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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
December 5, 2015
After many years of using Using OpenLDAP for User Authentication, and Using Kerberos 5 for Single Sign-On Authentication, it was time to look at FreeIPA as a way of streamlining everything. Important Note: You will want to have FreeIPA on it’s own system (whether this is a …
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 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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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
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 …
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.
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 …
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
SysV-init has been a staple of Linux for years and years. In recent versions of Fedora (current version is 18) this has changed to using systemd. I’m no stranger to alternative means for running startup commands (I did, after all, have Annvix using …
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 …
December 10, 2012
The purpose of this article is to detail the configuration of a Kerberos realm for single sign-on authentication. In particular, the document will cover installation and configuration on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, however it should be relevant enough for any recent Linux …
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 …
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> …
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 …
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 …
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 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 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
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 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 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 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
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 …
February 25, 2011
AIDE (Advanced Intrustion Detection Environment) is a GPL replacement for the commercial Tripwire tool and does pretty much the same thing. Both tools monitor the local filesystem for changes by building an initial database to which subsequent checks are compared. Both use a …
February 25, 2011
There are a number of Linux filesystems have support for Access Control Lists (ACLs) beyond just simple ownership and permissions restrictions to files. These file systems include XFS, ext2, ext3, ext4, and btrfs. This ACL support allows you to fine-tune permissions on your Linux …
February 25, 2011
There are a number of different filesystems available for the different *NIX-ish operating systems. Linux has perhaps the largest variety of filesystem types, including ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, and more. Other systems such as FreeBSD are a little more conservative in what …
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 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 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 …
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 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 …
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 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 …
October 31, 2010
NOTE: This is a revision of the previous LDAP authentication article on MandrakeSecure. A second revision is available on that site, but it is also more or less specific to Mandrakelinux whereas this topic will eventually cover as many different Linux and BSD implementations as …
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 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 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 …
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
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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 …
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 …
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 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
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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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
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 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 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
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
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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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
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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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
Copyright © 2003 Buchan Milne Originally written for the MandrakeSecure website. In what is now becoming a series on LDAP, previous articles have already covered basic LDAP setup and UNIX authentication, and the basics of building a samba PDC backended on OpenLDAP. However, many …
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
One of the best uses for LDAP is as an address book. Whether this is a company white pages or a personal (or distributed) email address book, LDAP makes for a great means of storing addresses that are not often changed. This will detail my own personal experiences in setting up …
March 25, 2008
Like qmail, djbdns is open source but has a restrictive license which makes distributing it a trifle difficult for many vendors. However, it is distributable in binary form if you follow the license and the packager assures to the best of their ability that the binary package …
March 25, 2008
If you’ve ever used qmail or djbdns, you’ve used tcpserver. tcpserver is the program that waits for incoming connections and will run a particular program; when dealing with qmail and djbdns, tcpserver hands off the TCP connection to the particular program to perform …
March 25, 2008
Due to the license of the qmail MTA (Mail Transport Agent), Mandrakelinux is unable to include binary packages of qmail in the distribution proper. The license does permit binary redistribution of qmail provided that it follows the precompiled var-qmail packages rules as set …
March 25, 2008
Courier-IMAP comes with some bundled scripts to create self-signed certificates. Depending on what operating system you installed Courier-IMAP on, and whether you compiled it yourself or if you installed a pre-compiled RPM package, the location for these scripts may be different. …
March 25, 2008
Apache is probably the most widely used web server currently available. It can be used on any form of UNIX and derivatives (Linux, *BSD, etc.) as well as other operating systems such as Windows and OS/2. It is freely available and open source, scalable, extremely configurable, …
March 25, 2008
NOTE: This is a revision of the previous “Enabling SASL in Postfix” article on MandrakeSecure. SASL, short for Simple Authentication and Security Layer is a method for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. In order for SASL to be used, a …
March 25, 2008
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an awesome means of real-time chat between individuals who share a common interest. There are many IRC servers on the internet; lots of places to find people to talk to. IRC clients exist for every operating system out there; IRC is universal. …
March 25, 2008
NOTE: This section was originally written by Vincent Danen as a piece for the MandrakeSecure website. GnuPG, the GNU Privacy Guard, is the open source equivalent to PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, which has been available for Windows, DOS, and some other operating systems for many …
March 25, 2008
Your data is your data. What belongs to you should stay with you, until you choose to give it away. Your personal data shouldn’t be subject to theft. It’s for this reason that banks use SSL on their websites; to protect your data in transit. Obviously, banking online …
March 25, 2008
One feature many firewall appliances have been pushing recently is content filtering proxies, whether transparent or authenticated. These content filtering proxies are a boon to individuals with young children in the house, but many of them are extremely basic. Without pointing …
March 25, 2008
Face it. Do you really want to spend $200USD to secure POP3 access for a year that only you and your family uses? Probably not. Yet, if you want to secure POP3 access, you need to create a SSL certificate, and these things need to be signed by someone. You can easily generate a …
March 25, 2008
With a lot of freely available and open source applications, you have a great amount of flexibility and control over what is installed on your computer. For instance, if you had the time, you could audit every single piece of open source software you install on your computer. …
March 25, 2008
PHP is a server-side scripting language that is extremely versatile, powerful, and in use by many systems. It’s popularity has increased to the point that any web-hosting service worth it’s salt provides the capabilities to use it. That being said, PHP can also be …
March 25, 2008
One of my favorite security tools is sudo. This isn’t a tool to help you monitor security, but it is a tool to allow you to secure your system a little further, especially if you run a box that needs to at times allow other users some extra (root) privilege. Let’s …
March 25, 2008
Locking the system down is important, but a lot of security can be circumvented by an attacker having physical access to your computer. The easiest thing for an attacker to do is push the reset or power button on your computer, pop in their own floppy or CD-ROM, and boot from it. …
March 25, 2008
NOTE: This section was originally written by Vincent Danen as a piece for the MandrakeSecure website (“Making the Most of OpenSSH”). OpenSSH is a secure replacement for deprecated protocols such as telnet and rsh. It has become a De-facto standard as a remote login …
March 25, 2008
Copyright © 2003 Jim Colling Originally written for the MandrakeSecure website. The example server box is i686 Mandrake 9.0 with all the updates I can get my hands on. To cut down on network traffic and to ease security, it houses both the OpenLDAP server and Samba. It has also …
March 25, 2008
The management of users on a system can be… interesting, depending on a number of different factors. For some systems, like a home system with one or two users, it’s pretty straightforward. When you start moving into larger networks, or servers with hundreds of …
March 25, 2008
Auditing user accounts is just as important as auditing other parts of your system. In fact, in large multi-user environments, it can be one of the most critical aspects of monitoring your system to prevent attack. For instance, if a user were to leave the company and the account …
March 25, 2008
A very useful tool for monitoring logfiles is Swatch (aka Simple WATCHer of Logfiles). This is a perl program that essentially watches a logfile. You can run as many instances of it as you want, but you can only watch one logfile per instance. Depending on the log file you want …
March 25, 2008
Most UNIX implementations (Linux, BSD, etc.) use a program called syslogd to handle most of the logging. syslogd is a system logging daemon and what it does is sit and receive messages from various applications. It will receive log messages from other daemons, programs, and even …
March 25, 2008
Logfiles are perhaps one of the most useful facilities available to any sysadmin or user to determine what is going on in the system. They can be used to track down error messages, authentication information (who logged in and when, etc), and a whole slew of other information …
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 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
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 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 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 …
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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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
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 28, 2007
New article on TechRepublic from yours truly about Configuring wireless support in Mandriva with ndiswrapper.
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 …
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 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 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 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 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 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
There are a few common mistakes, or bad assumptions, made with regards to security. Here we identify these common mistakes and what can be done to avoid them. This is the very basic premise of security; avoiding these will avoid a large number of problems that may occur. Weak …
February 26, 2007
Perhaps one of the biggest issues facing companies is the lack of a security policy. This isn’t as much of a problem with home users, but some of the same principles apply. A home user may not need to review their security policy every few months to ensure it still suits …
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 …
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 …
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 4, 2006
A friend sent me a link to cartoon about the powers of sudo. All hail sudo!
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
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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 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 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 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 …
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 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 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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …