Posts tagged ‘links’

I usually don’t just repost other people’s posts, but this one really deserves some extra attention. It explains a very elegant way to hop using SSH.

Continue reading ‘Hopping from host to host with SSH, automatically’ »

I just read this message by Mark Andrews on the BIND mailing list. It explains the possible issues with DNSSEC and over-protective firewalls, giving test-commands to verify your setup. This post is also interesting for regular DNS traffic, since a firewall doesn’t know the difference.

Continue reading ‘DNS(SEC) – Firewall issues’ »

A half year ago, I blogged about a web-based RSS-reader. Recently I found an alternative product, tt-rss. It has an AJAX-based user interface which is of course much slicker, but it also gives more features, such as:

  • Categories
  • Scoring: use regular expressions to hide/highlight certain posts

Since I like to follow up on my RSS-feeds from multiple locations and computers, a regular desktop-based aggregator does not fit my needs. I played around in Google’s Reader, which is a very nice tool. Personally I don’t like my data to be in someone’s cloud. Although unlikely, Google can decide to sell your RSS-ing habits to the highest bidder or vaporize your hard-gathered collection of feeds.

That’s why I wanted to host a Reader-like interface on my own server. Some Googling around – yes, they do have a very good search engine – I found this wonderful, open source, PHP application: feed on feeds. Some highlights:

  • Keyboard shortcuts: read your feeds with only the keyboard, no clicking around
  • Shared items: Create an RSS-feed of interesting posts you read
  • Tagging: tag items with custom tags (manually or automatically)

When doing some research on the different tables in iptables, I was trying to figure out in what order what tables are traversed. Obviously PREROUTING happens before POSTROUTING, but it becomes more difficult to figure out if mangle happens before are after nat.

I found a post which links to this overview (local copy):

packetflow

Recent tests on kernel 3.13.0 (Ubuntu Trusty 14.04) show that tcpdump captures before mange-PREROUTING and after nat-POSTROUTING.

When I’m debugging serial communications, it’s very useful to run the standard application inside a VM. This allows me to connect the virtual RS232 port to the physical one with socat, which provides me with a detailed log of every byte.

The VMware products under Windows and linux have the option to connect their serial port to a “named pipe“, although it’s more a socket, since they allow bidirectional communication. Strangely enough, VMware Fusion, the Mac product, does not have this option.

Continue reading ‘Connecting a serial port from VMware Fusion to a unix socket’ »

I was bored of constantly looking for updates on a website. A little googling turned up this nice site. It turns (a part of) a webpage into an RSS feed. Here are the ones I created:

Up until now, I logged into my blog using the standard username/password. Since my blog is hosted as a vhost, setting up SSL (https) is a pain: You either need a dedicated IP:port per ssl-vhost, or need to work with certificates that list multiple domains (Update 2009-04-18: SNI). Running SSL on a non-standard port works pretty well, but most firewalls don’t like that. Conclusion: the only widely available way to log into my blog is over plain http. Needless to say, I don’t like my password going in plaintext over the Internet.

Continue reading ‘OpenID’ »

My previous system was a Linux-box. I made some adjustments to my keyboard in order to make it “better”. Since I use Vim a lot (apologies to Emacs-fans), the escape-key is doing overtime. On a normal keyboard however, the escape-key is located at the top left. Other keys are very near the main keyboard, but are hardly used. I almost never use the CapsLock key at all. So I switched both keys around, giving the CapsLock key the escape-function and the other way around.

Under Linux, you can remap keys using xmodmap. It seems that Windows has a similar feature, although much less documented. Here is a short summary of this article.

Continue reading ‘Remap keys under Windows’ »

I just found a very nice post describing nice things to do with Bluetooth. By using the Proximity tool, my MacBook Pro can monitor the precense of my cell phone. Proximity will run an AppleScript when a selected device enters and/or leaves Bluetooth range. Most  phones are class 2 Bluetooth devices, which gives a range of 10m (outdoors). This allows you to automatically lock your desktop when you leave and unlock when you come back.

Continue reading ‘Useful things to do with Bluetooth’ »