I’m on a bit of an IRC kick with the blogging lately, mainly because it seems I’m usually fine tuning my settings, and I like to share what I find. Hopefully, someone finds these posts useful. For today’s post, I’ve picked setting up an SSL connection on OFTC and securely identifying to NickServ when connecting. [...]
Last night, Freenode made the migration from hyperion-ircd to a fork of charybdis-ircd they’re calling ircd-seven. There are a few notable changes in the new ircd code that are worth mentioning here that are of benefit to end users and clients. They are the ability to use OpenSSL encryption between client and server and the [...]
I used to travel quite extensively around the country, and even had the opportunity to leave the country and go abroad. My laptop was always with me. As a result, I was very concerned for the integrity and safety of my data. As such, I took the necessary precautions that travelers can take when their [...]
Two weeks ago, we had the Utah Open Source Conference, and I gave a presentation on how to crack passwords when you have physical access to a box. You can find my slides and materials here (3MB tar.gz). As an overview of my presentation, I discussed that if you have physical access to a machine, [...]
I’ve recently had the opportunity with wiping 13 SCSI drives. The drives are small- 36 and 18 gigabyte drives, and they do contain sensitive data. They will be sent off to a third party for physical destruction, but we need to make sure that the data is completely overwritten on the disk in a secure [...]
Every GNU/Linux distribution ships with GnuPG by default. While they all don’t ship with the same GUI frontend, they do ship with the the same CLI backend. So, we’ll be interfacing with that throughout this informational session. I’m not presenting this as anything necessarily useful. Rather, I hope you find it informational/educational, and learn a [...]
There is a meme going on with Planet Debian right now about SSH tips. Here’s mine. I used to travel the country teaching Linux System Administrators. I have spent many a day in airports, hotels and training centers. Whenever there was a network connection available, I was on it, mainly with SSH. SSH is so [...]
So, due to the bad shape of the economy I was let go from my position as a Linux instructor and guru. As unfortunate as it is, I have to press forward looking for the best job that fits my skill set. However, the point of this post isn’t to complain about being laid off, [...]
I had an interesting discussion yesterday at work, that I would like to share here. It was in regards to when the proper time presents itself to show identification versus identifying them on the outset. As you can probably imagine, this was the subject of GnuPG key signing. So, let’s start first with a couple [...]
Remember the old saying “What goes up must come down”, referring to the gravitational pull? Well, I have a similar saying for firewalls: What goes out can come back in. This is a cool SSH trick that will stump even the most seasoned network administrators. The trick is port forwarding. The idea is that a [...]
Freenode offers a couple wonderful services to any IRC user that I’m afraid many just know about. They outline it very well on their website, but I’m afraid that many an IRC user aren’t taking advantage of them. As such, seeing as though my blog syndicates a couple planets, hopefully I will reach a broad [...]
This image will circumvent Digital Restrictions Management on HD-DVD AACS disks. I have licensed this image under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license. Enjoy!
I just love OpenSSH. That is the single greatest tool on unix-like operating systems, as far as I am concerned. I’ve blogged about SSH plenty. SSH tunneling, SSH forwarding, SSHFS and more. Needless to say, I believe that SSH is the single most flexible and powerful package on unix-like operating systems. And, with this post, [...]
One of the things that I hate about instant messaging clients is the lack of adherence to standards. In fact, the specification that I think should be adhered to the most, isn’t. I’ve blogged about this before, so I apologize to the planets that I am syndicated to in advance for duplicating content. However, due [...]
Yesterday, I provided a problem about how to use my GnuPG key regardless of my location. In reality, there are only 3 computers that I sit at: Hercules, my laptop, and my main companion; Zeus, my “other” desktop, that is actually far more powerful than Hercules, but my wife is always on it with Windows [...]
