type -known_images -theme ../album/Themes/Blue
once i’m in a directory full of pictures. Makes it simple, really.

GPG key

scotth — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 06:14:00 +0000

I have decided to start using my GPG key again to sign emails and such. It’s a good thing to use encryption and digital signature technology. Consequently, I’ve gone ahead and posted my key here

How I post to the blog

scotth — Fri, 28 Feb 2003 02:15:00 +0000

I use Blosxom to run this here blog. It’s simple to set up and does everything I need. And it also means I can write entries in a text editor “like God intended”. I looked at some of the various blog services but those didn’t interest me. I have an apache server and a domain after all. And of course I preferred something Open Source. Blosxom fits the bill

One way to post is of course using good ole vim/vi inside an ssh session. But instead I work on my laptop remotely where I have a mirror of my blog directory structure. I use rsync to sync up the whole shebang. It looks like this from inside my local mirror of the blog: rsync --rsh="ssh" -avz --progress . www.scottharney.com:/path/to/blog/scotth
Very quick. And syncing back the other way is just as simple just switching up the “.” and the “www.scottharney.com…” parts. I use “–delete” when I need to prune up in one direction or the other.

Barkus pics are up

scotth — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 09:28:00 +0000

Pics from this year’s Barkus parade are up. Barkus is a parade just for dogs benefitting the Louisiana SPCA. There are 1500 dogs in the parade. It is enormous and great fun. We had beautiful weather and enjoyed dressing up as Elvis and his Memphis Mafia to complent the parade’s “TailHouse Rock” theme.