Sick of trying to remember root passwords for my *nix boxes, I’ve finally got round to configuring key based authentication using OpenSSH and Putty. This is a quick description of the setup and configuration that is required to get this going. There are some useful links at the end for background and understanding.

Download putty.exe, pageant and puttygen. Next, fire up puttygen and create an ssh key-pair (private to keep on the workstation, public to dole out to the hosts you’ll be authenticating to). Generate lots of lovely entropy by waggling the mouse furiously and pick a decent pass-phrase (one recommendation is to create a nonsense phrase of five or more words. Something you can remember but won’t be found in any books. That will be pretty strong and you then add a few character replacements, you’ll have a very strong pass-phrase).

Save your newly created public and private keys on the workstation that you’ll be making connections from.

Next up, copy the public key text from the ‘puttygen’ window and open up an SSH connection to one of the hosts you want to configure. Login as the user you want to key authenticate and paste the public key text into a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Save the file and logout. Note that this process can be automated somewhat using Plink and cat. If you’ve got a lot of servers to add the key to, it would be trivial to knock up a batch file using Excel and the concatenate function.

Note that it is important that the text be in the format shown in the puttygen window. I always forget this and spend ages fannying around trying to figure out the right format for authorized_keys. If you just load your keys into the puttygen application, it will provide the appropriate key-text for you (just hit the ‘load’ button and select your private key).

Back on the Windows box, run pageant.exe with the path to your private key as an argument. Pageant will prompt you for your pass-phrase (stick this command in your startup directory to make life easier).

Now, when Putty is run, it will detect the presence of Pageant and attempt to authenticate using the key you’ve provided. Bear in mind that if you’ve not configured a host correctly, login will fail silently. Thus, it’s worth checking the ‘Attempt "keyboard-interactive" (SSH2)’ in the ‘Auth’ section of putty’s options so that you’ll get a password prompt if key authentication fails.

Now just look after your private key and pass-phrase and all will be well with the world.

The following are pretty useful to get you up and running :

• Setting up in Unix Land (Keychain)
• This about covers it all for Windows (Pageant Manual)

A week off work and I have finally got around to properly scanning my mother’s copy of Leeds and the Bomb at a usable resolution. The versions here are 20% the original scan and haven’t been processed apart from being resized and saved as PNG in Paint.Net. Click the thumbnails for the resized versions. I have high-resolution copies available and can post them if anyone wants them. The images are readable (and are pretty faithful to the state of the original pamphlet after twenty one years). A bit of tweaking of contrast in your image editor of choice can tart them up quite nicely though.

The pages are below. Reading them, you might reasonably ask whether Leeds City Council which produced the pamphlet might have something to say about it being reproduced on-line. A quick look at page two will tell you that this brilliant little pamphlet was an early example of a publication released under a form of proto-creative commons.

Former Councillor Brian North said in a comment on the earlier post:

I devised and Edited Leeds and the Bomb . The booklet sold 60,000 copies worldwide and went into three print runs. Reproduced in Holland, Germany, Japan, USA.

We can add the internet to that list now.

The cover cleverly juxtaposes the apocalypse with lovely shades of pink and baby blue (in fairness, my copy is rather faded so the colours were probably more appropriate originally). Look closely and you’ll see that the pamphlet is well-thumbed. The markings left by a terrified youth.

Page two points out that the pamphlet wasn’t intended to espouse any view on the necessity or otherwise of nuclear weapons. This was written at the height of the disarmament argument (it wasn’t really a debate or didn’t seem like one to me at the time) though. One way or another, an objective assessment of the effects of a nuclear attack on Leeds was unlikely to create any love for the nukes.

Pages four and five are an introduction to nukes and their place in the world. Interesting that Israel was down as a ‘can make a bomb now’ state (they actually already had them at the time as we found out from Mordechai Vanunu in 1986) and North Korea is not on the radar. If only they’d stayed that way.

I love the final line on this page, “Europe of course, included Britain”.

Pages six and seven talk about how a war would start. We really had no idea what the ‘90s and early years of the new century would bring. It might also be worth re-appraising Admiral Le Rocque’s statement that World War III, like the other world wars, would be fought in Europe.

Pages eight and nine start to get in to the meat of it. The three pictures of a housing estate being steadily destroyed look remarkably like Little London, just down the road from Blenheim where I did most of my growing up. I fully expected to be one of the lucky folk for whom, “The initial flash of nuclear radiation could kill anyone out in the open…”. Lovely.

Page eleven has the first of the excellent diagrams the pamphlet used to clearly describe the effects of the bomb. This displays the blast-damage that could be expected from the one megaton nuke that is used to illustrate the effects of the bomb.

Pages twelve and thirteen have more of the diagrams – flash burns and fallout this time.

Pages fourteen and fifteen form the centrepiece diagram which draws everything else together into a single, coherent image of doom. I always loved that the major roads and motorways were clearly marked – you certainly wouldn’t want to get lost during the apocalypse.

As a diagram, I’ve always loved it though. I liked that a number of different but related ideas were presented in a single diagram without it becoming cluttered or unreadable. Looking at it today, I find it amazing that this was probably put together using a mix of hand drawing and Letraset.

Pages sixteen and seventeen make what’s come before seem comforting. One of the ideas that we had was that once the warning went out (and the air-raid sirens were tested with alarming frequency – including at Blenheim TA Barracks), it would be best to head on up to Woodhouse Moor to make sure we got fried in the first light of the bomb. That way we wouldn’t suffer the horrors likely to be inflicted on survivors. We came to this conclusion based on our in-depth study of Threads (Leeds got a pamphlet, Sheffield got a film – typical) and various other pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction that we got our hands on.

The pamphlet now presents a ‘realistic’ war scenario of bombings at Leeds-Bradford airport in Yeadon and the Royal Ordinance Factory in Barnbow. In this scenario, the centre of Leeds would very probably still be at least partially standing. In other words, we might survive to enjoy the depredations of societal breakdown, radiation sickness and starvation. The post-war North comes next.

When we moved to Headingly in about 1987, our new GP had a poster on the wall of his waiting room from the BMA. It was a photograph of a hideously melted telephone receiver. The text of the poster warned readers in stern terms against calling their doctor in the event of nuclear war. This was since, there would A) be no phone and B) your doctor would be dead or otherwise engaged. These reminders of the dangers we faced were all around us and put today’s terrorist threat into perspective. Whatever horrors bearded cave-dwellers might try to inflict on us, they simply don’t have the existential character of all-out nuclear war. Also, in the UK at least, concern about terrorism in the public ebbs and flows whereas the fear of nuclear war was pretty much constant. We knew war could start ‘accidentally’ at any time and we suspected that the people with their fingers on the various buttons weren’t necessarily all there mentally or morally.

I had a look around the web for a copy of the BMA poster and also for the famous poster of Maggie and Ronnie posed as Rhett and Scarlett under the tag-line, ‘The Film to End All Films’ and a mushroom cloud rising in the distance. I found a few images, none particularly usable. One was very interesting; in a brief photo-blog by the right-wing US commentator, Michelle Malkin. It turns out that there’s a copy of the poster hanging on the wall of the Reagan ranch. I suppose he took it in good humour then.

Pages 20 and 21 get onto the question of command and control. There would have been attempts to maintain some degree of government and coordination from a bunker in Lawnswood (just up the road from my high-school). As Threads made clear though, there was no real expectation that anything effective could have been achieved. In the last few years, we have learned much more about the scenario planning that was performed by the government to prepare for the post-apocalypse world.

This information was released after a Freedom of Information request in 2006 and showed that Central Government had in effect been writing its very own collection of post-apocalyptic fiction in which possible responses  to the break-down of society were examined. The friend who pointed me to this said:

It’s a terrifying read, the Death of Bristol in particular making for
nightmare stuff:

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/sfs/new_page_2.htm

[…]

“In Exercise Regard, Newark declared itself independent “under an able
but despotic leading citizen” and with the acquiescence of the local
police. In Exercise Regenerate a large part of east Scotland had
declared itself independent under a local Parliament and supported by
an army battalion. Should these people be stopped, if so how, or
should they be accepted and integrated into the system?”

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/sfs/file_8.htm

The bottom line is that the picture of the severe looking bobby on page 21 is unlikely to have been the reality.

Page 23 has a reminder of quite how demented the logic of nuclear war was. In the section asking whether evacuation would be an option, the pamphlet says:

What about evacuation? Would people be safer moving out of the towns and cities to the country? The problem with this is that no-one knows which parts of the country would be completely safe from fall-out. There might not be time for an evacuation. Evacuation might be seen as a hostile act and could lead to a nuclear attack.

In other words, the Soviets might think we were planning a pre-emptive attack because we evacuated and as a result, pre-emptively attack us. The civil defence policy described in ‘Protect and Survive’ demonstrates central government opposition to evacuation:

No help will be given to people who move away from home. [Protect and Survive] also warns that empty homes might be taken for others to use.

This sounds like a particularly grim version of compulsory purchase, known as eminent domain in the US.

An interesting tid-bit from page 24 points out that:

The spread of nuclear weapons to the middle-east or Africa, might increase the chances of a nuclear war.

It missed Asia from the list but otherwise seems to have been correct. There is potential conflict between Iran and Israel, Pakistan and India and North and South Korea (for which the US offers a nuclear umbrella).  This means that we live in a world where nuclear conflict is more likely than at any time in the last couple of decades. It is not certain that a local conflict would escalate into a global war. At any rate, it is less certain than it was in 1982, but the prospect is nonetheless a touch grim.

The final pages are a glossary of doom. They contain a reminder that Hard Rock isn’t just a nasty restaurant full of tat.

That’s the lot. It’s interesting to re-read it today in light of the new nuclear threats from smaller states and others. One way or another, the world is a whole lot safer than when we were growing up and yet somehow people feel much less safe. We put up with all sorts of idiotic rubbish at airports for the sake of avoiding (or at least appearing to avoid) threats that seem trivial compared to those we faced in the 1980s.

Where internal IT is imposing unreasonable delays and costs, this is going to be great for businesses. There are some major caveats to add though. In particular, a lot of the governance and ‘red-tape’ that internal IT seems to impose is actually about protecting an organisation’s data. By checking that things like backup and recovery have been considered and planned for, IT ensures that an organisation’s data, reputation and ultimately it’s business are protected. Where those checks are bypassed, it is fair to expect that the ‘boring’ aspects of application development and deployment will not get the attention the really require. The litany of data loss horror stories never seems to abate. Cloud computing service providers may provide the tools to implement effective backups, but that won’t guarantee that developers will use them.

To be clear, the threat here is not that organisations will use cloud computing, which will be a great addition to the IT tool-box. The threat is the same as that posed by applications running on servers sitting under people’s desks; It is the same thread as that posed by data that leaks on portable drives; The threat is that broken governance can lead to no governance and that organisations will be compromised as a result.

The solution is for internal IT and their management to build cloud computing into their governance and release management models. In much the same way as for suppliers of physical infrastructure, organisations need to choose their suppliers and build standards for development and deployment . By doing this, they can ensure that all applications, whether hosted internally or in the cloud are checked to ensure compliance with data protection, availability and security requirements.

There’s something else to say here though and that’s to remember quite how much due diligence vendors of physical infrastructure are put through before purchase decisions are made. Ultimately, even an SLA isn’t really enough unless you are convinced that the organisation to which you are trusting your data is able to follow through on their promises. I wonder what the cloud services RFP equivalent of a double disk pull will be?

Leeds, a city of (then) around half a million people in the North of England played host to a faded football team (now freshly faded following an all too brief return to success) and a lot of dead industries. It also had a council which like most outside the South of England was run by a vaguely left-wing (note for modern day conservatives, when I write “vaguely”, you may read, “rabidly”) Labour council which insisted that Leeds was a ‘nuclear free zone’. However silly a designation this might have been (and it was silly as there was not a nuclear power station within 100 miles and the river Aire isn’t suitable for sailing nuclear submarines), it did mean that the council put considerable effort into explaining the precise impact on Leeds that a putative nuclear strike might have.

The result of these efforts was the production of an amazing pamphlet called, “Leeds and THE BOMB” [original emphasis]. This thing was a wealth of horror for a young boy – I absolutely loved it. Between incredible graphs and diagrams (using a design that is absolutely of its time but which still looks great today) showing estimated casualties and fatalities were interspersed descriptions of the injuries that people would likely suffer. For an eight year old, these were quite clearly the stuff of nightmares. Consequently, I couldn’t stop reading it.

For years, I forgot about it, then recently had a discussion with a friend where we discussed ‘Threads‘. This film, a fictionalised account of post-nuclear-holocaust Sheffield (another Yorkshire town – I wonder to what extent the inherent ‘grimness’ of England’s North contributed to an obsession with nuclear destruction) was another great source of nightmares, albeit in my teens. The upshot of this conversation was that we both remembered this brilliant pamphlet but could find simply no trace of it on the internet.

This was a bit of a surprise frankly. How could something so brilliant not be available online? I intend fixing this frightening omission and plan over the next few days to finally get scanned copies of the pamphlet’s pages up onto the Web in all their horrible glory. Luckily for posterity, my mother found a copy lurking in a box somewhere and has been kind enough to scan the pages. Sadly, her scanner isn’t much cop and when I’m back in Europe I will get better versions done. For now though, they are legible and a great reminder of quite how bloody terrifying it could be growing up in the 1980s.

Just to whet your appetite, this two page spread shows the likely impact of blast, burn and fallout damage across Leeds resulting from a (comparatively small) one megaton bomb. To get a feel for how I felt about this diagram at the time, I lived right, bang, smack in the middle, where it says ‘University’.

More to come over the weekend. Hopefully, over time I will be able to get together some of the history behind this pamphlet including who produced it and what discussions were had about its likely effect (including on impressionable young science fiction fans like my young self). I might also do a few comparisons between the diagrams in ‘Leeds and THE BOMB’ and some of the more modern simulators such as HYDEsim.

—————————————————

Edit (10th January 2011): I have now put the full version of the pamphlet on-line.

As a concept (even one which is misunderstood and misrepresented woefully), cloud computing is orders of magnitude simpler to explain than SOA ever was. SOA is the only industry buzz-word that I’ve ended up buying books about just to get my head around the general concept (that may say more about me than SOA mind).

Cloud computing, I feel has much more of a self-fulfilling dynamic about it than SOA could have had. The economics of it are mind-blowingly simple – even if a solution ends up more expensive than in-house, it is at least cost-transparent. The benefits to the business are clear and are very often then things that in-house IT has been failing to deliver for years (think agility and effective communication of costs in particular).

Ultimately, while some of the FUD is important, it’s in the process of being answered. Most of the issues with cloud computing have been solved somewhere already. What we’re going to see (sorry, are seeing!) now is the emergence of services able to tick many boxes simultaneously. These services will take off, FUD or no FUD.

Five years from now, we may well all have forgotten the phrase ‘cloud computing’ but it will be there one way or another, and the enterprise IT department and the data-centre will have been changed forever regardless.

In Qantas’ defence, this was really the fault of Airbus and Boeing for failing miserably in their efforts to get new and more fuel efficient jets out the door. Still, I won’t miss being steadily deafened while sitting at the back of the old monsters.

Likewise at the BBC, I started out in the IT team of the ‘Youth and Entertainment Features’ department in BBC Manchester (one of three support and delivery organisations in one building!). By the time I left Auntie in 2004, I had been through three sets of organisational consolidation before finally being outsourced (again!) to Siemens.

The last twenty years has seen a steady process of consolidation of IT delivery in organisations. The relentless trend has been for the centralisation of development, infrastructure delivery and support into the corporate IT department. Outside of business units with very high margins and esoteric IT needs, it has become increasingly difficult for business units to develop and deploy applications without the cooperation of the corporate IT department.

I wonder though, whether cloud service providers open up the risk (or is it an opportunity?) that business units will once again be able to develop, deploy and support new applications, independently of the corporate IT department. Where once, deploying an un-authorised app. would mean running servers under desks or stacking Lacie drives off the back of a desktop to create a private file server; business units can now employ any one of thousands of boutique consultancies or developers to knock up the apps of their dreams using the cloud to obviate the need to involve corporate IT.

Of course, corporate security and finance policy may well stand in the way but history suggests that these won’t be too great an impediment. Once more than a few apps have been deployed, we might see the re-growth of the parallel support organisations that the corporate IT department thought they’d seen the back of (or more likely – absorbed) over the last twenty years.

If that happens, there are all sorts of consequences, many of them nasty. Business units and even businesses as a whole might be willing to pay them to gain agility and bypass what many see (if unfairly) as bureaucratic impediments to business thrown up by corporate IT.

The answer for corporate IT is to make sure that it is nearly or as easy to develop and deploy new applications through them as it is through the cloud suppliers. Maybe that means using the public cloud as a support for internal systems or maybe it means developing private clouds (though some are already pouring cold water on that idea). Either way (or some other way…), it’s an interesting time to be in IT.

“[When new applications are deployed,]often the first contact that the infrastructure team will have is when an application is delivered to be integrated into the infrastructure and they try to get the application to meet it’s NFRs, SLAs etc.

[…..]

Turning to the infrastructure to fix application problems, design flaws and oversights [in application design] should become the back-stop; yes, we will still use infrastructure to fix many problems but less often and with a greater understanding of why and what the implications are.”

I agree that it would be nice to see applications and developers bear more of the burden of ensuring they are recoverable from OR and DR perspectives. It’s worth noting though, that in the not so distant past applications that simply had to work – that were ‘carrier grade’ so to speak – would be developed on operating systems that had the necessary software ‘infrastructure’ to deliver on those NFRs. This begs the question as to why we don’t see all applications built in this way. There are a number of reasons but I’d argue that the primary one is simply that application development is more expensive than infrastructure.

Development of a new application or platform costs a lot of money. Whatever the complexity involved in developing non-functional requirements (NFRs) for things like availability, the pain involved in determining the functional requirements (or features) is far greater. Outside of a small number of edge-cases such as core software components of telecoms networks or manufacturing facilities, it does not make sense to build operational or disaster failure tolerance into the code of an application. Application developers (both internally in companies and in the wider ISV environment) focus on the functionality that delivers value to the business or will contribute to selling their product, not on replication, block-level data validation or data-recovery.

Even where developers are interested in building in resilience, they have been faced with a lack of software ‘infrastructure’ to support them. Many of those highly resilient applications in telcos, manufacturers etc. were built on operating systems or used components that provided services such as shared everything clustering and highly resilient, sharable file systems. OpenVMS which pioneered many of these services will forever be a niche product – albeit one that supports many extremely critical functions – because of the costs in terms of cash and flexibility that are paid when applications are developed on it. Building in resilience makes development (both initial and ongoing) and maintenance of applications more complex and expensive. It also means that the developer has to take responsibility for guaranteeing recoverability and who in their right mind would want to do that ?

Today, Oracle and MS are building a new variety of this software ‘infrastructure’ into their products but it’s only being used in a small proportion of developments. Even given the possibility that you might save some money on storage replication, people don’t seem to be using these services all that readily, for the reason I suspect, that developers (or management overhead) are still more expensive than those replication licenses.

The only way to change that situation would be (as SB notes) to make delivering resilience at the application layer simple, repeatable and manageable. That’s very much easier said than done though and the twenty-odd years of development of infrastructure resilience services is testament to that. There’s one place where the problem is being addressed though and that’s out there in the cloud….

Personally I think there is often a wider issue of integration between application and infrastructure teams that leads to situations where organisations focus on data rather than application or service recoverability. That boils down to process and in some cases (over) specialisation but it’s a question for another day I think.

In each case, the result for the poor, defenseless public transport user is the sensation of being tossed around like a cherry tomato in a particularly vigorous salad spinner. On London’s buses I’ve seen grannies thrown to the floor, coffees dashed against windows and handfuls of coins tossed to the floor as a driver, seemingly in the belief that only he is on the bus (and road), pulls away from the stop like one of Max Power’s finest.

In London, by the time I left it seemed there was nary a driver or operator left who understood how to drive the monstrous vehicles for which they were responsible. Given automatic gearboxes and a tidy nine litre engine, these beasts are capable of out-accelerating many of the smaller cars on London’s roads. In the hands of the hoolies who drive them, they are more than capable of disrupting the connection between floor and foot of even the toughest young London commuter.

It’s not just London though, and it’s not just busses. Even in laid-back Melbourne, Yarra Trams seems to employ a number of real bruisers in the cabs on their shiny (and some not so shiny) trams. While in general, better than London bus drivers (I have yet to see any wearing those string-backed driving gloves that I noticed appearing on the hands of some particularly speed obsessed drivers), I have been chucked about pretty effectively by one or two testing out the grunt available from their charges.

So what’s the answer? I remember a few years ago reading an article (probably in the Metro – where else would you find it) about a study of London Underground operators. This study found that passengers generally prefer the style of women operators. In the absence of those ‘amusing’ commentaries that some operators like to provide their passengers, this would be an entirely ‘blind’ test and potentially very reliable. By all accounts, the female operators were able to accelerate, brake and corner their trains in such a way that passengers were able to maintain contact between foot and floor and bum and seat. Something that was simply not possible when their male colleagues took the stick.

Sadly though, I suspect that Britain’s discrimination laws would see off any chance of firing all the male drivers out there. Realistically then, we can only expect the ladies to sort out a proportion of the problem. Luckily, I have a solution for the rest.

Accelerometers. It’s really very simple. Just a lorry drivers have a record kept of their speed and duration in the seat. Just as airline pilots have their every action tracked, monitored and investigated and just as MPs honestly track their expenses (um), public transport operators should be allocated a maximum average ‘G’ per KM travelled in any given day.

The driver who accelerates smoothly, brakes anticipatorily and treats their passengers like, you know, passengers will set the benchmark. The drivers who think that their job is a competition to achieve the greatest deviation from centre of gravity for the top deck of their bus will by contrast find themselves receiving remedial training around Swindon’s Magic Roundabout (and if that doesn’t teach them, they can just stay in Swindon).

Just imagine being able to walk the deck on the bus to your seat safe in the knowledge that your driver isn’t going to attempt to place you on your backside on the floor. Bliss, and all for the sake of a little bit of electronics and some damn harsh sanctions.

And yes. I smacked my head on one of the yellow rails of a tram a few days ago after the driver of a 96 decided to find out what the 0-60 time of the Bumblebee was.