work

"What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent."

- C.S. Lewis

Typepad Antispam

I've just set up Typepad's open-source Akismet backend, also known as "Serotype". This software internally uses Perlbal for communicating HTTP, Gearman to delegate instructions, and dspam for content-based spam filtering. Other software requirements are MySQL and memcached.

Documentation is pretty scarce; a README file is basically all you get. However, if you're familiar with Perl you should be good to go. I put the pieces together in a CentOS 5 VM. Many of the required Perl modules were already in EPEL, but I did have to get some things directly from CPAN.

Here are my initial thoughts:

• Thank you TypePad for making this open source, and releasing it to the world!
• Most of Typepad's software is in Perl, and they are the creators of Perlbal/Gearman, so no surprise that this software is based on that as well. Since it uses Gearman, this Serotype server should be able to scale massively.
• Once I installed all the required Perl modules, the software essentially worked "out of the box". I did need to adjust the Gearman client timeout to fifteen seconds. I traced this delay to the yuidd daemon. I'm not sure why it can take up to ten seconds to give me a UID.
• The handling of API keys is very loose; the web service accepts API key by default. However, only keys that are "blessed" are able to actually train the database.
• I wish there were an easier way to "prepopulate" the database with spam.

Web forms are the spammers' new battlefields. Good thing the Akismet API even exists.

Life After Graduation

Wedding in IL

Honeymoon in VA

Beach Trip with Dreyers in NC

Birthday in Littleton CO

Skillet concert in VA... in the rain

New nephew

laura-dreyer.com redesign

Laura and I spent the past three days re-designing her website, adding a blog, re-vamping the gallery... it was hectic but fun!

6 days and counting till I'm married :-)

Last View from Moody

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at MBI, and I won't forget the many memories from the school or the city.

new kenandaudrey.com coming up

We're re-designing our wedding website to be more interactive, and it's getting a facelift in the process. Here's a sneak preview :)


Also, I've re-vamped the website for Gingrich Enterprises at www.gei-1.com.

RAID1 on nslu2

Can RAID1 work on the nslu2 for big drives? Yes! I've got two 750 GB SATA drives hooked in, and it's humming along. I had to upgrade to SlugOS5 in order to be able to boot to the md device. Be ready for long RAID sync times though... it's taking about 21 hours to sync a 650 GB partition :)

Authenticating Wordpress with multiple domains in Active Directory

Recently I've been working on a project involving authenticating Wordpress to Active Directory. There's a great plugin on wordpress.org for doing AD authentication, but I needed it to do a bit more than the author intended. The main thing I needed was support for authenticating users from many different domains.

In the original plugin, there is a single, universal "account suffix", stored in the Wordpress settings database. I'm guessing the intent here is to have a user simply enter their username, like "kdreyer", and have the suffix automatically appended to it ("kdreyer" + "@example.com"). Since we're using multiple domains, this won't work. I could have a "kdreyer@example.com", or a "jsmith@xyz.com", and I need to authenticate both.

So here is my hacked version of the Active Directory Authentication plugin. It pulls out the domain from the user's account using split('@', $username), and uses the user-supplied suffix instead of the universal suffix. This means I can get rid of the global Account Suffix and Default Email Domain settings altogether.

There are one or two other modifications here as well. I'm using SSL in my adLDAP instantiation... and so should you ;-) I've also added a bit to update the user's display_name to be "John Smith", instead of jsmith@xyz.com... the info's already there in AD, so, why not help our user out and put it in there for him :-)

I'm using Wordpress 1.7.1, and the patch is against Active Directory Authentication plugin 1.0.5.

• plugin
• patch

Laura's website

Just finished 1.0 of my sister Laura's website, www.laura-dreyer.com. Laura designed the whole thing in Inkscape, I carved it up with GIMP, put it into a custom Wordpress theme, and put the finishing touches with jQuery. It was really fun and I learned a lot along the way. Laura's a great designer (and sister :)

Going to pick Audrey up in a few hours from the airport... our final un-married New Year's :)

"trick" interviews

Apparently giving "trick" interviews is as popular as it is unprofessional.

Ethically, is there a difference between what Michael Moore does to Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine and what certain creationists have done to Richard Dawkins?

Fedora 9 impressions

I've been running Fedora 9 for a while now. Although some things in F8 felt half-baked to me (I had trouble with PulseAudio + Audacious), F9, like each Fedora release, feels more polished.

Improvements:

• Yum is much faster - not as fast as apt, but getting there.
• PackageKit is much more polished than the package manager GUI F8 used (Pirut and Pup).
• Swfdec works pretty well!

Gripes:

• Firefox 3 occasionally crashes, and many plugin authors haven't updated their plugins to version 3.
• Gkrellm: I haven't seen an error window like this in a while :)

summer internship

I'm interning this summer at Community Bible Church, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania. I drove up to the area on May 24, met the pastor that night, and met the church congregation on Sunday the 25th. They are a nice bunch of folks! I was so surprised to see the sign outside the church welcoming me.


So far I've been able to teach Sunday School on Sunday mornings, lead Bible study on Wednesday nights, and redesign the church website: poconolakechurch.org. Tomorrow I preach my first sermon there on the book of Esther.

My fiancée, Audrey, is on a plane to the Philippines for her internship this summer, where she'll be working with the missionaries there and discipling women in the church group.

first mac experience

A friend gave me an old G3 to play around with today. It's my first Mac experience... and I promptly managed to hose Safari by installing the latest version from apple.com. Apparently OS X 10.3 doesn't support the newer versions of Safari or WebKit. After struggling around trying to downgrade back to Safari 1.3, I finally found good instructions for what I needed. Apparently I have to go back to Safari 1.2, then to 1.3 :) Also, Pacifist was necessary; simply installing 1.2 the regular way doesn't work.

big news

I'm engaged :)

hacking the WGR614v7

Netgear often builds a telnet daemon into their routers, but sometimes it can be a little tricky getting in. I was curious to see if my WGR614v7 has any way to access a command line interface, so I fired up nmap:

$ nmap 192.168.1.12

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2008-01-13 17:42 CST
Interesting ports on 192.168.1.12:
Not shown: 1694 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
23/tcp open telnet
80/tcp open http
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.355 seconds

All right! Let's try to log in...

$ telnet 192.168.1.12
Trying 192.168.1.12...
Connected to 192.168.1.12.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

Rats. For some reason we are kicked out as soon as we touch the daemon. A little hunting on the internet provides an explanation. Apparently the telnet daemon is disabled by default, but the Netgear staff have a Windows utility that will send a packet to the router in order to enable the telnet interface. A hacker has somehow reverse-engineered the encryption process and written it into a C program.

$ gcc -o telnetenable md5.c blowfish.c telnetenable.c

Now I use the program to construct the "unlock" packet with the IP and MAC address of my router, and the default username/password "Gearguy/Geardog":

$ ./telnetenable 192.168.1.12 00AABBCCDDEE Gearguy Geardog > modpkt.pkt

Then I send it to the router with netcat:

$ nc 192.168.1.12 23 < modpkt.pkt

Now I try to log in again...

$ telnet 192.168.1.12
Trying 192.168.1.12...
Connected to 192.168.1.12.
Escape character is '^]'.
Login: Gearguy
Password: *******
U12H06400>

And we're in! "?" gives a list of commands. I'm most interested getting the network statistics from this and putting the results into cacti... but I'll save that for another time! :)

--Edit--

Apparently seattlewireless.net, the original website that hosted the files and information, is down. I've put the C files up for grabs here:

http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/telnetenable.c
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/md5.h
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/md5.c
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/blowfish.h
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/blowfish.c

Good luck!

Junior Year

I'm back in Chicago for the semester. For classes, I've got Systematic Theology I, Communication of Biblical Truth (a preaching class), Greek Exegesis I, Interpersonal Communication, and Ministry and Staff Relationships. My PCM this year is at a nursing home where I'll be leading a Bible Study. It's awesome to be back on Dryer 2 and really great to start another year at Moody.

On the work side of things, I've quit using, or trying to use Cisco's VPN client on Linux. It was not very well maintained to begin with, and I couldn't even get it to compile against the kernel in Fedora 7. Now I'm using an opensource program for Cisco VPNs now called vpnc, and I really like it. It's 100% open, doesn't require a kernel module, runs as a daemon instead of an active program, and certainly feels faster. I had a great summer doing full time work and look forward to continuing part time for the rest of the year.

Speaking of Linux, my laptop has a Intel 3945ABG wireless card inside it, and Fedora 7 shipped with the new iwl3945 driver for this card. It is my understanding that the license is more open than the usual ipw3945 driver, and though the iwl3945 driver was new and kind of buggy, the Fedora devs had to decide to either bundle this one or none at all. I wasn't able to get the original iwl3945 driver on the CD to work, but when I updated to 2.6.22.4-65.fc7 I tried it again and it seems work well with both open and WPA networks.

Last Friday was the first "Programming Tonight" session I've attended (they started when I was in VA). It was a neat place, I had a good time, and learned something new about OpenLDAP - I didn't realize the registration dates were stored for each user! Pretty useful.

Done with school forever

Just took my last exam this morning. I'm so relieved to be done; this week has been rather hectic. I'm sticking around Illinois for a week to go to a friend's wedding, then I'll be heading back to Virginia for the summer.

A few weeks ago my new Netgear router started acting up. I did a cold factory reset (holding the pin in the back while powering it on) but when it booted up all the lights stayed solid green. The device was inaccessible, and subsequent resets and reboots yielded no change. Thankfully the thing was still under warranty, so I sent it back to Netgear and just received the replacement in the mail this week. I had purchased a WGR614v6 International Version from newegg.com, but Netgear sent me back a brand new WGR614v7 North America Version! This version seems to have fixed the authentication bug I noticed in the v6. I also got to keep the old ethernet cable :) So even though I had to pay a few dollars to ship the old one out, I'm still satisfied with Netgear's quick response and their better-than-the-original replacement device. I'm using it now as I type this with no problems :)

Lastly, we've finally rolled out our LDAP creation tool on chicagolug.org. Sign up, or update your account info. This means our wiki is open to all who register!

ktdreyer.com

I just registered ktdreyer.com with nearlyfreespeech.net. FreeBSD, SSH access, CGI, PHP, MySQL, unlimited subdomains... and you only pay for the bandwidth you use. Awesome. I'll probably use them for Laura's upcoming site as well. I'm still going to keep my email ktdreyer#gmail.com, although email forwarding with nearlyfreespeech.net is only $0.02 a day.

New wireless device

I just got a Netgear WGR614 from NewEgg for $36.42 (including shipping). It's going to replace my aging Linksys BEFSW11S4, which I'll give to my sister to use at home. I haven't got a chance to test out the wireless capabilities of the Netgear since I don't have my new laptop yet, but the firmware options available on the WGR614 are much more advanced than the Linksys hardware I've used (the BEFSR41 and BEFSW11S4... but that's understandable since those devices are several years old :)

The only issue I have with WGR614's configuration is that they try to oversimplify things with their "Smart Setup Wizard". For example, if you go to the default page at http://192.168.1.1/, the WGR614 will automatically redirect your browser to http://www.routerlogin.com/welcome.htm, which is a 404 error. To get around this redirection, I took a look at the source of the redirect page on the firmware itself and noticed it had a string in a line of Javascript, "start.htm". I tried http://192.168.1.1/start.htm and it brought up the configuration page without the hassle of the "Setup Wizard". All is well... though it appears that this method bypasses whatever authentication method the WGR614 is supposed to have. Oh well. At least it tracks my IP so that only one IP can be "logged in" to the manager web app simultaneously. It's sufficient for my needs here, and maybe I haven't found the right setting in the config, but I think this is pretty insecure if it works this way out of the box.

In other news, I just found out that Dryer 2 Skip Day is going to be the same day that Mom and Grace are coming to visit! Another reason I can't wait till Thursday :)

New laptop on the way

Just ordered a new computer from Dell... the Inspiron E1405. It's got an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 667 MHz FSB), 14.1 inch Screen, 1GB DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 80GB Sata Hard Drive, CD/DVD Burner, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945a/g wireless, 9-cell Battery, and most importantly... the 4 year warrenty :) Total was $1,587, and with a $450 off coupon, it was down to $1,193.85 (tax included). Incidentally, tax was about $25 more if I shipped to Chicago than to ship home, so my mom's going to bring it up when she comes in a few weeks. I'll need to think of a hostname for it in the meantime :)