PH-Neutral 0x7db

“If it is good, they stop making it”, the payoff printed on the conference necklaces, distributed to every participant, along with an über-l33t badge customized with our nickname and the key hash.

Being my first experience at an international security conf (I’ve only been to the ccc2k+7 camp), and being a ph outsider ‘cause I never participated to previous editions, the boot keynote held by FX, staffer and frontman, has been enlightening: “you ought to be here!”, he yelled while pointing at the stage, wearing a white shirt with the Phenoelit logo printed on both arms.

“This conference has never started on time”, he continued, “so there was no reason to do that for this last one”. the schedule is straightforward: party, the next days talks from 12.00PM to 7.30PM, then party, and the last days talks from 12.00PM to 5.30PM. definitely a setup well-playing with the available alcohol :-D.

Afterwards, another speaker informed us that the wi-fi access keys we received at the registration allows us to use a 6 APs/3 repeaters beast driven by an OpenBSD box – they want the audience to hack it because, well, “you are the Worst Case Scenario.” :-)

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*BSD onto a MacMini 4,1? No way. :-(

I spent the last two days trying to set up the Aluminium Mac Mini (rev. 4,1) as a home NAS server with encrypted storage, and I wanted a BSD system on it. There’s already an embedded OpenBSD onto the soekris gateway, and another companion would have been nice. :-)

Guess what, there’s no way out:

• FreeBSD 8.1 doesn’t complete the boot process, due to a bug in the SATA chipset, NV MCP89;
• FreeBSD 8.2-RC1 boots but, due to the same bug, doesn’t recognize any SATA drive nor any USB umass device;
• NetBSD 5.1 boots fine, handles SATA disks via the generic pciide driver (no DMA, thus quite slow) but, unluckily, doesn’t handle the BCM57762 ethernet controller. I tried with quick and dirty patches to bring the bge driver up to date with -current, but still no luck: the MII link detection works, the card transmits but doesn’t receive. The sdmmc controller as well works with -current but not with 5.1-RELEASE. ACPI works correctly;
• OpenBSD 4.8 boots, can access the SATA drives without DMA, and recognizes the bge network card, but exposes the very same behaviour as NetBSD 5.1 with the -current driver fitted in;
• DragonFlyBSD 2.8.2 doesn’t even enter kernel mode, I suspect due to ACPI bugs;
• PureDarwin didn’t inspire me too much, due to the many blocking issues.

All of them support encrypted storage, I built up a NetBSD CGD disk flawlessly onto dk wedges; FreeBSD has got the interesting gbde(8) and geli(8) GEOM-based tools that I wasn’t able to test, while OpenBSD supports crypto via a softraid personality. Unluckily, support for the, nowadays, exotic Apple hardware is a no-brainer.

So, with no other way left open, I decided to go the Linux route, using the excellent sysresccd, that I elect today as the successor of the pld-linux rescuecd, companion of endless system recoveries :-). Anyway, you’ll need the 2.6.36 kernel to make it boot onto the MacMini4,1, due to the aforementioned MCP89 bug. Ethernet card and SD card reader work out-of-the-box.

Now, I’m playing with LUKS and, while I’m not that competent in cryptography, looks like it is more evolved than the *BSD counterparts, and anyway it is more versatile tool than the tools in OpenBSD and NetBSD. On the latter, having to set up GPT and DK Wedges to make the CGD and synch MBR and Disklabel to make the boot loader work (yuck!), everything coupled with rEFIt is quite a mess™. There’s a GPT loader for NetBSD but I hadn’t a chance to try it out.

I hope this information is useful to anyone who tries a similar adventure, comments are appreciated :-).

Panmind spin-offs presented at Ruby Social Club Milan

On July 22nd 2010, Mikamai hosted a Ruby Social Club in Milan, where nearly 50 people attended watching five speeches about Ruby, Web development and Startups. I was glad to be one of the speakers, and I presented a set of Rails plugins we spinned off from our latest (and greatest) project: Panmind (read more on the about page) and released as Open Source on GitHub.

The keynote is split in two parts: the first one explains why you should follow the sane software engineering principle of writing modular and interest-separated code and then how you could (and should) extract it from your Rails application by decoupling configuration and then prepare for the Open Source release, by writing documentation AND presenting to a Ruby event so, hopefully, someone else will write unit tests! :-)

We released an SSL helper plugin that implements filters (like Rails' ssl_requirement) but also named route helpers: no more <%= url_for :protocol => 'https' %>! You'll have something like plain_root_url and ssl_login_url - like they were built into the framework. Then, a Google Analytics ultra-simple plugin, with <noscript> support, a couple of test helpers and an embryo of a JS Analytics framework - hopefully it'll evolve into a complete jQuery plugin. Then, a ReCaptcha interface, with AJAX validation support and eventually a Zendesk interface for Rails.

We released also more code on Panmind's GitHub account, including the nifty AJAX Navigation Framework that implements all the boilerplate code for the ultra-fast AJAX navigation of panmind contents and projects.

The keynote follows, you can download it in PDF (no exploits, I swear! :-) from this link or view/comment it on slideshare here.

Final words: check out mikamai blog post on the Ruby Social Club to read the other keynotes (I will, hopefully, update this post with sum-ups of them when time permits :-)) and say hello on twitter or on GitHub if you're interested in contributing our open source projects or you want to work with us.

PS. The slideshare flash-based player sucks by design and relies on its app servers, on its CDN and on the S3 CDN to work properly - if any of these breaks, the whole thing will break. If you find it broken, download a PDF version of this keynote here.

Spent my day on Erlang-Ruby-Marshal today ;-)

In a nutshell, it adds support for unmarshaling 1.9 strings, and implements the last missing type (TYPE_LINK) that was missing from the code. Tests still lack, can someone help ? :-)

Added TYPE_LINK, needed because of how ruby 1.9 marshals strings.

In 1.9, Ruby marshals the string encoding in the binary output, and
uses an Ivar construct (TYPE_IVAR) to wrap the string and adds an
"encoding" instance variable (notice: without a leading @) whose
value is the encoding itself.

While the Ivar code worked correctly, the values of the encodings
are actually *strings*, that are being reused via the TYPE_LINK
construct, that wasn't implemented.

So, the get() and put() primitives are being used to store not
only tuples {id, sym} for symbols, but now store either

  {{symbol, ID}, sym}

  OR

  {{value,  ID}, val}

for the other types that use TYPE_LINK.

By reading the ruby marshal.c source code, it looks like that MANY
data types save their values in the arg->data hashtable, but by
inspecting the binary marshal output of, e.g, an array of floats,
links aren't used.

Thus, in this unmarshaler, links are considered, for now, only for
strings and regexes.

Fork me on GitHub: http://github.com/vjt/erlang-ruby-marshal