- Published:
- August 5, 2009 – 9:16 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
You’ve flashed your old WRT54G or other vanilla router with the Tomato firmware. This itself turns your router into a lean, mean routing machine with QOS, SSH and more, but let’s say we want to take it a bit further. What it we want to get some more stats out of it? In order to do this, we first need to set up a way to pull this information from the router. The best way to do this is to install an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) daemon on the system. The main roadblock we face here is that the system mainly runs in volatile system memory, meaning that every time the system is rebooted the filesystem is reset. Fortunately Tomato provides a way to get around this using CIFS shares. Follow the steps below (as modified from here) to install an SNMP server on a Tomato router. Create a….
Categories: Code Samples,Configurations,Hardware,Linux,Other Code,Other Technology,Programs,Shell,Software,System Administration
Tagged: cacti, firmware, network, router, SNMP, sysadmin
- Published:
- August 4, 2009 – 4:04 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
There have been a number of high profile account compromises due to the insecurity of password reset questions. Examples of two big ones off the top of my head are Sarah Palin Yahoo account compromise and the Twitter “Hacker Croll” fiasco. There have been many more compromises on accounts due to weaknesses in password reset questions, even if they are rarely as publicized in the main stream media like the previous two. The attacks are basically the same – primary e-mail accounts are typically secured by password, and the password can be changed by entering an answer to a password reset question. Both of these account compromises were caused by weak password reset questions. And although Palin certainly was/is a high profile account, the Twitter compromise was caused by a low-profile IT Administrator who happened to store sensitive company documents in their Google Docs folder. This goes to show that everyone, from….
Categories: Email,Other Technology,Social Media,Software,System Administration
Tagged: accounts, password, Security
- Published:
- July 30, 2009 – 4:11 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I just restarted Google Chrome after clearing out my cache, and found a link in my tabs box showing a themes tab: I thought: Wait a second, Chrome has themes?! Hadn’t heard of that one. Excited, I clicked on the link. However, it takes you to a 404 file not found page. https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/themes/ It looks Official Chrome themes are coming shortly. I am running the dev channel version 3.0.195.4. Edit: Looks like cnet has an article about Chrome theming!
Categories: Google,Other Technology
Tagged: browser, chrome, news, themes
- Published:
- July 27, 2009 – 9:01 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I gave a presentation at the ABA/National Association of Bar Executives 2009 Small Bar Conference on June 26th, 2009 on “IT for the Small Bar”. Below are my Powerpoint notes for the presentation. It For The Small Bar A few photos from the talk:
Categories: Other Technology,Social Media,Software
Tagged: powerpoint, presentation
- Published:
- July 21, 2009 – 9:57 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Have you ever come across a server that is doing a lot of traffic? Maybe you have logged in to see a process running at 100% CPU, so you know the culprit, but instead of kill -9ing it, wouldn’t it be great to see what exactly it is up to? Or even if you see a process and don’t know exactly what it is doing, and you are just curious what it is up to? As with most issues there are several ways to skin this cat. You can use tcpdump or wireshark to sniff the all of the network traffic on the device. If you know the port the program is running on (you can use lsof for that), you can restrict traffic to that port. But what if the program is jumping ports, or even uses a side-port for some sort of data transmission (UDP?). The main problem….
Categories: CentOS,Code Samples,Linux,Shell,System Administration
Tagged: command line, Linux, network, Security, system admin, traffic
- Published:
- May 21, 2009 – 7:22 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
It is easy to do an in-place upgrade of Ubuntu Server from 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex‘ to 9.04 ‘Jaunty Jackalope‘. You can do this remotely over ssh or whatever you use to control your server. Best practices say to make sure to backup your server before doing the upgrade. I’ve done several servers this way with no issues! Issue the command: 1sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade; sudo apt-get install update-manager-core; sudo do-release-upgrade Follow any prompts to first upgrade the current distribution with the newest packages, then do the release upgrade.
Categories: Linux,Shell,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: System Administration, Ubuntu
