Tor-ramdisk MIPS 20090710 released

This release is the MIPS port equivalent of the 20090627 i686 release in which we updated tor to 0.2.0.35, the latest stable version sporting some major bug fixes. Updates and changes to busybox, ntpd and the setup scripts also came over with no differences and the build scripts only needed minor editing. We tested both little and big endian QEMU images for several days each (as node Mufasa) before switching to the Mikrotik rb433ah board.

Tor-ramdisk 20090627 is released!

Speak of the devil and he appears! When I last posted that stable tor has been sitting at 0.2.0.34 since February, I had no idea 0.2.0.35 was right around the corner! The announcement came on or-talk@freehaven.net just the next day. It was a minor effort to edit the build script and incorporate the lastest stable version in the next release of tor-ramdisk.

A new release of tor-ramdisk is cooking

The stable branch of tor, tor-0.2.0.34 has been around since February, so there hasn't been any need to update tor-ramdisk for i686. However, there has been some progress in the kernel --- new NIC chipsets are available --- and busybox has also come out with a new release 1.14.1, but this is not a critical because non of the new features are needed.

Tor in Iran

If you've been following the news you may already know that tor is being used to circumvent the Iranian firewalls and protect the identity of protesters. Here's two sites http://iran.whyweprotest.net and http://torir.org.

Tin Hat 20090519 is out!

This is the eighth release of Tin Hat. This release concentrates primarily on updating the hardened tool chain, and no changes were made to the kernel since the last release. The system was completely recompiled using hardened Gentoo's stock gcc-4.3.3 plus stack-protection added via the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS in make.conf. Extensive testing of the most used services and apps gave no issues with the exception of Evolution which required lazy linking.

Tin Hat 20090404 released

This is the seventh release of Tin Hat and represents an important turning point for us. As the ISO images start to grow bigger and bigger some decision needed to be made about what to keep and what to drop. The present branch is dedicated to gnome and rather than switching mid stream to some light windowing system, I decided to augment the build process to allow the option of removing documentation under /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/gnome/help and /usr/share/gtk-doc. This reduces the ISOs by approximately 100MB and reduces RAM usage by about three times as much.

Ramdisk versus Ramfs

I did a study of RAM usage for three different RAM-only systems plus a regular "disk" system for comparison. The purpose of the study was to see what is the best option for Tin Hat. The three systems studied are: 1) the system boots into an initrd (ramdisk), 2) the system boots into an initramfs (ramfs), 3) the system boots into an initramfs, but then sets up a new root on a tmpfs system (ramfs), and finally does a switch_root. The last option is similar to Tin Hat's bootstrapping.

Tin Hat 20090309 released

A new release of Tin Hat is out for both i686 and amd64. This is primarily a maintenance release addressing approximately 90 updates and syncing upstream with hardened Gentoo. Some minor bugfixes to the desktop were made. The kernel for amd64 was upgraded to 2.6.26-hardened-r9 but the i686 was held back at 2.6.25-hardened-r13 due to issues with 2.6.26 and 2.6.27. We did not want to wait for those issues to be resolved because the packages were falling behind Gentoo and we did not want to introduce too many security issues.

Some development environments for the MIPS

Cross platform development is difficult and I don't like (re)building toolchains targeted for other architectures. I much prefer a fully featured native environment. In porting tor-ramdisk to the mips, I've worked in uncomfortably restrictive situations, like busybox coreutils with just enough of binutils to be able to compile libraries like zlib and libevent. Much better to have a full blown desktop!

Tor-ramdisk MIPS 20090224 released, adding support for the Atheros AR7161

The MIPS port has progressed very nicely since our original venture away from i686 territory onto real routers cpus. The original port was only for a little endian system run in QEMU with binaries statically linked aginst glibc. This broke DNS resolution in busybox and OpenNTP didn't even link. The first task was to migrate to uClibc, thus fixing the broken DNS and time synchronization, and then produce both little and big endian binaries.

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