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 …

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 …

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 …

If you've ever wondered exactly who it is that Microsoft is catering their operating system, wonder no further. For those of who have bought Vista and haven't been able to figure out how to open the box, I have the answer for you. Don't feel bad if you've had Vista …

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).

A friend of mine has moved his domains over to Google mail, which can now do full domain support for email amongst their other appliances. Standard edition is free, but the premier edition is fairly pricy ($50USD per year per email account). So I signed up for the standard edition …

Well, yesterday was pretty nice considering it's nearing the end of January.. had a high of about -2C. Today.. drastic difference. Woke up and the thermometer read -15C and it was blizzard-like conditions... not heavy snow, but a pretty brisk wind. Currently it's -24C, but with the windchill, it feels …

Well, it's a little bit early for easter, but I'm cleaning my desktop and came across the following graphic, which is perhaps one of the amusing things that has made it's way to my email recently that sets me to grinning every time I look at it. Enjoy!

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 like a panic, thus …

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 I'm presuming kerberos …