My Samsung is Very Big

After a, well, little spot of Envy, I got a nice new and big LCD. It's a Samsung 193P which, if you check online, is a 19" LCD. And it's beautiful. And big. Did I mention it's fucking sexy? Aw yeah!!! As an added bonus, I just set the display in "portrait" orientation and turned the display so it now reads like a page. It's just fabulous. Complete content on a single 19" screen that is 1280 pixels high and still 1024 wide. That and it's got DV-frickin-I.

It's very nice.

You May as Well Have the PIN for My Bank Account

Between the "hacking" course I'm doing school and reading Cryptonomicon (for the first time, believe it or not), I've really started to notice how little I know about information security. Cryptography in any of its modern incarnations and applications. Today I found a copy of the O'Reilly book on SSH (the one with the snail on it) and man, I really only have a tiny inkling of what's going on.

We fuck it all. There's certificates to track down, some to share and some to hide, passwords and passphrases, clients and servers, confidentiality and integrity and authentication, and hashing and semmetric and asymetric encryption...

But I'll give it a stab. I think I have a fair idea of the most general ideas and a lot of places where I see security should be used and improved throughout all the systems I've been poking around on. So over the next little while, I'm probably going to be confused as shit. That should be fun. Go along well with the circus at work, the nuts at school (though the semester is wrapping up, thank kittens).

AAAAArrrrrrghg!!! I'm going to get a drink now.

Werd! We're Online!

Stuff is all a pain in the ass. In other news, I did get a nice little pine desk for my room so I finaly have a place to sit and hack away at my computer. Definately an improvement. I still have lots of stuff floating around. Mainly books. After pushing stuff in my room around, I have some space against one wall for a book shelf. I won't be able to get one quite yet since that's where the test-bed computers are going to live until the haxxor course is done, but once that course is done, then I'll be able to get a book shelf and finally put away all the last of my stuff. Wooo!!


I'm gonna go eat my "Broadway Deluxe Fried Rice" now...

And Moved

A little bumpy, but certainly not the worst moving day(s) evar. Anyhow, now I have to hack my network back together. Dropping the Linksys router back in place didn't just work. Hella-weak. Czak did the old mfr reset on that puppy and could get online at least.

Now I just have to restore the network setup. So far it hasn't been bad. Getting the router online was definately the important first step. I hacked away at that config last night and got a bunch of it up.

Got the router renumbered,

Verified that chevette could still get online,

Booted dulcea, she couldn't get online,

Disabled dhcp on the router (dulcea was numbered statically),

Now dulcea gets online,

Verified chevette could dhcp from dulcea and get online still,

Re-opened the essential services (smtp, dns),

Updated zone info on Nikita and transfered it to dulcea,

Haven't verified SMTP works, but I know DNS at my work hasn't updated yet so it won't work from here,

Opened more services (ssh, pop, spop, etc) and checked a few of them.

So far so good. Dulcea is a bit noisy for me to sleep with, but I think that's just the PSU. I'm going to try to replace the PSU tonight with one of the other ones I have handy and if that works, great, and if not, I'll leave dulcea off again overnight and buy a "silent" PSU tomorrow.

Now for the fun part. I'm supposed to be on this "eXtreme" service from Shaw which is 5Mbps down and lord knows what up. I tested off dslreports.com and scored over 2Mbps down by just under 1Mbps up. Not bad. I wouldn't complain about that 'cept I have other grievances.

I only get one real ip address. This is no good for my war-games course. This is flat-out bad. Wendawg thinks we're supposed to get two. I know on our old modem that I pulled as many as I could connect to the modem at a time (5). Either way, I have to reset the modem when swapping devices. I really only get one IP address. This I will have to sort out with Shaw even if they make me pay for a second IP for two months until the war-games course is over.

And I'm a little tired and cranky so screw it all straight to hell.