Captains Log

Wednesday started with a few surprises, a minor one being the fact that one has to get up early to have a shower without waiting for hours. But anyway, the water is really hot, so it's okay to wait and have a nice chat.
Then we encountered that our machines where without power. Obviously the Dude removed the power when he went to bed. I couldn't imagine why, thou. As dude got up he told us that the firewall is broken, so he decided to shutdown the machines the hard way.
Luckily for all of us it turned out that the firewall was still alive. There was some smoke yesterday evening coming from the power supply. Nothing to worry about as it seems.
Next in line of failing HW was our server. It rebooted several times, and all of a sudden froze with a "UDMA command error". It looked like a dead disk. In the end the HDDs were just too hot and the drives electronic fainted.
So I changed the disks positions.
This fixed all our HW related problems, but afterwards we still had some issues with system crashes. The machine is a FreeBSD-CURRENT using ZFS with 2GB of RAM. So memory shouldn't be the problem, but ZFS crashes are related to RAM. A look at /boot/loader.conf stated a bug in the configuration: To do some initial without the 2GB installed I reduced some memory caches, making ZFS prone to failures under heavy load. Removed the line, rebooted the machine - stable until now.

Because of all this failure tracking I missed two of the lectures I wanted to attend today, and the opening ceremony. So I just was listening to Wir entziehen uns, which dealt with possibilities of avoiding or breaking surveilance technologies. Destroying RFID chips is interesting. Using a microwave oven works, but leaves traces behind (burn marks). But there's the RFID-Zapper, too.
And of course the basic statement of the lecture was: "encrypt everything. Not only worthy stuff, but everything. Including mail, Instant Messages, SMS, Hard Disks...".

The day has gone by with sitting in the tent, doing a few walks around the camp site. You'll get some delicious food here, I can recommend the Thai Soup and the Indian Curry. But I've been told that the pizza is also good. But you've probably to deal with a long waiting time. 45min for a pizza isn't exactly fast food. And when the Thai or Indian food is gone, they have to prepare another round.
But it's worthy. Just because we're geeks we don't have to stick to fast food, do we?

The Open Source Drone Workshop showed some results. Several drones were on display, flying around at the art & beauty village, hoovering around in mid air. They nearly look like UFOs.
Really cool devices, and a pretty toy for all of us old children.

We just encountered a project I have to find the name for: Using a laser pointer one can write on the wall of foo shelter. Remembers me of shows like "Montagsmaler", where a team has to guess the meaning of an iconized drawing of an object.

After taking some more images I'm back in the tent. Temperatures are falling outside, it's getting really cold here. I'll download my images now and upload them to my gallery.

Kurzzusammenfassung:Der Tag startete mit einigen Hardware-Problemen: Zuerst waren die Maschinen ausgeschaltet. Wir hatten den Dude im Verdacht den Saft abgeklemmt zu haben, was sich dann auch als wahr herausstellte. Die Firewall hatte am abend wohl noch gequalmt und gestunken. Er tippte auf ein Netzteilproblem und hat sie runtergefahren. Jetzt läuft sie aber wieder.
Dann fing unser Server an zu crashen. Wie sich herausstellte waren dafür zwei Probleme verantwortlich: Die Platten waren zu eng montiert und wurden zu heiß. Eine Kernel-Einstellung im FreeBSD beschränkte die Cache-Größe für ZFS unnötig, was unter Last zu einem Absturz führte. Seitdem das alles behoben ist läuft der Server stabil.
Dadurch habe ich aber bis auf Wir entziehen uns die Vorträge verpaßt, die ich mitnehmen wollte.
Im Laufe des Tages gab es dann noch einige Open Source Drone WorkshopDrohnen zu bestaunen, gutes Essen und ein mir noch unbekanntes Projekt, bei dem man mit einem Laserpointer auf eine der Vortragshallen schreiben kann, fast wie bei Montagsmaler.
Jetzt wirds hier gerade kalt, und ich werde mal meine Bilder in die Gallerie hochladen.

Okay, it took me some time to get ready to blog here. Sorry everyone who waited for an update of what's going on at the camp. I needed to setup a secure connection from the camps network to everywhere. Since twoday.net and 23hq.com don't offer secure connections I had to make sure that nobody sniffing the network traffic is able to read my passwords.
I'm now using a ssh port forwarding to a squid running on my home machine.

There are several reasons why it took me so long to set up the apps. But read the summary below:

Summary
We arrived here yesterday under perfect weather conditions, it was sunny and nearly 30 degrees Celsius. Okay, one could state that this is pretty hot to set up several tents and all the equipment. But anyway, as we left our homes it was raining.
We where finished around 7pm, including some basic shopping for bear, water and food.
We needed the rest of the evening for configuring our equipment. We never tested the servers, firewalls and switches in the "production environment", so naturally many changes had to be made.
One particularly nasty part included a proper setup for our server, which wasn't finished until this morning. And this morning brought us some other quite unpleasant details, but that's for later.
One thing to point out are the moskitos at the site: They like me a lot, and my friends here like it when I''m being around. But I heard that C.E.R.T. has a cool device to stop them itching.
The atmosphere at the site was great so far. People came even after dawn, unpacking and setting up their stuff. Many brought blinking, shining gadgets with them, and after dark the site was illuminated. Nothing I'm used to from the medieval markets I attend, but damn cool!

Kurzzusammenfassung:
Wir sind hier gestern bei schönstem Wetter gelandet, nachdem es in NRW noch geregnet hatte schien hier in Berlin die Sonne, und es waren fast 30 Grad.
Der Aufbau ging recht streßfrei vonstatten, aber wir hatten noch etliches am IT-Equipment zu ändern. Vor allem unser Server mußte noch konfiguriert werden, womit ich mich dann den restlichen Abend im Großen und Ganzen herumgeschlagen habe.
Deshalb konnte ich auch nicht gestern schon bloggen, weil ich erstmal sicherstellen mußte, verschlüsselt ans Bloggen zu kommen. twoday.net und auch 23hq.com unterstützen und kein https, und es ist echt nicht sinnvoll, auf einem Hackerkongreß sein Passwort im Klartext durchs Netz zu pusten. ;-)
Jetzt läuft zuhause auf meinem Server ein Squid, den ich von hier aus über einen SSH-Tunnel anspreche.