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Ubuntu Jammy ate my homework
This site needs a lot of updates and a ton of spring (multiple springs’) cleaning. However, it’s a particular mess right now because I updated my Ubuntu server to Jammy and its newer PHP destroyed my (dated) WordPress theme. So… Lot to come there along with updating pages et al. Please forgive the ensuing mess.
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Signing the “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter”
I have joined the other signatories of the “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter“. Like any declaration of its breadth, I have varying opinions about points within the statement, but in broad strokes it captures my concerns. Note that I do not in any way limit this to OpenAI’s efforts only, but all machine…
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Resurrection
Been quite some time since I’ve posted to this site, in part because I had to debug a plugin issue, but also because I’ve spent too much time on Twitter, and (no small deal, and by far the best part) had a son to shepherd to adulthood. Some updates since: Look forward updating this site…
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Equifax
Being in the industry, I understand how difficult it is to secure an organization, so I have some sympathy for Equifax. As an ex-NSA colleague noted (paraphrasing), “A defender has to protect everything, an attacker only has to find one hole.” That said, their business is PII, so there is a higher standard there. In…
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VMware virtual or not?
Depending on naming, in a VMware environment you may not actually be sure if a Linux system is VMware or not. Here’s a quick command to find out: sudo dmidecode -s system-manufacturer which will generally output “VMware, Inc.” if VMware. On older systems you may find “-s” doesn’t work, in which case just pipe “dmidecode”…
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Installing Plixer’s “Scrutinizer” NPMD
Plixer makes a good “Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics” (NPMD) application called “Scrutinizer“. NPMD, as Gartner calls it, mostly omeans, collecting, aggregating, and reporting on Netflow data. Plixer provides a VMware OVF for installation of a virtual appliance. I, however, ran into a few issues with the installation: I couldn’t get the install to work…
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Ubuntu package commands
Because Ubuntu has a mix of utilities to manage packages I constantly seem to be forgetting the options I need when I go to do basic package management. Mostly for my sake are the ones I use most regularly: List installed packages: dpkg -l dpkg –get-selections List names of available packages (including those not installed):…
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Good basic email advice
Professor Alan Woodward from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Surrey via The Register: “Educate users not to open files that they are not expecting. Practice your ABCs – Assume nothing. Believe no one, and Check everything should be drummed into users – personally I preach ABCD – if in any doubt…
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Fix Apple Bonjour with Cisco autonomous APs
I purchased some used Cisco C1140 autonomous access points for my home network (autonomous meaning not lightweight or requiring a WLC). While everything seemed to be fine at first, later we noticed that printouts to our Canon laser printer were no longer working from our Macs. After some research I realized that the Macs were…
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Dell PERC 5i/R or H200 VMware Performance Fix
I had an old Dell PERC 5i/R RAIDÂ card laying around and wanted to use it for a home lab ESXi box (note: also works on Dell PERC H200). The card isn’t amazingly high performance, but it it’s good enough for simple RAID. Well, that is, it’s good enough performance if you change the settings. By…
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Fix VMware Web Client Integration Plugin for Chrome on Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)
The latest vCenter Server 6.0 VMware Web Client Integration Plugin does not work on OS X El Capitan. The installer finishes, but silently fails due to missing libraries, libraries that probably existed in earlier OS X versions. Because the libraries don’t exist, necessary certificates don’t get generated, and even re-running the installer from the application…
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Get RPM install date
Sometimes you don’t know when an RPM was installed – maybe it was updated, maybe it came with the system. In any case, it can be handy when debugging or even for auditing purposes. This gives an example of getting the install time for the “filesystem” package: somehost% rpm -q filesystem –queryformat ‘%{name} %{installtime:date}\n’ filesystem…
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Windows 10 under Fusion sluggish
If you made the mistake of upgrading your virtual copy of Windows under Mac OS X using VMware Fusion (version 8 here), you may find Windows 10 runs painfully sluggish. The answer? Disable 3D graphics acceleration. Shut down the virtual machine. Bring up the virtual machine settings (⌘E). Select “Display”: Deselect (remove the checkbox for) “Accelerate 3D Graphics”: Close…
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ASA Firewall Rules of Thumb
Some important Cisco ASA firewall details I and others have learned and shared over the years: Don’t use “security-level” as your method of security. In the long term at best “security-level” will cause you to block traffic you didn’t expect, at worst, it will allow traffic you didn’t want. Why? Well… If you add an ACL…
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Dell Service Tag the easy way under Linux
Sometimes you need the service tag or model off a Dell server that isn’t in your possession. You can either find some feet on the street to do it or as it turns out, with Linux, you can use “dmidecode”: someserver# dmidecode | more … blah … blah … blah … System Information Manufacturer: Dell Inc.…
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IC3 Alert on Microchip-Enabled (EMV) Credit Cards
Unfortunately quite accurate and what a number of us have been saying all along: http://www.ic3.gov/media/2015/151008.aspx The gist can be found in a single paragraph: Although EMV cards will provide greater security than traditional magnetic strip cards, they are still vulnerable to fraud. EMV cards can be counterfeited using stolen card data obtained from the black market.…
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Swift to C++
So having just watched a great webcast from O’Reilly on Swift (and certainly having plenty more to learn): Protocols == Pure Virtuals Generics == Templates Extensions == Class Derivation/Extension/Overloading on steroids Operator Overloading == Operator Overloading, again on steroids. Closures == well, nothing innate, but pretty much same thing as Python Closures Curiously, and I…
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Get rid of annoying “People Pane” in Outlook
I wouldn’t mind the “People Pane”, except that in our organization is shows nothing useful. Moreover for a reason I cannot fathom, it always gets opened up, taking enormous reading real estate. So from this (Outlook 2010 at least): Click the “View” tab: Select “People Pane” and set it to “Off”: Voila! UPDATE: Same two steps work…