Category Archives: Admin

How do you manage your passwords?

We all know that passwords sucks, that they are the nightmare of all administrators and security guys. So many hacks have been eased because the victims reused the same password everywhere : email account, forum, bank, critical systems… Sadly, so far, there is even not the beginning of a replacement solution. Passwords will be there [...]

World’s worst hacker

That was so funny !

Corrupted virtual disk with VMware

Wow, this article and especially one of its comments saved my day. My computer crashed and one of the VMware machine hosted on it could not start anymore : “Cannot open the disk ‘path of vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: the specific virtual disk needs repair. Checking on the [...]

Yet OpenSSL renegociation not fully fixed

How the hell is it possible that after so many months, the fix for OpenSSL renegociation has not been yet included in either Chrome (6.0.4) or Opera (10.61)? I haven’t tested other browsers though, except Firefox which at least has fixed the issue since several months.

get rid off ConsoleKit / Dbus / Hal stuff on a server

Console-Kit spawns 35 threads on my system, which is a waste considering that I use at most 7 vty. But it is definitely useless on a server (you don’t need fast switching stuff). Dbus and Hal are also not useful on a server and consuming resources for nothing. Unfortunately, they are settled with the default [...]

How to physically identify a software RAID disk member

What you need: a good earing smartmontools Indeed, so far, I haven’t found anything better than launching a process making a lot of disk activity. This command just do it: The “short” test will give you a few minutes to carefully listen and select the right disk. Well, it sure is pretty primitive! But do [...]

Beware of source code (even from your favorite portal/forum/…)

The other day I stumbed upon a weired piece of software on howtoforge.com : dns-add (code on sourceforge.net). Actually, the purpose of dns-add was very intriguing : update your DNS in one command ! The output should look like this: Who would need it these days where all distros include tools and script to update [...]

Downtimes: a hardware problem

You may have noticed that the site had a lot of downtimes recently. I was having a daily kernel panic and weired file system corruptions, which I first tought were coming from the successive crashes and reboots. However, while it happened again and again and I could not find any good reason for that, I [...]