Into.the.Void.

This is post is a rant. So don’t complain, I warned you.

<rant>
On my laptop (Macbook 4,1) I run Debian testing/experimental which was running quite smoothly since I installed it apart from the couple few weeks.

The first problem I faced was java not running inside browsers. Firefox, Iceweasel, Opera, google-chrome…nothing. I spent at least 2 hours installing/uninstalling various java packages, moving plugins to new locations and I couldn’t get it to work. I was furiously googling about the issue until I hit the jackpot: squeeze : in case you have no network connection with java apps ……

Today I upgraded xserver-xorg-input-synaptics from 1.2.0-2 to 1.2.1-1. Even though it is a minor version bump a kind fairy also told me to reboot…I rebooted and my touchpad was not working properly, tapping was lost, I couldn’t use synclient because shared memory config (SHM) was not activated and so on and so on. My dynamic config using hal was there, /var/log/Xorg.0.log said that I was using the proper device and lshal showed correct settings for the device. I read /usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/NEWS.Debian.gz nothing new. After some googling another jackpot: Bug#564211: xserver-xorg-input-synaptics: Lost tapping after upgrading to 1.2.1-1. For some reason touchpad config has moved to udev from hal and the maintainers didn’t think it was important enough that needed to be documented someplace or put it in README.Debian…

The last issue I am having is with linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686-bigmem not working correctly with KMS and failing with DRM.
[ 0.967942] [drm] set up 15M of stolen space
[ 0.968030] nommu_map_sg: overflow 13d800000+4096 of device mask ffffffff
[ 0.968085] [drm:drm_agp_bind_pages] *ERROR* Failed to bind AGP memory: -12
[ 0.968159] [drm:i915_driver_load] *ERROR* failed to init modeset
[ 0.973067] i915: probe of 0000:00:02.0 failed with error -28

linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686 works fine with those though.
[ 0.973466] [drm] set up 15M of stolen space
[ 1.907642] [drm] TV-16: set mode NTSC 480i 0
[ 2.137173] [drm] LVDS-8: set mode 1280x800 1f
[ 2.193497] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 160x50
[ 2.197435] fb0: inteldrmfb frame buffer device
[ 2.197436] registered panic notifier
[ 2.197442] [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0

Xorg is amazingly sluggish using linux-image-2.6.32-trunk-686-bigmem kernel. I search the debian bugs database and noone seems to have reported such an issue. But google came up with: [G35/KMS] DRM failure during boot (linux 2.6.31->2.6.32 regression). The issue looks solved so I will try and report it to Debian and see what comes out of it…
*Update* Bug Report: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=567352

If you dare to comment saying “that’s what you get for using experimental” I really hope and curse you to spend 3 hours today to try and figure out what has changed in a minor version upgrade of one of your installed packages.
Even worse, if you are on those guys that kept telling me “don’t use stable, testing is stable as a rock, never had a problem in years…” then I curse you to spend a whole day trying to reconfigure something with no documentation 😛
<rant></rant>

Filed by kargig at 18:18 under Linux
Tags: bigmem, debian, drm, hal, java, linux-image, rant, sun-java6, synaptics, udev, xorg, xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
12 Comments | 9,521 views

Six months after my original post on the creation of Greek Adblock Plus filter, the filter is finally added on the official subscription list thanks to Wladimir Palant.
Apart from Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox/Iceweasel/etc, the filter is also usable by the AdThwart extension for Google Chrome/Chromium

Until today the list peaked at 70 subscribers…I hope this will make more people trust my filter list and reach at least 100 subscribers.

As a sidenote, my RBL for Greek spam has moved to a new, better server thanks to a very kind person who donated it and some people administering mail servers have already added it to their spam filters. Since the original announcement the RBL jumped from 500 reqs/min to 2000 reqs/min.

Filed by kargig at 16:19 under Internet,Networking,Privacy
Tags: adblock, adblockplus, ads, antispam, grrbl, spam
6 Comments | 11,057 views

It’s been some months now that I’ve started collecting some IP addresses of well known Greek spammers and I’ve put them on an DNSBL. I’ve named this list GrRBL. The software I use to run the list is rbldnsd.

The list is strictly moderated by me and only me and I try to be very selective on hosts I add to the list. The list contains hosts not only in .gr zone but also “foreign” hosts used to send spam messages either in Greek language or of Greek interest.

There’s a minimalistic guide on using it with spamassassin, exim, sendmail and postfix on GrRBL’s website. There are currently no statistics and no public listing of IPs in the blacklist. If there’s enough demand for statistics I might create some.

There’s also NO automatic deletion support, once an IP is in the list there’s no automatic way out. Since I am the only one adding IPs to the list, I am also the only one removing them, manually of course.

Even though I use GrRBL in all of the mail servers I own/manage, still I consider the service as beta. I don’t think it’s ever going to eat your emails, but you are still the only one responsible if this happens.

To submit new spam messages for inclusion please send me an email with FULL headers of the spam message to grrbl [at] void [dot] gr and I will try to take a look at it as soon as possible.

If you use it, or plan to, please leave a comment or even better, submit some spam messages so the list gets bigger and better.

P.S. In case you wonder, yes the list contains the IPs of the notorious sofokleous10 spammer.

Filed by kargig at 15:48 under Internet,Linux
Tags: antispam, blacklist, dnsbl, email, exim, grrbl, postfix, rbl, sendmail, spam, spamassassin
11 Comments | 11,092 views

We have been talking with Patroklos (argp of census-labs.com) about going to a CCC event for years. This year though we were determined. So on late September 2009 we booked our flight tickets to Berlin. A couple of weeks later some other friends expressed their wish to come with us. So in the end me, Patroklos, huku and SolidSNK (of grhack.net) and Christine formed up a group to visit 26c3 Here Be Dragons. Another group of Greeks also came to 26c3, among them Ithilgore, xorl, sin , gorlist and one more that I have no idea who he was, sorry 🙂

After a canceled flight on the 26th of December due to fog on SKG airport we finally flew on the 27th and went to Berlin. After arriving there we immediately went to the hotel we had booked and then straight to the Berliner Congress Center where the 26c3 was taking place.

BCC is an excellent conference center, nothing close to anything I have ever seen in Greece. It looks great both from the outside and from the inside. When we entered BCC we saw a huge number of diverse people. You could see and feel the difference with all the other IT conferences. People were very relaxed, very talkative and extremely friendly. What makes CCC so special is it’s community. There were soooo many CCC volunteers inside the BCC willing to help you with any information you might need. More on that later on…

After paying just 80€ for the whole conference, 4 days, we started walking around the ground floor. There were many information desks of various projects, free PCs to use (loaded with Ubuntu), the huge lounge which included a bar for food and drinks with lots of seats for people and 2 rooms for presentations. On the upper floor there were many more projects and another large room for presentations.

What made BCC so lively were all these projects around the presentation rooms. There were always hundreds of people sitting outside of the presentation rooms hacking on their projects, discussing with other people, selling merchandise, etc. Because it was our first time in the conference we were not experienced enough to use our time wisely between the lectures so I only managed to visit very few projects, Cacert, Gentoo and Debian. I am sure that there were people who did not attend any lectures at all and just sat all day at their projects’ infodesk.

Before I continue with the presentations we went to I want to make a note about volunteers again. Volunteers at 26c3 were called angels and they did an EXCELLENT job. They would not allow you to sit wherever you liked at a lecture, they would try to find you a seat or they would put you on a place where you could stand without blocking others. Nobody was allowed to sit at the corridors, nobody. Everything was in order and I never ever heard a single person complain about angels’ policy. They were strict and firm on one hand but helpful, fair and polite on the other. They were probably the best volunteers I have ever faced anywhere. All of them were carrying an ID and a DECT phone on them to cooperate with other angels (oh yes, the conference had it’s own DECT network…AND it’s own GSM network!!!) Funny quote: Angels at the entrance and exit doors wore t-shirts that wrote “Physical ACL”, heh.

The very first presentation we attended was “Here Be Electric Dragons“, and then we moved to see “Exposing Crypto bugs through reverse engineering“. After a break we tried to go to the “GSM: SRSLY?” lecture but it was SOO full that we were not allowed to go inside the presentation room. So we went to the “Tor and censorship: lessons learned” presentation which was more interesting than I expected. The final talks we saw on the first day were: “UNBILD – Pictures and Non-Pictures” which was in German and of course “cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/fuckups“. Since none of us spoke German there was no urge to see the UNBILD lecture, but as we painfully understood by not being able to even enter the presentation room for the “GSM: SRSLY?” lecture, you have to go a LOT earlier to see a good lecture. We definetely wanted to see fabs lecture so we went there an hour earlier to find some seats. By the way, outside of the presentation rooms were TVs with live streaming from inside for people who couldn’t go inside or for people who didn’t want to. As I said earlier a lot of people preferred sitting at their projects’ infodesk and watched the streams of the presentations.

On the next day we saw: “Milkymist“, “Advanced microcontroller programming“, “Fuzzing the Phone in your Phone“, “Defending the Poor, Preventing Flash exploits“, “Haste ma’n netblock?” and “SCCP hacking, attacking the SS7 & SIGTRAN applications one step further and mapping the phone system“.

On the third day just “Playing with the GSM RF Interface“, “Using OpenBSC for fuzzing of GSM handsets” and “Black Ops Of PKI” since we decided to do some sightseeing as well 🙂

Finally on the last day we went to “secuBT” and from that to another German lecture about a distributed portscanner called Wolpertinger that replaced a canceled lecture on IBM AS/400. Afterwards we went to the realtime English translation stream of “Security Nightmares” and to the “Closing Event“.

I had a really great time and I certainly want to be there again next year. If I manage to go there again though I will try take a lot more days off work so I can visit many more places around the city. The whole event was excellent, the organization was almost perfect and the people who contributed to it deserve a huge applaud, especially the angels.

Congratulations to all.

Necessary pics:

P.S. I don’t want to go into specific details about the lectures I attended. Some were REALLY good, some were average and some were totally boring. If you follow the news you already know which streams of lectures you should certainly download and see. You can find every lecture on CCC’s FTP server.

P.S.2 What a great wiki for an event…I was amazed by the amount of information one can find in there…

P.S.3 To Greeks only…please download the closing event presentation to see how we should start organizing events. Just check on the efforts of the people who contributed to the 26c3 event. I don’t want to write anything more about this issue because the difference with any Greek event I’ve ever attended to, or even the mentality of the people attending “our” events is SO SO SO HUUUUGE that it makes me really sad. I hope that this might fire up something. If more Greeks attended events organized abroad then maybe one day we might get more serious about our events as well.

Filed by kargig at 15:41 under Internet,Linux,Networking,Privacy
Tags: 26c3, bcc, Berlin, cacert, ccc, conference, debian, dragons, Gentoo, germany, hack, here be dragons, ubuntu
12 Comments | 11,155 views