aj’s blog

Today I decided to finally upgrade two of my older boxes to the most recent OpenSSL version (openssl-0.9.8e) as that change has been on my ToDo list for ages. Both hosts are ancient Pentium I based Linux servers, so compiling OpenSSL was great fun and took hours.
Read on if you are interested in never-ending compile sessions, SSHd segfaults, issues with bn_mul_add_words() functions, no-sse2 settings, VIA Padlock crypto engines or other OpenSSL fun. Oh, and don’t ask me anything about OpenSSL in the next weeks, right?! 😉

(more…)

In case someone needs it (I do): I wrote a small web interface that quickly crypt()’s a string, e.g. when you need to write a .htaccess file and don’t have htpasswd available. It outputs DES, MD5 and SHA1 with random salts and salt-less md4, md5, sha1 and sha256. Maybe I’ll add MySQL password hashing too.. at least when I first need it 😉

Oh, and remember.. the password gets sent to my server without any encryption at all (and no, it’s not being saved here) 🙂

With the release of PHP 4.4.6 on March 1st PHP developers updated the PCRE version that’s included in the PHP4 tarball from PCRE 6.7 to PCRE 7.0. Unfortunately PCRE 7.0 has “some issues” with certain regular expressions – if you have recently upgraded to PHP 4.4.6, use regular expression functions such as preg_match and are wondering about strange “Internal Server Error” messages or empty pages – stop wondering. It’s a more or less documented “bogus” bug at php.net (Bugtracker, ID 40706) that they won’t fix because it’s within PCRE and not within PHP. Their solution? Upgrade to PHP 5.
You can’t? Well you can use PCRE 6.7 of the “old” PHP 4.4.5 version with PHP 4.4.6. Just follow the steps below. 🙂

(more…)

It’s been quiet around here for the last few months – sorry.
I just got around to update the blog software and moved it to a “better” URL; expect some updates and new posts soon 😉

What has happened recently? Well I was quite busy with the “LAN @ FH JOANNEUM 6 – the 6th sense!” at the FH Joanneum Kapfenberg where I was responsible for running the whole LAN network and the important servers (DHCP, DNS, Internet-Gateway, etc). Expect a blog entry covering that story soon 🙂 Pics are already available in the gallery btw.
Then again I’ve been playing around with a small VIA based embedded system based on a CV860A LexSystem mainboard in a fanless case with a VIA C3 533MHz CPU, a 20GB 2.5″ HD, 128MB of RAM and three onboard NICs. All for 1 EUR at eBay – and now it’s running Debian Etch 🙂