Mit 'ghostship' verschlagwortete Einträge

Finally some spare time…

…that I can use to write an article in my blog. That software I develop, ghostship, runs very stable in my experience. I think *someone* should package it for other Linux distributions. I’ve got already someone working on a Debian port, but I am not quite sure if and when he will actually do it – maybe I will do it myself in a few weeks.

Twitter became a handy tool for me, now I am able to post things like „the new southpark episode is [my opinion] [link]“ in just a few seconds rather than expanding this information to a whole blog article and finally posting it on wordpress (like I used to do previously). Another cool thing I noticed is that this information does get indexed on my blog by Google however, because the most recent (and who reads old ones anyway) tweets are shown in the navigation. That way you don’t even need to „follow“ me or add my twitter account to your feed reader :)

I’ve experimented around a bit with GTKRadiant (a map editor) in combination with Urban Terror as I wrote earlier. By now I am trying to remake cs_1337_assault from Counter-Strike 1.6, as this is one of my favorite maps with some outdated graphics though. On the other hand, I don’t like the Source version, because it is too different from the original cs_assault – I’ll try to mix it up with my own ideas. But by now I don’t have much yet except for the one building which is directly in front of the CT spawn, crappy lighting and some lame textures which I just use from the default Urban Terror maps. Well, if I have enough time and the map turns out to look great and be very playable without changing the original cs_assault feeling too much, I’ll definitely post it on this blog.

How to use Ultrasurf with Firefox

This is a little tutorial that should help you to set up Firefox for using Ultrasurf as Proxy. It should work on Windows as well as on Linux with either Ultrasurf running simply in Wine or as a daemon with ghostship. I will assume that you have already installed Ultrasurf (for detailed instructions on how to do that with wine, look here).

tl;dr: Server: 127.0.0.1, Port: 9666


1. Start Ultrasurf (or ghostship) for the first time. If you use ghostship, read on at step 6 (or if you require that Ultrasurf uses a proxy itself, run ghostship --viewer and follow the next steps).

2. The main interface appears now. Click Option (which should actually be named Options, but that does not matter – the software works anyway ;) ).

9.6-main-gui-option

3. Again, you will get another dialog right in your face. This time, check Do not use IE because we are talking about Firefox and not Internet Explorer and Hide Golden Lock because the image of a golden lock at the bottom right is not useful anymore (it should tell whether Ultrasurf has set the IE to use it or not).

9.6-options-gui-checked

4. Optionally, you can make Ultrasurf itself use a proxy by clicking Proxy Settings. This is only required if you can’t access the Internet without using a proxy in your local network or if you want to chain multiple proxy applications in a row.

5. Close the Options GUI (picture above) by clicking OK and the main window by clicking Exit. Then start Ultrasurf again, just as in step 1.

6. Start up Firefox, navigate to checkip.dyndns.org and write down your current IP somewhere.

7. Now you should think about whether you would like to always use Ultrasurf (easier, continue with step 12) or depending on a white- or blacklist with specific sites (read on) and/or with a icon in Firefox that allows easy switching on the fly.

8. Install the Firefox Add-On FoxyProxy by opening this website and clicking Add to Firefox as well as in the popping up dialog on Install Now.

install-foxyproxy

9. Restart Firefox.

10. After that, you will be greeted with a dialog that asks whether you would like to set up FoxyProxy for usage with TOR. In this tutorial, you don’t need to do this as the onion router is  a completely different proxy application and should therefore click on No, but you might want to do it anyway if you have TOR installed.

11. Foxyproxy is a very powerful application that allows – as mentioned before – the usage of proxys depending on lists just to name one big feature. Keep in mind that Ultrasurf will listen on your loopback IP, which is always 127.0.0.1 (that information might also be called server), on the port 9666. You can now either do a very simple setup that allows you to switch proxys on the fly by following this tutorial, or dive right into the official FoxyProxy documentation and learn how to use the more advanced features. Continue when you have Ultrasurf set up.

12. Open up Firefox’ preferences by clicking Edit/Preferences (Windows users will find it in the Tools menu).

firefox-edit-preferences

13. Navigate to Advanced, Network and set up a pretty high cache, like in the screenshot below (1024 MB). This will make sure that Firefox downloads only new data and keeps the old on the harddrive, thus speeding up the surfing experience and keeping away unnecessary traffic from Ultrasurf.

firefox-preferences-dialog

14. If you use FoxyProxy, click Close and continue with step 16 now. otherwise click Settings.

15. In the new GUI, click Manual proxy configuration, Use this proxy server for all protocols and fill in the following data:

HTTP Proxy: 127.0.0.1

Port: 9666

After that, click OK.

firefox-proxy-settings-for-ultrasurf

16. So you set everything up? You better check that by calling checkip.dyndns.org again and comparing the current displayed IP with the one from step 6. If it is different, everything works :)

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.

RabbitVCS: Manage Your SVN Repository With Nautilus

I discovered this fine piece of software the day I pushed ghostship to sourceforge. SF.net allows you to choose between several version control systems, GIT and SVN among them. I usually choose GIT and to make life easier, I decided to look for a GIT integration in Nautilus. But I got pointed to RabbitVCS which does the exact thing for SVN. Actually they plan to implement GIT support in the next version, but as it isn’t there yet SVN got the cake.

Just take a look at the screenshots on their website – the integration is fantastic!

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.


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