Category Archives: work

USB storage problems with Mandriva

Make sure you mount the usbfs on /proc/bus/usb : mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb Duh; I spend some time searching around for that one.

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Disabling “Mass Subscription” in Mailman

Some times you don’t want to allow your mailing list administrators to subscribe email addresses to their list en masse; think spammers. To disable this feature in Mailman apply this patch to the admin.py code: — admin.py.orig Wed Jan 18 … Continue reading

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Problem kickstarting Mandriva 10.2

So you’ve read through the Auto Install Documentation and you are on to the “postInstall” part of your auto_inst.cfg and you have script a bit of extra post install fun like say urpmi.addmedia … . But for whatever reason it … Continue reading

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Upgrading Mandriva/Mandrake via URPMI

Here are a quick few lines to upgrade your version of Mandriva to the latest and greatest version all using your handy update tool; URPMI. The following will migrate your 10.0 box to 10.1, but the same should work regardless … Continue reading

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Yum: Checking for updates.

Here’s a quick script you can put in your cron rotation to check and see if there are any updates available and what they are: #!/bin/bash yum_output=/tmp/yum-check-update-output.txt python=/usr/bin/python1.5 yum=/usr/bin/yum $python $yum check-update > $yum_output yum_return_code=”$?” case $yum_return_code in 100) # … Continue reading

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Subversion: Backing out a committed change.

You just committed a change to the repository and now you realize it was a mistake; how do you back your changes out in the working copy and recommit the corrected version? Continue reading

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Init script for rsyncd.

Ed: another one that was sitting in “drafts” for months. #!/bin/bash # # Startup script for rsyncd. # # chkconfig: 345 86 16 # description: rsync rocks. # case “$1″ in start) echo “Starting rsyncd…” /opt/rsync/bin/rsync –daemon –ipv4 ;; stop) … Continue reading

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Count bandwidth

Here’s a script I wrote to count the bandwidth used from the Apache access_log. Continue reading

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View a GPG/PGP key without importing it.

Sometimes I want to view a GPG/PGP public key, but I don’t want to import it into my key ring, so here’s how to just view it: gpg –with-fingerprint schwer.asc

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Vulnerable phpBB : Find and Disable.

Here’s a little script I wrote that attempts to find and disable old phpBB instances that may be vulnerable to the recent phpBB Worm in the wild. #!/usr/bin/perl # Name: Augie Schwer # File: find-vuln.pl # Date: 18, July 2005 … Continue reading

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Getting Firefox and Thunderbird to play nice under Linux.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are great programs, but they need a little glue to get them to talk to one another. Here’s how I did it on Linux. The documentation for these two scripts can be found here for those … Continue reading

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Supybot init script for Debian.

Supybot is a neat little IRC bot written in Python. I had been looking for a bot to do some logging of my favorite IRC channel (#nblug on irc.nblug.org). The setup was pretty easy and the documentation is nice, but … Continue reading

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Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets

Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets “Honeypots are a well known technique for discovering the tools, tactics, and motives of attackers. In this paper we look at a special kind of threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet … Continue reading

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FreeNX on Mandrake 10.1

FreeNX is an open source alternative to NoMachine’s NX Server. This means super speedy remote desktop access over SSH; I was streaming audio, surfing the web, chatting, checking email at home and doing the same via the nxclient on my … Continue reading

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Unison to keep files synced.

I saw this article on Linux Journal and decided that I had to check it out; especially since installing unison for Mandrake is as easy as urpmi unison. I had been using rsync to keep certain local and remote directories … Continue reading

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Viewing HTML messages in Mutt

In your ~/.mailcap put in this entry: text/html; lynx -force_html -dump %s; copiousoutput . And then add to your ~/.muttrc this line: auto_view text/html . Now you can view those nasty HTML based emails in mutt.

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SHA-1 Broken and GnuPG (GPG)

As noted on slashdot ([1] , [2]) earlier this week; famed cryptologist Bruce Schneier noted in his blog entry that the hashing algorithm SHA-1 had been successfully broken. While the new advances against SHA-1 are computationally feasible they are still … Continue reading

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