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            <p>When twitter's @anywhere came out many geeks (yours truely included) thought of ways of adding it to their sites and blogs. @anywhere has a lot of usefull features, then again some it isn't very usefull either (unless of course you are building a fully featured twitter app (which most website owners aren't doing)). In the end like many others I ended up using it to create a 'follow me on twitter' button. Sure it's a bit more dynamic than a static image but it's a lot bigger than a static image as well. &nbsp;There is a difference of about 20Kb when the page loads with and without the @anywhare javascript.</p>
            <p></p>
            <figure style="text-align:center"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/twitter/with-anywhere.png"><img alt="Statistics with @anywhere" height="125" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/twitter/with-anywhere-t.png" title="Statistics with @anywhere" width="400"></a>
                <figcaption>Page size with the @anywhere javascript included</figcaption>
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            <p></p>
            <figure style="text-align:center"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/twitter/without-anywhere.png"><img alt="Page load statistics without @anywhere" height="125" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/twitter/without-anywhere-t.png" title="Without the @anywhere code" width="400"></a>
                <figcaption>Page load statistics without the @anywhere code</figcaption>
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            <p></p>
            <p>Sounds bad huh? well maybe, but not even half as bad as Facebook's like button. It adds about 70Kb to the page size and doesn't do anything other than display the like button. In the case of @anywhere, it's got a load of features it's just that we are not making use of them.</p>
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Going nowhere with @anywhere.

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            <p>Amazon recently announced that S3 support has been enabled in the AWS management console. Sounds great. Except that it doesn't work. Once you click on the S3 tab in the console the process seems to hang. The reason amazon and other cloud hosting companies want us to switch over to the cloud is because it's supposed to eliminate this sort of thing. They have being throwing phrases like Auto scaling, Auto load balancing, Distributed locations and what have you to prove the point.</p>
            <p></p>
            <figure style="text-align:center"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/virtualization/aws-s3.png"><img alt="Shouldn't happen in the cloud." height="176" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/virtualization/aws-s3-t.png" title="Shouldn't happen in the cloud" width="510"></a>
                <figcaption>Now they are blaming us for their own faults!</figcaption>
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            <p></p>
            <p>Those who were patient enough to stare at the semi frozen browser window were rewarded with the above dialog. That's right nothing wrong at their end, we have a firewall issue. Except that in my firewall all outgoing ports are open. Which is pretty much the same for quite a few others who have commented on it.</p>
            <p>The truth is that this is not a firewall issue. It's not a scalability issue. S3 can and will scale very well, It's just that someone has written buggy&nbsp;JavaScript&nbsp;and doesn't want to admit it. In the meantime many users will jump to the wrong conclusion and get off the cloud.</p>
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Have we been misled about cloud hosting?

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            This is a footnote to yesterday's post about using fuse based encrypted filesystems on linux. Once you have everything setup and try to mount an encrypted folder, you might get the following error:
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;">﻿<span style="color: #993300;">EncFS Password:</span></p>

            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied</span></div>
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">fuse failed. &nbsp;Common problems:</span></div>
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">- fuse kernel module not installed (modprobe fuse)</span></div>
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">- invalid options -- see usage message</span></div>
            This can be easily fixed by typing:

            chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount

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fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

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            Six years ago, I had a <a href="568.html">post</a> with this exact same title. At the time it was about making a crypto loop. Cryptoloop allows you to create a large file, ecrypt it and then mount it with the help of a loop back device as a&nbsp;file system. The contents cannot be seen without the proper password. Truecrypt is another system which allows you to do pretty much the same thing but with the added bonus of having support for Staganographic content.&nbsp;However this method is cumbersome because if you run out of space on the encrypted volume, you need to create a new file and copy over the contents from the old one. That's where fuse based systems like encfs come in.

            <a href="http://www.arg0.net/encfs ">encfs</a> is pretty&nbsp;useful&nbsp;because you don't need to start of by creating a large single file to hold all your other files. Simply create two folders on your hard drive, one to contain the encrypted files and the other as the mount point where the decrypted files show up &nbsp;(but only if you provide the right password). &nbsp;Today, I tried to setup such a system on a Centos 5.4 box (well it wasn't really a centos 5.4 box it was virtualize, but never mind) and ran into an error straight away:
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Verify Encfs Password:</span></div>
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::filesystem::filesystem_error'</span></div>
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">what(): &nbsp;boost::filesystem::path: invalid name ".backups" in path: "/mnt/.backups/.encfs6.xml"</span></div>
            <div id="_mcePaste" style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">Aborted</span></div>
            <p style="padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            Oh by the way, encfs is not found on the Centos Base repos. You need to get it from <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL">EPEL</a>. There were exactly four results in Google for this error and none of them seemed likely to be the solution. Pretty annoying, because I had in fact set this up before on a 32 bit CentOS machine before (this time, it's a 64 bit machine). Rather than compiling from sources, which I am loath to doing, I thought to have a look at some of the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.html?title=EncryptedFileSystems">other options available</a>.
            <p style="text-align: left;">1) <a href="http://www.freenet.org.nz/phonebook">PhoneBook</a></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">Phonebook also appears to support steganography content and sounds similiar to truecrypt but it's a bit of overkill for me and it hasn't been maintained since 2004.</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">2) CryptoFS</p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">Sadly the site seems to have been taken offline.</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">3) <a href="http://polacanthus.net/">MinforFs</a></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">'MinorFs is a userspace filesystem (fuse) for Linux providing private storage to pseudo persistent processes. This allows programs that are run by a user to keep some data safe from all potential malware that runs with all this users privileges.' - once again it appears to be overkill</p>
            <p style="text-align: left;">4) <a href="http://www.enderunix.org/metfs/">MetFS</a></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;">'<span style="font-family: sans-serif;">MetFS is a filesystem software in userspace that is encrypted, dynamic sized (increase when new data added, decrease when data removed), single file when it's unmounted' - oh well, if the file grows and shrinks dynamically I can live with that. The only catch is that it doesn't have an RPM. It's released under an open source license but the download page says, it may only be used for educational purposes. Explain that one to me. </span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: sans-serif;">Sadly MetFS wouldn't compile either:</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">metfs.c: In function ‘metfs_extract_file’:</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">metfs.c:802: error: ‘TAR’ undeclared (first use in this function)</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">metfs.c:802: error: ‘t’ undeclared (first use in this function)</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">metfs.c:820: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘tar_extract_all’</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">metfs.c: In function ‘main’:</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">metfs.c:910: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘fuse_main’</span></p>
            <p style="text-align: left; padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">make: *** [all] Error</span></p>

            <div>It was time to look again at encfs but by now it was angry at my&nbsp;unfaithfulness.</div>
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            <div>
                <div style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">checking for boostlib &gt;= 1.34... configure: error: We could not detect the boost libraries (version 1.34 or higher). If you have a staged boost library (still not installed) please specify $BOOST_ROOT in your environment and do not give a PATH to --with-boost option. &nbsp;If you are sure you have boost installed, then check your version number looking in &lt;boost/version.hpp&gt;. See http://randspringer.de/boost for more documentation.</span></div>
                <div style="padding-left: 30px;"></div>
                <div style="padding-left: 30px;"><span style="color: #993300;">
                    </span></div>
                <div>Then it occured to me that <a href="https://moririn-web.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-use-encfs-on-centos-52.html">one of the four results</a> for the encfs - boost error mentioned that you should not use stuff from EPEL. &nbsp;I ignored that at first because the post was from 2008 and was speaking of Centos 5.2 but I decided to add the <a href="http://rpmrepo.org/RPMforge/">RPMForge</a> repo to my repository list and try again. And sure enough this time encfs worked without that annoyed error. Phew.</div>
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Monthly Archives for 2010 06

Going nowhere with @anywhere.

Have we been misled about cloud hosting?

fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied

Encrypted filesystem on linux