I updated the Planet software that runs Dudeville tonight…  I can’t really see much difference, but the one that’s in Portage is two-three years old so I figured it needed updating.

I did occasionally get problems with repeated posts when viewing the Dudeville RSS feed in Akregator, but that hadn’t happened for a while.  Let’s see how this one goes…

Around the same time (actually while I was waiting for software updates and reboots of a bunch of systems for work) I made myself a hackergotchi.  Planet is adding it to my posts in both the HTML and RSS versions of Dudeville, and I’ll be adding it to the CSS for the blog too.  If you’re wondering what I’m talking about: hackergotchis are the little floating-head style pictures.  I think mine came up alright, considering the model…

I read a blog post via Planet Ubuntu not long ago about using OTPs.  I had looked at things like OPIE in the past, but the idea of carrying around a pre-generated list of passwords was not so encouraging.  I changed my mind when I saw that ingenious folks have written J2ME midlets for running the password generator on your phone!

I went looking at a couple of the generators mentioned in Soren’s article.  Freesafe looks very nice, with the ability to securely store the passphrases for a number of hosts separately.  It looks very nice and has a lot of features, but the developers have had to sacrifice the generation of the “six words” format of the one-time password.  Since you enter the OTP at a traditional no-echo prompt, the idea of entering a long OTP in hex digits was not appealing, so I kept looking.

Eventually I found one called vejotp (the similarity to my moniker is coincidental; I’m not associated with it at all!).  It remembers your passphrase and sequence number, so each time you need a OTP you just hit the “Go” button and it gives you the goods.  It only remembers the details of one server though — so if you have more than one system protected with one-time passwords, vejotp is not really for you (unless you like tapping out strong passphrases in predictive text!).

Soren’s post has more info about how he set it up on Ubuntu — for me it was as easy as adding the “skey” USE flag and re-emerging openssh, making sure that brought in the skey package if it wasn’t already there.  Then, I updated sshd_config to “ChallengeResponse yes” and “UsePAM no”, restarted sshd, and the setup was complete.  Each user would then run skeyinit to seed their OTP generation.

The nice thing is that passwordless login using SSH keys still works, so I can use the existing method of key-based login from inside the network, and OTP when I’m out-and-about.

Soren also describes a way to use OTP for mail access using IMAP and a utility called imapproxy.  Well worth the read!

I bought a new switch recently, partly because I got cheesed by having to run an extra no-name 10/100 switch plugged into the Netgear Gigabit switch simply because the Netgear doesn’t talk to some of my NICs.  As well as some new Shiny, I got yet another reminder that the browser compatibility wars are far from over.

The Linksys SRW2024 is a managed 10/100/1000 switch at a rock-bottom price, and since I’ve had a really good run with Linksys kit I decided to give it a go.

It has a console port on the front, but that’s only good for basic setup (IP address, etc).  The main configuration interface is via a web browser.  I got the IP address in via the serial console, and fired up Firefox to check out the web interface.

The login panel appeared, which I completed, then garbage.  The menu screen only partially loaded, bits of graphics were overlaid text, and none of the menu options worked.  Hmmm.  I started checking network connectivity — a flood ping to the switch’s IP was all good.  I opened the page in Konqueror, and got a bit further, but still the menu was non-functional and the screen was not rendering correctly.

At about this point, the unthinkable idea emerged — was there still a company in the 21st century making devices with IE-only web interfaces?  Sure enough, I went to the Windows XP virtual machine on my work laptop, and the page worked perfectly.  Aargh!

A bit of research on the web would show that early versions of the firmware on the switch worked okay with other browsers.  And, looking at the Javascript console in Firefox shows a raft of errors in the CSS files — so it seems to be sloppy coding rather than exploitation of non-portable features.

So who’s the enemy?  Linksys?  They’ve turned out a shoddy firmware that doesn’t even have valid CSS in the management web interface — what does that say about the switch code itself?  What about Microsoft, who blather on about standards but still make a browser that doesn’t care what kind of horsemeat it renders?

I’m yet to try Opera or Seamonkey — I don’t expect Seamonkey to be any better than Firefox, but Opera might give joy.  I think I can forget about Safari too, since I saw one review buy a guy who returned his SRW2024 because the management interface wouldn’t render on his Mac (a bit extreme I first thought, but if you don’t have any Windows in your shop at all, the cost of a Windows box just to manage your switch blows the cost-case a bit!).

Stop Press: I tried the interface again with Konqueror on the home laptop, running Kubuntu Edgy, and it worked!  Not completely, as the rendering is still a bit dodgy and I can’t actually configure anything, but most of the viewing screens work just fine.

It seems like a whole year since I blogged…   Best Wishes for the new year to all!  2007 has started fairly quietly for me.  The most interesting thing has been a weekend trip to Brisbane (yes, same one) to celebrate Susan’s birthday, her new role at work, and, belatedly, our 10th Anniversary.

I traded some credit-card-award-scheme points for a discount on accommodation at the Conrad Treasury Hotel.  A lovely old building, transformed into a high-class hotel.  The development retains the incredibly (almost vertigo-inducing) high ceilings and ornate fittings of the original building.  They even kept the knee-high door-latches!  Susan and I met friends for a dinner at the Hilton and spent a little time at the casino before calling it a night, then had a buffet breakfast in the hotel restaurant the next morning.  Very relaxing, and doubly so since we arranged a sleep-over at Nanna and Pop’s for Nicholas

For me, work has been an utter drag.  I’ll talk about that in a separate post (perhaps).  Susan is on a working adventure, though, having been accepted on a 12-month posting into their Systems Testing section.  I’m really proud of her, not only that she got the posting but that she got into gear and applied for it in the first place!  As her background is processing rather than systems, she is likely to be covering more of the payment-specific parts of their work — they have other folks who have a background in system testing that do the more system-technical stuff.  It looks like a really challenging role for her, and just the thing she needs to restore some sanity to her career.

Susan’s change means that she leaves very early to go to work, and on public transport.  So, I now have the important duty of taking Nicholas to and from day-care!  Talk about eye-opening — I’ve had one more object lesson in the incredible variety of tasks that makes up parenting.  Some mornings are better than others, and there is definitely an art to leaving him there without tears — his and mine!  He’s adapting to the new schedule well, but it’s only been one week so we’ll have to see — but I’ve no doubt he’ll be fine.

PS: I always try to come up with some witty way of closing these posts, but this time I came up dry.  Oh well, next time!