May 18, 2026
I’ve talked about my use of Obsidian in the past. It’s my second brain, yet it takes too much manual effort to track everything in it. What important emails were there today? What meetings? Any tasks? In my role as a security practioner, were there new vulnerabilities …
December 27, 2025
Reading my 2024 retrospective was a little depressing, yet I’m happy to report that despite this year having its challenges, they were nothing like last year. What an amazing way to feel gratitude… remembering the things you’ve gone through and seeing that …
December 16, 2025
Recently I’ve done a lot of reorganization with TrueNAS, migrating Plex and Gitea to TrueNAS-based virtual machines and just generally spending a bunch of time poking around with my home lab and improving things. A few weeks ago I started actually using containers in …
December 2, 2025
I’ve written two articles previously, first was moving Gitea from FreeBSD to Linux and the second was a followup on accessing TrueNAS shares from a nested VM. The first was a few weeks ago, the second a few days. I took a long weekend and also took advantage of some Black …
November 29, 2025
In my previous article on moving Gitea from FreeBSD to Linux I ended the post noting that I needed to be able to share the host NAS filesystem with a virtual machine it was hosting. In my case, this is so that Gitea backups could be stored on the NAS external to the virtual …
November 18, 2025
I’ve been using TrueNAS for a number of years, from when it was FreeBSD-based to now that it’s Linux-based. Right now I use them both: TrueNAS Core (FreeBD) and TrueNAS Scale (Linux). The TrueNAS Scale box has been mostly for fiddling with containers, while the …
September 24, 2025
Tomorrow, the first episode of the new Compiler podcast season is coming out, and this season is all about product security topics! The season’s title is “The New Security Landscape” and we dive into quite a few topics pertinent to security practitioners (or …
June 3, 2025
A few weeks ago I was back in Boston for Red Hat Summit 2025. You can watch the keynote for day 1 and the keynote for day 2 on YouTube. This was probably one of the best Summit events that I’ve been to and the energy was absolutely electric. There were a ton of product …
May 29, 2025
Back in April I attended VulnCon, the second year this conference has been held by FIRST and the CVE program. This was a great conference for incident responders working on developing software. There were a ton of great talks, many of which I was unable to attend so I’m …
May 7, 2025
It’s been a bit since I’ve had a chance to write a blog post about something technical. As with most people in the world, I’ve been trying to dive deeper into using AI and making it make me more efficient and useful. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the …
February 15, 2025
Been working on this for a bit and now it’s here! I’m really pleased to announce that I’ve started a new podcast! It’s called Security Unscripted and the goal is to be short 10-12 minute episodes weekly about a variety of security topics. Bite-sized …
December 30, 2024
Normally I do some coding over the holidays as it used to be the one time of the year I could have some dedicated time to work on personal projects, or just fiddle with random non-work things. Normally that would have been updates to the blog platform I had written to run this …
December 26, 2024
After recently reading my 2023 retrospective, I’ve come to the conclusion that as we age, things just get harder. 2024 was a brutal year. It was busy, stressful, and sad. In a lot of ways it was still a good year and by no means am I ungrateful. A lot was accomplished at …
November 14, 2024
I’ve been running Pi-hole in a container on my TrueNAS Scale box for a while and had unfortunately experienced a number of upgrades that required deploying the container from scratch. This was due to incompatibilities in the Helm chart settings, which broke in-place …
November 12, 2024
Last week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the International Common Criteria Conference (ICCC) in Doha, Qatar. This was a first in a number of areas: first time keynoting for longer than five minutes, first time attending a compliance-focused conference, first time …
October 31, 2024
Last week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the OpenSSF SOSS Fusion 2024 event. This is the first full multi-day OpenSSF security event and it was a privilege to be able to attend and speak. I gave the same talk that I did at BSides back in September as I believe it …
September 28, 2024
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the BSides Edmonton 2024 event. This is a local event that’s been running for a few years and oddly I’ve only been able to make it every second year, usually due to conflicts in my schedule. This year I …
August 9, 2024
Red Hat has been publishing VEX documents for some time now. VEX stands for Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange, and the documents are machine-readable JSON files that describe vulnerabilities and status for them. For example, one CVE could impact a number of different products …
June 5, 2024
Today I had the privilege of being involved in Tidelift’s Upstream 2024 virtual conference. The conference as a whole was fantastic, I watched every talk and there is some really great content there about open source security and how it’s being looked at and …
May 26, 2024
Last month I was in Denver for Red Hat Summit 2024. The keynotes are available on YouTube. This was perhaps the most energetic Summit that I’ve been to, even pre-COVID. There was a lot of activity and, of course, the primary topic was AI. We unveiled InstructLab and our …
February 6, 2024
I’ve had the opportunity to write a few blogs and articles on one of my favourite topics: vulnerability management. In particular, the thinking on risk in this space. What’s acceptable risk? What isn’t? You can get into the details on the variety of articles …
February 2, 2024
It’s been a fantastic 15 years at Red Hat as of today. Started as a Senior Software Engineer on a very small team focused on incident response for two products (RHEL and JBoss EAP) to end up leading a large organization focused on a significant number of products and …
December 26, 2023
It’s the end of 2023 and, as is my custom, I always read my retrospective from the prior year. And… umm… 2023 was not better than 2022. Well, in some ways perhaps but in many ways it was not what I was hoping it would be. But, I’m resolved to look on …
December 9, 2023
I’ve been using GTD (Getting Things Done) as a methodology for how I work for a number of years. I revisit the systems I use occasionally, particularly when I don’t feel they’re working out for me or my needs have changed. And lately one of the biggest challenge …
November 27, 2023
I had the opportunity to speak at the recent OpenShift Commons in Chicago that was an event that coincided with Kubecon in Chicago a few weeks back. I spoke about the Evolution of risk management in software which is a more reent talk that I’ve given a few times; the first …
November 26, 2023
This is both a test and awareness. I’ve moved the site from PythonAnywhere to GitHub Pages because I’m cheap and it’s a static site, so it doesn’t need to be on PythonAnywhere anymore. I changed the theme at the same time to make it a bit more readable. …
June 4, 2023
I had the opportunity to attend Red Hat Summit 2023 which you can watch on demand in Boston, MA. Unlike the OSS Summit, this was a 14h door-to-door trip, there and back, due to delays (typically 12h door-to-door). However the annoyance in travel was more than made up for by the …
May 13, 2023
I had the opportunity to attend the OSS Summit 2023 in Vancouver, BC. Probably the easiest conference I’ve ever attended, travel-wise, as it was about three hours door-to-door. Contrast that to Red Hat Summit in Boston, which is about 12 hours door-to-door. The conference …
April 7, 2023
There have been a few neat opportunities to write and discuss a variety of topics over the last few weeks that have been published. The most recent is a blog post I co-authored with Tracy Ragan at DeployHub entitled SBOMs, So Far, So Good, So What? where we take a look at the …
March 5, 2023
I’m an avid note taker and have migrated through a series of different tools to take notes, some proprietary and some open source. I’ve gone through Quiver, Inkdrop, Agenda, and recently I migrated everything to Joplin. But I wanted to be able to sync my notes between …
February 15, 2023
Recently I had the opportunity to be interviewed as a member of the OpenSSF governing board. In fact, I’m not sure I mentioned this here before… I’ve been an observer on the board for all of 2022 and at the beginning of 2023 I joined the governing board as a …
December 28, 2022
Well, here we are at the end of 2022 and frankly, I’m hoping 2023 will be better. Is it just me or do things seem to continue getting worse? The economic uncertainty, war, inept governments, broken medical systems, intolerance across the board, and everyone seeming angry …
December 22, 2022
For a number of years, since getting more and more into management, I’ve had less time to do any real programming. So a highlight of the year, for the first few years at least, was to take time during the Christmas break to do some work, mostly on this blog and for a few …
December 18, 2022
I recently wrote for opensource.com on A new generation of tools for open source vulnerability management (the above image is credited to opensource.com). This is my first article written there and while the article itself tends to be vendor-agnostic, this truly is an article …
December 5, 2022
I had the awesome opportunity to interview professor Daniel Gruss and one of his PhD students, Martin Schwarzl, a while back and the article recently was published in the Red Hat Research Quarterly magazine. For those who don’t know, Daniel was one of the folks behind the …
November 22, 2022
I did an ad-hoc interview with Eddie Knight over at Sonatype during the Linux Foundation Member Summit, for his podcast ZeroBytesGiven. It was a lot of fun and got to talk about some supply chain concerns and even dig into little-known history of how we did security at Mandriva …
November 15, 2022
For much of this year I’ve been advocating for a risk-based vulnerability management approach, rather than the “industry standard” checkbox-based approach. I’ve been talking to customers, both directly and at various events (such as Red Hat Summit in …
February 18, 2022
Recently I had the opportunity to join a few other Red Hatters to talk about software supply chains with SiliconAngle. They did a writeup “Controlling software supply chain security will require new tools, automation and vigilance” that was great and included the …
February 1, 2022
Published on the Red Hat blog, noting here that Curated, tested and supported: How enterprise vendors mitigate open source supply chain risk was posted yesterday. It’s an article that talks about supply chain risk and associated costs – after all, no software is …
January 3, 2022
I think, like many people, I did not expect to be writing this at the end of 2021 and still be in the COVID-19 pandemic. Simply to get it out of the way because COVID certainly wasn’t the most exciting thing this year, the entire family got COVID in the summer. It wasn’t …
November 7, 2021
I was recently interviewed by my friend Jack Wallen at the New Stack about Linux and cloud native security. This was part of a series they did with a few others. Linux and Cloud Native Security: Red Hat’s Perspective
March 6, 2021
It’s taken me some time to even get to the place where I wanted to stop and think about 2020. We’re just over 2 months into 2021 and I’ve been thinking about writing this since December, but between being plain old tired (physically and mentally) and being …
December 22, 2020
Given it’s the holidays and that’s when I tend to have time and energy to poke around the house, I decided to upgrade my FreeNAS box to the newer TrueNAS 12 release. The upgrade itself went without a hitch, simply switching from the FreeNAS 11 train to the TrueNAS 12 …
November 7, 2020
While the Alberta government has some excellent visualizations about COVID-19 statistics in Alberta, I felt there was a little too much missing. The province is quite transparent and you can export the data in CSV. Since these days most of my “technical work” is …
June 9, 2020
I was recently interviewed by my friend Jack Wallen (whom I’ve known for 20 years as he actually coerced me to start writing for TechRepublic ages ago!). It was about a topic near and dear to my heart: CVSS (or Common Vulnerability Scoring System). With the explosion of …
May 9, 2020
Yesterday we had someone at our home to look at replacing the front and back doors. The rep for the company was exceptionally personable and we probably spent more time with him than the simple transaction of selecting and ordering new doors for our home warranted, but my wife …
February 23, 2020
I have a terrible memory, which means that I rely on a lot of tools and methodologies (like GTD, Getting Things Done) to help me track things. This also means that I have a lot of different tools ,and I regularly re-evaluate and change them if something new can meet my …
February 17, 2020
I’ve been running FreeNAS as a file and application server for quite a while and love it. The FreeBSD jails are awesome for running applications like Plex or gitea in isolation. Recently the base FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE went end of life and 11.3-RELEASE was the new stable …
January 2, 2020
I’ve enjoyed reading (and writing) these annual retrospectives. This will be the fourth that I’ve written. There are two recurring themes I read from the past retrospectives: tough and hope. Life is tough – be that in work or personal life. But there is hope. …
December 25, 2019
I’ve had a Unifi Security Gateway for over a year now but never had the time or patience to make it work properly. Turns out my ISP really likes to cache MAC addresses so getting the USG to present the pfSense MAC address solved the problem pretty quick. The rest of my …
November 18, 2019
I recently got another yubikey and due to poor handling of the old key (can’t load it onto the new card) I’ve generated a new key. I’ve revoked my old 2017 key (key id 0xBD51CB9670DF9DE7) and replaced with my new key (key id 0xDAE4D06F77191ACD) My new …
October 3, 2019
I had a great opportunity this summer to be interviewed by TelecomTV. It feels a little weird to post this here since I don’t typically “self-promote” in any way, however this was a neat experience and I think the points are good. If you’ve been looking …
September 1, 2019
With my move to PythonAnywhere a few weeks back, I got my Flask-based applications up and running quite easily (I have two, this blog and another application). Then I had a bit of a heart attack on Friday realizing that Python 2 will be EOL at the end of the year. I guess …
August 12, 2019
Just a quick note that I’ve moved my blog from Liquid Web (which used to be WiredTree) since I didn’t really need a full blown VPS anymore. I was looking at a number of different solutions to host this blog, given it’s python-based and, after a lot of reading …
December 28, 2018
As I sit here taking my first real break of the year, suffering with fever, chills and a ridiculously stuffy nose that has lasted since before the holidays began, I turn once again to a retrospective of 2018 after reading the one I wrote last year. Once again, life provided no …
December 24, 2018
The other day I blogged about using LetsEncrypt with FreeNAS. There were another two things around the house that I wanted to have proper SSL certificates on: my Plex server and the Unifi Controller. The latter looks like far too much effort to go through, but I did get it up …
December 22, 2018
Last week my LetsEncrypt certificate expired on FreeNAS which effectively locked me out of my FreeNAS UI when using Chrome (my default browser). Thinking perhaps that I had forgotten something during my upgrade to FreeNAS 11.2 I set out to figure out what the problem was, only …
November 4, 2018
I’ve been running FreeNAS 11.2 beta for a while (currently on 11.2-RC1). I’ve got a bunch of media on it from when I started running FreeNAS 9 (home videos, music, etc.) and I’ve not taken the step to migrate the old warden-based jails to the newer iocage …
August 15, 2018
Have you heard the parable of the stonecutters? This is one of my favourite parables/stories because it speaks of purpose and passion in a very simple to understand way. If you’ve not heard the parable before, let me relay it briefly. There are three stonecutters doing the same, …
June 1, 2018
Finally I got the pictures of Israel up. Apologies once again for those who have been waiting… I didn’t intend for it to take this long, but they are up now! Favourite places in Israel were the Garden of Gethsemane, Madasa, Shiloh (who wouldn’t want to stand …
May 5, 2018
Apologies for this taking so long… I know there are quite a few people who have been after me to post the pictures. Unfortunately due to time constraints I have skipped to the end of the trip to post pictures from Jordan (since there are less than those of Israel). One of …
March 18, 2018
There are far too many pictures taken of my recent trip, but since I’m being (graciously!) hounded by friends I figured I’d note when some of them were available so I’ve gotten the first few up, just of the Egypt part. The Israel part will take longer though as …
March 3, 2018
This past last half of February I took a trip with my family and members of our church on a tour of the “land of the Bible” (Egypt, Israel, and Jordan). This was a 15 day trip that took us to and through five countries in four continents. It was a whirlwind …
February 11, 2018
I’m a week behind as the 20th anniversary of “Open Source” was a week ago. Back on February 3, 1998 the term “Open Source” was coined as a result of the decision of Netscape Communications Corp to give away the source code to it’s Netscape …
December 30, 2017
Last year I wrote a retrospective and was interesting to read it at the end of this year so I’ve decided to do it again. What can I say about 2017? From a work perspective, this was a crazy year. The vulnerabilities we had to deal with this year were pretty significant, …
September 30, 2017
I’ve read a few articles lately about working from home and some best practices for working remotely, and other topical guidance around the subject of working from home. I always find these articles fascinating because I want to see if there’s something I am missing …
May 2, 2017
Today is the first day of Red Hat Summit 2017, this year in Boston. I’m not there, but am thoroughly enjoying watching the keynotes and other interviews via TheCube on Summit. One of the big things that we’ve been working on for a while that was announced today is …
March 24, 2017
During the day I’m a manager of one of the greatest security teams on the planet (in my biased estimation), but at night (and random times throughout the day), I’m a sysadmin tinkerer. There’s just something about goofing off with operating systems that appeals …
February 12, 2017
Quick note to indicate that I’ve revoked my old GPG key (key id 0x94BE833CE8B86CAB ) and replaced it with my new one (key id 0xBD51CB9670DF9DE7 ). My new key’s fingerprint is: 1810 81E8 178E 4692 03F6 BFD0 BD51 CB96 70DF 9DE7 and it is signed with the old (revoked) …
February 11, 2017
You know your wife is a keeper when she gets you a YubiKey 4 for your birthday! I was really excited about this YubiKey because of its support for storing your GPG private keys and also for an SSH private key, in addition to the U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) support. I’ve …
December 30, 2016
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this past year and all of its challenges and accomplishments, the moments of growth and clarity, the opportunities taken and the opportunities missed. I’m not one to get deeply personal in public, and won’t get …
December 8, 2016
I’ve been using GitLab for a while now and I really like it. I can’t objectively say whether it’s better than GitHub or not (I have a few projects on GitHub but I rarely make any changes to them and even more rarely use the web UI), but one of the things I …
November 22, 2016
So it’s been noted in a few places that 2017 is the year that SHA1 for HTTPS is doomed. Microsoft has deprecated SHA1 in Edge and Internet Explorer browsers and in February 2017 will be blocking them entirely. Google is doing the same thing with Chrome starting January …
October 24, 2016
This year we celebrated 15 years of Red Hat Product Security. I’ve not been with Red Hat that long, but I’ve been doing product security work for longer (slightly over a year longer). I was asked to write a little something to stroll down memory lane with the …
October 1, 2016
Today marks one month that my “work time” is 100% devoted to Red Hat; last month I “retired” from any of the IT/web work for my church that I’ve been doing for the last 12 or so years. It’s been an interesting month being able to spend time on …
September 11, 2016
Today we held a “Ministry Fair” at the church that serves to highlight the many ministries within our church as a way to highlight the sorts of things we do and also to allow others to volunteer and serve in particular areas where we have need. As I stood at my …
August 10, 2016
I was on holidays a few weeks ago and decided to replace an aging Mac Pro that I had been using as a Plex server with a new FreeNAS box, since I could run a jail with Plex. So I used the four 3TB WD Red drives in the Mac Pro with another two new similar drives to construct a new …
August 5, 2016
I’ve not had much time in the past week to work on the blog platform due to getting back to work after two weeks off. So that means future enhancements to the blog will take a bit longer. I managed to implement a fairly basic commenting system that works well, so at least …
July 22, 2016
This is the first post on my new blogging platform that I’ve written from scratch using Flask and Python. I’ve been using Drupal to host annvix.com for quite some time (mostly for consulting client information) and have used WordPress for years on linsec.ca. To be …
February 24, 2016
I’ve recently found and become a fan of the Dash documentation browser for OS X. It has some neat integration with some applications, like Sublime Text and PyCharm (both of which I use), but not for Komodo IDE (which I also use). So this post is to show how easy it is to …
January 16, 2016
Just a quick note to say that I’ve shifted things around and have put most of the mediawiki content on as pages on the blog. This way I don’t have to worry about updating both mediawiki and wordpress. I’m getting older and have less interest in patching things …
August 16, 2015
This is another one of those “just so I don’t forget” posts. I’m working towards migrating from IPA in a KVM-based virtual machine running CentOS 6 to one running CentOS 7 and the way of making serial consoles work in 7 is different than it was in 6 …
August 15, 2015
I’m mostly writing this for my own reference as I spent a bunch of time figuring this out while I was on holidays with some serious oVirt misadventures and didn’t document any of what I did, so since I had to reinstall CentOS 7, I’m stuck doing this all over …
August 15, 2015
It was a long day; my daughter got back from youth camp this afternoon, I got home from being in Raleigh at 2am, and we’re all beat. So we had some fun with the cat. And now I just need to share it so I never forget. =)
August 1, 2015
I’ve meant to do this for ages, so on my first day of my “staycation”, despite vowing to myself that I wouldn’t look at a computer screen this week (hey, it’s not actually the technical start of my week off is it?), I fiddled this morning with BIND …
June 14, 2015
The following is the transcript of what I spoke on at a Tuesday night at Christcity. A few people missed it and wanted to know what I spoke about, so I’m sharing it here. For those reading who may not “get it”, this was delivered to Christians. This isn’t …
January 7, 2015
I started playing around with GitLab last month in order to get to know it a better and, while I like it well enough, the one thing that drove me nuts was the email that it sent out alerting of changes. My old git setup used the wonderful git-notifier script to send out emails …
January 6, 2015
Python 2.7.9 was released nearly a month ago and with it came some SSL-related changes (it backported the Python 3.4 ssl module and does HTTPS certificate validation using the system’s certificate store). The latter can cause some problems with home-grown CA’s, …
January 6, 2015
Python 2.7.9 was released nearly a month ago and with it came some SSL-related changes (it backported the Python 3.4 ssl module and does HTTPS certificate validation using the system’s certificate store). The latter can cause some problems with home-grown CA’s, …
December 23, 2014
I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, from my family to yours. My wife found the most awesome card for my teammates at work and it is just too good not to share with everyone – for those who are programmers or into IT, this is perhaps one of …
November 19, 2014
We’ve started a Bible study at the church so I’m going to just share some of the thoughts and scriptures that we look at each week. This is our first week and the topic was What does it mean to be a Christian? The first thing we looked at was the Apostles Creed and …
November 1, 2014
Full disclosure: I have not and will not participate in Halloween, and I personally do not believe that Christians should. And while this posting talks about Halloween, it’s not about Halloween itself. It’s about misinterpreting scripture to suit your own desires. The …
October 26, 2014
Whenever I hear (non-Christians) talk about Christianity it’s always about “religion” and how they’re “not into religion.” When they make statements like this, I know that they have not heard the real gospel of Jesus Christ, nor do they …
September 22, 2014
Recently I wrote about Christian Statements of Faith, which talks about the foundational pillars of Christianity – those things that make Christianity what it is. In this posting, I want to explain some theological terms that every Christian should know (sadly if you ask …
September 11, 2014
In the course of my studies I’ve come to realize that a lot of people have no idea what Christianity really means – even people who profess to be Christian really don’t understand what it means, and this is the real disappointment as the North American church …
September 9, 2014
I’ve had to rearrange the layout of the blog to accommodate some new postings that will be showing up here in the future. As an aside, my apologies to those who visit and see that I have been sadly lacking in any kind of content on the site. I will be making a distinct …
April 12, 2014
I’ve refrained from posting or saying anything about Heartbleed all week because I didn’t want to add to any sensationalism and hype, and I’ve also been too busy actually dealing with it (as opposed to simply talking about it or running around with hands waving …
February 1, 2014
So this year I’m going to be 38, which means that I’ve been collecting tattoos for 20 years. The biggest “rush” of ink has been in the last 5-6 years as I’ve actually been able to afford it, whereas before it was getting a piece done whenever I could …
January 31, 2014
I’ve been collecting tattoos for 20 years. In that time, Angela has never gotten a tattoo. Her sisters and her brother all have, but she was the last of the great holdouts. I’m pleased to announce that as of January 29th, that is no longer the case! Angela has lost …
January 23, 2014
The last 6-8 months have been pretty hectic for me, both at work and with other “real life” stuff and I’ve noticed, as a result, that my email handling has really suffered. I can’t even say it’s begun to suffer because it’s entirely snowballed …
January 6, 2014
Being sick this Christmas season with a cold and a middle ear infection caused me to spend more time than I normally would have on Twitter and Facebook because it was a complete time-killer and I didn’t have energy for anything productive. In fact, my one goal for this week …
December 28, 2013
So, playing around with MailMate I’ve found you can create keyboard shortcuts. It comes with a standard keyboard shortcut list, one for Postbox (a Thunderbird-based email client), and Gmail. My main need here to is to map “delete” to “Archive …
December 28, 2013
To begin with, I liked Apple Mail in Mountain Lion (and Lion also). I’ve been using Apple Mail for a while now for my personal email on my mac, and mutt for my work email on my Fedora box. It works well, and I’ve gotten used to using a GUI for my personal email and …
December 24, 2013
Merry Christmas to all my friends, family, co-workers, partners-in-crime, and just generally everyone else out there. I share a wonderful eCard with you all. May it bring you much joy and laughter. Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab! God bless the faithful!
December 24, 2013
Merry Christmas to all my friends, family, co-workers, partners-in-crime, and just generally everyone else out there. I share a wonderful eCard with you all. May it bring you much joy and laughter. God bless the faithful! Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!
December 24, 2013
Probably most people who use git know about patch management and whatnot, so I’m writing this largely for myself as I keep forgetting (mostly because I don’t have to do it very often). Some code that I’m working on has a development branch which I’m …
December 7, 2013
Actually, it’s not much of an adventure so much as a reminder. I’m used to doing software RAID on Linux with mdadm and am fully comfortable with the commandline tools – in fact, I prefer them to any GUI tools that may or may not be out there (for example, if I …
November 27, 2013
I’ve had no time to do any coding lately, which makes me sad, but when I did have time and was doing lots of commits in short periods of time, I definitely felt like doing this. Many many times.
October 31, 2013
Today I got more work done on my sleeve, but I’d neglected to post (and even take!) pictures of the next-to-last session. So if you look at Flickr you’ll see the last bits I got done (the flaming cross and re-darkening the tribal Jesus), but not the stuff before that …
October 10, 2013
The blog needed an updated look. I think I kinda like this new look. Much cleaner and sharper. I think I’m going to be doing more “life” blogging from this point forward. The tech stuff is important, but so is “real life”. So there should be more …
October 10, 2013
I saw this on Facebook today and, thankfully, it’s also on their blog. I’ve always liked the idea of “Inbox Zero” and have even gotten my inbox to zero a few times since I started (mostly)-seriously using GTD. Sadly, I’m not there anymore due to how …
August 24, 2013
I’ve been programming in Python for a few years now (I can pretty much mark the beginning because of starting at Red Hat). Since picking it up, I’ve fallen in love with the language and have a few books on the subject. One of the most indispensable books I have is …
August 20, 2013
This just absolutely blew my mind so I figured I’d post a quick note about it. I have to convert a CVS repository to SVN and this is a big repository, over 33k commits to it spanning a decade. In my trial runs, using cvs2svn resulted in it taking just shy of 11.5hrs to …
June 26, 2013
There’s something about NAS units that makes me happy. Tiny little boxes full of storage and ripe for mucking with since for the most part they run Linux make me all warm and fuzzy and just generally put me in a good mood. Probably because I’m a bit of a digital …
June 8, 2013
I’ve been working with bugzilla for years.. at Mandriva I was the primary bugzilla care-taker for a few years, and now with Red Hat I do a lot of work on some internal tools that interface with bugzilla that enhances and directs the workflow of day-to-day work (being that …
April 27, 2013
I know I’ve written about this in the past (here and here), but I needed to do another conversion the other day that was similar, yet different. Previous posts talked about pulling parts of a subversion repository into a git repo – effectively taking one svn repo …
March 13, 2013
This really makes me sad: http://googlereader.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html. Does anyone know of a similar service? I’ve gotten so used to using Google Reader (not the web interface, but the actual syncing and being able to connect to the account …
February 8, 2013
Spent a few hours last night laying some of the groundwork for getting more of the second sleeve done. This is was re-lining and darkening of my existing cross, and I think the flames look pretty darn sweet. This is re-lining and darkening of my tribal Jesus, and fixing the J …
February 3, 2013
Sorry, couldn’t resist. =) So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried …
February 2, 2013
In light of my recent (mis-)adventures with Fedora 18 installation in VMware Fusion and the need to figure out some systemd stuff, I’ve started writing a hints/tip sheet type entry on my wiki: Systemd. Far from complete yet, but I’m going to use it to document some …
February 2, 2013
I was thoroughly excited about Fedora 18 until I actually went to install it. I use Fedora 17 on a laptop and a desktop, but I also have copies in virtual machines that I use for testing – these virtual machines run in VMware Fusion on my Mac Pro. So never having used …
January 27, 2013
I’ve been running an instance of my Nagios XI monitor in a VMware Fusion virtual machine on my (aging) Mac Pro. The other day I found a blog post on How I converted a VMware VM to KVM and since my new LAN server is a beefy 8-core AMD FX-8120 with 32GB RAM (as opposed to the …
December 12, 2012
So I’ve been having to deal with some IPA-related bugs in the past little bit, which of course got me thinking that I had no idea what IPA did or how to use it (thankfully I wasn’t responsible for fixing the bugs!). But as I had to deal with this issues to some …
September 21, 2012
I’m a big fan of the git-notifier script, which acts as a hook in git to send you nice emails about things that have changed in your git repos. I’m also a bugzilla user, so I wanted to be able to put git commit notifications, automatically, in bugzilla if “bug …
August 23, 2012
Software Update Service is part of OS X Lion server (and Mountain Lion server) that allows you to download OS updates and serve them to multiple clients on a local network (similar to Red Hat’s Satellite server, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux). I’ve had to play with …
June 7, 2012
I don’t normally post things like this… how could you? With so much need in the world, you could post about kids every day, multiple times a day, and still not cover them all. But this one is special. Teagan is a family friend, and so I have to mention it in the …
May 5, 2012
Dear lazyweb, I’m having severe issues with Apache’s mod_rewrite on my VPS. I’m pretty sure what I want to do is doable, but I can’t figure out the rewrite rules to allow it. In my httpd.conf I have something similar to this: <IfModule mod_dav.c> …
March 10, 2012
So this past Wednesday I started on finishing up the second sleeve (my right arm). Unfortunately, with my wife’s new business, she’s been too busy to take pictures and I’m not one of these “take pictures of yourself in the mirror” guys. So I’m …
March 10, 2012
I recently purchased the HighPoint RocketU 1144AM PCI-E 2.0 x4 Quad-Port USB 3.0 Raid card for my Mac Pro. Since most external drives you buy these days are USB3, and the Mac Pro only has (and perhaps only every will have, if the rumour mill is true) USB2 ports, the only option I …
February 26, 2012
I have an SSD in my Fedora workstation for my rq tool, specifically for the MySQL database. The speed increase there, because it was dealing with huge amounts of data, was very welcome – not so much for importing (speed there didn’t much increase since all the files …
January 23, 2012
I’v been asked this question a few times over the last year or so, so I thought I would explain some of why you might see some issues on a Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux system (or any other Linux distribution that uses prelinked binaries) when trying to track down …
January 5, 2012
As I’ve been git-ifying some stuff around here, I’ve run into a few tips that might be useful for other git beginners. The first is to setup some global options, some of which are nice for folks coming from Subversion. Having a global ignore file is useful. Mine has …
January 4, 2012
So I had about a week and a half off this year around Christmas. My initial plans were to do the family things one normally does around Christmas time, and there was plenty of that… visits with the parents and in-laws, dinners and whatnot. Too much food as usual, but …
December 22, 2011
So today I spent a lot of time manually merging the annvix.org mediawiki data into my linsec.ca wiki (in a new Annvix namespace). There are some various automated tools and mediawiki import/export stuff, but I didn’t have a lot in terms of pages so taking a few hours to do …
December 7, 2011
The blog is going all new, which means it’ll probably change over the next few days as I find time to tweak it and make it look the way I want it to. I like the theme I’ve got at the moment, but it needs some more personalization, so keep an eye out for new stuff and …
October 29, 2011
Ok, so the last of my git-related topics today (I need to get back to washing windows, sadly). I’ve pulled out AIDE+gpg and rsec from the Annvix tools subversion repository and they are now on github: The next step, maybe for around Christmas, is to turn these into Fedora …
October 29, 2011
Well, that was pretty easy to figure out. As per my last post, I was going to try to break out the AIDE+gpg part of the Annvix tools subversion repo to be it’s own git repo. It was scary simple. First, the location of AIDE+gpg in the subversion repo was …
October 29, 2011
I’m a little old-school in that I like subversion. I’ve used subversion for years, and have had it as a big part of my workflow for a really really long time. Unfortunately, there’s this git thing popping up all over the place and I’m starting to feel …
October 22, 2011
I’ve just released AIDE+gpg 1.0.4, which adds support for signing and verifying signatures on the AIDE binary itself (/usr/sbin/aide), and on the AIDE configuration file (/etc/aide.conf). Thanks to George Notaras for giving me the suggestion. Apparently someone other than …
October 13, 2011
So I was thoroughly annoyed to find a guest account with a sandboxed Safari after I had setup iCloud on OS X 10.7.2. Turns out, this only appears when you have “Find My Mac” enabled, and it does make sense (how can your mac be found if no one is using it?). If you …
July 26, 2011
So I had upgraded my wife’s MacBook to Lion and discovered that, once again, Apple screwed around with Kerberos. This seems to be a recurring theme (and not a good one). After quite a bit of fighting and figuring, a few things have been sorted out. Once I’ve got it …
July 9, 2011
So I upgraded my Fedora 14 workstation to Fedora 15 last night using the yum update method (I’ve used preupgrade a few times and it’s worked on some and botched on others (mostly due to not enough space on /boot)). Since with other distros I’ve either used apt …
July 8, 2011
One of my last TechMails to ever be published by TechRepublic is Nagios XI wizards make setup a snap for network monitoring. This tip looks at using Nagios XI, a really slick commercially-backed install of Nagios with a really incredible GUI frontend for configuring Nagios. …
June 25, 2011
Last week’s TechMail was Two-factor SSH authentication via Google secures Linux logins which talks about using Google two-factor authentication with SSH (and PAM in general). I really like it and it works quite well although the comments in the TechMail indicate another …
June 24, 2011
The TechMail from a few weeks ago was Chromium on Fedora Linux is closing in on Firefox which takes a look at using Spot’s Chromium for Fedora repo (thanks Spot!) to get Chromium running on Fedora. I have to admit that in the last month or so, I have thoroughly enjoyed …
May 25, 2011
Last week was my third and final part of my series that introduced SELinux on Techrepublic: Practical SELinux: Port contexts and handling access alerts. This one finishes off what we were looking at in part two, and introduces port contexts (ensuring that a program can only …
May 25, 2011
This week’s mac tip is Two SSH clients to consider for the iPad. In this tip I look at two really great SSH clients for the iPad (and iPhone as well, although I was mostly just looking at the iPad versions which do vary from their iPhone counterpart): iSSH and Prompt. …
May 25, 2011
Last week’s mac tip was Google Apps’ two-factor authentication provides security boost for Mac and iPhone users which looks at how to setup two-factor authentication on the mac (or anywhere else really, this isn’t quite specific to the mac). Two-factor …
May 17, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Work some project management magic with Merlin where we look at using ProjectWizards’ Merlin project management software. If you need project management on steroids, Merlin is a good bet. Even more importantly, if you need an easy way to …
May 10, 2011
This week’s techmail is Practical SELinux for the beginner: Contexts and labels which is part two of my series on SELinux. This one talks about how to get started with SELinux (how to turn it on or off), how to view contexts, and how to create new contexts, how to set them, …
April 28, 2011
This week’s mac techmail is Finding uses for the iPad 2: A skeptic gives it another shot in which I write about my experience with the iPad2. Short version: I like it. It’s no replacement for any existing device I have, but it’s definitely useful. Read the tip …
April 26, 2011
This week’s techmail is Introduction to SELinux: Don’t let complexity scare you off. This is the first of a three-part series that introduces SELinux and digs into some of the basics on how to change policies, add policies, troubleshoot SELinux, and basically give you …
April 23, 2011
This week’s mac techmail was Enhance security on your Mac with Hands Off! which is a neat security tool for OS X. I’ve been using Little Snitch for years, and Hands Off! is quite similar except that it provides more features and functionality, including the ability to …
April 23, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Hack the D-Link DNS-323 to get an array of Linux server options. I bought one of these things quite a while ago to use more as a backup box than anything else (in case of fire, small NAS is easier to carry than big computer cases, etc.). But I had …
April 23, 2011
Last week’s Mac techmail was Use Fake to automate web testing on the Mac which takes a look at a neat app for the Mac called Fake. This app is similar to Automator, except instead of automating desktop-related tasks, it automates web-related tasks. With it you can automate …
April 12, 2011
This week’s techmail was Redundancy and flexibility with RAID1+LVM which talks about how to combine RAID1 with LVM for a few rich, flexible storage management solution. The tip describes how to get started with setting up RAID and LVM (although here’s a hint: the …
April 12, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Choosing the right Git GUI client for Mac OS X in which I looked at the Tower application, a Git GUI client for OS X. I’ve looked at a few Git clients for OS X and Tower was my application of choice amongst the contenders; the tip explains …
April 12, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Printing to AirPort shared printers from Linux, which looks at how to configure a Linux system to print directly to an AirPort shared printer. This is actually quite easy to do, as the tip explains, but it’s not overly straightforward (hence …
April 3, 2011
I’m a little behind on putting up my recent Mac articles for TechRepublic here, so I’m going to put them all in one post. The first is Introduction to OS X Access Control Lists (ACLs) which introduces you to OS X’s implementation of filesystem access control lists. OS X, …
April 3, 2011
I’m a little behind on putting up my recent articles for TechRepublic here, so I’m going to put them all in one post. The first one is Use Getting Things GNOME to get things done which looks at Getting Things GNOME (GTG), a GTD application for GNOME. It’s pretty …
March 14, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Use APF to manage your firewall which takes a look at using the APF (Advanced Policy Firewall) set of scripts to configure an iptables-based firewall on Linux. I was always a big Shorewall user; used it on my servers whether they ran Mandriva or …
March 14, 2011
The mac techmail from a few weeks ago was How to use CrashPlan for online backups, which looks at getting the CrashPlan client setup on OS X. CrashPlan is pretty neat: you can pay to store your backups on CrashPlan’s servers in the cloud, or you can use the client for free …
March 14, 2011
Well, I’ve been working for Red Hat for two years, one month, and 14 days now. It’s actually amazing how time flies. I guess when you’re doing something you love, with amazing people you respect and enjoy working with, time has no real bearing on anything. When …
March 10, 2011
The Linux tip from a few weeks ago was Nagios monitoring with NRPE allows better tracking of remote systems which talks about using the NRPE daemon on client systems to allow Nagios to get more information from the remote host that would normally be only available to a local …
March 10, 2011
The Mac tip from a few weeks ago was Easily distracted? Mac tools that keep you focused. This was an interesting tip to write because when you sit in front of the computer all day, it’s sometimes hard to quantify how much productive work you get done. Like now, updating my …
February 23, 2011
Well, I’ve begun the migration and probably picked the hardest machine to start with. One of my goals here was to do a clean migration from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 box to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 box for a specific set of services, and to intentionally have SELinux …
February 23, 2011
As part of my work migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I found that AIDE+gpg does not work with GnuPG2 (previously, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Annvix only used GnuPG version 1). The AIDE+gpg scripts now work with GnuPG version 2, and a new version is available from the …
February 17, 2011
This week’s mac techmail is How to reassign the primary display on multi-display Macs which is pretty simplistic, but really sweet all at the same time. I’m not sure how to do this in Windows (never done it before) and on Linux it’s pretty straightforward too. …
February 12, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Obtaining network information with netstat where we take a look at some of the nifty little things you can do with the netstat program including listing which ports are being actively listened to and by which programs and what active connections …
February 12, 2011
This week’s techmail was Use Fail2ban to blacklist IP addresses and alert you to attacks which takes a look at the fail2ban tool. Fail2ban is a program that will watch log files and if it notices failed login attempts on any configured services (ssh, smtp, etc.) it will ban …
January 30, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Still frustrated with Apple Mail searching which gives some of the reasons, and some possible workarounds, to the awful search capabilities in Apple Mail. For a mail client today, it sure doesn’t offer very much power for email searching, …
January 30, 2011
Last week’s techmail was Tips and tricks to help you do more with OpenSSH which is a followup to the previous tip that talked about OpenSSH key management. This one gives you a few one-liner tips to stimulate the imagination (yet are useful on their own) with the kinds of …
January 30, 2011
A member from my local LUG posted this, and it’s a gem. Highly amusing, especially for anyone that considers themself a hacker and wants to see what the defining characteristics of a hacker was 10 years ago. Whether this was something serious or something tongue in cheek, …
January 29, 2011
So the RPM Query (rq) tool that I inherited as ‘srpm’ from Stew Benedict back in the day at Mandriva is now on fedorahosted,org. Unfortunately, it’s missing history because I had a dickens of a time trying to extract it from my existing svn repo (I got it so …
January 20, 2011
This week’s mac techmail is Mac App Store pros and cons: What it means for developers and users. This is a bit of an opinion piece (I try to avoid writing opinions, but I couldn’t help it here) that looks at the current state of the Mac App Store, what’s good …
January 20, 2011
This week’s techmail is What you need to know about OpenSSH key management which looks at a few tips and tricks in using OpenSSH public/private keys. It talks about generating keys, using ssh-copy-id to copy keys to servers, and using hashed representations of host keys to …
January 18, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was First look at the Mac App Store which took a look at the new Mac App Store. It’s pretty much a technical primer on what it does, how updates work, how it works (or doesn’t) with already installed apps, etc.
January 10, 2011
Last week’s mac techmail was Tips for safer web browsing when using Adobe Flash on your Mac which talks about using ClickToFlash on the mac to prevent flash from automatically loading. Since flash is pretty awful and there have been a lot of security holes in it, I prefer …
December 27, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Life with the MacBook Air: The netbook I’ve been waiting for and it’s my review on the new 11" MacBook Air. I love this machine!
December 24, 2010
Well, it’s early on Christmas Eve day here, but I realize that for some of my friends and co-workers, it’s Christmas Day already (well, really early Christmas Day anyways) so figured that if they are at all like me and checking on things instead of relaxing, I would …
December 20, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Create a local Fedora mirror system and get blazing-fast updates which shows you how to use the Fedora mirror manager and associated tools to setup a local private (or public, if you wanted) mirror of Fedora. It’s really quite slick and since …
December 20, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Digital pack rats will love organizing with EagleFiler which talks about EagleFiler, one of my favourite file organization apps on the mac. It has a welcome Finder-like interface, but makes managing files so much easier than simply trying to …
December 13, 2010
Last week’s TechMail was Review of the new Komodo IDE 6: Great new features, one gripe which is a review of the latest version of ActiveState’s Komodo IDE. I’ve been using Komodo on and off for years, but have really been using it the last few years now that …
December 13, 2010
Last week’s Mac TechMail was Get flawless system backups with SuperDuper for the Mac which looks at ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper! tool. This is the one backup tool on the Mac that I have 100% confidence, and the tip explains why and what you can do with it. SuperDuper!, …
December 4, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Enterprise Subversion gets a boost with Cornerstone 2 which looks at my favourite GUI subversion client on the Mac: Cornerstone. The new version has gotten a seriously sweet overhaul with a lot of really nice new features and tweaks. Cornerstone …
November 23, 2010
This week’s techmail is The most important updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Disclaimer: I didn’t give it that title. =) It mostly looks at the security features of RHEL6 and what makes it compelling (to me, who is more concerned about security than pretty much …
November 22, 2010
Last week’s mac TechMail was Web page editing and design with Flux for the Mac which looks at the Flux WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor. I’m really an old-school web designer (using tools like textmate or vim, and hand-coding everything) and you can tell… my web …
November 22, 2010
Last week’s TechMail was Enhance screen with Byobu’s cool functionality which looks at using Byobu to spruce up GNU screen. Byobu adds some nice color and character to screen, and is definitely worth looking into if you use screen a lot.
November 11, 2010
This week’s techmail was Kerberos authentication with NFSv4 which looks at how to get more security out of NFS. By using Kerberos. I’m not sure if this is the definition of insane for a home network or not, but since I’ve got Kerberos running here already, I …
November 9, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Window switching with Witch will boost your productivity which looks at using the program Witch as an alternative to Apple’s baked-in app switcher. Instead of switching windows by applications, Witch brings up a list of all windows, …
November 9, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Stream audio and video from your Mac with Playback which looks at Yazsoft’s Playback software. Out of all the streaming server options for the mac that I’ve found, Playback is the easiest to get up and running and the one that works …
October 26, 2010
This week’s techmail is Set up easy file sharing with NFS on Linux which is a quick primer on getting NFS setup quickly on Linux.
October 26, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was How to set up an OS X OpenVPN client which looks at using the fantastic Shimo VPN client program to setup a client endpoint to an OpenVPN-based VPN (using certificates). It ties in with the other tips in this “series” regarding …
October 13, 2010
This week’s techmail is How to set up an OpenVPN server which is a quick-n-dirty primer on how to get OpenVPN setup. Insider’s tip: it’s part 1 of a 3 part series about fairly basic OpenVPN configuration and usage (OpenVPN has got a lot of neatness and …
October 13, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Get an easy VPN on-the-cheap with ShareTool for Mac which looks at ShareTool, a program that allows you to remotely control your computer when away from home, or work, whatever the case may be. I like that ShareTool uses OpenSSH for a transport …
October 12, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Working with Safari Extensions: A few to try which is a bit of a primer on how to work with Safari’s Extensions, and also gives some of my favourites to try. There aren’t a lot of Extensions as of yet, but there are a few goodies to …
October 12, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Enable spell-checking in Vim and customize default behavior which talks about how to get spell checking enabled in vim. I actually wasn’t even aware that vim could do spell checking natively until a little while ago, and it sure makes for my …
October 11, 2010
The techmail of two weeks ago was The easiest way to set up Samba for file-sharing which discusses a really quick way of getting Samba setup for filesharing. It doesn’t go into all the details of setting up multiple users or different authentication types, but if you want …
October 11, 2010
The mac techmail two weeks ago was Synchronize OmniFocus tasks via Spootnik on the Web which looks at the Spootnik web service. You can do more than just sync OmniFocus using Spootnik (i.e. use it as a remote WebDAV service to sync OmniFocus on two macs); if you use Basecamp than …
September 29, 2010
I realized today, after having a conversation with someone at work about gpg keys and rpm support, that I haven’t updated my GPG key in about 6 years. Then I realized I harped on CERT not too long ago about not doing things right. =) Granted, my key hasn’t been …
September 21, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Turn your Mac into a security surveillance centre which discusses the SecuritySpy software and using it to watch the feeds of remote video cameras. Very cool stuff, and shockingly inexpensive (the cameras I got now monitor the exterior of the …
September 21, 2010
This week’s Linux techmail is How to set up WebDAV hosting on Apache which looks at how to setup your Apache server for use as a WebDAV server. This was a tricky one for me as I’d tried it before and couldn’t get one of my applications that allowed syncing via …
September 14, 2010
This seems to be an ongoing saga so now I’m going to vent about it. It is ridiculous that an organization supposedly as secure as CERT can have such poor distribution mechanisms for alerting users of their new GPG keys. It is really important that, when you update GPG keys …
September 13, 2010
And this is why I have randomly generated passwords on all sites and services… this is funny, but sadly way too true.
September 9, 2010
As with the Linux tips, I’ve been so busy that I’ve neglected the mac tips, so here they are: Power up your Apple Mail with MailTags and Mail Act-On discusses two very useful plugins for Apple Mail. With these plugins you can put Mail on steroids with some great …
September 7, 2010
I’ve been so busy in the last little while I’ve not had a chance to post the recent techmails that have gone up, so here goes: Cloud-based RSS reading with Google Reader and Liferea looks at using Liferea as a client for Google Reader. The nice thing about using …
August 3, 2010
A little bit frustrated with Fedora’s new git repositories this morning (for packages). Ding-Yi Chen has a really nice write-up on how to get started with it. Got me a few of the essentials that I had missed earlier. I like the new certificate that can be used with Koji. …
July 27, 2010
This week’s techmail is Clear some desk space with cross-platform keyboard and mouse sharing app. The tip is about Synergy+ which is awesome cool. With it, I can share the same keyboard and mouse across as many computers as I want (it’s cross-platform, so I use it …
July 26, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Head off problems by monitoring servers with munin which takes a look at the Munin program. Munin is pretty slick in that you can use it to monitor resource usage on the local machine and networked clients as well. Goes nicely with Nagios when you …
July 26, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Mind mapping with MindNode for the Mac. MindNode is a neat program that lets you do mind mapping, or drawing pictures to represent thoughts or plans or ideas. Mind mapping is quite popular, and with good reason as it gives you a visual …
July 17, 2010
Seems like I fill quite a few of these roles… so how come I don’t have all the spare time these guys do? Maybe I need to have a single role, so that instead of switching roles while one is “busy” I can have one role with blockers. Hmmmm…. Only one …
July 13, 2010
This week’s techmail is GUI scripting in bash which takes a look at a few options for GUIfying your bash scripts: Zenity (for GNOME) and kdialog for KDE. My favourite is Zenity since I use GNOME, and it doesn’t require all this whacky DBUS stuff (although I suppose …
July 12, 2010
Last week’s mac tip was Handy screen locking tips for Mac. Unlike Windows or Linux, which have keyboard shortcuts to quickly lock the screen when you get up to grab a coffee or go to the bathroom, the Mac doesn’t. It has the same functionality, but you need to mouse …
July 12, 2010
Last week’s techmail was My favorite Firefox extensions for Linux which talks about a few of my favourite extensions for Firefox. Read the comments on the tip… I’ve already found another couple that I didn’t know about before that I’m going to have …
July 4, 2010
Falling a little bit behind here… the mac techmail from two weeks ago was Safari 5 boasts speed gains but real improvement is extensions which discusses the new Safari 5. My initial reaction to Safari 5 was “meh…”. Using it now for a few weeks, …
July 4, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Take advantage of full-featured Komodo IDE to boost productivity which looks at some of the cool features of Komodo that can help you get more out of the IDE. I’ve been using Komodo for years, and even though it is pay-to-play, it’s …
June 30, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Increase download speed with Aria2 utility which looks at an incredibly useful and cool file download client. Aria2 is unique because it can grab the same file from multiple sources: http, ftp, bittorrent. It can do it at the same time and then …
June 19, 2010
This is perhaps one of the coolest things I have ever seen: http://www.woehr.de/en/projekte/budapest_m730/index.htm. I wish I could embed it but I can’t (sadly, you need flash to watch it). It’s the parking system in Budapest. I can see this solving all kinds of …
June 16, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Send instant messages between Macs on a LAN which discusses using Growl and growlnotify, along with a little help from Automator, to send instant messages between macs on a LAN, without requiring any instant messaging clients. Useful for sending …
June 16, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Simplify Terminal usage on Mac OS X with Visor. Visor is a really neat plugin for the OS X Terminal that allows you to hide and re-open the Terminal with a keystroke. For someone like me who has multiple tabs open, uses mutt and irssi, ssh …
June 16, 2010
Last week’s techmail was DNS querying with dig which is a little bit of a primer on an indispensable tool called dig. dig is a DNS querying tool that can look up all kinds of handy DNS-related information, and is useful for helping to diagnose networking issues.
June 16, 2010
This week’s techmail is Learn more about how you can use SQLite which is a bit of a primer on how you can use SQLite to create your own little SQL databases, or how you can use it to manipulate the data stored in SQLite databases found in other programs, like Firefox. I …
June 5, 2010
This past week’s mac techmail was Transmit FTP client for Mac OS X gets updated to version 4 which looks at the new version of Panic’s Transmit FTP/SFTP/WebDAV/S3 client. Transmit is pretty good; I’ve been using it for years and the new version is a nice …
June 2, 2010
This week’s TechMail is How to pre-upgrade Fedora 13 which shows how to use PreUpgrade (great tool). I used it to upgrade an F12 box and it worked flawlessly, despite the small /boot size. More information on how to use it is also on the Fedora wiki.
May 27, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Fun tricks with Growl and GeekTool which looks at a (probably rather unique) scenario of running an IRC client in a virtual machine (running Linux) and having alerts show up on the OS X desktop. The tip, while relatively specific to one function, …
May 27, 2010
This week’s techmail is Monitoring MySQL with mytop which looks at the mytop perl tool that can help monitor and diagnose problems with MySQL (mytop is essentially a top for MySQL).
May 25, 2010
My main Fedora workstation is an HP desktop. It’s got a Core i7 quad CPU (Q9300), 8GB RAM, and dual boots Windows 7 and Fedora 13. Dear lazyweb, how can I make this system as quite on Fedora as it is on Windows? It’s absolutely silent when Win7 is running, but when …
May 23, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Get increased password protection on the iPhone which looks at using the iPhone configuration utility to create security profiles. While this isn’t a pure and perfect security solution, it’s another layer in the onion that will keep …
May 23, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Set up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux server which takes you through the necessary steps of setting up Dropbox on a GUI-less Linux box. I use Dropbox here for keeping certain files in sync between systems, but I also am connected to a secondary Dropbox …
May 15, 2010
This week’s mac techmail was Get cross-platform remote access via LogMeIn and your Web browser which is a really interesting remote login system. With it I was able to control my OS X workstation from a Fedora box, from within Firefox. The downside is that I couldn’t …
May 15, 2010
This week’s techmail was Firewall configuration with system-config-firewall which discusses the niceties of using Fedora’s system-config-firewall to configure iptables. I’m not much of a GUI guy, but the interface for the firewall configuration is really slick. …
May 7, 2010
This week’s techmail was Managing MySQL with MySQL Workbench. I’ve always been a CLI guy when it comes to MySQL (as with most things: mutt, irssi, etc.), and when I needed something GUIrific I went with phpMyAdmin. However, I’ve looked at MySQL Workbench and I …
May 7, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Advanced tips for using LaunchBar shortcuts with Mac. I love LaunchBar and have talked about it before. I absolutely could not imagine life without it, and I’m still learning new things to do with it, so this tip mentions some of that …
April 29, 2010
This week’s techmail is Work on remote Subversion repositories locally with Git which talks about using Git locally to interface with a remote (or local, even) subversion repository. Involved in a project that uses Subversion as their version control system, but prefer to …
April 29, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Upload your old email to Google Apps. If you have a Google Apps account, rather than a GMail account, you can use the Google Email Uploader tool to upload old/existing emails from a local client to Google Apps. This is great if you want to have …
April 29, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Protect your privacy with Little Snitch for Mac which talks about Little Snitch, one of my absolute favourite and essential mac software tools. Little Snitch is an outbound firewall, so it will alert you if any applications try to make outbound …
April 21, 2010
This week’s techmail is System monitoring with Zenoss takes complexity out of configuration (not quite sure why my original title got changed, as this one doesn’t make much sense to me, but ok…). Anyways, I’ve been a long-time fan of Nagios, still use it, …
April 21, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Use Microsoft Remote Desktop from a Mac with CoRD. It talks about using the CoRD application to remotely control Windows systems (or Linux systems using xrdp). I’ve been told that Microsoft provides a Remote Desktop Client for the mac, but …
April 21, 2010
Last week’s techmail was Using rsnapshot to back up and retain snapshots. Rsnapshot is pretty slick; the tip goes into the how and the why, but now that I’ve found this thing I think it’s going to replace my home-brew rsync backup solution. I use subversion to …
April 7, 2010
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I maintain a repository of packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (arguably these could/should be in EPEL but I’ve not had time to get into the Fedora side of things as of yet… someone will beat me with a wet …
April 7, 2010
This week’s techmail is Setting the record straight on sudo which I wrote as a rebuttal to another, rather ignorant, rant against the use of sudo. I get it, the author uses Ubuntu and probably doesn’t give much thought to the fact that Ubuntu really shouldn’t …
April 7, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Mounting NFS volumes in OS X which takes a bit of a tour on how to mount NFS volumes on a mac (which is not nearly as user-friendly as it should be).
April 1, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was How Thunderbird 3 works on Mac OS X: Better than Apple Mail? which took a look at some of the improvements in the latest Mozilla Thunderbird 3 and how it compares to Apple Mail in Snow Leopard. Is one better than the other? I look at a few areas …
April 1, 2010
This week’s techmail is Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives. Smartctl is awesome, and having it monitor your drives on a constant basis will likely give you the early warning “oh crap, something is wrong, backup NOW!” that people …
March 23, 2010
This week’s TechMail is Replace a failed drive in Linux RAID which goes into the fun I had on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago replacing a drive in my backup box at my mother’s place. All-in-all it was dead simple and very painless, which just goes to show how …
March 20, 2010
This week’s mac TechMail is Install open source software on your Mac easily with Fink. I love Fink. One of the first things I install on any OS X computer I setup is Fink. It gives me all the goodies I’m used to on Linux and makes the CLI so much more bearable (using …
March 20, 2010
This week’s TechMail is Enhanced history searching in zsh because I seem to always be doing the same thing over and over again and it’s good to save keystrokes. =) I imagine other people are in the same boat as well, so there you go… something simple yet …
March 11, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Create your own SSL CA with the OS X Keychain. This talks about how you can use the Certificate Assistant on OS X, to create your own SSL Certificate Authority for a local network or internal organization. The tool is quite slick, if a little …
March 9, 2010
Last week’s mac techmail was Remotely wake a sleeping Mac which explains some tricks on how to wake up a local Mac that is asleep. Useful if you want to have a file or media server that is also energy efficient so it’s only on when it needs to be.
March 9, 2010
This week’s techmail is Convert CVS repositories to Git which goes into the how, and possibly the why, of converting a CVS repository into a git repository, retaining all commit and history information.
March 4, 2010
Linux Magazine is having a vote where the results will be published in an upcoming magazine: the poll. Currently Fedora is third at 8% with Ubuntu leading at 35%, and Debian in second at 10%. Show these people some Fedora pride!
March 4, 2010
This week’s TechMail was How to create LXC system containers to isolate services which goes into further details on using LXC, using an OpenVZ template to create a new LXC container for use, and a brief rundown on how to configure it, start it, etc.
February 27, 2010
This week’s mac techmail was Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems which takes a look at the ExpanDrive tool, which sits in the menubar and allows you to connect to remote SFTP, SSH, FTP/FTPS, or Amazon S3 file systems and mount them on the computer as if they were …
February 27, 2010
This week’s techmail is Introducing Linux virtual containers with LXC. I played with LXC for the first time a little while ago when writing this tip, and it’s pretty slick. It’s not quite as feature-complete or as robust as OpenVZ, but it’s very close. It …
February 20, 2010
This week’s mac techmail was 1Password for Mac OS X: One program to store them all which is an introduction to the immensely useful 1Password program. If you have a mac and you don’t have 1Password, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. 1Password stores …
February 20, 2010
This weeks’s techmail was Use Live USB Creator to install Fedora 12 from a USB stick which looks at using the Live USB Creator tool to build a bootable USB stick that can be used to run or install Fedora (or any other Live CD Linux distro). Very slick stuff. Worked great …
February 18, 2010
Does anyone know of such a beast? Last night I had to drive to my mother’s place as she insisted there was a problem with her email and needed me to come check it out. Sadly, it was due to the Buzz stuff and if she actually read the page, she’d have seen the …
February 13, 2010
This week’s Linux techmail is Learn and use regular expressions with Kodos which is a slick little app written in python that lets you learn regular expressions and build them in a nice GUI interface. This is a great tool for testing regular expressions outside of your …
February 13, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Enhance Safari with Glims plug-in which discusses the free Glims plugin for Safari. This plugin adds a bunch of features that should have been in Safari to begin with as far as I’m concerned: automatic re-opening of tabs when you start …
February 2, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is completely non-technical and is a bit of an opinion/rant piece: iPass on the Apple iPad: It’s no netbook killer and it pretty much sums up my feeling about the much-touted iPad. I get what Apple has in mind with this thing, thinking …
February 2, 2010
This week’s techmail is FreeBSD 8.0 installation walk-through where I take a look at a quick install of FreeBSD 8.0. I’ve toyed with FreeBSD for many years and it’s never really appealed to me beyond a curiosity because Linux is so capable. I’ve also …
January 25, 2010
This week’s techmail is Why PostgreSQL is a better enterprise database than MySQL which takes a look at what makes PostgreSQL a compelling database, when compared to MySQL. Particularly in light of the whole Oracle/MySQL thing, I think it’s good to remind people that …
January 25, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Managing SSL Certificate Authorities on OS X which takes you through adding a CA to the OS X keychain to verify SSL certificates. This is mostly useful for internal networks that use their own CA and it (obviously) doesn’t come bundled with …
January 21, 2010
This week’s techmail is Manipulate monitor displays easily with the xrandr extension which talks about how to automatically resize, re-orientate, and reconfigure your monitors using xrandr. xrandr is really cool and shines especially bright when used with laptops and …
January 21, 2010
This week’s mac techmail is Using Cornerstone to handle Subversion on the Mac. Subversion is my favourite VCS; I moved to it from CVS years ago. Git is still pretty new to me and one day I may invest more time into using it more fully, but subversion still has my heart, so …
January 12, 2010
Last week’s mac TechMail was Save time and avoid errors with Typinator for the Mac which looks at one of my favourite productivity tools: Typinator (a text expansion utility). Typinator is one of those things that now that I’ve been using it for a few years, I …
January 12, 2010
This week’s TechMail is Set up rsyslog to store syslog messages in MySQL which gives a brief rundown of how to setup rsyslog to log messages in a MySQL database so that you can use a viewer such as phpLogCon in order to view/filter them. For me, this is a novelty thing more …
January 9, 2010
This week’s TechMail was Change default applications easily in GNOME which looks at how you can configure GNOME to use your preferred applications to open certain file types (i.e. if you had a specific IDE you wanted to edit PHP or Python files with, or a specific media …
January 4, 2010
Ran into an issue today where I needed to convert a Maildir containing over 50k messages to mbox format and couldn’t really find any good tools. So I found this blog post about using mutt to do it. Unfortunately, it converted one Maildir to another. =( One crucial piece is …
January 3, 2010
Last week’s techmail was 2009: A Linux year in review in which I took a (brief) look at some of the happenings in 2009. Of course I had to add the obligatory “year of the desktop linux” routine but don’t worry… I didn’t make any silly …
December 25, 2009
Merry Christmas to all my compatriots, friends, and (strangely enough) the folks who find my blog interesting enough to read! =) Got spoiled something fierce this year. Feels nice. =) wOO! 25th anniversary Transformers boxed set! I’ll be reliving my childhood for a long …
December 23, 2009
This week’s mac techmail is Syncing The Hit List with Daylite gives you all-access pass to your data anywhere you go which looks at combining The Hit List with DayLite to handle task management. I’m a huge fan of Daylite; it’s the CRM I’ve been using for …
December 16, 2009
This week’s mac TechMail is Sync application preferences with Dropbox which talks about the fantastic file syncing tool/service known as DropBox (disclosure: yes, that is a referral link and I get a small amount of added space if you sign up using it). Dropbox is great, and …
December 16, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Learn to use extended file attributes in Linux to boost security which takes a look at using chattr, getfattr, setfattr, getfacl, and setfacl; tools that can be used to offer more granular security to files and directories. Being able to use SELinux …
December 10, 2009
This week’s TechMail was DIY pfSense firewall system beats others for features, reliability, and security which takes a look at pfSense which is, in my opinion, one of the best open source firewall systems around. I’ve used quite a few, and for a long time when I was …
December 10, 2009
This week’s mac tip is Cross-platform Dropbox provides easy backups and file-syncing between computers which looks at using DropBox to synchronize files between computers in an easy fashion. DropBox is cross-platform, which makes it even nicer.
December 3, 2009
This week’s mac TechMail is Easy application syncing with Mac’s Daylite CRM which talks more about using Daylite on the mac as a contact-relationship management software. I love Daylite and use it daily, and it’s ability to sync with other applications makes it …
December 3, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Don’t need groupware? Organize your life with Osmo which looks at using Osmo as a pretty basic, yet useful, personal information manager. Osmo is quite basic, but if that’s all you need (i.e. don’t need Outlook or Zimbra or …
November 26, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Learn to use Git version control for added flexibility which talks about some of the basics of using Git. This was good for me since I’m a subversion monkey, but since a lot of projects are using Git now, I really needed to get the basics down …
November 23, 2009
Two new mac tips on TechRepublic… last week’s is Configure OS X for Kerberos single sign-on authentication which talks about how to configure Kerberos with OS X. This week the tip is Get to know Daylite CRM for Macs which talks about the Daylite contact management …
November 17, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Fedora 12 boasts enhanced performance, improved reporting, better graphics which is a great big gushy welcome to Constantine! The tip highlights some of my favourite new features in Fedora 12. I’ve been running the beta on my new HP machine for …
November 13, 2009
Well, I bought a new computer about a month ago or so, and got my Win7 upgrade disc today. I’ve got Vista on one drive, and Fedora 12 on the other (Vista is around for gaming and that’s about it). So I decided to go through the steps of the Win7 upgrade. Well.. the HP …
November 10, 2009
This week’s techmail is Snoop on your own network with ntop, which discusses the many uses for the ntop application and why you want to use it, particularly if you need to keep an eye on your network traffic and throughput. ntop is a great analysis tool that deserves a …
November 10, 2009
This week’s mac techmail is Get creative with Automator workflows in Mac which discusses some of the new Automator-related features of OS X 10.6, particularly in regards to the new Services menu and easy-to-get-started Automator templates. Combining Automator and the …
November 8, 2009
Missed two mac-related techmails from the previous weeks. The first is Learn to use the improved Snow Leopard Services menu which talks about the OS X 10.6 much overhauled services menu and some of the cool things you can do with it such as making your own Automator actions that …
November 8, 2009
Last week’s techmail was Using BitlBee to consolidate instant messaging into one client which talks about the really neat BitlBee program which brings your instant messaging to IRC. It’s got a few rough edges, but it’s really quite neat and worth checking out if …
November 7, 2009
I’m in crunch mode right now… wrote 2400 words today, another 4300 to get back on target (need to write 1167 words per day to make the 50k target at the end of the month). Not an excuse, really, but this was a stupid work week with stupid little things going on that …
October 31, 2009
So last year I participated in National Novel Writing Month but didn’t pull it off. The idea is to go nuts and write a 50k word novel during the month of November. People all around the world do it, and it’s quite fun but very time consuming and pretty crazy. Last …
October 30, 2009
Every time you turn around someone is posting about, talking about, writing about, or otherwise having something to do with H1N1. While I get this is a new flu, and the media have a job to do in increasing sales and readership, the sheer volume of “OMG! H1N1!” is …
October 28, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Keep IMAP email messages locally using OfflineIMAP. OfflineIMAP is an extremely cool program that lets you treat IMAP mail as local with two-way synchronization. Works awesome with mutt and allows you to keep a local copy of stuff for grepping or …
October 23, 2009
This past week’s mac TechMail was Use Shimo to create VPN connections in Mac OS X which talks about using the Shimo VPN client tool on OS X. I’ve tried a few VPN clients to connect to a Cisco VPN, and Shimo is the one that works the best for me. It also supports other …
October 20, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Configure Apache to support multiple SSL sites on a single IP address which talks about the new SNI (Server Name Indication) feature in Apache 2.2.12. This is a really welcome feature as previously if you wanted more than one SSL-secured site, you …
October 14, 2009
And this week’s mac techmail is about one of my all-time favourite applications: Optimize your Mac experience with the LaunchBar multitasker. Launchbar is probably the first thing I install after the OS itself. I’ve been using it for years and can’t live without …
October 14, 2009
Last week’s mac techmail was Get system display options with GeekTool for the Mac. GeekTool is one of my favourite tools for the mac. Kinda like Conky on Linux, but more flexible since you can have multiple windows all over the place doing various things (i.e. my GeekTool …
October 14, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Setting up a Cisco VPN connection with Network Manager which shows just how easy it is to setup Fedora to connect to a Cisco VPN using Network Manager (other distros too, I suppose). Also mentions OpenVPN as well. At any rate, this is an introduction …
October 6, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Using Corkscrew to tunnel SSH over HTTP which talks about creating an SSH tunnel using HTTP and the Corkscrew tool. Very cool and interesting stuff. Fortunately I’ve never been in such a restrictive environment where I’ve needed to use …
September 30, 2009
Ok, I’ve just updated my Fedora Planet config so that only stuff in the Linux category (and sub-categories, like “Red Hat”) will show up on Planet. Sorry if you felt I was spamming Planet with non-Linuxy stuff, I wasn’t really thinking about breaking it …
September 30, 2009
Last week’s mac TechMail is Use The Hit List to get things done with Mac, which talks about using The Hit List as a task manager. It works quite well with the GTD methodology, although it’s not necessarily geared towards it (you can use THL without following GTD). …
September 29, 2009
No, I’m not throwing one although it would be amusing… sad thing is, I’m geekish and all my friends know it, and a large majority of them (also sadly) use Windows yet I think if I threw a Windows 7 house party… no one would show. I’m quite certain …
September 29, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Get network versatility with SSH tunneling and netcat which talks about using netcat as a proxy tool to bounce transparently through a bastion host to a secure end point. It’s not something that you may use a lot, but if you need to be able to …
September 22, 2009
Blogging has been on my short list the last two weeks. Yesterday the contractor we hired finally finished putting up new insulation and vinyl siding on the house, and I have to admit he did a fantastic job and it looks bloody sharp. Pics to come (the eavestrough isn’t up …
September 22, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Configuring VOIP in Twinkle which talkes about how to setup Twinkle, a SIP softphone, for VOIP. It’s ugly, but it works really well. =)
September 22, 2009
So I am now also writing for TechRepublic’s new Mac blog. Same format as with the Linux tips, but they’re geared towards “macs in business”. Should be interesting and give me something else to write about as well. So my first foray here is Lay the …
September 8, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Save time on downloads with delta RPMs in Fedora 11 which discusses the delta RPM feature in Fedora, how to set it up and use it, and why you would want to. Delta RPMs don’t make sense for everyone, but they will for quite a few people (i.e. …
September 3, 2009
Last month I got Kerberos working quite nicely on my macs, thank-you-very-much. This week Apple wrecked it by making Kerberos an absolute nuisance. It wasn’t bad in OS X 10.5.. a bit annoying to setup but the tools were adequate. In 10.6 they threw away the half-decent GUI …
September 2, 2009
My Flickr account now has pictures of the work I got done last Saturday. The sleeve is getting close to completion! Yikes… three sittings in 2 weeks. What was I thinking? Feels like as soon as the burning and peeling and itching settle down I’m off to do it again. =) …
September 2, 2009
So I was approached by Eugeni, one of my former fellows at Mandriva, today about some collaboration in regards to Mandriva’s msec and my way-back-when fork for Annvix, rsec. He wrote a blog post about msec’s future and plans detailing the things he wants to do with …
September 1, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Mirroring Web sites with wget which discusses using wget to mirror… websites! Pretty simplistic, but a lot of people miss some real goodies by ignoring CLI applications.
August 25, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Monitor your system for threats with rsec alerts which discusses the rsec tool I forked from Mandriva’s msec years ago (for Annvix). It’s been updated and is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (and CentOS 5) as I think it’s …
August 23, 2009
So my Flickr account now has pictures of my new in-progress sleeve. The first session was just the line work and that was done on July 18th and took 5hrs. Sessions 2 and 3 added color; session 2 was done this past Monday (the 17th of August) and took 6.5hrs, and session 3 was …
August 18, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Tweeting from the command line. Basically it discusses using a shell script to send out tweets to Twitter. Interestingly enough, one of the comments posted on that tip from a TechRepublic member discusses how he setup a private twitter account so he …
August 11, 2009
This week’s TechMail is How to use Virtual Machine Manager on Fedora 11 which discusses my first foray into using Virtual Machine Manager and KVM. It’s no surprise that I’m a big virtualization fan, but this is the first time I’ve used something baked …
August 4, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Secure remote firewall administration via SSH which talks about using ssh to create a secure tunnel to a remote network/system to use with configuring a remote firewall. I use this quite a bit with remotely-deployed pfSense boxen to configure it …
July 28, 2009
This week’s TechMail is System monitoring with Conky which gives a quick introduction to the conky tool. I’ve come to like conky so much that I’ve replaced gkrellm by it. Really useful tool. If you use a mac, it’s a lot like geektool (another tool I love), …
July 21, 2009
This week’s Techmail is Setting up a dynamic DNS service part 2: dhcpd which wraps up the two part piece on setting up a dynamic DNS service, specifically covering dhcpd and tying it all together.
July 19, 2009
This past week’s TechMail was Setting up a dynamic DNS service part 1: named which discusses setting up a local intranet dynamic DNS service. This is the first of two parts: the first deals with named, the second deals with dhcpd. I was put in a position where this had to …
July 16, 2009
Ok, this time the word “fun” is sarcastic. I had it working this afternoon and couldn’t figure out why it all of a sudden stopped working or… at least… subversion via kerberos. I was getting this error whenever I did a “svn ls …
July 16, 2009
This actually isn’t a sarcastic title, for once. I’m actually having a blast fiddling with Kerberos these last few days. I was put into a position to do some kerberos debugging for work, so had to re-setup a kerberos realm at home to do the testing. Of course, at the …
July 9, 2009
This week was interesting, dealing with the supposed “OpenSSH 0day” vulnerability stuff… rumours, innuendo, strange logs and packet capture files… it made for a long week trying to keep an eye on this and sort fact from fiction. Instead of focusing on …
July 8, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Hacking Vim covers the basics and reveals tips for power users, which is a book review of “Hacking Vim” by Packt Publishing. If you’re a (serious/wanna-be) vim user, this is a really useful book to read. I learnt a lot of tricks …
June 30, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Use Makefiles for more than handling source code which takes a quick look at how you can use make for more than just handling source code. The example provided uses make to update remote websites (which is moderately related to source code I guess), …
June 30, 2009
Last week’s Techmail was Manage dotfile configuration with subversion which goes into use subversion to manage all those pesky little .foo files in $HOME. It uses a combination of subversion and make to handle it and works quite well, although the Makefile could probably be …
June 16, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Two hours (and counting) with an upgrade to Fedora 11, in which I describe my initial experience with the upgrade of my laptop from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. All-in-all, the upgrade was good and has worked great. I have no complaints, except for two …
June 9, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Use tabs to open multiple files in vim which pretty much discusses how to use tabs in vim so you can have multiple files open at once. Using some nice key mapping, you can navigate tabs with simple keystrokes and have vim act like any good GUI text …
June 3, 2009
Last night I attained “Legendary Status” on Rock Band by doing the never ending setlist (84 songs), on the drums, on hard (not good enough to do more than a handful on expert). It took me about 30hrs to accomplish (left the xbox on overnight hoping it wouldn’t …
June 2, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Create custom keybindings in vim which goes into how to tweak vim’s keybindings to make them more familiar if you come from another editor. It’s also useful to create shortcuts for things such as moving to the end of a line. I’ve …
May 28, 2009
Read an interesting piece on Lifehacker that pointed to an article entitled Working From Home: 10 Unconscious Cues to Create a Work-Life Balance. Being a remote worker for Red Hat, and before that Mandriva, I’ve worked full-time at home for about 10 years now. (Man, I feel …
May 22, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Gain fine control in OpenVZ with resource management which discusses how to setup and manipulate resource management in OpenVZ. As with any other virtualization solution, OpenVZ allows you to assign resources to your containers so they cannot exceed …
May 19, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Create an OpenVZ container which discusses how to create your own OpenVZ container using pre-built templates. I’ve really fallen in love with OpenVZ; I find it much simpler and much faster than VMware or other full virtualization solutions. …
May 15, 2009
Yeah, this is one of those sappy posts. But I like to think it’s worth the few minutes of my time to write it, and it’s something I’ve really noticed and I’d like to share my appreciation. I’ve made it past my first 90 days at Red Hat and I sure am …
May 12, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Create your own yum repository which pretty much discusses the createrepo tool and how to use it to create your own custom yum repository. Handy little tool; this came about when I was figuring out how to make a yum repository for my Annvix packages. …
May 7, 2009
This week’s techmail is Store passwords with pwsafe which looks at the pwsafe CLI application that can keep track of all your passwords and login credentials in a safe and secure manner (and throws in strong password generation as a bonus). Really useful app.
May 3, 2009
I was hunting around yesterday to find some themes for my Blackberry Storm. When I first got it, there was one theme to choose from, but now there’s a whole bunch of them, so I figured I’d note them here so I don’t have to look for them again when I get bored of …
April 29, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Get a handy multi-item clipboard with Glipper which talks about using Glipper to manage a multi-item clipboard. When I started using Fedora daily for work, this was one of the first things I had to find for it simply because I’ve been using …
April 24, 2009
I’m hoping some benevolent reader out there can give me a hand here as I’m banging my head against the wall with this. The scenario is this: I have one system that can access a private school network and do not want to setup the same vpn connection on other systems. …
April 24, 2009
An annoying and very CPU intensive service called dashboardadvisoryd keeps eating at my CPU on my workstation. This thing has been around for a while but it only spikes every once in a while (probably when trying to connect to Apple’s servers for the Dashboard Advisory …
April 21, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Install OpenVZ on CentOS to create a virtual container which discusses using the OpenVZ virtualization software. I have to admit, I’ve become extremely fond of OpenVZ. I stumbled upon it as the open source version of Virtuozzo which is used by …
April 14, 2009
Well, maybe not but there’s an interesting survey of college students that correlates Facebook usage with grades, and how people (keeping in mind this is just a survey, and there are no real conclusions by the authors) who spend more time on Facebook have lower grades. So, …
April 14, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Dodge the challenges of a dual-head display setup with Fedora 10 which discusses setting up a dual-head display on my Lenovo T61 and how insanely easy it ended up being… once I knew what I was doing. Truth be told, I haven’t setup a …
April 7, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Use encrypted filesystems with Linux Logical Volume Manager which discusses how to setup LVM with encryption right at install-time. I’m finding for myself that having information, particularly on laptops, encrypted is becoming increasingly …
April 1, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Get a stable and secure server setup with CentOS, RPMForge, and Utter Ramblings which talks about setting up extra repositories in CentOS. As was pointed out in the comments on that blog, I neglected to mention EPEL (in all fairness, when I wrote …
March 24, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Converting Subversion repositories to Git. This is a small primer on how to migrate from using Subversion for version control to using Git instead. I’m still quite a big fan of subversion, but git is pretty cool too… I can definitely see …
March 21, 2009
Well, this past Thursday I got my 11th tattoo (although it only looks like I have 9 in total, two were to extend earlier tattoos). Every other tattoo was pretty good pain-wise… no big deal. This one wasn’t too bad either, except in a few tender spots… base of …
March 17, 2009
This week’s TechMail is How does Ubuntu’s Upstart system initialization compare with runit? which looks at the upstart system vs runit. I really like runit; so much in fact that with Annvix I rewrote the entire init system to take as much advantage of runit as …
March 17, 2009
Well, sort of. Annvix is not coming back as an operating system like it used to be, but rather a repository of packages for RHEL/CentOS (currently just version 5). There is very little there right now: a new version of openssh and a new version of logwatch. It will increase as …
March 13, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Getting started with the yum package manager which goes into some of the basics of using yum. This was good reference for me coming from years of urpmi, so digging into the use of yum was a good exercise for how I’m going to be dealing with …
March 11, 2009
A post on Planet Fedora from Nicu (What is YOUR Elvish name?) caught my attention this morning and since I’m a big Tolkien fan, I embarked to find out how cool (or not) my elvish name would be. Using the same references (thanks, Nicu, for linking them all!) I found out that …
March 8, 2009
So I’ve taken it upon myself to learn Python, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I usually write code in PHP or shellscript, with the odd thing in Perl every once in a while (but I’m not a real big fan of perl and I don’t have the desire to …
March 3, 2009
Took me a bit to find one, so I’m noting it here in case I ever forget (or anyone else needs to find something like this). GNOME terminal works great (ctrl-click on the s/key challenge and it does the rest), but for OS X there wasn’t something so obvious and the only …
March 3, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Set up RPM Fusion with Fedora to shore up multimedia support which looks at adding extra multimedia codecs to work with Fedora that don’t come “in the box”; things like MP3 support or watching protected DVDs on your system, or …
March 1, 2009
Last week’s TechMail was Set up a bluetooth keyboard and mouse in Fedora 10 which, as the title indicates, goes through setting up a bluetooth keyboard and mouse in F10. Much different from the last time I did it (much easier, much faster, a whole lot less frustration). In …
February 15, 2009
This week’s TechMail is A Mandriva user kicks around Fedora Core 10: How does it compare? (not the title I chose, but I guess my editor figured it needed my “flare”). Basically talks about my first impressions of using Fedora 10, considering I’ve more or …
February 10, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Check out subversion repositories with ViewVC which is pretty much just about installing and configuring the ViewVC web-based tool to view subversion repositories (works with cvs too).
February 6, 2009
Well, technically speaking, I guess this is a bit of a downgrade. But, since I’m not longer using Mandriva and need to get used to Red Hat products (Fedora, RHEL, etc.), CentOS makes sense for upgrading my internal server to. It was also a long week, so I goofed a bit on it …
February 4, 2009
Well, I took my first trip to the USA, ever, this week and it was down to Raleigh, NC, for orientation with Red Hat. I’d like to say it was an experience (meaning the trip), but it wasn’t… I was mostly fighting too hard to stay awake so it all really seems like …
February 4, 2009
This week’s TechMail is: Get started with the security tool OSSEC, a quick run-down of what OSSEC is and how to use it. It’s a pretty big “package”, so I couldn’t cover everything, just a single-server-use scenario which I think is what the majority …
January 30, 2009
I better post this before I forget about it. One of the issues I had today was getting corp3/x86_64 installed in a chroot with Mandriva 2009.0 as the host. Of course, the db4 version had changed, so I had to take advantage of some conversion tools. urpmi is supposed to do this …
January 30, 2009
Well, today is my last day and so without much fanfare I say “adieu” to Mandriva. As the title indicates, never a dull moment. You get spoiled with new stuff, then have to go back and re-setup old stuff. Part of this switch for Oden is that the build system goes with …
January 28, 2009
This week’s TechMail is VMware Server 2.0 offers handy new upgrades which takes a look at the new(ish) VMware Server 2.0. When I wrote it, it was pretty much the first time I’ve looked at VMware Server for a while… it made a decent alternative to VMware …
January 23, 2009
So, I’ve gotten quite a few emails about what I’m going to be up to, so to save myself having to type the same thing over and over, here’s the lowdown. I’ll be hanging out with Adam for two days in February… you can see where he’s going to be …
January 23, 2009
Well, that cat is out of the bag now (finally). As noted here: http://blog.mandriva.com/2009/01/23/goodbye-vincent-welcome-back-oden/ I am leaving Mandriva after almost 9 years. And I quote: After nearly 9 years, Vincent Danen will be leaving Mandriva at the end of this month. …
January 22, 2009
Well, due to some changing circumstances, I decided I’d try to get a better handle on my email and maybe move to using IMAP instead of downloading all my mail. There are some really irritating reasons why this is a bad idea (in my case). Google’s use of labels is …
January 21, 2009
All of my reading of reviews lead me to believe that Ninja Gaiden Sigma is one of the hardest games out there. Well I can tell you it’s true. Man, this game is really starting to drive me nuts! I enjoy doing the odd bit of gaming, and I certainly don’t mind a …
January 20, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Remotely monitor servers with the Nagios check_by_ssh plugin which discusses using the check_by_ssh plugin in Nagios to get local plugin results from remote systems, via ssh. I use this to monitor my VPS and other remote systems so I can see things …
January 20, 2009
Adam forwarded me a link to his latest blog post about Linux security. It’s quite amusing to read (I suspect someone must have told him how uber secure Linux is). Anyways, it’s completely true so for all the pundits who preach on how much more secure Linux is than …
January 19, 2009
A friend pointed me to a really cool blog post called The Larry Test. It basically talks about when done is Done. I.e. an engineer will keep working stuff until it’s perfect, likely because it’s in our nature (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewritten …
January 15, 2009
This week’s TechMail is Learning more about Nagios for server monitoring which reviews the book Learning NAGIOS 3.0 published by Packt Publishing. This is a pretty decent book for anyone interested in learning more about Nagios. It taught me, who’s been using Nagios …
January 8, 2009
This past week’s TechMail is Firewall MySQL with GreenSQL which talks about a really cool little application-level firewall that sits between your database-accessing code and MySQL. Really neat concept and although I’ve played with it a bit, I need to find some time …
December 27, 2008
For kicks, this Christmas I decided to give myself something “hackish” to do, and noticed that the local Staples was selling the MSI Wind with SUSE on it for $299CAD. This little beast (the U90, model number MS-N811) is nice… a little bit bigger than my Eeepc, …
December 23, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Save time managing multiple systems with Parallel SSH, which discusses using pssh (or Parallel SSH) to do similar operations on multiple systems at the exact same time. Very useful little program indeed.
December 18, 2008
Decided to change the theme of the site as I upgraded to the latest WordPress. Also stuck a picture of my kitties on there (Tika, who’s 16 (and grey), and Pepper, who’s about 1.5 (and black, obviously)).
December 17, 2008
Some statistics, before I go on holidays until the end of the year. Looking at bugfix updates, we’ve seen a steady increase since I’ve kept track (going back to 1999, although I think in 1999 it was only a half-year of doing updates). For security updates, it’s …
December 17, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Monitor your server with Monitorix which discusses the Monitorix web package that provides a nice almost-real-time monitoring interface for your system that is accessible via the web. On a side note, why is it that almost everytime I write these …
December 17, 2008
Found this really cute/funny blog post today about programming languages being religions, or the comparison of programming languages to religions (i.e. C being Judaism, Visual Basic being Satanism, etc.). Quite funny. Here’s the link: If programming languages were …
December 9, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Using pam_mount to automount filesystems at login, which essentially discusses using the pam_mount PAM module. A lot of people use it to mount encrypted partitions or loopback devices, which is great, but it can also be used to mount samba shares, …
December 5, 2008
I’ve been saying it for a while, but never really put hard evidence to it. Our community has declined and by the numbers I’ll produce, I’m going to say it declined a lot. I just wrote a quick shell script to parse the number of messages posted to each given list …
December 3, 2008
A good friend of mine has over the last little while been feeding me some really great books that have made me re-evaluate a lot of things. The first book is “PresentationZen” (ISBN: 978-0-321-52565-9) which gives some really great ideas regarding presentation design …
December 2, 2008
This week’s Techmail looks at some of the new features of ActiveState’s Komodo IDE and asks Is the new Komodo 5 toolset worth the upgrade?. Personally, I think it was. Others may or may not agree… someone else has already posted about using a “real” …
December 1, 2008
Some lesser-known urpmi tricks I’ve had to figure out today. The situation is that the machine that had my mirrored files has been moved somewhere else in order to ease up on rsync being an absolute bandwidth pig (great for downloading, bad when it’s throwing nagios …
November 30, 2008
The Mandriva community is small, yes, but tight-knit. This can be evidenced by the comments in my previous blog entry and the many emails I received privately, and the many chats initiated on IRC. It has been my honor and privilege to work with you guys, and I sincerely …
November 27, 2008
Well, I received some horrid news today. As of December 31st, my contract with Mandriva will be terminated and I will no longer be working for Mandriva. We’ve got a new CEO now, and he’s determined there is to be no remote contractors, and as a result I’ve been …
November 20, 2008
This one may be a bit long, because I’m going to use it to vent. =) I won’t make it all “front page news”, tho. On Monday I signed up with a new provider, WiredTree. I still have a few accounts with my old provider, WebHostingBuzz, but they are being …
November 18, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use Dovecot for POP3/IMAP services which discusses how to setup and use Dovecot to provide POP3 and IMAP services. I’ve become quite the fan of Dovecot after having used it for a while; I used to use Courier-IMAP for the longest time and much …
November 14, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Tips and tricks for working on the command line which points out a few simple things you can do on the CLI to make life easier for yourself, such as renaming files or dealing with history, and some lesser-known character sequences you can use. Funny …
November 8, 2008
This has ticked me off for a bit, and I finally decided to find out why. Tab completion in zsh was returning the following every time I tried to use it, after upgrading to subversion 1.5: _arguments:comparguments:303: invalid argument: ARG Looks like the reason is that the …
November 6, 2008
Well, after some discussion on cooker and, quite frankly, needing a resource myself to speed up security update testing (particularly looking for regressions), we’ve re-implemented “Testzilla”. Sorta. Instead of integrating with bugzilla, we’ve used the …
November 4, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Using dnsmasq for DNS and DHCP services, which discusses using dnsmasq in place of software like BIND and ISC’s dhcpd (or other similar packages). I had actually never heard of dnsmasq before poking around looking for something interesting to …
October 28, 2008
Well, actually, I just found about it this week. The NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is “contest” to encourage people to write a novel. The goal is to write 50k words in one month.. from scratch, starting at 00:01 on Nov 1st with the deadline being 23:59 on …
October 28, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use DropBox to seamlessly sync files which discusses the DropBox service to synchronize files seamlessly and automatically between Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. This service works fantastic, BTW. 2GB of free storage with paid upgrade options. …
October 26, 2008
Seven weeks ago I setup a local copy of Bugzilla 3.2rc1 to test the upgrade/migration from 3.0.5, using the templates and data from Mandriva’s bugzilla. Tonight it went live on qa.mandriva.com. Although it could have gone up 6 weeks ago, due to the release of 2009.0 coming …
October 24, 2008
This week’s techmail is Improve MySQL performance with MySQLTuner which discusses how to use the MySQLTuner perl script to tune the MySQL server to ensure you’re not over-committing resources, that your configuration is sane, and giving helpful pointers on how to …
October 16, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Searching with GNOME Do, which discusses the application launcher GNOME Do, a fantastic little application. The thing I love about this is that on the mac I’m used to and spoiled by Launchbar, so this is something similar on the Linux side …
October 9, 2008
Today marks the release of Mandriva Linux 2009.0 (the 23rd Mandriva release!) and for the first time in probably 5 years, I was actually involved with it’s development. =) The last few years I’ve stepped away from any sort of a developers role simply due to lack of …
October 7, 2008
Found some weirdness with subversion 1.5 today. I had previously upgraded to 1.5.1 when it came out (from 1.4.x) and found I couldn’t commit to svn+ssh urls. 1.5.2 fixes that, but has a naughty habbit of upgrading the repository format behind your back. So, if you have a …
October 7, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Listen to music with open source Banshee which is a brief introduction to the Banshee music player. I actually quite liked the player, despite it not being able to connect to my iTunes library (which I had hoped it would do). Was also a little irked …
October 2, 2008
Well, when my previous TechMail editor Sonja Thompson asked me to do an interview for TechRepublic a week or so ago, I was up for the gig but little did I realize until yesterday that it was for a podcast. I suppose if I had known that I would have made sure I wasn’t doing …
October 1, 2008
The Canadian national do not call list is up which basically prevents telemarketers from phoning you, by registering your phone number(s) in the registry. All I can say is “about damn time”. Anyways, if you’re Canadian and as annoyed by those yahoo telemarketers …
October 1, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Control Apache with the apachectl command which pretty much gives a brief primer of the different commands and cool things you can do with apachectl to control Apache.
September 23, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Consider these Linux file management alternatives which discusses three alternatives to the “traditional” file managers (namely Nautilus and Konqueror). It discusses Midnight Commander, Gentoo, and Krusader (and to be honest, I really …
September 22, 2008
“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behaviour. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behaviour.” – Dee Hock I’m reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and this quote really stuck …
September 22, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Try command-line looping for added efficiency which discusses using loops in the shell to iterate over a number of items while using particular commands (i.e. for loops in the shell). Extremely useful stuff if you’ve ever needed to repeat …
September 9, 2008
Was poking around and found some amusing “get a mac” ads on YouTube, done SouthPark style: South Park Mac vs PC South Park Mac vs PC vs Linux OMG… YouTube is scary. You should check out this fellow trying to explain Why Linux is Better Than Windows. I think …
September 9, 2008
I’ve spent the entire day yesterday and another day last week working on migrating the current Mandriva bugzilla 3.0.5 to the new 3.2rc1. You won’t see it anywhere official until 2009.0 is released most likely, but having (some) spare time, I wouldn’t to put it …
September 9, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Expanding text with Snippits in Linux, which discusses using Snippits (a ruby app) to do text expansion. Unfortunately, I went hunting for something that worked as well as Typinator or TextExpander on OS X and this was the only thing that seemed to …
September 9, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Send messages and alerts from the command line which discusses using the mail and wall commands. Two very simple, yet infinitely useful, programs.
September 3, 2008
A recent post from Russ Coker entitled AppArmor is Dead was tolling the death bells for AppArmor because SUSE decided to include SELinux in their operating system… not as the default, and not as a replacement for AppArmor, but it was included nonetheless. Russ determined …
August 28, 2008
This week’s techmail is One-time scheduling of tasks with At which discusses one-shot scheduling with the ‘at’ tool, rather than using something like cron. Alternatives to at include uschedule (which I personally like as it follows a djb service/run-script style …
August 27, 2008
Last week’s techmail was Schedule periodic tasks with cron, a title that pretty much summarizes what the tip is about. All about cron and how it can schedule stuff.
August 12, 2008
Last week’s techmail was Customizing the Joe text editor which goes into some detail regarding customizing Joe, specifically about how you can change key bindings to make shortcuts or other modifications. Joe is one of the first text editors I’ve ever used with Linux, …
August 12, 2008
This week’s techmail is Get a complete security toolkit with BackTrack 3. I was approached a month or so ago by an individual who does forensic work, mostly on Windows and Mac computers and he was in need of something to do forensics with Linux, and wanted a tool that could …
August 2, 2008
This past week’s Techmail was Install extra packages on the ASUS Eee PC which discusses adding extra Xandros repositories to get more packages on the Eee PC than what the standard install provides.
July 26, 2008
Hey, just a question for you guys out there. Don’t know how many of you are with a hosting outfit rather than running your own server (be it at home, work, or at a colocation), but I have a bit of an issue here when I reported a problem with my web hosting outfit’s …
July 25, 2008
If there’s one thing that irked me about WordPress, which I more or less ignored for months, was the inability to change the “From” address on emails it sent. It’s hard-coded to “wordpress@${sitename}” and when you have some… …
July 25, 2008
This week’s TechMail is entitled Installing Mandriva 2008.1 on the ASUS Eee PC, which, as the name implies, discusses Mandriva 2008.1 on the ASUS Eee PC. When I wrote it, I had installed Mandriva onto an SDHC card, but I’ve since replaced Xandros with Mandriva on the …
July 15, 2008
This week’s Techmail is ASUS Eee PC is a good option for a lightweight laptop which is a basic summary of the little EeePC and why I like mine. =) This one basically covers the Xandros OS that comes with the Eee, but a future one (probably next week I’m suspecting) …
July 12, 2008
Last week’s Techmail was GUI scripting with Zenity which discusses using Zenity to display GUI widgets from scripts. I’ve used such things for a full blown menu driven CLI app before, but Zenity is quite cool in that you get all the power of a shell script with a nice …
July 11, 2008
Last year I wrote about my 20 minutes with OS X Leopard server. This week I had the opportunity, and the obligation, to spend a bit more time with it. Next month I’m converting an office that’s currently using Windows and Exchange for an OS X-based solution. There …
July 3, 2008
I came across this great article today entitled Linux is Not Windows. This is a fantastic post that breaks down why people should stop comparing Linux to Windows and what newbies can do to make their Linux experience more enjoyable as well as not piss off existing Linux users. =) …
July 3, 2008
This one is over a month old and got lost in my inbox, so I’m posting it now. A month ago’s TechMail was Dig for more data in the /proc directory which pretty much shows some ways of mining for info in the /proc pseudo-filesystem.
July 2, 2008
Haven’t been keeping up with the TechMails, so here’s the last three works worth. This one is entitled Use Fuse to mount remote ssh directories and it discusses how to use Fuse (user-space filesystem) to mount remote ssh directories as “local” filesystems. …
July 2, 2008
And finally, this last week’s Techmail was Send mail with eSMTP for a simple, single-user system which discusses using eSMTP to send email instead of setting up a full-blown postfix or exim or whatever server.
July 2, 2008
Last week’s TechMail was Chroot users with OpenSSH: An easier way to confine users to their home directories which discusses the new chroot capabilities of newer openssh. Chrooted sftp is very very cool and a welcome addition to openssh, although it would be neat if …
June 21, 2008
As I was poking around the Amazon website to find the name of a certain Venom album I had owned when I was younger, I cam across an amusing forum thread entitled What is the best band of the 80’s, in the metal forum. Presumably they would be discussing metal here and by …
June 18, 2008
Now that people have let me know where that OpenSSL comic came from, I’ve been looking at xkcd.com more this morning and found one that is utterly priceless and totally reminds me of me. If you have time to kill, I suggest checking the site out but in the meantime, …
June 17, 2008
Found another good comic inspired by the Debian OpenSSL issue (no, it will never get too old for me). Forget where I came across this one though… just saw it in my downloads folder as I was doing some cleaning up. It’s quite funny though, because it also pokes at …
June 17, 2008
Has anyone encountered this, or more specifically, know how to fix it? I’m using gmail to host my linsec.ca mail, and accessing it via POP3 (fetchmail->procmail->mutt). When I send mail out, I send it out via gmail’s SMTP server. The problem is that I never see …
June 16, 2008
The last TechMail is Realize the flexibility of OpenSSH which talks about some of the basics of using OpenSSH, from setting up keys to modifying sshd_config for user/group access controls and different features per group/user. OpenSSH is another of my favourite tools. Of course, …
June 16, 2008
Last week’s TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, sudo: Delegate privileges to users with sudo. It’s just a short primer on how to use sudo so for those that do know how to use it and manage /etc/sudoers, it’s nothing special, but for those who …
June 3, 2008
As much fun as I had in France, I’m sure glad to be back in Canada. Six more hours until I get to see my girls! Can’t wait. France was fun, so thank you again, Anne, for pushing to get me to go. Very much appreciated. Despite leaving my iPod in Anne’s place, …
June 2, 2008
The announcement just went out for the newly formed oss-security group (which is a similar concept to the private vendor-sec group, but open to anyone interested in helping promote and work with security in open source projects). I’ve mentioned oss-security before, but the …
May 30, 2008
Sitting in the Paris office, working across from Oden with Pascal not five feet away, Thomas in the same room, and Pixel, Thierry, and ColinG in the room next to me. Talk about wierd. Some of these guys I’ve worked with for 8 years and never met them before yesterday. I …
May 29, 2008
We got a really really nice review of Mandriva 2008.1 over on Linux.com. Good stuff. It’s nice to see the kind words for all the hard work the developers and community have put into this release.
May 28, 2008
I’m off to the airport now. Should be in France tomorrow at 9am their time (1am my time). Praying for a good flight! For the first time in eight years I will be meeting my co-workers face-to-face. Quite exciting stuff!
May 25, 2008
Industry Canada has posted a study entitled The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada, the description of which is: Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which …
May 23, 2008
This comic amuses me. It’s originally at http://www.lessaid.net/fun/apt-get-wife.png
May 21, 2008
The Register has just put up an article entitled After Debian releases SSL patch, a world of hurt for security pros. On page 2, I’m quoted which is cool, but what isn’t cool is that the two typos in the article happen in my “quotes”. Strange thing is that …
May 21, 2008
Last week’s Techmail is Log Linux services with runit (although I’m pretty sure that’s not the original title I submitted). Anyways, it discusses logging various services running under runit using svlogd, so you can completely separate services from each other. …
May 21, 2008
In light of the recent Debian debacle and to get the word out to more people, this week’s Techmail is Find and fix weak OpenSSL/OpenSSH keys: Debian-based Linux vulnerability which more or less reiterates what happened with the Debian OpenSSL… fun… and points …
May 17, 2008
It’s been an amusing morning reading more takes on the Debian OpenSSL issue. While I was in the know before most others due to vendor-sec, and was able to quickly verify this didn’t affect Mandriva, the fallout still continues. For those that think otherwise, this is …
May 16, 2008
At the end of the month Mandriva is celebrating it’s 10 year anniversary. I didn’t think I was going to be able to get to come, but it turns out that I am (thanks Anne!). This is very cool for me because in June I’ll be celebrating two anniversaries of my …
May 16, 2008
Found this interesting comic today.. Fred linked to it in IRC and I just had to share.
May 7, 2008
This week’s TechMail is about one of my favourite programs, runit: Use runit to supervise Linux services. I can’t recommend runit highly enough, but ever since I started with qmail years ago and djb’s daemontools, supervised services have been a bit of a thing …
May 7, 2008
Last week’s TechMail tip was Learn to use the openssl command-line program which goes into the use of… openssl… on the command-line. Stuff like generating hashes, doing general file encryption, etc.
April 24, 2008
And this week’s TechMail is Try IRC with Irssi to communicate via chat, which essentially looks at irssi being the superior IRC client to anything else you can find out there. Couple screen, irssi, and mutt and you’ve essentially got my “command center” on …
April 24, 2008
Been busy redoing my office this week and was busy with Mandriva release stuff last week so I forgot to put up the new TechMails. Last week’s techmail was Using vi key bindings in bash and zsh, which looks at using, you guessed it, vi keybindings instead of the default …
April 20, 2008
Well, I’m no longer a virgin to the Mandriva build system. I’ve been using some tools, like iurt, on the secteam buildbox for a while now, but I’ve not had the need to use repsys or mdvsys. So I started playing with them yesterday. For starters, someone needs to …
April 20, 2008
Saw a few others on Planet Mandriva doing this so I figured what the heck, I’d do the same. I don’ t use bash tho, I use zsh and on one box I have the extended history saved (timestamps), and the other I don’t. Also keep in mind that I do a lot of stuff via sudo …
April 10, 2008
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 …
April 9, 2008
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 9, 2008
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.
April 9, 2008
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.
April 8, 2008
/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 on another? …
March 28, 2008
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 …
March 26, 2008
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 …
March 25, 2008
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.
March 23, 2008
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 properly. The …
March 14, 2008
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 bought from …
March 14, 2008
I love this gif. Has to be one of my all-time favourites. Was doing some file cleaning, found it, and figured I’d stick it up here so I never lose it. =)
March 4, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Set up ISC’s dhcpd server which discusses setting up dhcpd, and how you can use it to assign static IP addresses – using the convenience of DHCP-supplied configurations with the convenience of static IP addresses for client machines (and …
March 3, 2008
As usual, I take a day or two when a new Mandriva version is in RC status to install and play around with it. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that the machine I throw to the dogs is my Toshiba Libretto. Asus may have a cute thing with the Eee PC, but …
March 1, 2008
I read this really eye-opening piece on the death of HD-DVD to Blu-ray, and Microsoft’s stakes, involvement, and (typically) underhanded activity regarding it. The piece is called Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD. I didn’t pay much attention to the next-gen hi-def …
March 1, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Secure temporary files in Linux which discusses how to properly secure temporary files, using things like loopback filesystems, separate partitions for /tmp and using appropriate mount flags. It’s pretty simplistic stuff, but can make a huge …
March 1, 2008
Last week’s TechMail tip was Encrypting and decrypting files with GnuPG, which covers some stuff about using gpg to deal with encryption of files (instead of just using gpg for mail).
February 17, 2008
A few of us on vendor-sec have decided to pull some cross-vendor resources and we’ve put together a new informal organization, similar to vendor-sec, but for a more “general public”. It’s primarily a wiki of various security-related information and a …
February 12, 2008
This came through as this week’s techmail, although I’m not sure why.. this was originally posted back in June, but since that was before I started linking to the tips I figured I’d note it here anyways. Tuning the Linux kernel for more aggressive network …
February 11, 2008
Found this link this morning, to a site with some nice cheatsheets that might be of interest to some people. There are cheetsheats for regexps, PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, etc. Single-page cheetsheats that can be used for easy reference. Found them on ilovejackdaniels.com. Might be …
February 9, 2008
I was bored tonight so I wrote a wrapper for hddtemp for Nagios monitoring. I have a bit of a quirky setup for Nagios where I run the local system checks on remote systems via netcat, ipsvd, and a script to handle the query. This allows me to monitor remote drive space, current …
February 8, 2008
There was a vulnerability in libcdio that we sat on for quite a bit because I had accidentally found another way to crash iso-info. Took some time to figure it all out, but we were persistent and Gustavo came up with the fix for all supported libcdio versions. I don’t …
February 6, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Get started with GnuPG, a quick primer on another of my favourite tools: GnuPG. Learn the basics of getting your own GPG keypair created and learn a little bit about fingerprints and signatures and what they all mean. And if you want to get more into …
February 2, 2008
If you’ve ever wondered exactly who it is that Microsoft is catering their operating system, wonder no further. For those of who have bought Vista and haven’t been able to figure out how to open the box, I have the answer for you. Don’t feel bad if you’ve …
February 1, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Use tcpdump for network debugging which goes over some of the basics for, yes, using tcpdump to debug your network (or, if you’re curious, just to watch packets sling around your computer).
January 28, 2008
A friend of mine has moved his domains over to Google mail, which can now do full domain support for email amongst their other appliances. Standard edition is free, but the premier edition is fairly pricy ($50USD per year per email account). So I signed up for the standard …
January 27, 2008
Well, yesterday was pretty nice considering it’s nearing the end of January.. had a high of about -2C. Today.. drastic difference. Woke up and the thermometer read -15C and it was blizzard-like conditions… not heavy snow, but a pretty brisk wind. Currently it’s …
January 27, 2008
Well, it’s a little bit early for easter, but I’m cleaning my desktop and came across the following graphic, which is perhaps one of the amusing things that has made it’s way to my email recently that sets me to grinning every time I look at it. Enjoy!
January 26, 2008
This week’s TechRepublic tip is on Auto-reboot Linux after a kernel panic. It’s a pretty simplistic post regarding automatically rebooting the Linux kernel if it encounters a panic. The posts on it are good too, indicating on how to tell the kernel to treat an oops …
January 22, 2008
Anyone have any experience with this? I may end up (and will be proposing) that the school my wife works for looks into replacing their (falling apart, IMHO) Win2k server using Active Directory for the domain controller and whatnot to a solution using Samba and OpenLDAP (and …
January 22, 2008
Wow. This was completely unexpected, but I just read this morning that Crispin Cowan has joined Microsoft to work on security stuff over there. This, as far as I’m concerned, is big news for Microsoft. Sounds like they may finally have someone who has a clue working over …
January 17, 2008
This week’s TechMail is Learn to use a serial console on Linux which walks through the steps needed to use screen as a serial console client and setting up the remote system to answer to serial login requests. Handy for those headless servers when ssh stops working for some …
January 16, 2008
This is quite exciting for me as no one (other than myself) has ever written anything about Annvix before. But today I saw that Linux.com had written a review of Annvix. The title was Annvix: A stable, secure, no-frills server distro and I don’t think the reviewer realized …
January 11, 2008
My wife works for a lutheran school as the secretary, the same school my daughter goes to. Unfortunately, it’s primarily a Windows environment. It was 100% windows until I donated a linux server to handle their backups. But now that the machine is in there, it opens the …
January 10, 2008
This week’s TechMail tip is Use OpenNTPD for time synchronization, which discusses using OpenNTPD (from the OpenSSH team) instead of the older (and more bloated) NPTD.
January 9, 2008
Today is the first day of MacHeist 2, an event where you can get 10 shareware OS X applications for $49USD (all the apps regularly priced at $343.75USD). That’s a pretty spanking good deal. This year’s heist looks pretty good… last year’s was better, but …
January 8, 2008
Forgot to close the guinea pig cage top last night, and this is what I woke up to: Seems like the two get along just fine… I’ve had them together in a “controlled” environment before, and Peekaboo (the rodent) is pretty familiar with cats (we’ve had …
January 7, 2008
Remember having to write an essay in school with that same title? I do. Had to do it a few times… no longer, but it makes for a nice nostalgic title so let’s just go with it. Today was my first day “back” after three weeks of holidays. It was definitely a …
December 30, 2007
Just finished releasing Annvix 3.0-RELEASE. It’s been almost a year since the last release and while this one isn’t as significant (in terms of features) as 2.0-RELEASE was, it’s significant in that RSBAC is gone, AppArmor is default, new kernel, new glibc, and …
December 21, 2007
These are older tips I wrote for TechRepublic but I found myself needing to look them up before and realized they weren’t linked on my blog. Of course, with over 200 articles written for TechRepublic over the last 7-8 years, that’s not surprising. =) Anyways, Automate …
December 18, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Filter for unwanted mail and mailing lists with procmail, which goes into procmail recipes a little more in depth than last week’s tip (size restraints on these tips sucks sometimes, so we end up with two-parters). Shows how to build …
December 13, 2007
This week’s techmail is Filter mail with powerful procmail, a brief introduction to using procmail. For those who don’t get to use procmail, I feel sorry for you. Procmail is the best filtering system for email, bar none.
December 10, 2007
According to Michael Geist’s blog, the Canadian DMCA… nonsense… is being delayed. I guess sending that email did more than just show me as a zealot, eh? Yeah, I’m pointing at you Adam. =) Why wait for it to be introduced to raise a fit? Better do it …
December 4, 2007
Today’s TechMail is Get more e-mail flexibility with Fetchmail, which discusses the use of fetchmail. It doesn’t go into too much depth, more of a primer on fetchmail than anything. I think an upcoming tip will discuss procmail a little bit more.
November 29, 2007
I read a moment ago on /. Canada’s New DMCA Considered Worst Copyright Law and was horrified. The link is to this article on the Globe and Mail: A new copyright law is coming. All Canadians need to do their part to protest this obscene piece of potential legislature. …
November 29, 2007
I don’t usually take much interest or stock in anything the ZD family of sites put out, but there was a decent piece I read tonight, entitled Ten things you can do to help open source. It’s an interesting read, and I’ve read similar articles in the past. I …
November 28, 2007
A little late to the party here, but I just finished watching Sicko, a film by Michael Moore. I’m still astounded by what I saw. I sincerely thank God that a) I’m a pretty healthy individual (lack of exercise and such aside) and b) that I live in Canada. I don’t …
November 27, 2007
Well, to put it bluntly, Safari butchers the visual editor in WordPress. No idea why. Really irritating, but on a whim I fired up both Camino and Firefox to do some edits and they worked fine. Then I disabled the visual editor in my account profile and lo-and-behold Safari …
November 27, 2007
This week’s TechMail is pretty basic, but one of those “hidden gems” that the average person probably isn’t aware of. Of course, it’s one that the average person may not care about either but… regardless, this week’s techmail is …
November 26, 2007
While working on the Mandriva maintainer’s database, one thing needed is an authentication token as a very basic safety precaution. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working and it looks like PHP’s message digest hashing is off. Has anyone ever seen this …
November 21, 2007
The cool thing about Guitar Hero III is that you can view stats online. This is nice because the stat-viewer in the game sucks compared to Guitar Hero II. Anyways, here’s the link to my Guitar Hero statistics. On a side note, I’ve found that in some ways GH3 is both …
November 20, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Secure Connections to PostgreSQL which goes a little bit into the many different possible authentication methods you can use with the PostgreSQL database server, how it differs from MySQL, and illustrates why, at least from a security standpoint, I …
November 18, 2007
Another Techrepublic tip is up, entitled Specify who can log in via OpenSSH. I love writing about OpenSSH… it’s probably, weirdly enough, one of my favourite programs. I can’t imagine not having it or even surviving one day (of work) without it. This tip talks …
November 9, 2007
I had the privilege today of getting to play with Leopard Server a little bit (the new OS X 10.5 server). I can honestly say it’s extremely “wow”. It’s got a slick interface to configuring things like DNS, DHCP, apache, Open Directory (which is essentially …
November 6, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Define disk quotas to keep users from hogging drive space. Already the comments associated with it are amusing. I wonder where people get the idea that anyone (I mean, seriously, anyone) would pay some guy $2000/mo to be a “junior disk quota …
October 31, 2007
Seems like I’m writing quite a bit about OS X. Sorry, it’s so new and there’s some cool features in it. Like AutoFS finally working (more or less) properly out of the box. It works, but the NFS exports need to be exported to the server with the …
October 30, 2007
This week’s TechMail tip is Authentication caching with nscd which talks about how to keep authentication credentials cached for disconnected operations (i.e. if you auth against an LDAP server and it goes down or you take your laptop home). It’s missing some bits …
October 29, 2007
Well, my beloved Saft is still not updated for Safari 3… there’s a beta for Safari 3 that works on Tiger, but nothing that works on Leopard. Which makes Safari almost useless, although I did find in the History menu bar the option “Reopen All Windows From Last …
October 28, 2007
Well, I did my duty on Friday and went out and grabbed a copy of OS X 10.5 (Leopard). As I was finishing my SuperDuper backups, I was poking around on Apple’s support forums and heard about all the horror stories people have had. Two essential apps for me, DayLite and …
October 24, 2007
According to most gaming sites, Guitar Hero III is supposed to be released on October 28th. Either it got pushed forward, or I lucked out and my local Walmart screwed up big because when I was out buying picture frames, I decided to see if Conan (which was supposed to be released …
October 23, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Configure GNU Screen to handle multiple terminals. Screen is an awesome program that works great on Linux on OS X. The tip is pretty much platform-agnostic; it works well for both Linux and OS X (I use it on both). The really great thing is …
October 20, 2007
I find it quite amusing how quickly people jump the gun on things and start spreading FUD without bothering to talk to the people involved. I suppose that’s the creative license that having a blog entitles people, but it still irks me because in a lot of cases it’s …
October 16, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Power Linux with pipes and redirection; a little discourse on how to use pipes and redirects and how they make the CLI way more kick-ass than any GUI.
October 15, 2007
I’ve been on Facebook for a few weeks now and while I think it’s great in that I’ve gotten to connect with old friends that I’ve not had contact with for years, I also find it really bizarre. For instance, with Facebook you can set your status.. a little …
October 12, 2007
Shocking news on the AppArmor mailing list today. Novell laid off all the guys they hired when they aquired Immunix a few years ago, back in 2005. I had noticed that my friend Seth had sent a message a while ago indicating that he has no longer with Novell and passing on a new …
October 9, 2007
Well, I’ve decided to move the blog to wordpress instead of serendipity. I liked serendipity a lot, but… well, wordpress is more popular and I wouldn’t to see if I could make trackbacks actually work. Seems a little simpler and straightforward, once you get …
October 9, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Synchronize computers with Unison which introduces the multi-computer synchronization tool known as Unison.
October 9, 2007
I always like the week or two before a release. While the other developers are busting their butts trying to get things finished for the upcoming release, I actually get to take a bit of a breather, largely because I don’t like duplicating effort so any non-essential …
October 2, 2007
This week’s TechRepublic tip is Using FileZilla on Linux.
September 25, 2007
This week’s TechMail is Getting things done with mutt, a look at using the GTD concepts with my favourite email client.
September 18, 2007
I’ve got an idea in my head… my daughter goes to a private christian school, and my wife works as the secretary there. Unfortunately, they’re married to Microsoft technology, and I doubt they even realize why they are. They’re using an Active …
September 18, 2007
Today’s tip over at TechRepublic is Obtaining file information with RPM. Gives a bit of an overview of some of the commands you can use with rpm, regardless of which frontend you use (urpmi, apt, yum, etc.).
September 11, 2007
Another week, another tip, this one is Locate files with the find tool, a quick run-down on using find to… well… find stuff.
September 4, 2007
Another week, another TechMail tip. This week’s is Learn to search with grep.
August 31, 2007
Well, I’ve decided to try and take the plunge and implement some GTD philosophies in my life. While it encompasses a lot of different things, the first thing I aim to try is to reclaim my email, which has been getting way out of hand lately. I remember about 2 years ago I …
August 28, 2007
New article on TechRepublic from yours truly about Configuring wireless support in Mandriva with ndiswrapper.
August 21, 2007
This comic from The Joy of Tech is awesome. Had to link it. It’ll probably screw up the formatting on the page a bit, but is well worth it.
August 21, 2007
Well, I’ve been writing for TechRepublic for about 8 years now. I think I’m going to start linking the weekly tips to my blog here. For those interested, past tips (just tips, I think, not the full-blown articles) are available for perusal here. So here’s this …
August 18, 2007
I read a very well-written and thought-provoking article the other day entitled “Windows is Free”. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek because “Free” here isn’t free in the sense that we in the open source world view things… neither free as in …
August 18, 2007
I’ve been really busy with a few side jobs this week, as well as regular work for Mandriva (playing catchup from a few days in Drumheller (Alberta’s dinosaur capital) last week). However, last week I bought Guitar Hero II with the guitar controller when we got back …
July 17, 2007
After a few really long weeks, bugzilla is finally live. It’s about bloody time. Of course, now that it’s live, there are even more requests to do stuff. Oh well. Par for the course I guess. However, I’m seriously considering taking the next two days off to …
June 30, 2007
The bugzilla conversion is almost complete, except for a few minor issues that need to be figured out (such as who will be owning the bugs initiall when they are submitted). And a few minor cosmetics. Head on over to bugzilla.linsec.ca and check it out. Constructive feedback is …
June 28, 2007
Well, someone else was supposed to be working on the new bugzilla, but they got pulled off for an OEM project (completely understandable), so since I really need some functionality and speed out of bugzilla to progress with some work flows I have in mind, I decided to hunker down …
June 18, 2007
I’ve been using PhoneValet to handle the voicemail system here. It’s an OS X app and it works really good. I’ve run it on my desktop, but now that I have a spare OS X machine that I’ve turned into a bit of a server, I’ve put PhoneValet on there. With …
June 2, 2007
Came across this good HOWTO on HowtoForge entitled The Perfect Desktop: Mandriva 2007 Spring Free (Mandriva 2007.1). Pretty good write up, although there’s too many pictures for my liking. I guess that makes a good visual HOWTO tho. Goes into detail on how to setup the PLF …
May 29, 2007
Been messing around with OpenVPN today since I had some time and it’s a little frustrating. There’s some tutorials out there, but they’re all pretty terse… most of the stuff it’s almost assumed that you already know. Anyways, used the church I go to …
May 24, 2007
I’ve never really played with Solaris before. I’ve looked at it once or twice, briefly, but that was about it. The other day I downloaded a vmware image for Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris, one of these OpenSolaris-based distributions that apparently uses a lot of GNU …
May 24, 2007
I had asked on IRC the other day for info on how to send emails to bugzilla. Well, I found the actual specs for it on the bugzilla site. The documentation in the bugzilla tarball is a bit dated in this regard. The only problem is that checksetup.pl is a little strict and keeps …
May 20, 2007
Just discovered something very interesting. I had all my websites setup on my machine with IP-based virtual hosts (i.e. <VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80>) and was trying to use wildcards (*:80) and it just wasn’t working right the way I wanted it to, because I wanted some …
May 18, 2007
As part of the consulting business that I run, I do some web hosting on the side, usually for clients I take from start to finish; those I design/develop the site for and then end up hosting it for them. I used to do this with a box at a colocation facility close to me and it was …
May 10, 2007
I keep running into this issue everytime I have to run vmware tools so I thought I’d mention it here. vmware-tools insists on rewriting /etc/modprobe.conf and changing “alias sound-slot-0 snd-ens1371” to “alias sound es1371”. I have no idea why, but …
May 5, 2007
Short of implementing some more error checking and making things a bit prettier, the “RPM Query Suite” is pretty much done. I’ve finished rqp, the counter-part to rqs. rqp imports the requires, provides, and file lists of binary rpm packages into a postgresql …
May 3, 2007
Just spent most of the day and quite a bit of yesterday porting a program Stew wrote for the secteam (called srpm) that builds a database of src.rpm files so you can do queries on source files (this is extremely useful for us in determining whether or not a vulnerable source file …
April 30, 2007
Just found today when I was looking to see if I missed something with the mutt sidebar patch (still irritates me that I have to sync a mailbox before jumping to another mailbox in order for the counts in the sidebar to be updated properly), that mutt 1.5.15 was released earlier …
April 26, 2007
Over the weekend I had the opportunity to install 2007.1 on a HP TX1120 laptop (a tablet). This is a really slick laptop; it’s an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56 (1.8GHz), with 2GB RAM, a Seagate 160GB HDD, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 (ok, the graphics card leaves a little to be desired …
April 26, 2007
Well, I’ve played WoW for about 2 years now… it doesn’t do much for me anymore. I had hopes with the Burning Crusade expansion and it was pretty neat playing an over-sized smurf for a while, but now it’s pretty much all the same old thing. Kinda …
April 19, 2007
I just setup a CIA.vc account for Mandriva which is available here: http://cia-vc.org/stats/project/Mandriva. Should be interesting to see the statistics, and I presume we’ll be “front-page” most of the time simply due to the number of commits that go through on …
April 14, 2007
Well, yesterday was Stew Benedict’s last day with Mandriva. Stew has been working with me on security updates for a few years now and it has been an absolute pleasure to work with him for that time. He’s moved on, and I respect that… probably needed something …
March 20, 2007
I came across an interesting editorial today entitled Vista - Arrogance & Stupidity. It was an extremely interesting read. So interesting, in fact, that I had to share it just because it astounds me what Microsoft is (or isn’t, as the case may be) thinking. Disclaimer: …
March 17, 2007
I decided to give the new Mandriva 2007.1 RC1 a try. Since I mirror cooker, I figured I’d do a straight “urpmi –auto-select” upgrade on my 2007 box rather than downloading a bunch of ISOs. So it’s not really RC1 (really, with a few hundred packages …
March 9, 2007
The other day I put up a full-feature tutorial on how to use mutt on OS X (most of it is applicable to any other OS, of course… there are very few bits that are OS X specific). Thanks to a hint on macosxhints.com, this article is becoming one of the most popular on the …
March 3, 2007
Due to an issue that the 2.6.17+ kernel exemplified, all of the sites I host (annvix.org, linsec.ca, danen.ca, etc.) have been unavailable to anyone using a 2.6.17+ kernel due to a change in the way TCP window scaling was implemented, which has been noted in a number of places …
February 26, 2007
I’ve reorganized my main linsec.ca site a bit. I’ve moved everything into MediaWiki (yes, I’m finding I’m in love with that silly thing). Mostly because it’s just more convenient to edit and nicer to keep track of statistics with. I’ve also …
February 23, 2007
Yes, I’m nostalgic. Before I started using Linux, I was using OS/2. I went to it from DOS/Win3.1… skipped Windows95 altogether. OS/2 was the absolute best OS back in the day (as far as I’m concerned) and being a nostalgic (and sometimes bored) idiot, I decided …
February 17, 2007
On IRC last night I was pointed to a new secure linux distro… this one simply called Hardened Linux. The individual whom I was speaking with (“Intensity”) was wondering why there needed to be YASLD (Yet Another Secure Linux Distro). Interested, I was reading …
February 15, 2007
Found this really nice patch for mutt today, it’s a sidebar patch that adds a list of mailboxes to your mutt view so you can see which mailboxes has new mail in it, the current count of messages in each, etc. All I can say is very very nice! This needs to be in mutt proper …
February 5, 2007
Someone posted on the expert@ mailing list a very interesting link to a fellow who ran a series of benchmarks on different Linux filesystems over a year ago (Jan 2006). It was in the Linux Gazette and shows some very interesting stats. Granted, this was with the 2.6.14 kernel, so …
February 4, 2007
It’s been nearly a year in the works, but the next version of Annvix is out (2.0-RELEASE). You can read the (relatively short) “PR” on the Annvix blog announcement. Anyways, I’m just happy it’s done with. Trying to get this release out in a timely …
January 31, 2007
Was banging my head with this trying to figure it out a few times and figured I’d post the solution here. Due to googlebot and the load it was generating on my server at the colo, I had to move svn.annvix.org from my primary webserver to a spare box on my cable line at …
January 30, 2007
My one gripe a few months ago about OS X was the lack of sshfs and fuse support… I wrote about this for a TechRepublic tip quite a few months ago and when I did I was pretty ticked that it didn’t work on OS X (sshfs absolutely rocks!). Anyways, the fine folks at …
January 23, 2007
Title says it all. I love smoking, but it’s not good for me. I have to start hating it. At any rate, I feel like a sh*t because my daughter thinks I don’t smoke and the other day she said “well, my daddy doesn’t smoke” to her aunt who graciously …
January 15, 2007
Well, last night I got my druid to level 55. This is a pretty amazing feat for me considering how little time I spend playing WoW these days. But I’m all psyched for the expansion, so I’m sure I’ll go overboard on it for the next week or two and then it’ll …
January 15, 2007
I love hearing about the iPhone. I’ve seen pictures. It’s pretty slick. Looks really nice. Now throw Palm OS on there and then we’re talking. Sorry, but I’ve already got an ipod (well, two actually… no… three including the wife’s …
December 15, 2006
Having some issues with screen. I’ve been running mutt under screen for a few weeks now (and irssi) which has been working fine but it wasn’t until today that I put two and two together, namely that when I cut-n-paste from a terminal with mutt in it, I was getting a …
December 7, 2006
I understand I volunteered for the job (it’s a dirty job and I think very few people would want to do it) but boy am I glad it’s done. I’ve just spent nearly two weeks converting content from the Mandriva development wiki …
November 25, 2006
Well, I’ve decided that since it’s been over a month now and no one has decided yet on what software to use (apparently there’s one hold-out for xwiki while everyone else wants mediawiki… hello… VETO!), I’ve decided to make it monumentally in …
November 22, 2006
I’ve been doing a lot of my web development lately on my macbook pro, but the problem is that I do the work locally, then have to rsync it to my Linux-based server to see the results. Not a huge deal, but a PITA. So I decided I was going to look into running the …
October 30, 2006
Well, I’ve had it. Spam is driving me nuts. My spamassassin/RBL lists/etc. setup was working really well for a long time but now more and more spam is getting through and it’s nothing if not pissing me off. Strange thing is, I get a lot more spam on my Mandriva email …
October 2, 2006
Sigh. I love it when things get thrown out of context and misinformation abounds. I’ve gotten used to this with proprietary vendors and ignorant news sources, but to get this within the open source community? And from a web site that is supposed to be pro-OSS? Come on. Yes, …
October 2, 2006
Well, wow, if I didn’t expect to get the “anti-Mandriva” coverage based on a previous post. So, as a result, I determined to get the ATI drivers working. The big difference here is that this time I’m using the 32bit Mandriva rather than 64bit; no idea if …
September 30, 2006
On Thursday I brought up, on the maintainers@ mailing list, the question that had been dicussed a few months ago and discussed on the cooker list from about April-June, regarding the restructing of the Mandriva Linux Development Community wiki with the possibility of moving if …
September 28, 2006
Michael Scherer posted to cooker@ a few days ago about putting PyBugz a devilishly cool python app for querying a bugzilla database into cooker. He also emailed me because a while ago I had tried the GUI Deskzilla product with the Mandriva bugzilla and it didn’t work, so he …
September 25, 2006
This might sound a little harsh coming from a guy who’s worked for a Linux company for over six years, but things never seem to get easier. Oh sure, the stuff that was hard to deal with last time is easier, but the new features and the stuff you want to check out this time …
September 22, 2006
Well, it’s been over a week since I got my wisdom teeth yanked (last Wed, the 13th). That was just about the most fun I’ve ever had. First off they put me completely out (and I’ve never been under anisthetic before) which was… wierd. I didn’t have …
September 7, 2006
The news is out and any OS X-using developers out there are probably aware that BareBones provided a new major update of BBEdit today. I downloaded it and was playing around with it (this is a paid upgrade so I’ve got some time to evaluate it although the upgrade cost is …
September 4, 2006
I’ve got a lot of trees in my backyard… specifically, about 6 really huge pine trees that I’d love to get rid of. Unfortunately, do to how they are and how the layout of my place is, I can’t pull them down easily… either they’ll go into power …
September 4, 2006
A friend sent me a link to cartoon about the powers of sudo. All hail sudo!
August 29, 2006
I’m a huge fantasy nut… one of my biggest hobbies is reading. I love reading fantasy books; I have for years. I own a few hundred fantasy books and buy at least 1-2 books a month. One author that I’ve always found interesting is David Eddings. He’s not …
August 25, 2006
The web cracks me up. I’ve been writing for TechRepublic for about 6-7 years now, and every month I write these little tips called “TechMails”. They don’t pay a whole lot, but I enjoy doing it as it gives me a reason to look at new and different things, …
July 31, 2006
I’m depressed. I used to look forward to playing with beta releases and new versions of distros. I’ve even been known to buy copies of distros just to check them out (well, I’ve bought SUSE and YellowDog and downloaded the rest… particularly because those …
July 28, 2006
I read with great amusement a blog entry from Bryan O’Bryan entitled Why I ditched my Mac for Linux and some of the comments (no time to read them all; perhaps later). Instead of leaving a comment there and having it lost in the 100+ comments, I decided to respond here. …
July 4, 2006
This is kind of funny but as I was going through my CVE mails to figure out what needs to be patched, I came across CVE-2006-3244, with this reference: http://secunia.com/advisories/20838. Actually, Secunia has some nice statiscs (I should look at some other programs because …
July 4, 2006
I’ve taken the last week of June “off” from doing updates to look into RSBAC and AppArmor because I’m not convinced that the Mandriva implementation of RSBAC will be user-friendly or transparent, nor very “out-of-the-box”. This was the result …
June 21, 2006
I get a lot of people asking me why, when it comes to my own servers, Annvix, and my own personal recommendations to people who ask what kernel to use, I whole-heartedly do not recommend the 2.6 kernel and instead advocate the stability and greater security of the 2.4 kernel. …
June 14, 2006
I have this shiny new HP media PC to play with (well, setup really) and I installed Mandriva 2006/x86_64 on it last night and was somewhat disappointed with how it turned out. The big issue was with the proprietary ATI drivers which, to my amazement, weren’t in commercial …
June 9, 2006
I write these little things called TechMails for TechRepublic every month and this month I was looking at Konqueror and it’s fish:// Kioslave stuff. I’ve never actually played with fish before, probably because I don’t really like KDE and never use it but this …
June 3, 2006
Well, I’ve been on holidays for two weeks now, with just a little less than a week to go. Talk about busy vacations! That first week I spent a fair amount of time working on Annvix just because I don’t have time otherwise to really get in there and work on it, …
May 22, 2006
Really… it is 2006 right? Email’s been around for ages, so why are email clients still so crappy? Last August I switched from the OS X Mail.app (in Tiger) to mutt because Tiger’s Mail.app was too stinking slow. I get lots of mail… I mean lots of mail. My …
May 10, 2006
Ever seen that movie Swordfish with Hally Berry(sp?) and John Travolta? I like that movie. Appeals to me. Hackers… security… mmm… even if it is a little.. outlandish in parts. Anyways, my favourite scene is when he goes to the big house and sits in front of …
May 1, 2006
I like to call this entry “The problem with incentives for new clients” or, the title I really like, “Why companies screw over the companies who’ve supported them for years”. In this particular instance I’m talking about Bell ExpressVu, my …
April 26, 2006
I find it amusing that so many people “new” to Linux and other open source programs think we’re all a bunch of arrogant, caffeine-strung, egomaniacs. I’ve been lightly reading (and laughing about) a thread on the exim mailing list entitled “Why is …
April 24, 2006
Legacies are a good thing. Everyone wants to leave a legacy… in the most basic form it’s being a parent to a child who will carry on a physical legacy. Almost everyone has a legacy, will have a legacy, or is someone else’s legacy. There are, of course, other …
April 22, 2006
Good God… I’ve just deleted nearly 70 spam comments originating in the last 2 weeks. This is retarded. Makes me almost want to disable comments altogether, although, fortunately, I have it set that every single comment requires moderation. But still… what a …
April 19, 2006
Well, the one thing I love about being an independant consultant is that I get to do lots of different things, not just work on Mandriva stuff. One of the things I hate doing is Windows maintenance and it seems like there is a lot of that going around. Inevitably it’s the …
April 6, 2006
Well, like pretty much everyone, I was pretty pleased to see BootCamp released by Apple; a tool that allows one to dual-boot an intel mac. Not good enough for me, but a good first step. I’ve been waiting for VMWare to step up to the plate and offer a Mac version of their …
March 30, 2006
I moved all the Annvix-related blog entries to the new Annvix Developer’s Blog since I’m “consolidating” all Annvix-related stuff there. That means this blog will be “Annvix clean” (at least as far as technical-ish stuff goes). Just a heads up …
March 30, 2006
I’ve been reading one of the most useless threads on Cooker (the mailing list) I’ve seen yet. Entitled “CasElOVeRs” it’s a… errr… “discussion” regarding the changing of all package names to lowercase for package names. And …
March 27, 2006
I’ve been embarking on a bit of a project since Jan when someone from Groklaw was asking about what vulns we released last year affected a certain distribution and the only way I could get her that info was by doing some convoluted grepping and re-formatting… it …
March 25, 2006
Found this fantastic article about how to setup Subversion, MediaWiki, and Bugzilla to be nicely integrated. The article is really well done, and I’ve adapted most of it to the Annvix wiki and bugzilla, but the subversion integration will be a little problematic (or at …
March 18, 2006
I think if the Egyptians had a plague of snow first instead of water turning into blood, those Israelites would have been let go right away. We’ve had about two feet of snow since midnight last night (might have been later but that’s when I went to bed and there was …
March 15, 2006
Well, only had to go down to the colo twice for this migration… =) Phoned the wife to check on it, reported all connections were good, so happily put stuff back, cleaned up the closet, etc. only to find when I got back home that I couldn’t connect anymore. I think …
March 8, 2006
This is a sweet little machine… 1U opteron 146 (2GHz). Only comes with 512MB stock, but I’m putting 2GB of RAM in it, and two 300GB SATA II drives (acting as a RAID1 mirror). Comes with two gigabit ethernet cards (forcedeth and tg3) and uses sata_nv. vdanen@newhades …
March 2, 2006
I found my new license with which I will license everything: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~avar/cvs/COPYING The DWTFYWWI license is my kind of license.
February 25, 2006
Was just reading this article on linux.com about some guy’s sysadmin toolbox. Yeah, the tools were ok and nothing much different from what I use except for some of the desktop-ish stuff he uses. What got me though was the first comment that was made. Vim has text folding? I …
February 24, 2006
I just read an amusing article on Government Computer News entitled Security wars: Novell SELinux killer rattles Red Hat. I find it amusing because now that Novell owns AppArmor, and has made it public (GPL), it’s starting to rattle some SELinux-based cages (for those not …
February 23, 2006
Last week when I had my little hard drive fiasco, and about 15 minutes after writing my blog entry, I realized I had lost my phone… a motorola v710. Figuring that it was either at the colo or at the one convenience store I had stopped at on my home, I went out at 1:30am to …
February 15, 2006
Well, having a RAID1 setup on this server has saved my a$$ in a huge way. Yesterday I started getting notifications of a smart failure on one of the drives (I have two configured as a RAID1 across a few partitions). So I went down to the colo to swap the drive (after finding a …
February 15, 2006
Funny the timing of these things. When I got my ANNVIX license plate it was within a day (if I remember correctly) of 1.1-RELEASE going out. Looks like it’s the same this time. Picked up the Annvix-mobile this afternoon after about 2.5 months of being in the shop since it …
February 7, 2006
Well, I’ve been playing WoW for a while now… since the summer of last year. I finally managed to get my druid up to level 40. Yeah, you young guys with nothing but homework are laughing at me now since it’s taken me so long to hit, but whatever… …
February 6, 2006
You know, almost every single article that I’ve ever bothered to read on OSNews has been pure crap, to put it politely, and I wonder why these idiots haven’t gotten a clue yet. Their latest piece of editorial or user-submitted idiocy is entitled UNIX Security - …
January 11, 2006
Can’t figure out why I haven’t played with LVM before, but I took a bunch of old drives (2x80GB, 2x46GB, and 2x60GB) and stuffed them in a machine I wasn’t using, installed Annvix on it, and made a 345GB LVM partition that spans all six drives. Very slick! Now I …
January 10, 2006
I find the computer industry, as pertaining to Microsoft “innovation” quite laughable. But the thing I find most amusing is that people buy this whole “we’re Microsoft and we innovate”. I don’t think Redmond has come out with an original idea …
January 5, 2006
You know, it really irritates me that almost every single day there is a new “report” or article out about Linux security… and more often than not it’s compared to Windows security. Not only has this topic been beaten to death, stomped on, kicked, buried, …
January 5, 2006
It’s come to my attention that some folks seem to think I’m Theo de Raadt in disguise… that I’m somewhat volatile in email. Nope… I’m not Theo. But I do get irritated fairly easily… maybe I’ve got a hidden God-complex somewhere …
January 3, 2006
I had made the transition to subversion a while ago for handling not only Annvix, but my own personal stuff as well (web work, scripts I use, etc.). The one thing that I really liked about using CVS tho was the cvs2cl script, which makes a nice little Changelog file out of your …
December 20, 2005
Well, after some mucking around, I finally got FreeNX to work on Mandriva 2006/x86_64. The problem was the 64bit version didn’t work very well. And the commercial NX server, although it says it’s for i386 and amd64, also has a lot of unresolved dependencies due to it, …
December 10, 2005
I don’t know if I’m an idiot and just can’t make it work, but I’ve been farting around for most of the day trying to get the desktop of one Linux box to show up on my OS X box so that I can move the Linux box into my rack and run it headless, but still get …
December 7, 2005
Well, the wife managed to mash the Annvixmobile yesterday morning… geez, dealing with a car accident is no fun. Insurance, police reports… waiting 4hrs for a tow truck (yeah, yesterday was a great day for accidents). Wasn’t her fault at all… and no big …
December 5, 2005
Well, this is my first machine moving to the new colo facility. Should be interesting. Been farting around all day getting ready for it.. it’s amazing how lazy you get when the server is in the next room. Now that it’s going to be 15 minutes away, I have to behave a …
November 29, 2005
Everytime I turn around I’m hearing someone say how good Ubuntu is. I’ve never tried it before today so I figured I’d give it a go and check it out. My first comment: not a big fan of brown. I’m not an “earthy” kinda guy (nevermind that my …
November 29, 2005
This cracks me up. I hate ABBA. My wife likes ABBA… I can’t stand them. I find them… irritating. So it was quite amusing for me to hear a cover song by the band Diablo… they do a cover of “Dancing Queen”. This has got to be the funniest …
November 21, 2005
Good Lord… I just found out from the owner of the house next door (who was renting the house to her step-son and his friends for the last 2 years) that they’ve been growing pot in the basement and have been selling ecstasy and crystal meth out of the house. And one …
November 15, 2005
I should have been doing other work today, but there was nothing super urgent so I decided to dedicate the day to converting content from the old TWiki-based Mandriva Community Wiki over to the new system (using MediaWiki). What an utterly boring job. Dries out the eyes too. …
November 11, 2005
I swear… if another spitting venom thingamajobby kills me I will freak right out. Trying to kill this level 30 furbolg with a bunch of level 27-28 body guards is one thing… (I’m only level 27 myself) but for those fricking spiders to come wandering around and …
November 9, 2005
Ok, as per my last entry, I’m gonna do some comparisons between Komodo 3.5 and Zend Studio 5.0. Both have recently been released, both are “heavy weight” IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments). Zend Studio deals particularly with PHP… …
November 9, 2005
Hot on the heels of Komodo 3.5 for OS X, the final version of Zend Studio is now available too (upgrading as I write this). I’ve been using the betas for a while, and I think it’s a great upgrade over version 4. I’m a little concerned by the comments and writeup …
November 8, 2005
Well, I have a definite need to have virtual machine support for 64bit guests so imagine how pleased I was when vmware indicated that the new version of workstation (5.5.0) would have support for 64bit guests. Fantastic! Then, reading the fine print, discovered that I would need …
November 3, 2005
Well, I’ve been asking for it for about 2 years now but ActiveState has finally come out with an OS X native version of the Komodo IDE. Is it too late? I dunno… I’ve been using Zend Studio for a while now and I’ve come to really like it. The latest …
October 29, 2005
Here I figured with Annvix 1.1-RELEASE done I could get cracking on some WoW finally… been missing it and haven’t had much time to play. I did get a little bit in, then found a few problems with some packages (well, 3 isn’t so bad I guess) so I did that, then I …
October 29, 2005
Hmmm… looks like I built php-xml wrong and the rss feeds weren’t working so this is just a test to see if my rss reader picks things up now.
October 28, 2005
Well, I’ve always had Tux hanging around the rear-view mirror of my Jetta and when we got the Sportage I had to fight with the wife to (ahem) borrow the Tux that my daughter had… aquired… from my office and hang it from the rear-view mirror of the Sportage. Of …
September 26, 2005
Ahhh… life in the wild frontier of the internet with it’s pervasive exploits, backdoors, rootkits, and other goodies. It was quite a surprise this morning when I was reading through my daily logging reports and found that I had a process spring up since …
September 10, 2005
Haven’t posted in this section for a bit… but I have to admit that ever since I gave World of Warcaft a go, I haven’t missed EverQuest or EverQuest2 at all. WoW gives me all the MMoRPG junkiness I need and although I don’t have time to play it as much as …
September 9, 2005
Ahhh… it’s cold out but I’m outside with my new couple-day old Toshiba Libretto U100.. typing is slow and I feel like my fingers are very fat, but I’m happy and satisfied. After a couple days of struggling, I’ve got this little beast configured …
August 16, 2005
Oh my God… I just read the scariest thing on slashdot about the sale of 1000 iBooks for $50 each and the resulting riot. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/16/197222 This is the sickest thing I think I’ve read in a long time. People actually feel …
July 30, 2005
Has anyone else had issues with Tiger’s Mail.app? I preferred the version that came with Panther! After using it for a while, and doing a fresh install about two days ago (granted, I copied all of the old files, but still… the whole system feels spunkier so one would …
July 18, 2005
I find LDAP for authentication highly irritating. It’s better than some alternatives, like NIS (haven’t looked at NIS+ so I don’t know how it measures up), but man oh man, it’s a real nuisance sometimes. I wrote that LDAP Authentication piece when there …
July 16, 2005
Just finished the first draft of my Using Kerberos 5 for Single Sign-On Authentication paper. Needs to be re-read and proofed and definitely needs some adding (i.e. adding Windows XP and Mac OS X clients, integrating with OpenLDAP, etc.). but for a starter, it’s pretty good …
July 1, 2005
I think everyone has a set of applications that are absolutely essential to them. I’d like to list a few of the essentials and favourite apps that I use for OS X (I’ll do another list later for Linux). There are a lot of great applications out there… some open …
June 23, 2005
Yesterday started some of the most laughable speculation regarding Mandriva’s future that I’ve read in a long time. It made for quite a good chuckle at first. To recap, an interview on LinuxPlanet with Ian Murdock was published yesterday indicating, among other silly …
June 20, 2005
This may be of interest to some people, but it’s more of interest to me. Below are links to my current EQ2 characters. Yes, most of them are pretty sucky right now, but I’m working on it (it’s not like I have tonnes of spare time!). Right now my main is a druid …
June 20, 2005
I hate to add to the noise that’s going on about Apple’s move from PPC to x86, but it’s just starting to irritate me so much. I can’t believe that people are so stupid and/or blind! The death of Linux? Come on. Microsoft might like us to believe that, but …
June 20, 2005
Well, I ditched the old static-page iBlog software in order to use Serendipity, which is PHP-based, hackable, and moveable in that I can add entries wherever I am. iBlog had a stupid licensing thing so I could only use it on my desktop machine. Oh well. Anyways, I’m hoping …
May 9, 2005
Hopefully no one will have noticed, but earlier this weekend I moved the Annvix (and linsec.ca, mandriva.vmlinuz.ca, and other sites) over to an x86_64 system from an x86 system. With a spanky powerful build system now (dual Opteron), I had an extra athlon64 system no longer …
May 8, 2005
Well, I got OS X 10.4 (aka “Tiger”) the night it came out.. then spent that night doing backups before I even opened the box. Took me a bit, but worth it because I always do an erase and install… best time to clean up is when installing a new OS. Unfortunately, …
April 19, 2005
Not really, OS X-related, but kinda is considering my Windows install looks more like a default OS X install than my Mac desktops do! Read on for some good links to customizing Windows XP if you, like me, are saddled with using it some of the time and just can’t stand how …
April 6, 2005
I use LDAP for authentication on my LAN (I wrote one of the earliest and definitive articles available on the internet for MandrakeSecure quite a while back), but I find dealing with LDAP to be a serious PITA. It’s not the easiest thing to manage from the …
March 26, 2005
Spammers irritate the heck out of me. And due to the open nature of TWiki, they’ve begun to take advantage of it and start including little hidden spam links on the site. I’m sorry to generalize, but every one of these spammers have been Chinese. It’s very very …
March 21, 2005
I’ve been a huge fan of service-style handling of daemons since I first played with qmail a number of years ago. Using daemontools and supervise was awesome, even if it was only for qmail and djbdns back then. When I first decided to start my own proof-of-concept secure …
March 21, 2005
I’ve never kept it a secret that I’m a huge fan of OS X. I love this OS! So I’ve set a category aside for my notes and thoughts on OS X in general. Yes, I work for Mandrake, and yes, I use Mandrake. But I also use OS X (in fact, I use OS X primarily for my …
March 21, 2005
The linsec.ca site has had a few changes and this is due primarily to the fact that chinese spammers are abusing the wiki. So, in the interests of keeping my sanity, I’ve decided to make all the articles on linsec.ca static meaning no more wiki…. This may make for a …