Ryan – Page 27 – Ryan Schulze

Virtualbox

August 10, 2009May 13, 2013Ryan

I’ve been playing around with Virtualbox here at work the last few days (all our MMO games have windows clients, I have a Linux at work), and I must say I am pretty impressed. Before someone comes around the bend and yells “but my favorite virtualisation software XZY can do that too”: I’ve tried a few and Virtualbox is: free, stable, easy to setup and use, has a good performance. The latest version supports Direct3d, so now I can run games that caused problems with wine. Creating snapshots are a breeze too, so I can revert the whole system back to a “clean” version without any problems if I want to test something.

A tip: boot the windows guest into the “safe mode” (press F8 after the BIOS sceen and before windows start to boot) and install the “Guest additions” while in safe mode, had trouble with direct3d if installing in the “normal” windows.

self0wned politicians

August 7, 2009May 13, 2013Ryan

The German politicians are currently still pushing laws to censor the Internet (they actually managed to pass one law, now they are trying to defend it and broaden the spectrum of things to censor). It all started out as a good thing, they were trying to eradicate child pornography. Instead of having the child pornography simply removed from the Internet (which has been proved time and time again is fairly easy), they used the topic to implement general Internet censorship instances. Censorship is bad, and what pisses people off most is the fact that the “censorship” just puts up a big red stop sign in the browser of a user when he surfs to a page on the blacklist, and anyone with enough computer experience to turn a computer on and surf the Internet is more than able to bypass the current “censorship” and surf to any website he wants to.

Back to the reason I’m writing this post 😉 DNS servers are the servers that turn , for instance, www.google.de into the computer understandable IP Address of the server (so your browser knows where it has to go to get the pages). DNS servers are a fundamental part of the Internet as we know it. In a nutshell: A politician from the German SPD party stated that anyone running his own DNS server *) is supporting child pornography because he (or she) bypasses the efforts of the German politicians to use the DNS servers of the Internet providers to censor websites. To make this strange mental leap of the SPD even more funny, the SPD has a DNS server that anyone can use and (since certain institutions were explicitly exempted from the censorship laws) doesn’t censor anything.

Let’s look at the list of DNS servers from the SPD:

$ dig -t NS spd.de
spd.de.           26100   IN   NS   ns1.arcor-ip.de.
spd.de.           26100   IN   NS   ns2.arcor-ip.de.
spd.de.           26100   IN   NS   ns3.arcor-ip.de.
spd.de.           26100   IN   NS   dns2.spd.de.

aha, let’s have a look at dns2.spd.de since it is the only one not from a large Internet provider

$ host dns2.spd.de
dns2.spd.de has address 195.50.146.131

$ whois 195.50.146.131
inetnum:        195.50.146.0 – 195.50.146.255
netname:        SPDINET-NET
descr:          Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland
descr:          Wilhelmstr 141
descr:          10963 Berlin
country:        DE
admin-c:        FH1138-RIPE
tech-c:         ANOC1-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by:         ARCOR-MNT
source:         RIPE # Filtered

yepp, belngs to the SPD, let’s check if it resolves hosts for us …

dig @195.50.146.131 dopefish.de
dopefish.de. 3600 IN A 188.40.34.99

Works fine, that means we can tell our computer to not use the DNS servers from our provider, but use the one from the politicians who are helping to push Internet censorship.

*) Yes, I know the differences between DNS servers, recursors, … I’m just keeping it simple.

Blog Facebook

August 2, 2009May 13, 2013Ryanblog, email, facebook, hetzner, Server, web

So I finally got around to getting Facebook to automatically impoort my blog entries. Was easily done technically, all I had to do was decide if I wanted them to end up in the news feed or as status updates. Both had their advantages, but I decided going with news feeds because they provide better formating.

Now I’m back to moving my website and email server to new hardware (websites are easy, email is a bit of a pain).

bash foo

July 15, 2009March 12, 2011Ryanbash, scripting

Instead of writing tons and tons of small scripts < 10 lines that all depend on each other I have the habbit of writing them as functions and throwing them into one file (easier to edit, less worries about them depending on each other). To be able to use the functions from the bash shell, just add $(basename $0) “$@” to the END of the file, and add symlinks function_name -> file.

Example:
$ ln -s foo.sh foobar

$ cat foo.sh

#!/bin/bash
foobar() {
echo "world domination"
return
}

$(basename $0) "$@"

#!/bin/bash

foobar() {

echo "world domination"

return

}

$(basename $0) "$@"

mobile and online

June 16, 2009May 13, 2013Ryanbluetooth, online, umts, vodafone, websessions

I just finished setting up my laptop and cell phone so that I can go online from anywhere. It’s not comparable to DSL speed, but it is fast enough to surf around and use SSH/VNC/Rdesktop. The hardest part was actually not the technical part, but finding specific information what I need to do from my cell phone provider!

After doing a bit of searching I finally found out that what I wanted (surf the internet with my netbook using my cell phone as a modem) seemd to be the “websessions” option at Vodafone. Now you can either buy dedicated hardware that you plug into your usb port (costs money, need to remember to bring netbook and adapter, needs strange software), oder sou use your cell phone and special software from vodafone (which didn’t work at all for me, couldn’t find my phone even though other software has no problems synchronizing my google calendar to my cell phone), OR you just set up a internet connection in your cell phone with the APN event.vodafone.de and hook it up as a modem in windows via bluetooth. Unsusprisingly I use the last option since it requires neither additional hard- nor software. Just grab the netbook, connect to the cell phone in my pocket via bluetooth, and go online.

Depending on how often I use this I may even have a look into a flatrate. Only problem I’ve had so far, is that my cell phone (a sony ericsson w880i) sometimes seems to hang up the bluetooth connection, and refuse to reconnect until I turn bluetooth off and on again. I’ll have to check if there is a firmware update available.