Fresh on the heels of the OTD win comes news that some really big players in the encryption field have killed the Openssl FIPS-140 certification. Those players stand to loose a ton of money (millions? billions?) if there’s a viable Open Source alternative out there and I’m guessing there was more than a little bit of pressure. And NIST folded. Hopefully John will be able to continue pushing and get the certification re-instated.
And people wonder why I’m so cynical.
Haven’t blogged in a while, too much going on, this seemed important enough tho…
Meethune showed me a really cool new feature inOpenSSH 4.2 called multiplexing. In short, it allows you to connect once to a remote host, then simply uses a socket to reuse that connection for new login shells. To use add:
Host *
ControlPath ~/.ssh/ctl-%r-%h-%p
ControlMaster auto
to the beginning of your ~/.ssh/config and enjoy!
To check the status of the connections run:
ssh -O check remotehost
and to kill the master connection run:
ssh -O exit remotehost
Now this won’t allow for adding forwarded ports to the multiplexed connection, but that feature is in the works.
I went ahead and hacked an ebuild to include the smbk5pwd overlay and submitted a bug to the Gentoo bugzilla. I don’t know how well it will be received since it screws with the Kerberos dependancies, but we shall see…
If anyone wants a more direct download it’s in my overlay, but I’m not gonna drop it in BMG since it just doesn’t seem appropriate…
I haven’t tried this, but something like this seems more and more essential these days for those mixed networks… 
