Just got my hands on a new updates build server. It's a quad-core xeon 2.13GHz with 8GB RAM. To put things into perspective, this machine will replace 3 different machines eventually... one to do the administrative stuff (AMD Athlon64 2.2GHz w/ 2GB RAM), one to build 32bit updates …

Well, it's official: Mandriva 2008.1 is now out and available. Time to start gearing up for the barrage of bugfix updates. =) On a similar note, 2007.0 is almost EOL.. you've got a few days left to upgrade to something newer before being left without security updates. April 13 …

Last week's TechMail was Securely delete files with shred, a quick introduction to the shred tool in order to securely delete files on a Linux box.

This week's TechMail is Use command-line MySQL for additional flexibility which delves into some quickie commands useful on the MySQL CLI client, such as setting prompts, using mysql output in scripts, etc.

/start rant

Switching my servers from Annvix to Mandriva is absolutely maddening. The biggest problem is dynamic uid/gid mappings. Do you know how frustrating it is to have apache uid 77 on one machine and uid 92 on another? Or svn is gid 75 on one and gid 76 …

Well, a friend sent one of those app invites on Facebook today and largely I ignore them but this one was "which bible character are you most like" and she said it was "scary accurate". So I answered the 5-6 questions, stuff like "do you believe in God", "do you …

This week's TechMail is Configure Snort to log packets to MySQL which looks at using MySQL to store snort logs and BASE to view them. Already there's a comment there about someone wanting to know how to do it on Windows. I'm sure it's possible, but my first instinct was …

Sorry for the little bit of downtime... I finally got around to moving the linsec.ca site from home to the hosting provider that has the rest of my sites (except for annvix.*). A few little hiccups but nothing major.

This past week's TechMail tip is Detect intruders on your network with Snort which is a quick primer on how to use the Snort IDS (Intrusion Detection System). Snort is pretty cool if you have the patience to deal with it and the time to invest in setting it up …

This week's TechMail is Set up a TFTP server for easy network boots and firmware upgrades, which pretty much explains the process of setting up your own TFTP server. I had to figure this one out a while ago in order to upgrade the firmware on a Netgear router I …