I got my new corporate laptop today, a Dell Latitude E6500, very nice computer. Working as a security consultant, I’m always on the road, connecting my laptop on customers or evil (free Wi-Fi access point or conference) networks . Fortunately, my company allows consultants, if they want, to manage their
Tag: Unix
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
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
Lynis: Security and System Auditing Tool
Michael Boelen announced today a new release of his tool called Lynis dedicated to UNIX specialists. Michael is also the developer of RootKit Hunter. Quote from the homepage: “Lynis is an auditing tool for Unix (specialists). It scans the system and available software, to detect security issues. Beside security related
Crontab Security
All UNIX flavors have a command scheduler called cron. Each user can schedule repetitive tasks at regular interval. Example: files cleanup, backups, data synchronization or web sites checks. User space commands are provided for this purpose: crontab to easily schedule your tasks and at to schedule a one-shot command. A
Debian apt-get upgrade exception
Quick tip to help you to manage packages on a Debian distribution: How to perform an upgrade (apt-get upgrade) without upgrading one or more critical packages? I’m running a Debian server with a Groundwork monitoring tool. Groundwork requires specific MySQL packages that cannot be upgraded. # cat <<END | dpkg