I spent a good part of the weekend auditing the security of my infrastructure at home, since I haven’t given it much attention lately. One of my first steps was doing a port scan with nmap of my public IPs from a remote host, both to make sure there …

I’m running a Vyatta vyatta router at home - in my opinion it’s pretty near “enterprise grade”, and I’m running the Community/Core (read: no-cost and almost all Free) on commodity hardware with great performance. Granted, I’m still on the older version (5 as opposed to the …

Anyone who tried to visit any of my sites last night, or send me email, probably noticed that I dropped off the face of the earth. I take my uptime pretty seriously - even with virtually no budget, about 10 minutes of UPS time, and everything hosted out of my basement …

I have a small web-based tool for allowing members of an organization to register their wireless MAC addresses, and then automatically adding them to the MAC ACL on Ubiquiti AirOSv2 APs. It’s a pretty quick hack, along with a simple and ugly web-based tool, but it gets the job …

• Big media fails to turn ISPs into copyright cops | Media Maverick - CNET News
• Court: No warrant needed to search cell phone - The Red Tape Chronicles - msnbc.com

I’ve had the need to find out the actual username of someone logged in and working as root (via sudo su -) to put it into a subversion commit message. This quick little bash script does the trick, and just echos the username.

#!/bin/bash

PID=$$ # get PID of current …

While I know this isn’t best practice, since we use LDAP-based auth for our Linux boxes (including a sudoers file based on LDAP group membership), we usually do work on some boxes as root (sudo su -). This includes our puppetmaster, where configs are kept in subversion and edited …

Net Neutrality is a big issue these days, and one that’s exploded out of the geek circles into mainstream media. I’ll admit that it seems like there are endless variations on exactly what people consider Net Neutrality to be (or what it should be). The general goal of …

So today I started to implement a number of complex regex-based rules and templates to get rsyslog to parse ISC DHCPd logs in realtime. Unfortunately one of my templates must have been wrong, because I started seeing some errors about a field that cannot be blank in /var/log/messages …

Yes, I haven’t posted much lately. Just a quick little tip, since it came in handy today.

Grep accepts a --color argument which highlights matches in color (assuming your terminal supports it). Passing grep --color=always and piping the output into less -R will allow you to scroll through …