The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin (12)

Read all about it here.
Very interesting series. I've read to chapter 4 the other night ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remove copy protection from PDF documents

This is probably illegal, so use it at your own risk. Some PDFs on the internet have a copy protection to make sure you cannot copy-paste any content from the PDF into a document you're writing. To circumvent this protection there are several tools available on the internet. I haven't tried any of them, because they're not free ;) There is however a procedure that will enable you to circumvent the copy protection using free tools. The trick is to convert the PDF to a PS (PostScript) document first and then convert it back into a PDF. So, download Ghostview en Ghostscript from: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ . Next, open your PDF in Ghostview. Next, from the "File" menu, select "Convert" (a dialog will pop up) Press "Ok" Fill in the name of the "converted" file. Press "Save" Tada, you can now copy content from your newly created PDF ;)
Read more

The story of the Cobalt Qube

Image
The other week, a friendly colleague of mine brought me a small present. He gave me one of his Cobalt Qube s (for free!) which was collecting dust at his home. He was certain that I could give it a better use. I think I can still remember the days these things hit the market (somewhere in the late 90's). This was a home / office server appliance way before the people of Microsoft thought up their Windows Home Server . It was running some modified version of Linux RedHat, featuring a web interface for all administrative tasks. It also had 2 network cards, so you could easily turn it into a gateway / firewall. The RedHat version running on the Qube was known to be notoriously insecure. It was also running an older 2.0.x kernel which was outdated, even at that time. The Qube 2700 and Qube 2 were both equipped with a MIPS processor. Later models had an i386 architecture. Mine was a Qube 2. Getting the serial connection to work The Qube does not have any VGA adapter, so if you want to s...
Read more

pam_ccreds howto

This document is largely inspired by this link. The configuration contains a few flaws however and is not working for Ubuntu Edgy. First we need to install nss-updatedb: sudo apt-get install nss-updatedb Make sure to update /etc/nsswitch.conf : passwd: compat ldap [NOTFOUND=return] db group: compat ldap [NOTFOUND=return] db shadow: compat ldap Populate the cache by issuing: sudo nss_updatedb ldap Make sure nss-ldap doesn't search for the LDAP forever. Update /etc/libnss-ldap.conf : bind_policy hard nss_reconnect_tries 1 nss_reconnect_sleeptime 1 nss_reconnect_maxsleeptime 8 nss_reconnect_maxconntries 2 Check if this worked by unplugging the network and typing the following command: getent passwd Be warned, this might take some time. Now, install libnss-db and libpam-ccreds: sudo apt-get install libnss-db libpam-ccreds Update /etc/pam.d/common-auth : auth sufficient pam_unix.so auth [authinfo_unavail=ignore success=1 default=die] pam_ldap.so use_first_pas...
Read more