When the going gets tough, the tough sniff packets.
Update 2011-09-18: This post is out of date. See the latest release here.
I’ve been maintaining my own hacked-up theme based on Tarski for several years now. This required modifying the theme source, which meant that every update to Tarski would overwrite my customisations. The better way to do this is to write a child theme.
Tags: wordpress
I regularly reformat my laptop. I do this when the latest Ubuntu release has major changes, such as the KDE4 upgrade and moving to ext4. I also do it after a change (or failure) of hard drive. This last time was the first time since switching to Evolution as my mail client. Imagine my surprise when I learned that just copying ~/.evolution wasn’t enough.
Tags: evolution
Update 2012-07-25: These instructions have been (mostly) superseded by a new version of this guide. Follow that document instead.
I recently acquired a TEMPer USB thermometer. It’s a cheap, convenient way to measure temperature in your server closet or machine room. My home “server closet” consists of the living room entertainment center, which is an enclosed wooden structure. It gets pretty hot, so I decided to track the ambient temperature with Cacti.
A few months ago, I hacked up a solution for secure locate and ecryptfs. Ian D. Allen suggested a better method, using a private per-user locate database rather than mucking with the system one. I’ve taken his suggestion.
Tags: encryption
Update 2012-03-27: keymap updated for XBMC 11.0 “Eden”.
I’ve been using a Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard on zuul, the new HTPC, for three weeks now. There are plenty of reviews online, which you should read if you are thinking of buying one. These are my notes on using it with XBMC and Ubuntu.
It’s been almost two years since I assembled gozer, my first HTPC. Over the Christmas holiday I replaced gozer with zuul, a Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11.
Update 2011-08-06: BackupPC has been removed from the repo. A newer release is available in maverick-backports.
Minor updates to the repo for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:
Merry Christmas, everyone! We have a special card just for you:
http://www.tolaris.com/xmas/xmas2010.php
(In case you miss it the first time, try reloading or clicking the button.)
Tags: xmas
Update 2010-12-06: Ray points out that you can do this with gconf-editor, which is a much better solution.
It’s a handy feature of Gnome that pressing “PrntScrn” or “Alt+PrntScrn” will take a screen capture of the desktop or current window, respectively. However, in typical Gnome fashion, you can’t do anything more advanced. You can’t capture a region, or a window area. You can’t delay the capture. You can’t save the captures with iterating, numbered filenames. However, the equivalent KDE tool can do all of those things, and you can make Gnome use it.
I’m an IP network engineer. When something goes wrong, the first thing I do is sniff packets. Got a SIP phone that won’t register? Forget reading logs; sniff 5060/udp and read the SIP chatter directly. A customer complains that “Yahoo chat doesn’t work”? Sniff 5050/tcp and look for TCP hangups, login failures, or ICMP “port unreachable” messages.
Sniffing is easy when you have access to the intermediate router, but that isn’t always the case. What if you’re just another PC on the same switch? That’s impossible, right?
Tags: networking, security, wireshark
All content © 2008- Tyler J. Wagner
Recent Comments