Bitfever

Viruses were originaly named that way, because those first viruses behaved exactly that way: They infected files, like a bio-virus is infecting cells and yous those infected files to spread further - and last but not least they did damage to their host, like bio-viruses do. The malware (to use the correct term) which is most popular in the connected world to today, is the worm, which can be compared to a contagous virus. Worms like Blaster, SQLSlammer or Code Red and even Nimda (still remember), can be compared to higly contagous (in this list SQLSlammer of course leads the field, in course of speed), but not very dangerous things like the common cold: They hurt you, you can (or could) get them fast (so they are very contagous), but there is very good medicine against these forms of cold. Luckily for us (like in the real world) there hasbeen no higly contagous virus, which has done real bad things (think information extraction, powerfull trojan horse features, encryption, automated sniffing, SQL lookps etc.). The time will come, I guess and fear.

The only thing I can notice: It has to be spring time in the net world, too, the cold is around: I installed a Virus scanner (clamav in connection with amavisd-new) on the server handling all of my mail yesterday, and within the the last 24 houres the scanner quarantined 18 mails containing a (known) virus (Sober.F leads the competition with 10 against several incanations of the SomeFool worm with alltogether 8 hits). Nothing uncommon I guess, it's spring time after all - so harden your immune system.

Well as you'll probably notice, I (finally) validated this site for XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2. While doing so I took a look at this site using every browser I could get my hands on. As there are: Mozilla Mac, Mozilla Firebird, IE 5.2 Mac, IE 6 SP1 for Windows XP, Opera 6.02 Mac (Why isn't there a actual version?), Safari 1.1 (of course ;-). Now I can understand all those complains about the standard compatibility of modern browsers. Just look at this: Ok, I designed the Page using Safari (or, to be more precise the WebKit preview in SubEthaEdit), so the page looks like I intended in Safari. <% image name="Safari" %>

Now here goes Mozilla Firebird, who renders very nice and (almost) like I intened: <% image name="Mozillafriebird" %>

Mozilla does even better than Firebird (note the RSS icon, which is made up using div and span

IE for Mac does (and here I was suprised) does a good job: <% image name="IE5" %>

Opera (in the old 6.02 Version) does bad, but I also tested a 7.x version, which does a lot better, but I got no screenshot of that:
 <% image name="OperaMac" %>

And now after I showed how it should look I'll show how IE 6 SP1 for windows XP does it's job and this ist why it doesn't suprise me that most Company websites are not "state of the art" XHTML but some bad HTML-something. this clearly is nothing to blame the webdesingers for. You can only blame this: <% image name="IE6SP1Win" %>.

Update: Oh what hell of a day; it really has to be bad to make me confuse </img> with </image>

The road to my personal e-mail server seems to be rocky...

uw-imap config is just the start...

I started by trying to accsess the mailbox of a user whom I created for this very purpose on this Debian Linux system (hail to apt-get btw.) Considering that emailis probably the most used internet service everything seems to be based on rather antique mechanisms. For example almost everybody uses POP3 which is a very unconvinient protocol (ever tried to keep the eMail database of two computers synced using POP?). So I decided to go with IMAP. Setting up IMAP isn't really problematic if uw-imap is your weapon of choice, but considering that I frequently use email over potentially unsecured and public networks (campus WLAN or coffe house WLAN etc) I wanted to add more security using MD5 authentication and SSL. Setting up MD5 is simple (just write the desired usernames/passwords seperated by tabs and linebraks into /etc/cram-md5.pwd) Setting up SSL in theory is simple, too. In theory... In the real world you need to have a certificate placed in /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem. because this server is only for my personal use I can setup my own CA to sign this certificate (I guess I can trust myself - at least most of the day ;-). This sounds easier than it is. What do we need to do:

1. openssl genrsa -des3 -out privkey.pem 2048 - generate a private RSA key (no passprase is very convenient - but less secure of course). You should secure the private key via file-permissions now.
2. openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out imapd.pem -keyout imapd.pem -days 3650 - Create the key for the imap Server.(granted, 10 years is a lot of time you can use less)
   So much for the server part
3. Now you should install the imapd.pem in your Mail client or the OS of your choice (For OS X Mail this is the way to do it - In Mozilla you just need to open a connection to https://mail.server:993 and install the cert)

For my taste this is a little bit too complex, no wonder everyone is useing unencrypted mail. So much for uw-imap - exim is next...this is going to be fun...

OK, full turn backwards! The Volume tip below isn't really working. After fiddeling around with Partion Magic 8 I found out, that as soon as you create a HFS+ volume you cannot use the disk in Windows anymore. So I now have to use only one big FAT volume - no bootable backup system for me. It seems, that OS X stores the voume information for HFS+ volumes on some place that confuses Windows (havn't tried Linux yet, but I expect better results - there is a Linux kernel module for HFS+).

Oh hell! I bought a new external Firewire Harddisk today, because the Disk in my Windows PC is always close to it's limit (as of right now I got 800Megs free space on a 97GB data partion, thats not even 1%!). So I bought a 160GB Drive form LaClie. I plugged it into my Panther runnig PowerBook, it mounted the 160GB Volume - fine - but I wanted more. I need to exchange files with my Windows PC and because OS X 10.3 can only read NTFS Volumes, I needed a FAT Volume for main storage. In addition to that I needed 40GB of space to store a CarbonCopyCloner image of my PowerBook (You do have a backup? Don't you?). The problem is that the Panther DiskUtility can create HFS+ volumes (besides HFS and UFS), but it cannot create FAT volumes - Apple doesn't go that far in supporting the Windows platform (in fact FAT16/32 is the only filesystem that can be fully used by almost every OS), shame on them (yes, you can create FAT using the shell, but more on that later). So I turned to the very people who created the FAT filesystem a long time ago - Microsoft. But, after experiencing the working Plug&Play of Windows XP, I fond out, that, using MS tools you can only create FAT partions to a limit of 32GB. Yet another of those painfull artificial restrictions impsed on us by the folks in Redmond, to push a newer technology (NTFS in this case). So I turned back to Mac OS X - with a little help from this hint I found out that you can actualy format Volumes in FAT32 via the command line.

Here is a little HowTo (because the one in the hint above is not exactly working - the author himself notes this in the comments).

1. First check the name of you local drives (do not plug in the FireWire drive) by typing

   ls /dev/rdisk?

   . Everything you see there are HDDs - those you do not want to modify. Remember those, because you'll be messing with the partion table - some mistake and you could lose data!
2. Now plug in the drive (click ignore, when the Finder promps you about the new drive) and do

   ls /dev/rdisk?

   again. The line that is new is the name of your FireWire disk. Remember this one - again one wrong number and you could erase date!
3. Now run the Disk Utility. Choose your FireWire Disk and partion it the way you would like (using the MacOS Extended filesystem) - but make shure that the volumes that you want to be FAT32 are first (on top in the Panther Disk Utility) - otherwise Widnows won't reckognize them later.
4. Let's assume your the id of your drive you found out in 2. is

   /dev/rdisk9

   Now you need to find out the names of the volumes:

   ls /dev/rdisk9*

   this will show a numbered list of the volumes in the format

   /dev/rdisk9s1
   
   /dev/rdisk9s2

   etc.
5. Now the fun part ;-) If you are totally shure that /dev/rdisk9 is the disk you want to edit you can begin formating the volumes:

   newfs_msdos -v ANY_NAME -F 32 /dev/rdisk9s1

   to format the first partion of /dev/rdisk9 in FAT32. Do not format the HFS+ volumes yet.
6. Now plug the disk into you Windows box and start the System Management Tool (right click "My Computer", "Manage") then select Disk Management. Now you'll be promted to activate the Disk for Windows, do so, but do not format anything. If everything worked you'll be able to assign Dirve letters to the FAT32 partions (note that Windows can use partions >32GB, but cannot create them!)
7. Eject and unplug the Disk and plug it back into the Mac. Now just format the remaining Volume with the Disk Utility - et voila - you got what you wanted.

I hope this helps annyone, cause I needed more than two hours to figure this out. I'm writing this while CCC is creating the backup image.

Of course I will not tkae responsibelity for anything you break or erase on your machine! Think before you do annything - you are messing with Volumes here and those pretty little things hold all your data! (How often did I warn you? ;-)

As of right now I'm installing Windows XP on Virtual PC. I cannot await to download all those lousy patches from Windows Update - for a PC that only exists because some people don't bother that there are people that have chosen anything but Windows&IE6 (just try to book a flight on www.lufthansa.com with Safrai).