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racks / enclosures / environmental units
by hanasaki 16 Dec '04

16 Dec '04

anyone know where to buy something that will hold about 10u in an enclosed box with fans and filters?

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RE: hand powered Linux box
by Brian Densmore 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

> -----Original Message----- > From: Duane Attaway > > On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, djgoku wrote: > > ... APC is > evil and sets > their float voltages too high. Its a great business model. > > Marine batteries are about $60 for the 125 Ah sizes at > Walmart. Pretty > big bang for the buck. That's about 20 times more power than > the original > UPS battery. You should be able to modify the float voltage by adding resistance to the circuit. I have yet to make my homemade UPS. What do you recommend for an enclosure? I think it's safe to assume that marine/ motorcycle batteries are to big to fit in the APC battery slot. I was thinking about using sheet metal cut and bent. Something like: +-+ +-+ <-- screw tabs +-+-+------+-+-+ | | | | | | v +---+--------------+----+-+ | | | | | | | inside | | | | | | | | | | | | | +---+-+-+------+-+-+----+-+ +-+ +-+ +--------------+ | | | | +-+--------------+ | | | | | inside | | | | | | | +-+--------------+ ^ |______ screw tab

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XLiveCD
by djgoku 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

If you are ever at a windows box and need ssh this would be great... Testing right now. Having problems with my laptop not see anything on the disk... http://xlivecd.indiana.edu/ -- dj_goku -www.djgoku.com- -www.tektronic.org-

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RE: hand powered Linux box
by Brian Densmore 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

> -----Original Message----- > From: Duane Attaway > > On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, djgoku wrote: > > ... Oh, I can push an average of 200 watts of power from my > exercise bike. A > hamster can put out enough power to light a LED. Must not forget all > sources of power that can run our computers! > > http://www.otherpower.com/hamster.html > http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_experiments.html > Boy I can't tell you how many times my Hamsterlite (TM, patent pending) has kept me from stubbing my toes at night!

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Meeting Date
by kclug＠itdepends.com 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

I just realized that the meeting was not last night, but is next Tuesday, 12/21. Duh! So, I think I can make that meeting. I'll see about getting the Q1 reservation filled out to drop off that night. BTW, I noticed that this statement on the website needs updating: "Free parking after 6:00 on the street or in the lot off of Oak on the east side of the building." That's for the old library, which was on Oak. Peace, Jim

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RE: knoppix question
by Brian Densmore 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

> -----Original Message----- > From: D. Joe > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 10:42:38AM -0600, Brian Densmore wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > > From: D. Joe > > > > > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 08:48:20AM -0600, Brian Densmore wrote: > > > > I've booted Knoppix on my laptop which only has 96MB RAM. > > > > I didn't touch any keys to do this. Now to be fair there is > > > > a swap partition on the drive and it may have seen this and > > > > used it. In fact the creators would be foolish not to look > > > > for and use it. > > > > > > How foolish it is depends on what you use the disk for. > > > > Yes, it is all relative, but based on the designed use/audience > > for Knoppix (aka, GUI desktop, Linux newbies, Windows users), > > it would be most desirable to boot using as much power and with > > as little interaction as possible. Hence I made my comment > [. . . ] > > >From the knoppix.org main page (English version): > > "KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue > system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial > software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything > on a hard disk." > > So, I guess it depends on how one reads that list--as a set of > design goals in order of decreasing importance to the designer, > or as a simple enumeration of the kinds of uses one might > anticipate. I am not contesting the usefulness for Knoppix, but they do state Linux demo and educational CD *before* rescue system. Any Linux distro can be used as a rescue system, so stating that as a goal is redundant. > > I suspect you've conflated the design goals of the disk with the > uses to which you put it. Perhaps, but we differ in our interpretations. Yours is perfectly valid and I consider mine so also. Opinions are after all opinions. > > > as I said before Knoppix isn't the ideal distro for > > troubleshooting broken systems. There are much better choices > > for such tasks. > > How many different live CDs have you used to fix broken systems, I have no need to fix broken systems. I have not had a broken system since switching to Linux 7 years ago (or more). [That is not to say that I haven't trashed my system by doing stupid experiments, but I have not had a system break. In these times tomsrtbt was all I needed. Or a new install of an upgraded version. I have yet to lose a single character of data from a Linux system. I have trashed: programs, libraries , rpm databases, and gentoo configurations. None of which, I suspect, could be fixed neatly by any tool.] > > How suited KNOPPIX is depends on the specific task at hand: True. I was merely stating that *if I were to want to fix a broken system* I wouldn't want to wait for X to boot, for KDE to launch, etc. I am, I guess of the old school that way. If you need to fix something, do it from the CLI. It's faster and you most likely will have more control. But then I don't do much in the way of fixing broken/borked Windows. I find it saves me having to digest massive quantities of Mylanta. ;') IMHO, Brian Densmore

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RE: Lexar Secure Jumpdrives
by Brian Densmore 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

> -----Original Message----- > From: Jason Clinton > > > On Tuesday 14 December 2004 11:14, Brian Kelsay wrote: > > That, my friend, was an awesome post. This may sound like > a simple thing ... > > *chuckle* Thanks for the compliment! I'll add that to my list of > awesome-projects-I'll-get-to-someday-soon. ;) I second Brian's statement. I would only add one thing to that idea. I would make the script the default mount command and pass thru the mount command to the real mount command unless it was one of the "encrypted devices". Ok two things, I would also add an option to require a password or passphrase rather than just a public/private key scheme. > > ... easy to _not_ forget. Losing your private key is a very nasty > proposition -- > publishing revocation certificates is _not_ a fun thing. > Why is that? I would think you would want to do this every so often, to ensure a bit more security. Especially since it's relatively easy now to build a really powerful mainframe cheaply, that can do nothing but crack private/public keys. Not to mention the fact that the encryption techniques we thought were so secure turn out to have problems too. When is there going to be another key signing event?

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RE: knoppix question
by Brian Densmore 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

> -----Original Message----- > From: D. Joe > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 08:48:20AM -0600, Brian Densmore wrote: > > I've booted Knoppix on my laptop which only has 96MB RAM. > > I didn't touch any keys to do this. Now to be fair there is > > a swap partition on the drive and it may have seen this and > > used it. In fact the creators would be foolish not to look > > for and use it. > > How foolish it is depends on what you use the disk for. Yes, it is all relative, but based on the designed use/audience for Knoppix (aka, GUI desktop, Linux newbies, Windows users), it would be most desirable to boot using as much power and with as little interaction as possible. Hence I made my comment based on the intended use and audience for Knoppix. My wife who is rather PC-illiterate, wouldn't know how to respond for a request to mount a swap disk partition and would probably make her nervous and she'd probably get frustrated and give up trying to use it. So I stand by my original statement. Certainly there are risks in doing that, but as I said before Knoppix isn't the ideal distro for troubleshooting broken systems. There are much better choices for such tasks. Brian

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OT: more cleaning
by Ben Kelley 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

Free to the first person to claim them. 2 HP customer education 3 ring binders with the following content: HP-UX System Administration for Series 300/400/700 Unix Systems Basics II They came with the cube I moved into, and I never found a need for them. Maybe someone here would want them?

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Re: Lexar Secure Jumpdrives
by Brian Kelsay 14 Dec '04

14 Dec '04

That, my friend, was an awesome post. This may sound like a simple thing to you, since you have been dealing with encryption for a while, but have you thought of doing a detailed write-up and sample scripts to get a person new to encryption started? That would be a cool thing to post to http://www.gnupg.org/(en)/documentation/howtos.html or as a small project on freshmeat. (e.g. Encrypted Jumpdrive/Pendrive Howto) Just a thought. Yes, the attempt to be cross-platform is usually the wrench in the works. I have seen some real small USB fobs that I think only carry an encryption key. They are only about a half inch long or just a bit more. Have you seen those and do they work in Linux? If they work, they might be just the thing. I imagine that if you look at them in Linux, you will find that they only contain a fat16 filesystem with 1-8 MB of flash, maybe less. A private key takes up how much space if it is in a text file or compressed? Not much, maybe a few kb. Brian Kelsay >>> Jason Clinton <me(a)jasonclinton.com> 12/14/04 10:55AM >>> Well, I put all the questions here together because my suggestion encompasses all of them. The Lexar encryption hardware is not compatible with Linux; it's done in hardware and, IIRC, it's extremely simple (easy to crack) but no device driver exists. Rather than worry about having enough size on either the encrypted partition or the non-encrypted partition, I suggest that you partition and format the whole thing in VFAT32 and place a copy of gnupg on the device. There's a number of ways that you can do it but here's one scenario that can vary in size and is compatible with Windows unlike the loopback file system method: On your Linux systems, you have a /usr/local/bin/mount script that you manually invoke that mounts the /dev/sd? device to /mnt/cf0. It then looks for /mnt/cf0/encrypted_archive.tar.gz and executes gnupg with your private key from your home directory and decompresses the archive to some place in /tmp or /home/~. You have another /usr/local/bin/umount script that reverses all of those steps: wrap up the changes in the directory, encrypt _against_your_public key_ on the device, unmount. On your Windows systems, the exact same process takes place but it's all automatic via the autorun.inf file using MING32 compiled gnupg.exe, tar.exe and gzip.exe on the device. If you take your device to another person's system, you will need to explore some of the many ways that you can securely access your private key from remote locations (perhaps even a separate, 8MB pen drive to store your private key -- they make watches that do that that have USB connectors). That way, if you lose the device, the person would need both the private key and the password to access the data. Regarding the existing software on the device, there's no danger in losing any of it unless you want the Windows-only, weak encryption to work with Windows. This all sounds rather complicated but in practice, good encryption is hard work and the cross-platform nature makes it even more complicated. Good encryption is not yet a commodity.

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