• Mac OS X

    Notification Center, Mountain Lion and Me

    I love Notification Center on my phone. I think it’s great to receive a simple list of items that have changed since the last time I looked at the phone.  I can also quickly dismiss the screen so the fact that there’s often 20 or more items in the list when I’ve been sitting at my computer for 10 minutes and not looking at the phone doesn’t really bum me out much. In Mountain Lion, Notification Center comes to the Mac. What I’ve grown to love on the iPhone, I’m not sold on for OS X. You see, the alerts that pop up on the screen are great for a…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  Windows XP

    NTP, OS X, Windows, Cisco and You

    At this point, most Mac admins know to how to enable ntp on a Mac OS X Server and set clients to the server. Most Mac admins also know how to use managed preferences to set ntp as well. We all know that time is pretty important and most are using ntp at this point. Network time should, almost by definition, be continuous, which allows ntpd in Mac OS X can update clocks in small denominations. Thus, managing corrections with little overhead or impact to the system enables ntp to be an inexpensive method for managing clocks. But ntp is also built to keep things running smoothly even when there…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Customizing vsftpd Banners

    vsftpd supports custom welcome banners. By default the vsftpd configuration files are stored in /etc/vsftpd. The main config file is /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf. In this file there are two ways to display a banner. The banner_file parameter will allow you to build nice spiffy banners with multiple lines and paragraphs even (ASCII pr0n if you roll like that): banner_file=/etc/vsftpd/welcome.banner Or for simple setups (most are), the ftpd_banner parameter lets you configure a single line welcome string for unauthenticated users. Make sure this doesn’t wrap to the next line or the daemon won’t start. ftpd_banner=Welcome to krypted.com. The daemon will need to get restarted once changed. The easiest way to do this is to use /etc/init.d/vsftpd:…