Tumbleweed tumbles from my computer

Several years ago, SUSE 7.2 was my first Linux experience and with openSUSE 11.4 I have returned to the SUSE community. One of the things I liked about it, was the idea behind Tumbleweed: having a rolling release. It worked nicely and after the release of openSUSE 12.1, it was able to pick up the pace rather quickly, but with the release of openSUSE 12.2 I have felt the need to leave Tumbleweed.

"Stadsklap" at Het Roze Huis

In the last two weeks there was twice a "Stadsklap" (City talk). It is part of an integration course where people new to Belgium have the opportunity to talk to people of several organizations. Het Roze Huis is one of those organizations, but there is also a Stadsklap with an orchestra for example.

Privacy on the Internet: Tracking your browsing history

In a previous article, I gave an introduction to some privacy concepts. As always, it is important to know your enemy. Therefor in this article I will present a few tools and services concerning tracking browsing history. Do Not Track (DNT) tries to prevent tracking when cookies are enabled and Collusion shows you who is potentially tracking you with cookies, through web bugs, etc. Panopticlick demonstrates that it is even possible to track you on the Internet without cookies.

Privacy on the Internet: an introduction

Each time you surf on the Internet, information is being exchanged. You get a lot of great services, many of them for free, but what about your privacy? Do you check what will happen with the information you provide? Which information do you provide unknowingly? This article gives you an introduction to some Internet privacy concepts.

SCTP multi-homing with dynamic address reconfiguration

In the previous article, I have introduced SCTP, the Stream Control Transmission Protocol. In this article I would like to get more technical and explain how you can create SCTP multi-homed connections with dynamic address reconfiguration in C/C++ in a Linux environment. All in all it is fairly easy, but the hard part was to find all pieces of the puzzle, so I have put them together for you.

An introduction to SCTP

In every modern network, TCP/IP is used. Traditionally this refers to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) running over Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). In terms of computer science, both protocols are ancient, dating respectively from 1974 and 1981.

At the Network Layer, we see currently a change of Internet Protocol from IPv4 to IPv6, mainly driven by the shortage of addresses in IPv4, but the new protocol, published in 1998, offers also better features concerning mobility, security etc.

At the transport layer, TCP and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP, from 1980)  have some successors but none of them breaks really through. Perhaps the most well-known is the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), defined by the IETF SIGTRAN group in 2000.

To go forward, you must backup: luckyBackup

Everyone needs backups, but what is the right tool for the job? There are not that many good backup tools for Linux on the desktop.

What I expect from a backup tool is the following:

• An open format, easily recoverable even when the backup tool would fail.
• Incremental backups
• Both local and remote backups
• Ease of use

In the course of the last 10 years, I have used three different backup tools: