Six impossible things

I was like “wtf?!”. Debian.org replaced by a link farm ?

debian.org being actually domainsquatted is highly unlikely, so I started searching how this could happen.

First, a little explanation of the setup :

• I’m on a bullet train on my laptop, up-to-date Debian Lenny, 2.6.24
• My laptop is connected to a 3G+ (HSDPA in the US) PDA phone with a USB cable
• The phone appears to the computer as a network interface thanks to the usb-rndis-lite kernel module
• The phone does NAT routing between my computer (192.168.0.100), himself (192.168.0.1) and a restricted network from my phone operator
• The only host visible on this restricted network is a HTTP only proxy server that checks the user agent (Nokia is OK, Firefox means GO AWAY)
• I connect through this proxy to a dedicated host through a OpenVPN tunnel masquerading as HTTP with a Nokia user agent
• The dedicated host at the other side has special iptables rules to redirect requests coming from my mobile phone operator netblock on port 80 to the regular OpenVPN port.
• The dedicated host does NAT for my computer to the real Internet.
• The total latency varies from 120ms to 30 secs and the bandwidth from 2mbps to 8kbps depending on the coverage
• The only DNS server on my laptop is set in resolv.conf to 192.168.5.1, the remote OpenVPN endpoint, the dedicated server
• The dedicated server runs Bind and provides recursive resolution

Now there are some peculiarities to the situation :

• It happens exactely once a week on the train from my home in Paris to the campus in Grenoble
• It doesn’t happen the other way around or at any other time for that matter

Some hints :

• My hostname at home is aeris.home.eu
• My hostname on campus is aeris.liuo.res.rhb
• I almost never shut down my computer, only hibernate
• Jonathan Roes

Now for the challenge : how could this happen ?

I’ve been reading my blog and it looks like I’ve not been very active.

It’s not totally untrue.

I’ve been very busy (and still am) with final exams and should be freed on May 28th, at 13:30 GMT precisely.

Not that I haven’t done anything. I have a lot of design ideas written on napkins. I concluded that pencils doesn’t write very well and fountain pens tend to be.. fountains. So, I have a stack on napkin-sized UI designs on a corner of my desk.

As for the request for ideas, I have some specific questions I’d like to have an opinion on. Here’s one: how far away from the ncurse interface should the GTK+ interface be ? To be more precise, we could take the example of keyboard bindings. Should I try to keep the same bindings ?

Keep in mind that the interface metaphor used for the graphical interface will probably be a bit different from the terminal interface. People will also be coming from other applications that implement some well known bindings. I’m thinking for example about the ctrl+pageup and ctrl+pagedown bindings to navigate between tabs which are widely used.

Edit: Hi Slashdot friends!