Image of the glider from the Game of Life by John Conway
Skip to content

{ Author Archives }

Zombie Proccess- What They Are and How To Handle Them

First off, a zombie process isn’t really a process. At least it’s not executing anymore. A zombie process is more of a “state”, and that state is “defunct”. However, we typically refer to them as “zombie processes”, so I’ll stick with convention here. Second, a zombie process on a Unix system is a child process [...]

Install ZFS on Debian GNU/Linux

UPDATE (May 06, 2012): I apologize for mentioning it supports encryption. Pool version 28 is the latest source that the Free Software community has. Encryption was not added until pool version 30. So, encryption is not supported natively with the ZFS on Linux project. However, you can use LUKS containers underneath, or you can use [...]

Mount Raw Images

Just recently, I needed to mount a KVM raw image file, because it was depending on a network mount that was no longer accessible, and any attempts to interact with the boot process failed. So, rather than booting off a live CD, or some other medium, I decided to mount the raw image file. After [...]

Tighten the Security of “Security Questions”

Some of you may remember the email hack of Sarah Palin’s email by David Kernell in 2008. The Wikipedia article describes how this was done: The hacker, David Kernell, had obtained access to Palin’s account by looking up biographical details such as her high school and birthdate and using Yahoo!’s account recovery for forgotten passwords. [...]

Hello ZNC

After nearly 6 years of running Irssi behind GNU Screen and Tmux, I’ve ditched it in favor of ZNC. Don’t panic, I’m still running Irssi locally, but this does allow be to try out different IRC clients, without being disruptive to the channels I’m in (including giving yet another assessment to WeeChat), and it will [...]

Encrypt Your Irssi Config

Actually, this can work for any config that you want to encrypt. Because I’m such an IRC addict (admittidly), and use Irssi as my client of choice, AND the fact that others have asked me about it after blogging about encrypting your IMAP/SMTP passwords with Mutt, I figured this was an appropriate title. The Problem [...]

Setup Network Interfaces in Debian

If you’re not using NetworkManager or Wicd, or some other similar tool to automatically manage your network interfaces for you, this post is for you. In the Debian world, you have a single file that manages your network interfaces. It can manage VLANs, bonded interfaces, virtual interfaces and more. You can establish rules on what [...]

Randomize First, Then Encrypt Your Block Device

This blog post is in continuation of the previous post, where I showed why you should not use ECB when encrypting your data. Well, when putting down an encrypted filesystem, such as LUKS, you’ve probably been told that you should put random data down on the partition first BEFORE encrypting the disk. Well, this post [...]

ECB vs CBC Encryption

This is something you can do on your computer fairly easily, provided you have OpenSSL installed, which I would be willing to bet you do. Take a bitmap image (any image will work fine, I’m just going to use bitmap headers in this example), such as the Ubuntu logo, and encrypt it with AES in [...]

Why I Cryptographically Sign My Email

Yesterday, I received a disturbing phone call. Someone very close to me, call him John, might lose his job, because a slanderous, offensive email was sent with forged headers, claiming to be John. John certainly did not send the mail, and those close to John know that the tone of the mail does not seem [...]

DISCLAIMER

DISCLAIMER: By sending me email, you agree to the following: I am, by definition, “the intended recipient”. All information in the email is mine to do with as I see fit and make such financial profit, political mileage, or good joke as it lends itself to. In particular, I may quote it where I please. [...]

Protesting SOPA/PIPA

Starting Jan 18, 2011 at 00:00 UTC, this blog will be joining many others to protest SOPA and PIPA. I strongly oppose the views outlined in the bill, and with a Google Pagerank of 4/10, with almost 650 RSS readers, and about 1,500 hits to my site per day, I’ll be taking advantage of these [...]

Encrypted Mutt IMAP/SMTP Passwords

Rather than storing your IMAP and SMTP passwords in plain text on disk, you can store them encrypted using GnuPG, OpenSSL, the GNOME Keyring, or any other method of password storage encryption. It still requires a “master password” from you to decrypt the file(s) on the fly, and set the appropriate passwords, but then it [...]

My Google Voice Rant

So, I’ve been a Google Voice subscriber for about 2 years. I have one of the most awesome phone numbers you can get: 686-8086 (it has an inside geek reference to x86-based CPU architectures, and also to my PGP key ID of 0x8086060F. Awesome, eh?!). I’ve used it for SMS text messaging, receiving calls, and [...]

Making Sense of Hashed Hosts in ~/.ssh/known_hosts

I don’t expect you to follow this post completely, but it’s so amazingly cool, I have to blog it. Consider the hashed sections of ~/.ssh/known_hosts file for (recent) OpenSSH clients, not including the public key parts: |1|kFJT5z0x3ndyutgZ4E5pRk+ORBA=|hzXvdYUudo+qK9BGlFWtSAUXlXc= |1|8wo1+FO0hkATPgQZoeNHeIlvAjw=|dt/a9jz9CnLKP72j+Jr8MKMjgEE= |1|pvBQEKEGLnH0RCJr+8Dmqqnvlrs=|fJJvjyG/TmHFnuIX57nDThq/C4M= |1|HKV4DzgDkajXoUHf9B82JBu7J10=|c/K+MdJvWaZeJFs/W7iqhqo0wvE= |1|rtvQhRVnNanQZYkLUMbjoBGNhn0=|0U6a1LUQqLL6P1T2Wji3VWw69pw= |1|0ziSYi4c+xBXGEBZcNN1LMhYUc4=|qRSN5GSPyQi+fmaVz2zNwkmKoy8= |1|6nv6Vpk3AYgICHxJGVgVdsYRuq0=|fBNOIz1l3RW+N61jyDPunKX9n7E= |1|+b4uA+Mq7RHRAFW21qv8aO3rIRs=|1eizMri01IxEKrXquBnwTYP61Ow= |1|BkB0PZu2qtsLID/Ibe/D68gANQU=|qW6uAzcpecOOKNI4zEvngyfpGkI= |1|n+QrRn7QXeAJ5hRe2M8v8IspihE=|EqUxXdSeIF1cl1fQjl5zILebkGY= |1|BOKuKnWojy028tJf9Y671lws0d0=|SuBQJmJZp5JNVYG/rP9yb9ZhJcE= |1|WACsxtodOiM89kf4rNPLgF1CXZ4=|UTccVeLDZJF3wlH8V05XJNlsOBw= |1|o6FFoirXYblM7wBMdeJDYGMPI58=|5jJB7T7itY702ZHHByXtSpGk9SE= The column fields are similar to [...]