digital survival

Inconsolata

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 16:47:09 -0700

Today I was browsing around and found a beautiful free font. I’ll be switching my terminals over to it shortly.

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

Enjoy!

Maffblaster

Digital Survival Project Updates

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 16:54:03 -0700

It has been a while, has not it? Although this site has not been updated a while, a lot has happened on the home front. I wanted to write a little update to inform those who may be interested that Digital Survival is not over. On the contrary Digital Survival is just beginning…

I’m still very much interested in moving this project forward, but since I have (lately) been learning so many new technologies it has been difficult to allot much time here. Things should be ironed out in the next couple of weeks. There is some personal projects that are finally coming to a close which will free me up to some more brain storming and actual work on this side of things.

Recently I read the Appropriate Technology article on Wikipedia. I’m not entirely sure yet, but I believe Digital Survival is an appropriate technology proponent. As far as I understand, the appropriate technology article on Wikipedia provides a great summary of what I want Digital Survival to be.

There will be more to come on these thoughts in the future when I get some kind of a mission statement worked out.

For more current updates check out my personal blog.

Progress on Stage7

Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:13:25 -0800

This week I’ve been able to make some decent progress on the Stage7 installer. As of version 0.1.1-alpha there is now a check to determine if essential S7 modules are missing. It doesn’t actually extend the functionality of the code, but it is a step in the right directly as far as the stability of the installer. Next I will make sure the live medium contains the required tools. Most of them are generic GNU core utilities (echo, chmod, sort, etc.), but a few “outside” tools to exist. Those are the important ones to check for. These things will not matter much as long as people use Stage7 installer from a Digital Survival LiveCD/USB because I will make sure all the utilities are available, but if other Gentoo-based distributions want to use Stage7 it will be helpful for them to determine they are missing something.

I hope to push a few commits this weekend, and then focus more intensely on actually extending functionality to include Grub 2 and GPT support. God willing I’ll be able to get those kinds of issues worked out rather quickly.

Onward and upward!

Maffblaster

Projects You Should Keep Your Eye On

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 08:41:28 -0700

The Digital Survival website was created in order to help the average individual stay private, secure, and free. Your affairs should be just that: your affairs. Governments, massive internet companies (Google, Facebook), and internet service providers (Comcast, Verizon) simply should not be concerned what you’re doing on your computer in the privacy of your own home.

Ideas like Chomebook take off because they’re cheap, fast, and (supposedly) help people be more productive. All those premises are probably true, but many of us have reconsidered what we are trading for those conveniences. As a wise man once said we trade security for convenience. Now that big data has come along, now people mostly trade privacy for convenience.

Almost all of us rely on large companies in certain capacities. Whether it’s our mobile phone service (AT&T, T-Mobile), our computer operating systems (Windows, OSX, Android), or our e-mail.

I get it. Not everyone cares about these issues, which is all right. Everyone has a right to simply not be concerned about issues that others may consider to be of grave importance to the history nations. However, I urge you to care about them.

That’s enough musing for this entry, now to the point: if you’re concerned about aforesaid things, the following projects are the types of things you should be keeping your eye one.

Stage7

Stage7 is written by none other by myself, Maffblaster, who started Digital Survival. I started this project for a few good reasons. If you don’t follow the link to see the “expanded list” of reasons, at least know this essential: choice in free software is a very important thing and should not be infringed upon. Gentoo Linux retains the spirit of how free software should work therefore providing the end user with maximum choices both efficiently and (relatively) simply. Although some would disagree, one of the things Gentoo lacking is nice installer, which is what Stage7 hopes to become.

Mailpile

Mailpile is e-mail software that is designed to provide an easy to use, but good looking, web interface to people who want to host their own mail servers at home. Written by a few Icelandic guys, the project should turn out being very useful as long as 1) they can figure out some major bumps in the road with GnuPG and 2) they don’t give up. They have the potential to help me continue to be a funder of crowd sourced software in the future if they deliver the product they promised to deliver.

CJDNS

This project is very interesting to me because it’s authors are basically re-designing internet’s underlying structure. I’m very optimistic about CJDNS. It’s creator is pulling massive amounts of work into the project on a daily basis and it has an active community which is excellent for the health of an open source project.

The Tor Project

Tor has been around for while and has the most frequent media exposure out of any of the projects mentioned above. The Tor network has continued to improve since its start. A growing number of people run Tor relays at home, which helps increase the anonymity of the users and provides more bandwidth.

Are you Poor, or are you Broke?

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:06:35 -0700

Are you poor, or are you just broke? Good thoughts from WranglerStar today on his YouTube channel vlog (video blog).

http://youtu.be/i-RossLMK7w

Windows 10 Technical Preview has a Keylogger

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 16:12:21 -0700

According to the Inquirer.net, the Technical Preview of next official release of Windows, which will be Windows 10, watches what users type. It is unclean what other data Microsoft is collecting with Windows 10 TP.

It should be noted this kind of data collection may only be done for the TP version of Windows 10, and could be changed in the final version.

With this being said, keylogging is a tiny example of what closed source software companies are capable of – even if the user is not primarily connected to the web in order to use the software. Other “free” web services are entirely built upon the principal of watching what you type and noting when you’re online/offline (think Google and Facebook).

For more information read the Inquirer’s article.

How to Setup a Local Gentoo Distfiles Mirror

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 17:01:24 -0700

Why setup a local distfiles mirror?

Why would you want to setup a local, private distfiles mirror? There are several reasons why a local mirror is a good idea. First, if your access to the internet goes down, a local mirror enables you to still download and install packages. Will they be the absolute newest packages? No. They will be only as up to date as your local repository is, but as long as you have electricity you will have access to them

Another time you may want to setup a local distfiles mirror is if you’re working for a company doing specific tests where they will have to pull many packages to new machines. This will save a main Gentoo mirror lots and lots of bandwidth.

Another advantage is that internet companies, governments, etc. will not be able to see what you’re doing so easily. If you have your mirror setup to sync on a regular basis then it will routinely grab the new packages.. That’s it. No one but you will know what you’ve chosen to install on your personal machine(s) if you sync to your local mirror. They will know, however, that you have the newest packages. Does it really matter if anyone else knows what packages are on your local machine? Probably not, but in the case you want that privacy option a local mirror could help.

Lets cut to the chase and start to build our local Gentoo distfiles mirror!

Creating a local Gentoo distfiles mirror

Before we download the files, lets create a new directory for these files. I chose to put the files in the following directory on my distfiles server, you can do what I did or choose where you want to put them:

mkdir -p /mirror/distfiles

It’s important to note before you start downloading the files to a 40 GB partition you’ll be downloading a LOT of files. How many? At least 200 gigabytes worth. Plan on letting your system download files for several days (this all depends on the speed of your internet connection; if you have a uber fast connection like FIOS or something, it might only take a few hours).

You can download the files from a mirror using this, or a similar command:

rsync --recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --omit-dir-times --compress --stats --human-readable --progress --timeout=180 rsync://rsync.name.of.mirror/gentoo/distfiles/ /mirror/distfiles

Each time you’ve successfully connected to an official rsync mirror you should see a message of the day (MOTD) similar to this one:.

GEORGIA TECH SOFTWARE LIBRARY Unauthorized use is prohibited. Your access is being logged. GTlib is hosted by the Research Network Operations Center (RNOC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. GT-RNOC - http://www.rnoc.gatech.edu GTLib is operated as a "best effort" service. We _strongly_ recommend against depending on the availability of this service in a critical context. If you run a publicly accessible mirror, and are interested in mirroring from us, please contact lxmirror@gtlib.gatech.edu. If you run a mirror that is not accessible to the public, please mirror from the modules listed at rsync://rsync.gtlib.gatech.edu.

Be sure to read the rsync MOTD in its entirety. Sometimes the providers of official mirrors will ask the user to connect to a different location if they will be syncing for the purposes of a private, local mirror (which is exactly what you would be doing). You want to be sure your local mirror is being nice with how much it talks to the official mirrors. Your mirror will be downloading a lot more data than a normal user will be, especially to get the initial sync.

Right now there are about 68,419 files being hosted on any distfile mirror. All of these files are varying sizes. The largest file (FlightGear-data) is around 1.1 GBs. The smallest (v4l-dvb-saa716x) being 10 bytes.

Using rsync to expose the distfiles to other machines

Once you have all the files downloaded, it is a simple matter of “exposing” them to other machines using the rsync daemon. Since Gentoo replies upon the rsync command for Portage, it should be already installed on your system. In the rare instance that it is not installed it can be installed using the emerge command:

emerge net-misc/rsync

It is relatively easy to expose any part of your system to the rsync daemon. You can expose the part of your system that contains the distfiles by editing /etc/rsyncd.conf accordingly:

# /etc/rsyncd.conf # Minimal configuration file for rsync daemon # See rsync(1) and rsyncd.conf(5) man pages for help # This line is required by the /etc/init.d/rsyncd script pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid # You may need to reduce the amount of max connections you allow depending on the speed of your network and your mirror's hardware. max connections = 30 use chroot = yes # Make sure read only is set! read only = yes motd file = /etc/rsyncd.motd log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log [distfiles] path = /mirror/distfiles comment = My local Gentoo distfiles mirror. #exclude /portage /packages

You can setup a “message of the day” for anyone who connects to your mirror to see by editing the rsyncd.motd file:

/etc/rsyncd.motd

Thanks to the article on the Digital Survival website I am now downloading software packages from my local Gentoo distfiles mirror!

Configuring local machines to use the local distfiles mirror

After you setup the rsync service, the final step is to tell your machines to use the local mirror instead of downloading the distfiles from the internet (you better not forget this step, lest you be foolish). For each machine you will need to modify the GENTOO_MIRRORS variable in /etc/portage/make.conf

Replace the “IP_Address_Of_Mirror” section with the actual IPv4 address of the machine containing your distfiles. Do this to the make.conf for each machine that is supposed to connect to the local mirror.

GENTOO_MIRRORS="rsync://IP_Address_Of_Mirror/distfiles"

As long as you are on an internal network, be it a 10.x.x.x network or a 192.168.x.x, you should be able to connect to the mirror. If you’re having problems connecting to your machine, then you are going to need to so some digging to determine why. Unfortunately resolving network problems is beyond the scope of this entry.

That’s it! You’re done! You’ve become more independent by having source code for literally thousands of packages saved locally. You can now upgrade, reconfigure, install, uninstall software without an internet connection (providing you have electricity to power your machines). Granted, your mirror should be on a schedule to sync with an upstream public mirror in order to have the most up to date files. Maybe that’s the content of another upcoming how-to entry… As long as you configure things properly you should very little maintenance to do.

Soon I will add this guide to the official Gentoo wiki so that the community will be able to find it in wiki formatting instead of having to read it on a blog! I hope you have found this guide to be both helpful and useful.

If you are interesting in helping out with Digital Survival in any way, please contact me via e-mail: Maffblaster at gmail dot com. As always, I’m happy to hear from you.

There’s more to come in the future!

Maffblaster

Digital Survival

Welcome to Digital Survival!

Wed, 01 Oct 2014 22:41:57 -0700

Bhooyaa! The Digital Survival website is here! I’ll write a few entries and then I’ll work on creating a theme for the site!