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 [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Hardware category.
Tested the Lenovo support…
… and was quite impressed. Wednesday evening, I called the support to report that I was not satified with my battery. I had lost 25% of its capacity over less than 8 months. Thursday morning, I am recalled by someone from the technical service. They first say that the battery is no more under warranty [...]
Note to myself
When you want to do such a thing as upgrading the BIOS of your Thinkpad, read the instructions that come with the bootable CD flash utility. If you think you did, read it again - and do not interpret them. It would avoid loosing time with a boot error like : CDR101: not ready reading [...]
Practicing Cisco networking with GNS3 and Dynamips
GNS3 and Dynamips put together give a nice open-source and free alternative to emulate a network with IOS routers. Dynampis is an emulator of Cisco 7200 router, while GNS3 provides a nice graphical environment to design your network and use the virtual routers. I sometimes use Boson Netsim, which is not only non-free but not [...]
Hacked !
This blog got hacked yesterday. It looks like some spammer managed to inject some PHP code into almost all *.php files of WordPress. It was not just like the classic SQL injection that is usually used to post some malicious post. The following code was added : <?php echo ‘<script type="text/javascript">function count(str){var res = "";for(i [...]
Cold boot attack, not a threat to Full disk encryption (FDE)
Since the new cold boot attack hack is on the news, touching most of the software encryption solutions, I have wondered if it had any chance to concern also hardware encryption. Hardware encryption is provided by a few laptop makers, generally on high-range an business models. It has much less performance impact than software encryption, [...]
My new toy : Thinkpad T61
As a replacement of my old but reliable Vaio, I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. About laptop PC, I have always been conveiced that the best pieces of hardware are found among Sony and Lenovo (ex-IBM). In tough or ultra-light categories, I would add Panasonic, but it is not the kind of laptop I am [...]
How to connect to a Cisco device using the serial port on Linux
Using the serial port is still necessary to manage some devices, when it is reseted to factory defaults. It could be also a security choice… Nowadays many computers – and especially laptops don’t have anymore a built-in serial port. Not a problem, there are many cheap serial-usb converters like this. As an alternative to the [...]
