I needed a neat way to write and present articles. I got bored and wrote a little xsl script that turns my happy new article xml into some html-ish stuff. So far it's looking very cool. For instance, it will do automatic table-of-contents generation with proper anchor tags, etc. I'll post more on this later when it's finished. I'd finish it tonight, but I'm tired.

• ppp over ssh article
• article.xsl
• article xml

I got bored today and wrote a quick script to start/stop a ppp over ssh vpn. I'm working on an article on how to get ppp over ssh working for freebsd, so that'll be up shortly. I've also been working on a few new upgrades to logwatch, i'll commit those as soon as they're completed.

% ifconfig ndis0
ndis0: [snip...]
        inet 129.21.112.158 netmask 0xffffff80 broadcast 129.21.112.255
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (DS/11Mbps)
        status: associated
        ssid baccus 1:baccus
        channel 11 authmode OPEN powersavemode OFF powersavesleep 100

As you can see, I'm currently using wireless on some random access point I associated to called baccus. I don't know who's access point this is, but it's what ndis0 insists on associating with, so I don't complain. Being on a school campus is, in my opinion, one of the most potentially dangerous networks you can put your computer on. Here you'll have an assortment of geeks of varying clue levels - pretty much anyone with half a brain can sniff all the wireless traffic they want.

Having my traffic sniffed isn't really annoying until I want to login someplace that insists on clear-text passwords (say, thefacebook.com). So, I have gotten into the habbit of using OpenSSH's SOCKS5 proxy to do that, but it's annoying starting a proxy every time I need one. What can I do instead?

A quick solution that is very simple is to tunnel PPP over SSH. I won't go into the details here, but the short of it is this: I have a ppp tunnel to one of my machines in my dorm room which is on a wired, switched network I consider to be trusted. Then, all of my traffic can possibly be tunneled to a safe network where it will then go forth and be happy.

As I mentioned, I'll be posting an article on how to make this go shortly.