I took a few minutes today and updated my resume. It's still in the middle of the Links section. Added a few things that I've done of late and cleaned it up just a little more.

I've only been working on learning Morse Code with the Koch method since Saturday, but already I'm seeing significant improvement by using the software from G4FON

I started out on Saturday with only 2 letters, k and m. For that day, I was only able to achieve a 25% accuracy in my copy. I have since then quickly progressed to a consistent 80% copy. Here's most of what I've done in the last few days:
2006-04-23| 5 minutes|km|Your score was: 68.98%
2006-04-24|30 seconds|km|Your score was: 61.74%
2006-04-24|56 seconds|km|Your score was: 75.92%
2006-04-24| 4 minutes|km|Your score was: 71.57%
2006-04-25| 5 minutes|km|Your score was: 80.22%
2006-04-25| 5 minutes|km|Your score was: 82.71%
2006-04-25| 5 minutes|km|Your score was: 83.81%

The list here isn't any output from a program, rather it's just notes I took. The "Your score was: xx.xx%" was from a Perl script I wrote to compare the text from the program generating the Morse signal with the copy I take as it sends the code. I'll post that here to my site very shortly.

The only trials missing are a few 30 second / 1 minute runs from Sunday that bridge the gap between the 25% I was achieving early on.

As was explained by N1IRZ in the first link in this post, the Koch method rewards the student very quickly with positive reinforcement. I was a little frustrated early on, but that quickly faded away, as can be seen by the scores I've been achieving since Sunday.

At this point, I expect to achieve a consistent 90% or greater copy with 5 minute samples in just a few days. Once I've reached that, I can add a third letter. It will be very interesting to see how that new letter affects me, and how quickly I start advancing after that point.

73 de KB3NKH

Don't do it!

CQ CQ CQ de KB3NKH KB3NKH KB3NKH

One of the things I'm getting interested in since passing my amateur radio Technician class exam is Morse Code. Not only is it presently required for the next class of license, the General class, but I find it an intruiging way to communicate, and a challenge to be beaten.

I was fortunate enough to bump into a long time ham on QRZ.com, by the name of Gerry. Through later conversations, he learned of my interest in Morse Code (also known as CW). When he did, he gave me some advice for learning CW.

He basically told me to avoid every learning method except for one - the Koch method. While other methods have you memorizing charts and starting practice at 5 wpm, which is the minimum for getting one's general exam, this technique starts at 25-35 wpm. But only with 2 characters to start with. After achieving 90%+ successful copy for a 5 minute transmission, a third character is added. After 90% or better is achieved for a 5 minute transmission of that, another is added and so forth.

He also supplied me with two links. The first is a write-up in more detail about the Koch method, including a little about it's origins. The second is a link to the site of a ham whom has written software to administer the Koch method.
--www.qsl.net/n1irz/finley.morse.html
--www.qsl.net/g4fon

I downloaded the software and started using it tonight. It's not trivial, and is obvious to me that it's definitely going to take some e and a lot of practice and work. I'm already seeing some small improvement, though, and I'm hopefull that I can start making significant progress quickly.

If not, I'll just be patient and keep at it until I get it.

73 de KB3NKH

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.