The Get Down is a Netflix
miniseries about a group of kids in the Bronx New York during that
summer of 1977 when Disco was dying and Hip Hop/Rap was being born. Life
was hard in NYC in the '70s. The Bronx was burning and you had to
hustle to survive.
Systems Operations is not like dodging bullets in the boogie
down but
you do need to be street smart and hustle to survive. Urban decay,
absentee landlords, abandoned buildings are synonymous to technical
debt, out of date legacy systems, and orphaned applications and tools.
You don't learn in school about containerization, cutting edge
automation and working with your crew. You learn those things by busting
your ass, doing your work and keeping your eyes and ears open.
I was 16 years old in 1983 when my high school physics teacher, Rocky
Trembly, carried a little
white box into the
classroom. He fired it up and the dark screen lit up and said,
"Hello." I didn't know it at the time but that moment turned out to
be the cornerstone to a lifetime of exploration and discovery.
Throughout my life I've earned a living as a art director, writer,
technology manager, web master and systems engineer and none of it would
have been possible or probable without that single moment. Now as the
screen goes dark I'd like to say thank you to Steve (and Rocky) for
making my world and the whole world a better more different place.
"Goodbye"
Nǐ hǎo 你好! Permanently on my desk, and everywhere I go is an
iPad/iPhone app called Pleco, which has my custom flash cards that I use
to quiz myself about 300 Chinese (Mandarin) characters. I’m getting
pretty good with the help of a weekly instructor found via Craigslist,
daily walks through Chinatown in NYC, and a website called Memrise. In
less than a month I’ve been able to specifically translate (a lot of)
the data sheets for products I’m sampling/purchasing for my job at
Adafruit Industries, and for fun/downtime I’m translating some of the
Chinese graffiti in Blade Runner (I always wanted to know what they
said).
The SPDY project defines and implements an application-layer protocol
for the web which greatly reduces latency. The high-level goals for SPDY
are:
| * To target a 50% reduction in page load time. Our preliminary
results have come close to this target (see below).
| * To minimize deployment complexity. SPDY uses TCP as the underlying
transport layer, so requires no changes to existing networking
infrastructure.
| * To avoid the need for any changes to content by website authors.
The only changes required to support SPDY are in the client user agent
and web server applications.
| * To bring together like-minded parties interested in exploring
protocols as a way of solving the latency problem. We hope to develop
this new protocol in partnership with the open-source community and
industry specialists.
If you are developing an application for Linux desktop and would like to
automatically find out more information about system, use the following
commands in shell scripts to gather information about system. Recently I
was involved in project where I need to collect information about
running GUI, browser and other information such as disk space, running
kernel etc.
Finally a way to flush the DNS cache on Mac OS 10.5 "dscacheutil
-flushcache". PC users have always had a way to do this with "ipconfig
/flushdns" but Mac users usually had to restart. In Mac OS 10.4 there
was "lookupd -flushcache" but that never quite worked 100% of the
time. Here's a bit of the MAN page and a link to the complete page via
developer.apple.com.
dscacheutil -- gather information, statistics and initiate queries to
the Directory Service cache.
| Tomato Firmware | polarcloud.com
| Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for Linksys
WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based
routers. It features a new easy to use GUI, a new bandwidth usage
monitor, more advanced QOS and access restrictions, enables new
wireless features such as WDS and wireless client modes, raises the
limits on maximum connections for P2P, allows you to run your custom
scripts or telnet/ssh in and do all sorts of things like re-program
the SES/AOSS button, adds wireless site survey to see your wifi
neighbors, and more.
| Test Early » Hudson - Tips and
Tricks
| Hudson is an open source CI server that is by far the easiest one to
configure. Second to ease of use is Hudson’s impressive plug-in
framework, which makes it easy to add features. For instance, Hudson
has a plug-in for tracking FindBugs issues, PMD issues, and CheckStyle
issues over time as well as code coverage. It also trends test results
from JUnit, as well as build results and corresponding execution
times. In spite of all these cool features, we had to find ways to get
around some common issues we faced at work using Hudson.
A basic tutorial about the Linux commands ssh and scp. It features
explanation about the syntax, the possibilities and the differences
between the two. It also features some tips and tricks that'll come in
handy when working with these programs.
| ShellSQL - SQL for shell
scripts
| ShellSQL is a suite of programs designed to enable LINUX/UNIX shell
scripts to connect to SQL engines and execute SQL queries and commands
in a simple way enabling intergration with the rest of the script. For
example, it can do things like..
#/bin/shHANDLE=`shpostgres dbname=mydb`
shsql $HANDLE "begin"
for ARG in $
do
shsql $HANDLE "insert into mytable fld1, fld2" \
"values nextvalmyseq, $ARG"
done
shsql $HANDLE "commit"
if [ $# -gt 0 ]
then
ROWS=`shsql $HANDLE "select count from mytable"`
echo "No of rows now in table is" $ROWS
fi
shsqlend $HANDLE
For details on how it hangs together have a look at the
overview.
Whenever I login remotely to my machine in Canada, the ssh session dies
after a while if I don’t actively type something. This is not the server
timing out, but rather the TCP connection hanging. Figuring out a way to
keep sending it keystrokes automatically is beyond my ability, but I
found out that I could just have it send me data continually, and that
works just as well to keep the terminal session alive. The following
Bourne Shell loop works:
| Google Web Toolkit - Google Code
| Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes it easier to write high-performance
AJAX applications. You write your front end in the Java programming
language and GWT compiles your source into highly optimized
JavaScript. Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone
process. You spend 90% of your time working around browser quirks, and
JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing
AJAX components difficult and fragile. It doesn't have to be that
way.
I love iMovie ‘08. I know, I know, it has less whizzy features than
iMovie ‘06 does, but darn it, it’s so darn fast and easy to build
videos. I can create a whole hour-long movie in about ten minutes! (Not
a very good one, of course — but none of my movies are very good.)
| Wfuzz - A Tool for Bruteforcing/Fuzzing Web Applications | Darknet -
The
Darkside
| Wfuzz is a tool designed for bruteforcing Web Applications, it can be
used for finding resources not linked directories, servlets, scripts,
etc, bruteforce GET and POST parameters for checking different kind of
injections SQL, XSS, LDAP,etc, bruteforce Forms parameters
User/Password, Fuzzing,etc.
Some windows programs use a compression for larger files that is not
compatible with the linux unzip command. Resulting in the following
error:
need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
There is a special program for handling these large files:
p7zip
Run these commands to install and run:
$ curl -o p7zip_4.20_src.tar.bz2 http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/p7zip/p7zip_4.20_src.tar.bz2
$ bunzip2 p7zip_4.20_src.tar.bz2
$ tar xvf p7zip_4.20_src.tar
$ cd p7zip_4.20_src
$ make
$ make install
$ 7za x largefilename.zip
This saved my ass... let me know how it works for you.
| Using Rsync and SSH by Try
Johnson of troy.jdmz.net
| I like to backup some logging, mail, and configuration information
sometimes on hosts across the network and Internet, and here is a way
I have found to do it. You'll need these packages installed:
| * rsync
| * openssh
| * cron (or vixie-cron)
| Please note these instructions may be specific to Red Hat Linux
versions 7.3, 9, and Fedora Core 3, but I hope they won't be too hard
to adapt to almost any *NIX type OS. The man pages for 'ssh' and
'rsync' should be helpful to you if you need to change some things
(use the "man ssh" and "man rsync" commands).
| First, I'll define some variables. In my explanation, I will be
synchronizing files (copying only new or changed files) one way, and I
will be starting this process from the host I want to copy things to.
In other words, I will be syncing files from /remote/dir/ on
remotehost, as remoteuser, to /this/dir/ on thishost, as thisuser.
| I want to make sure that 'rsync' over 'ssh' works at all before I
begin to automate the process, so I test it first as thisuser:
| $ rsync -avz -e ssh remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/dir /this/dir/
| and type in remoteuser@remotehost's password when prompted. I do
need to make sure that remoteuser has read permissions to /remote/dir/
on remotehost, and that thisuser has write permissions to /this/dir/
on thishost. Also, 'rsync' and 'ssh' should be in thisuser's path
(use "which ssh" and "which rsync"), 'rsync' should be in
remoteuser's path, and 'sshd' should be running on remotehost.
This tutorial is meant for increasing the performance of Windows XP,
either it can be a fresh installed windows or an old windows. Actually
these r some tips/tricks, which I always apply whenever I do a fresh
installation of windows. So here I’m sharing many of those
tips-n-tricks:
UPDATE: This story was reported as stolen from this source:askvg.com**
I just grabbed it from digg. It's a very helpful article and I would
like to give credit where credit is due.**
It seems like Ive been interested in security since I started playing
with computers. It was always about trying to push the limits of what
could be done. As I moved through the various phases of an IT career my
interest just grew. At the University of Georgia and then in enterprise
environments that I worked at when I first got out of school there was a
lot of infrastructure being built out, but not a lot of interest in
security. This is about the time that I found Def Con, 2600 and Black
Hat, and became part of that community. Once I got a little involved in
those the interest seemed to grow exponentially. Then, when I got
involved in networking Macs in the Entertainment Industry, these
interests came together. Now I see the hacker community somewhat of a
protector, finding flaws so they arent discovered by people with bad
intentions and helping to make systems more secure for everyone.
| Linux / UNIX: Python programming tutorial for system
administrators
| Generally I use Perl and Shell script for automation or to make system
administration easier for me. Python is an interpreted, interactive,
object-oriented programming language that combines remarkable power
with very clear syntax. Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X,
OS/2, Amiga, Palm Handhelds, and Nokia mobile phones.
You can easily adopt Python to manage UNIX and Linux systems while
incorporating concepts of good program design. Python is an
easy-to-learn, open source scripting language that lets system
administrators do their job more quickly. It can also make tasks more
fun:
| Learning and Mastering the Linux VI / VIM
editor
| VIM is my preferred text editor for configuring system and writing
code at a shell prompt. However many new Linux user finds it difficult
to cope with vim. This tutorial provides a good introduction:
The VI editor is a screen-based editor used by many Unix users. The VI
editor has powerful features to aid programmers, but many beginning
users avoid using VI because the different features overwhelm them. This
tutorial is written to help beginning users get accustomed to using the
VI editor, but also contains sections relevant to regular users of VI as
well. Examples are provided, and the best way to learn is to try these
examples, and think of your own examples as well… There’s no better
way than to experience things yourself.
| macosxhints.com - OS X VPN client and Cisco
ASA
| Summary: This hint is for Network Engineers who want their firewalls
to accept VPN connections from standard OS X L2TP / IPSec clients
(should also work for Windows and Linux clients). If you are not a
network engineer, but are having trouble connecting to one of these
devices, you can also forward this tip to your company's "firewall
person," so that they can fix it.
This is a simple backup solution for people who run their own web server
and MySQL server on a dedicated box or VPS. Most dedicated hosting
provider provides the backup service using NAS or FTP servers. These
service providers will hook you to their redundant centralized storage
array over private VLAN.
Every machine needs an individual address. To keep things simple, we
assign them in clumps; each network of machines generally gets a range
of addresses.
A single IP address is 32 bits long: printed in binary has 32 binary
digits, each 1 or 0. Its standard to print them as 4 decimal numbers,
each representing 8 bits, such as 192.168.1.1. In binary, this would be 11000000101010000000000100000001.
Andy and Jeremy ROCKED THE HOUSE. Panel discusses how to bluff your way
through Web 2.0 at a party or conference. Don't be the idiot who does
not know how to speak the speak even if you have no idea what it means.
Also has a video about the definition of Web 2.0 and pictures of some of
the best of Web 2.0 bluffing.
| Introducing the Hipster PDA | 43
Folders
| The Hipster PDA Parietal Disgorgement Aid is a fully extensible system
for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your
life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports
optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited
number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip
pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s
make one together.
I created the following scripts to mimic the ipconfig /all functionality
found in the Windows NT operating system. In the unix world, all of the
info is available, but not in one place which is where this script comes
in handy. It concatenates all of the various pieces of IP configuration
into one easy-to-read display. The bonus is all of the functions used
are contained in a separate file, which can be sourced into your shell
environment and used individually.
A great step-by-step guide to hooking that rouge PC up to your Airport
wireless network. You are going to need the HEX Password Key which
should be available from your network admin.
psst... hey network admins. You can find the HEX key for your WEP
protected network by hitting "Equivalent Network Password" under the
Base Station menu in the Airport Admin Utility.
One of the biggest advantages of Mac OS X's UNIX heritage is the huge
range of open source scripting languages available. Scripting languages
are often the ideal tool if you want to manipulate text, manage jobs, or
link together disparate components without resorting to a compiled
language like C or Objective-C. Scripting languages are a great tool for
system administrators, application developers, and pretty much any user
who needs to perform complex or repetitive tasks, because they were
invented to solve these types of problems more quickly than can be done
with general-purpose languages.
| MAKE: Blog: HOW TO make Enhanced Podcasts (images, links and more
with
audio)
| Apple's new iTunes 4.9, iPod color, allows you to view (and listen
to) "enhanced podcasts" these are audio files that can have
slideshows, URLs and some cool features we have discovered. Apple's
included documents and a Wiki was all I needed to make our MAKE
enhanced podcasts, but I also wrote a how-to. Here's how to get, make
and all you need to know about enhanced podcasts! As a bonus, we put
together some fun ideas we think many might use...
| MAKE: Blog: MAKE ebooks for your iPod
guide!
| There’s a somewhat little know and often-unused function of iPod
called "Notes" which can actually be quite handy for storing and
reading text, creating a locked "kiosk mode", quizzes, games as well
a full-length ebooks. The Notes reader is located in Menu > Extras >
Notes. Only the more recent 3G and 4G iPods, including the iPod photo
and iPod mini both have the iPod Notes application. Here’s our how-to
on making them!
If you work in network support for Windows, sooner or later it's bound
to happen. You'll be sitting quietly at your desk, and someone will
walk up with a long list of questions about their Apple Macintosh
computer. How do we connect it to the existing network? How will users
access file shares, print, browse the Internet, and use e-mail? What do
you do? You don't know anything about a Mac beyond plugging it into the
wall. In a perfect world, you could plug in any device and go to work.
Unfortunately, it's a little more involved than that. It isn't as hard
as it sounds, though, nor is it as difficult as it used to be. Just
remember that there is more than one way to peel an Apple!
Homemade Dot-Mac with OS Xby Alan Graham08/09/2002 So, still fuming
about the .Mac annual fee? The question of whether .Mac is worth $100
is a personal matter, but one of the greatest ironies of this situation
is that Mac OS X is packed full of features that make many aspects of
.Mac unnecessary.
| Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X, Part 2
| by Alan Graham
| 09/20/2002
Jaguar has made significant improvements to aspects of Mac OS X. These
features make setting up a home Web server easier and more powerful than
ever, and I'll touch on some of them while digging deeper into the
homemade Dot-Mac project.
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