Featured Articles

Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Hardening Guide for phpList
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
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Rockbox – Sansa e260v2

I bought a cheap, $30 refurbished MP3 player off of woot back in December ’08: the
. . . → Read More: Rockbox – Sansa e260v2

xen hung at “Checking for hardware changes”

So, xen is really beginning to piss me off. I turned off all my machines to do a snapshot, and when I tried to bring them back up, they were all in the ‘blocked’ state. Upon further investigation (using virt-manager/xm console), I found that they were hung at the “Checking for hardware changes” item in their boot process. This could be a CentOS/RHEL 5 issue, but I’m putting my money on xen.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: xen hung at “Checking for hardware changes”

Enabling SELinux strict on RHEL5

I’ve been playing around with SELinux at work recently. Not surprisingly, I was struggling to get SELINUXTYPE=strict to work properly. Unfortunately, all “google results for ‘enabling selinux strict’ would return were dead ends. People would enable selinux strict, kernel panic, and ‘fix’ it by disabling selinux.

Well, a co-worker of mine *was* able to successfully enable selinux’s strict policy on RHEL5 (CentOS 5). He gave me this guide to post to the world for others to see how (thanks Mykola):

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Enabling SELinux strict on RHEL5

*Cheap*, Redundant, Multi-TB, Storage Solution

Storage is getting so cheap these days. So cheap, in fact, that multi-terabyte home servers are now economically feasible.

The emergence of cheap 1 terabye hard drives and ZFS perfectly compliment each other. Like others, I’ve embraced these two technologies to build myself a redundant, multi-TB disk array with 3x1TB drives running in a RAIDZ on OpenSolaris for about $300.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: *Cheap*, Redundant, Multi-TB, Storage Solution

Install “build-essential” on RHEL/CentOS and OpenSolaris

Debian

If you want to be able to compile packages in debain/ubunutu, you can issue the following command:

apt-get install build-essential

 

Red Hat

If you want to be able to compile packages in red hat/centos, you can issue the following command:

yum install make gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel

…or, if you don’t care about maintaining a small footprint, you can get *all* of the development packages (including X devs–eww):

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

 

Open Solaris

If you want to be able to compile packages in open solaris, you can issue the following command:

pkg install SUNWgcc Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

Clone Xen RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) VM

Hello world! I just updated my whole server environment and, my, things are looking good. Anyway, I had to run through these steps a half dozen times, so I thought I would post it here for myself and (maybe even) others.

Here’s the commands I ran to turn a clone of my base RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) Xen image into another working virtual machine on my RHEL5 (CentoOS 5.2) Xen Host:

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

Sabayon, KDE, and Evolution

I recently reformatted my hard drive–switching from pure Gentoo to the Sabayon fork. Sabayon did for Gentoo what Ubuntu did for Debian. It’s generally a lot easier to use, but–unlike Ubuntu–it doesn’t sacrifice functionality for ease-of-use.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Sabayon, KDE, and Evolution

kmhssoccer.org Update

To a degree, I still actively work on my high school soccer team’s website (which I created back in 2005). I started working on it on and off since summer 2008, and 71 hours of development later, I finally pushed my changes to the live server in January 2009.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: kmhssoccer.org Update

New GPG Key

I went to send an email the other day and I was halted when I discovered that my key had expired. I can’t believe that I’ve been using GPG for 6 months, but the time had come to generate a new keypair.

This post outlines the process to gererate a new keypair once your old keypair has expired.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: New GPG Key

Smoothwall Update

A few weeks ago, I finally got around to downloading and installing 4 updates to my smoothwall box. Unlike Ubuntu upgrades, this process was farily painless except for one thing: my Zerina OpenVPN ‘plugin’ broke.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Smoothwall Update