For whatever reason Fedora came with Firefox 3 Beta 5. Unfortunately most of the add-ons does not work with Firefox 3b5, yet. I use Bookmark Sync and Sort with WebDAV to synchronize work and home PC/laptop therefore I need Firefox 2 back! Firefox 3’s bookmark structure changed so updating this add-on will be a lot [...]

I’ve been using Bookmark Sync and Sort in conjunction with Webdisk offered by University of Calgary for quite sometime. As my bookmark file grew in size, I had no way of checking the validity of the URLs inside. To address this problem, I wrote a simple python script that checks the URLs for 404 and [...]

After installing RHEL/CentOS 5, I noticed on both system, vim under root user has no color even though I have the correct .vimrc in place. Finally found an answer in Red Hat KB. It seems that in version 5, root user by default uses a minimal version of vim that does not support syntax color. [...]

Described below are several methods for shooting yourself in the foot using various programming techniques.
How to shoot yourself in the foot

I’ve been trying to find time to play around with ModSecurity2 (mod_security) for web server security. The need for experimentation is partly driven by the issues I faced with regards to a vulnerable web server at work.
Installation was painless, I modified SPEC file from tanso.net and built the RPM with latest stable version 2.1.4 source [...]

The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.” By using different keyboard shortcuts, you are able to shuffle through the shell instances and access any of them [...]

Finally found a font with good size for use under gnome-terminal. I was never able to get “MiscFixed” to a desirable size.
sudo yum install terminus-font-x11

An example of forensic analysis on a cracked Linux server
Holliday Cracking

It’s acutally not very stright forward..

su -

With sudo you will get a “bad interpreter: Permission denied” error.
Moving on…

tar zxvf cal_linux_1012.tar.gz
cd OracleCalendar_inst

Here’s come the tricky part

cat cal_linux |sed “s/export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL/” > cal_linux.new

Now compare the file size, they have to be the same, after that’s done

mv cal_linux cal_linux.old
mv cal_linux.new cal_linux
yum install ncompress
./cal_linux

It will whine about [...]

I wrestled with an old install DELL Open Manage agent all morning today. Unable to remove the old rpms (scriptlet error, missing files) and these entries were also causing new agent install to fail. I attempted to use various switches such as “–force”, “–nodeps”, none of them worked. Finally found a way to remove the [...]