So I decided I would install Solaris 10 to see if I am able to get a compiler going (GCC) to see if I can port certain parts of 0x58-unix to Solaris, most notably the event handling. It is proving to more difficult than I had imagined to get a real Unix system up and running. I am able to log in over SSH and use bash, which is better than the default shell that Solaris uses.

Everything is different, whereas in FreeBSD I am pretty used that when I go to Linux that some commands will act differently, Solaris is a totally different beast. The PS output I was looking for in FreeBSD is:

ps auxwww

in Solaris it is:

ps -Af

Took me a while to figure out. I have to re-learn different commands, where things are located. GCC is not even installed standard, so as far as I know there is no compiler on the system, and that for an install that is pretty hefty. First thing I need to teach myself is how to make the install lean. I want just core, no Xorg, no staroffice and other such stuff that makes no sense to have on something that is a server.

I just read the rather excellent articale The sorry state of Open Source software on The Jem Report. I will let the article speak for itself, I enjoyed the read!

I am really pissed off, Samba is throwing errors at me, and I have no clue how to fix them. Samba developers say read the documentation, but this is a standalone server. These are the error messages:

[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_administrators(785)
create_builtin_administrators: Failed to create Administrators
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_users(751)
create_builtin_users: Failed to create Users
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_administrators(785)
create_builtin_administrators: Failed to create Administrators
[2007/04/14 01:47:11, 0] auth/auth_util.c:create_builtin_users(751)
create_builtin_users: Failed to create Users

So I did what the documentation told me to do, and tried to net groupmap them.

Guests (S-1-5-21-3909197182-276841819-79004845-546) -> nobody
Administrators (S-1-5-21-3909197182-276841819-79004845-544) -> wheel

There is no good documentation on what the error means or how to fix it. The weird thing is that the share used to be working fine until I decided I did not want to give others the ability to add items to the share, unless they were logged in as me, so I wanted to make it accessible by guests yet have it writeable by me. That is when the nightmare started. Now no-one could access the share, with valid username/password or without. (Yes, permissions were set up properly, I am not dumb).

Fuck samba. I can set up an FTP server, allow anonymous logins and make people use an FTP client to access the files. Samba is becoming too big, too convulated and too overwhelming for the standard user. I by no means think of myself as a standard user, however if I am unable to figure out how to get Samba working by reading the docs and having a clear grasp on the concepts then something is wrong. Setting up Samba used to be simple, compile it, install it, smbpasswd a new account edit smb.conf and off you go. Nowadays there are many more steps.

Is there a FUSE port for Windows yet? I bet there is a really good Fuse FTP plugin! Samba needs a timeout, some cleanup and some better documentation as to why it can't create it's own builtin users.

I was watching some of the 2007 ShmooCon video's and came across one about Backbone Fuzzing.

This one caught my eye, I have been hearing quite a bit about fuzzing lately and I got interested in it, since it applies to the field of Network Security and Software Engineer. Since any data I would be receiving over the wire could be fuzzed I would need proper input validation, studying what one is will be subjected to could help avoid mistakes.

I also believe that if she does find real flaws in Cisco's IOS and other implementations it could mean big problems for the internet. She is going after the core protocols that run the internet, and would cause it to die a pretty harsh death if they suddenly stopped working.

Looking forward, the MPLS stuff ought to bring up very interesting results!

I am starting to question wether these days we need to even have physical hardware lying around to do testing on. I ask this question because I have been playing with VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X, and I love it. I have several images of different OS's that I can boot in a virtual machine to do certain tasks, mostly testing of software.

Normally I would have grabbed an install CD for my OS, walked up to one of the many machines I own, and installed the clean OS with the software and tested it. If I screwed something up badly I would start from scratch, no harm done. These days I do my testing after I create a quick snapshot of the OS as it currently stands, so if I screw up, I hit another button and it all gets undone. No more long waiting time to install an OS, quick snapshot and we are back to where we were.

I for myself have been trying to justify keeping the machines I have, especially since every single last one of them has been used because I needed machines to test something on, with Virtual Machines that has become a thing of the past and they are mostly neglected. One of them is still used for the lan parties at UAT, but that is just one HD, which I could pop into any machine with two interfaces and have it up and running. Thinking about it now, I could technically run that in a VMWare session as well without losing functionality by getting a second interface for my Mac OS X, and exposing that to the underlying Guest OS as well.

In a business environment I think VMWare machines would come in very handy for testing of new software that is about to be deployed. Is virtualization the way of the future in terms of testing? Or even for machines that have to do real work? Let me know what you think by commenting on this post.

My birthday was really good fun. Did not do much all day other than part of my homework, then later that night me and 4 others went out to Outback (all expenses paid for me! Awesome, thanks Kris!). We were planning to go watch a movie but could not find anything we could all decide on.

Instead we headed back home, sat on the patio outside, smoked Hookah and watched TV through MythFrontend on Mark's laptop. It was a great night :D.

I am still looking for a job, if you know anything or anyone that is looking for a Linux/FreeBSD systems administrator, programmer or anything of the sorts that would be great. I am located in Laveen, AZ and have limited mobility as I don't own a car.

Will get a resume back online soon.

I have signed up for the Google summer of code submitting two applications. One is off course bsdPanel, and hopefully that will be the one that is accepted, the other is the creation of BSD licensed text processing tools. Diff, grep, and sort. Entry on the FreeBSD website.

I am really hoping for bsdPanel though. If I don't get accepted for bsdPanel or the BSD licensed text processing utilities then I will be looking for people to sponsor me working on bsdPanel. If you want the chance to sponsor me, or know someone that is willing to sponsor me, please contact me at xistence [at] gmail [dot] com. It would be in part to cover some of my tuition cost, as well as money for books for school.

Should Apple be making fun of Vista UAC? by ZDNet's George Ou -- Windows Vista UAC (User Account Control) has an additional security feature called Secure Desktop that hardens the UAC privilege escalation prompt, but some people seem to be upset with this feature because they say it’s annoying. Apple has even gone as far as making a new TV commercial out of it with "PC" being bossed [...]

I disagree, what you have shown here is how UAC shows up when installing an application, however installing an application on Mac OS X can be as simple as drag and drop. Most of the software I download is downloaded in a DMG which you can mount. I can drag it into my Applications folder, and if I have Administrator rights, I won't get asked anything. If I don't have Administrator rights, I can run it right from the DMG or move it into another folder in my home directory aptly named Applications and run it from there. Mac OS X does not ask me for a user-name and password in both those cases, whereas the UAC will ask you if you want to run it as Administrator to install it, even if you would like to place it on your Desktop in a folder named Program Files.

The Mac OS X commercials also seem to refer to the Windows firewall, which asks whether you want to allow incoming or outgoing. When I ran Vista I had disabled the firewall, so I can't say if that is true or not, however I do feel that the Apple advertising is fair. Nothing about it is unfair. I as a user of Windows Vista am unable to run a setup program under any user rights other than that of an Administrator, which allows the installer full access to my entire machine, which is unacceptable to me. In Mac OS X I can drag it to any folder and execute it from there, and it won't have privileges above that of what the user is running at.

Even most .pkg's in Mac OS X can be installed in an alternate location as to not require Administrator privileges, however most if not all .pkg's are .pkg's since they need to install something in /System which is the guts of Mac OS X. For example, SMCFanControl requires this to install a kernel extension.