Hardy smbfs is borked.  Actually, I understand that smbmount has been adandoned.  CIFS, the samba replacement in Hardy, is busted.  All hail Ubuntuforums.org!  Beta OS != perfect, right?

It seems there was a change in the Samba package between Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04.  I was getting an error while trying to connect to some Solaris shares.
$ smbclient -L //web -I 192.1.168.0 -U user%password
Server requested plaintext password but 'client use plaintext auth' is disabled

It seems that adding the following to your /etc/samba/smb.conf file solves the problem:

client plaintext auth = yes
client lanman auth = yes


It took awhile to realize that just setting plaintext auth to true wasn’t enough. lanman auth overrides it. Should have read the man page more closely, I guess.

I’ve been having some trouble lately with RoadRunner from Time Warner Cable.  Their DNS servers are ridiculously slow and I decided to take some action and switch to OpenDNS.  Details follow.

First, I configured my Buffalo router running DD-WRT to use OpenDNS and to update DynDNS of my dynamic IP address.  Then I  configured  dnsomatic to update OpenDNS  so that my custom network settings will follow my home network as the address changes.  Actually, my dynamic address at home hasn’t changed more than a couple of times in more than a year, but it’s nice to have a static domain name to use when connecting to my network from elsewhere.

I think my tubes are considerably faster and I’m not getting the flaky name resolution failures that I’ve been getting recently.  Plus, when I don’t have to support TWC in their ignorant and greedy bid to redirect DNS requests from nonexistent domains to their advertisements.

I’ve been waiting to see a US precedent concerning forcing a suspect to divulge encryption passwords. The UK passed the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) in October of 2007 which provides for a two year imprisonment for failure to produce an encryption key regardless of any other charges. The RIPA has been used once against an animal rights activist. Now, a Vermont judge has ruled that, under the Fifth Amendment, a suspect cannot be required to produce evidence including an encryption key. Here is some interesting blog commentary by an attorney.

This is a particularly interesting case in a couple of ways. First, officials opened his laptop and started poking around as he was being processed at a Canada-United States border crossing. Second, it brings up some interesting questions concerning rights of accused. The particular crime he is accused of, possessing “animation depicting adult and child pornography”, is one that inspires extreme emotional reactions, it seems. People then tend to forget why the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were included in the Bill of Rights, namely that American citizens weren’t protected by the Magna Carta and searches and seizures illegal in England were commonplace in the colonies.

Of course, if Bruce Schneier is right, the government may be trying to place a backdoor in new encryption standards to avoid this sort of mess. It wouldn’t be the first time, though. See the clipper chip, or mandatory key escrow. I’m sure this isn’t over, but it’s a nice turn of events.

I’ve gotten around to migrating my backup partition to a Truecrypt encrypted partition. This partition, /dev/sda2, was an ext3 partition I’ve been using for backups. I have an external backup drive (also encrypted) that I keep off-site and so didn’t worry about destroying the backup data on the partition.

Knowing a little something about computer forensics, I wanted to ensure that data I had written prior to encrypting the partition would be unrecoverable. If I had wanted to erase the entire drive I would have used Darik’s Boot and Nuke or some other linux-based drive eraser conforming at least to the DoD specification for file wiping. It’s important to remember, though, that wiping only files likely leaves data remnants in the empty drive space, file slack space, and sectors marked as bad. So, clearly it’s important to erase the entire partition or drive, not only files.

I wanted to only erase a partition so I used a more configurable utility to overwrite the space within the partition. First I rm -rf’d the files and directories on the partition. Then I overwrote the available space in the partition with random data using dd and /dev/urandom. sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/back/bigfile I probably should have just overwritten the partition at the device level, but I didn’t think of it until later. Next I used wipe to remove the bigfile. Only then did it occur to me that I could call wipe against the block device itself. sudo wipe -Q 1 -R /dev/urandom /dev/sda2

Hoping that the drive was sufficiently overwritten with random data I created a Truecrypt container on the partition. I chose to use the ext3 file system so chose the ‘no filesystem’ option in Truecrypt. After creating the container, I mounted the container. sudo truecrypt /dev/sda2 Then, I created the filesystem. sudo mkfs.ext3 -cjv /dev/mapper/truecrypt0

Now I have an encrypted backup partition on a separate internal hard drive completely independent of the LVM/dm-crypt encrypted system. I have a script that calls rsync against my /home, /etc, and /usr/local directories, which is everything I need to rebuild a system.

To those who would suggest that only people with something to hide should be concerned with privacy, I urge you to read ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy.

A friend and I were at lunch yesterday and the conversation turned to progressive atheism.  He proposed this question: Why do progressive atheists support causes, such as universal health care, that have no or little impact on them?  This question also applies to greenhouse gas emissions and many currently relevant topics.  I found it a very thought provoking question.  There are some implicit assumptions in the question that I found troublesome, but it was a worthwhile topic.  I’ll share my answer.I suspect many progressive atheists are humanists a la William James.  Disbelieving divine retribution but desiring a better world, progressive atheists value life and, not believing in afterlives, work to improve the quality of this life not only for themselves but for all.  I described environmentalism as a moral decision, which led us to discuss the source of morals in the absence of religion.

I related an NPR piece I recently heard featuring  Joshua D. Greene discussing his research into morality using neuroimaging.  My friend suggested that perhaps religion is a justification and codification of morality rather than the source.  This fits with Greene’s experience showing that people of all and no religions make the same moral decisions.  It was Greene’s theory, if I recall correctly, that morality is an evolutionary adaptation to social interaction.

My mother and I once had a conversation in which she said that she would expect atheists to all be murders as a result of not fearing god.  In fact, I hear this a lot in the media.  I suspect that if those people, my mother included, lost faith they would not immediately turn to murder.  I imagine they’d find that morals can operate independently of religion.

is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Well, at least it seems to be the favorite number of the Motion Picture Association of America. They’re issuing DMCA Takedown Notices to people who post this number, I’ve read. I’ve always wanted one of my own! For those readers not ‘in the know’, this number is the decryption key for HD-DVD Processing. DVD encryption is meant to prevent DVD copying, but also makes it a criminal act to watch DVD’s in Linux, among other things. When I pay for a DVD I want to be able to watch it. That’s it. Also, copyright law clearly grants the right to make ‘archival backups’. See Spread this number for more information.