I’ve just installed my Corsair H50-1 watercooler on my Core i5 750 box and its amazing – I’ve idled as low as 14c at stock speeds, I’m now overclocked to 3.2GHz (using this tutorial on Youtube) and am getting ~20c idle and haven’t got above 41c under load yet – that’s running four instances of the mprime torture test. I also installed the new RHEL6 beta1 under VirtualBox. Its supposed to be based on Fedora 12/13, so is nothing new really, still a big step up from 5u4.

I’ve been testing PGP10 with GnuPG2 again, and noticed that GnuPG2 seems to embed the filename of encrypted files incorrectly – they’re always called “-&25”. Whilst they decrypt fine using GPG which I guess ignores the embedded filename and uses the actual filename, PGP cannot handle it. The fix is to add: set-filename "" to ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf I installed my Corsair H50-1 watercooling system the other day, and on the final step found that I had a mis-manufactured part so am awaiting delivery of a replacement – which is being helped up getting between the US and Europe due to bloody Icelandic ash!

I’ve been playing with the commercial PGP Desktop Pro today. Its funny, how for 185ukp its frontend really isn’t as nice as the free Seahorse and the PGP 10 backend isn’t [reportedly] as secure as the opensource GnuPG 2. They both comply to the OpenPGP standard so I found I could use public/private keys generated on one with the other; and create encrypted/signed files using one tool and decrypt and verify on the other.

It’s Wednesday night and I’ve still got a lot to do before Sunday: Order one of these Siemens Gigaset S685 phones. Its a dual pack of portable phones that also can accept a wired or Bluetooth headset. They also use 3.5GHz so won’t be knocked out by the microwave or knock out the WiFi. The handsets have a 50m indoor range from the base unit, plus another 10m from the handset to the Bluetooth headset, outdoor is something like 350m total!

I was pondering what to do about disk encryption on an unattended server. If you want an uninterrupted boot sequence, you can’t use full root disk encryption or it will ask you for your passphrase during init. You can apparently do some fudge to put dropbear (mini SSH daemon and shell) into your initrd, so you can enter your passphrase over SSH, but that seemed hacky. I’d rather a serial console on a terminal server, for those servers with serial ports or LOM’s.