I’ve just built and rolled out packages that have been patched against this.

If you are running Xen on a 64 bit machine, please make sure you update to 4.1.2-8 ASAP.

From the Xen-Announce post:

ISSUE DESCRIPTION

Rafal Wojtczuk has discovered a vulnerability which can allow a 64-bit PV guest kernel running on a 64-bit hypervisor to escalate privileges to that of the host by arranging for a system call to return via sysret to a non-canonical RIP. Intel CPUs deliver the resulting exception in an undesirable processor state.

IMPACT

Guest administrators can gain control of the host.

Depending on the particular guest kernel it is also possible that non-privileged guest user processes can also elevate their privileges to that of the host.

I’ve also patched for CVE-2012-2934 - although this probably won’t hit anyone…

Its strange, I always thought that companies had their fingers on the pulse when it comes to internet connections. How surprised I was to find out recently how far off the ball Telstra is in some of their pricing.

I’m currently in Tasmania - which Telstra has a big advantage over the Optus network in coverage. To the point where I’ve only had odd spots of coverage with my Virgin Mobile device over the last two weeks. I went to the local Post Office and purchased one of the Telstra $99 Prepaid Mobile Broadband devices that came with a bundled 5Gb of data.

It does the job well - its quite snappy and 5Gb is more than enough for the couple of weeks we’re over here. The shock I did get is when I looked at the pricings for recharging the device. It seems Telstra class these devices in a world of their own - most of the time it is over 4 times more expensive to top up a mobile broadband plan than a similar iPad plan.

Do what do they offer? Look at this:

Yes, you saw it right. $30 will get you 3Gb of data on an iPad plan, but a tiny 700Mb on a mobile broadband device. To add insult to injury, it doesn’t seem like Telstra have reviewed their pricing for well over a year.

Interestingly, it seems most of Telstra’s competition are offering mobile broadband plans on almost the same rates as the Telstra iPad plans. I wonder why Telstra do not merge their MBB and iPad plans? Do they really get that much of a kickback from Apple to make these extreme differences in pricing feasible?

A new project Endurance News is now online and running well.

If you’re into ponies and endurance riding, drop by and have a read.

Hi guys,

The data center that hosting.wireless.org.au resides is to be powered down for mains power works on Sunday 03/05/12 from approx 00:00 to 05:00.

This will mean all services hosted will be unavailable during this time.

The following will be impacted:

• melbournewireless.org.au (All services)
• wireless.org.au (All services)
• crc.id.au (All services excluding *.mirror.crc.id.au)
• Statum 2 NTP server on 203.23.237.200

DNS will still be live due to secondary DNS servers being hosted outside of the Melbourne data center.

hosting.wireless.org.au will be powered down a little early for these works to ensure a clean shutdown before power is lost.

All going well, services should resume by 5am at the latest.

NOTE: All times are in AEST (UTC+10).

About a year ago I purchased a cheap TDM410P clone from eBay. The pricing was just too cheap to refuse.

To compare the pricing:

• Digium Card with 2 x FXO, 2 x FXS = $637.78 USD + shipping
• Chinese Card with 2 x FXO, 2 x FXS = $84.94 USD inc shipping

One good thing is that these cards work straight out of the box with the dahdi drivers. From my experience, the FXO ports seem to work perfectly. The FXS ports however gave me no end of trouble.

So finally I decided to spend some time on it to try and figure out what is going on. Now on the documentation, for using these cards in Australia, there is a opermode switch that is passed as the module is loaded (for me, in /etc/modprobe.d/dahdi.conf): options wctdm24xxp opermode=AUSTRALIA

What I noticed is that when this was set, the noise levels on the FXS ports was unacceptably high. It was almost at a point where it started to drown out the dialtone! Interestingly enough, this ONLY happens on the receive side and the person on the other end can hear you fine.

To cut a long story short, I played around with the options available and I came across this combination: options wctdm24xxp latency=6 companding=alaw

Now the noise is just about gone (I would swear it is CNG now) and the audio quality is much better than before. Oh - and before I forget, as this changes the impedance on the line etc, make sure you run fxotune again!

On a side note, I would love to see Digium produce a much cheaper card to compete with the chinese cards - as really, they are a victim of their own success in the home / hobby market. Maybe a suggestion could be to offer a card with no support - but a warranty service. Sadly, I’ve dealt with Digium before (yes, I actually own some completely useless G729 licenses!) so I’m not expecting much to happen.