Being the tinfoil hat I am I obviously don’t like nor use whatsapp, some time ago I set up my own XMPP server and made a bunch of close friends switch to it. There are multiple clients for every platform, my personal preference goes to Xabber on Android and Pidgin on GNU/Linux; both support OTR encryption and all around are pretty decent clients. The only real issue we had so far is the very annoying problem of lost messages; if the internet connection is stable and decent the problem will very likely never come up, too bad that mobile phone internet connection is everything but stable. …

Ok, -everyone- knows it, this new version introduces a number of interesting updates, one above all: openssl version 1.0.1. Openssl is the library used by many programs to perform encryption tasks, for example it’s used by openssh, webservers, etc etc. The version included in CentOS 6.4 was really outdated, it doesn’t support TLS v1.2 for example, so I had to install it separately (which is a PITA to say the least). …

It’s been quite a while since the last time I fired up the single stage (actually, it should be 290 days), let alone having a LN2 session. Past saturday I went to my grandfather’s place and got him a new PC since his precedent one is, to say the least, outdated. Anyway, since the old one has some interesting parts I decided to give it a try, hooked it to the single stage and baaaaaaam. …

This post is meant to be the sequel of the one I wrote one month ago about CentOS as router, transparent proxy, and much more. A big chunk of the precedent article is on how configure squid and squidGuard to act as a transparent proxy with URLs filtering capabilities. But there’s a problem with that: nowadays many sites (f4c3b00k.c0m just to name the most annoying one) are HTTPS. With HTTP one can really easily intercept a packet and read the payload (which contains the URL) but with HTTPS this is not possible anymore since the payload is encrypted. …

I got a new TV for the living room (a Panasonic Viera TX-L39E6E) which is DLNA capable. To be honest I’m also planning to build some kind of media center, maybe a really low power one, based on some kind of raspeberry-pi lookalike device. Anyway, for now I’m using my workstation (Fedora 19 x86_64) to stream video contents using miniDLNA. First of all, let’s install it with the usual: $ sudo yum install minidlna Then, edit the following file: …

As usual, long story short: I’ve to setup a firewall to log traffic, block some stuff and do some other things. – epel repo is required – The system is made of a single CentOS machine with 2 physical network adapters: eth0, connected to WAN, static IP address 192.168.0.3 eth1, connected to LAN, static IP address 10.0.0.1/24 .:. Network adapters configuration WAN network adapter: [root@CentOS ~]# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 DEVICE="eth0" BOOTPROTO="none" HWADDR="**:**:**:**:**:**" IPADDR=192. …

Ok, I know I fucked up, I know everyone who knows me just a little bit would never expect this, but I got my first mobile phone or, like they call them nowadays: a smartphone. I don’t like the smartphone buzzword since I think the only smart ones here are the guys who are able to sell this stuff for hundreds of bucks to billions of people, so I’ll stick with the old and almost forgotten mobile phone name. …

It’s summer, it’s hot as hell, I am back home from mountains and I’ve plenty of free time. Between a barbecue and the next one I spend my time playing with and learning new stuff: this week new stuff is called QEMU-KVM. Yesterday I also tried XenServer but to be honest I wasn’t impressed, it just look like to be an old version of CentOS minimal install with some custom repos and a fancy GUI. …