Nix Bits

I’ve started a new job recently and with it came a new, very nice, laptop. And of course my whole “workflow” is changing so that’s pushed me to look at some new tools for doing my job. I like to tinker with new tools and utilities from time to time. tmux First up is tmux. […]

I recently installed Linux Mint (ubuntu with some goodies) on a laptop and wanted an encrypted whole disk. In order for this to be truly secure, you need encrypted swap. Well most of the HOWTOs for encrypting swap use a randomized key. This breaks hibernate to disk for laptops because the linux kernel has no […]

Well Twitter was all abuzz about a WordPress worm and sure enough a worm had been circulating attacking old versions of wordpress.  Well obviously I pretty much never post on this blog these days.   And wordpress is notorious for security issues.  This is partly due to the popularity of the product, partly due to problems […]

Oh Man, These past two weeks since getting back from Vegas have been brtual. I’ve had patches blow up in my face (partly because Solaris patching is still so 1995). I had a storage crunch on my NetWorker index store force me to borrow some space and mount it over NFS. Which worked great. Until […]

So last thursday I find the server that houses this site, my domain, my pictures, is unavailable. The server actually belongs to a friend who runs a business on it. I have helped him over the years keep the machine and the site up and running. It’s been housed on the same box since at […]

Denyhosts parses your log files and adds ssh attack automated attack attempts to tcp_wrappers’ /etc/hosts.deny. This is the same concept as this little shell script I cooked up. Of course my little script was derived from another script specific to openbsd and it’s pf firewall. Denyhosts is pretty much the same idea as mine but […]

This interesting article talks about the kernel.org infrastructure used to maintain the Linux kernel. Overall it’s a fascinating little bit of history. It’s also intriguing because it gives an example of running an extremely bandwidth and processor intensive site. This quote is especially interesting regarding an earlier verision of kernel.org hosted on a dual PIII. […]

According to this the MP3 hard drive player I use every day — a PJB 100 — is an antique. O.K. Maybe not an antique, but a collectors item. The PJB was the first hard drive MP3 player. The one I have has a 20G hard drive. It’s about 4 times larger than an ipod, […]

The new Knoppix 3.8 has added an interesting feature by incorporating UnionFS into the filesystem. What does this mean? Well it means I can modify a file in /etc without a problem. The underlying unionfs structure writes the mod to /ramdisk and the change is transparent. In fact, any change can be made. Software can […]

This is one of those articles I’m just preserving for my own future reference.