Category: tech

  • <3 Policy

    Security Policies Let us praise, slay, and bury security policies together. A security policy is perhaps the best way to deal with the security monster. It concerns itself with business and organizational issues, and is designed to assist the organization succeed in spite of human nature. I sometimes not-so-glibly say that a security policy is simply…

  • getting tcpdump to write to pcap format

    I wouldn’t think I’d be writing something like this, but….. Apple changed the default of tcpdump to writeout pcap-ng format, which wireshark doens’t understand by default. Wasn’t sure what was up, but a quick search didn’t get any hits… turns out the -y flag is the key (at least, Mavericks+.) $ sudo tcpdump -w /tmp/1…

  • Get Device ID (moar IPMI… yawn….)

    I’d had this sitting around for awhile and thought I’d take another look at it; in this I simply toss out an IPMI Get Device ID command and see what happens. This is an interesting one; the GUID is a Vendor Specific ID – the specification says that it’s “a unique number per device”, and that…

  • mega mega mega… chan chan chan….

    Or… Notes on the IPMI Protocol Security Model. I wrote in Sold Down the River about the curious aspects of channels and authentication and users and all that stuff. Here’s a slimmed down model… and as a bonus a program that iterates through all the channels, users types, and authentication for a host, which is…

  • certificates and security

    npm is the defacto package manager for the node.js javascript network programming environment thingee. The folks who make npm have taken a security leap: npm no longer supports its self-signed certificates Ah, they build the bastions of light and goodness, protecting us from the sins of the masses by standing tall. So… how do you install…

  • The Dynamic and Depreciating Value of Computers

    I wrote this while I was at my company Elemental, and was meant for engineers to implement, so despite some of the very specific language for implementation purposes it was never meant to be dogmatic. I love the idea of calculating value based on… not much. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I can say that…