• Faking Production – database access

    One of our services has been around for a while, a realy long time. It used to get developed in production, there is an awful lot of work involved in making the app self-contained, to where it could be brought up in a VM and run without access to production or some kinds of fake supporting environment. There’s lots of stuff hard coded in the app (like database server names/ip etc), and indeed, and there’s a lot of code designed to handle inaccessible database servers in some kind of graceful manor.
  • The New Toolbox

    In days gone by, any computer guy worth his salt had a collection of boot floppies, 5.25″ & 3.5″, containing a mix of MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Toms Root Boot & Norton tools. These days passed and the next set of essentials was boot cd-r, containing BartPE, RIPLinux, Knoppix etc. People quickly switched to carrying these tools USB sticks, smaller, easier to change, great when the dodgy PC you were trying to breathe life into supported USB booting.
  • ssh-vulnkey

    There’s a flaw in ssh-vulnkey, it doesn’t always show you the name of the file with an offending blacklisted key in it. Here’s a couple of ways round this: For a small machine, inspect the files by hand: strace ssh-vulnkey -a 2>&1 | grep ^stat64| grep -v NOENT| cut -d” -f 2| sort | uniq | xargs vi Or, a little longer, using ssh-vulnkey to find all relevant keys & reprocess them displaying the filename & then the result of the ssh-vulnkey for the individual file:
  • Why would you do that?

    I indulged myself recently and obtained a new MacBook, which I’ve spent the last few days loading up with the usual suspects (Firefox) as well as getting acquainted with some new tools (Mail.app). I use Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks in order, with a neat toolbar of my regular sites, I noticed that in FF on OSX, all my toolbar favicon images were missing (several of my bookmarks on the Personal Toolbar have no text, so just the Icon shows up on my other machines (XP & Ubuntu/Linux))
  • Using GPRS Easy Connect 3.0.1 with Ubuntu 7.04 (Edgy Eft)

    I’ve been playing around with some cobbled together pppd � chat scripts to get my Novatel Wireless U630 working under Ubuntu, with a Vodafone UK Data SIM (I think most of the problmes come from VF UK’s DNS Servers being broken in some odd way) <p> I just kick this off with a &#8220;pppd debug vodafone-U630&#8221; in a root terminal window. </p> <div> PPS The Windows based Novatel tool is able to tell me all sorts of into about signal strength etc, as is the 3rd party tool MWConn, I wonder are there any specs around that would let us get similar info in a non-Windows environment?
  • Unison, Cygwin & syncing stuff

    I have a Linux VPS account which I use for hosting this and some private photo collections [i.e. personal, not porn!] etc, I used to use Unisonto sync my photo directories between my Linux VPS and my Linux Laptop. I’m currently running Windows XP on my laptop, so I was looking for a way of syncing stuff with my off site storage again, after some playing around with different versions of Unison, I settled on running unison from withing Cygwin.
  • OpenBox & fbpanel

    I have an old laptop (PII-400Mhz, 196Mb RAM, it’s small & light, which is why I still keep it around), it used to run Debian Woody just fine, I wiped it recently and dropped Debian Sarge on to it, it just seemed sluggish, I reckoned it couldn’t cope with all the new graphical schmuck in the new GNOME release. One of the things I liked about Sawfish/Sawmill was the pack window feature, I can be quite keyboard orientated and liked to be able to bounce windows round without have to jump for the mouse.
  • Dual Headed laptops…

    Some notes on getting the second head on your i810 based PC here, I’ve got the CRT pipe working, but can’t get it to go to a higher res than the LCD at the moment 🙁
  • DebianTips

    Hotplugging USB Storage devices. http://www.debian-administration.org/?article=126
  • suspend2.net rocks!

    My last major requirement was decent hibernate & resume, the standard suspend to disk in 2.6.8/10 didn’t cut it, so I started on patching the kernel with stuff from suspend2.net, but it wouldn’t patch a debian’ised kernel source, or even any kernel source I tried to pull from kernel.org, then I remembered a post on debian-laptop about a some debian’ised suspend2 patches, some hunting through my inbox and I found it: