Tag: linux

  1. Sometimes I hate being right.

    01 March 2007

    It seems that Dell Computers is putting the brakes on their new lines of Linux-equipped computers. They've changed their minds, and instead of selling machines with SUSE Linux preinstalled they are actually certifying three models (the Optiplex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Precision workstations) for use with Linux. If they are going to sell machines running Linux, it's not going to be anytime soon.

    I hate to tell Dell spokescritter Jeremy Bolen, but the Linux community has already certified Dell's hardware under Linux - we've been doing it for years and posting our results.

    Read our lips: We want to buy Dell …

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  2. Dell finally caves to customer pressure and offers systems with Linux pre-installed on them.

    26 February 2007

    Back in the late 90's, Dell offered computers for sale with Linux installed on them instead of Microsoft Windows, a move which got them sued and pressured to stop this practice. On 16 February 2007 they set up a website called Dell Ideastorm to gather suggestions from their users and customers so that they could better work within the marketplace.

    Well, guess what the thousands of requests they recieved included - I'll give you a hint, the site got flattened by the influx of traffic and is still getting hammered.

    In response to these requests they started adding lines of desktops …

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  3. Archive: 20070112

    31 January 2007

    It's just about the middle of January, and just now has winter come to DC. I don't want to say that it's cold or anything but we've gone from wearing t-shirts and shorts outside to frost on the windows and multiple layers of clothing because the temperature has been below freezing for much of the day. As if that weren't enough, the wind's been cold enough to feel like it's cutting right through you, and the pressure waves of cold air coming off of the Metro trains when they arrive at the station are enough to deaden one's sense of …

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  4. Doesn't anyone sell flippin' bookcases anymore?!

    29 January 2007

    It's been an interesting weekend, to be sure.. Lyssa and I have been in the market for a couple of things lately, namely a bookcase or media shelf of some kind that we can migrate our DVD collection to, and ring binders that we can move our CD collections into while we rip and encode everything. So, to that end, we spent Saturday driving around searching for stuff along those lines. In two days, we didn't find any bookcases anywhere we looked (well, that's not entirely true, I did find one bookcase, a floor model at OfficeMax, but the construction …

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  5. 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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  6. Random knowledge VIII.

    25 January 2007

    You're getting old if you consider sleeping until 0900 'sleeping in'.



    When configuring a firewall with IPTables you have to specify the protocol before the port number(s) in each command. Do this:

    iptables -A INPUT -s 1.2.3.4 -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

    and not this

    iptables -A INPUT -s 1.2.3.4 --dport 22 -p tcp -j ACCEPT

    If you don't, you'll see error messages to the effect of "Unknown arg '--dport'"

    When writing Snort rules, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, rules come in two parts: the …

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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. Random knowledge III.

    25 January 2007

    Coding with a teddy bear in your lap helps immensely.



    IPtables for the v2.4 Linux kernel series doesn't understand virtual interfaces (a.k.a. IP Aliasing). If you've never seen this before you can take one interface, say eth0, and bind an IP address to it, for example 192.168.1.1. Under the v2.4 kernel series you can bind more than one IP address to an interface, which creates a virtual network interface. If I bound a second address (10.0.0.1) to our network interface above you'd see in the output of /sbin/ifconfig eth0 …

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