slaptijack

In the past, I've written about the usefulness of using iptables to limit incoming SSH connections. Although it isn't a replacement for a good password policy, it at least limits the ability of outsiders to perform a brute-force password attack on your system. Now that I've started using Ubuntu more …

rsync: on remote machine: --extended-attributes: unknown option

If this is the output you get when running rsync, you are almost certainly running the Mac OS X version of rsync -E on the client with something else on the server side. The fix is to install the MacPorts version of rsync …

Behold, the benefits of virtualization!

I spent most of the evening preparing to move a few websites. I decided to do some benchmarking just to see what sort of improvement I was getting from the new server setup. Although the old server didn't feel slow when browsing sites, the results …

Although this process is well documented on the Ubuntu community site, I decided to take notes of the exact steps that I took so that I wouldn't have to fumble through that long document next time. I'm installing the tools in a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS …

Using WordPress to write a technical blog can be occasionally frustrating. WordPress uses the wptexturize() function to rewrite certain ASCII character combinations into HTML entities. Although this may generally be a "good thing," it's really annoying on technical blogs where two dashes is not an em dash.

To disable this …

This will just be a short reminder. If you're planning to create multiple-column indexes in MySQL, remember that the order of the columns matters. As the MySQL documentation points out, any "leftmost prefix of the index can be used." This means that the index can be used for any number …

Via: Wikibon

The Influences Driving Virtualization is a new white paper from the guys at ReadWriteWeb. I recently downloaded and read through it. If you're curious about virtualization, but aren't sure about giving up your contact info to ReadWriteWeb, here are some notes about what you'll find after you download.

"Organizations that …

My Belkin N1 Vision router replacement arrived today. I was glad it only took two days to arrive. Without the wireless router, I've been stuck working from my desktop. My kids were also pretty annoyed that they couldn't sign into XBox Live or watch Netflix. Needless to say, my sons …

Yesterday, I submitted an RMA request to Belkin for my N1 Vision router. The N1 Vision isn't a great wireless router, but it does have a lifetime warranty. Less than 24 hours later, I received an email from Belkin customer service that my new router is on the way!

This …

A few years ago I received a Belkin N1 Vision (F5D8232-4) wireless router from a friend of mine. She had received it as some sort of door prize. The wireless on the router isn't that great, but it was strong enough to cover parts of my house that my previous …

In vCenter Chargeback version 1.6, VMware added the ability to define a pricing matrix for virtual machines in a virtual data center (vDC). A pricing matrix associates a fixed cost with the virtual machine based on the number of allocated vCPUs and RAM. If you're implementing a bundle-based pricing …

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently requested comments from concerned Internet entities regarding the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) performance of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions. ICANN currently holds a contract with the NTIA to that is set to expire in September of 2011 …

I was recently struggling to add a Windows shared printer to my MacBook Pro (running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)) until I ran across this post which gave me two important hints:

1. You need to use the Advanced tab in the Add Printer dialog. You can find this …

I recently had to add over 100 new devices into Cacti. Believe it or not, you can do this in bulk using the command-line tools provided with Cacti. I used to add_device.php, add_tree.php, and add_graphs.php scripts to get the job done.

First, I created a file (/tmp …