Wed Jul 23 15:51:00 PDT 2008

• http://metasploit.com/dev/trac/changeset/5579

• http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/dns-exploit-in.html

• http://www.caughq.org/exploits/CAU-EX-2008-0002.txt

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Wed Jul 23 10:28:53 PDT 2008

• When trying to change an Exchange password using Outlook Web Access at $UNIVERSITY, a user got "Error number: -2147024891". winerror.h describes this as a General access denied error. In the end, it turned out that when the account was created, the "user cannot change password" option was checked. Hope that'll help someone else's google-fu…

• I had managed to miss this quick command-line check for Dan Fucking Kaminsky's DNS bug, aka CERT VU#800113. Just run:

dig +short porttest.dns-oarc.net TXT

and watch the skies.

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Wed Jul 16 08:47:41 PDT 2008

How to quiet noisy cron entries that send far too much to STDERR:

exec 3>&1 ; /path/to/script 2>&1 >&3 3>&- | egrep -v 'useless|junk' ; exec 3>&-

I've been very busy of late, but the biggest news is that I've started a 3-month temporary part-time assignment here. It's a neat place, and feels a lot like a software startup. Even though it's a small group, they've got certain hardware requirements that are a lot bigger than what I've worked with before; it'll be interesting, to say the least.

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Fri Jul 4 12:47:34 PDT 2008

Thanks to the good folks who wrote this page, I was able to come up with some quick graphs showing how often our RealMedia files are used:

All it took was five minutes mucking about — cf OpenOffice.org, where I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get a decent-looking output.

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Wed Jul 2 09:43:02 PDT 2008

Just had a repeat of the weird mouse-X disconnect I've encountered before. This time though, I'm running Debian Etch — so no more blaming the problem on SuSE (as I secretly always did :-).

One noticeable problem this time was that the middle button did not work, making click-to-paste impossible; I even ran xev and saw no events for middle-clicking. (This in addition to clicking being inconsistent, the client receiving the click being inconsistent, etc). Running cat /dev/input/mouse0 did not work. What did work was disconnecting the mouse (a USB 3-button optical jobbie), then plugging it back in. Sure, coulda been the mouse driver, or X, or something, but I wonder if the hardware itself — whatever little controller chip is in there — maybe got wedged. Interesting to think about…

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Thu Jun 19 06:17:58 PDT 2008

Flu sucks. I've been down with it for the last two days. Today I'm feeling a bit better — a little bit, mostly with lots of drugs. We'll see if I make it in to $WORK today or not.

What else have I been doing? Let's see…

• Our Roku SoundBridge M1001 has died after just over a year, which turns out to be a semi-common thing. Fortunately I've found a local electronic repair store that I'm hoping will fix things up. Other than that I've been fairly happy with it; it's definitely a lot handier with the SoundBridge Commander, though.

• Started playing with Xen on my web server. I'm going to try setting things up more complicated than they are now, but hopefully more secure: one instance to serve files, with /home (where all the sites are) mounted read-only; one with a database server; one for mail; one for SSH access; and one with the bag of passwords (LDAP, probably). Yeah, it's hopelessly baroque for a home server with, what, 8 websites, but it's a work in progress and it's fun to play. :-)

• Installed the Awesome window manager after reading about it for the nth time. Happy so far, but I'm still exploring.

• Tried making bread that rises overnight. I got into the habit of making my own bread at the beginning of the year, and I really got used to it. But two kids means much less time, and half an hour to mix and knead the dough is getting hard to find. So the latest trick has been using the KitchenAid and its dough hook (I did it all by hand previously), and fiddling with the amount of yeast so that, in theory, it'll rise overnight and be ready to bake when I get up at 5:30am to go to work. This used to work, but now I'm having problems with it collapsing. That may be because I'm using instant yeast rather than the regular, active stuff. Updates will follow as events unfold.

And that's that. Time to put together some lunch and see about going to work.

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Tue Jun 10 16:34:08 PDT 2008

$TTL != refresh.

This lesson brought to you by the ISC, Cricket Liu and RFC 1035.

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Thu Jun 5 12:52:09 PDT 2008

Looks like we're going to be getting a bunch more Windows desktops in the near future at $WORK, so I've been looking into Unattended again. I'm having much better luck this time than the last time I tried, a couple or three years ago.

I can't remember what went wrong then, but this time it took me a stupidly long time to figure out that an error message about a missing djgpp.env file means you forgot to unzip the support files under a directory called djgpp.

Another thing that tripped me up this time: unattended installations from OEM media are not allowed by default, even with a legit key from the sticker on the side of your new shiny box. This mailing list post pointed out the magic key, which seems to be working for mwe.

Now that I got those things sorted out, things are going much better.

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Mon May 26 13:47:34 PDT 2008

…after a month off, and almost no emergencies in my absence. Sweet!

Now if only I could catch up on sleep. I remember this from the first kid: you never know just how much you can accomplish on so little sleep.

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Sun Apr 20 13:09:47 PDT 2008

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