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Category: tech

  • Def Con, Jeff Moss, and Sexism

    I suppose this could be subtitled “why I won’t be going to Def Con again.” Last August I wrote a letter to Jeff Moss (who is the founder of Def Con) about the disturbing sexism – including a conference sponsored strip show – I personally witnessed on a short jaunt I took to Def Con…

  • Even more IPMI, woohoo!

    I wrote a small paper surveying the scene of IPMI in the wild – Sold Down the River – the title of which might give you some clue as to make on the situation. Used to be folks used guns to rob us… computers make everything so much easier!

  • From A on B to C on D

    I find iptables to be a bit of a beast… so for posterity (or my own sanity, in case I lost this, I might recover from search engine caches!) this simply forwards a port (A) of a certain protocol from one host (B) to a second port (C) on a 2nd IP (D). Linux only,…

  • Random bits

    … well, literally… or pseudo literally? To generate 128 bits of pseudo-randomness: dd if=/dev/urandom bs=16 count=1 2>/dev/null| hexdump |awk ‘{$1=""; printf("%s", $0)}’ | sed ‘s/ //g’ Block size 16 = 16 bytes… do that once (count=1); that’s 16 bytes * 8 bits/byte = 128 bits. I’ve been using this in scripts lately, like “foo=$(…)”.

  • openssl… let me count the ways I hate you….

    I put a script or two on github; generates a CA and server and client certs, suitable (I hope!) for openvpn and https and all that. Based on the easy-rsa scripts, but I didn’t find them that easy to use. A haiku to openssl: openssl a black crane over the lake may you rot in…

  • if you’re feeling (digitally) suicidal….

    … here’s how to decrease the security of your mac…. It was one of those situations that are hard to explain, but I wanted to execute an X program on a remote system and have it show up on my Mac’s screen WITHOUT using ssh. This was on Snow Leopard with the XQuartz X server,…