Geek Pit

I recently had the need to install Linux on an older PC - a generic
PIII 1Ghz with 384MB of RAM. I’ve long been a fan of Debian for older
hardware - the installer allows you to install a base system of about
400MB which you can tweak and add onto after-the-fact. I find this
much easier than installing […]

Read Full Post »

There is some interesting discussion over
at LWN
about binary blobs used in hardware drivers. The impetus
was this
article, a review of Fedora Core 6 that basically said “It sucks
because it has no support for modern-day web content”.

I appreciate the fact that distributions like Fedora Core are still
focused on free-as-in-rights software, but today’s Web content
requires more proprietary browser […]

Read Full Post »

So I recently purchased another laptop, after surviving the
last Dell
fiasco. I bought
an Acer
Aspire 3620, and it runs Ubuntu Dapper beautifully. Every piece of
hardware is supported out of the box, including the onboard wireless
(I did a bit more research this time before I bought it). Here are the
basic specs:

Memory: 512MB
HDD: 80GB (IDE, […]

Read Full Post »

There is an interesting article at tbray.org where Tim Bray recounts
his
recent experiences
with Ubuntu. He discusses a few things I’ve talked about before
- one,
that apt-get
is Debian/Ubuntu’s main strength, and why
something
like it should […]

Read Full Post »

Ex-parrot brings
us fun with
wireless Internet access thieves. This one is really funny, a
real-life “Revenge of the Nerds”. Of course, someone who can fiddle
fluently with iptables
and Perl should be using some
variant of WPA, but that would not be nearly as fun.

NeoBinaries lists
Five
very useful Firefox extensions.

Windows
DRM is […]

Read Full Post »

One of the reasons I like Perl so
much is CPAN, and how easy it makes
writing scripts for system administration. One of my clients
uses Clam AV to screen incoming
mail for viruses. The updater, called ‘freshclam’, runs periodically
and updates the virus definitions database, and also checks to see
that the installed version of Clam AV is not out-of-date […]

Read Full Post »

Being a CT resident, I’m taking some interest in
the story of
Joe Lieberman’s “hacked” website. According to the Lieberman
campaign, their website and email has been offline for about 18 hours
now. They are also claiming that this is a DoS (Denial of Service)
attack,
and suggesting Ned
Lamont supporters’ involvement
(Update: Now
denied).

(Note: More updates below)

A few extra pieces of info you […]

Read Full Post »

In honor of Sysadmin
Appreciation Day (July 28th),
the classic
song and
some humor.

Very useful site with backported
Debian installer images. They mainly contain updated kernels,
meaning they support lots of newer hardware, including Dell’s latest
power-edge servers.

SearchSecurity.com gives us an analysis of security patch times for
various Linux distros. The fastest
patchers? Ubuntu, Fedora and
RHEL,
with Debian a close fourth.

Yet another
high-profile switch from
[…]

Read Full Post »

The US
is unprepared
for a major attack on the Internet infrastructure.

A good tutorial
on Securing
Apache with mod_security.

Tim O’Reilly comments
on recent
high-profile switches from Mac to Ubuntu.

Captchas are slowly
but surely falling prey to computers.

The shock
of using IE when you are used
[…]

Read Full Post »

Perl beginners might be
tempted by online books
like this, simply
because they are readily available. In this case, I would not
recommend this book even after just skimming the online
chapters. One of the biggest things that jumped out at me was the
chapter on CGI form processing […]

Read Full Post »