Monday, November 19, 2007
The hardware vendors are to blame
I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks for any new/alternative OS, be it Vista or Linux is driver support by hardware vendors.
My primary server is a Windows 2003 box. The server is running so many open source apps (ssh, squid, tor, popfile) that it no longer made sense to run Windows. So I formatted the OS partition and installed CentOS, everything worked fine except CentOS could not recognise my Promise SX4000 RAID card. Given that this is where ALL my data is located, this was a big problem.
After much Googling, it turns out that the Linux drivers for my RAID card are closed source, not compatible with the 2.4 kernel and only support a few flavours of Linux. I can understand the hardware vendor not supporting newer versions of Linux but how about releasing the source to the driver? It seems that the hardware vendors are still a handbrake to alternate OS adoption.
My primary server is a Windows 2003 box. The server is running so many open source apps (ssh, squid, tor, popfile) that it no longer made sense to run Windows. So I formatted the OS partition and installed CentOS, everything worked fine except CentOS could not recognise my Promise SX4000 RAID card. Given that this is where ALL my data is located, this was a big problem.
After much Googling, it turns out that the Linux drivers for my RAID card are closed source, not compatible with the 2.4 kernel and only support a few flavours of Linux. I can understand the hardware vendor not supporting newer versions of Linux but how about releasing the source to the driver? It seems that the hardware vendors are still a handbrake to alternate OS adoption.
Go ahead... SPAM me
I don't know what has happened in the last month, but there seems to be a worldwide explosion of SPAM. I have several email accounts across multiple ISP's and my daily SPAM tally has jumped from 3 or 4 a day to 160 a day across all my accounts.
After much Googling and trying out a bunch of open source & free anti-SPAM solutions I settled on the brilliant Spamihilator. What sets Spamihilator apart from the other solutions, most of which are wrappers around SpamAssassin, is the ability to delete SPAM before it hits your inbox, coupled with a large array of SPAM identification techniques including email address white/black lists, DNS Black lists, filtering based on number of recipients, Bayesian learning filter, bad word lists etc.
I have found after a week of training that Spamihilator is above 99% accuracy for SPAM filtering. I have only seen a couple of SPAMs in my inbox since I installed it plus there is a nice recycle bin in case you get any false positives.
Using the AnalogX Portmapper I was able to give access to Spamihilator (normally bound to localhost) to all the machines on my network.
After much Googling and trying out a bunch of open source & free anti-SPAM solutions I settled on the brilliant Spamihilator. What sets Spamihilator apart from the other solutions, most of which are wrappers around SpamAssassin, is the ability to delete SPAM before it hits your inbox, coupled with a large array of SPAM identification techniques including email address white/black lists, DNS Black lists, filtering based on number of recipients, Bayesian learning filter, bad word lists etc.
I have found after a week of training that Spamihilator is above 99% accuracy for SPAM filtering. I have only seen a couple of SPAMs in my inbox since I installed it plus there is a nice recycle bin in case you get any false positives.
Using the AnalogX Portmapper I was able to give access to Spamihilator (normally bound to localhost) to all the machines on my network.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Having trouble Syncing Nokia phone with Linux?
Sync it in Windows first.
I lost an entire afternoon trying to get my new Nokia 6300 to sync with multisync and kitchensync. After trying everything on the forums I sync'd it with Windows then went back to Linux and everything worked without a configuration change.
I am guessing the official Nokia software turns on sync'ing on the phone.
I lost an entire afternoon trying to get my new Nokia 6300 to sync with multisync and kitchensync. After trying everything on the forums I sync'd it with Windows then went back to Linux and everything worked without a configuration change.
I am guessing the official Nokia software turns on sync'ing on the phone.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Web application testing tip
Full credits go to my colleague w0ndrboi for this tip.
When using an interception proxy like Paros or Burp and you want to trap/log the interaction with one (or limited) number of addresses, you can create or modify a custom PAC file. You configure the PAC file to tell the browser to only use your interception proxy when browsing your target sites. You then configure your brower's "Automatic proxy configuration URL" to point to the location of the PAC file. Very nifty!
When using an interception proxy like Paros or Burp and you want to trap/log the interaction with one (or limited) number of addresses, you can create or modify a custom PAC file. You configure the PAC file to tell the browser to only use your interception proxy when browsing your target sites. You then configure your brower's "Automatic proxy configuration URL" to point to the location of the PAC file. Very nifty!
