It is easter…. Holidays. The weather is good and here I am, upgrading the firmware of my old Lexmark S1255 laserprinter (with an marknet N2002E network adaptor) just for the fun of it. Very simple actually
thosan-laptop% unzip N2000.ZIP
Archive: N2000.ZIP
inflating: 3_20_45.PSW
inflating: README.TXT
thosan-laptop% tftp 192.168.1.3
tftp> bin
tftp> put
(file) 3_20_45.PSW /dev/flash
Sent 1068122 bytes in 10.5 seconds
tftp>
Nothing more, nothing less. Printer firmware is upgraded.
It took some time, but I finally got my drivers license Not that I have a lot to use it for. Occassionally at work and a trip from time to time to relatives that live in remote areas in denmark. The downside is ofcourse that I have yet another thing to use my hard earned money on.
It was bound to happend sooner or later; i would seek new challenges. Not that I’m tired of Openview Operations for unix. Not at all. But I have been there and tried that. And the prospects of advancement in denmark are slim. I could (maybee) find another job but to the same pay. And maybee I couldn’t. It could be an consultant either in denmark or europe, but with a familiy I have obligations towards a stable family life.
My new job is as HP-UX adminstrator in Telia and I really look forward to start. And on the bright side with openview: I can now publish stuff I have made, for which Telia can’t make any claim. Hopefully I can sell it 
I was bored and decided to harden the security for some of the stuff on my server. A server which, by many means, are secure enough. Some people would claim otherwise, as my ssh is still open to the world and not hidden behind a port knocking sequence. But that will change real soon now(tm).
dmcrypt is a Linux device mapper module written by Christopher Saout. I have read and understood all the code as part of my project of migrating Poul Henning Kamps ingenious GDBE module to device mapper, but thats another story. Dmcrypt will be more than adequate for this tutorial. Basically dmcrypt is an AES block encrypter using a single passphrase for all blocks (which makes it really lean and fast, but vulnerable to attacks)
I’ll just provide the actual commands to let you see just how easy it is:
# touch .passwords (only initially/first time)
# shred -n1 -s5M .passwords (only initially/first time)
# losetup /dev/loop0 .passwords
# cryptsetup -y create mypasswords /dev/loop0
# mkfs.ext2 /dev/mapper/mypasswords (only initially/first time)
# mount /dev/mapper/mypasswords /mnt
# ls /mnt
# umount /mnt
# cryptsetup remove mypasswords
# losetup -d /dev/loop0
Could it be easier? AES secured filestore in a single file, right there on your linux filesystem. I have omitted the pesky details on the kernel and userlevel utils, but basically you need support for AES, loop devices, device mapper for both kernel and userland.
Being over 30 and not having a drivers license I thought: “Why not get one”. And so I’m started on getting my drivers license. Topgear trafik has been selected as the school that is going to teach me to drive. A selection based solely on the fact that they are located 3 minutes from the place where I live. My calendar is getting more and more full these days 
So one the first experience with driving a car in denmark when you are applying for a drivers license is a closed track where you (and a few other n00bs) tries to use the gearshift, brakes, speeder and whats not. It was actually quite fun and all in all a good day. The cars were wrecks but that just makes you concentrate even more to learn how and how not to do things 
Years after everybody else installed Windows XP and while everybody else is frenzy about Windows Vista, I finally made the step from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. Wouldn’t have happened so soon if it wasn’t for the fact that the wireless connection in my laptop stoppped working out of the blue and couldn’t be fixed. I look forward to getting acquinted with Windows XP. While I’m at it I’ll install a couple of other operating systems on my laptop as well. Most notably solaris 10 and OSX (if it can be done )
…. well, I’m not about to start on some domesday prophecy or something. No its much more simple. The end is near for my faithfull server I think. What should have been a simple reboot resulted in two hours of downtime. It just hang on “verifying dmi pool ….”. It took me some time to resolve the issue. I put in a gfx card (a server does not normally need a gfx card and thus no gfx card is installed in my server), attached the keyboard and mouse and tried to see what were wrong with it. To my surprise it booted just fine. I pulled out the gfx card and took out the keyboard and mouse and it hanged at the next reboot. …. time passed with me being more and more annoyed …. Finally I figured out that if the mouse was present it could boot otherwise it just hang.
So I’ll try to keep it running, because I’m sure that the next time I reboot it, it might not come back to life anymore…. Almost like a good friend of mine is dying
Well then I got on the wagon as well. Years after it was in to blog. But who cares. Nobody is going to read any of this anyhow