As some of you noticed, my blog just vanished from the face of the earth. And it did, for quite some time too. It was gone well over two weeks. Because of matters out of my control, the server this blog (and other domains) was hosted on was taken offline. But not only was it taken offline, after some time, the whole server was deleted. And yes, I didn’t keep any backups! When will I ever learn?

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It’s been a busy month, with work and training and adjusting back to the real world. After having been out on extended sick leave all summer with a back injury I sustained in late March. And there’s been lots and lots of football to watch and attend too, with my local team Strømsgodset fighting for survival in the Norwegian equivalent of the Premier League. They only need one more victory to save themselves from being relegated. And then we have Liverpool, with a packed Premier League program as well as playing in group A of the Champions League, there’s plenty of football to keep up with.

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So you want to set up IPv6 on your Debian box? Sick and tired of the fact that you can’t test the new stage of Internet addressing because your ISP simply just doesn’t offer IPv6 connectivity yet? Well, fear not, because here is your solution. Getting IPv6 up and running might sound rather daunting, involving quite a few steps and rather complicated configurations? Well, let me be the first to tell you that this just isn’t the case. You will actually find it rather surprising just how easy it is to set up, and how little time you’ll be spending doing it. Once you’re done, you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it sooner.

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Today I was made aware of something that’s been pestering the Internet for ages. A trend that the pornography industry started ages ago, and has fooled more than one innocent web user. We all know how easy it is to make typos, both in letters, e-mails and when we enter the web address of the site we want to go to. This of course is really annoying, especially when we’re at work when we try to make this office friendly. So what is this method that so many use to fool innocent Internet users? Well, the technique is as easy as it is in terms ingenious. What companies do, is that they register a domain name with very similar spelling to a popular web site. For instance, it might be gooogle.com, googel.com, gogle.com etc. All possible misspellings of the word Google, that might get you to a site you didn’t ask for. So what happens when you misspell the domain name? Well, you’re taken to a page which in effect redirects your request to another site. This is something that porn industry has done for ages, and has gained them millions upon millions of unjustified hits.

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Yes, it’s official! This might be the end of the world (of Warcraft), as we know it. It’s been a ghost and a fear that has chased humanity and mother earth for all eternity. As you all know, we are but a small planet in the galaxy known as the Milky way. This is just our little corner in space, which is infinitely large and ever expanding. In the grand scheme of things, our planet is nothing but an extremely small dot in space. But in space, there are many things moving about. There are other planets, stars, moons and miscellaneous other items including what we should fear, asteroids. These lose cannons drift around in space, seemingly without cause nor purpose. But as chance has it, they do from time to time bump into other objects in space. And when this happens, it might have tremendous impact on the object it hits. As some of you may now think, NASA has calculated that one of these asteroids might hit a large server park near you, meaning that you won’t be able to play World of Warcraft, and thus making it the end of the World of Warcraft, but fear not. Even though you might be sitting at home playing World of Warcraft, and ending up like the poor chums in South Park, you should not fear this. As this is minor to what might happen.

It has been well known for some time now that both asteroids and meteors has hit earth before, and according to popular science caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and 90% of all life on earth roughly 65 million years ago. Asteroids and meteors are constantly in the near vicinity of earth, but most of them are far enough away that they never hit. And those that eventually get near enough, are usually so small that they burn up during their decent through the earth’s atmosphere that they just disintegrate. There are proof that we’ve been hit by large asteroids before. Under the Arctic ice there has been found traces of a major asteroid hit, and in modern history you have the Tunguska event where a meteorite detonated with brute force about five to ten kilometers above ground resulting in severe damages to the earth directly beneath it.

Scientist has now confirmed that there is an asteroid heading our way, called Apophis (or 99942 Apophis to be exact). This asteroid is roughly 250 meters in diameter, and would if it hits earth cause severe damage. It is not big enough to be defined as a planet killer, but would cause catastrophic regional damages. Chances are obviously high that it will hit the ocean, seeing as the earth is 70% covered by water. In that event it would cause a major tsunami which would effect the coastline thousand of kilometers away from point of impact. If it is to hit solid earth, the crater is believed to be as big as 2500 meters deep and 8 kilometers wide. An explosion with the force of 880,000,000 tons of TNT, or the equivalent of 60,000 Hiroshima bombs. In other words, more than the fire cracker that exploded in your hand when you were little, or was that only me?

So when is this asteroid due for earth? Well, this should come as no surprise to most, but it is calculated to approach earth for the first time on Friday the 13th 2029. If it comes close enough, the earth’s gravitation will be strong enough to bend its existing course enough that it will hit earth on its next run past us, which is approximately seven years later. So what can we do to avoid this believed disaster? We’ve all seen the major blockbuster movies where a skilled team of professionals are sent into out space to save the day with atom bombs and what not, showing of extreme courage or idiocy depending on your view point. This time around though, we’re based in the real world where things might not be as glamorous as sending Bruce Willis out into outer space to rescue us. Though, we will have to send out a vessel of some sort to help remedy the situation. It is believed that if we build a space vessel big enough in terms of mass, the mass of that vessel will be enough to cause a big enough gravitational pull to help the asteroid on a new course. No fancy lasers, no atom bombs, no Bruce Willis! It’s simply physics in play. Only time will tell if you we will succeed on this mission, but time is short. Financing such a project and making it a reality isn’t done by itself, and needs international cooperation. We still don’t know if it will hit us, and if it does, where it will hit. But it is the responsibility of the entire human race to help one another on this project. And even if it doesn’t hit us, the lessons we learn from doing this will be something that we can use for the future. There are far more asteroids out there lurking, and who knows if we will ever be put in the same position again. It’s better to be prepared for what might happen, than not to be prepared at all.

We only have one earth, let’s make sure we keep the one we have for as long as possible.

After the IRC operators on Undernet had a singing competition the other night, I felt compelled to write a song myself based on a ever popular The Beatles song. So here goes.

On the network where I was born
Lived a man who surfed the net
And he told of us of his life,
In the land of networking

So we surfed up to the switch
Till we found a net of drones
And we lived beneath the packets
In our yellow patch cable

We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable
We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable

And our friends are all logged on
Many more of them live next door
And the servers starts to play

(Trumpets start to play)

We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable
We all live in a yellow patch cable
Yellow patch cable, yellow patch cable

(weird sounds)

As we live a life of binary (a life binary)
Every one of us (everyone of us) has all we need (has all we neeed)
Sky of TCP (sky of TCP) and a sea of packets (sea of packets)
In our yellow (in our yellow) patch cable (patch cable, ha ha)

Using udev can ease your life with using external units, such as memory sticks or removable storage devices which many of us use these days. On a personal note, I have a few memory sticks that I use quite often, as well as Western Digital USB HDD I use for backup purposes. Having to manually mount these every time I plug them in, is rather tedious task so I thought about a method to get this done automatically. And here comes our friend udev in for play. The purpose of udev is to manage your /dev entries, so that it becomes more manageable. To quote kernel.org on udev;

udev allows Linux users to have a dynamic /dev directory and it provides the ability to have persistent device names.

First things first, we need to find some information about the unit in question. In this case I want to get information about my USB HDD, which I know is has the dev entry of /dev/sdc.

luna:/dev# udevinfo -q path -n /dev/sdc
/block/sdc

Reading this, we now know that the information is found under /sys/block/sdc. Let’s move on.

luna:/dev# udevinfo -q all -p /sys/block/sdc
P: /block/sdc
N: sdc
S: mybook
S: disk/by-id/usb-WD_2500JB_External_57442D5743414E4B38343139353830
S: disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0
E: ID_VENDOR=WD
E: ID_MODEL=2500JB_External
E: ID_REVISION=0108
E: ID_SERIAL=WD_2500JB_External_57442D5743414E4B38343139353830
E: ID_TYPE=disk
E: ID_BUS=usb
E: ID_PATH=pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0

As we can read from this, we see that there’s an attribute that uniquely identifies this hard drive. The attribute is called «ID_SERIAL». This attribute is what we will use in our udev rule. Let us now proceed to make the actual udev rule.

vim /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules

I take caution into making a new rules file called «local.rules» to make things more manageable for both myself, but more importantly so that apt doesn’t touch my rule sets when udev might be upgraded in the future.

BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", ENV{ID_SERIAL}="WD_2500JB_External_57442D5743414E4B38343139353830", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="mybook%n"

An explanation of the above rule

BUS==”usb”
# The unit in question is plugged into the USB bus.
KERNEL==”sd*”
# The system mounts the unit to /dev/sdc as mentioned above.
ENV{ID_SERIAL}
# This is the serial number we got from using «udevinfo» earlier on.
NAME=”%k”
# I have to admit that I’m a bit uncertain what this bit does, but I know that it has to be there.
SYMLINK=”mybook%n”
# This is the name of the symlink we want created when the unit is plugged in.

And that’s all there is to it. Hope this guide was understandable and helpful. And good luck!

Update
As it turns out, udev has certain problems with the above rule set when you attach more than one USB unit that uses the usb-storage sub system. The reason is that udev doesn’t see «ENV{ID_SERIAL} for some obscure reason. Why this is the case eludes me, but I’ve found a workaround.

udevinfo -a -p `udevinfo -q path -n /dev/sdc` | grep serial

Which will yield the following:

ATTRS{serial}=="57442D5743414E4B38343139353830"

On some system, ATTRS are reported as SYSFS, but pay no attention to that. In udev rule sets, SYSFS must be used at all times, as ATTRS isn’t a recognizable parameter in udev. The new and updated rule set would then be as follows:

BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", SYSFS{serial}=="57442D5743414E4B38343139353830", NAME="%k", SYMLINK="mybook%n"

[17:06:35] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | *|
[17:06:43] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | * |
[17:06:48] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | * |
[17:06:55] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | * |
[17:07:01] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | |* |
[17:07:16] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | *| |
[17:07:31] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | * | |
[17:07:45] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | * | |
[17:07:58] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | * | |
[17:08:05] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: |* | |
[17:08:10] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: *| | |
[17:08:13] <@knutin> ohnoes!
[17:08:35] < moridin> you lostz0rz!
[17:22:13] < tolecnal> lik3, 0mg 0mg! w00t!?
[17:22:56] < tolecnal> 0mg, d4t w4z lik3 r34lly b4d pl4y! l0lz0rz!
[17:24:38] <@knutin> up yours
[17:25:33] < tolecnal> lik3, c4lm t3h fuck d0wn m4n! it’5 n0t t3h 3nd 0f t3h w0rld!
[17:27:42] -!- knutin changed the topic of #info-crew to: | | | <– anywhere, anywhen, if j00 |_|p f0r t3h ch4ll3ngz0rz0rz, tolecnal

Yet again, mother nature shows its sheer strength and brutality. And yet again, humans are left behind in awe and despair. Millions are affected as Katrina swept across Louisiana, and New Orleans, the home of my aunt and uncle. Katrina could not have timed her appearance worse, as she came in brutally the same week as my aunt and uncle were supposed to move inland safely away from the unstable weather that comes in on the southern shorelines of the US of A. My dad was coming over too, to help them move and settle in and build the farm they are setting up. Guess they should have done that a week earlier. Well, there is nothing you can do about that is there. Mother nature gives, and mother nature takes. That’s the way of life, always has been that way and will remain so for all eternity.

But it is at times like this that you see the true face of human nature. You see ordinary people become heroes, some turn desperate and become modern day vigilantes, you see people losing all they’ve ever had. Looking at the news reports from down town New Orleans reminds you not of a town that thrives with life during the Mardi Gras festival, or a town with great history, a town with that good jazzy atmosphere. What you’re looking at, is a war zone. No guns were fired, no a-bomb was dropped. No, it was mother nature that showed of her brute force. Mother nature shows of her arsenal, her potential of devastation. She has no mercy, and has no feelings. Even though no guns were fired by her, the victims of this great tragedy is now firing guns like there is no tomorrow. I can’t say that I blame them, they are fighting for their survival. It’s the sheer instinct of getting on to tomorrow, all signs of being civilized and being a moral being plummets like a rock heading from outer space into our atmosphere. It’s destined to fall to the ground. My respects go out to the ones working for the New Orleans police and fire departments, their job is hard in the first place, but the responsibility placed on their shoulders after Katrina did her work is way beyond imagination. Working around the clock for days, without sleep, not knowing where the next bullet may strife. They themselves have lost everything, and yet they stand fort trying to maintain peace and order. Seeing that many police officers have deserted comes as no surprise, most people would have in their position.

Which brings me to the federal involvement in this matter. The federal government was slow to deploy the national guard and army to the area. They showed very little interest in doing anything, and good old Bush sat on his picket fence just staring. It took a very long time before the president even bothered to make a statement, to get off his fucking arse. Adding to injury, the sitting administration has cut back on flood protection funds to cover the ever growing expenses for running the war in Iraq. The US has heaps of military personnel abroad, especially in Iraq that should have been dispatched to the disaster area. But no, good old Bush is too occupied fighting the war that his father started. His own pride makes him fail in his own back yard, where it matters the most. The fact that the US was quicker to deploy personnel to the tsunami affected areas than in their own home land also makes me wonder. It puzzles me, makes me speechless. But nothing surprises me anymore, when it comes to the Bush administration. Pack of useless, no good red necks.

Bush is like an untrained sea captain. If you show him a naval chart, he wouldn’t know how to use it. Show him a compass, and he thinks it’s a toy. Ask him to guide the ship by the stars alone, and he’ll laugh at you and say; “No, that’s damned impossible! The stars are only dots sprinkled across the sky by God to entertain us. God bless us, and God bless America!”

The only thing I can say really, is this; My thoughts go out to the flood victims in New Orleans and the surrounding areas.

Update: It seems that the initial reports my aunt and uncle was given was wrong. They’ve now been able to get to their house, who hasn’t been affected by the catastrophe at all. Just minor water damages, that’s it. I just can’t say how pleased I was to hear this.

Piracy has always been a problem for software publishers and game makers, but over the years other parties has been struck with the same problem. We have the music industry fighting the spread of illegally copied music with formats such as MP3, WMA and OGG. One of the organizations fighting this battle is RIAA, the leading organ for music artists in the US. RIAA has during the years intensified their efforts to minimize online piracy. There has been new technology that has been developed to make sure people aren’t able to spread their legally downloaded music with DRM, and intensified efforts and co-operation with ISP’s to catch huge contenders in the piracy scene.

Not only that, but the spreading of big Hollywood blockbusters before they hit the movie screens has increased vastly the last years, and the MPAA is fighting this battle with claws, scissors and what not. Even though Kazaa and other pirate resources has been removed, it is still easy to find and download illegal material. Just before Christmas, there was a huge raid against pirate sites that hosted bit torrents. One of the internet’s most visited pirate sites, Suprnova was shut down along with well over 200 other sites. This was made possible with the co-operation with people from RIAA, MPAA and ISP’s all over the world. A majority of the bandwidth used on the internet is not used for web surfing, e-mail downloads or other legal activities. It’s used for online piracy. Of course, this has huge economical impact on the firms involved and it’s in their best interest to get rid of this growing problem.

Just recently, a unofficial program was made available for users of iTunes to download their music without the content being tagged with DRM information. Thus, the users were able to copy their legally downloaded content to other sources, such as other pc’s or to other users. I can understand the record industry’s need for the implementation of DRM, but it severely limits the end user’s ability to handle their content in the way they want. If I download some music from say iTunes, that I’ve paid for, I want this music to be available to me everywhere. That be on my desktop, my laptop or my portable MP3 player. With current DRM implementations, this is not possible. I would really wish for a world without the need for such.

But what about the fight against piracy, will it ever be won? In short, I have to say; “No way in hell!”. It’s a battle that can’t be won, there will aways be ways to limit it in some ways, but every technology made by man can be broken by man. Nothing is unbreakable, everything can be tampered with. And by that I mean, everything. Given enough time and resources, computer nerds across the world will find ways to avoid copy protections and other similar technologies. I’m not saying software publishers, record companies and Hollywood should stop the battle, but they have to face the fact that the problem will always be there. The key to this issue is to make it possible for everyone to co-exist in the same sphere, and develop solutions that works for the average consumer. By that, I mean a more versatile and flexible DRM system, and make downloadable music and movies cheaper. They have to set a price line that will be very competitive with buying the actual CD or DVD. The fact is that buying music or movies over the internet, means that you suffer a quality loss from buying the real deal. This is a sacrifice I sure as hell don’t want to pay extra for, I want a discount. Thus the price line has to be much keener than the real deal. If the big boys and their lawyers will listen to me, well, hell no. They’ve probably never heard of me. But spread the word, say your opinion. Start the revolution! Make us be heard! Only if they listen will they be able to minimize their problem with online piracy.