Information Technology

I had a nightmare this night: Someone had hacked my server evily. Whatever command I tried to execute, strange log lines appeared on the terminal which looked like shell code installing a rootkit and sending passwords to an e-mail address. He/she even activated an HTTP-proxy which hijacked requests from within my network to some weird other URLs. As additional ‘fun’, the cracker replaced simple commands like ‘ls’ or ‘less’ with some counterpart like ‘rm’, such that I ruined the system more and more by myself. In my dream, I now had to spend all night to set up a new system with a bad feeling about not having enough know-how to conserve the broken system for forensic analysis.

Please, dear crackers, don’t do it like that.

I successfully stitched together my first panorama pictures on GNU/Linux. I used the GUI frontend hugin, which itself uses autopano-sift for automatic detection of mapping points. For the actual stitching process I used enblend, but not from within hugin, as there currently is no possibility to watch it progressing. This tutorial helped me doing my first steps, more tutorials are available on hugin’s website.

My first try was on a series of 3 pictures of a rainbow above Vienna, Austria:

Next, I created a panorama picture of a mountain view consisting of 8 pictures, which I took last october near Kitzbühel in Tyrol, Austria:

Installation of these tools was quite easy, as I use a distribution which includes such cutting-edge multimedia programs in its package tree: Gentoo Linux.

Free space is getting small on my workstation as well as on my web-&-mail server, and I want to set up a separate firewall computer anyway. My first idea had been to use my current workstation as server, turn the current server to a firewall and get myself a bleeding-edge shiny new workstation.

But I found a cheaper solution: As the only real reason is missing space - my workstation CPU and RAM are still big enough, and I don’t do any gaming anyway -, I will buy a SATA-controller with 2-3 new 200GB SATA harddisks for my workstation. Then I will purchase an average PC by auction, put my current workstation harddisks (2x 80GB ATA) into it and set up a Debian Testing system on it - this will be the new server then. When everything is tested, the old server with the old, old 2x 4GB SCSI harddisks will become an OpenBSD firewall.

With three 200GB disks on RAID-5, I would then have 400GB space to waste for music, movies, video editing and other things.

Update: As my mainboard doesn’t have 64bit PCI, it’s getting a bit trickier than I thought. I don’t really want to buy 3 new harddisks of a dying technology, so a simple additional ATA controller and a third harddisk of the given type could be the solution for my workstation, but what about the server and firewall then? I still have to think about it.

Update 2: I will keep an even cheaper solution: A simple PCI SATA-controller with 2 new harddisks on (SW-)RAID-1 will do it for a while on my workstation, RAID-5 has to wait for another day. The solution for server and firewall will stay as mentioned above.