Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

HTTP get methods

Saturday, February 20th, 2010 by mopey

Traditionally I’ve done this with nc. However, there is in fact a curl flag to do this. Demonstrating once again how awesome curl is (but I still use the inferior wget because I can never remember curl syntax).
curl -X CONNECT example.com

chromium for linux upgraded to stable (only by me)

Saturday, August 29th, 2009 by mopey

I’ve made chrome my default linux browser. It’s been performing very well…
The thing is, flash on linux is unstable, gosh darn adobe! I have ff crash about every few days due to something like google finance. No more! The separate processes of chrome isolate this somewhat. So although it’s still “unstable” it seems to be [...]

GPG Cheat Sheet

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 by mopey

The gnu Privacy handbook has a ton of useful information, but I thought I’d make a quick reference for the gpg usage I use most. Especially because I was just an idiot and lost my gpg private key (though I do remember the passphrase) – this time there will be a backup!
List all keys
gpg –list-keys
print [...]

execv-like system call

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 by mopey

From the system man page, it explicitely says:
Do not use system() from a program with set-user-ID or set-group-ID privileges, because strange values for some environment variables might be used to subvert system integrity.
Since system is basically a fork and wait, it’s pretty easy to use execv instead. Here is a snippet from the goog_pam module [...]

Boinc

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 by mopey

Boinc is a project I just discovered, but find it very cool. I have used projects like the protein folding and seti@home in the past, which use your spare cpu cycles for something useful. Boinc allows you to manage many projects like that in one place. It seems like an awesome way to help scientists discover look at some really cool problems. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

browsing with firefox, tor, refcontrol, and noscript on ubuntu

Friday, May 8th, 2009 by mopey

I am doing some research that involves a *lot* of google searches. Because this research involves a significant number of directed queries, it seems logical to hide this information as much as practical. If there is a web host who notices sequential names in a Google referer URL repeatedly, this might raise suspicion or alter behavior which could skew results. Similarly, it is desirable to hide IP information from both the web host (for similar reasons) and possibly even search engines.

Security in an Insecure Environment

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 by mopey

stk500 avr atmega16 linux gcc hello, world

Saturday, April 4th, 2009 by mopey

Does my title sound like buz-word central? You bet it does. That’s because it was a bit difficult to find any good introductory material on this. Maybe that’s because there’s so much information out there…

php multiuser system – the www-data problem

Thursday, March 19th, 2009 by mopey

On our multi-user system, one where we have 300+ users all with usermod enabled, we also happen to have other web services running. It’s inconvenient and in some ways insecure for everyone to be running their dynamic web stuff as the same user. One problem in particular is php. suexec was built for cgi-bin stuff – but php is a whole other beast. That’s what I’m talking about here – getting php to run as the user who owns it. More specifically, this will show how /home/user/public_html/myphp.php will run as “user”, but stuff in /var/www will still run as www-data.

Auto Restore Virtualbox

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 by mopey

For the security class I’m teaching we recently had a box to pwn. Problem is, they would sometimes get the address wrong and crash the virtual system. I probably would have just distributed the vdi, but not all of them have machines robust enough to run a vm, so I had to set something up.

New Site – Wordpress

Saturday, February 28th, 2009 by mopey

All the old content will be migrating here to the new site here… stay tuned.

Count number of lines in a file

Thursday, February 26th, 2009 by mopey

“find . -type f -exec cat {} \; | wc -l;” and if you don’t want repeats “find . -type f -exec cat {} \; | egrep \\S | wc -l”

mounting partitions from a disk image

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 by mopey

My laptop drive recently died on me. Of course, this is the one machine that I don’t have good backups on. After various passes of dd_rescue (forward and backward) I had a pretty good disk image. Now I wanted to mount a partition. Problem is, I had an image.

whoever said userspace filesystems had to be slow?

Monday, January 26th, 2009 by mopey

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/performance.html

auto-identify with xchat

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 by mopey

Yeah, it took #python’s mandated identify to make me finally find it.
Open up the network list (cntrl + S), select your server (mine is freenode), then input your password. Yep, that’s it.

madwifi == awesome

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 by mopey

You know, with how much people tout the prism2 chipset, atheros sometimes gets looked over.

Audo books for IPOD from Linux

Friday, November 7th, 2008 by mopey

Using this new IPOD I got with my Linux desktop is pretty smooth with amarok, but audio books was one format that was a bit tough to figure out.

convert flash to mp3

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 by mopey

Using ffmpeg, anything’s possible
Just install ffmpeg, lame, and then you can do something like

ffmpeg -i flashvid.flv -ar 44100 -ab 160 -ac 2 outfile.mp3

HTTP over SSH

Saturday, November 1st, 2008 by mopey

It’s easier than you might think. socks is actually built into openSSH, so its really a trivial matter to setup a local proxy.

2.0.38 /usr/src/linus/fs/ufs/ufs_super.c

Saturday, October 25th, 2008 by mopey

Linux has definitely lost it’s cool.


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