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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for September 7th, 2018

https://altd.embarcadero.com/ TLS certificate does not match domain name

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07

One of the domains not yet monitored at embarcaderomonitoring.wiert.me, was the altd download server for ISOs and installers on http and https level. Ultimately you want https, as most of these are about installers, so you do not want any man-in-the-middle to fiddle with them.

TLS on altd fails

Upitmerobot is not yet smart enough to check validity of TLS certificates on https connections.

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, wget, curl and ssllabs however are.

altd hides as much from itself as possible

Uptimerobot did not like monitoring the plain http://altd.embarcadero.com/ and https://altd.embarcadero.com/ URLs, because the altd is not browsable, so it tries to hide most of its structure from access. This means they both return an odd response:

Those responses are actually 404 errors (note the - minus sign after curl --trace-ascii: it sends the trace to stdout):

$ wget http://altd.embarcadero.com/
--2018-09-05 10:44:23-- http://altd.embarcadero.com/
Resolving altd.embarcadero.com (altd.embarcadero.com)... 88.221.144.40, 88.221.144.10
Connecting to altd.embarcadero.com (altd.embarcadero.com)|88.221.144.40|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2018-09-05 10:44:23 ERROR 404: Not Found.

$ curl --verbose http://altd.embarcadero.com/
*   Trying 88.221.144.40...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to altd.embarcadero.com (88.221.144.40) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: altd.embarcadero.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< Server: Apache
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
< Content-Length: 16
< Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2018 08:45:57 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
< 
* Connection #0 to host altd.embarcadero.com left intact
File not found."

$ curl --trace-ascii - http://altd.embarcadero.com/
== Info:   Trying 88.221.144.40...
== Info: TCP_NODELAY set
== Info: Connected to altd.embarcadero.com (88.221.144.40) port 80 (#0)
=> Send header, 84 bytes (0x54)
0000: GET / HTTP/1.1
0010: Host: altd.embarcadero.com
002c: User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
0045: Accept: */*
0052: 
<= Recv header, 24 bytes (0x18)
0000: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
<= Recv header, 16 bytes (0x10)
0000: Server: Apache
<= Recv header, 45 bytes (0x2d)
0000: Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
<= Recv header, 20 bytes (0x14)
0000: Content-Length: 16
<= Recv header, 37 bytes (0x25)
0000: Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2018 08:47:19 GMT
<= Recv header, 24 bytes (0x18)
0000: Connection: keep-alive
<= Recv header, 2 bytes (0x2)
0000: 
<= Recv data, 16 bytes (0x10)
0000: File not found."
File not found."== Info: Connection #0 to host altd.embarcadero.com left intact

This is also the reason that WayBack does not want to archive that link, but it can be archived at [Archive.is] https://altd.embarcadero.com/.

Luckily, a Google search for site:altd.embarcadero.com revealed there is a non-installer file short enough (~72 kibibytes) for Uptime robot to check, so it now verifies it can access these:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix-tools, cURL, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, Power User, Security, wget | Leave a Comment »

God is real unless declared integer, 

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07

Kristian Köhntopp commended:

GOD IS REAL UNLESS DECLARED INTEGER..

In some versions of Fortran, the default type of variables starting with I, J, K or L is integer, while other varianles are by default typed as real. The Fortran statement DECLARE can be used to explicitly declare a variables as being of a specific type.

The variable GOD stats with G and hence is implicitly real, unless you add an appropriate declare statement.

He reminded my of my FORTRAN 66 days at university when studying “computer usage for chemists”:

I remember a “computer usage for chemists” course during my studies where (end of the 1980s!) were supposed to program in FORTRAN 66.
Luckily the VAX/VMS machine supported a much more recent FORTRAN version and had support for 132 columns as well, which allowed me to indent properly (like I was used from my Pascal background).This tremendously helped me solve basically this problem:

  • import tables with
    1. atom code, radius and valence (bonding count)
    2. atom1 code, atom2 code, minimum distance, maximum distance
    3. atom code, X/Y/Z coordinate
  • determine which bonds can occur
  • walk the bonds and determine the atomic structure, including cycle count

Especially the last one was easiest to solve with recursion, which FORTRAN does not support. So I wrote my own stack structure and solved the problem.

The student coach was mad when she found out I had printed the full documentation on continuous form paper which took the printer about half an hour for printing the ~100 pages.

Next morning, I had read it front-to-back and colour-indexed all the sections so it was far easier to find what the compiler could do for me. She could not believe I had done that.

All my co students were on a (non shielded!) 300 meter multiplexed serial connection with VT-120 emulators from PC’s with all sorts of connection problems.

I discovered a small room right above the VAX/VMS machine having a couple of terminals with direct connections that were hardly used. A few of them were VT-240 that had a session switch allowing for maximum 3 interactive sessions running at far higher priority than the compiler/linker batch queues provided.

This allowed me to perform quick release cycles of my project: 1 session for editing and inspecting logs, 1 session for compiling my last version, 1 session for linking the previously compiled version.

I was about the only student that delivered the project on time (:

Via: Archive.is Check out @chicaScientific’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/chicaScientific/statu… having

“Why did the integer drown?”

“Because he wasn’t a float”

–jeroen

 

Posted in Fun, History, Quotes, T-Shirt quotes | Leave a Comment »

LiFePO4wered/Pi+ | Crowd Supply

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07

A few days left for [WayBack] LiFePO4wered/Pi+ | Crowd Supply: A full-featured LiFePO4 battery, power manager, and UPS for the Raspberry Pi

via:

–jeroen

 

 

Posted in Development, Hardware Development, Power User, Raspberry Pi | Leave a Comment »

Some sites than can help you check if your (maybe dynamic) IP has been black-listed

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07

A few links that helped me track down why a sudden new Ziggo IP-address was blacklisted:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some Linux mail solutions

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/09/07

Too bad most of them are very picky to the Linux distributions they run on.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »

 
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