There's no Place Like ::1

If you know me, I use LUKS for a long time. But there was always one thing that kept annoying me: it was not cool, every time I rebooted my computer, to go the the console and manually mount my encrypted hard drives.

I discovered today that there was already a solution: pam-mount. It is a nice PAM module that allows one to have automatically mounted the encrypted devices as soon as you enter your username/password do access your system.

I installed it on Ubuntu (apt-get install libpam-mount) and did a little bit of hacking on /etc/pam.d/common-session and /etc/security/pammount. What impressed me the most is that it worked like a charm on my first attempt! Now I can boot on my computer and GDM, and just put my username and password to access my box!

Of course you need an excellent user password because your hard-drive security depends on his strength.

Just a note…

If after installing and configuring pam_mount you start hitting problems with your cron (cron segfaults everytime) remove pam_mount.

I don’t understand why this happened and I really don’t want to know. I spent 30 precious minutes hacking GDB just to see that the problem was on pam_mount…

I will need this in the near future for sure:

\newenvironment{warn}
{
  \medskip
  \begin{minipage}[t]{0.1\linewidth}
    \vspace{0pt}
    \Huge{\Pointinghand}
  \end{minipage}%
  \begin{minipage}[t]{0.9\textwidth}
    \vspace{0pt}
    \begin{small}
}
{
  \end{small}
  \end{minipage}
  \medskip
}

Everyone knows that Java sucks. But now I’m finishing my one year project on program comprehension. The application is written in Java, so you can imagine I have tons of classes and many KLOCs spread over the project tree.

Unfortunately I am at this phase that it is impossible to maintain the code! Poor planning? No! JAVA SUCKS! So now I’m refactoring all the way down, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting….

This will be a really bad week :(

Yesterday I bought a nice new Play Station Portable. Unfortunately, it came with a 2.71 TA-082 motherboard. I’m happy that it can now be downgraded to 1.50 as easily as the old motherboards.

Now I’ve ordered a 4Gb Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo from eBay and I’ll wait for it to arrive. Then we’ll have fun :)