Badger Woes

I have all my backups restored and most additional software installed, but I’m still having two rather large problems. One, the Firestarter tray icon will not launch at login and two, running SSH via Startup Programs is broken. All in all, I’m not as impressed with 5.10 as I thought I would be – it does feel a little rushed. That said, there are many improvements over 5.04 and none of the problems I’m experiencing are enough to make me pop the Slackware disc back in.

If you’re currently running 5.04, I’d recommend holding off upgrading for a few weeks till some patches come out.

FiberCloud

I just discovered that FiberCloud has a data center here in Bellingham.

I want a tour.

Time to format

I thought Breezy Badger was supposed to be released on the 15th, not the 13th. Oops. I downloaded the iso this morning, which was interesting – I’m always worried now that whenever I wget large files at high speeds, I’m going to get another call saying that I’m eating up 25% of the bandwidth (this time it looks like my average bandwidth consumption was only about 2.1Mb, so I’m safe).

I’ve been planning on using this new release as an excuse to format instead of just upgrading with apt, so I did a backup during class.

rsync -rav --delete --stats /home/pigmonkey /media/usbdisk-1/backup/nyx/

I was also thinking about going home this weekend, so now I’m going to do that, update the backup I have stored on Wintermute, and format.

crypto

Tunneling SMTP through SSH

Since Dreamhost doesn’t support any sort of secure SMTP, I’ve been tunneling it through ssh for the past month or so.

ssh -f -N -L 9999:mail.myserver.com:25 myserver.com -l user

9999 is the local port, mail.myserver.com is the mail server, 25 is the remote port, myserver.com is where your shell is, user is your username on the server. Then, just tell Thunderbird (or whatever mail app you use) that your smtp server is localhost:9999

I have this run at bootup, so that all I have to do is type in my key when I boot up and all my mail is encrypted (Dreamhost does support IMAPS).

You could, of course, setup your ssh account to have no key, but this is a rather large sacrifice of security (as soon as the attacker acquires your private key, he has access to your ssh account)– especially if your primary computer is a laptop, like mine.

Minor updates

I’ve made a few more minor changes to the stylesheet, most notably the textured background. There’s also a couple new banner images above.

I'm a data whore

ResTek Nick called me last night to say I was eating up 25% of the bandwidth. Oops. Sorry about that. Wget is an aggressive little bugger.

In other news, the IAEA won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Shifty drugs

I seem to have acquired a cold, so I decided that this was the perfect time to try the random drugs I picked up on a street corner in a nondescript brown paper envelope.

Ok, so it was a street corner – it was red square. And the women who gave it to me was wearing a lab coat (at least she looked like a doctor). They’re supposed to be a homeopathic cold remedy. The envelope says it includes Echinacea, Calendula, and Chelidonium. We’ll see if it works.

More deer in the parking lot

I went to a slideshow last night of some guy’s mountain climbing in Nepal. It was cool.