Tuesday morning I was booting up at work and getting ready to tackle the day. While I waited for various jobs to finish running, I logged into arrl.org and set up a query to refresh through the day to find out my call sign. After that first screen came up, low and behold, there was my call sign.

It was quite a surprise. Even the hams I'm meeting and telling how quickly I got my letters are impressed.

After several days of struggling, I finally made contact tonight with a couple of guys out in Delaware, one fellow in New Jersey, and one last guy in Maryland.

My troubles in communicating had to do with repeater operation. A repeater is an automated station that someone sets up to listen on one frequency, and rebroadcast on another frequency, with a lot more power to give a much greater range. So, to achieve this, one needs to turn on the feature in one's radio. At first, I thought this was my problem, but that feature was running by default on the Yeusu VX-7R.

My problem turned out to be not setting the CTCSS, or as most hams refer to it, the PL code. To avoid transmitting garbage picked up from communication not intended for the repeater, most stations use an activation signal. That's the PL code. (PL is a proprietary, trade-marked Motorola name. CTCSS is the same thing, it's just an industry-standard name that's not owned by any one company.)

So when I looked up repeaters online and found sites like this one, I recognized the input, output, and offset columns, but missed the meaning of the third column (which I thought had to do with auto-patch, the process of tying into the phone lines from amateur repeaters). As it turned out, the third column of frequency values were the PL codes (like it said at the top! ;)

Once I'd started configuring that on my radio when I tried transmitting on the repeaters' respective input frequencies, I started getting repeaters chirping back at me. After that, it was just a matter of transmitting when other people were listening.

In all, tonight was very gratifying, and a great reward for all of the frustration I experienced in trying to transmit and getting no where. I'm definitely looking forward to continuing to explore this hobby. Some things that are already beginning to interest me are packet radio, morse code, antenna design/construction, as well as the EchoLink and IRLP systems - EchoLink can run on Windows or Linux, while IRLP is Linux only.

Other repeater resources I found are here.

73 DE KB3NKH CL

I just finished rebuilding my firewall. What a crappy way to spend an evening.

Today when I got home, my network was in a general state of screwed up. Two of my four towers were cold, and the firewall was completely fubar'd. It wouldn' mount anything other than /dev/hda3. What was totally strange about it was that it claimed /dev/hda didn't exist...although it did mount /dev/hda3.

I think my firewall problem was due to the fact that I did an emerge -uDav world on the weekend. The disk was physically fine, but the OS was totally hosed. In any case, I wasn't about to trouble-shoot so intricate an issue, particularly when the server that was down was the heart of my network. I did manage to save my iptables config files by booting to a Gentoo LiveCD copy I had lying around and scp'ing the tarball of my few config files off to another server.

So, I failed back to my old FreeBSD firewall, which had been sitting cold, ripped out the little 3GB Seagate hard-drive I'd been running on, and installed a 6GB Western Digital. I then added some more RAM and a second quad-ethernet card, and set about installing Debian.

The Debian install was a breeze, as is to be expected. The only hassle I had was the MAC cache on my cable modem, but Comcast explained that a simple reboot would flush that right out. 30 seconds later and my Debian box was sucking down dpkg files and installing.

I manually configured the file system, that was no big deal. Fortunately enough, the default kernel came with iptables installed, so I didn't have to recompile the kernel (that would have taken a while!). At the end of the Debian installer, I chose the following packages to set up the standard-issue basic home-router:
* dhcp-client
* dnsmasq
* snort
* ntop

To be honest, however, I had forgotten to install dhcp-client, installing the server instead. That too was no problem, however. I was able to set the old firewall as the new firewall's default router, just to download the package. After I had installed that, everything pretty much fell into place.

That's the first time that a Gentoo system ever crapped out on an emerge world for me. Rather disappointing, but at this point it leaves just my AMD64 box as the last Gentoo system standing. It's probably just as well, this last cycle of emerge world on the old PII I'm using for a firewall took over a day.

Today's off to a pretty good start. This morning went to the local library and wrote the examination for the Technician class amateur license. I passed with flying colors!

Sadly, I need to wait a few days to be assigned my call letters by the FCC. It's not a big deal of course, as I have plenty of chores that need doing in the mean while anyway (as always).

The question pool and answers are published, so studying for the exam isn't that hard. For people interested in becoming an amateur radio operator, here's a few links to help you out. The ARRL website has a great deal of resources, and I found their prep book for the Tech class license to be a great study guide. It does a fine job of explaining the concepts that you need to know, and has the test pool in the back. At the end of each reading section, there's a reference to which questions on the exam were just covered so you can go quiz yourself right away.

In addition, QRZ.com has an on-line test facility that gives a randomly-generated test each time you take it. I found that site to be crucial for ensuring I was ready for the test.

Now it's off to the local ham store to shop for a kit. :-D

I've started a howto doc for Vim. Here I'll be adding all the arcane stuff I learn to do in my use of that most powerfull editor.

For those more interested in Vim, check here

Oy vey...here we go again.

Metasploit has the announcement.

I'm personally not very keen on the unofficial work around, it seems like it'd have the same vulnerability, just not with the other really nasty side-effects.

I'll just have to implement some bounds-checking on my own, I suppose. After all, I'm not about to turn off the vulnerable function. ;-)

This evening I made a purchase that is perhaps long overdue. I bought a relatively inexpensive AMD64 motherboard and accompanying 2GHz processor, along with 1 Gig of DDR RAM. This will be the most powerful server I've put in my cabinets yet.

There are several reasons for buying this. One, I just bought an ATX mid-tower case for an old Athlon my parents gave me. Unfortunately, the board is quite toast, and I don't feel like exerting any effort to fix it, since it's so old. Secondly, Tiger Direct had a couple of good sales going on. I bough the whole kit for less than $200 (after rebates).

Thirdly, with VMware making their GSX server free, I realized that a powerful box to host a virtual suite of machines would be far more economical in the long-run, not only in terms of electricity consumed, but also in terms of time spent playing sysadmin.

I've worked with VMware Workstation for years, but now that their server product is available gratis, it really expands the possibilities and the potential. Virtual machines running resident on a server open up all kinds of possibilities for black-hat tool and malware testing and research, for honeypots, for playing with different (x86 architecture) operating systems, for virtual networks of servers to play different roles like mail server and so forth, and just for standing up special boxes on short notice or general geek play.

This will be my first foray into a 64-bit system at home. At work, I've been dealing with 64-bit for some time of course, but I've never owned a 64-bit system. The idea of making that transition is quite exciting. Upgrading architecture platforms is one of those rare moments for a geek. Clock speed increases on chips happen all the time, but to move to the next level on the overall chip architecture is a rarity indeed. The last time I made the jump, from 16 bit to 32 bit, I had never heard of Linux, and everyone was running Windows 3.11.

Naturally, I did my research for Linux support. My first inclination was Debian, since I've recently switched to it from Gentoo as my Linux distro of choice. Sadly, however, Debian does not have strong native AMD64 support. So, my second choice was Gentoo, which has robust AMD64 support.

Even before I had found that Debian didn't have good AMD64 support, I was thinking Gentoo might be what I want on this new system. After all, optimizing for the particular hardware platform it's running on is what Gentoo is great at. With such a powerful system, the compile time for software packages should be minimal, and the potential gain of a well-tuned system will pay back the effort, particularly if I'm going to stuff it full of virtual systems - every bit will count.

Having said all that, I'm going to make Gentoo my distro for this new mighty server I'll be building. For all the other hardware servers, I'll continue with Debian. It would probably be feasible to make Debian my distro of choice for the VM Linux systems I'll build, in fact.

So, having done my research and made the purchase, there's little left now but to eagerly await the arrival of my new kit. With any luck, I'll get to build it this weekend, or maybe early next week.

Ran across this quote a while ago. Can't help but agree with it. :-P

Title: 10 of the Best for Security
Author: Sue Bushell
Source: CIO

Excerpt:

"The typical computer network isn't like a house with
windows, doors and locks. It's more like a gauze tent
encircled by a band of drunk teenagers with lit matches" - Robert David Steele, former CIA analyst and CEO of Open Source System


Click here for the original article

This morning when I checked MythTV on the web-frontend, I found that the system seemed to be broken. I was able to fix the problem, fortunately. I did a full write up on the problem and the fix, such as it is.

Okay, so the title is a little cheesy, but so is the title of every other topic in every blog on the planet. Deal. ;-)

So as those who rolled their eyes at the title have already figured out, I went ahead and built my PVR box. Having migrated everything from my old file server, I tore the old hard-drives out, slapped in the nice shiney 300GB Seagate I bought at C0mpU$4 for a C-note, installed the Win PVR-150 card, and booted off of the KnoppMythTV CD.

The long and short of it is, a PentiumII is just fine as a MythTV for recording only. I can download the mpgs and watch them full screen, with good sound. The only bitch is, it's about 1.1GB for a half-hour of programming. I had intended to put shows on my 1GB flash card that I have in my PocketPC, and have a poor-mans video iPod. I'm going to have to look into the settings on the Myth box, and see if I can downgrade the quality just a smidge. That, or I could use mpeg2cut to slice out the commercials, bringing a typical show under the 1GB ceiling.

Forget about streaming on such a thin box, though, it doesn't have the juice. It might be able to watch TV at the same time, but I haven't set it up for that. Besides that, the Compaq I'm running it on has a sound card that Linux didn't like the first time around. I'm not going to spend any time trouble-shooting, since I'll probably upgrade the CPU before long.

The details of my experience can be found here in my private Wiki. Hopefully, someone can make use of them.

Don't believe me? The proof has been posted here. Go see for yourself if you want...