Here we go again. As is my regular habit, I've grown weary of my mail client, and have decided to change yet again. This time, I'm going to do something radically different and go for a web-based client. The simplicity of it is somewhat appealing, but moreso is the ability to access it easily from anywhere on the Internet. Of course, accessing it from the Internet securely is another topic all together (a topic I'll address at a later time. ;)

At first, I tried Horde, which I've been told is a really good mail client, among other things. Essentially Horde is now a framework with things like Calendars, Todo lists, and so forth. I just wanted mail, and I wanted to do get the whole thing working on my Debian box through APT, in as few commands and with as little effort as possible. Horde quickly turned out to be neither easy nor convenient to set up, so I quickly abandoned it.

My next effort was to try Squirrelmail. It's a pretty neat little application, in all, very simple and clean. It was easy enough for me to set up within a half-hour or an hour, without too much effort or digging. I've done a quick-and-dirty write-up of my efforts in my Document Trove.

It's a pretty easy to use, clean piece of software. I'm not thrilled with how it handles threading, but I've come to the conclusion I can't ever be completely happy with any mail client, so I'd better decide what's important to me.

We'll see how I like this one in a few months. Let's just hope the cycle is finally broken. (I'm tired of having my years archives of email scattered between disks and file formats.)

I've been motivated of late to work on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) on my home network a lot more lately, due to various reasons not worth stating here. The natural choice for the signature based component is Snort. Suffice it to say it's been years since I gave the software a good look, being too tired and weary of NIDS after my day-to-day at work. I think the last version I tried at home was 2.0 or 2.1, and I'm glad to say that a lot has changed, all for the better.

I won't go into the gory details about what Snort can and can't do, that's been done to death in books, online guides, and documentation. In particular, snort.org has an excellent guide about installing the latest Snort on Debian (warning, PDF link).

In addition to really neat features, Snort has become quite a resource...erm...hog <ahem>. My firewall device, running Debian Sarge, started with 196MB of RAM and 193 MB of swap space. When I tried to start up Snort with those parameters, the kernel killed it. I doubled the physical RAM, and found that it was still running out of memory, with the kernel still killing Snort. So I doubled the swap-space too in the end, and it finally ran, leaving only 66MB free.

It looks like I'm going to have to find still more RAM.

I've been neglecting my VMware server, not out of boredom, but out of disk space. Literally. I didn't have enough disk to run a proper VMware server. So, I went and found a nice deal at NewEgg, a Western Digital 250GB drive SATA for only $85. The disk arrived last week and I installed it. Then I confronted my aged VMware beta install. That's where the fun began.

I did an emerge --sync && emerge -uDav world && dispatch-conf, stopped the current VMware server, uninstalled the old version (the VMware overlay for Gentoo isn't done with proper Portage revisioning), and updated my working copy of the Subversion repository at
http://callisto.cs.kun.nl:81/svn/trees/vmware/app-emulation.

The revision number came out at 53, and I promptly had emerge errors that complained about broken VMware ebuilds.

Doing a little Googling, I came across some good sites (see the end of this post). Apparently the Gentoo Overlays are becoming official projects and have centralized Subversion repositories now. Cool! My only problem became a little one. WHERE THE HECK WERE THE REPOSITORIES??

I couldn't find any docs, either on the Gentoo Overlays site, or on gentoo-wiki.org. However, a polite email to overlays@gentoo.org gave me my answer:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/proj/vmware/trunk/app-emulation.

The latest revision from there was 64, which works like a champ. So, if you're stuck like I was, just go get the latest revision from that repository, and you should be all set.

Links
* http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Installing_3rd_Party_Ebuilds
* http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Overlays
* http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/vmware/timeline

It's been a long while in coming, but I finally got VMware working on Gentoo AMD64. I've posted the details of the problems I encountered, as well as the solutions I found here

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.