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Latest News From Beyond The Looking glass!

Hello all, I’m currently in London, enjoying the Queen’s weather and gardens. I visited Buckingham the other day and saw a wonderful amount of statues of famous dead people and lions and unicorns and dragons (oh my!).

I’m starting to get the hang of the UK, it’s almost exactly the same as North America, except there are a lot of people and it’s fairly crowded. It’s sort of like stepping through the looking glass, where people speak a little bit differently, they act a little bit differently, they drive on the opposite side of the road and even the crows are just a little bit different. I guess they call them rooks here? They seem super intelligent. Been taking lots of pictures with my new Camera (Nikon D60) so I’ll be sure to show everyone when I get back.

Jaunty is out!

W00t!

Get  Ubuntu 9.04 here:

http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/

I’m torrenting now as we speak

Ideas for i18n in linux

Well, I’ve read through planet gnome that there is still a long ways to go for i18n (internationalisation) and it got me thinking on how the process could be made better.  I don’t know how it works currently, but as far as I can tell you have a team of translators and users, and they interact with a set script on a website somewhere.

Why not cut out the middle man, i.e. the website? Why not just have the users use the system, then when something doesn’t look right, click on an icon to suggest a better translation. This could be sort of like a “debug” mode for translations on the desktop.  There is a large user base that doesn’t contribute because they simply don’t have the time to contribute, however, if we make it easier for them (click on an icon in the taskbar > click on the phrase > suggest a new translation…) the i18n efforts would become a lot easier.

kpasswd and passwd not allowing password change for kerberos

I tried to find this on google but no avail.

We have a couple of systems here at work that use kerberos to login. I would like to allow people to change their passwords using passwd, and they can, but only on some systems.

On a particular subset of our systems, I was getting errors from passwd that looked like this:

Changing password for user username.
Kerberos 5 Password:
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error

OK, I thought, this must mean I have to use kpasswd or something similar. No dice. After trying to set the password with kpasswd (i’ve misplaced the exact values):

kpasswd: Message stream modified changing password

What the shit? This makes me think that there was a man in the middle attack.. But I just logged in to the system, using kerberos. How in the hell can the message get modified on password change? Thinking about it a bit more and comparing certain files on both systems, I found that there was a discrepancy, quite by accident, in /etc/krb5.conf.

After a bit of testing and playing around with two lines, I found that you need to change a single line in /etc/krb5.conf:

dns_lookup_kdc=true

to

dns_lookup_kdc=false

Simple, right? It looks like setting the above to false might also protect the system a bit too, by preventing the KDC from being fetched via DNS requests. I have all kdcs defined in there under [realms] anyway so it works like you’d expect it upon login.

These were on some scientific linux systems so YMMV.

Starcraft II footage

W00t!:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/17/watch-this-20-minutes-of-starcraft-ii-footage/

Also, 16 seconds in you can see a picture of two dudes in the static…?

This man is my hero.

http://ernstfamily.ch/jonathan/2009/03/hp-refunds-520-of-software/
He makes it look so easy I think if I ever had to buy a computer with Windows on it I would do the exact same thing. Of course, I might also try to get the laptop without windows installed on it beforehand.

Tags: linux, mstax