Posts

It sucks when your home directory partition gets foo bar’ed. {% codeblock %}########### reiserfsck --rebuild-tree started at Wed Aug 17 03:33:36 2005 ########### Pass 0: Loading on-disk bitmap .. ok, 18207763 blocks marked used Skipping 8818 blocks (super block, journal, bitmaps) 18198945 blocks will be read 0% left 17928713, 5874 /sec{% endcodeblock %} One of my partitions has begun acting up, causing oops in Linux and causing things to lock up. I hope this fixes it…and I hope I don’t end up with gobs of nameless files in lost+found. Luckily I was able to scratch up the 70gb required to back said home directories. Had to burn off a few rainbow crack tables, tho… ;) ...

I just found this blog entry about backing up your del.icio.us links. Good to know. I’d like to expand it to provide Yahoo “My Web”-like capability of saving web pages. :)

One of the reasons that I am considering moving my webserver to Gentoo is due to it’s ability to manage web applications using webapp-config. I’m somewhat cautious as just as many people hate it as love it, but I think it might be useful for me. I manage several websites, some of which are using gallery, some of which are using wordpress, and it’s become a hassle anytime I have to upgrade something. ...

Well that wasn’t so bad. emerge wordpress >>> emerge (1 of 1) www-apps/wordpress-1.5.2 to / >>> www-apps/wordpress-1.5.2 merged. OK, getting wordpress installed was easy. Now let’s try to upgrade the old installation. Note the postinst has this: * To install wordpress-1.5.2 into a virtual host, run the following command: * * webapp-config -I -h -d wordpress wordpress 1.5.2 but since I’m doing an upgrade, I’ll be using -U. webapp-config -U -h domain.com -d /wordpress wordpress 1.5.2 ...

I had seen a couple articles about keeping your $HOME in subversion, but none of them really walked me through it. They all assumed a pretty good knowledge of subversion. As a former cvs user with no subversion experience whatsoever, I was pretty lost. # svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/svn/users/userX # chown -R userX /var/svn/users/userX Ok, now what? I’ve got the repository created… This is where I started to get confused. Joey Hess’ home directory looked normal, but ToyKeeper’s site was talking about trunks and branches. I didn’t know whether those went into the home directory or the repository. I assumed the latter, but I needed an answer. Another ONLamp article indicated that it’s on the repository side. I should probably make the decision of how I want to do that now, but I’m going to hold off until I’m more familiar with subversion. ...

Unfortunately, I had to forego DefCon 13 this year for various reasons, but I still kept up a little bit on the chatter that was going on. My favorite presentation…SensePost on BiDiBLAH. BiDiBLAH is a tool that automates 80% (SensePost claim) of the vulnerability/penetration assessment process. That, my dear readers, is sweet and desperately needed in today’s information security assessment environment. Penetration assessments are performed by a unique breed. There’s a certain knowledge required to identify a host and realize the potential exploitability of said host. BiDiBLAH assists in this process. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but have just never got around to. BiDiBLAH looks like it does a pretty decent job and while there are some things I would improve/change…it’s still pretty zexxy. ...

After reading around a little bit, it seems the best approaching to subverting your homedir is to use multiple repositories for the different portions of your homedir and then tying all those together using svn:externals. This post will be a lesson in doing so. First, let’s determine the projected layout. I have several items I want to keep in subversion: homedir - my nix home directory, generally config files code - various projects I may or may not be working on, may consist of various other repositories docs - stuff I need to keep around for my personal life. This won’t be checked out to many machines, but will be nice to keep in svn work - any stuff related to work…resume’s, temporary files, etc. downloads - all the junk I download…how nice would it be to have previous versions in svn instead of x_v3.2.3.8.exe?! bin - various finished shell scripts and utilities for personal use…I may have to seperate this out to win32 and nix ...

I came across a good tip a while back about making meeting requests smartphone friendly. Use the “tel:” prefix and embed the participant passcode (pp) so that can be dialed by one click from a Smartphone. Tel:425-707-2000pp123456 By the way, p is an acceptable substitute for a pause comma. Add more for longer waits. Awesome - as somebody that loves my new smartphone and the ability to have my calendar everywhere, this is very useful.

Couple interesting things I found while trolling around tonight. Microsoft has a project called the Strider Honeymonkey Exploit Detection System that attempts to automatically detect malicious websites that are attempting to distribute malware. According to this SecurityFocus article… Microsoft 's experimental Honeymonkey project has found almost 750 Web pages that attempt to load malicious code onto visitors' computers and detected an attack using a vulnerability that had not been publicly disclosed, the software giant said in a paper released this month. Way to go, Microsoft! ...

Many of you have heard about the Cisco cover-up at Black Hat this year. You know, your normal gestapo presentation suddenly cancelled, pages literally ripped from the conference book, etc. The link to Lynn’s presentation on the Black Hat Multimedia page had also been removed. Now…you think they would have removed the actual pdf as well, don’t you? I mean…this is the hottest news in the past few days and everybody that wasn’t at Black Hat wants to get their hands on this information. And most of these “hacker-types” are fairly resourceful. So you would think that Black Hat would be smart enough to remove the actual pdf… ...