The BFC Computing Weblog

Ideal Time Machine Hard Drive

Bill McGonigle — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:47:23 -0400

After coming close to losing a few years' worth of the kids’ digital photos (I had a backup, thank you, rsnapshot, but when I only have one copy it’s close to being lost) I decided to find a good hard drive for the wife’s computer. Hers is a Mac Mini running Leopard, and it has the Time Machine backup system (think exactly like rsnapshot, but with directory-level hard links as well). So, I wanted to find a drive that would be:

Small
Quiet
Easy
Big enough to handle backup of an 80GB drive
Reliable
Cost-effective

Now, there are several drives out there that have the capacity. Most are pretty big (physically), and many of them require an AC wall wart and have fans in them. That I didn’t want.

I usually just head over to Newegg and find a case and a drive and screw something together, but they didn’t have any that met the requirements. By this time I had decided that a Firewire bus-powered drive with a 2.5” 160GB drive would be perfect, and I finally found one at MacSales/OtherWorld Computing. These guys sponsor the open source project XPostFacto which lets you run OSX on hardware Apple has abandoned (so that you can connect to the Internet without being pwned). So, good guys, and they have the 160GB OWC Mercury On-The-Go Oxford911 FireWire 2.5” 5400RPM 8MB Cache Portable Storage Solution, which, while a mouthful, is just the right drive for Time Machine backups. I didn't think I'd buy another PATA drive, but the Oxford 911 chipset is really quite well-proven, a nice feature for a backup drive. The drive comes with a cable and a pleather case:

and a CD that contains some software for something I don't need (it would be a nice green move to be able to leave out pleather cases and CD's if they're just headed to the trash heap). I plugged the drive in, the Mac asked me if I wanted to use it for Time Machine, and a few clicks later the backups started running. Nicer interface than rsnapshot, for normal mortals anyway. Now after all that, there are two complaints. First, it's in a very nice lucite case. But the case doesn't have much in the way of markings on it. There's a 3-position switch on the back, and you have to refer to the user's manual pamphlet to figure out what it does. It's a switch for Bus Power/Off/AC Power. I made a label on my label maker so I could recycle the instructions. The second point isn't about the product but the marketing. The box exclaims, "Fits in your shirt pocket!". Here's how well that works:

This particular oxford (not 911) shirt of mine has bigger pockets than any others, and it just fits. When I hear a claim like that, I think of another 2.5" drive I have:

that can almost fit reasonably in a pocket. This isn't a shirt pocket drive - maybe cargo pants. Better to just call it a really nice drive.

Complete Deniability

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:51:00 -0400

I’ve written before about the limited usefulness of plausible deniability, especially in relation to software like TrueCrypt, a hard drive encryption program.

The gist of plausible deniability with TrueCrypt is this: You have multiple encrypted hard drive partitions. When your enemy forces you to reveal your keys, you reveal the low-cost key, and the enemy sees some data that he doesn’t care about and sends you on your merry way. The ‘real’ stuff you want to hide is still hidden.

This works if two conditions are true:

The enemy doesn’t know you employ a product with plausible deniability
The enemy can merely detain you

If those conditions aren’t true, you’re in big trouble. Say a violent group gets you and your data. They know TrueCrypt has plausible deniability, and they really want your data. You’re going to be tortured until they get what they want, it’s that simple, and ugly.

Now, the worst possible scenario is that you can’t give up ‘your data’ because it doesn’t exist. But only you know that. The bad guys think you have it and they know you have plausible deniability. You’re completely screwed.

For this reason I’ve been against plausible deniability systems for defending against all threats (yes, TrueCrypt would still be fine from hiding that porn you have stashed away on your home PC).

This changed when Cal Harding introduced the concept of Complete Deniability. That is, you can prove that you have no more plausible deniability.

Here’s how it can work: With TrueCrypt, you could have a utility that, once inside a locked data set, could be given a set of keys and ensure that those keys account for all readable data and all blocks of the storage device. Because TrueCrypt is open source, the bad guys can trust this utility to verify that you’re no longer hiding anything. They can review the source and compile it themselves, if they wish.

But, good news for you, you get to go home. Because even bad guys don’t like to waste their time and you’re not otherwise terribly interesting. Odds are you’re not getting your laptop back once the bad guys find your porn bank, though.

Twittervision

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:19:00 -0400

Twittervision is combines Tweets and geo coding to show a realtime display of what people are Twittering. It’s quite a beautiful thing to watch, especially the 3D view.

I guess I wasn’t aware that Twitter fed all updates to third parties, so that’s something important to be aware of - it’s not just your followers who are seeing your updates.

I’m not sure it’s actually useful, but it certainly is neat, so probably it is useful to somebody.

I wonder if Twitter will be coming up with a trademark licensing program to allow apps like this to live peacefully.

Mac OS X 10.5.4 Issues

Bill McGonigle — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:28:00 -0400

I was hopeful that Mac OS X 10.5.4 would address previous versions’ data corruption issues, but it appears they still exist.

According to MacFixit, issues still exist with saving files to servers via at least AFP (are NFS or SMB affected?), system logging issues, firewall problems, and apparently Software Update is still buggy at applying binary deltas.

So, unfortunately I’m still not recommending 10.5 (Leopard) Client for folks who need to use network filesystems. If you’re using local disks only and don’t mind downloading the ‘Combo’ OS updates and applying them by hand, you’re likely to be fine and feature-wise Leopard has plenty to offer.

Hopefully 10.5.5 will finally quash the network filesystems problems, and nearly a year from release the OS will become widely useful.

PICT Abandoned by Apple

Bill McGonigle — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:30:00 -0400

I was cleaning up my hard drive today and found some screenshots I took of websites on 9/11, in Apple PICT format. Less than 7 years later, those PICT’s aren’t viewable on OSX in the Preview application (the standard image viewer). Seeing as this OS came out in 2005, it was likely abandoned then. At the time I was running the latest version of Mac OS 9, judging by the screenshots.

So, less than 4 years of support for that presumably very common file format.

I’ve converted the pictures to PNG (Using Photoshop 7, which can parse them), which as an industry standard open format ought to be recoverable for some time to come.

This has been reason #687 to avoid proprietary file formats.

Dan Grover - Speedy Recovery!

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:12:00 -0400

Our friend and sometimes subcontractor Dan Grover had surgery today, and we wish him a speedy recovery.

Dan posted a pre-surgery photo today, and finally it makes sense how he’s so efficient at his work:

All the best, Dan.

Fonality Astroturfing FreePBX?

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:00 -0400

Have a read here and boggle in disbelief.

I used to run Trixbox on my PBX; I started when it wasn’t a commercial product, and Tim did a great prezo on it for SLUG. When they required registration to run the software I became very uncomfortable. When I couldn’t administer my PBX one day because their server was down, I switched to Elastix, and I couldn’t be happier - I should have done it sooner; it’s a superior product.

If you’re still sitting on the fence, this behavior from Fonality is likely to knock you square off it. That Fonality relies so heavily on FreePBX only makes it so much more inconceivable. Assuming this is true, only the dismissal of the individual involved could regain any trust the community once had in Fonality.

Oh, and BTW, a FreePBX backup and restore makes it fairly simple to switch from Trixbox to Elastix.

Barracuda Moves Against Trend Micro Bogus Patent

Bill McGonigle — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:44:00 -0400

After reading about Barracuda moving to invalidate a bogus patent Trend Micro filed for on virus-scanning at an e-mail gateway (many of my clients depend on this technology) in January, I sent Barracuda the following note:

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill McGonigle [mailto:bill@bfccomputing.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:24 PM
To: legal@barracuda.com
Subject: possible SMTP prior art - TFS

From:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.sendmail/
browse_frm/thread/3cee3dc93ea81690/a8cd75d669fbd6b7?lnk=st&q=smtp+virus+scan#a8cd75d669fbd6b7

Its pretty functional - gateways between any/all MS/MAIL,
WP-OFFICE, CC:MAIL, SMTP, UUCP, MCI-MAIL. It does uuencode
and MIME attachments (configurable per address or domain
wildcard) and international characters. It can also virus
scan attachments on the way through the gateway, and access
can be controlled on a user by user basis!

(message dated July 25th, 1995).

It looks like it's still around in some form from foxT:
   http://www.tfstech.com/

Good luck,
-Bill

I never heard back more than a quick “thanks!” from Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda, but today, I read they’ve moved ahead with this strategy and Goran Fransson, developer on TFS, is a new open source ally.

Dean writes of Goran, “We greatly appreciate the time that Goran Fransson took in coming forward to share this very important piece of prior art,” Drako says. “We believe that his testimony is instrumental in our case against what we believe is an unjust patent claim by Trend Micro against Barracuda Networks and the open source ClamAV project. In our view, Goran is an open source hero.”

Full disclosure: I’ve sold completely open solutions, based on postfix/MailScanner/clamav/sqlgrey against Barracuda’a blackbox appliances, but I’m glad they’re fighting against Trend Micro’s abuse of the system.

The Great Geek Takeover

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:33:00 -0400

The geeks are taking over society, re-making it in their own image.

“How’s this then?” you may ask.

Consider that reality is what you perceive. What you perceive is based on what you know.

So then, what is it that we know? It’s either what we’ve derived ourselves or what we’ve been told or read. Most of us learn far more from others than we figure out on our own.

These days, if an average person wants to know something, where do they turn? Some people go to the library, but most go to Google, or someplace more specific, like Wikipedia.

Now, to add to Wikipedia, you need to learn MediaWiki markup. Most people don’t want to learn this. Geeks have no problem diving in, so they do it. They build an encyclopedia based on their perceptions and biases. Consumers of Wikipedia believe it to be true. Not that Wikipedia is usually incorrect, but perceptions are formed based on what is included or not included.

How about Google? Google tells you what’s out there, and it’s ranked primarily by how many links are pointing to a particular article. Who makes links? The geeks do. Google is a ranking of what geeks think is important, to a large degree.

And, again, users of Google generally accept its rankings to be ‘good enough’ for their needs. They don’t usually ask, “but what else is true that Google hasn’t told me?”

From the blogosphere to major media, to presidential campaigns, much of what “true” is based on what is found online. And what is found online is what the geeks feel like putting there.

If the industrialists shaped the last century, the geeks are going to shape this one. Sit back, enjoy, and go have a look at what’s popular on YouTube today.

Solving 'function "lexize" already exists with same argument types' in PostgreSQL

Bill McGonigle — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:22:00 -0400

If you run across:

function "lexize" already exists with same argument types

in PostgreSQL, when adding tsearch2 to a database, even when you’ve created a fresh new database, you probably have a corrupt copy of tsearch2 in your template1 database, which is used to create your ‘fresh’ database.

To fix this, copy the uninstalltsearch2.sql somewhere temporarily (on a Fedora-derived OS it’s at: /usr/share/pgsql/contrib/uninstalltsearch2.sql) and remove the BEGIN; and END; transaction statements from the file, then run it against your template1, ala:

psql template1 < /tmp/uninstalltsearch2notransaction.sql

and it will go through and delete all of tsearch2. Expect some failure messages if it’s partially deleted already, this is normal.

Now you can load tsearch2 into your new database without complaints.