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Unfortunately for them you can do DNS via all sorts of interesting methods, such as within an ICMP packet.

I can't fathom how they might start blocking that, especially if one applies a simple cipher to the 'wrapped' data as well. Sure, my example does require an outside resource, but that's not really that large of an impediment.

Time consuming, perhaps... but painful? Not in the slightest. http://thomer.com/howtos/mp4ize

You can even automate the task and put it behind a gui so that people who don't like command lines can do it.

Not to mention IP over DNS. They may block him on wifi after his 100 minutes, but he can get a slow connection this way.

http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html

My video card didn't work, sound didn't work, and, apparently, I use stale software with has been deprecated.

Either way, here's a review of my adventures:

http://thomer.com/howtos/hardy_heron.html

Here's a summary of the woes described on that web page:

1) to get nvidia to work for a GeForce 8600 GTS (and in my case TwinView, for two displays), you need to download a beta driver straight from nvidia,

2) to get sound to work you need to run a completely undocumented /etc/init.d/alsa-utils reset,

3) Firefox 3 (beta) is cool and all, but it does not support various plugins so I downgraded to firefox-2, and

4) xmms, which is ugly but worked just fine, has been deprecated and its replacement, audacious segfaults and freezes.

5) I got annoyed by trackerd hosing my disk and my CPU, so I removed it.

Hope this helps.

It was a game balance and rules contradiction or rules ambiguity problem. As much as one might want to leave all decisions to the GM/DM, there were the inevitable rules lawyers that made gaming miserable by ... well ... lawyering...

But there are rules lawyers in every game with rules, even games like Monopoly and American Football. Some games even seem to facilitate this process with complex rule systems (RuleMaster, I'm lookin' at you, baby).

In my eyes, 1st Ed. AD&D is the One True Edition just as vi is the One True Editor. :D

It was a game balance and rules contradiction or rules ambiguity problem. As much as one might want to leave all decisions to the GM/DM, there were the inevitable rules lawyers that made gaming miserable by ... well ... lawyering...

But there are rules lawyers in every game with rules, even games like Monopoly and American Football. Some games even seem to facilitate this process with complex rule systems (RuleMaster, I'm lookin' at you, baby).

In my eyes, 1st Ed. AD&D is the One True Edition just as vi is the One True Editor. :D

You're right, if commodity clients don't fall back on TCP (I have no idea which ones if any do so, we just use "dig +vc" for an app server directory in our data centers), they'd need a pinhole for DNS. Maybe just their DNS, if they know about IP over DNS. But when Joe Sixpack can't synchronize with his choice of atomic clocks, I doubt Comcast could possibly care less.

It's just the way it is.

I often am tasked in working with some of the systems in (small) 911 dispatch centers, which often lets me see rather more than I'd like of what holds them together.

First off, the infrastructure is horrible, almost as a rule[1]. Take the messiest, most confusing, and disgusting wiring closet you've ever seen, and add another layer of funk and wayward cross-connects and a nameless PC under the floor, and you'll have yourself a fairly typical-looking E911 telephone system.

And, generally speaking, the network isn't in much better shape. The tools to secure and lock things down ceased being new long, long ago, but just aren't generally in use. And every system that the dispatchers see (including those that operate the fucking radios) runs Windows, and if it is anything based on HTML, it also has a dependency on Internet Explorer.

It goes downhill from here in all of the obvious directions.

[1]: Of notable contrast to this is the 911 center in the county where I live, where I had to request a hole in the firewall in order to make NTP work on some new equipment. Things there are generally pretty tidy and well-kept... However, nothing at all prevented me from plugging my laptop into an available Ethernet port on the wall, getting a DHCP address on the same subnet as the rest of the building, and then doing some random web browsing and DNS lookups. This was very convenient for me because it let me finish the job a little quicker, and I did have permission for it. However, it only takes one compromised or malicious PC, along with one motivated person, to bring down the whole house of cards with even this small amount of implicit trust. Just a cursory Google search shows that there are lots of ways for one to whatever one wishes with a network like this.

Heh. I know the feeling. I have referred to this page or a version thereof on and off for years.

Price doesn't matter with a little know-how. NSTX will break through most captive portals by tunnelling IP over DNS.

February 2006, Flight from Singapore to Frankfurt, Singapore Airlines.

About an hour into the flight I get out my laptop to quickly check my email. Wifi connection is great, browser shows a login page that asks for my credit card number. $29.95 for the whole flight. Well, whatever. Man gönnt sich ja sonst nichts.

I briefly consider using http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html [NSTX] and fumble around for a bit, then decide to shell out the dollars because I can't get a connection to my NSTX master. (Later found out it wasn't running since the last reboot, which had happened over a year ago.) I open the browser window again and reload.

The lights go out briefly and come on again. The plane shudders a bit.

The stewardess anounces over the microphone that we are experiencing some turbulences and would everybody please fasten their seat belts and keep the lids on any hot drinks.

I quickly shut down my notebook and put it away.

About five hours and a brief nap later, I try again. Again, I switch on my laptop and within two minutes of running the Wifi connection the plane encounters "turbulences". Again, I give up. Again, no turbulences for the rest of the flight.

The funny bit here is that I was on my way back from a conference about EMC shielding in vehicles.

Jens

You're not the first one: http://thomer.com/vi/anim_written_in_vi.gif . (And unfortunately for you, I prefer this one)

But of course that doesn't help, since the 2nd time in a minute you type slashdot.org and it doesn't work, you'll be annoyed and edit it to put a # in front of those lines before you're even conscious of it.

Somebody has a script out there, that changes the root password to something random, and uses cron to put the old password back at some specific time. You can use that to lock yourself out of your /etc/hosts file for a time, if you don't need root access in the meantime. Yay, managed to Google it - http://thomer.com/lockout/lockout.

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I wrote a tool against distraction. It's silly, but it works for me. Sometimes.

http://thomer.com/lockout/

It was also featured on Slashdot a while ago:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/24/212825 1&tid=185&tid=133&tid=1

Most stutterers don't stutter when they're alone, though. But, then again, even when I'm alone, recording a message on an answering machine can be a challenge since I know that someone is going to hear it. Stuttering is a big mindfuck, so I wonder whether I'd experience the same sort of self-awareness when talking to a computer.

As far as I know, software like this doesn't deal well with speech disorders, and it probably should't be expected to.

You could always lock yourself out.

No, really.

Going from 2.4 to 2.6 worked great on Debian and Gentoo, but they automatically download the proper extras for you whereas RedHat only distributes single RPMs for everything. I see where my mistakes were, but the problem lies with RedHat and the way they distribute software.

I think that your problem is understanding how RedHat distributes software. Your upgrade worked ok on Debian or Gentoo because the version you were using supported being upgraded to a 2.6 kernel.

RedHat does not support RH9 upgrading to a 2.6 kernel, but you can do it if you look for instructions.

RH9 is really not meant to be upgraded

Sure it is. Grab yum and pull RH9 up to FC1. Then use yum to pull FC1 up to FC2 test - voila, a RedHat distribution that supports a 2.6 kernel.

2.4.x -> 2.6.x is quite a big step to get right.

I followed this 'how-to' here, and then added some other stuff needed to do also (linked on the page).

Nick

I just hope RedHat 10 includes a 2.6 kernel, so I don't have to bother compiling it myself.

man, i thought the very same thing for the last month or two. but the other day, i downloaded test8 and i've been a happy camper ever since.

actually, compiling the 2.6 kernel is a lot easier than the 2.4 one. there's less commands to deal with and there doesn't seem to be any compile breakage.

for redhat users, check out this page and this page.

I expect Arjan to have updated Red Hat packages soon at http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/2.5/

Remember though that some things have changed between 2.4 and 2.6 that can't just be worked around by installing new packages. (USB module names, some mount points, that kind of thing.) If you want a clean boot you will have to change some of the init scripts, and this will break booting 2.4. So it's a bit all or nothing at the moment, and I recommend people who aren't convinced it will do everything they need it to do (I couldn't get my network card working under 2.6) stay on 2.4 until it's released proper.

Check out http://thomer.com/linux/migrate-to-2.6.html and http://www.fearthecow.net/index.pl?section=guest&p age=kernel for the information for making these kernels work on RHL.

Actually, that's not true.

There are patches that you can apply to VMware to get it to work properly with 2.6.

Gentoo handles this automatically if it detects that you're running a 2.6 kernel.

I found out how to do it manually here. Hope that helps.

VMWare just needs a couple of tweaks, though..

Just go and read this page. It's hit # 5 on a Google search for "vmware 2.6 kernel"

I'm sorry, but am I missing a pun here? "vi" was developed by Bill Joy on and for UNIX. See here.

* That doesn't mean using Dreamweaver or any other GUI HTML design software. Real HTML-ers write it by hand. Real Men use vi from what I hear but I like BBEdit for UNIX.

1. OpenNap
2. XFree86
3. Cygwin
4. Emacs
5. Vi and Vim
6. Mojo Nation
7. Visual Tcl
8. MikTEX
9. Open Perl IDE
10. Mozilla
11. WinCVS
12. BitchX
13. Firebird
14. mySQL