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! UPDATE Feb 9, 2011: Added a QR Code to the mix. It too is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 U.S. license.
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 [...]
I ran into a problem. I need to have GnuPG wherever I am, mainly due to the fact that I need to digitally sign my email wherever I go. I need my GPG key with me. However, I do not want to install my GPG key on every PC I work on (work, school, etc.). [...]
Series two, in a string if posts about SSH is sshfs. For those unaware, sshfs provides the ability to mount a remote SSH server as though it was a local device on your machine. But first, let me show you how to browse a SSH remote system using a GUI on the Gnome desktop. If [...]
This is going to be old hat for some, but I know there are those who can benefit from it, so I’ll post a brief tutorial here. This post is to extend upon the post published by Christer on Ubuntu Tutorials. There is a lot of software on the Linux system that I take for [...]
It’s a morning of security. What can I say? I just updated my GPG keypair, and after hitting “publish”, I thought to myself “Why not write a quick tutorial on using GPG with Thunderbird?”. So, here it is. Before I get into it, however, I want to talk about my motivations for creating such a [...]
