Wilmer's stuff

Burn all spammers!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:31:06 +0200

I have a habit of always having a tail -f /var/log/mail.log running on my mailserver somewhere. It's noisy, but has been useful in the past. Over the last weeks/months, I noticed open relay probes are getting incredibly popular (again), but also extremely aggressive. They're frequent, done by hundreds of botnet drones all the time.

Obviously my Postfix is configured properly, so this is mostly a waste of (fairly scarce, on a DSL box several km away from the exchange) bandwidth and annoying noise in the logs. But getting rid of it is harder than I hoped. :-(

This is what I have now: iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp --sport 25 -s 192.168.0.0/16 -m string --algo kmp --string '554 5.7.1 <' -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset

This works as-in it kills the connection as soon as my mailserver sends a "554 5.7.1 Relaying denied" response. The REJECT goes to the mailserver, but together with the tcp-reset this also kills the TCP connection on both sides fairly quickly. However, the little fuckers are also using pipelining, so I still get a screen full of logspam for pretty much every attempt. Although this is mostly cosmetic, I'd love to get rid of that crap..

What I really wonder is, WTF are they even doing this? Are open relays really still that common? Don't they have their botnets already? I guess the open relays are nice multipliers and are also more willing to deal with stuff like graylisting...

[edit]Looks like "554 5.7.1" is not just about "relaying denied", so possibly not such a great idea. Don't try this at home!

BitlBee, alive and kicking

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:43:23 +0200

As quin in #bitlbee said a little while ago, I stole someone's mojo and found an amazing amount of productivity when it comes to writing code, and it feels great. I'm quit relieved that I can still find plenty of time and motivation to work on BitlBee even though during the week I already spend a lot of time at the keyboard. This after not working much on it for probably at least a year.

I managed to finally do the IRC core rewrite + abstraction that I intended to do for so long already. It'll allow adding non-IRC frontends to BitlBee if someone ever wants to, and also the IRC core has the flexibility it needs to add many more features that I wanted for years already, and were impossible to implement without adding even more horrible hacks.

There's also a libpurple-based backend for a few months already, plus file transfer support (written by Uli Meis and Marijn Kruisselbrink actually, it just took me a long time to merge the >3000-line diff, fortunately Review Board did make it a lot less painful), all thrown into a bleeding edge branch called killerbee. It's code that needs a little bit more work before I really like it.

Also, BitlBee has Twitter support for about two months already (thanks to hard work done by Geert Mulders), and according to the application registration page on Twitter it has almost 500 users already. It's quite likely that many of those used it for five minutes and went back to a client with more features, but it's still nice to see.

Last of all, to help with the current lack/fragmentation of online documentation there's now a BitlBee Wiki. Its supposed to have easy-to-find docs about common FAQs, but the easy-to-find part isn't really working out yet since it hardly shows up in any search results. Hopefully this hyperlink from a high-profile weblog will improve that a tiny bit. ;o) Possibly the content is not that good yet either, so if anyone has something to add to it, by all means, please do!

With a 1.2.8 release coming up, BitlBee is totally alive - and is for almost eight years already. It's been a fun project to work on so far, and hopefully will be for a long time.

Sending files using netcat

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 22 May 2010 21:34:34 +0200

There are plenty of articles about this already, but I couldn't find anyone who wrote a script to automate this simple task of transferring files using just netcat.

CODE:

wilmer@ruby:~/src/bitlbee/devel$ ncsend.sh /audio/03\ Tree\ of\ Life.mp3
nc 87.198.255.202 6886 | pv > 03\ Tree\ of\ Life.mp3

Run it and it will give you a command to run/copy-paste on the remote side/pass to the person who wants the file. It uses pv as a nice progress indicator, and the script assumes pv is available on both sending and receiving ends. But that's good, everyone should have pv installed on his/her machine.

I'd just include the code in this little article, but Serendipity would screw up the layout completely, so instead you can download it here.

Gotta love Unix hacks...

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:35:07 +0200

Forgetting your LUKS cryptopart password sucks. But writing a shell oneliner like this:

CODE:

for i in P{a,4}ssw{0,o}rd{-,}Permut{4,a}tions; do
echo -n $i > /tmp/pwd
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/loop0 test --keyfile /tmp/pwd && echo $i
done

is awesome. :-) Took me only ten minutes to get it back once I had a copy of the superblock onto my workstation.

spamass-milter and IPv6

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:51:51 +0100

While migrating my mailserver from Ubuntu Dapper to Debian Lenny, I noticed spamass-milter didn't want to start:

Could not parse "2001:770:017b::" as a network

After scratching my head on that for a while (it worked on the old box!) I remembered two years ago I spent some time adding IPv6 support to spamass-milter myself. Support as-in allowing IPv6 subnets to be whitelisted/auto-accepted. Very useful if you want mails from your local IPv6 machines to be accepted automatically without waiting for 10s while spamassasin is checking if you're not a spammer...

I never published the thing and now I could hardly find back the damn thing at all. :-)

http://wilmer.gaast.net/downloads/spamass-milter-ipv6.diff

Just to make sure I won't lose it again ... and maybe it'll be useful for someone else.

Also just de-Ubuntufied my laptop. Debian's doing great so far: Suspend and Resume actually work better out of the box, but fonts look a bit ugly (and sometimes really less readable I'm afraid) compared to Ubuntu...

edns-client-ip

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:16:09 +0100

Finally, the Internet-Draft I was working on with my team over the last months made it to the public.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/01/proposal-to-extend-dns-protocol.html
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-00.txt

This draft was the main purpose of my visit to IETF76 last year. I'll have to go to 77/78 this year then to hopefully get this idea accepted as a working group item.

It's interesting to see all the comments coming up claiming that this is evil and meant for tracking purposes just because it has the name Google on it... :-/

Running 32-bit 3D apps on 64-bit Debian NVIDIA systems

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:46:22 +0100

Because Intel on-board video isn't quite good enough at 3D and my somewhat old laptop with built-in NVIDIA chip wasn't doing all that well at X-Plane either, I bought an NVIDIA GT240 card. Mostly because it seemed to be a good performer without doubling the power consumption of my PC. Stuff wasn't working all that well though and I got pretty frustrated:

QUOTE:

X Error of failed request: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error)
Major opcode of failed request: 135 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 2 (X_GLXRenderLarge)
Serial number of failed request: 1468
Current serial number in output stream: 1483

was all X-Plane could tell me. Google Earth also didn't work and seemed more like Google Black hole to me. Both are 32-bit apps. A 64-bit binary of Flightgear did work. Sigh.

After some poking I noticed the nvidia-glx package replaces /usr/lib{64,}/libGL* with its own versions, but didn't touch /usr/lib32. A-ha!

The fix: Get a 32-bit version of nvidia-glx, extract it somewhere (dpkg -X) and copy all the files in its usr/lib to /usr/lib32, overwriting the libGL symlink that is currently there.

Or, hmm, as I just found out: apt-get install nvidia-glx-ia32. I'm glad someone thought of it already.

Now X-Plane works perfectly (with maybe even ten times the frame rate I had with Intel on-board) and Google Earth can show me my house again.

Just blogging this since so far a Google search for any part of the error above didn't give useful results.

Now, I just have to find out if I can get a TV signal out of this thing somehow, since my TV was made long before HDMI was invented. :-/

Google Public DNS

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:13:03 +0100

Today at work my first user facing product was released, Google Public DNS. I've worked a lot on it over the last months and it was actually the reason for my visit to NY this Summer. :-)

But now, finally after a long time, I can actually start calling the thing by its name instead of saying "my secret project at work", which makes me very happy.

Praise, complaints and comments about the service are welcome! :-)

Back from Japan

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:06:55 +0100

I'm back ... for almost two weeks already. Getting used again to bad weather (today's a very foggy and cold day in Dublin), working and all the other things of daily life. Japan was fantastic. I'll be careful to not sound like your average "everything's better in Japan" idiot, but admittedly, there were some things there I really liked.

One of the first things I noticed was that a rule about escalators I really like is actually enforced over there. Wherever I've been so far escalators are always full of people who don't understand how stairs work; they think the fact that the escalator goes up means they can just put their lazy feet on it and wait (forgetting that for lazy people we already invented elevators :-P). Many civilizations have tried introducing a "stand still on the left, walk on the right" rule, but Japan's the only place where I've seen people all obeying it.

Getting around there indeed turned out to be challenging at times. Even though people (at least from "my generation") learn English for about ten years at school, many people still don't or hardly speak it. This was never really a problem though. Menus in restaurants have pictures and pointing at things is the most successful international language ever invented. :-) One of the first days I had sushi in a place just a few steps away from my hotel in Tokyo. While eating my meal, the man behind the bar (probably also the owner of the place) came to me with a map, asking me to point at where I come from. Also, the little origami bird he folded for me from my chopsticks wrapper is still sitting on my desk here. :-D

The ramen place I went to for breakfast one of the first days was also amazing. Not so much because of the food (which was also good), but because of the size. Literally, it was a room of maybe just over 2m wide, about 10m deep, with a bar separating it into two small 10m × something areas. Two people working on one side, and ten seats on the other (all occupied, most of the time).

My camera claims I made over 700 pictures there. Obviously there are many duplicates and worthless pictures, and after soring there will probably only be around 100 left. I hope to put them online soon, and probably with some more stories. I wrote too much now already.

All I know is that I'm definitely going there again.

Disabling the stupidest FireFox feature ever (adding www/com to URLs)

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:31:10 +0100

Every few days it happens to me that I mistype a URL, and Firefox thinks it can fix it by adding www. and/or .com to it. This often brings me to some stupid webpage instead of the intranet page I was looking for, or just generates another broken URL that needs more work for me to fix because I have to undo what Firefox did and then still fix my typo.

I finally found out how to disable that stupid feature and am sure more people are wondering about that. Since it took me a while to find out how to do this, I guess I'll just write a (maybe easier to find) blog post about it.

In short: about:config -> browser.fixup.alternate.enabled.

Fixup. Yeah right.

For a similar feature that adds some other TLD to the URL if you accidentally have alt/ctrl or something pressed when you press Enter, there's a plugin called ClumsyFingers, I think. Fortunately my fingers aren't clumsy enough yet that I need that one.

I'm still in Japan, now in Hiroshima for the IETF meeting. Japan's fantastic. :-D

Good morning from Tōkyō

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:14:02 +0100

It's always morning somewhere, and right now it's still morning in Tokyo! (Although not for long anymore.)

I arrived here yesterday morning, found my hotel and some good food. I'll spend the next three or so days here and then take the Nozomi (very fast train) to Hiroshima for IETF76.

My current plan is to find some breakfast, then go to Ueno Park and Akihabara (which is supposed to be like Fry's but then good). And generally just see what the city is like. Planning to join the Tokyo Bicycle Tour on Saturday, also. Any suggestions for other things to do here are welcome, assuming they have nothing to do with anime. :-P

HAR2009

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:20:13 +0200

Hey, it's more than two months ago already, but it's just in time for my thoughts on HAR2009! I put pictures on-line a little while ago already, but nothing else so far.

It's a pretty neat event. It feels like a festival, but then completely stuffed with geeks. And talks instead of concerts. And also, fantastic decoration. Or maybe I should call it light pollution? Also, we had our own GSM network! Of course, we also had police on site, because you don't want to know what this hacker scum does in their spare time. From the stories I heard, the police had a pretty unexciting but pleasant time there though.

All in all it was fun, and I met a whole bunch of people, including some happy BitlBee users and contributors. Most interesting was perhaps that I met a roommate of a former Mountain View teammate of mine at the train station before the conference already. The geek world is pretty small, I guess.

Fun in Irish shops

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:58:31 +0200

The Daily WTF once posted an image like this IIRC, and I thought "Come on, I see this all the time in Irish supermarkets!". For example, I saw this in Tesco last Saturday:

One 2l bottle of 7up for EUR 1.92. (How much does that cost in The Netherlands BTW, I wonder...) Now 2l is more than enough for me, but imagine it's not and maybe I want two bottles. HAVE THEY GOT A DEAL FOR ME!

TWO bottles for only EUR 3.95! What a bargain! But, wait... 2×1.92=3.84, so I pay five cents more per bottle if I get two. At least they're nice enough to give the price per litre for people who don't like maths. :-) Maybe this is Ireland's way of keeping its people on a healthy diet?

In other news, I miss Maplin from two years ago. It used to be a useful store for electronics (and components) and there used to be a guy who pretty much knew my name and actually knew what he's selling. But now... Jelena went there to get me some 2.5mm heatshrinks. I gave her a pack of 1.5mm ones with order numbers of what I need written on the label. Back home, it turned out that the guy in the shop tossed away the 1.5mm pack she had with her, for one reason of the other ...

Or not? Last weekend I was in the shop myself, and guess what I saw in the rack of 1.5mm heatshrinks? MY PACK OF HEATSHRINKS! With my handwriting on it and everything. Even better, opened and everything (I already used quite a few centimeters since I bought the pack months ago).

That's not how you get yourself happy customers, guys...

Oxegen 2009

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:31:39 +0200

The event happened almost a month ago, but I really did intend to mention it here. Oxegen 2009 was a rainy bunch of fun. From what I still remember:

Bottom:

The rain, there were some dry spots but especially on the last day I experienced some real showers. It was really good to have some boots.

Careless people on the camping, please learn to walk people, I had to fix up my tent pretty much every morning.

The average age of people there, which confronted me more with the fact that I'm getting old myself!

People from Dublin, apparently all people who steal beer and beg for free cigarettes are from Dublin. The nice girl from Waterford (?) told us on Thursday evening that only Dubliners do that. ;-)

Top:

The Mars Volta, played for only about an hour, which is way too short. Cedric (singer) didn't like this either and tried to destroy the stage clock.

Mogwai, indeed extremely loud!

The rain, better said, how nobody seemed to care and rain pretty much added an element of fun. Mudfights are fun as long as you can just watch.

The people, mostly as much fun as they were last year. I was especially amused every time a group of 5-10 16-year-olds wade their way through an audience, holding each other's hands to stay together. Somehow seeing that made me feel like a car driver waiting for a family of ducklings crossing the road.

The trip back, a few hours after the last concert. We managed to pack ourselves very quiclky in the dark and I think we didn't even lose anything. In the bus someone upstairs took a guitar and played Blur and Oasis. Things did get out of tune more and more as we got closer to Dublin. At some point the bus passed police cars that were stopping cars (for obvious reasons, especially in Ireland :-P), from upstairs we could hear a very loud "SHIT, THE GUARDS! HIDE YOUR BEER!"

Other scary fact: We (Jelmer, Erik and I) got into the bus to the festival on Thursday, and I noticed the people next to us had a schedule with them already. I asked them where they bought that now already, and the response was "Wij spreken ook Nederlands hoor." Eh? And they were sitting right next to us! But in true un-Dutch fashion we did not set up our tents next to theirs.

All in all, a fun experience. If the lineup is really good I may go again next year, otherwise maybe just for a day to pick up the atmosphere.

One week of New York

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:53:52 +0200

One week passed and in 24 hours I will already be almost halfway on my way back!

New York is great, both as a city and as a Google office, and I'll definitely try to have some more trips to here in the future. The first night I walked here, on my way from the Penn Ave LIRR station to the apartment, I already decided I'd spend as little time in the apartment as possible. Weather forecasts looked like they were going to get in the way, but the actual weather was pretty fine (almost) all the time.

What did I see? Loads of high buildings, walked along the water quite a bit, saw the building site that used to be the WTC (I expected to see some monument, but nope!), Times Square, a view from on the General Electric Building, the Statue of Liberty from far away, a tiny piece of Central Park, another park near it closer to the water, and blisters on my feet after walking for many hours especially during the weekend. I tried to not be a typical tourist and probably failed, but I must say that I saw a few of these things by accident by just running into them while pointlessly walking around through the city.

I made over 500 pictures and will try to make a decent selection of what's actually interesting and original. This is probably going to take a while... :-(

Time to catch some sleep now; in the morning I will finish packing and spend half a day at work. After that I'll get the joy of travelling to/being at JFK airport the night before the Independence Day weekend. My planning was definitely "splendid" with that detail in mind...