Making up passwords is something we have to do almost everyday it seems. Banking web sites, forums, email accounts, webhosting accounts, mail lists, etc. But it seems that making passwords is one of the things that some people have the hardest time doing. Maybe it’s not that it’s hard to make a password, but hard to make a GOOD password. First off, what’s a good password and what’s a bad password? Anything that is a dictionary word (even in another language) is a BAD password. Personal names are usually very bad choices. Why?
Tag: BAD
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iScsi and AoE with linux
A few days ago I had reason to investigate iscsi and AoE (ata over ethernet). Both are protocols for sharing a physical drive over the network at the block level. Let me put it in context first. Traditional network file shares have been done like this…. Computer A has a large drive, it’s formatted and available to Computer A and then THAT computer shares it out to computers B-zzzzzzz. iscsi and AoE basically share the bare drive and then computer B can attach to the drive format and make use of it as it’s own. Realistically I see the greatest advantage with this is adding storage to a server.
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Linux Permissions Headache
Yikes, what an evening….. it started innocently enough in the afternoon. I have an old Mandrake 10.0 server that I was upgrading clamav on (recent security update). While I was at it, I was reviewing the anti-spam setup to see if I could get any better success with filtering junk mail. spamassassin has had an update since I updated this one last and also it seemed that dcc was installed, but not in active use *(no indications that it’s being used at all.) So, I set about trying to fix that and install the latest spamassassin. Somehere along the way something BAD happened. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure how, but at one point I was root having just installed the rpms for spamassassin and then exited to my user account. Promptly on switching back to my user account I got a “permission denied” error. Eh? Ok, well let’s su again and see what’s up…. “permission denied” uh oh…. ls “permission denied” most everything actually….. permission denied.
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Massive Dell Laptop Battery recall
This is worth reading if you’ve got a Dell laptop. There have been numerous stories in recent months of Dell laptops exploding into flames and it looks as though now over 4 million batteries from their inspiron, Latitude and Precision laptops are being recalled. The manufacture dates range from April 2004 to July 18, 2006. There is a Dell site for this issue www.dellbatteryprogram.com. Realistically, the new lithium ion batteries are trying to pack a large power density into a small space and if something goes wrong, it can go BAD wrong….
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Reinventing the capacitor
These days, big inventions aren’t entirely new creations, but improvements on an old idea. This latest in a string of interesting science/technology breakthrough stories is about just that. Researchers at MIT (how many sentences have I started like that this week?) have developed a new way of constructing a capacitor. One of the limiting factors with HOW much charge a capacitor stores now is the surface area of the “plates” that hold charge. The greater the surface area, the greater the charge. What they’ve done is laced the surface with nano-tubes, greatly increasing the surface area. One writer compared this to a fuzzy bathroom towel soaking up more water than a flat cloth. Probably not a bad analogy. What makes this significant….
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Preparing for disaster recovery – system change log
There are a lot of elements to a good disaster recovery strategy…. knowing where offsite backups are located, keeping the offsite backups fresh. Knowing where any ON-site backups are. Having a plan for quick access to replacement hardware. One that probably is easily overlooked is very low-tech. That’s a system log. I don’t know that this isn’t a BAD idea for any system, but certainly is a good idea for servers and other “mission critical” systems. (In thinking about my desktop, this kind of log wouldn’t be bad….maybe a bit obsessive with a desktop, but…. I think I’ve messed it up more times than it’s spontaneously had problems…) So what am I rambling on about this time?????
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How effective is the MediaMax copy protection?
One of the sub-stories in all the Sony DRM mess of the last month with the XCP copy protection was that it was really an ineffective way of preventing copying of music anyway. In other words, you could press shift while inserting the cd to avoid the installer, then other programs could access the cd/allow copying without the software installed, other OS’s could access the disc and rip the tracks. In other words it wasn’t very useful toward it’s objective of preventing copying…