January 2014 - Roundtable

IBM "clicky" keyboards
by Adam Thompson 13 Oct '16

13 Oct '16

Enough people have wondered/asked/complained to me about this that I'm posting this now as a public service. IBM Model "M" keyboards are still available, *NEW*, today. They are expensive, but they are the original design that you can use as a melee weapon. The catch is that they don't say "IBM" or even "Lexmark" on them. They are available for purchase from the manufacturer, Unicomp, who can be found online at http://www.pckeyboard.com/. You can also find some vintage NIB units from time to time at http://www.clickykeyboards.com/. There are also a number of other manufacturers now making similar, but not quite as good, keyboards. - CVT Inc., the maker of the Avant Stellar (I own two of them), which is the direct descendant of the Northgate Omnikey, seems to have restructured and no trace of their keyboard manufacturing operation can be found online. However, Northgate keyboards are still available new-in-box from (this is a horrible site, beware) http://www.northgate-keyboard-repair.com/. - The Happy Hacking keyboard (now owned by Fujitsu, apparently) is equally comforting to some people despite having a totally different feel. They, and many others, can be had from http://www.elitekeyboards.com/ - Das Keyboard - Anything using Cherry MX Green, Blue, or White keyswitches. The "green" switches apparently are the closest anyone's come yet to emulating the IBM/Lexmark/Unicomp switches... and they can be had in MUCH cheaper keyboards, like the Rosewill RK-9000 (http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823201040 and http://techreport.com/review/23405/rosewill-rk-9000-series-mechanical-ke yboards-reviewed). - And there are an increasing number (yes, again, after the big die-off ca. 2009) of speciality manufacturers of "ergonomic" keyboards that are making clicky keyswitches available as an option. One of the better ones is a tiny shop in Ontario, but I can't find the name right now. References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicomp http://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net

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SpamAssassin false positives on DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_Q?
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 23 Feb '16

23 Feb '16

I mentioned this problem at the last round-table session, but didn't get a solution, so I thought I'd post it here, just in case anyone has any suggestions to offer. I'm still seeing a whole bunch of false positives in SpamAssassin, since an update was installed in mid-September on a CentOS 5.7 system, for a rule called DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_Q, which is only supposed to be triggered when the "Date:" header has a date that is 4 days to 4 month ahead of the date in the "Received" header that has the _smallest_ difference in date. Here are the headers from the latest e-mail I've received with this false-positive. (I've stripped out irrelevant headers, for the sake of clarity and simplicity.) From topfivestories(a)messagent.itworldcanada.com Mon Nov 14 07:50:13 2011 Received: from mail.messagent.itworldcanada.com (mail.messagent.itworldcanada.com [207.112.10.80]) by palladium.cs.umanitoba.ca (8.13.8/8.13.8) with SMTP id pAEDoAxV028594 for <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca>; Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:50:12 -0600 Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:50:13 -0500 X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,DATE_IN_FUTURE_96_Q, HTML_MESSAGE,RP_MATCHES_RCVD autolearn=no version=3.3.1 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.1 (2010-03-16) on palladium.cs.umanitoba.ca Note that I'm calling spamd via the spamass-milter on a system running sendmail. Note also, that in the above example, the only "Received" header was the one generated by my own server. (I've had other false positives, however, with multiple "Received" headers, all of which were within seconds of the time in the "Date" header.) Any ideas? -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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big scanner
by Trevor Cordes 27 May '15

27 May '15

Does anyone have big (like tabloid or bigger) scanner they want to sell? Even an ancient SCSI or parallel one might be ok. I just want *big*. Do they even make scanners bigger than legal or tabloid?

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Linux distro for Pentium III
by Robert Dyck 01 Jun '14

01 Jun '14

I have a customer who wants a laptop with Linux. My impression is he wants to learn Linux. I have refurbished laptops: IBM ThinkPad A21m, with Pentium III processor @ 750 MHz, 512MB RAM, and I can upgrade the hard drive to 40GB. Which distro of Linux would you recommend? I would ask Mike Pfaiffer, but he passed away earlier this year. Thanks, Rob Dyck

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GD package?
by Kevin McGregor 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

I'm setting up a Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS server at work for a client who plans to install something called "Stori" (an Oracle-ish thing, stori.orapub.com) The requirements FAQ on that site is vague, saying "You can install our product on any Linux server." Okay, so what else? "You will need the gd package; do rpm -q gd to ensure it's installed." That's for a Red Hat-derived distro presumably, so what's the equivalent for Debian/Ubuntu? The only package I found was php5-gd, which seems like overkill as it brings in a ton of other stuff. Is gd installed by default in Ubuntu 10.04?

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Treasure Chest
by Brock Wolfe 19 Jan '14

19 Jan '14

Alas I have to make room by doing some spring cleaning on my magazine collections. I hate to send these to recycling. Offered on first come first serve basis: - Circuit Cellar Magazines - major collection. - Linux Magazines - Maximum Linux magazines - Sys Admin magazines - Home Power Magazines - Servo Magazines Brock

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MitM on IMAPS?
by Trevor Cordes 19 Jan '14

19 Jan '14

I'm just wondering if it is possible for someone to MitM me in the following scenario and intercept plaintext traffic: dovecot imaps server with real thawte "quick" cert | imaps (ssl) | public wifi | android phone using imaps using "ssl" not "ssl (any cert)" option For instance, can a malicious hotspot use some sort of interception technique / spoofing and some sort of wildcard cert to trick my phone into negotiating SSL with it, which then does its own SSL to my dovecot server, thus MitM'ing me without me even knowing? I know in a web browser I'd normally be protected against that by looking at the URL in the address bar, or the green EV-cert graphics (or am I wrong in even that assumption)? How paranoid do I have to be? And is there any way to beat any shortcoming on Android, perhaps with a client cert or a way to tie the account to a single manually-specified server SSL cert?

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Re: [RndTbl] xargs with no command
by Trevor Cordes 18 Jan '14

18 Jan '14

On 2014-01-18 Adam Thompson wrote: > Other way 'round: xargs was the newline inserter, splitting a > WS-separated list into multiple lines. >From memory, it looked to me like xargs was a NL-eater, and only an EOL NL- appender. #cat > z a b c # xargs <z a b c *** note how the input is NL-sep, but the output is space-sep, just I think as in Kevin's RTFM. And the while loop was one line (one xargs call) per iteration. Of course, this is just from memory!

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Re: [RndTbl] xargs with no command
by Adam Thompson 18 Jan '14

18 Jan '14

Other way 'round: xargs was the newline inserter, splitting a WS-separated list into multiple lines. That's still the first time I'd ever seen xargs used like that! -Adam On Jan 18, 2014 12:54 AM, Trevor Cordes <trevor(a)tecnopolis.ca> wrote: > > As per Tuesday's meeting RTFM: > > ibm.com gave me the first hint: > If no command template appears on the command line, xargs uses echo by > default. > > Which then let me find it in Linux's man page: > ... and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) ... > > So they were basically using xargs as a newline-eater to combine all the > lines of the iteration into one. > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

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Re: [RndTbl] MitM on IMAPS?
by Adam Thompson 18 Jan '14

18 Jan '14

Short answer: not in any practical way. Medium answer: yes, but someone would have to surreptitiously obtain physical control of your phone long enough to install a new root CA. (See Sean's answer) Longer answer: of course it's theoretically possible, but the attacker would have to compromise a CA that you already trust. Sadly, this isn't as outlandish a prospect as it should be, but it's still extremely unlikely. I don't know how often Samsung or Google removes known-compromised CAs from the trust list, if ever, so I can't say how large the potential exposure is. On the other hand, the only way you'd be caught by something like that would be as part of a very large, very sophisticated operation that was doing it to *everyone*. You can issue your own certificate, signed against your own CA, and "just" ensure your own CA is imported into every client you use... I wouldn't bother, but it's an option. -Adam On Jan 18, 2014 3:37 AM, Trevor Cordes <trevor(a)tecnopolis.ca> wrote: > > I'm just wondering if it is possible for someone to MitM me in the > following scenario and intercept plaintext traffic: > > dovecot imaps server with real thawte "quick" cert > | > imaps (ssl) > | > public wifi > | > android phone using imaps using "ssl" not "ssl (any cert)" option > > > For instance, can a malicious hotspot use some sort of interception > technique / spoofing and some sort of wildcard cert to trick my phone into > negotiating SSL with it, which then does its own SSL to my dovecot server, > thus MitM'ing me without me even knowing? I know in a web browser I'd > normally be protected against that by looking at the URL in the address > bar, or the green EV-cert graphics (or am I wrong in even that > assumption)? > > How paranoid do I have to be? And is there any way to beat any > shortcoming on Android, perhaps with a client cert or a way to tie the > account to a single manually-specified server SSL cert? > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable(a)muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

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