DSTUMBLER for those on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD
on
NetStumbler v0.4 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Should mention the incredible (and similar) dstumbler here - for those on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD.
dstumbler is a wardriving/netstumbling/lanjacking utility for bsd operating systems that attempts to provide features similar to netstumbler in a fast and easy to use curses based application. it is part of the bsd-airtools package released by Dachb0den Labs, which provides a complete bsd based tool set for 802.11b penetration testing.
current features of dstumbler include:
color s/n graphs
detection of weped networks
detects the beacon interval for aps
detects the maximum supported rate for aps (with prism2 cards in scan mode)
reports if the ssid of a network is default
export/import to wi-scan'esque log format
support for prism2 cards (without wep detection)
interactive display of ap statistics
intuitive navigation hotkeys
nmea gps support
monitor mode support for prism2 cards
/dev/speaker audio support for reporting detected aps and nodes
realtime logging to file (for wi-scan'esque compatibility)
detection of weped and adhoc networks
detection of nodes on bss networks
detects if a bss network uses shared or keyed authentication
detects the maximum supported rate of aps and nodes
detects the beacon interval for aps
detects if bss nodes are set to connect to any network or a specified one
Snippet from the article: Those living near one of the closed Starbucks outlets have reported strange glowing mists, howling and/or cowering on the part of dogs that pass by, and electromagnetic effects that cause haunting, unearthly images to appear on TV and computer screens within a one-mile radius. Experts have few theories as to what may be causing the low-frequency rumblings, half-glimpsed flashes of light, and periodic electronic beeps emanating from the once-busy shops.
No we switched everything to FreeBSD. Though OpenBSD was my first love, when the site started getting really popular we needed better performance and SMP from our MySQL servers. FreeBSD blew it away, performance-wise.
You're right that OpenBSD can be a little pokey and not the greatest Desktop. I went with OpenBSD first and was not thrilled - then I tried FreeBSD.
On FreeBSD the ports are kept up-to-date faster. There are SO many more ports ready-to-go. Really a surprising amount. Like anything you ever needed, just go to/usr/ports and there it is, ready to install.
No RPM hell. Just cd/usr/ports/multimedia/xmms ; make install clean. It downloads and compiles any dependencies from source. And a simple command can automatically upgrade ALL of your installs ports every night!
I find FreeBSD faster and simpler than any Linux distro I tried.
I still think OpenBSD is wonderful for making a bulletproof network-connected server or firewall, but if you haven't tried FreeBSD yet, I think it'll make a much better desktop.
recommend using FreeBSD as a desktop
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FreeBSD 5.2 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
A little FreeBSD evangelism FWIW:
My company uses FreeBSD 5 on half of our desktop machines in the office. All the PCs for customer service and general-purpose use are all running:
Everything like XMMS, Acrobat, and mplayer you know from Linux-land work just fine in FreeBSD
The fonts are anti-aliased and beautiful. I find it easier on the eyes than Windows or OS X.
It only takes us about an hour to set up a whole new ready-to-go office desktop PC for the office, using FreeBSD ports. And we LOVE that all boxes' apps are kept automatically updated every night using the portupgrade scripts.
If you're thinking of dabbling with FreeBSD as a desktop I can highly recommend it.
In fact I'm typing this on my Gateway laptop with FreeBSD 4.9 right now. Here are some FreeBSD laptop compatibility lists if you want to see if yours will work.
FreeBSD 5 works fine in production, here
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Although they advise against using the FreeBSD 5 line in production servers, our company went ahead & did it anyway because we needed a gigabit ethernet driver that was only in FreeBSD 5 not 4.
Our site gets a million hits a day on a completely db-driven website. Both the Apache webserver and the two replicated MySQL servers on the backend are all running FreeBSD 5, and have been for months now.
It's fun to see the little things you can do to get a press release, isn't it? It's kinda like finding a technicality to get into the Guinness Book of World Records.
5th paragraph of the article says, "Such a release strategy has never before been attempted by Tinseltown. The closest a studio has come to doing such simultaneous, synchronized release was in May, when Fox opened X2 on the same day in 80 countries, but not at the same hour."
So, I guess another movie some day will top this in press release land by saying, "Yes the Matrix did something similar last year, but not with the same color carpet!"
Since many Slashdot readers are Mozilla users, I think you'll appreciate this little code bit for your devbox, below.
This PHP code (and following head tag) put at the very top of any HTML page will tell Mozilla that the.html page following is actually application/xhtml+xml.
Then if you make ANY little mistake at all in your (X)HTML code, it will completely fail on you, as if it was a script, showing you the exact error and where it lies. It's been a priceless way to check my XHTML syntax without always linking over to w3.org
<?php /* XHTML proper header for browsers that accept it. If using Mozilla, this is a GREAT way to make sure your XHTML validates! */ if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']) AND stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/xhtml+xml')) { header('Content-type: application/xhtml+xml'); } else { header('Content-type: text/html'); } ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> < html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head>
etc. (not sure why slashdot comment is adding ; before html xmlns
I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is
on
Telstar 4 is Down
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· Score: 5, Funny
My girlfriend always told me that when I talk tech with fellow tech-heads I make no sense at all.
"It's hard for me to believe it's even English you're speaking. I don't recognize any of the words."
Reading this Slashdot post just made me understand what she means.
It's like a bad sci-fi screenplay!
(Telstar? CW carriers? 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H? orbital slot? Intelsat? Loral's US domestic fleet?)
The first time I heard "noise" music like this, I was flipping around radio stations while driving down a highway. It all seemed like the same old 4-minute song with verse, chorus, verse, chorus, songs about love, 4/4 beats, major/minor keys, guitar-keys-bass-drums-vocals.
And then... hit a college station playing this noise!
What a refreshment! What a way to cleanse the pallette. No chords. No lyrics. No beats. No guitars. Nothing recognizable at all! Just wonderful organized noise.
Then after listening to a LOT of it, especially the stuff that you know was actually composed by a human, something new happens:
You start to listen to the world around you (traffic, nature, conversations) as if it was composed. Imagining a single intention behind the noise of the world. It really is a beautiful mindset. See the restaurant scene in the movie "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0108328/
If you haven't spent a lot of time with music like this, try it. If you hate it after 5 minutes, listen for 10. If you hate it after 10, listen for 20. Try to appreciate it.
That's a side project we're doing at CD Baby: Helping hook artists directly into iTunes and other download services. No record contract. No ownership of their rights. Just acting as a digital distributor.
Apple iTunes is paying the label 65 cents per download, (as reported many places). Of that we can pass almost all of it to the artist, since we're not a record label, and have no up-front expenses.
You can see my notes on Apple's meeting with independent record labels here (pt 1) and here (pt 2).
That's like saying 'Never buy software' because you don't like Microsoft.
At CD Baby we work directly with 38,000 musicians (NO record labels) that are selling their music direct to the world.
Just like we should all support the independent programming projects when possible, you should support independent music so that these big record labels will have to reinvent themselves or die.
We don't listen to every minute of it. In fact if it's god-awful we only listen to about 2 minutes, tops! But at least we listen to SOME of every single CD, so we know what we're selling, and whether we can recommend it.
And yes they certainly do go bonkers. The music-listener job has a pretty high rate of dropout due to insanity.
Yeah CD Baby is blossomming, too. It's really funny when you hear those stories from the major labels saying that the whole music industry is declining (cough cough).
I suspect it's just the majors that are declining because all the independent musicians I know are reaching more people than ever, and are more in control of their own career than ever before!
We carry 34,000 CDs from independent artists that are not affiliated with the RIAA. (Meaning: you can boycott the RIAA and still buy damn good music.)
We only work directly with the musicians, not distributors or labels. So we pay the artists every week. Unlike buying the majors, your money spent on CDs goes directly to the artists. We've paid over $3 million directly to musicians already.
We actually listened to every one of those 34,000 CDs before selling them, and can tell you which ones we highly recommend, here: http://www.cdbaby.com/picks. (It's somebody's full-time job, listening to 75 new albums a day, writing internal reviews, and linking up to other albums in the store, for the last 5 years.)
Slashdot Mirror
- color s/n graphs
- detection of weped networks
- detects the beacon interval for aps
- detects the maximum supported rate for aps (with prism2 cards in scan mode)
- reports if the ssid of a network is default
- export/import to wi-scan'esque log format
- support for prism2 cards (without wep detection)
- interactive display of ap statistics
- intuitive navigation hotkeys
- nmea gps support
- monitor mode support for prism2 cards
- /dev/speaker audio support for reporting detected aps and nodes
- realtime logging to file (for wi-scan'esque compatibility)
- detection of weped and adhoc networks
- detection of nodes on bss networks
- detects if a bss network uses shared or keyed authentication
- detects the maximum supported rate of aps and nodes
- detects the beacon interval for aps
- detects if bss nodes are set to connect to any network or a specified one
- partial detection of 40-bit or 104-bit encryption
Download at http://www.dachb0den.com/projects/dstumbler.html (or just install it from ports!)Snippet from the article:
Those living near one of the closed Starbucks outlets have reported strange glowing mists, howling and/or cowering on the part of dogs that pass by, and electromagnetic effects that cause haunting, unearthly images to appear on TV and computer screens within a one-mile radius. Experts have few theories as to what may be causing the low-frequency rumblings, half-glimpsed flashes of light, and periodic electronic beeps emanating from the once-busy shops.
No we switched everything to FreeBSD. Though OpenBSD was my first love, when the site started getting really popular we needed better performance and SMP from our MySQL servers. FreeBSD blew it away, performance-wise.
On FreeBSD the ports are kept up-to-date faster. There are SO many more ports ready-to-go. Really a surprising amount. Like anything you ever needed, just go to /usr/ports and there it is, ready to install.
No RPM hell. Just cd /usr/ports/multimedia/xmms ; make install clean. It downloads and compiles any dependencies from source. And a simple command can automatically upgrade ALL of your installs ports every night!
I find FreeBSD faster and simpler than any Linux distro I tried.
I still think OpenBSD is wonderful for making a bulletproof network-connected server or firewall, but if you haven't tried FreeBSD yet, I think it'll make a much better desktop.
My company uses FreeBSD 5 on half of our desktop machines in the office. All the PCs for customer service and general-purpose use are all running:
The fonts are anti-aliased and beautiful. I find it easier on the eyes than Windows or OS X.
It only takes us about an hour to set up a whole new ready-to-go office desktop PC for the office, using FreeBSD ports. And we LOVE that all boxes' apps are kept automatically updated every night using the portupgrade scripts.
If you're thinking of dabbling with FreeBSD as a desktop I can highly recommend it.
In fact I'm typing this on my Gateway laptop with FreeBSD 4.9 right now. Here are some FreeBSD laptop compatibility lists if you want to see if yours will work.
Although they advise against using the FreeBSD 5 line in production servers, our company went ahead & did it anyway because we needed a gigabit ethernet driver that was only in FreeBSD 5 not 4.
Our site gets a million hits a day on a completely db-driven website. Both the Apache webserver and the two replicated MySQL servers on the backend are all running FreeBSD 5, and have been for months now.
No problems at all. Rock-solid. Good ol' FreeBSD.
I'm surprised the previous post of this story didn't make an impression on CoyboyNeal!
5th paragraph of the article says, "Such a release strategy has never before been attempted by Tinseltown. The closest a studio has come to doing such simultaneous, synchronized release was in May, when Fox opened X2 on the same day in 80 countries, but not at the same hour."
So, I guess another movie some day will top this in press release land by saying, "Yes the Matrix did something similar last year, but not with the same color carpet!"
This PHP code (and following head tag) put at the very top of any HTML page will tell Mozilla that the .html page following is actually application/xhtml+xml.
Then if you make ANY little mistake at all in your (X)HTML code, it will completely fail on you, as if it was a script, showing you the exact error and where it lies. It's been a priceless way to check my XHTML syntax without always linking over to w3.org
etc. (not sure why slashdot comment is adding ; before html xmlns
My girlfriend always told me that when I talk tech with fellow tech-heads I make no sense at all.
"It's hard for me to believe it's even English you're speaking. I don't recognize any of the words."
Reading this Slashdot post just made me understand what she means.
It's like a bad sci-fi screenplay!
(Telstar? CW carriers? 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H? orbital slot? Intelsat? Loral's US domestic fleet?)
And then... hit a college station playing this noise!
What a refreshment! What a way to cleanse the pallette. No chords. No lyrics. No beats. No guitars. Nothing recognizable at all! Just wonderful organized noise.
Then after listening to a LOT of it, especially the stuff that you know was actually composed by a human, something new happens:
You start to listen to the world around you (traffic, nature, conversations) as if it was composed. Imagining a single intention behind the noise of the world. It really is a beautiful mindset. See the restaurant scene in the movie "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0108328/
If you haven't spent a lot of time with music like this, try it. If you hate it after 5 minutes, listen for 10. If you hate it after 10, listen for 20. Try to appreciate it.
--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby
http://www.cdbaby.com
Apple iTunes is paying the label 65 cents per download, (as reported many places). Of that we can pass almost all of it to the artist, since we're not a record label, and have no up-front expenses.
You can see my notes on Apple's meeting with independent record labels here (pt 1) and here (pt 2).
We just have to take their word for it. We're not cops. We're a record store, (with about 100 new CDs a day added.)
When and if there's a problem or complaint we put the appropriate parties in touch and have them let us know the conclusion.
At CD Baby we work directly with 38,000 musicians (NO record labels) that are selling their music direct to the world.
Just like we should all support the independent programming projects when possible, you should support independent music so that these big record labels will have to reinvent themselves or die.
Hurt the record labels, not the musicians themselves. Do a musician a favor. Bypass the labels. Buy direct . (My little store alone has paid over $3 million directly to musicians in the last couple years.)
(See our flavor galleries for some real creative browsing.)
I knew it! Those prophetic Gallagher brothers in Oasis predicted the whole thing!
When using my wireless laptop, I use SSH2 tunnels for all of my email and intranet work.
So - pretty much anything that I wouldn't want sniffed is going through SSH2 anyway.
Do I still need wep or ipsec? Is it more to protect the host (firewall+WAP), client (my laptop), or the stuff exchanged inbetween?
Having this story posted on Slashdot is like having an article on a paid porn site called, "A beginner's guide to masturbation."
On a normal Linux system running Slashdot, we see this:
On a Slashdot running one of the Trusted Debian kernels, you will see something like this:
As you can see every value is different.
temporary mirror here
tell us in the shipping instructions to mark it as a $0 gift and we will
hehehe... gotta break those stereotypes! Not all Slashdotters are virgins, right? No seriously I posted that one because it's our most popular.
OF COURSE! I'm a proud shareware-payer of many things. See my post on it here.
And yes they certainly do go bonkers. The music-listener job has a pretty high rate of dropout due to insanity.
:-)
Yeah CD Baby is blossomming, too. It's really funny when you hear those stories from the major labels saying that the whole music industry is declining (cough cough).
I suspect it's just the majors that are declining because all the independent musicians I know are reaching more people than ever, and are more in control of their own career than ever before!
Look at this most recent sales chart for our one little store.
Slump? What slump?
- Derek