Chucks Blog

The most secure you can get a box from a login point of view involves three authentication methods: Something you have, something you know, and something about you.
So to secure my laptop a little more I decided to implement the “something you have” method. The “something you know” method is obviously the password. Currently I [...]

One time passwords are a very effective way to connect to an SSH server from an untrusted computer. Consider the following scenario I deal with almost daily.
The computers where I take classes are owned by a governmental organization. Sounds secure, right? Not really. Quite often other students will mess with the computers as they see [...]

Yesterday I found myself stumbling around Amazon searching for Christmas gifts. Out of pure habit I checked the electronic gadgets section, and managed to find an interesting little device for around 50$ USD: The Zipit Z2.

It is marketed as a instant messaging device, but a quick Google search finds it capable of being flashed to [...]

ab (apache bench) is a command line program that comes with apache by default in most distributions. It allows one to run a quick and efficient test of how a server can handle a heavy load of clients.
To use it simply run (as root)
ab -n number_of_requests_to_try http://www.websiteyouwanttobenchmark.com/
Note that the trailing / is necessary for ab [...]

Today I poured over some of my auth.log files as usual, and yet again to my disappointment there were several hosts that had spent around three to four hours hounding my server with login attempts every five seconds. Having a few hours of time to kill I decided to investigate one of the machines.
I managed [...]

Around the end of October, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) announced the new release of Ubuntu, specifically version 9.10. A little after it was released I installed in on my laptop, and so far I’m pretty impressed. I haven’t tested it extensively, but I do use it enough on a day-to-day basis that I would [...]

So maybe you’ve gotten tired of entering your password every time you log in to your home server. Maybe you desire better security. Or maybe you want to run automated scripts from a remote box and have their results piped to a local file. (Yay nerdiness!) Regardless this article is for you.
I’m not sure how [...]

Just today I recalled that I was going to commit myself to posting an analysis of the spam I received each month. That was waaay back around March, so I’ve decided maybe I shouldn’t commit to that sort of time frame. What made me take so long? Well..

This is my personal account’s spam box you [...]