robert's rant room » freitagsrunde

Eine Stunde Bildungsstreik

rbu — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:47:01 +0000

In diesen Minuten demonstrieren (mehr oder weniger) fünftausend Schüler und Studenten auf der Spandauer Straße in Berlin. Ich war auch am Roten Rathaus, doch meine Ideen von besserer Bildung (frühzeitig, durchlässig, besser ausgestattet, kostenfrei) sprachen dort nur wenige aus. “Kritik am Bildungssystem ist immer auch Kritik am Kapitalismus!” schallt es. Man verkauft T-Shirts und protestiert, die Universitäten seien “Steigbügelhalter des neoliberalen Systems”. Ich fühle mich instrumentalisiert von den Ideologen am Mikrofon.

Ich kann mich entscheiden, im “schwarzen Block” der Autonomen, im roten Block der Kommunisten, bei den Antifaschisten oder den Antikapitalisten mitzulaufen. Dann doch lieber zur S-Bahn.

LinuxTag setup and first day

rbu — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:20:14 +0000

So the first day of the four days of Gentoo at LinuxTag is almost over. It’s a very exciting event, talking to users, visitors, and devs, and in the end we could even convince some unhappy Ubuntu users to try Gentoo. Here’s some pictures of what happened so far.

Pictures were taken by Florian, amne and fauli. The word cloud poster is by sping and me.

LinuxTag Berlin starting Wednesday

rbu — Mon, 26 May 2008 15:17:36 +0000

There are only two days left until the LinuxTag in Berlin will start (May 28-31), and Gentoo will be featured with a booth again this year. It’s been some busy weeks for us, and I hope our presentation will turn out to be satisfactory. Even if we do not have the financial backing of other projects.

Speaking of money, if you are still in need of free tickets for all four days, drop me a mail. First come, first served.

OpenSSL certificates with multiple domains (common names)

rbu — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:27:29 +0000

At Freitagsrunde, we are currently installing an ejabberd Jabber server, and came across the problem of using one SSL certificate for multiple host names. While the old anwer to this problem is using one IP address for each hostname, or wildcard certificates, one of us proposed a solution unknown to the others before: SSL certificates with more than one common name, aka Unified Communications Certificates.

# copy the system's openssl config

$ cp /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf .

# patch

$ cat<
--- openssl.cnf.orig	2008-04-10 18:01:37.000000000 +0200
+++ openssl.cnf	2008-04-10 18:02:18.000000000 +0200
@@ -141,8 +141,14 @@
organizationalUnitName		= Organizational Unit Name (eg, section)
#organizationalUnitName_default	=

-commonName			= Common Name (eg, YOUR name)
-commonName_max			= 64
+0.commonName			= Common Name 1
+0.commonName_max			= 64
+
+1.commonName			= Common Name 2
+1.commonName_max			= 64
+
+2.commonName			= Common Name 3
+2.commonName_max			= 64

emailAddress			= Email Address
emailAddress_max		= 64
EOF
# now create a certificate with this config
$ openssl req -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -keyout ssl.key -out ssl.pem -config openssl.cnf
...Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name 1 []:goodpoint.de
Common Name 2 []:*.goodpoint.de
Common Name 3 []:*.*.goodpoint.de
Email Address []:...
And for all remaining sceptics, these certificates will even  be signed by CaCert.org:

Distro Bashs for the World

rbu — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:54:54 +0000

The TU Berlin students of the Freitagsrunde, which I am a part of, organized a series of talks last summer called the Distro Bash. In three sessions Linux and Unix enthusiasts met and discussed merits and flaws of their favorite (or most hated) distribution. Most of the speakers were active users or developers, who studied or worked at the TU Berlin. The talks were rather informal, usually accompanied by live demonstrations. We had about 30 to 40 people attending each session and I learned a lot about how other systems work.

Apparantly, I was not the only to feel this way. Tobias Klauser of the Zürcher Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften in Switzerland who heard of (or attended?) our series started an own session of Distro Bashs in the Linux User Group of his university. Too bad I can’t be there, but it’s great to see how our idea travels and evolves. Read more about it in press reports at Pro-Linux and symlink.