Posts Tagged ‘linux’

Making Passwords for An Easier Life…….

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Hot on the heals of Companies Make VPN Easy For Yourselves……. comes another gem from the school of ‘kinda obvious if you think about it’ !

If you use the UK pound ‘£’ symbol in any passwords, at some point it will bite you in the ass when you are on an American keyboard (especially laptop keyboards).

With so many other non alphanumeric characters to choose from that are accepted in both UK and USA regions (ampersand, asterisk, exclamation mark, percent sign, carat) why run the risk of being unable to logon when not sat of your default location/system (this come from being unable to SU all bloody weekend on some Linux systems owing to my laptop be of the crappy USA keyboard variety….and yes I know about character map and such, but I couldn’t be bothered)

So from now on, I will never use pound ‘£’ or hash ‘#’ in my passwords just to be on the safe side (I guess some among you would consider this a security enhancement…….I suspect you are the same people who think obfuscation through DNS is also a security measure !)

DOH !

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in unix, windows | No Comments »

Apache Header Byte Range DoS Exploit…….

Saturday, September 3rd, 2011

Grrrrr, looks like there’s an unpatched exploit in *all* versions of Apache web server.

Is to do with using header byte ranges which allow http responses to be broken into smaller chunks before sending. You can read about them here and here.

There are multiple workarounds for mitigating the issue that can be read here and here.

And as of 30th August, version 2.2.20 of Apache was released which has mitigation built in (If the sum of all ranges in a request is larger than the original file, ignore the ranges and send the complete file.)

Guess what I’m going to be doing all next week ? :-/…….

Tags: , ,
Posted in apache, internet, IT, security, unix | No Comments »

Change Ubuntu Default ‘ls’ Command Alias…….

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Change Default Ubuntu Aliases

By default Ubuntu (plus several others) change the ‘ls’ command to be an alias that colour codes the output. While I’m sure this is great for many people, I don’t like it :o(

I like back background, lime green text, directories indicated with a ‘/’ character at the end, and hidden files to be shown.

To change the default, you need to make the same change in a couple of places…….

Firstly, in your home directory. Edit the hidden file ‘.bashrc’. Find the line that reads alias ls=’ls –color=auto’ and comment it out with a ‘#‘ at the start.

Then add a new line (above or below, does not matter) with the following

ls=’ls -aF’ (in this case, ‘a’ shows all files including hidden ones, ‘F’ indicated a directory by adding a trailing forwardslash ‘/’ after the directory name

This will change your login only. If you also want to change the root ls alias you will need to follow the same steps for the file /root/.bashrc, but you will need to either use sudo with your edit command, or su to root and then edit.

The last place you may wish to edit is the skeleton template file used for all new users. This is located at /etc/skel/.bashrc. Again, eidt the file with the changes above, and all newly added users will recieve a copy of the file and have their ls command alias set to your formatting (if you so wish).

Tags: , , ,
Posted in unix | 2 Comments »