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Uh oh

By Rich Johnson on Published: February 23, 2010 at 1:54 am

For those of you who have kissed off openSUSE, Novell, and possibly recently Ubuntu for its Yahoo deal (which by the way is with Yahoo, NOT Microsoft), it is time to kiss off other things, such as Amazon. Granted this deal blows to the highest level and just shows how shite Microsoft is, there are many companies doing this same thing with Microsoft, deals like this and others. So while you are sitting there, wearing your anti-Micro$oft (see what I did there? That’s what all of the cool Microsoft haters do) hats, ditch the following product manufacturers:

  • Samsung
  • Fuji
  • Nearly every computer manufacturer
  • Asus
  • MSI
  • Nearly every automobile manufacturer
  • More than likely your lovely ISP
  • and so much more…

Don’t forget to dismiss your family members who are using Microsoft products too, but not Uncle Ned, he is cool, oh and Aunt Jane, as they at least use Linux. And the next time you get a bill, just throw it out, as it was probably printed from a Microsoft computer. Oh boy, and your government, local police, because they are up to their armpits in Microsoft deals. I wonder if Microsoft touched the snow in the backyard? I think I will get naked and sleep out there tonight. Yuck, the thought of something Microsoft has a deal with anywhere near me gives me the heebee-jeebees.

NOTE: I sure hope you all found the sarcasm, because I am not a Microsoft lover at all. I am tired of their BS just as much as the next person, but I am also tired of the anti-Microsoft extremists and their simple-minded attitudes. It’s fine to stand up against Microsoft, and those who have deals with Microsoft, but just remember, that is a lot of standing, hope your legs and back are ready for it.

Posted in Linux | Tagged , | 11 Responses

Please say Fedora

By Rich Johnson on Published: February 18, 2010 at 1:43 pm

Last evening I went over to a family friend’s house to help her with an ongoing problem with her Internet connection. She has AT&T DSL, and every night around 5pm or so, the connection pretty much drops. Getting to a web page is hit or miss, like one in every 10 attempts it will load a page. The pings were good, but getting out was a nightmare. She has a huge laptop running Windows 7 with insane specifications. Great machine. So, I took over my netbook running Kubuntu Netbook Remix (Lucid) to see if the problem was her laptop. Right away I was able to decide it wasn’t her laptop. Further debugging made me realize it was the DSL connection. I connected directly to the DSL modem, no router, firewall, anything in between me and the Internet. The problem still existed. At that time I determined it was AT&T’s fault so we called them up. Initially the phone call was a nightmare.

Typically I am really good at understanding an Indian dialect because the area of Chicago I grew up in was largely an Indian population. The person on the phone was a bit harder to understand and I believe the reason was because they had a mix of the Indian dialect with a distinct southern US drawl. Anyways, after talking to the AT&T tech support person for a few minutes, I started telling him what was going on and what I had done thus far. He asked what version of Windows I was using to test and I told him I wasn’t using Windows and instead was using Linux. I expected the “We don’t support Linux” comment, but was floored when he said, “Please say you are using Fedora.”  I chimed in with a “Sorry, using Kubuntu.” He chuckled then said, “Some people will never learn.” We shot little jabs back and forth at each other having a bit of fun while he was doing a modem test. In the end they figured out it was their issue and some AT&T techie will be out there today to fix the issue.

So, if you were that AT&T dude I talked to last night who loves Fedora and despises us Ubuntu fanboys, drop by and say HI! It was a pleasure getting to talk to you for support on the issue, and it is great seeing that there are some tech support people who aren’t afraid to explore other options.

Posted in Personal | 84 Responses

Freenode IRC – Connect And Auth Securely

By Rich Johnson on Published: January 30, 2010 at 9:30 pm

OK, so today freenode migrated to their new server. It was a bit rough around the edges at first, however they have finally added support for connecting via SSL and using a script in Irssi you can authenticate via SASL. So, I will quickly show you how to get SSL and SASL setup for Irssi and Irssi only, and I am assuming you already have a connection to Freenode already setup.

WARNING: It has been brought to my attention that the Irssi folks get mad when people tell you to edit the config file instead of using the commands, so with that, backup your config file first, and if anything goes wrong, not my fault 🙂

  1. Let’s install the necessary packages (I think this is all, I already had openssl installed but had to install the libcrypt- packages for the SASL script below): 
    sudo apt-get install openssl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl libcrypt-dh-perl libcrypt-blowfish-perl
  2. Grab and save the cap_sasl.pl script to ~/.irssi/scripts and setup a link for it to autorun: 
    cd ~/.irssi/scripts
wget http://www.freenode.net/sasl/cap_sasl.pl
mkdir autorun  ## only if you do not have this directory already
cd autorun
ln -s ../cap_sasl.pl .
  3. Fire up Irssi without connecting to anything: 
    irssi -!
  4. Once in Irssi, setup your username and password for SASL: 
    /sasl set freenode your_nick your_password DH-BLOWFISH
/sasl save
/save
  5. Quit Irssi
  6. Using a text editor, edit ~/.irssi/config and in the section that says servers = ( you want to remove the stuff between the { and } for freenode, and then add the following in its place: 
    address = "chat.us.freenode.net";
chatnet = "freenode";
port = "7000";
use_ssl = "yes";
ssl_verify = "yes";
ssl_capath = "/etc/ssl/certs";
autoconnect = "yes";
  7. Now under the chatnets = ( section, you want the freenode = part to be changed to: 
    freenode = { type = "IRC"; };

If you get a message about your nick being “Juped” or “temporarily unavailable” and get switched to Guestxxxx nick, read the following, otherwise enjoy your new secure connection.

Now you can go ahead and connect to IRC like you are used to. If you have the ENFORCE flag set for your nickname, you may come across some issues with identifying, and the one message I kept getting was:

Nick nixternal is Juped

If you get this, you need to disable the ENFORCE flag on your nick (make sure you are identified with your correct nick first):

/msg nickserv set enforce off

After that, disconnect from IRC, then reconnect to IRC. You shouldn’t be getting that error message now. If you do, go to #freenode and complain accordingly 🙂 If all is well, you can go ahead and set the ENFORCE flag back to on:

/msg nickserv set enforce on

Now all should be well. Enjoy your new secure, SSL and SASL authentication, connection.

Posted in Application | Tagged , | 6 Responses

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