I've been on IRC for a long time. Not as long as some, granted, but likely longer than most. I've had my hand in a number of IRC clients, mostly terminal-based. Yup, I was (shortly) using the ircII client, then (also shortly) BitchX. Then I found irssi, and stuck with that for a long time. […]
One of the things that has always bothered me about the Chromium project (the project the Google Chrome browser is based on) is that passwords are encrypted, if and only if your operating system provides an authentication API through your account login. For example, on Windows, is is accomplished through the "CryptProtectData" function. This function […]
One thing that bothers me about OpenSSL is the lack of commandline support for AEAD ciphers, specifically AES in CCM and GCM block modes. Why does this matter? Suppose you want to save an encrypted file to disk, without GnuPG, because you don't want to get into key management. Further, suppose you want to send […]
File this under the "I'm bored and have nothing better to do" category. While coming into work this morning, I was curious if I could use my monitors as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG). I don't know what use this would have, if any, as your GNU/Linux operating system already ships a CSPRNG […]
I'm not sure who I should be more disappointed in- Mozilla or Debian. Iceweasel 43 recently arrived in Debian unstable, and with it, Pocket. For those who are not familiar, Pocket is a 3rd party service that allows users to save sites they want to read or visit for later. Provided the extension is installed, […]
Background I've been a long-time KeepassX user, and to be honest, I don't see that changing any time soon. I currently have my password database on an SSH-accessible server, of which I use kpcli as the main client for accessing the db. I use Keepass2Android with SFTP on my phone to get read-only access to […]
Recently, Apple released the ability for iPhone 5c and newer hardware to create a spoofed software MAC address for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wireless access points. The MAC address is locally administered, and a unicast address. This has sparked a small discussion in various forums about how to generate valid locally administered unicast MAC […]
This post has a background bug that was introduced just over a week ago, ONE THE DAY BEFORE ITS RELEASE. The bug is being able to bypass the lock screen by just holding down your <Enter> key, letting Unity crash, then restarting without locking the desktop. That's a pretty big bug. What's interesting about this […]
With all the news about Heartbleed, passwords and two-factor authentication, I figured I would finally get two-factor authentication working with my SSH servers. I've known about it in the past, but haven't done anything about it. Now is the time. To get two-factor authentication working with your OpenSSH server, you need to install the "libpam-google-authenticator" […]
Introduction Yes, this post was created on April 1. No, it's not an April Fool's joke. So, I need to begin with post with a story. In 2007, I adopted my daughter, and my wife decided that she wanted to stay home rather than work. In 2008, she quit her job. She was running a […]
This post gets filed under the "budget and planning" part of systems administration. When planning out your ZFS storage pool, you will need to make decision about space efficiency, and the cost required to build out that architecture. We've heard over and over that ZFS block deduplication is expensive, and I've even mentioned it on […]
Introduction With the proliferation of ZFS into FreeBSD, Linux, FreeNAS, Illumos, and many other operating systems, and with the introduction of OpenZFS to unify all the projects under one collective whole, more and more people are beginning to tinker with ZFS in many different situations. Some install it on their main production servers, others install […]
This is an open letter to all GNU/Linux and Unix operating system vendors. Please provide some sort of RSS or Atom feed for just new releases. Nothing else. No package updates. No "community" posts. No extra fluff. It shouldn't include news about being included in the Google Summer of Code. It shouldn't provide a list […]
I just recently acquired a Raspberry Pi at SAINTCON 2013. I already had one, and forgot how much fun these little computers can be. I also forgot what a PITA they can be if you don't have your house hard wired to your switch for Internet access, and have to go into the basement to […]
Introduction This comes from the "why didn't I think of this before?!" department. I have lying around my home and office a ton of USB 2.0 thumb drives. I have six 16GB drives and eight 8GB drives. So, 14 drives in total. I have two hypervisors in a GlusterFS storage cluster, and I just happen […]