Let's say you set up a machine using an encrypted disk with LUKS (debian-installer's partman makes this wonderfully easy!). You choose an initial passphrase, get the machine working, and it's working great. Then, you need to restart it, and realize that (for whatever reason) you've forgotten or lost the passphrase …
Articles in the misc category
Liberating Knowledge: A Librarian's Manifesto
A friend just pointed me to Liberating Knowledge: A Librarian's Manifesto for Change by Barbara Fister, an academic librarian who also happens to write mystery novels.
She has an excellent perspective on the meaning of libraries, and the tradeoffs involved with the current societal trend toward privatizing knowledge through so-called …
converting eviews models to gretl?
Someone recently pointed me to some economic/statistical models that were designed for eviews (a proprietary tool).
They were looking for help converting the model into a format that could work with gretl (the Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library). I'm afraid i'm an economics dunce, and i have no …
forwarding unix domain sockets with ssh and socat
i suspect a lot of people are used to forwarding TCP sockets with SSH -- for example, to connect locally to a mysql daemon that runs only on the loopback interface of a remote machine (this is debian's default
mysql-serverconfiguration):ssh -N -T -oExitOnForwardFailure=yes -L 3306:localhost:3306 remoteuser …registrars and AAAA glue records
i've been on an IPv6 kick recently, getting dual-stack systems up and working for a bunch of folks.
I'd like to make some of these services reachable by IPv6-only clients. this suggests that i need a range of details sorted out, but i think the one piece left for me …
Debian NYC Workshop: What's in a Package?
Debian NYC will be holding a workshop next week: What's in a Package? will happen at 7:00pm New York time on October 27, 2010. If you're in the New York area, interested in packaging things for debian and related systems, or just want to understand the packages in your …
monkeysphere and distributed naming
Roland Mas writes an interesting article about decentralized naming, in which he says:
Monkeysphere aims at adding a web of trust to the SSL certificates system, but the CA chain problem seems to persist (although I must admit I'm not up to speed with the actual details).
Since i'm one …
You should be using ssh-agent
If you're not using
ssh-agentto authenticate yourself to SSH servers, you should be. (i'm assuming you're already usingPubkeyAuthentication; if you're still usingPasswordAuthentication,ChallengeResponseAuthenticationorKbdInteractiveAuthentication, fix that please).You should use
ssh-agentfor a number of reasons, actually, but the simplest is this: when you authenticate to …hotmail thinks powerpc means mobile
Apparently, live.com thinks that any browser coming from a ppc architecture is a mobile device. This sucks for the users of the hundreds of thousands of powerpc desktops still in service.
I don't use hotmail myself, but i do support people who use it. I set one of my …
NYC SYEP still requires Microsoft Software
A year ago, i wrote about how New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) requires the use of Internet Explorer to apply online (and it even appears to require IE just to download the PDF of the application!)
Sadly, the situation has not changed, a year later. Today, I'm …