~imt @ hackers.cool

tilde.hol.es

Sat, 10 Jan 2015 00:04:52 +0100

I ran across this awesome free monitoring service from UptimeRobot, and of course I couldn’t resist the temptation to add club6.nl and the other tildes to it. It checks for SSH (port 22/tcp) every 5 minutes.

Furthermore, using UptimeRobot’s API I created an external site at http://tilde.hol.es with a JSON/JSON-P data feed (thanks Hostinger!) Default output is JSON, but just add a callback URL param if you wish JSON-P output.

There’s an array with all tildes monitored. For each tilde, there’s an object like this:

{ "host": String, "code": Number, "status": String, "uptime": Number }

host: Friendly host name. Matches global domain, not SSH host (i.e. club6.nl vs tty.club6.nl)
code: Status code for the monitor>status key: 0 - paused, 1 - not checked yet, 2 - up, 8 - seems down, 9 - down
status: Friendly description of the code field above.
uptime: The uptime ratio of the monitor calculated since the monitor is created.

~club6.nl is up

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:29:23 +0100

I’ve been working very hard to setup my shinny new tilde: ~club6.nl It’s the first IPv6-only Public Access UNIX System! I’m happy to announce is open for registration :)

Lurking around cheap VPS providers I found VDS6 They offer extremely cheap OpenVZ boxes in Netherlands and I sadi Hey!, wouldn’t be a great idea to have another tilde?.

If you feel curious, there’s a master plan in the ~club6.nl TODO list.

I’d love to post sometime the adventure of configuring everything arount ~club6.nl, but for the time being I’d like to thank:

brennen, the first real user!
pfhawkins for listing us
delfuego for setting up IRC peering with tilde.club.
[englishm] for the NNTP peering setup.
endorphant for adding us to the Nethack Empire.
ecelis and papa, ol’school SDFers, always with positive feedback.
[…] please don’t be upset if I forgot you, my memory is slighty worse than my english! Just drop me a line and I’ll fix it ;)

Two videos worth viewing

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 01:08:49 +0100

Signing all pages with GnuPG

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 14:31:00 +0100

So, two posts and already changed them twice. These ~tildzitens are teaching me more stuff that I expected. In a previous version of this post, I was self-publishing my public key (and using pgp.mit.edu for distribution), but now I’ll use a different public key (global, if you will), managed under Keybase.io (thanks dlowe for the invite!)

The general idea is to sign all posted pages in this blog using GnuPG. Not that I doubt my root (if fact I wouldn’t be here if I did), but there’s always a good practice in a shared host to add an extra layer of security. Thus, I’m signing all pages with my GnuPG key, also available on my Keybase account.

All pages get signed at render time, and a .asc file accompanies every HTML and XML feed in this blog. So, let’s say you wish to verify http://hackers.cool/~imt/index.html. First, you’ll have to fetch my GnuPG public key from a known key server:

$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key C5241360
gpg: requesting key C5241360 from hkp server pgp.mit.edu
gpg: key C5241360: public key "keybase.io/imt <imt@keybase.io>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)

Next, download the page and the corresponding .asc signature file.

$ wget -q http://hackers.cool/~imt/index.html http://hackers.cool/~imt/index.html.asc

Last, but not least, run gpg --verify. Remember, the first argument is the .asc file (GnuPG ASCII signature armor)

$ gpg --verify index.html.asc index.html
gpg: Signature made Mon 08 Dec 2014 18:57:28 UTC using RSA key ID C5241360
gpg: Good signature from "keybase.io/imt <imt@keybase.io>"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 185B EA37 4F1D E4BC F3F7  8A36 8A0E 8807 C524 1360

The phrase Good signature from “keybase.io/imt imt@keybase.io“ indicates the HTML page was not altered since it was signed with my GnuPG key.

In a next episode, how to get rid of the warning message This key is not certified with a trusted signature!.

PS. Here’s my GPG public key:

Re-start

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 14:31:00 +0100

Thanks to ~emilis@retronet I found a geekier way to maintain this blog. Instead of using bashblog (and a lot of tweakin’), I’m checking Jekyll.

The reasoning is pretty much the same as before: ~tilde hosts tend not to have enabled PHP support, so I’m getting a static HTML render to upload these contents to my tildespace.

Page template is build using Bootstrap and the Slate theme from Bootswatch. Jekyll templating system is sweet, so not much work to do adapting the template really.