Evilcoder.org

We have a cat! Moving over, changing lines, PFsense and what I think off :-)

On February 28, 2010, In Weblog, by Remko

Since 2 weeks we have a cat in our house, his name is Floris. Floris is a very friendly, loving cat, that enjoys being around us (most of the time). We took him under our care and we all love him very much, hopefully he enjoys us as much as we enjoy him . He’s black with white, seemingly he walked into the white paint and has the lower part of his body/feet/tail painted white Such a funny sight! It’s also great to see when Denise comes home, he starts prrr’ing and hugging her, so that seems he really missed her. He sits with her a lot of the time, so getting used to eachother becomes much more easy that way

Then, my parents are moving over, they are (finally) leaving the bad neighborhood of Rotterdam-South (IJsselmonde) and will be living at a much more friendly place to live in. For the past weeks I am helping in getting things going in and around the house arranging that the internet lines are still there when they move over, and that the hardware for that is prepared. Today I will be bringing in the first boxes that will mark the beginning of the actual move. There is one thing left that needs to be done (well two actually if you see things as seperated actions): The kitchen needs to be placed, and the walls need to be finished in the kitchen. The walls will be done rather soon, and the kitchen will be brought at some point (some parts are scheduled to arrive this week). When that’s done, the move is complete. Next weekend we will start the final phase out of IJsselmonde and have some time left to do “remaining items” .

Yesterday I upgraded my home PFSense version, I lost some local modifications (stupid of me) but I still have the newer files alive so I can generate diffs again. One funny thing is that the route 0.0.0.0/1 was added to my WiFi, preventing me from accessing the internets. The people of the team are very great, on the dev list there are plenty of clueful people around that can assist with various problems and ofcourse enhance the setup. Personally I am trying to see whether I can finish the OSPF stuff that was recently brought in under my request. There are a few rough edges in the current code that I took out, but I also want the daemon to be able to listen on multiple interfaces, set specific interface options so that you can get something like the IPSEC configuration, have one master configuration, that can be altered per interface. That way I can add the node back into the OSPF-cloud that a couple of friends from Snow and I are running

Well that was the huge amount of updates, oh yeah, tommorrow I will be traveling to amsterdam to meet the team there and see how they work and the like.

Cisco WAP 4400N

On February 18, 2010, In Weblog, by Remko

Some time ago I posted an article about Cisco and my WAP 4400N here. Yesterday my unit was replaced and it seems to work much better. Ofcourse the things were only visible after some days of uptime, but now I have internet-wireless access at my upper floor, where I didn’t have that before.

I really applaud the way Cisco handled this, Luca, John, Daniel, Nico, all thank you very much for the support you have given, enduring patience, and professionalism! Other companies can learn something from this, not only big companies like this kind of attention, consumers as well

Stelen mag, Heling mag ook. [1984]

On February 3, 2010, In Politics, by Remko

Een scherp onderwerp, maar het mag schijnbaar. Ik las zojuist een artikel op de telegraaf http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/5944077/__Zwartspaarder_biecht_81_mln._op__.html wat gaat over zwart spaarders. Natuurlijk mag je geen geld achterhouden, maar ergens staat toch wel een heel gevoelig stukje tekst:

“Daarom wil hij snel de hand leggen op de gestolen cd-rom met Zwitserse bankrekeningen, die een onbekende man voor 2,5 miljoen euro aan Duitsland heeft aangeboden. De Duitse fiscus denkt zeker 100 miljoen euro terug te kunnen halen van Duitse zwartspaarders.”

Er is dus een gestolen CD-ROM, die schijnbaar gebruikt mag worden (heling?) bij het zoeken naar overtreders. Volgens mij is dit een stukje onrechtmatig verkregen bewijs. Mensen die dus ‘dingen’ stelen, en het vervolgens doorverkopen aan de staat die er (zoals altijd) aan wilt verdienen, krijgen een aai over de bol, maar als een zwerver een brood steelt omdat hij geen geld heeft, wordt ie opgesloten. Krom.

Ben eigenlijk wel benieuwd naar hoe rechtmatig een gestolen CD-ROM Wel niet is, en hoe bevestigd wordt dat de gegevens op het gestolen medium wel waar zijn. Daarnaast ben ik benieuwd naar hoe het bankgeheim van Zwitserland hiermee omgaat, immers er is een overeenkomst met de rekeninghouder dat zijn gegevens geheim zijn (ga ik maar even vanuit) en die zijn nu bestolen door iemand, EN de staat.

Het biedt natuurlijk ook nog vragen over hoe dit soort dingen nu doorwerken; een kleine 70 jaar geleden speelden mensen informatie door in de hoop op een beter leven, of een stuk extra kaas, nu worden gestolen CD-ROM’s door verkocht aan overheden. Ik vraag mij dan af, wordt er zo niet aangewakkerd dat je een “big brother” cultuur krijgt zoals in 1984? Dat als er iets gebeurd, je dat meldt, en vervolgens de ander de dupe is. Je zou bijna denken dat wij onze eigen “controleer je buurman” cultuur aan het opbouwen zijn, hoe denkt de lezer hierover?!

Weather Forecasting

On February 1, 2010, In Weblog, by Remko

Funny. Last night people told us that it was going to snow around six o clock in the morning (I think a lot of people woke up early because of that and headed for work); but even though multiple parties believed that it was going to snow later on,it already started to snow around 0300 last night.

It seems to me that metereologic institutes are missing the boat a lot lately. Perhaps they want to keep up with the IPCC, who only misses items with a margin of 300 years.. A little mistake, thank you!

Playing around with PFSense

On January 31, 2010, In FreeBSD, Weblog, by Remko

In the last period I became rather familiar with the PFSense project. I decided to migrate some of my firewalling devices to PFSense, first starting at 1.2.3-RELEASE, and finally I upgraded them to 2.0-BETA1. Doing the latter thing is possible since the locations only use the internet from the LAN, and have some minor settings applied locally. Playing around makes it much easier because of that.

Currently I am checking the GRE and GIF interfaces, I am using them to create an OSPF network, and there are some oddities in them

So perhaps I can see why the oddities are there and if needed correct them (or myself when I am misbehaving )

You should test PFSense, it runs FreeBSD 8, and is awesome !

SGR: Meebetalen aan garantiefonds voor consumenten.

On January 27, 2010, In Weblog, by Remko

Dit is het bericht wat ik eerder vandaag las. De SGR wil reizigers mee laten betalen voor de pot met garantiefondsen. Dit omdat er de laatste tijd heel veel turkije specialisten omgevallen zijn en daarvoor de pot opengetrokken moest worden.

Er zal vast een reden zijn dat juist deze groep geraakt wordt, maar moeten daarvoor de consumenten de dupe worden? Er zit voor miljoenen in de garantiepot, nadat deze zo vol raakte dat er geen inleg meer nodig was.

Blijkbaar kan iedereen zonder meer lid worden van de SGR, vervolgens failliet gaan, en de SGR betaald uit. Zou het dan niet handiger zijn dat je aan de hand van strengere eisen de bedrijven lid laat worden? Ik zie niet zo snel een Arke Fly of TUI failliet gaan, deze blijven netjes lid, en ieder ander die lid wilt worden moet bijvoorbeeld aan een bepaalde voorwaarde voldoen. Net als dat geldt voor als je een hypotheek afsluit etc.

Het is allemaal zo simpel; maar feit is weer dat er een paar bedrijfseigenaren heel rijk geworden zijn (als ik de berichtgeving mag geloven is er iemand met het geld vandoor); en de consument draait ervoor op. Waar eindigt zoiets toch?

FreeBSD 7.3 release cycle begun

On January 24, 2010, In FreeBSD, by Remko

Yesterday and today, Ken Smith (FreeBSD’s release engineer), started the procedure to get the 7.3 release cycle going.
Mostly from stable branches and a new release, progress will be much quicker then like with the 8.0 release cycle.
Hang tight! I will try to gather some information about new things in 7.3 that weren’t in 7.2 yet.

Rumour has…

On January 13, 2010, In FreeBSD, by Remko

That a new 7-release will be planned. Ofcourse this is entirely inline with what we saw with the 6.x releases, and now the 7.3 release will be planned and continued. It might be good advise if you start preparing to update to the 8.x releases though, I wouldn’t be surprised if 7.4 (after 7.3) might be the last release on that branch, like the 6.x releases had. Stay tuned for more (and official) news when I get a hold of it

Marketing Stunt

On January 2, 2010, In Weblog, by Remko

Hedenochtend werd ik weer verrast door onze marketing afdeling binnen Snow. Ze blijven me verassen dat het periodiek toch lukt om een ultieme Marketing Stunt uit te halen. Deden we dat 2 weken geleden nog en was toen het hele land ontregeld, nu proberen we het gewoon weer zo net in het nieuwe jaar.

Dus als jij ook sneeuw in de straten hebt liggen, bedenk dan dat onze marketing stunt van http://snow.nl gelukt is!

FreeBSD Foundation end of year Fundraise

On December 21, 2009, In FreeBSD, by Remko

Hello, it’s the time again. The FreeBSD Foundation is looking for a few spare bucks here and there to reach the goal of $300.000. So I was wondering, if we all make a contribution of $1 or more, we will reach that easily. I donated $150 so you should consider donating a few spare bucks as well. The original announcement is found below.

Since the start of our ‘Be Counted!’ campaign in August of this year, over 350 new and returning donors have contributed to the FreeBSD Foundation. With your help, we are now 50% of the way to meeting our 2009 fund raising goal. Thank you donors, for your support! Now, in these last few weeks of 2009, the FreeBSD Foundation needs the support of those who have yet to donate to take us the rest of the way.

The recession has hit everyone hard. For many, every possible expense has been cut, and what spending they do is out of strict necessity. Unfortunately the challenges facing FreeBSD are undiminished by recessions and the technological landscape continues to change at a rampant pace. That is why the FreeBSD Foundation nearly doubled its 2008 budget for 2009 and needs your support so we can avoid cutting our investments in 2010.

If you benefit from FreeBSD, please donate so:

development projects are funded to support emerging technologies such as solid state disks, USB 3.0, machine and network virtualization, highly parallel processors, clustering, and data replication.
BSD conferences continue around the globe.
students and contributors have the opportunity to attend conferences and developer summits.
the infrastructure of computers and equipment supporting our community can be maintained.
the FreeBSD community is grown through marketing and outreach to users and businesses.
FreeBSD trademarks are protected and the project has access to legal counsel.
FreeBSD continues to serve as the foundation for research and enterprise.
Every donation, no matter its size, makes this work possible. As a non-profit with very low overhead, your donation is the best way to invest in FreeBSD. Please make that investment today so we can meet our dual goals for 2009 of 1000 donors and $300,000.

You can make a donation (including recurring subscriptions) by going to: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.