To quickly encrypt a file with a password of your choice you can use OpenSSL. OpenSSL supports a whole range of ciphers, including government approved encryption algorithms. The encryption algorithm AES is the only accepted open confidentiality algorithm here in Norway (read more here). AES is the new algorithm replacing DES. You can read all about AES and DES elsewhere.

I really would like to have an encrypted swap, tmp and home partition on my laptop. In case it gets stolen or if I should forget it somewhere, I can be sure that no-one would be able to read my private files. In this mini-howto I set my home partition using LVM, but using a regular partition should work just fine. This howto should also work, with minor modification, if you use another distribution than Ubuntu.

Updated:
May 2009: Updated for Ubuntu 9.04. Added encrypted /tmp.
May 2008: Init for Ubuntu 8.04.

Me and my girlfriend are staying in a hotel here in Sha Tin, Hong Kong. Since the hotel only allow one computer per room connected to the Internet at the time - I found out it would be a nice time to look into Internet connection sharing over bluetooth.

I'm out traveling and I forgot to change the timezone on my camera again. So the EXIF time stored in the pictures are all wrong. My first though was to write another Perl script to fix this. But I found out that the program jhead can do all sort of magic EXIF manipulation.

A short little script I stumbled across when cleaning my $HOME. I do not think I wrote it myself - at least I can't recall that I did. Quite handy and it's small and compact using the commands ps, awk, sort and head:

The first request for comments (RFC 1) was published 40 years ago today (7. April 2009). RFCs are standard documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Today over 5000 RFCs have been published by IETF. Stephen Crocker, the author of RFC1, recollect some thoughts of the early days:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html

There are numerous articles on the importance of creating strong secure passwords that are hard to guess and break. However, the harder the password, the harder it is to memorize. Another problem arises when we have several different passwords, usually one for each device or service. How can we store and manage the increasing number of passwords? Console Password Management (CPM), created by Harry Brueckner, does a great job for exactly that.

A friend of mine, Espen Grøndahl, has created his very own IDS. To be precise, it is not a IDS per se, but a tool to visualize firewall logs. It's written in Perl and visualizes OpenBSD's pf firewall log. The IDS is called Fireplot and can be downloaded here. It is really easy to identify port scans, like this plot shows.

I have a Nokia N73 "Music Edition" mobile phone. The "Music Edition" part isn't important to me, since I never listen to music when I'm on the run. I read. But sometimes I'm too tired to read, especially when I'm on my way home from work. But the subway takes 30 minutes so I'll have to do something.

Many scientific papers use Latex for formatting. There exists an Latex class called IEEEtran which "produce high quality typeset papers" (example here). Besides from being nice, it is also a requirement for many conferences/journals to submit papers using this class. But how do we install it on Ubuntu/Debian?

I received a Mac Mini today. We plan to use it as part of our lab setup here at work. The box is pretty small and compact. It's quite cheap too.

It will primarily be running some flavor of Linux, but I plan to install Windows Vista ("Business" version) and OSX Leopard on it as well. This way I can quickly test all three OSes if needed. So how do we set up triple boot on this box? It turns out to be quite easy.

At my last place, I had a dedicated room full of servers. It was lovely mix of cra^Wold hardware running various flavors of Linux, BSD and Solaris. At my new place, we didn't have that much space so I was forced to do a cleanup. I bought a powerful server with sufficient RAM, CPU and disk. Now I have one server and a whole bunch of virtual machines running on it. (Throw in a couple of Linksys devices running openwrt and dd-wrt and I was happy.) There was one "problem" - the server had to be placed out on the balcony. It has been running out there for over a year now - how did that go?

Unix sysadmin and never heard of Munin? Good news for you: You have a great tool waiting. Munin monitors your servers, stores the results and generates pretty graphs for you to interpret. Munin itself is written in Perl, but uses plugins, written in language of choice, to fetch relevant data. The default install comes with a number plugins that works out-of-the-box - most of them written in Perl or shell. But some plugins, or services, require manual intervention to work. Bind is such a service, so let's see how we can monitor Bind with Munin.

I've been on the lookout for a decent webcam. After some searching, the choice fell on Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, which should be supported according to the Linux UVC driver page. It's not one of the cheaper models, but not the most expensive either. It also has "HD-quality" (which in this case translates to resolution up to 1600x1200). So how does this camera works under Linux?

Soon Christmas and still no snow? Since there hasn't been a decent cold and white winter here for years, it's a little hard to get that Christmas mood. Luckily, we have computer tools that can help us out.