As before, much of my spare time in the past two weeks has been spent making two more Scalemate plushies so I could give one of them to my little nephew Brandon this weekend as a "Hi, welcome to the world" present. I wanted to make two of them in case I messed up, and also to have a choice of which one to give him because they weren't going to be identical or perfect, but ideally better than the first one I sewed. I wanted them to be fairly bright and cheerful looking, the better to get his attention …
Since v0.5b of Byzantium Linux hit the Net, all of us have been taking the opportunity to get a little R&R before proceeding to the fifth and final milestone, which is writing up everything that happened in the previous six months. That's going to be a lot of stuff, but we've got good notes, a bunch of blog posts, and no shortage of lessons learned through the development process. I think when we sit down and get to work, we'll get it knocked out, edited, and published in not a very much time. I'll also be in a …
Byzantium Linux v0.5b is officially released. We've changed a significant number of things under the hood for the fourth ISC development milestone, such as completely revamping the build process by splitting the repository into a number of other modules, making the captive portal page more reliable, and updating packages to their latest stable version. All of us are kind of fried right now - that's why we called this release Sleep Deprivation - so we've made it available on the usual mirror sites as well as a brand-new BitTorrent tracker.
Life's busy right now. I'm being pulled in several different directions, sometimes simultaneously, which hasn't left a lot of time or compute cycles to do any writing. What I have had time for lately has been a lot of "fire and forget" stuff, which doesn't really do anyone any good. Failing that, long hours at my day job doing what I do best. I don't think any more need be said on that point.
The next release of Byzantium Linux (v0.5b) is due in five days, so that's where most of my spare time goes - knocking out the next …
Project Byzantium can now take a breather for a day or two to recuperate, so I have some time to write a hopefully coherent post during my second cup of coffee.
Last week we wrapped up ISC development milestone number three: Addding amateur radio support to Byzantium Linux. This was probably our more difficult development effort to date, as it required that we use our relatively newly earned skills as ham radio operators to figure out a way to connect mesh networks over long distances - longer distances than 802.11 wireless can ordinarily cover. I'll not recap the entire report …
Kali Linux (formerly Backtrack) is a distribution of Linux designed for penetration testers and information security professionals. I'll spare you the details - that's what Wikipedia is for - but I did want to post about a problem that I've been wrestling with for a couple of hours.
Kali Linux can be installed and operated like any other distribution of Linux, which means that you get all of the nifty and handy tools that you'd expect to have, like AIDE for monitoring the file system for unauthorized changes. Unfortunately, because Kali is based upon Debian, and Debian over-engineers a lot of things …
A brief post to catch everyone up while I'm at work:
Project Byzantium has been hard at work building a PTT (push-to-talk) circuit to support the third milestone of the ISC grant. What we're trying to do, in a nutshell, is this:
We have a couple of Baofeng UV-?R radios that we're trying to interface with laptops running Byzantium Linux. This is a known technology - ham radio operators have been doing datacomm over amateur radio frequencies for a couple of decades but this is a first for the three of us. What is posing a problem for us is …
It is, in theory, possible to configure any network service to be reachable over the Tor darknet. This includes instant messaging servers, like the XMPP server EjabberD. Conversely, it must be possible to configure your instant messaging client to connect over the Tor network. I used Pidgin as my client, and here's how I did it:
I then created a new XMPP account in my Pidgin client which connects to the XMPP domain the server was configured for (let's say it's 'xmpp-domain', though …
