Computer Tips -Tech Info

For quite some time I’ve been making use of a dd-wrt modified linksys box on my home network as an openvpn endpoint so that when I’m out and about in the world, I connect the vpn, switch firefox to route through a squid proxy server on the home network and I’ve got a nice fairly […]

There are some tools that I make use of almost daily. Either because something strikes my curiousity or because of necessity to find out a bit more about a computer issue. DNS lookup tools fall into the category of “must have” for the kind of stuff I wind up doing. Whether it’s a whois lookup […]

Incidents.org has been running their security tip a day this month and I really liked this one. It’s essentially a way to encrypt your wireless traffic using ssh. That’s something I’ve covered here before, but it’s worth reminding that it’s possible and a good idea.    Send article as PDF   

I use wget a LOT. Many times in working with a website I’ve got a ssh console opened to the site and if there’s a plugin that I’d like to download it doesn’t make sense to download and then upload, I want to just download it directly from xyz.com webserver to the website where it […]

George Ou has a good post on Banks cheating their way to meet web security guidelines. Many of the observations that he notes come from the Between the Lines column here and are SPOT ON. The biggest I see is related to “multifactor authentication”….    Send article as PDF   

It has been a few days now, but I noticed that WordPress 2.0.4 has now been released and is highly recommended due to the fixing of a few security issues. They also list a number of bugfixes as well. So, if you’re running a site based on wordpress it’s time to update. It’s really a […]

Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables. For starters, I’ve tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download from vmwarez.com…) I’ve detailed previously one dilemma that I had with regard to my own cable connection which made me question how […]

Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan… i.e. blocking that activity on the Wireless segment.) You know, traditionally firewalls have had the attitude of defending the internal network […]

Sans also brings this story about the Debian development server being compromised. Investigation is ongoing. The machine was gluck.debian.org and hosted CVS among other things (ddtp, lintian, people, popcon, planet, ports, release). It has been taken offline currently for a reinstall, other systems have been locked down until they can patch the vulnerability that they […]

I’ve got to say, I haven’t spent ENOUGH time with rsync to really be fluent in how I could put it to use…. A week or so ago I was reading this list of essential Linux software by a guy that moved from Mac OS X to linux because he detested the DRM that was […]