Allnet donates network switches to CCC Berlin

In very short amount of time, two 19" rack-mountable Ethernet switches went dead at the Berlin Chaos Communication Club.

The chairman of the friendly company Allnet was immediately willing to donate two replacements. Very kind of him :)

Chaosradio 99 - Telekommunikationsueberwachungsverorndung

After about four months, the first Chaosradio radio show that I was participating in. Subject of the show was the telecommunications surveillance act (TKUeV) and the corresponding technical directive. Starting from 1st January 2005, any "provider of telecommunication services" has to provide lawful interception interfaces for government and police authorities.

The big issue is that it isn't only about providers, but about anybody who runs more than 1000 mailboxes on an email server, even if it is non-for-profit.

If you're interested in the full show, you can download it from the usual location on ftp.ccc.de.

Website now has a logo

The gpl-violations.org website now has a nice logo, thanks to it's designer Chris Huebsch.

Coordination with Free Software Foundation Europe

Finally I've had the opportunity (and the time) to talk to Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation Europe. It's good to know that they're very supportive of my GPL enforcement efforts, and it seems like we're going to coordinate our efforts at some later point this year.

This comes exactly at the right time, since I really want to get more development done and deal less with those legal issues.. believe me.

SDSL line has arrived

About a week ago the QSC SDSL line was activated. This is great news, and I just cannot describe the amount of difference it makes if you suddenly have eight times the upstream bandwidth.

Conferences 2005

I'm a bit in planning mood for conferences in the first 6 months of 2005. So far I'm going to visit FOSDEM (Brussels), CLUC (Zagreb), CLT (Chemnitz), LinuxTag (Karlsruhe) and obviously OLS (Ottawa).

If you happen to be at any of those conferences and want netfilter T-Shirts, please contact me beforehand so I can make sure to bring the required sizes and quantities.

New development version of grouter (aka linwrap)

Some time ago I started working on a small embedded Linux distribution. You will now ask yourself, why yet another one? Well, any free distribution you can find out there has either not a networking focus strong enough for my demands, or is using horribly outdated software (and especially no 2.6.x kernels).

So I'm now running that distro (still not sure whether I'll finally call it "gnumonks.org router (grouter)" or "Linux Wireless Router Application Platform (LinWRAP)") on three embedded production systems.

It's main features are

• Linux 2.6.10
• uClibc 0.9.27
• busybox 1.00
• iptables-1.2.11
• dropbear
• quagga
• openvpn
• iptraf
• siproxd
• dhcprelay
• in-kernel PPPoE
• fits in less than 15MB of flash

The only hardware supported so far is the PC Engines WRAP embedded x86 platform. More hardware support will be added over time, very likely candidates are IXP42x and probably even some of the Broadcom/ti/intersil consumer access point platforms.

The current state of the distribution can be followed in this svn repository. Please note that there is absolutely zero support or documentation.

Work starting on ct_sync active-active

The swiss company dremalab wants to sponsor me to work on an extension of ct_sync for active-active setups. More detailed news will appear very soon on the netfilter page and/or on this blog. Stay tuned.

Rusty producing more patches than I can review in fast time

There was s sudden surge in netfilter/iptables development in late December and early January. I'm still reviewing some of the changes, and am not yet convinced that all of them are the way to go.

Another preliminary injunction was granted

About one week ago I had to apply for another preliminary injunction. Unfortunately the respective multi-billion company (name still undisclosed for strategic reasons) refused to sign a declaration to cease and desist before the deadline for obtaining injunctive relief has passed.

The injunction was meanwhile granted, basically banning the company from shipping their product in it's current form. I'm really sad that this happened, since I expect it to harm their business. However, I really see no reason why they couldn't just sign a statement "no, we won't do it again, and we will comply with the GPL from now on".

We're still waiting for their legal staff to get back to us, let's hope they have good news next time.

Keyframe-accurate mp4 file cutting

I've done some modifications to the mp4clip tool (part of the MPEG4ip software package) to do key frame accurate cutting/clipping of mp4 files. In general it seems to work, but from time to time it corrupts the source (!) files. Need to find time for debugging.

I'll release the patch as soon I consider it to be used safely. Don't want to be responsible for corrupting someones video collection...