The day after the RMS speech, and it was time for currybeer again. Paul was skiving, so I took the twelve of us off to the Punjab restaurant. We have been there before, but with a larger group that ended up sitting around two tables. This time we got one, although there was still no talk between the extremities of the table.

I had keema dosa, which was quite filling. So filling I didn’t eat all of my main course, which was a fairly nice dish that I can’t remember the name of (a Punjab special tawamix thingy).

There was an impressive turnout at the #manlug currybeer. A whopping eighteen people turned up. There were a few new faces, including, but probably not limited to Simon Murray, a friend from my university days who now gets to be called “pink”, and some fellows known by their IRC nicks in #manlug as Falken and parag0n. Also there were Daniel and Rob after a bit of a break, Leslie was kind enough to give Eve a lift, and Matt came along too.

Paul took us along to Lal Haweli, a restaurant I’m not sure has ever let me down, and last night it didn’t let us down either. They had no problems, or didn’t show them, seating eighteen of us at no notice. Popadums as usual, lime pickle included. The lime pickle was extra yummy too. It felt like there was some time before the starters came around, but that may have just been my curry cravings, I can’t help it. I had a lovely, gingery “lamb special” for my main course.

Back to Hardy’s Well afterwards. Of course, they rock too.

After almost whining (I should use LiveJournal) about the lack of some expected people, I thought I’d post something a bit more positive.

Before I go on Tim Dobson (call him “dobby”) would prefer me to distinguish between:

• ManLUG, that has a an associated mailing list and fairly formal meetings on the third Saturday of the month; and

• #manlug, which refers to either the group of people, some of whom frequent ManLUG meetings, who hang around in the IRC channel of the same name, the channel itself, or the confusingly named “ManLUG Social” that I prefer to call “#manlug Currybeer”.

#manlug is very much related to ManLUG. The channel originally contained just ManLUG attendees, but we diversified. Some people previously had some involvement with ManLUG or its mailing lists, and stuck around in the IRC channel even after leaving. We’ve occasionally had people from South Cheshire GNU Users, and I’m sure we’ll start to see some more users from the recently started Manchester Free Software group too, as we now also pimp the curry there.

Now, onto curry review…

The turnout was good. Ben Higginbottom now lives out of Manchester, but makes an effort to come along, and it was nice to see Mark Johnson again (I bet he enjoyed the chance to get out too).

Discussion included some BIOS implementation, some other things that I didn’t catch all of, with a brief interlude of Eee PC shiny talk.

We went to Shere Khan for curry. With the reputation of not being as clean as one might wish for a place that serves food from a few years back, and my own not so nice experience of poor quality but expensive food, in my mind, I was hesitant about eating there. It turned out to be not so bad. It has been refurbished not so long ago. While it looks a bit more swish from the outside, the inside looks much as every other restaurant around. The toilets were clean, and there was no sign of any messiness, that I saw, elsewhere.

When seated, a couple of us found that we were also not given too much space between the table and window or banister. The service was ok in general, but not as attentive as they should have been. The music was loud. Apparently we should eat, and not talk. We did ask them to turn the volume down a touch, and they did, but it seemed to gradually increase back beyond the original level later. The food didn’t take too long to arrive, and we all got to tuck in at about the same time.

Poppadoms were first issue as usual. They had some green stuff instead of lime pickle. For starters, I wanted a “chicken tangri”, but they didn’t have any. Ben H had a similar problem with his preferred starter. Instead, I went for “reshmi kebab”, which I quite liked. For my main course I had a “lamb handi”. Also nice.

After curry it was back to Hardy’s for a couple more beers. All in all, a pleasant night.

The December (aka Christmas, apparently) currybeer (that would be the ManLUG (well (I hope you like parentheses), really #manlug) meeting that happens on the first Friday of the month) went well enough.

Five others turned up at Hardy’s Well. Notably missing were:

• Matt Lee. He said he would come but buggered off to some party in Leeds instead. We know how important we are.

• Paul Waring Long time organiser of the currybeer, but a little unwell tonight. If he can’t make it, there’s always someone else, like me, who can be around to herd (hurd?) up the geeks entering the pub. I hope he gets better.

• Noah Slater. He claimed something along the lines of not being able to afford it, yet Tim Dobson, who is a poor student who claims becoming a student member of the FSF is a bit of a financial blocker, managed to. Noah actually gets paid. Finding out whether that’s for work is left as an exercise to the reader.

Edit: Perfdave says he isn’t notable and that I smell of badger wee. I do not dispute either.

Twice a year ManLUG has an InstallFest, where people bring in their computers and install GNU/Linux on them, and picking the brains of the other attendees. Normally they aren’t that interesting to me, and I’ll just chat to people, or get on with something on my laptop. I was going to go about installing a few GNU/Linux distributions on some virtual machines, which seemed quite suitable for an InstallFest, but instead got distracted by a Netgear router.

The router is a Netgear DG834. The initial difficulty was finding the exact model so we could be sure we were following the right instructions. All we had to go on was the model name of “DG834” but the OpenWRT wiki documents the DG834G and DG834GT. It has a TI AR7 processor, so that ruled out the DG834GT, and was an older model (the case design also gives that away), so we concentrated on the documentation for the DG834G version 1. The firmware version was reported as 3.01.25, which also helped identify it. I saw the note about firmware from this version onwards using LZMA compression, and spent some time attempting to build the patched squashfs. I didn’t manage to build it because I was missing the lzma library. I grabbed the LZMA SDK, but that didn’t help much either.

Simon Hobson came over for a bit of a nosey, and got me back on track. As per the instructions for the DG843G, we backed up the flash devices, and modified the one containing the bootloader. I didn’t have a hex editor, so used vim and xxd to edit the image. Vim mangled it, and the checksum didn’t match the expected checksum after the change. Lesson learnt. Instead of opening binary files in vim, hexifying with ‘:%!xxd’, editing then de‐hexifying with ‘:%!xxd -r’, I first run ‘xxd’, edit the result, then run ‘xxd -r’ on it. After copying the modified bootloader back, and restarting the router, we were pleased to find that it came back up successfully.

Unfortunately that’s all we had time for, and we only managed to change four bytes. The plan is to perform the install at next month’s meeting, after Jim Jackson’s talk on IPv6. It should prove to be another interesting meeting, and not just because of the router: I’ll be paying attention the the IPv6 talk.

I currently use IPv6 at home via a tunnel broker (Hexago, formerly Freenet6), but I haven’t updated any of my servers to do so. One of the reasons blocking it was the lack of support for stateful filtering in the Linux kernel. As of version 2.6.20 this changed, and Bytemark (yes, that’s a sneaky referral link, here is a non‐referral link) have some kernels with the relevant options in testing, so I shall be requesting a block of the IPv6‐space from them soon (yes, Bytemark are great, they’ll give you IPv6 connectivity as a free extra).

South Cheshire GNU/Linux Users met in Macclesfield last night, and I went for the first time. Getting there was pretty painless: Macclesfield station is probably the furthest in that direction that I can get a direct train to from Levenshulme, and the venue, The Society Rooms, is easy to find.

The turn out was good, I think I counted twelve, and someone said it was probably a record. Normally they get about three or four people. To accommodate us we had to commandeer some extra furniture, comfy furniture. The Society Rooms is quite nice considering it’s a Wetherspoons pub (I’m used to the ones in Manchester).

We started off by introducing ourselves: There were people from quite varying backgrounds, including step‐ father and son who were just getting into GNU/Linux. I wasn’t the only person wearing a Debian shirt either. Stranger things have happened (no pink elephants involved here).

Topics covered included various UNIX‐like operating systems, virtualisation, the broken MS OOXML specification, network cards that silently corrupt traffic. It was well worth going, and I hope to make it to future meetings.

ManLUG

Yesterday I went to ManLUG’s August meeting. It was supposed to be discussion on the BBC’s iPlayer, DRM and the protests that happened outside the BBC’s offices in London and Manchester on the 14th of August, organised by Defective By Design. If there was such discussion, I wasn’t involved in it. Later, Simon Hobson did a short presentation on fail2ban among other things, which got some interest, especially from some young new ManLUG attendees who I hope aren’t too put off to return.

Preventing SSH brute force attacks

I ended up getting drawn into a discussion #manlug about the “hackiness” of the likes of denyhosts and fail2ban, that continued on to preventing brute force attacks. I gave up trying to get it across to someone who I think is pretty clued up about system administration that simply running SSH service on a high port may help prevent casual brute force attacks, but by itself it is an (very close to) ineffective means of defence. I’d like to think I gave him something to think about, but I think he just ended up not listening on the grounds that he doesn’t see anything in his logs resembling unauthorised connection attempts and assumes it doesn’t and won’t happen. I was getting irritated and losing patience. It felt like everything I said was being put to question. I wanted to tell him to just do some research (I think I did, though can’t remember). The only positive thing I can get out of that is it made me consider my reasoning more carefully. It’s a painful process.

Beerage

After the ManLUG meeting, landstalker and I went to SandBar for a few. We met up a bit later in the English Lounge in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. It’s quite a nicely furbished place, and seemed friendly. Guinness came in at £3/pint. I think I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember. landstalker’s friends were already there, but I didn’t know any of them to say hello. That was resolved on landstalker’s arrival. We went somewhere else, and then on to Bar Fringe where landstalker drank a 9% beer because of a pink elephant. It was fun. I got the bus towards home (Levenshulme) and ended up in Stockport (map), in the rain, with no buses to take me back. The taxi was £16.something. That was not so fun.