I really don’t read Digg, but I found this little gem:

And heres the appropriate lolcat:

moar funny pictures

Because of my parents recent sellout merger with a larger company, I had to make sure that my Internet activity went unnoticed for the time that I am still here. I have a server at home already. The rub is that I recently upgraded to the Tomato firmware because of some issues I have with DD-WRT. In my haste to upgrade, I forgot to set up port forwarding to my server and forgot to set up the ssh daemon on my WRT54G. Thankfully, my friend Tesseract has a server at Drexel University that I have an account on. So with a little:

ssh user@remote.host.com -C -D 1080

And configuring my applications to utilize a SOCKS5 proxy server through localhost:1080 and configuring Firefox to tunnel the DNS requests through the ssh connection, we go from:

Unproxified:

To

Proxified:

This, coupled with passwordless ssh login and a brief entry into your .profile / .bash_profile file to set up a command alias, you have a very powerful, secure and easy solution to utilize anywhere you may be using your laptop on an unsecured wifi access point at Panera or the like. Or to simply get around corporate firewalls. One caveat on the latter; your company’s sysadmin may become interested at the sudden increase of encrypted traffic on his/her network and become suspicious as to what exactly you are doing. So happy holidays and safe hacking!

With the advent of the new Web 2.0 business and website model, more and more people are trying to cash in on the new content creators of the Internet; you and me. It has become easier for “professional” bloggers to bring in enough money to sustain themselves through advertising revenue just by driving enough traffic to their website. This is not a rant that I do not get a lot of traffic; this is not a rant that I am better than everyone else because I do not succumb to the commercialization of blogging. Lets face it; theres a lot of subpar blogs and websites out there, many run by so-called “professional bloggers” or “professional reviewers”. Please note that I do not call myself a professional blogger because quite frankly, I am not a professional blogger and I know that most of the time, I rant and merely present my opinion on an issue. I know my place and I will not pretend to be one of these people. Please read on…

Ohio Linuxfest 2007 is just around the corner! This is the place to be if you’re in the Northeast and you’re an avid Linux user looking to converse with other avid Linux users. For the past two years, I have been making the short trip between Pittsburgh and Columbus in order to participate in this event. The past two years has seen the number of attendees that I have been bringing climb. In the past, it was easier for us to manage who was coming and coordinate transportation and lodging. Last year, it was very challenging and frustrating because some people wanted to come along but wanted to contribute absolutely nothing to getting there. It’s simple; if you want to go, plan to go! Don’t rely on others to plan around you! This year, I am officially stepping down from that post and leaving my fellow attendees make their own transportation and lodging arrangements. I am still attending the conference, but I have planned for myself and myself only. Simply put, if you want to go; we will see you there!

I recently attempted to set up FreeRADIUS to act as an authentication server for a wireless network at my place of employment. Unfortunately, I had to jump through more hoops than required because of some incompatible legal red tape. You see, the Ubuntu package for FreeRADIUS comes from the Debian distribution. Unfortunately, this version of the package cannot link against the OpenSSL library because of some arbitrary interpretation of the GPL license. This whole frame of mind has to stop. As I have done in the past, I am releasing a version of the package on binarybadass.com that has this compiled in; regardless of what the license pundits say. If you are aware enough of the problem to require these packages, I’m sure you’ll know how to install them and configure them. The usual caveats apply; I’m not responsible if you manage to turn your computer into a molten pile of plastic, metal and silicon. I do not provide technical support for this package, yadda yadda yadda. This package was built for Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” so your mileage may vary with other Debian and derivative distributions.

FreeRADIUS:

• freeradius_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_i386.deb

FreeRADIUS Extensions:

• freeradius-dialupadmin_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_all.deb
• freeradius-iodbc_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_i386.deb
• freeradius-krb5_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_i386.deb
• freeradius-ldap_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_i386.deb
• freeradius-mysql_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_i386.deb
• freeradius-postgresql_1.1.3-3ubuntu1_i386.deb

Pertinent Links:

• Article about Debian and OpenSSL
• FreeRADIUS
• Forum Posting in Ubuntu Forums