http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk Ramblings on software developement Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:30:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My hosting companies recent upgrade from Virtuozzo Power Panel to HyperVM resulted in a change to how RAM usage is calculated (and therefore restricted).  Despite top telling I was only using ~80% of my RAM, after the upgrade I started receiving frequent emails from cron informing me that processes were ... http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk/index.php/2008/05/24/free-memory-upgrade/ Since the Debian security advisory was published there has been plenty of discussion about who is to blame and how such a bug has gone unnoticed since September 2006. While they are important discussions that need to be had, I'll focus on how to protect your Debian based PCs, ... http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk/index.php/2008/05/15/predictable-random-number-generater-in-debains-openssl-package/ After installing Xubuntu Hardy Heron on my laptop I found that ctrl+alt+del was not activating the screensaver. To understand why this happens we look at /usr/bin/xflock4 - the script that Xfce uses to enable a screensaver, $ cat /usr/bin/xflock4 if ps aux | grep x[s]creensaver > /dev/null 2>&1; then xscreensaver-command -lock elif ps ... http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk/index.php/2008/05/04/enable-screensaver-in-xubuntu/ It's common practice to use self signed certs in development environments. Here's how to do it for Lighttpd. $ openssl req -new -x509 -keyout ~/cert.pem -out ~/cert.pem -days 365 -nodes Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key ....++++++ ...................................................................................................++++++ writing new private key to '/root/cert.pem' ----- You are about to be asked to enter information that ... http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk/index.php/2008/04/16/creating-self-signed-ssl-certificates-for-lighttpd/ Entering your password when SSHing onto remote machines gets very boring, very quickly. The good news that this is can be avoided by using public key authentication and without compromising security. In fact, this approach can prevent brute force attacks if password based authentication is turned off as well. 1. ... http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk/index.php/2008/02/08/ssh-keys-for-quick-logins/ Like most technically minded people, okay then, geeks, I spend a lot of time (too much?) reading about and playing with new technologies and the latest software releases. Before now I've used my private wiki as a dumping ground for links, code samples, howtos and it's become a huge ... http://blog.sw-designs.co.uk/index.php/2008/02/03/first-time-blogger/