I know many of you use Launchpad’s “Personal Package Archive” for updated and beta packages. I have about a half-dozen configured on my machine to give me the latest and greatest of my favorite applications. The one problem with a PPA though is that the packages can’t be verified when downloaded because you don’t have… Read More »
At work we maintain over a hundred machines, most of which are regularly accessed via SSH by our developers. Due to the number of machines and the number of tasks that need completed, we found that many of the developers would often forget they were logged into a server and leave an idle SSH session… Read More »
I got to thinking about something the other day when I rebuilt my webserver using Debian 5.0. How does Debian/Ubuntu standardize on reloading the iptables rules at boot time? I know that Red Hat and its variants use the /etc/sysconfig/iptables file as a save and restore point, and there is an init script, iptables, that… Read More »
This post is published in the hope that it’ll help others solve an issue I’ve been dealing with for the past few weeks. I have searched and searched for a solution and only recently found one workaround for the problem. The bug that I have found is here. Hopefully with some more attention it’ll be… Read More »
I have been tunneling all of my web traffic over an encrypted SSH connection for some time now. Considering the fact that I travel a lot, I’m very regularly on untrusted, insecure networks. I prefer to secure those connections (web, IM, email, etc) by creating an encrypted SSH connection and pushing the traffic through it.… Read More »
I covered VNC this afternoon in my Linux system administration course and the question came up on how to secure VNC. You may or may not be aware than VNC is not encrypted by default, which could be a security concern. If you use VNC regularly to connect to other Linux machines you may want… Read More »
I’m sure many of you have heard by this point that there is a reported vulnerability in openSSL and openSSH. The basis of this is that they keys that are generated when you use these tools (ie; installing openssh-server, etc) are generated in a weak manner and can be prone to simple brute force attacking.… Read More »
I’ve been hearing more and more recent requests (at OpenWeek -chat and in blog comments) regarding a request for a GUI on top of ufw. I wanted to take a second and outline more clearly what ufw is, which will likely stop these requests. I think its just a simple matter of not truly understand… Read More »
I wanted to quickly toss something out there for all of you on the interweb. I spent some time last evening cleaning up a few of my code projects. If you have been using either of them you may want to update. apturl for Gnome Do I spent some time in the #gnome-do channel last… Read More »
I’m really happy to announce that SELinux is now available in Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”. This is the result of the amazing work of the ubuntu-security and ubuntu-hardened teams, as well as the huge contributions from the folks at Tresys. (note: SELinux will not be the default, but is available as a security option.) If… Read More »