I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my Epson Stylus Photo RX425 printer with a 64-Bit Ubuntu 8.04 install, as Avasys/Epkowa haven’t written a 64-Bit version of PIPS. So the alternative was to install a 32-Bit Ubuntu or a distro like Fedora that includes both 32 and 64-Bit libraries in its 64-Bit installation. Anyway, I think I’ve gotten around it with help from this forum post.

I’ve been playing around with dm-crypt and LUKS. I’ve come up with a 10-step process to encrypt a couple of hard disks (not the boot drive) and use a USB key plugged in at boot time to unlock them – boot without the USB key in, and you boot fine, but the drives aren’t mounted or readable. Initially I was going to try some UDEV rules to unlock+mount the drives whenever a USB key was plugged in, but in true UDEV style, it didn’t work – we got an endless loop of cryptsetup processes, also there’s a method for reading the keyfile from the USB drive from Grub, but that didn’t seem to work either, so I’m sticking with my method below.

I’ve been programming Expect scripts today, to login to Juniper routers and parse their config using Nessus. Similar to what I attempted with Cisco switches a while back, but I never really got into it then. I’ve got a working implementation now that can login to my Olive VM using just the regular expect program and a NASL script, no custom TCL or Perl or even the policy compliance plugin required.

Dad came over the other day and helped me run some CAT6 cable from my computer room to my lounge so I can stream video’s etc at gigabit speed over NFS from the fileserver upstairs to the Mac Mini which is now hanging off the LCD TV using my new HDMI-to-DVI cable. MacOSX at 1920×1080 on a 37″ screen is incredible! I’m awaiting my wireless keyboard/trackerball so I can use it to surf downstairs as well as running Plex (Xbox Media Center ported to the X86 Mac) with the Mac’s remote control.

I learnt something new today! I was wondering why when using TLS/SSL for secure POP3 Email, you still connect on port 110 instead of the POP3S port 995. Well it seems there are two methods for secure POP3: Implicit TLS – connect to port 995 using TLS, the whole stream is encrypted. Explicit TLS – connect to port 110 in plaintext, then issue a ‘STARTTLS’ command, and the stream is encrypted from there on.