passcod

Before HTTPS was all but required for everything, an intranet site would get blocked in one particular office at 11pm every night. We tracked it down to a night-shift employee signing in, whose last name contained "shit". After pleading fruitlessly against that office's IT policies we solved the problem permanently by eating the overhead and turning on HTTPS.

The rdesktop (and GUI frontends) Remote Desktop client on Linux is perfect for this. Supports the Windows RDP protocol. All you need is to find the raw connection data (if they don't give it to you, e.g. if they use "remote desktop connection files"). We have various Windows servers at work yet no developer uses Windows (it's all OS X and Linux).

When Pfiffer told me peh would post that on HN, my reaction was something like "Fine by me, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to get schooled." Looks like I was right.

I got schooled, I'm learning, next time I'll be more clever about it, thank you!

Most of the time is spent on generating the random string, which was because I very quickly realised looking through the entire possibility space in order would be unproductive. Granted, my entire approach was unproductive, as shown by linuxbochs, pedrox, and others below :)

I actually did some micro-benchmarking in the midst of all that and found that hashing a single, static, string took something of the order of 20ns. That's half a billion hashes per second, or 2 billion on four cores. Add a little overhead for string generation, and yeah, we get the same number.

This is for a spot instance, which could get stopped at any moment if the spot price increases, and that would be pretty bad for that task as I could lose computation results. The on-demand price is about $1.60 an hour. But wait! I'm not using the same dollar, I live in New Zealand, which makes that about NZ$1.90 an hour, or NZ$45 for 24 hours.