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

    TrueCrypt

    Great encryption software, although there is no full disk encryption for the Mac from TrueCrypt I hope to see it eventually.  By the way, I didn’t mention this yet: it’s free. http://www.truecrypt.org/ UPDATE: While TrueCrypt does not do full disk encryption (FDE) for the boot volume still, it does do FDE for other volumes fairly easily and of course free.  If you need FDE for boot volumes on Mac OS X check out PGP and CheckPoint FDE.  PGP Desktop is easy to install and use and has a great command line interface.  CheckPoint though seems to be a bit more mature and has an easier methodology for mass deployment.

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Linux: Install Wireshark from yum

    Using CentOS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, install and run Wireshark over the command line.  To install Wireshark, use yum: yum install wireshark Run a capture: tethereal -i eth1 -w ~/mycapture.pcap This command will run a Wireshark capture on the eth1 interface and output the data to a file called mycapture.pcap in your home directory.  You can then view this file in the X11 interface for Wireshark or grep it for specific information.

  • Ubuntu,  Unix

    Fedora: Installing fail2ban

    Install fail2ban using this command: yum install fail2ban Next, create the system startup links for fail2ban: chkconfig –levels 235 fail2ban on Next, start fail2ban: /etc/init.d/fail2ban start The config files are now in /etc/fail2ban.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Creating a crontab

    Creating your first crontab job is a three-part process: Prepare the absolute path to the program or script that you want to run Create a text file containing a line to schedule the job as described above for crontab fields Upload the text file to your system cron When preparing program to run or creating scripts to run remember that crontab jobs are background tasks. There is no terminal attached to a crontab job so there should be no print statements that normally write to the screen. (It is possible to redirect such print statements.) The same consideration hold true for requesting user input. Let’s assume that we want to…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    openssl and Signatures

    A checksum can be used to determine if a file has been tampered with at a later date.  To run a checksum use the following command: openssl dgst -HASHTYPE path_to_file HASHTYPE would then be md2, md4, md5, mdc2, rmd160, sha or sha1.  Let’s go ahead and do a checksum of our smb.conf file: openssl dgst -md5 /var/db/smb.conf You should then see output similar to the following: MD5(/var/db/smb.conf)= e4b58a63c6682b298aeca3ad40734c1e MD5(/var/db/smb.conf)= e4b58a63c6682b298aeca3ad40734c1e

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Unix

    Backing Up and Restoring Subversion

    To make a Subversion backup (replacing /repositorypath with your actual repository path and /repositoryname.dump with the path and name of the file you would like to export your repository into): svnadmin dump /repositorypath > /repositoryname.dump To then restore the Subversion backup (replacing /repositorypath with your actual repository path and /repositoryname.dump with the path and name of the file you would like to export your repository into): svnadmin load /repositorypath < /repositoryname.dump