a.kao

D-Link DNS-323 NAS

root — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:39:32 +0000

I have been thinking about getting a NAS device for home use for quite some time, I even bought 2 500GB hard drives a few weeks back during a NCIX weekly sale. Originally I wanted to build a DIY NAS with unused equipment using either FreeNAS, OpenSolaris (with ZFS) or plain Linux. However at the end I just got lazy and settled for a simple NAS enclosure from D-Link. My reasoning is simple, I do system administration during the day, when I am home I just want to relax and “enjoy” the technology.

RAID1 array setup was fairly straight forward once you navigate to the web administration interface. Default login is “admin”, password is blank. I changed password and then created folders, users and group. After these steps I was able to mount my new volume and folder via

mount -t cifs -o username=abc,password=abc //nas/Volume_1/stuff /stuff

Fedora 9 with Firefox 2

root — Sat, 24 May 2008 01:19:55 +0000

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 of work.

sudo yum remove firefox sudo yum install compat-libstdc++-33

After that you should be able to download Firefox 2 directly from Mozilla.org and install it.

UPDATE: At the end I decided to give Firefox 3 another try since it’s now out of beta phase. As for bookmark synchronization, I am using Foxmarks as substitute. I still prefer storing my bookmarks on my own storage but it seems Foxmarks does the job, I also tried GMarks but it was painfully SLOW!

Baby Instructions

root — Tue, 20 May 2008 01:52:50 +0000

Found this online, after reading it I feel I will be a much better father.

Broken Ankle

root — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:23:24 +0000

I’ve suffered my first legitimate sport injury, first broken bone(s) ever, during the last indoor soccer game of the season.

I heard 2 pops when I went down so I knew I wasn’t going to get away with a simple ankle sprain, but the X-ray showed a much more chilling story. I had to have surgery to insert a steel plate on the outside ankle bone and several screws on the inside ankle bone in order to hold them back together. Good news is that doctor said I would recover fully in 6 weeks. However I am probably done for the year because wife might break my other leg if I choose to rejoin sports immediately after my recovery ;)

XBEL Bookmark Checker

root — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:09:41 +0000

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 inaccessible (server down) URLs.

Download
xbelbmcheck.py

RHEL/CentOS 5 Vim Syntax Color

root — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:54:07 +0000

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. I believe the change was made under /etc/profile.d/vim.sh, anyone who has uid < 100 will be using /bin/vi (minimal version) instead of /usr/bin/vim.

How to shoot yourself in the foot

root — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:45:50 +0000

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

How to shoot yourself in the foot

ModSecurity2 on CentOS 5

root — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:06:59 +0000

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 direct from modsecurity.org. RPM is available HERE

I restarted httpd and wrote my first rule
SecRule REQUEST_BODY test_attack

and as expected, received a “Forbidden” page response when I tried to submit a page via POST with string “test_attack” in the text area. Quite simple to get it up and running, but now I really need to read the documentation to use it to its full potential.

Las Vegas

root — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 10:14:40 +0000

For our annual getaway we decided to visit Las Vegas for the first time. We stayed at the mirage and overall the trip was good, nothing spectacular. However armed with lessons we learned this time, next time will definitely be better.

Mostly, we did some shopping at the outlets as the malls on the strip are way out of our budget and style (designer items), especially the forum shops, nice place to window shop ;)

Couple of things we learned from this trip

Hit tix4tonight first thing in the morning for discount show tickets, tickets availability are shown at ~10:15am daily.
Fast food for lunch and buffet for dinner - most restaurant at the casino are OVER-PRICED, especially Chinese food. Once you add on the 15% tip you might as well eat buffet.
Avoid < $20 buffet (or Excalibur) - One day we ate at the Excalibur for $17/person since we were at the hotel. Big mistake, the food sucked and the selection was no better than the shitty buffet you find back home.

Soccer

root — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:47:17 +0000

I never liked soccer, always felt it’s slow and boring, a bit odd consider I like baseball. However I’ve signed up for a season of indoor soccer from Fusion Co-ed Soccer. This is my second try at indoor soccer, last time was at Mount Royal intramural several years ago and it was PHYSICAL, people killing each other with elbows, lots of push and shove, overall shitty mix of skill level.