ghostship: first release (0.4)

Ghostship runs surprisingly stable (which may also have something to do with the recent upstream update of Ultrasurf from 9.5 to 9.6), so I decided to release an official source package.  It still does run Ultrasurf like an Unix daemon, I have written pretty much about that by now, so if you don’t know the project yet, check out its homepage.

Why do I start with version 0.4? Well, I just counted my first two attempts plus the major rewrite I did lately as single versions.

About packaging: I have already made two PKGBUILDs for the AUR, so Archlinux is all fine. Yoschi on the other hand will build Debian/Ubuntu packages as soon as I get the code ported properly (I am not quite sure, but I think that there are still some parts in the code that work only on Arch). If you would like to see ghostship on another distribution, please try to build a distribution specific package from the release and give some feedback.

PS: I guess I will add a little tutorial how to use Ultrasurf with Firefox on the ghostship homepage soon. The wordpress.com control panel tells me, that there are actually people looking for such information.

ghostship-svn in the Archlinux User Repository

Ghostship itself runs okay now in my experience, but I’ll keep on testing a bit longer, before I make a stable release. Archlinux is bleeding edge, so if you use that distribution, you may just build the most recent SVN revision from the AUR with the PKGBUILD I submitted.

Any feedback is welcome.

ghostship 0.4: some major rewrites

A few days ago I noticed that my ghostship software had much more bugs than I thought – in fact some bugs that prevented even bigger bugs (that happens sometimes…). Today I had enough time, so I read through all the code again, gave it better comments, simplified it where possible and rewrote some parts. The ship does still need a lot of testing and fixing, since some parts (shutdown, viewer and the init scripts) do not work anymore.

As said before, I will release an officiall tarball (gotta love that word) as soon as I think it is stable. But feel free to literary check out the svn and tell me what you think about it if you want to.

ultrasurf-tools becomes ghostship

As mentioned before, I like to run the Windows proxy software Ultrasurf on Linux.

Some time ago, I made a simple script, that keeps the connection alive by sending data through it from time to time. Two weeks ago I decided to advance it and give it a new name, „ultrasurf-tools“. This piece of bash code was able to completely hide the GUI and run it like a Unix daemon then.

A few days ago however, I decided to push the development even further and turn it into a full Unix daemon. That means automatic installation of the two needed DLL files, automatic download and update of Ultrasurf and even automatic setup of an own user with his own wineprefix and TightVNC settings. So basically one just needs to install that daemon and as soon as it gets started, everything works out of the box.

It basically does its job by now, except that there is still a little bug. When your internet disconnects, Ultasurf tries to connect again for an infinite amount of time, but it somehow does not trigger wget’s timeout (which I use to check whether we are online or not). Thus not only Ultrasurf hangs, but the daemon does not realize it and so nothing happens at all. As soon as I fix this, I will put an official release of the script on its brand new homepage.

Also you may have figured out from the title of this article, that I gave the software a new name. Why? Because ultrasurf-tools might be fine for a little bash script, but as a full functionally daemon, I’d rather use a name that is not related to another software’s name. So I came up with ghostship (metaphor for the invisibility of your IP as well as the invisibility of the GUI).

More information on the official homepage.