Rene Mayrhofer's virtual home
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Various open source stuff
On this page, I collect some of my open source work. It will most probably be incomplete, so please drop me a line if you know that I have written some open source application/tool/patch that is not yet listed on this page and I can send it or put it up here.

Tools

I have written some open source tools in different programming languages and for different platform/operating systems. Most of them have been developed to scratch a personal itch (as probably with most open source tools...).
  • mkinitrd-cd: A combination of a lot of shell scripts (some have grown quite large) and small C programs to allow a Linux system to boot from a CD-ROM, USB or other read-only root file system.
  • Spider tarpit: A small PHP script that tries to get poorly programmed link harvesters stuck, if possible for a long time.

    Since I do not like poorly behaved link harvesters at all, there is a small PHP script which generates random links and pauses quite a lot in between. This will hopefully gets spiders stuck enough so that my web page gets pruned from their lists. Of course, the link to this spider tarpit is listed in robots.txt for spiders not to visit. Well-behaved ones should thus not be bothered, but all poorly coded harvesters might run into trouble. I place this spider tarpit script under the GPL, you can see it in action here. To enable it with apache2, you only need a config line 
    AliasMatch ^/link-collection/[A-Za-z0-9]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+$ /..../spamtrap.php
    (You should of course adapt the link location and the location of the script in your file system.)
  • Particle Smart-Its Bridge
  • SerNTLog

Patches

Other open source work of mine includes patches to well-known (or sometimes not so well-known) open source projects.
  • Squid filter: Patches to the Squid proxy server to enable content scanning.
  • Webmin PAM: Patches to the webmin administration tool to allow authentication against PAM.

Debian packages

I maintain a few packages for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution:
  • openswan/strongswan/freeswan:
  • pptpd:
  • mkinitrd-cd:
  • havp:
Additionally, I was the first maintainer of the logcheck package (and still use it at all of my machines). During my time of administering this package, I basically took over maintainership for the whole package because upstream development had stopped and the original author was no longer working on it.

At the moment, I also sponsor the following packages for people who are not Debian maintainers but want to have their packages included with Debian:
  • fireflier by Martin Maurer. It's a nice package for setting up firewall rules for desktop machine in much the same way as the various "personal firewalls" for Windows work. It has a nice architecture, being split into a server component and a client GUI that is available in multiple versions.
  • coco-java/coco-cs by the Institut für Systemsoftware at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, the Debian package is currently maintained by Markus Löberbauer. It's a compiler generator ("compiler compiler") for Java and C#.