Static in the Ether

Recently I had need to produce pdf files of some man pages simple because the are far easier to print and review onscreen. The following snippet added to my .bash_profile does the trick. # Convert man pages to pdf man2pdf() { m2pfile=”/tmp/${1}-m2p.pdf” if [ ! -s $m2pfile ]; then # is it there and > [...]

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Last login: Fri Nov  9 14:52:41 2007 FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE (GENERIC) #0: Mon Jul  4 05:48:29 SAST 2005 Welcome to FreeBSD! sysadmin@gwort$ uptime  2:54PM  up 613 days, 8 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Systems like this re-enforce my feelings that FreeBSD really is rock solid. Yes the box probably needs patching and upgrading, [...]

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Interoute has launched a new online Internet Barometer detailing attacks as observed from their 22 monitoring stations across the European portion of the Internet. The site provides rich graph and chart interfaces, which are nicely interactive.  There are definatley some ideas I want to incorporate form this into my own Network Telescope management console.  It [...]

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This morning I move the last of the services and data off the system I’ve had at LayeredTech since November 2005. This little AMD XP 2400 has given great service over the years, but the hardware got increasingly flaky and the cost of hosting at LT just keeps increasing for old kit. These factors in [...]

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For the last few months I’ve been plagued by the inability to at times remote desktop to some of my Windows XP based system. While not critical, it is nice to be able to connect home and carry on working on a document/email I was busy with before departing to work. After some hunting, I [...]

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I had an interesting question posed ot me today by Dominic who asked me to verify whether his all new Digital certificate was correctly being used for signing mail. Thunderbird sadly complained that the signature was invalid, which was unexpected, and that the issuer was unknown ( expected since it comes form a private hierarchy.)  [...]

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Having finally completed my points transfer from my Thawte web of Trust to CaCERT, I thought it would be worth documenting the process.  I am already  Thawte WOT notary, and as such a trusted and assured person in the sense of their Web of Trust. details of this migration process can be found here, although [...]

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With the comment spam continuing to pour in I caved in a and implemented captchas for comments.  While a solution using mathematical computation such as that offered by the match captcha plugin for wordpress, since the are only host defendant (rather than having to rely on some other 3rd-party service), this particular plugin was only [...]

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With the ongoing smoldering relating to the cross platform cross-vendor flaw in DNS as reported by Dan Kaminsky, Christofer Hoff has put a summary of  the situation together, but as a poem. Its also worth noting that Halvar Flake has stepped up and stated that hes found the bug as well ( so I assume [...]

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Having now migrated to WordPress from my own very customised version of phpBloxsom, which ran the previous incarnation of this blog, Ive been left with the issue of dealing with all the sites pulling my RSS feeds. With the change of software has come a change of url for the location of the feeds. Apache’s [...]

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