Older blog entries for jLoki (starting at number 47)

Heh, rotten.com featured the wireless Airline stuff on me in its Friday news postings. Finally. More than Slashdot, kuro5shin or CNN, I always wanted to have something on rotten.com, even if it's just a picture of my dead carcass.

Whoop dee firping doo! What a month so far. I haven't written in so long, so I'll spare the world any updates. The news, as it stands, are:

a) d-fensive is profitable, thus much more likely to survive. After oozels of months, doing what we were best in and doing it damn good, we finally convinced enough companies out there, that we're a legit and damn professional company. Well, fact of the matter being, we're looking at quite some future here :)

b) Computerworld ran an article on wireless airline security and mentioned me a few times. Coolio!

c) My hate-page has moved somewhere else. I am sad, that stuff kinda made my day everytime I got around reading it (and running it through babelfish for my local friends to read :)

d) Someone puked in our frontyard last night

And, I finally converted the last machine in this system to BSD. No Linux spoken here, anymore, except for a development system for my Z and the Z itself. The hard part was not so much to convince the others but to get those Linux systems to work until we could migrate fully. Linux and GigE just don't match well :(

Whow, got my own hate-club. I feel l33t now.

Despite some semi-friendly threats from semi-friendly people over at the other monopoly, I've put my Cisco Type 7 password decryptor online. It's old news, anyways.

Went outside to see the Leonids. Jill had to work so I went alone. Swapping Linecards and updating IOSes, how's that for a night-time activity during a twice-in-a-livetime event like the swarms?

Anyways, I searched my stuff and found my old Sony Walkman and the only tape I have left (it was in the walkman). It's a collection of Haydn and Mendelsson-Bartholdy compositions played by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Just the right music to stand outside and watch particles the size of large sand-grains die in our athmosphere.

mirwin: tynux development has pretty much stalled with my (as you pointed out) company becoming something that claims 16 hours a day.

As for the "embedded" Tynux: That's a different one :). There's also a Linux based IP-Phone, called TyNuX and a Linux-on-a-floppy ditribution with a similar name. Our tynux is none of that, it's basically a distribution which slaps a kernel, a shell (ash) and some tools on your harddisk, waiting for you to compile a full glibc, etc.

Initially we all thought this would be fun to do. With a preliminary 0.8 release the problems started. Self- proclaimed Linux Experts started sending flames regarding the lack of editors (we DID include ed), Perl or Python (download and compile) or their inability to do a fdisk, mkreiserfs and lilo on their own (the installer drops you into a shell when these things are required).

I finally did it and bought a new "netwarrior", the shell server that serves some 70 users. Installed a new Linux real quick (Rock-Linux, what else?) and started migrating mail and news over to the new machine. The system istelf is a SCHWEEET box, 1GHz, 1Gig RAM, 200 Gig HD and 2.2.19 with LIDS, all in a case the size of a shoe-box.

The real pain will start when all 70 users complain that I moved them from Password to RSA-Auth in SSH :).

8 Nov 2001 (updated 8 May 2003 at 08:57 UTC) »
7 Oct 2001 (updated 8 May 2003 at 08:57 UTC) »

I tried to introduce some paradigm shifts into our sales foce by educating them for about four hours on Open Source and how money can be made selling exactly that. I then proceeded to show some of our stuff that actually is OpenSource, finding a highly disinterested crowd at the end of the day. If they can't sell it (and make a commission out of it) they're not interested. So we changed a few commissions to reflect our business model: there's money to be made for them by giving away Open Source components for free.

Harold and I are working on converting everything in the Campbell office over to Linux and Plan 9. Our new brochures show a smiling admin/secretary and read "Even our front- desk uses Unix". Inside you find the first of three campaigns to migrate companies to Linux or BSD as part of the Risk Management stuff we do. The coolest thing today (a too warm sunday, I tell ya) was finding drivers for the Minolta QMS color laser printer and Linux online. And a lot of documentation on QMS and SNMP. I love it when stuff like that happens.

On the Evil Empire side, I dug out VC++ this morning and wrote a short program to eliminate Nimda-Stuff within a whole netblock.

Oh, and I started cleaning up my home-office, found some very interesting things I thought I had left in germany when moving over here and spent about an hour writing another sensor for NOBAD using PGP to ensure control file integrity.

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