Work Log

Open letter to PGP corp:

I have recently purchased PGP Whole Disk Encryption license. After 100 hours of work I have not been able to set up a working system on linux or Windows platforms. I therefore would like an amiable reemboursement of the license fee.

Description of my situation

Being a Linux user for nearly a decade I have had lot’s of troubles in installing, configuring and administering my machines. As I was running into troubles, specially in the beginning, very often I had an impression that I ought to switch back to proprietary software.

Now, after spending 100 hours finding a decent combination for deploying PGP WDE as a double-boot (later as a single boot) system; I am finally convinced for the next decade: proprietary systems are a waste of money.

How did I got here? I was looking for an encryption tool with RSA token support. Obviously one has good solutions on Windows and Linux as well, but there is no system, that could harmonize the system encryption, the USB token authentication and the support of Linux and Windows. As we talk about privacy here; no closed source solutions compete — at all.

PGP has had an excellent reputation, but apparently it’s quality has decayed over the years. As of january 2010 it still only supports Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 9.04. They tell you the list of supported systems on the product page, but what they don’t tell you is that they hadn’t touched the Linux version for a year. No bug-fixes, no new features. Of course you could download the source and see it for yourself, but this is something you’d expect to do with a free software, not something you pay hard money for. They also fail to mention that it does not support Ubuntu 9.04 either because as soon as you install PGP, it does not boot any more (I suppose it’d booted on earlier systems). Maybe it still does in some cases; it certainly didn’t boot for me. Again not something you should take from a FIPS certified software.

The biggest of all disappointments

You can live with the complete lack of Linux support and competence. Obviously, they were not serious with the Linux support.  Still there is worse to come. Then you try to encrypt only the windows partition, saying that you use some serious encryption with the Linux system and then you get the cold shower: Windows won’t boot any more … either.

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

This is where you try to decrypt with the recovery disk, but you can’t because you’ve only got the iso image … and you are on a netbook; and there is no cdrom on a netbook. Haven’t they just sold like a hundred million of those? Neither Microsoft, nor PGP could care less. You are stuck. You try the netbook recovery partition, it boots, but it fails to re-install the Windows. The solution: you should spend more money on buying an usb-cdrom!

And this was the moment, where the insanity has had to stop. After 100 hours 20 days and 150 wasted dollars for software I can now demonstrate beyond a doubt; that proprietary software is a complete waste the users time and money. PGP cannot compete by far with free solutions as TrueCrypt or Linux LUKS. It takes much less time to set these systems up (even if they are not multiplatform or not support USB tokens out of the box); and it ary far more reliable.

It is time for PGP to admit their mistakes and recommence developing high quality serious software.

With best wishes,

A would-be PGP user

Many people start using Zimbra as email client. I personally think that even if it’s a good initiation, it is too unfledged now for it too be a truly useful software. Personally the only reason why I’m using it is that this is the only email client that can deal with my three hundred thousand (300 000) emails without blinking an eye. Basing a database on a database is an idea that has become more and more inevitable nowadays. I’m waiting for the first true database file system to became available.

However this discussion is about Zimbra and specifically about zimlets.  Main features missing from zimbra:

• gpg/pgp support
• random signature generation (specifically calling a shell script when is to sign a letter)
• distributed synchronization / secure synchronization. (this is a very interesting problem mainly connected to zimbra desktop and not necessary present in zimbra ose)

The best shot to target these insufficiencies is, not too surprisingly, the plug-in system. Whereas it is fairly easy to install a zimlet on the server using

zmzimletctl deploy my_zimlet.zip

does not work on desktop. The specific equivalent line on zdesktop is:

java -cp jetty/lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar:jetty/common/lib/commons-httpclient-3.0.jar:jetty/common/lib/mail.jar:jetty/common/lib/commons-logging.jar:jetty/common/lib/commons-codec-1.3.jar:jetty/common/lib/json.jar:jetty/common/lib/dom4j-1.5.jar:jetty/common/lib/zimbracommon.jar:jetty/webapps/service/WEB-INF/lib/zimbrastore.jar -Dzimbra.config=conf/localconfig.xml com.zimbra.cs.zimlet.ZimletUtil deploy zimlets/com_zimbra_zimlet_name.zip

cheers 

Emacs has a great set of color themes. The problem is that they’re not installed by default. This is inconvenient, because emacs comes mostly un-customized. For those, who didn’t go deep enough into emacs most of the features remain hidden.

So how what do we do about color themes?

it turns out ALT-linux’s rpm packages works also for opensuse. So you download the following two packages:

emacs-color-themes-6.6.0-alt2.noarch.rpm

emacs-color-themes-el-6.6.0-alt2.noarch.rpm

after downloading, you hit:

sudo rpm -i –nodeps emacs-color-themes-el-6.6.0-alt2.noarch.rpm emacs-color-themes-6.6.0-alt2.noarch.rpm

as we ignore dependencies, I assume, that emacs is properly installed.

I have recently purchased a motherboard with ATI digital sound and I have lot’s of trouble getting it run on OpenSUSE 11.0. I wanted to use it on skype, but the microphone was not working. After playing for a few HOURS, I have managed to get it run in the front mic, but the sound quality was very poor.

The solution was annoyingly simple. It has to be set up in YaST. I didn’t try YaST auto config, because I supposed that, the same script is run at installation. It can also interfere with VirtualBox. So if you don’t need it for all price, then just shut it down.