slaptijack

I'm not a fan of Firefox 3 Beta 4's new navigation buttons. I don't really use these buttons, but that huge Back button keeps distracting me. Thankfully there's a way to fix this, but it's not in the Preferences menu.

The key to getting a more reasonable set of navigation …

Let me start off by saying that I really don't have a lot of experience with Lotus Notes. I was able to suffer through using the client for about a week before I finally begged the Notes admin to forward my mail to my Gmail account. As an email client …

A few days ago, I talked about Mozilla Prism and how it came up short in a few key areas. At the end of that post, I briefly mentioned Fluid as an alternative for Mac OS X users.

In response to that brief introduction, Slaptijack reader Stephen has put together …

(Let me point out at the very beginning that I am aware that Mozilla Prism is still in beta. This commentary is specifically based on Mozila Prism 0.8 for Mac OS X.)

I love the idea of Mozilla Prism.

As an avid user of Gmail and other web-based applications …

Choosing a language in which to develop your custom Nagios plugins is pretty easy. You have two roads you can go down: compiled or scripting.

If you decide to build plugins using a compiled language, just about any will do. Generally speaking, C is the usual choice for something like …

As you might recall, I had previously taken umbrage with Cisco's inability to forward a range of ports to a particular host. Many readers have offered suggestions and links to other documents around the Internet offering various solutions, but none of them really sat quite right with me.

In hindsight …

Just in case your browser hasn't popped up and told you, Firefox 2.0.0.12 is now available!

This version addresses stability and security issues uncovered in Firefox 2.0.0.11. Several of the fixes are critically important. Therefore, it's recommended that all users upgrade as soon as …

If you are using Apache and <acronym title="Secure Sockets Layer">SSL</acronym> as a proxy front-end for your Ruby on Rails application, you might have a problem with redirects if the backend server (Mongrel, for example) does not use SSL.

In a nutshell, you'll discover that redirects are sent …

A colleague of mine is not fond of backup <acronym title="Mail eXchange">MX</acronym> hosts. He (correctly) points out that all incoming mail should be transmitted through another mail server anyway, so the backup MX hosts only serves as an attack point for spammers.

For the most part I …

I've written a lot of posts about various methods for blocking <acronym title="Peer-to-Peer">P2P</acronym> traffic, especially with Cisco's Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR). Although these posts are probably of interest to smallish Internet Service Providers and administrators of business networks, they don't have much use for the average …

During a recent project, I was asked to configure a Linksys SPA942 4-Line IP Telephone to work with Asterisk in an medium-sized office environment. Since this phone was going to be one of many used in a corporate environment, I decided I would need one master configuration, and then individual …

I recently started messing around with building my own Facebook application. I figured the best way to start learning was to download the demo application and get it working on the Slaptijack web server. I quickly ran into a problem:

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function json_encode()

The problem …

If you've been reading Slaptijack for a while, you might remember that I've been doing personal backups with rsync and hard links. The hard links conserve disk space by making sure I don't have multiple copies of the same file lying around.

I recently added a new drive to my …

Error: The image in the archive which would be used to upgrade
Error: system number 1 does not support the same feature set.

I just got this error message while upgrading a Cisco Catalyst 3560 from 12.2(35)SE5 to 12.2(44)SE. The older version was IP …

Oops! I guess I'm way behind the times.

For quite a while, I've been using ip verify unicast reverse-path to prevent packets with spoofed source addresses from crossing my routers. Apparently, as of IOS 12.0 (12.4 is current as of this writing), that command has been replaced with …