Because no one should ever have to remember all this nonsense, or have to track it all down, here is a Tanzanian Internet Phone: Phone Cheat Sheet.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, read the text below and then return to the table later.

There is a somewhat updated version of this document available at Current 2009-2011/12 PCV Yue’s Volunteer Blog. His additions are in red on that page. And there are a few late-2010 numbers at WhiteAfrican’s blog post.

Contained within is my attempt to clarify Kenya Tanzania’s mobile phone situation for new visitors, especially current and future Peace Corps volunteers, who may not be the most technical people.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE FOR Kenya TANZANIA TO LIVE HERE FOR TWO YEARS

The Peace Corps recommends that you wait to buy a phone until you arrive.  I disagree.  Good phones here are rare, old, expensive, hard to find, and sometimes fake.  Buy a tri-or-quad band phone with 3G on eBay.  Size of the screen, keyboard, etc, is entirely up to you.  Small Nokias go unnoticed here because everyone has them, but nice phones unavoidably look expensive, and phone theft is reasonably common here, especially in Dar, so don’t spend your life savings. Current suggestions: the Nokia 6220 Classic (no WiFi) or N79 (with WiFi).  The WiFi is good because you can leech off of other people’s Internet, if you can find it, without toting your laptop around town.  Great for downloading big files that would cost you a lot otherwise.

If you already own such a phone, but it’s locked into a contract, cancel your service but beforehand tell them you’re leaving the country and YOU NEED THE UNLOCK CODES.  They will give them to you if you persist, then just follow the instructions so your phone will work in other countries. If you are buying a new phone, make sure it is UNLOCKED.

Also buy a USB cable that will connect your phone to your laptop.  BUY THIS IN AMERICA, because not only is it expensive and hard to find here, good luck even describing what you want to the phone store employee who mostly sells tacky faceplates.

Before you leave the US, install these program on your phone, or at least note them down so you can get them later:

• Web browser: Opera Mini (if you have a Blackberry you NEED to download and install this before you disconnect your US service)
  
  
• Email: Gmail Mobile (or if you use Hotmail or something else, the appropriate program if you can find it).  Gmail Mobile also works with Google Apps, which is how I have it set up.
  
• Maps: Google Maps Mobile
  
• Text chat: Skype Mobile
  
• Alternate browser: TeaShark
  
  

THE PHONE COMPANIES

You will decide on your phone company once you get here.  Most volunteers have traditionally chosen Zain for specific deals but have recently dispersed:

• Vodacom, the incumbent, first phone company
  
• Zain (previously Celtel), the second largest phone company.
• Tigo (previously Mobitel), original discount company, often used by students
• Zantel, fair nationwide coverage, discount company started in Zanzibar, acquired by a UAE company EtiSalat
• TTCL, landline provider, CDMA mobile, and DSL provider, mentioned here for completeness, generally not a contender.

To get a line from any of these companies, just buy a SIM card in a shop that has a sign that says “Nunua Linei ya Simu hapa.”  Pretty simple, just pop it into your phone and then follow the instructions.  You can also buy little credit card-looking things with scratch-off codes that will add credit to your SIM card.  If you buy SIMs from different companies, each will have its own starting digits for the phone number.

THE DIFFERENT CALLING PLANS

The calling plans are pretty complicated even before you start worrying about Internet.  Most companies have at least two “tariffs,” which is to say different plans.  They change a lot, so I won’t bother itemizing them, but after you’ve settled down here, ask around and look out for the fact that:

• Nights & Weekends (after 9pm+Weekends),
  
• Family/Circle of Friends
• None of these things affects the cost of the Internet, which is where all my money goes, since domestic calls and texts are really not that expensive and incoming calls (including international) are free.

Usually you are allowed to change your tariff once a month.  The way you accomplish this is the same way that you accomplish most things with these companies: you type cryptic, mostly undocumented numbers into your phone and hope that they work.  Usually they resemble *123# or #123#, were 123 are the secret numbers.  Sometimes you will hear people, and even advertisements say, “send a blank SMS to 123,” but I’ve never seen this work.  You usually need to type *123# or #123# (or whatever numbers) directly into your phone and dial.

THE INTERNET ON YOUR PHONE

So now you want the Internet, both on your phone and on your laptop.  Let’s review how to do this.  First of all, good job, you bought a 3G phone, this leaves your options open.

To make the Internet work on your phone, what you need to do varies depending on your carrier.

For Vodacom:

For Zain: Send an SMS to 232 that says “all”.  (No quotes, all lowercase.)  You will get a message on your phone asking you to download your settings.  Do so.  This worked right away for me, and interestingly, if you pop in a Zain SIM and set it up, you can use the same settings for Vodacom.  I usually just leave my phone on the Zain settings and I can swap SIMs and surf the Internet with either with no problem.

When trying to apply to the internet service by texting in as described above, if the Zain network doesn’t happen to recognize your model of modem or phone it will give an ambiguous message and fail to enable your line. Then you will need to find another internet capable phone to activate service from (preferably a Nokia as most of these seem recognized). Line must be activated before internet is available.

For Tigo: ???

Send a blank text to 1234 (or my guess, call #1234#).  The text does nothing when I try and my guess doesn’t work either, but at least it says “coming soon” when you try.

It’s worth noting that if you have trouble with this, and you have a Nokia, your phone has a support option somewhere (depends on the model) where you can have Nokia send you your settings, in case your carrier is being dumb.  This is what I did at first for Safaricom.  If that fails, enter the APNs manually into your phone using the cheat sheet table.

For Zantel: Send a text with “wap” or “internet” to 15098. You should get a system message back with the phone settings.

THE INTERNET ON YOUR LAPTOP

You will probably also want to use your phone as a modem (called “tethering”) for your computer.  You can do this even if the Internet on the phone itself isn’t working.  These things are actually unrelated, which is usually sad to realize after struggling to get one to work, that was just the first hurdle!

Most brand name phones have some sort of software package you can install on your computer.  I connect through “Nokia PC Suite,” which is free and has presets for Vodacom & Celtel (now Zain).  I think it may even work on non-Nokia devices.  Anyhow, the more you can do on this front before you leave, the better, because downloading programs needed in order to access the Internet is incredibly difficult when you don’t have Internet.  The steps for this are completely phone-specific.  Find the nearest computer guru and task him/her with helping you set this up in advance.

You can also accomplish the above through Bluetooth (wireless phone/laptop communication), but it takes up extra battery and is slower, so why bother?  Just buy the cable.

Before you leave, you should install on your laptop the following free programs:

• (bonus!) NetLimiter 2 Monitor Freeware – this is software that will watch to see how much of your internet speed is being used by each program on your computer. For example, you can see how many megabytes you downloaded with Mozilla Firefox on 21 September 2009. You can also see what is using all of your download speed or upload right now. Handy for tracking down bandwidth hogging programs. It can be the only tip you’d forgotten to turn off expensive autoupdates!
  
• http://m.google.com/?dc=gbackstop to enable access Google services like Gmail in whatever bandwidth format (standard, HTML, mobile) you prefer, even from your computer.
• ZoneAlarm or similar software firewall (blocks all sorts of annoying programs from taking up all your Internet)
  
• Opera web browser 10.0 or newer (syncs your bookmarks and stuff with Opera Mini): “Turbo Mode” can save you bandwidth!
  
  
• Firefox (and the below extensions)
  
  • ImgLikeOpera (more control over selectively allowing images)
    
    
  • Greasemonkey (needed to run the below)
    
    
    • custom GreaseMonkey Mowser Images script.  This is a simple script that will make all images pass through Mowser, which is a web site that converts sites into phone-friendly versions.  In this case I’m on a laptop so I don’t want the site to be changed, but Mowser also recompresses images. Anyhow, I still mostly keep images off, but when I selectively “load image” using ImgLikeOpera, this script actually loads it from Mowser to save a lot of bandwidth.  If this ever becomes popular I’m sure Mowser will just stop allowing this.
      
      
  • User Agent Switcher (needed to run the below)
    
    
    • custom User Agent list. You can trick sites into thinking you’re using any number of mobile phones, so they’ll give you streamlined versions of their pages.  Gmail for instance gives a cool little version for iPhone and Android, and a super-basic version for the other mobile browsers.
  • Flashblock (forces you click on a Flash element in order to start it’s a nice bandwidth saver!)
    
  • Adblock Plus
    
    
  • Google Gears (may help you if you use WordPress or other web apps that can take advantage of it)
    
  • Type about:config into the Firefox address bar and change the rightmost values so they match the below.
    accessibility.blockautorefresh;true

    browser.cache.check_doc_frequency;2

    browser.chrome.favicons;false

    browser.chrome.site_icons;false

    network.prefetch-next;false
    
    

  • Do the same for the following, but you will also need to right-click and select “New -> Integer” and type everything to the left of the semicolon.  Then enter the number value to the right.  Doing so will save you a little time and bandwidth because you will have to contact your DNS servers less often.
    Network.dnsCacheExpiration;3600
    network.dnsCacheEntries;1000
• Windows Live Writer or similar offline blogging program, great if you have a blog.
  
• Mozilla Thunderbird (and try to set up your email on it before you leave: it’s nice to be able to read old emails and open attachments without having to get online every time)
  
  

Because you pay your phone carrier per megabyte (upload/download combined), all of those little auto-update programs on your computer can cost you money and can also slow everything else down.  ZoneAlarm takes care of this by asking you every time a program wants to connect to the Internet.  Get used to saying “No” a lot.  Even with this, you will notice that the Internet on your laptop costs more than on your phone.  This is because the web browser on your phone intercepts data and compresses it before giving it to you, which saves money for you.  This is called a “transcoding proxy server.”  Mozilla Fennec and Opera 10.0 do the same things for your laptop, so use them when you can.  Images cost more than text, so in Opera I stay in “cached images” mode, and only download images when I really need to, and they will then show up on subsequent visits to that page.  Firefox seems to have a clunkier images off/on method, so I use Firefox only for site that use Gears.  Google it and see if any site that you regularly visit can take advantage of Gears.  Live Writer is also great because you can prepare blog entries before you go online, and then you can simply press one button and let it go. It will shrink the images before uploading them and prevent annoying copy/paste.

WHICH INTERNET PLAN TO GET?

If you set up all the above and take no extra steps, credit will simply deplete from your account on a per-megabyte basis.  The rates, to my knowledge, are as follows:

• Vodacom: 254 shillings per megabyte
  
• Zain: 470 shillings per megabyte
• Tigo: 200 shillings per megabyte
• Zantel: 100 shillings per megabyte

An MP3, for example, is about 3 megabytes.  Using Skype Video in a rural area will take up maybe 1MB per minute.  These are ballpark numbers if you are not familiar with such things.

If you use more than, say, 50MB per month, you should look into some of the more specific data plans.

• Zain Prepaid: There are discounts by pre-purchasing megabytes for three month blocks in advance. It does expire after 3mo. I believe 500mb is sold for 160/= just the regular per-MB rate, 200MB and less packages are available at the store. If Zain is the only provider in your area or it seems faster due to its fiber connection these might pay off.
  
• Vodacom Prepaid: 60,000/= per month for unlimited internet. This may be related to an international unlimited data deal also available through USA/Verizon ($60/mo).
• Zantel CDMA Unlimited: For 90,000/= per month you can get unlimited Zantel internet through a semi-proprietary Zantel CDMA/EVDO modem. They will also sell you “unlimited” 3GB plans on GSM/EDGE for 90,000/=.

PHONE-SPECIFIC DATA PLANS

Each company has a flagship phone that they’d like to sell you, but if you show up from America with that phone, you can probably just get into the phone-specific deal if you want.

I don’t know the ins and outs of the deals in this category for Tanzania so refer back to the Kenya guide for the gist of this section and visit the respective stores downtown Dar or at Milimani city Mall where they are all together.

SPEED

Zain has 3G in Dar Es Salaam only with Mwanza/Arusha in planning as of Aug 2009. Vodacom advertises 3G in large cities around Tanzania. Zantel has 3G in many larger cities around TZ using its CDMA modem but otherwise only EDGE.

Tanzania lags behind Kenya in acknowledged fiber adoption. Zain has officially connected the fiber to its data hub in Dar and has better responsiveness as a result. I haven’t heard updates from the other vendors.

Since there are limited capacity on the towers, if other people are using the internet or heavily using the cell service, you may be affected. For EDGE all carriers hovers around 50kbps down / 20kbps up.  (Of course, if you don’t have a 3G phone, you’ll never get 3G speeds.  Hence my earlier recommendation, as all the networks are promising to go 3G “eventually.” though for Tanzania this may take a rather longer time than in Kenya, given Zain’s slow adoption to date)

CONCLUSION / WHICH TO GET?

Internet in Tanzania, like phone calls, are expensive versus neighboring Kenya but you generally don’t have to worry about contracts and thanks to Zain, internet is available even in many of the most remote Peace Corps-post villages.

If you are in an area where you get a 3G connection, you might consider Vodacom.  Theoretically the speed should be better.  You can also get a dedicated modem from them if you don’t want to always be plugging in your phone.  Just be aware that it’s not unlimited, so Skype Video and Windows Update will eat that data plan for breakfast.  Then again maybe you can find a friendly and cheap Internet cafes to offset your data usage in your major banking town.

If you are not in such an area, Vodacom Unlimited looks like the best deal if you can stomach the 60,000 shillings.  Then you never have to worry about another megabyte, you only have to worry about the 1 month recurring payment.  They’ll also be happy to sell you a modem.

If that’s too much money, any of the Vodacom’s/Zantel prepay plans seems good.  Just pick the one that you know you’ll use up in 30 days (90 days with Zain), and if you start to go over, just add more.  It’s way cheaper than paying the same 470 shillings per minute all the time with basic Zain.

PERIPHERALLY RELATED:

I feel like I also need to mention the following:

Zantel has confusing CDMA vs GSM networks. They also sell 2G EDGE modem devices at their store, further confusing their system. Make sure you know what you are buying if you shop at their stores. Expect if you buy the CDMA (its fast 3G internet tech is called EVDO) then you will be completely out of luck if you leave their very limited CDMA network. GSM/EDGE is practically national with many options.

Some areas also have WiMax as an option.  There are two kinds of WiMax: regular and mobile.  Regular WiMax means you basically need an antennae on your roof.  Mobile kind of resembles the tethering options discussed above, although you need to buy a special WiMax modem.  Different companies provide different services, and usually just around Dar Es Salaam. At least one popular service uses proprietary Navini pre-WiMax box devices.

POSTSCRIPT

Go back and look at the table: it will make sense now and you won’t have to reread all this text unless you’re looking for the lists of programs.

Any chance you would be willing to add some of it to the African Signals wiki on internet and web costs in Africa?
One Computer at a Time

It is nice to be able to flick your wrist to do all the common tasks in a browser without touching menus, reaching for toolbars, or the keyboard. Personally, I’ve got a tablet so the pen is often the most convenient interface. Back, Forward, Next (in series), Previous (in series), new tab, close tab, minimize and maximize all in two mouse moves or less.

I used to use “All-In-One Gestures”:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/index.html which is a fork of the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures” extension. It was forked before reliable diagonal gestures were implemented though and it has stayed san diagonals for years. Optimoz was broken in Firefox for a time with no maintainers so I had to move to All-in-One, I got used to a few of the bit features and didn’t check back on Optimoz.

I sorely missed diagonal gestures, instead of 4 gestures with one move (Up, Down, Left, Right) I could do eight!, but I tolerated AIO. Two gestures which were especially handy as one move-gestures but don’t fit into the UDLR orientations were Grow Image and Shrink Image. Did I mention the loss was a tad annoying?

A new extension has come about though which adds two more amazingly useful one move gestures into the mixin’s though–”NextPlease”:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=390 . This extension adds interfaces for Next and Previous page, filling out and in my opinion, fully justifying the diagonals as legit gestures, if there was any question. All-In-One supports these gestures but only for the non-diagonal gestures–Up (Link-in-new-tab), Down (Link-in-new-window or Scroll Down) , Left (back), Right (forward) are already taken with important moves. No flick to next page for you there.

So, how can you flick to the next page?

2. Install the “Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension”:http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/installation.html
3. After you restart firefox, click the links below to add the NextPlease gestures to Optimoz:
   • NextPlease (9) – Diagonal Up and Right for Next
   • PrevPlease (1) – Diagonal Down and Left for Previous

The other two classic diagonals are all enabled by default–Grow Image is Down and Right, Shrink Image is Up and Left.

I found a post which suggests a fix for the unstable debian libwine-cil package to get .Net/Windows software running (or closer to running) on Mono. I’ve installed the packages from the mono-for-debian site too.

+4. When trying to run a SWF application I get the
+System.DllNotFoundException:user32.dll exception. What's wrong?
+
+In order for SWF and winelib to operate properly you need to have
+symbolic links for the wine dlls in the <prefix>/lib directory. While
+the rpm should install those automatically as part of the postinstall
+script you can also manually create those with the following command:
+
+cd <prefix>/lib
+for i in <wine_dll_dir>/*dll.so; do ln -s $i lib`basename $i`; done
+
+<prefix> is the base directory where mono is installed under (ie. /usr
+or /usr/local) and <wine_dll_dir> is the directory where the wine dlls
+(user32.dll.so, gdi32.dll.so, etc) can be found (ie. /usr/lib/wine or
+/usr/local/lib/wine)

In my case I’m trying to get RssBandit running as a curiousity and due to the fact I haven’t found a comperable RSS reader for Linux yet–and I’d like to use the session syncing capabilites of RssBandit which are currently unstandard. (It appears that they’re cooking something on the back burner in the way of standards though, which is laudable. IMAP&Webmail combo is wonderous, I’d love to duplicate it in my agreggator.)

You also have to run the wineserver manually. Of course to get that error you’d have already of had to know that. So /usr/lib/wine/wineserver.

I get an error right away:
Unhandled Exception: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.
in <0x001e9> System.Resources.ResourceReader:ResourceValue (int)
in <0x00076> ResourceEnumerator:get_Value ()
in <0x000da> System.Resources.ResourceSet:ReadResources ()
in <0x00088> System.Resources.ResourceSet:GetObject (string,bool)
in <0x0001f> System.Resources.ResourceSet:GetString (string,bool)
in <0x00125> System.Resources.ResourceManager:GetString (string,System.Globalization.CultureInfo)
in <0x00014> System.Resources.ResourceManager:GetString (string)
in <0x00047> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:InitializeComponent ()
in <0x000f7> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:.ctor ()
in <0x0004f> (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.SplashScreen:.ctor ()
in <0x0001e> RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.Splash:ShowThread ()
in <0x0005f> (wrapper delegate-invoke) System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_void ()

The K5Diary2RSS screen scraper app I mentioned in an earlier post creates very mangled output. I’m not sure what to think of this with respect to Mono. Shouldn’t it run identially? It seems the compilers generate the same output, or at least generate the same output on either platform which they are run on (.NET CLR or Mono CLR) respectfully.

RSSBandit is Open Source so theoretically I could go in there and bugger around with it. Hmm.

Edit: I take back the not having a linux feedreader app statement. Liferea is nice and very fast compared to RSS Bandit’s weighty .NET baggage. The typically underpowered gtkhtml is a perfect fit for a RSS newsreader and tabs are probably overkill in Bandit as I use Firefox’s tabs & gestures to navigate the sites anyway. I would love to see syncronization added though.

A portion of the Topologilinux installer runs in windows and generates the blank voids (aka swap-like files) for Linux to use safely. One for the base and one for the swap. It also sets up a new version of the Grub bootloader, w32grub, which runs cleanly and kindly underneith the windows default NTDLR. The installer, in the wonderful tradition of windows installer is as simple as few textboxes and next-next-next. So I potentially have a Linux install that I can scoot around or easily backup should I run out of disk space on the small 40gb drive. Or delete/restore with a simple edit of the boot.ini.

Anyway, back to how I installed. I edited the C:/boot/menu.lst grub menu file to have another entry which used the topologilinux kernel with the debian initial root directory (initrd) called root.bin,which you might extract from the debian bootcd’s rescue.bin boot floppy image, with an app like WinImage (I mounted it under linux while I was trying to get all this figured out). Drop that in the C:/boot directory, edit the file, and reboot picking your new entry. I mounted the NTFS drive rw (so I can make a mess inside the swappish file). I set up the loopback with:

Then I simply proceeded with the debian base install with their utility. After that I had to dig in the CD image for Topologilinux to get the kernel-modules package (which since it’s slackware is simply tgz) and wade through it to find the e100 ethernet module. Debian is amazing once you have ethernet. You just `apt-get install` to your heart’s content.

I compiled the 2.6 kernel with debian’s kernel package and ran across another large bump. This took me ages to figure out. Not only do you have to explicitly complile initrd, loopback and ram disk support (in block devices) for all this to work but for Kernel 2.6 you need to add ramdisk_size=10000 to your grub configuration otherwise the kernel panics on boot RAMDISK: incomplete write (-28 != 32768) You also can’t have “devfs mounting on boot” in the kernel for the Topologilinux initrd’s linuxrc script to run properly.

I have an Atheros card in my tablet so I grabbed the cvs of the madwifi drivers from sourceforge (see cvs tab) and compiled them into my 2.6 kernel with the kernel-sources I’d downloaded. (after apt-getting cvs and sharutils)

After getting all the software online with my nice XFCE desktop using the instructions provided at those linux links provided earlier (also, for alsa–add your users to the audio group). I tried out xstroke, gok, xkbd. xstroke is okay, but I don’t particularly want to learn scribbles or any pda scribble techniques. I’m kind of partial to the Windows TIP way. Maybe the Mono team can get the Ink stuff to run in Linux some day. Gok is nice but so many features I couldn’t figure out how to get it totally set up in my time available. xkbd is plain and simple, no preference window so I had to look up fonts manually and flag them in, meh.

Wow, 20 hours of mussing round it all boils to a page of solutions. Linux is such a frelling timesink when you run into the odd corner. Hope this helps someone. At least I’m not running gentoo anymore, this same system would’ve likely taken 10x as long with extra maintenance over there and I’m more familiar with that distro (sadly). It sucked up thousands of hours in 2003 when I managed to go a full year with the dubious Linux Only title until I got this tablet on Dec 31 (coincidentally exactly a year from when I installed it to a few hours). That and people started playing addictive FPS games in the dorms and managed to drag me into them, which required having Windows running and dual-booting like crazy.

Now that I have this crazy setup running I wonder if I could rig it to something even crazier…use coLinux to optionally use my linux INSIDE windows or booted on the hardware. The excitement never ends! I’d also be interested in setting up a mini NETBSD install on the SD card similiar in function to the HP/Compaq tablet’s QuickInfo (err?) feature. I could hibernate windows then reboot and pick the SD card on the BIOS screen. It wouldn’t mount the hard drive and only light the screen. Wonder how much battery this would save, if any…

Fun fun fun, here’s the relevant log entry:

[Thu Jul 24 21:31:15 2003] [error] [client 218.150.223.238] File does not exist: /var/www/sumthin
[Thu Jul 24 21:32:11 2003] [error] mod_ssl: SSL handshake failed (server caemlyn.thadk.net:443, client 218.150.223.238) (OpenSSL library error follows)
[Thu Jul 24 21:32:11 2003] [error] OpenSSL: error:1406908F:SSL routines:GET_CLIENT_FINISHED:connection id is different
[Thu Jul 24 21:34:26 2003] [error] mod_ssl: SSL handshake failed (server caemlyn.thadk.net:443, client 218.150.223.238) (OpenSSL library error follows)
[Thu Jul 24 21:34:26 2003] [error] OpenSSL: error:1406908F:SSL routines:GET_CLIENT_FINISHED:connection id is different
[Thu Jul 24 21:52:39 2003] [error] [client 216.39.48.171] File does not exist: /var/www/employ/index.html

Looks as somehow I got a slightly updated version of the OpenSSL library somehow through apt-get but only the version included with the stable debian distribution was being updated for security patches. Yuk.

Luckily it appears all clean now, the automated attacker sqrewed up in two ways:

• His email account was shut down so the automated attack-report email was mailer-daemon returned-to-sender.
• As if that wasn’t obvious enough, his script changed the root password and added another user (volvo uid:0) but failed to remove sudoers or remove ~/.ssh keys
• The steps to cover up file changes wern’t made, I just pulled up Knoppix and searched for all files changed since the above time and easily nuked all of the offending files. I even saved a copy for forensics purposes.

I found that many of my /bin/* files were replaced with equivilents infected with the rst.b linux virus, what appeared to be some cracking utilities in /usr/lib/unamed, a covert ssh server in /usr/lib/xsf hosting behind port 1003 with a password of 123 and a psybnc tgz (IRC bouncer) in /var/tmp.

And now I’ve been made appropriately paranoid about security.