April 2014 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

OpenSSH No Longer Has To Depend On OpenSSL
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '14

30 Apr '14

"What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL. `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys." -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/04/30/1822209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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LED and current limiting resistors
by chris 30 Apr '14

30 Apr '14

Following on from Monday nights discussion about LEDs and resistors. https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/219 BTW, I acquired a pad heater and a brewing container for my set up from a colleague and its now all wired in - regulating 15 litres of water nicely at the moment.

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Linux Mint 16
by Peter Reutemann 29 Apr '14

29 Apr '14

Hi there Just came across the following blog post of how to install Linux Mint 16 and what to do afterwards to fine-tune it. It also discusses in length all kinds of applications (and their Windows equivalent): http://debianhelp.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/to-do-list-after-installing-linu… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Talk Monday
by William Mckee 28 Apr '14

28 Apr '14

Hello wlug For her holidays im taking my sister down to wellington and going to miss the wlug meetup, where I am spose to be doing a talk on godotengine. I feel bad about pulling out so late, but im sure someone else will be able to step in and do a talk. If people are interested I could do my talk another month. Cheers, William

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Man Builds DIY Cellphone Using Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 26 Apr '14

26 Apr '14

"Photographer and software engineer Dave Hunt has posted an article about his most recent project: a DIY cellphone based on a Raspberry Pi (he calls it a PiPhone). It has a touchscreen dialing interface for making calls, and it's built with off-the-shelf components. The total bill of materials clocks in at about $158: $40 for the rPi, $35 for the 320x240 touchscreen, $15 for the LiPo battery, $48 for the GSM module, and about $20 for miscellaneous other minor parts. Hunt says, '[The GSM/GPRS module] allow us to send standard AT commands to it to make calls, hang up, send texts, data etc. Overall a very clever module. Towards the bottom of the white PCB, you can see the SIM Card, which allows the module to associate with my local GSM network, and it’s using a regular prepaid SIM card, bought in my local phone store for €10. Below the GSM module, you can see the on.off switch and a DC-DC converter, which converts the 3.7volts from the LiPoly battery to 5volts needed by everything else.' He points out that the phone is not terribly practical, but it's a neat project. Hunt has done several others, including turning the Raspberry Pi into a controller for time-lapse photography. He'll be publishing the code he wrote for the PiPhone next week." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/04/25/2220250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Lumina: PC-BSD's Own Desktop Environment
by Peter Reutemann 24 Apr '14

24 Apr '14

"The PC-BSD project is developing a new open source (BSD license) desktop environment from scratch. The name of the project is Lumina and it will be based around the Qt toolkit. The ultimate goal is to replace KDE as the default desktop of PC-BSD. Lumina aims to be lightweight, stable, fast-running, and FreeDesktop.org/XDG compliant. Most of the Lumina work is being done by PC-BSD's Ken Moore. Even though Lumina is still in its early stages, it can be built and run successfully, and an alpha version can already be obtained from PC-BSD's ports/package repositories." -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/04/24/1544216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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OpenSSL Forked By OpenBSD Into LibreSSL
by Peter Reutemann 24 Apr '14

24 Apr '14

"LibreSSL is a FREE version of the SSL/TLS protocol forked from OpenSSL" -- source: http://www.libressl.org/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Private Keys Stolen Within Hours From Heartbleed OpenSSL Site
by Peter Reutemann 20 Apr '14

20 Apr '14

"It was reported when heartbleed was discovered that only passwords would be at risk and private keys were still safe. Not anymore. Cloudfare launched the heartbleed challenge on a new server with the openSSL vulnerability and offered a prize to whoever could gain the private keys. Within hours several researchers and a hacker got in and got the private signing keys. Expect many forged certificates and other login attempts to banks and other popular websites in the coming weeks unless the browser makers and CA's revoke all the old keys and certificates." -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/04/13/1553258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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How To Reset A Forgotten Root Password With Knoppix
by Peter Reutemann 18 Apr '14

18 Apr '14

Today, I had the problem that I could no longer remember the user/password for one of my Xubuntu installations in Virtualbox. So I downloaded Knoppix 7.0 and had a look what the names of the installed users were. After that, I had to figure how to reset them. Here is the HOWTO that I used to reset my user's password (doesn't have to be "root"). It's scarily easy, to be honest... "This guide explains how you can reset a forgotten root password with the help of the Knoppix Linux Live-CD. Afterwards you can log in to your system as root again." -- source: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-reset-a-forgotten-root-password-with-knopp… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr Released
by Peter Reutemann 18 Apr '14

18 Apr '14

"Ubuntu Linux version 14.04 LTS (code named "Trusty Tahr") has been released and available for download. This updated version includes the Linux kernel v3.13.0-24.46, Python 3.4, Xen 4.4, Libreoffice 4.2.3, MySQL 5.6/MariaDB 5.5, Apache 2.4, PHP 5.5, improvements to AppArmor allow more fine-grained control over application, and more. The latest release of Ubuntu Server is heavily focused on supporting cloud and scale-out computing platforms such as OpenStack, Docker, and more. As part of the wider Ubuntu 14.04 release efforts the Ubuntu Touch team is proud to make the latest and greatest touch experience available to our enthusiast users and developers. You can install Ubuntu on Nexus 4 Phone (mako), Nexus 7 (2013) Tablet (flo), and Nexus 10 Tablet (manta) by following these instructions. On a hardware front, ARM multiplatform support has been added, enabling you to build a single ARM kernel image that can boot across multiple hardware platforms. Additionally, the ARM64 and Power architectures are now fully supported. See detailed release notes for more information. Aquick upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu is possible over the network." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/04/17/1756254 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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