Tag: configuration

  1. Open source desktops and closed source video drivers.

    06 July 2010

    When you have a workstation running some variant of Linux, the Gnome desktop and you have an nVidia graphics card in the box, do yourself a favor and install their drivers. Make sure that the "Driver" line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf reads "nvidia" and not "nv". And when you get around to configuring multiple displays on the same system, don't mess with Gnome's System->Preferences->Display utility, use the nvidia-settings utility to do it for you (it'll ask for the root password).

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  2. Boot loaders and securing dual-booting portable systems.

    29 May 2008

    UPDATE - 20170327 - Truecrypt was disconnected in 2014.ev when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP.  DO NOT USE IT.  This blog post must be considered historical in nature.

    If you've been following the news media for the past year or so, stores have been cropping up with frightening regularity about travelers who are detained at the border while customs agents demand the login credentials for their notebook computers so that they can be examined for gods-know-what kind of information. From time to time, the hard drives of computers are actually imaged for later analysis. As if that weren't enough, the United …

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  3. Random knowledge X.

    25 January 2007

    How to set up a crossover ethernet connection between two Sun Solaris machines:


    • Connect both machines using a crossover ethernet cable.

    • root@solaris-machine-1# ifconfig plumb

    • root@solaris-machine-1# ifconfig netmask

    • root@solaris-machine-1# ifconfig up

    • On each machine, ping the other. If both are reported as being alive, you're golden.


    It would look something like this on a live setup:

    root@igg# ifconfig ce1 plumb

    root@ook# ifconfig ce1 plumb

    root@igg# ifconfig ce1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

    root@ook# ifconfig ce1 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

    root@igg# ifconfig ce1 up

    root …

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  4. Random knowledge IX.

    25 January 2007

    When all else fails, try doing what you know shouldn't work. I don't care if the docs say it doesn't work, if the FAQ says it doesn't work, if the books say it doesn't work.. try it anyway. Stuff like BIND is like that.

    In trying to get a domain working with BIND, what I wound up doing was changing a record for a single host (www IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to the FQDN (fully qualified domain name - www.promiseofiris.org. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), incrementing the zone's serial number, and then kickstarting the daemon. Lo …

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  5. Random knowledge VII.

    25 January 2007

    The /usr/bin/eject utility on a Linux system is a good way of figuring out which machine has what name in the KVM when you're dealing with a rack of machines, many of which are likely to be mislabelled. Use the eject utility to open the CD-ROM drive and see what machine you're really connected to; then update the labels in the KVM's configuration appropriately.



    If your fibre-optic network card isn't seeing any traffic at all, try switching the plugs on the card. Some optical network cables don't have colour-coded connectors so it's easy to plug them into the …

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  6. Random knowledge VI.

    25 January 2007

    The actions of a systems cracker trying to get a foothold in someone's network by social engineering the people in the NOC and someone hunting for a job who is trying to get hold of a human being in the HR department somewhere in a company are not that different.



    When writing Perl code, generally speaking the simplest code is what will do exactly what you need. If you overthink what you're working on, you won't get anywhere.. especially with the reverse operator.

    Perl gives you enough rope to not only hang yourself but your entire family, too. Don't make …

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  7. Random knowledge II.

    25 January 2007

    If you turn on the Xscreensaver module called Sonar while you're running a packet monitoring application (such as TCPdump), people are less likely to think you're doing anything shady, because "Only hacker tools don't have GUIs." Always hack your shell's personal configuration file (~/.bash_profile, for example) to change your shellprompt if you use GNU screen. That way you can tell what shells you've left open are single-access shells and which shells are multiplexed through a single connection with screen. It can get confusing sometimes. Because a shell run inside a GNU screen metaterminal sets an environment variable called $WINDOW, you …

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