Jason Sidabras

McCain has picked his running mate… its a woman! How progressive! I really think he will fix… OH SHINY KEYS!! YAY!!!

Now that I have OpenBSD installed on my RAID server at work, I figured that I would write a few tutorials about the things I have done with it. If for nothing else, so I can remember and repeat them if something happens.

I noticed looking at /var/log/authlog that a significant number of failed attempts at root and invalid user login attempts were occurring from seemingly random IP addresses (thousands of dictionary attacks). These are probably boxen that have been hacked into and they haven’t figured it out yet. My first approach was to use pf(4) to filter these IP addresses. With this I found simple pf.conf code using tables and reject code to reject an IP address list.

This worked well and good until I realized the endless array of hacked boxen out there. So I had to figure out something more.

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A friend of mine found Married to the Sea. I recommend you go check them out.

So for quite some time I’ve been dreaming of a perfect backup system. Luckily my current RAIDbox at work was no longer cutting the mustard so I decided to upgrade… big time.

As the system goes:

• Intel Core2 Duo 2.56GHz
• 1 GB DDR2-4200 RAM
• Giga-byte GA-945GCM-S2 Mobo
• Areca ARC-1220 SATA raid controller 8-port
• Seagate ES 250GB
• 5x Seagate ES 1TB

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So for the past two days I’ve been writing a patch for GNU Chess. First, GNUchess hasn’t been updated since August of 2003, so what could I possibly add to such an awesome chess program.

Let me introduce you to Chess960. Chess960 or Fischer Random Chess is a chess variant designed by Bobby Fischer to enhance creativity and talent for chess playing which is lost in memorizing awesome starting moves, middle and finishing moves.  Since there are 960 possible positions for the chess pieces memorization if futile. Pawns are where you expect them. Obviously there is one of the 960 setups which is the original chess board.

This version needs some testing in that the castling queen and kings side ends up the same but doesn’t start the same. I will be posting it on gnu.chess in google groups.

UPDATE: There seem to be a few random bugs. In one game, a chess piece changed on me from turn-to-turn. I haven’t tested castling yet.

gnuchess-507_508.diff