My Little Pocket Universe
Scott Garrett Linux has great facilities to view what is happening with the hardware and kernel, but the information isn’t always in one place or organized for humans to look at. Seeing the fibre channel HBAs and the attached devices is a prime example. Getting a quick view is a royal pain. Here is a bash script … Read more
Unfortunately, since the last OS update for the Mac (Monterey), QuickLook has become especially unstable, especially on my M1 Mac Mini. It doesn’t cause crashes or anything, it simply stops working; especially with video files. However there is a simple solution to the problem. From the Terminal, just run the command (you do not need … Read more
To add an extra layer of security to your server, especially when you are working on a shared client, you can add SSHFP records to the DNS record of the host. This allows the ssh client to pull the hash of the server from DNS to add an extra layer of verification that the host … Read more
If you have the HashKnownHosts option for your ssh client set to yes, then you have a more secure known_hosts file so that a bad actor cannot easily get a list of the hosts you connect to, which is a good idea. However, it also hides it from you, so if you need to remove … Read more
You’ve got this shiny toy in your Mac that lets you use your fingerprint for authentication, and for some reason when you need to elevate your privileges, it doesn’t use that sensor. Epic Fail! Fortunately, the facility is there. Apple just chose not to enable it for some reason only they know. Since MacOS uses … Read more
When archiving videos, often times there is a logo of some sort that really distracts. Or even worse, is put in by someone who had nothing to do with actually making the video like they are taking credit for the hard work of the production company. I ran into a case of the latter, and … Read more
One shortcoming of the native settings on the iPhone and the iPad is that you can’t easily set up on-demand or automatic VPNs. While there is no way to do it in the GUI, you can, however create a profile and install it with all the necessary information and logic. Profiles are just XML documents … Read more
While I was updating some settings with my bind server on Ubuntu 20, I noticed a lot of queries for “pizzaseo.com”, which appears to be some kind of marketing company trying to scrape for data. On reading out in forums about it, apparently they’re looking for vulnerable pi-hole servers that are exposed to the internet. … Read more
It’s particularly irritating when security people who have a limited grasp of security set password rules in your domain that force you to change your password way too frequently. It’s even worse when it remembers a history of passwords that you cannot reuse. I am not condoning never changing your password, but a very complex/long … Read more
I was looking for a way to compare compression ratios with different algorithms, and didn’t want to have to run them in serial. So I started digging and found a nice bash syntax that allows you to do just that. And just for fun, it calculates the sha checksum as well. curl -s https://someserver.com/file.txt | … Read more