I have been busy, however not very productive, lately. A hacked mail and proxy server foiled my plans to work on the Xft-Xemacs project. This server used to be the gateway server to the Internet at the company my parents run. Well, ran, by now. They sold their company, including this proxy server, of course. However, just a few weeks before the date at which the company should be handed over, I discovered the break-in. I decided to fix the problem just before christmas, so I set up the system with the brand-new FreeBSD release 5.3 and turned off the computer for the christmas holidays.
Now for the absurd part. After the christmas holidays the hardware ceased to exist, gone to meet its maker and became an ex-computer: the hardwared didn’t survive the shock of being turned off. After getting new server hardware from a computer dealer in Hamburg, I spent another two days to set up FreeBSD and all the software needed to run a mail and proxy server. This means: Squid as the proxy server, the Cyrus imapd IMAP mail server, Postfix as the MTA and Squirrelmail as a webmail application for the Intranet use. And tons of other services for the Intranet.
I’m very sastisfied with FreeBSD 5.3 — it just works fine! Before the server got hacked, it ran some flashy colorful sissy linux, sorry, SuSe linux. I’m not sure how the intruders hacked the system, but I’m quite sure that those guys where not the brightest hackers around: They managed to install a root kit, however, the programs the root-kit replaced (like pp and netstat) linked against a new version of libc.so which wasn’t installed on the system. So, issuing a ps on the command line just brought up an error message. Very inconspicuous… Well, however, they didn’t do anything more destructive than that.
Just after returning to Tübingen a writer for a German Mac magazine invited my to write an article on the basics of XML. Writing this article ate up my last weekend and my time reserved for hacking.
However, this weekend I have some time to spend on Xft-XEmacs. The first step will be to make my new, much simpler bindings to the fontconfig library work with Stephen’s Xft work. Since I do have commit access to the Xft branch in the XEmacs CVS repository now, I plan to commit this. Can’t wait to try out my commit access!