There’s been a dearth of tech posts around here lately, but that’s about to change.

I’ve previously mentioned the Alfa AWUS036S USB WLAN adapter that I got a while back for OpenBSD wardriving. It’s been reliable for that purpose, but lately I’ve been interested in using it with aircrack-ng to crack WPA pre-shared keys.

I just tried to install Slickedit 2007, my programmer’s editor of choice, on my 64-bit install of Ubuntu 7.10. When I ran the vsinst executable from the CD, I got:

sudo: unable to execute ./vsinst: No such file or directory

I’ve been playing with CouchDB lately, and the CouchObject Ruby bindings. When I tried to install the latest CouchDB gem with sudo gem install couchobject-0.5.0 it fails because json isn’t installed. Then I ran sudo gem install json, which failed with:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

ruby extconf.rb install json
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
        from extconf.rb:1

Now that I have Azureus mostly running on Ubuntu, I’ve been focusing on integrating the machine into my download/watch/archive pipeline.

Back when I ran BT on a Windows XP box, I kept a drive mapped to my media share on nemes, my 2TB NAS box. Whenever a download finished, I’d copy it over to that share. Now that BT is running on Linux, I want much the same functionality.

Previously, I’ve bitched about getting Azureus running on Ubuntu Feisty. A commenter pointed out the new version of Azureus, 3.0.3.4, which I wasn’t able to install through automatic updates but had no trouble installing from the Linux x64 tarball. I’m pleased to report there was no fiddling with SWT files or deletion of archives to get it going.

Now that I set up a 1TB Ubuntu box I needed to get Azureus 3.x running on it. It turns out this is vastly harder than it should be.

A while back I contorted myself to get a 64-bit FreeBSD 6.0 driver for my HighPoint RocketRaid 2220 RAID controller. Now that I have a 2TB ReadyNAS box, that old 1TB FreeBSD box is falling into disuse, so I thought I’d repurpose it as a dedicated Azureus download machine.

I cloned an Ubuntu 7.04 VMWare Workstation 6.0 virtual machine, and found that the cloned VM booted without network access. dmesg | grep eth0 showed that the pcnet32 driver was loaded fine and detected eth0, but ifconfig doesn’t list eth0, and ifconfig -a lists eth1 which is down. WTF?

Today I’ve installed both the desktop and server versions of Ubuntu linux, primarily so I can run Kismet and diagnose my wifi LAN problems. As much as I’d rather use OpenBSD or FreeBSD, Linux has the broadest WLAN card support, and is Kismet’s preferred platform.

I’ve grown quite unaccustomed to installing UNIX-based OSes with a dick-holding install process. With the BSDs, you’re left to type in the partition table, set a root password, and if you screw it up, well, go back to Windows 98 you pussy.