Compiling SSL support for Activestate perl is no fun task. I tried it one day (and succeeded) but it was still a pain and took the entire day. Thanks go to John Bokma for making it as easy as

ppm> install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Crypt-SSLeay.ppd

I haven’t verified that it works, but if somebody does please let me know!

Update - Confirmed, it works!

Looks like I have yet another reason to drink Mountain Dew.

Beginning August 28, 2005, Mountain Dew and Xbox® will select a winner of an Xbox 360™ gaming and entertainment system every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for nine weeks straight! That’s an Xbox 360 every 600 seconds!

Pepsi sure is being an advertising whore - they just wrapped up a promotion to win Apple iTunes songs on Pepsi bottle caps and now they’re promoting Microsoft’s Xbox 360. I’d much rather win a $400 Xbox and a $0.99 song, though…wouldn’t you?

More details on everytenminutes.com.

Schneier blogged this morning about how an identify thief managed to steal a house! Apparently, the thief had merely transferred the deed using a stolen SSN and drivers license number.

I’d be curious to see how the thief managed to get ahold of that information. That’s a crazy example of extreme identity theft, though.

I put some pics of my kitchen up recently. It looks really nice in these pictures, but most of that is due to Stacey. Now I just need to work on getting some furniture in my living room!

wl-kitchen/IMGP1776

It can mean only one of two things when fighter jets are buzzing the sears tower.

Yes, folks, that’s right. I had almost forgotten, but this weekend is Chicago’s annual Air and Water Show featuring the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds.

Go out, get some sun, and enjoy the jets!

It sucks when your home directory partition gets foo bar’ed.

###########
reiserfsck --rebuild-tree started at Wed Aug 17 03:33:36 2005
###########

Pass 0:
Loading on-disk bitmap .. ok, 18207763 blocks marked used
Skipping 8818 blocks (super block, journal, bitmaps) 18198945 blocks will be read
0% left 17928713, 5874 /sec

One of my partitions has begun acting up, causing oops in Linux and causing things to lock up. I hope this fixes it…and I hope I don’t end up with gobs of nameless files in lost+found. Luckily I was able to scratch up the 70gb required to back said home directories. Had to burn off a few rainbow crack tables, tho…

Update
That went flawless! I’m only missing one file, that I was already getting access denied to prior to the fix which meant it was having some issues anyway…

--- old_home-fixed.ls 2005-08-17 04:20:28.000000000 -0500
+++ old_home.ls 2005-08-17 03:29:23.000000000 -0500
@@ -4410,7 +4410,6 @@
/mnt/tmp/mp3/Dance-Techo-Electronic/Dream Dance Vol30:
.
..
-01-ATB - Sunset Girl.mp3
01-Dj Shog - Tribute.mp3
02-Chicane - Daylight.mp3
02-Woody Van Eyden - Unfinished Symphony.mp3

I just found this blog entry about backing up your del.icio.us links. Good to know.

I’d like to expand it to provide Yahoo “My Web”-like capability of saving web pages.

After reading around a little bit, it seems the best approaching to subverting your homedir is to use multiple repositories for the different portions of your homedir and then tying all those together using svn:externals. This post will be a lesson in doing so.

First, let’s determine the projected layout. I have several items I want to keep in subversion:

• homedir - my nix home directory, generally config files
• code - various projects I may or may not be working on, may consist of various other repositories
• docs - stuff I need to keep around for my personal life. This won’t be checked out to many machines, but will be nice to keep in svn
• work - any stuff related to work…resume’s, temporary files, etc.
• downloads - all the junk I download…how nice would it be to have previous versions in svn instead of x_v3.2.3.8.exe?!
• bin - various finished shell scripts and utilities for personal use…I may have to seperate this out to win32 and nix

OK, so that’s good for now. But Joey’s use of home-base and home-full is starting to confuse me. More on this tomorrow, hopefully, but my apartment needs a serious cleaning!

Unfortunately, I had to forego DefCon 13 this year for various reasons, but I still kept up a little bit on the chatter that was going on. My favorite presentation…SensePost on BiDiBLAH. BiDiBLAH is a tool that automates 80% (SensePost claim) of the vulnerability/penetration assessment process. That, my dear readers, is sweet and desperately needed in today’s information security assessment environment.

Penetration assessments are performed by a unique breed. There’s a certain knowledge required to identify a host and realize the potential exploitability of said host. BiDiBLAH assists in this process. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but have just never got around to. BiDiBLAH looks like it does a pretty decent job and while there are some things I would improve/change…it’s still pretty zexxy.

<foam party>I missed you DefCon…’till next year!</foam party>

I had seen a couple articles about keeping your $HOME in subversion, but none of them really walked me through it. They all assumed a pretty good knowledge of subversion. As a former cvs user with no subversion experience whatsoever, I was pretty lost.

# svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs /var/svn/users/userX
# chown -R userX /var/svn/users/userX

Ok, now what? I’ve got the repository created… This is where I started to get confused. Joey Hess’ home directory looked normal, but ToyKeeper’s site was talking about trunks and branches. I didn’t know whether those went into the home directory or the repository. I assumed the latter, but I needed an answer. Another ONLamp article indicated that it’s on the repository side. I should probably make the decision of how I want to do that now, but I’m going to hold off until I’m more familiar with subversion.

Upon finding this post about inverting(?) the process of creating a subversion repository, I was able to figure out what to do next.

userX@host ~ $ svn co files:///var/svn/users/userX/ .
userX@host ~ $ svn add .zshrc
userX@host ~ $ svn ci -m ’svn test checkin of zsh config file’

…That seemed to work. I’m realizing that the branches usage referred to by ToyKeeper might be very useful. But let’s keep going for now. After updating my .zshrc (it’s a few years old…I’m lazy, what can I say), another checkin and this is easier than I thought.

userX@dipshell ~ $ svn ci -m ‘Removed old items from .zshrc’
Sending .zshrc
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 2.

Now, If I want to make this useful I need to enable network access. This has also been a slight point of contention as I must not be reading close enough but svn doesn’t seem too easy to setup over ssh. And I just realized I have another problem - if I check out this base directory on another machine, it will be cluttered with dot files. I’ll have to look into that later.

Well it seems I’m just an idiot - svn over ssh is as simple as just running the command.
userX@host2 ~ $ svn list svn+ssh://host/var/svn/users/userX
*sigh* The postinst message from emerge confused me…I thought there were additional steps. Well that makes me happy!

userX@host2 ~ $ svn co svn+ssh://192.168.153.8/var/svn/users/userX/
A userX/.zshrc
Checked out revision 2.

Oh no…it checked it out to the userX directory. Adding the location to checkout to solved that, but I need to remove the old file first or I get the following error:
userX@host2 ~ $ svn co svn+ssh://192.168.153.8/var/svn/users/userX/ .
svn: Failed to add file ‘.zshrc’: object of the same name already exists

Cool, this is no problem. Now I need to figure out how best to organize it so I can pull stuff down from linux, windows, and even osx if the need arises.