Hugh's Worthless Blog

Well, I'll be the first person to admit I'm not perfect, and I found that out really quickly when we were hacked severely over the weekend. My biggest mistake was using the same two passwords all over a bunch of assorted Linux boxes I use around the Internet, and my second mistake was overusing 'sudo' and giving myself too much access based on two very good and cryptic passwords . Sure they were good passwords, but once someone has captured those two passwords (through a compromised ssh client or sshd server no doubt), they had root access all over the place. So now I have changed passwords everywhere, patched assorted systems with clean binaries (why are we still using Red Hat 9 on some boxes?) and removed access to many domains and simply turned off sshd on several systems that really did not need it (Did I really need to ssh into my iMac?). What a fun time this has been, all because a few people somewhere thought they needed to run psyBNC bouncer somewhere and also...

Well, a friend of mine inherited an old IBM ThinkPad from his sister which had a 800 MHZ Pentium-III (not too bad), a 10 GB hard drive (small but usable) and 128MB of RAM. He could have bought more memory for the machine to run XP on it (forget Vista), but since you can buy a whole laptop like this on eBay for under $100, it seemed like a lot to spend $20-30 to push it to 256MB or 384MB just to run XP. The simple solution appeared just a few days ago -- a brand new Puppy Linux release (version 2.15 Community Edition)! Just a 130MB download and a fast burn onto a $0.20 CD and his old ThinkPad roared to life? The small 128MB is no problem, Puppy runs just fine with that. After installing it fully, the disk still had well over 9GB free since Puppy only took about 450MB (including AbiWord, Gnumeric, Firefox, XMMS, etc....) It easily detected his IBM EtherJet card (he still needs to find his sister's dongle -- but that sounds creepy!), my Dell branded 3com CardBus ethernet card, and ...

We transfer a lot of files around using FTP and SFTP (that's how you are supposed to move around large files -- not with e-mail attachments!). Typically we use FileZilla since that is a popular open source project. For unencrypted FTP within our department and for small SFTP transfers it isn't a problem. But for SFTP'ing large amounts of data FileZilla seems to be a bit of a dog (i.e. slower than molasses). I tried some other open source SFTP clients and whereas some were substantially faster than FileZilla no Windows client came close to just using command line SFTP within Linux (or Mac OSX terminal). That is until I tried Tunnelier . It does have a file explorer type interface and is relatively easy to use, but the great thing here is the speed. It simply flies doing SFTP transfers, running several times faster than FileZilla, CoreFTP LE or even WinSCP (which was substantially faster than the other two). Since speed does matter, I will have to start promoting Tunnelier o...

Since I have been so lucky in the past winning free CD's and stuff from ChristianBook.com and HearItFirst.com , I had to sign up for their latest contests. At ChristianBook.com you can win a brick of 30 CD's from the artists on the WOW Hymns CD . Even though I already have several of the CD's, I entered the contest anyway. I can always give the extras away. Included among them is Steven Curtis Chapman's "All Things New" which you can now purchase for $5.99 from them as well. Switchfoot's "Nothing is Sound" and "Learning to Breathe" are also there for $5.99 each. I may have paid more for my copies, but I've also experienced the years of enjoyment from them! Steven's "Abbey Road Sessions/The Walk DVD" is also available for $5.99 and I am considering actually buying that one now. At $15-$20 I did not see the point since there were no new songs there, but now as just $5.99 it is tempting! It is almost my birthday after...