geekwisdom's blog

Just change your LinkedIn password

Posted Thu, 2012-06-07 12:32 by geekwisdom

The other day it came out that millions of LinkedIn password hashes were leaked. Of course everyone with a LinkedIn account wonders if their password has been compromised. This has led to a bunch of put-your-LinkedIn-password-in-this-form-and-I'll-tell-you-if-it-was-leaked websites. This is a perfect example of the Password Anti-pattern; it's a pattern you want to avoid.

Keep external hard drives mounted under OS X without being logged in

Posted Fri, 2012-02-03 22:12 by geekwisdom

I have an old G4 mac mini running OS X 10.5 Leopard that I've set up as a NAS for my home network. The idea was to have our laptops and other macs use Time Machine to backup to the USB drives attached to the mini. The mini draws only a small amount of electricity and I happened to have a couple of large USB drives kicking around so it seemed like a great replacement setup for my aging Linux solution. So I plugged the drives in, turned on file sharing, shared the drives, and started backing things up.

Beyond Passwords

Posted Mon, 2012-01-09 11:40 by geekwisdom

I've written, spoken, and taught about password management in the past. I continue to believe that password-centric authentication systems are limited in their ability to provide much assurance about a person's claim on an given digital identity. Any information system requiring more than a basic level of assurance must use stronger multi-factor authentication mechanisms that incorporate things like one-time passwords and biometrics.

Information Technology: Liability, Plumbing, or Force Multiplier?

Posted Mon, 2011-11-28 11:21 by geekwisdom

I've been saying for years that you can generate a fairly accurate hypothesis about the organizational attitude toward IT by looking at the responsibility for IT within an organization.

If responsibility for IT is scattered hither and thither then IT is likely an uncoordinated aid to other things, probably very inefficient, providing patchy uptimes, and non-scalable systems.

If IT is coordinated then the reporting line from the highest ranking IT person to the Executive Board Room can be very telling.

The joys of OpenSuSE 11.4 on a Dell Latitude, and a Docking Station

Posted Thu, 2011-09-08 13:05 by geekwisdom

I've been running SuSE for 12 years. So, when I got my standard issue Dell Latitude E64xx I installed OpenSuSE 11.4. It runs great except when it's time to plug or unplug it from the docking station in my office. Then it's a pain because of the display switching issues.

Listing the unique IP addresses from a Web log

Posted Thu, 2011-09-01 21:02 by geekwisdom

I want a list of the unique IP addresses for the machines that have requested pages from a specific directory of a Web application.

// pull out the requests for just this directory
grep DIRECTORY/request_log > DIRECTORY/request_log

// remove all hits to non-pages (e.g., graphics, CSS, JS, etc)
cat DIRECTORY/request_log | grep -v "\.gif" | grep -v "\.js" | grep -v "\.jpg" | grep -v "\.css" > DIRECTORY/page_hit_log

// pull out the IPs, sort them file and remove duplicates

Think before you meet

Posted Tue, 2011-04-12 13:21 by geekwisdom

Years ago I began working as a system administrator, then programmer. In 2000 I worked remotely 90% of the time. From my home office I could do almost everything I needed to do, but it was in this situation that I began to struggle with intense frustration related to interruptions. I began analyzing my situation and discovered that each interruption (e.g., phone call, meeting, pop-in) took me at least 20 minutes to recover from. That is, if I could ever return to the previous task that day.