I've made a small plugin which generates a tag cloud for your nb style blog. It's probably a bit rough aroudn the edges, but it works, as you can see on the right.

You can fetch it here.

I'm using the gallery plugin for the photos on this site. This plugin works great and easy, but there wasn't an easy way to create a slide show. So that you can click 'next' and go to the next photo. So I've added this functionality to the script.

I'm putting this up for download, so that other people may use this too. gallery.sh If you want to regenerate the slides, you can just remove the html and slides directories.

For the unix minded... I've bundled the C-fonts from windows Vista in a nice package:

windows C fonts

Well, I've finished my conversion to nanoblogger. I think it looks quite neat. Maybe I will keep this more up to date from now on :)

Happy hollidays.

master's thesis

For future reference. My master's thesis can be found here. It details the development of the DNSSEC protocol, a supposed successor of the DNS on the Internet.

It was officially publiced as a research document by my university (University of Nijmegen).

You can find the thesis (pdf|ps) here:
CSI-report.pdf.
CSI-report.ps.

Our original announcement of our marriage can be found at this page

Ans and I are married. There are already some pictures

You can see the card we send too.

.my

I was recently invited to give a talk in KL (Malaysia) about DNSSEC. They are running a three year program after which .my should be signed.

You can find the talk (pdf) here:
dot-my-pres.pdf.

In the go'old days cursors didn't blink. I also don't like it.

I wanted to have a non-blinking, block cursor in (g)Vim, turns out the following is needed:
set gcr=a:blinkwait0,a:block-cursor

This is (perl) FUSE program that creates a filesystem from the DNS, so can walk in the nl/ dir and just 'ls' the labels and 'cd' to child zones. This is a DNS Filesystem.

It's pretty alpha, but it works. Comments are welcome:
fusedns.pl.

You have gotten your adsl modem (in my case a speedtouch 510) and you want to use linux to do the routing and firewalling stuff. Mainly because the 510 is a very brain dead modem, which mangles too long DNS packets, can't do IPv6, etc, etc.

I've seen a lot of pages about SIP_SPOOF and DHCP_SPOOF (for details I refer to google). People remarked that those things worked, but are a hack. If you go down this rat hole, use SIP_SPOOF instead of DHCP_SPOOF, because that is a lesser hack IMO.

Also I have KPN ADSL (Netherlands), you might have more luck if you use ADSL from bbeyond. If I knew then what I know now, I hadn't taken KPN ADSL...

Anyhow, I couldn't get either of these hacks to work at my place, so I needed something else. This page tells you what I did; it boils down to using the modem as some kind of bridge and do the actual calling from your linux box. You actually get a ppp0 device which is your Internet connection. Just as in the go'old times ;-)

You need to setup your local network so that you can communicate with your modem. This means having a 10.0.0.0/8 address on your ethernet that is connected to your modem.

modem side

It is assumed you can reach your modem on 10.0.0.138 and you have a browser handy.

Put the CD from KPN in your computer and find a file called PPTP.INI on it. Upload this configuration file to your modem. You may need to rename the file to PPTP.ini. Next configure your modem, disable DNS, DHCP, i.e. all the br0ken stuff. Your modem now only bridges between the local ethernet and the adsl connection.

Note: I couldn't get the bridging going be using easy-setup (->Bridging) in the modem's configuration, I really had to upload this PPTP.INI file to the modem.

linux side

Download pptp-linux, it's in Debian/Ubuntu. Configure it to make it work. Examples of configuration can be found on the website from pptp-linux.

Make it work at boot time - the Debian way

This was a bit difficult, but I got it working in the end. In /etc/ppp/peers create a file with a name for your connection. I called mine xs4all, in there put:

pty "pptp 10.0.0.138 --nolaunchpppd"
user `yourusername@axs4all'
lcp-echo-interval 10
lcp-echo-failure 3
defaultroute
persist

Also be sure to update the /etc/ppp/options and /etc/ppp/pap-secrets according to pptp-linux's documentation.

And in /etc/network/interfaces add the following:

# ADSL ppp config
iface xs4all inet ppp
    provider xs4all

where provider xs4all must match the name of the file under /etc/ppp/peers. Don't forget auto xs4all somewhere in that file and you're set to go.

trying it out

Do a pptp 10.0.0.138, this should yield (after one or two seconds) a ppp0 interface with your ip address. After this I was able to ping hosts on the Internet. It worked :-):

ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
          inet addr:xx.xx.17.126  P-t-P:xx.xx.250.2  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:1036930 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:639014 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
          RX bytes:1167757439 (1.0 GiB)  TX bytes:50856576 (48.5 MiB)

Kill your pppd daemon and try the command pon xs4all, this should now also work. Kill the connection with poff xs4all. If this works the stuff from /etc/network/interfaces should also work. Try ifup xs4all, if that works the interface should also come up during boot.

the future and beyond

Next I need to reconfigure my firewall and setup the (new) internal network, but that is all trivial.

Done is implemented as two shell scripts in zsh that allows for keeping a backlog of root's changes to the system. This is extremely handy if more than one person has the root account on a machine.

If you login as root you get a greeting message like this:

Last login: Mon Jul 22 12:10:58 2002 on pts/7
======================================================================
     Miek Gieben                        Mon Jul 22 13:20:33 CEST 2002
                                            Linux elektron 2.4.19-rc3
======================================================================

17-07-2002, 13:13:26 : miekg : System shutdown: kernel: 2.4.19-rc1
18-07-2002, 10:24:25 : miekg : spam
18-07-2002, 12:39:51 : miekg : spam
19-07-2002, 11:50:55 : miekg : upgrade
20-07-2002, 18:31:26 : miekg : enter in /etc/hosts

======================================================================

[21:54:16 /home/miekg]
root@elektron# 

If you log out as root, you should run zdone and update the log. One could set it up that this is run automaticly when root's log out.

With the script zlog you can generate the above log message.

download

• zdone - enter log message
• zlog - show last 5 logs

I've started to use nanoblogger for the content of my site. Expect a lot of breakage and other stuff that won't work. I'm in the process of moving everything into neat categories.

LaTeX style

A few years ago I've created a LaTeX class which I particularly liked, but looking back on it, it was getting a bit old. So I recreated the style with the excellent memoir class for LaTex.

class file

The style consists out of a single class file, called blocksbook.cls. Just put it somewhere, where TeX can find it (i.e. the current directory) and use it with: \documentclass{blocksbook} All options from memoir are supported in addition to:

• draft - puts the word 'draft' in the header, also given to memoir
• serif - use the 'serif' font
• headbold - use bold font in the headings
• bold - use bold font in itemize
• bottomline - draw a \hrule under each page, excluding part and chapter pages.
• titlepagenr - show a blocked page number on the title page.
• Some spacing issues are fixed

Latest changes

• Fix the title page - a blocked page number is optionally printed.
• per default, don't draw a \hrule (see option bottomline).
• number subsection also.

Screenshots

Ans and I are married, see here for more info information (dutch).

Ans en ik zijn getrouwd, klik hier voor meer info