On UNIX systems, log files are everywhere. Application are often very verbose (which is good!) but keeping an eye on logs can quickly become a nightmare! I’m a big fan of the tail command, specially the “-f” flag which does not stop the command once the end of file is
Category: Unix
Just Switched to Ubuntu “Jaunty”
A lot has been written about Ubuntu “Jaunty” 9.04 since it has been released. My corporate laptop runs Ubuntu very smoothly. Unfortunately, since the last Nvidia drivers upgrade, I faced a nasty bug. I was running version ‘180-11’ but ‘180-44’ is officially available by default in the latest release. No
Keep an Eye on SSH Forwarding!
OpenSSH is a wonderful tool box. The main purpose is to establish encrypted connections (SSH means Secure SHell) on a remote UNIX machine and, once authenticated, to spawn a shell to perform remote administration. Running on port 22 (default), the client (ssh) and the server (sshd) exchange encrypted information (what
Bash: History to Syslog
For those who still ignore, Bash 4 is out for a few days! Bash is the most used shell on UNIX hosts. Bash has a built-in mechanism to save a log of all commands executed by the user (default in $HOME/.bash_history) but this file belongs to the user itself and
Quick and Dirty Integrity Check Script
Here is a quick and dirty bash script which will take care of your files integrity. Integrity is a component of the CIA triad, I’ll not come back on this. For a personal project, I should be able to monitor any change in a specific file. I quickly wrote the
Introduction to Nmap Scripting
All people working with networks know the wonderful tool called Nmap. Basically, Nmap is a network scanner. It allows you to detect hosts on a network and services running on them. Just type “nmap <hostname|ip>” to perform a simple port scan. But Nmap can do much more! Host discovery, multiple
Simple DLP with Ngrep
DLP stands for “Data Loss Prevention” or sometimes, “Data Leak Protection“. Companies primary goal is to make business. And their activities rely on their data (customers, databases, research results, statistics, source code, …). DLP is a security process which takes care of: monitoring, identify and protection of the data. The
Tiny Password Generator
Found on Korben’s Blog, a nice way to generate a random password on UNIX: # < /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c8 tOULPeOk Just create an alias for a more convenient day-to-day use: # alias gen_pw='< /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 | head -c8' # gen_pw wbk0ewpn Note: this works
SSH Fingerprint ASCII Visualization
OpenBSD is my favorite OS and one more time, it makes the difference! The latest OpenBSD CVS version introduces the “SSH Fingerprint ASCII Visualization“. What does it mean? When you connect to remote host via SSH, your SSH client performs some checks on the server key. If it changed, you
AdvFS Goes Open Source
HP announced that the AdvFS source code will be made open source. A few years ago, I worked with Tru64 and AdvFS. It was a wonderful file system but, unfortunately, Tru64 development stopped after the Compaq take over by HP. Let’s hope that the AdvFS source code will provide benefits