tuxmaniac’s blog

Off late, all blog rolls seem to be talking on the OpenSSL vulnerability in Debian based systems. Well, I took it a bit lightly given the lazy goose I am. But some of my work for the weekend threatened to come to a grinding halt as most of the servers which I access, disabled my blacklisted ssh key. So had to regenerate the keypair and re upload to all the servers. Man!! I seemed to have access to shit loads of servers. I recommend this article by tonnere which gives a very nice gist of the actual problem and the affected systems.

Also the Debian folks have released a package to check whether your key is vulnerable or not. If you are on any Debian based system, just run “sudo ssh-vulnkey -a” to check for all existing key pairs to find out whether they are blacklisted.
Simple steps to update your ssh keys

1. $ssh-keygen

2. Copy the ~/,ssh/id_rsa.pub to the server you wish to update your ssh key.

3. Safeguard your ~/.ssh/id_rsa private key.

I am back after a really nice relaxing weekend at Wayanad. Stayed back at the Resort for most of the time. Flickrd all the pics already. Some samples are put below. I feel so rejuvenated after this trip.

Will begin digging out all my mails shortly and slowly reply to all you folks who have bombarded me with your thoughts

Complete flickr set

I am off to Wayanad for the weekend. No emails, IRC and the likes! Its gonna be just relax and enjoy nature! See you all later with nice pictures.

For all those VLSI enthusiasts, Magic is now debianised. For people who are still wondering what “Magic” is all about here it goes..

Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980’s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.

For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main

For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.

http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb 

The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.