September 2010

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Update 2012-03-06: gnupg.vim now has a new maintainer. Link updated.

I’m always looking for a better way to digitally store private data, like passport numbers, credit cards, and server root passwords. Unfortunately, good encryption is hard to find. I have yet to find a solution better than “GPG-encrypted text files edited with a secure editor”. For five years I’ve used KGpg‘s built-in text editor for this, but it has a number of limitations. Today, I discovered that I can do it natively within Vim.

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I use a number of open-source tools that rely on rrdtool to generate graphs. Cacti uses it for its core functionality. BackupPC uses it to graph storage pool usage over time. Unfortunately, the files it generates are architecture-dependent. This means that if you upgrade your BackupPC server from i386 to amd64, your pool graphs will mysteriously disappear. Shall we fix that?

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I’ve run OpenWRT on my Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH home router for a week now. So far there has been only one problem: wireless performance. The ath9k driver in OpenWRT Backfire 10.03 has a number of bugs, from poor latency jitter to occasionally dropping the connection. I’ve upgraded the router twice, first to 10.03.1-rc2 and then to 10.03.1-rc3. It appears that 10.03.1 final is only a few weeks away.

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I’ve been using a Linksys WRT54GL router running DD-WRT for several years now. It runs OpenVPN and fits a surprisingly large number of features into 4 MB of flash and 16 MB of RAM. It has been stable and reliable, but it’s a very under-powered device by modern standards. I haven’t been happy with the pace of DD-WRT development, which takes a very long time to release large, monolithic updates. First I tried to upgrade it to OpenWRT, but the latest release is too large to incorporate OpenVPN in 4 MB of flash. So I replaced it with a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH running OpenWRT Backfire 10.03.

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