Author Archives


28
Sep 11

maze’s digital life as an HAM

A new blog has been started which will contain more information about radio amateur related material, you can follow my experiments via: http://pd0mz.nl/ This blog will concentrate on (digital) radio communications and related items, whereas maze.io will still be about Python, Development, Hacking and Stuff.

11
Aug 11

One less GNU tool: tmux replacing screen

So, you are busy working on a project, switch between browser and your vim session running in a screen back and forward. You continously resize the terminal and switch tabs, then you switched back to your vim session running in a screen and … boom! Screen is dead once again. Obviously GNU screen has not [...]

12
Jul 11

zsh: for lazy system administrators

Another cool zsh trick. As I am hopping to all kinds of machines all day long in my role as UNIX system administrator, for convenience, I can now just type the hostname into my shell: Previously: ~% localhost zsh: command not found: localhost After installing this into my ~/.zshrc: We get: ~% localhost Last login: [...]

10
Jun 11

Call for hardware: got router lab?

For my RANROD project I am looking for funky networked devices to play with. RANROD is a RANCID-like network device configuration backup utility with version control. There are various emulators I am using, such as Cisco On Unix (IOU), Juniper Olive and some others, but I would like to add support for more devices. If [...]

7
Jun 11

PyCrypto with Python from homebrew on OSX

Today I had some difficulties with running a Python module on my OSX system. I compiled Python using homebrew, and installed paramiko (and pycrypto) with pip. But when importing the paramiko module I got the following error: >>> import paramiko Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/homebrew/Cellar/python/2.6.5/lib/python2.6/site-packages/paramiko/__init__.py", line 69, [...]

24
May 11

Web server: are you using strong encryption?

Most of the analysed websites by Qualys that are using SSL are still using SSLv2 or even SSLv1 for their encryption. SSLv2 standards were formed in 1995 and can be called outdated without a doubt. Therefor it is recommended to use at least TLSv1 (which is dated back in 1999, but hey) but rather TLSv1.2. [...]

15
Apr 11

Moving to nginx/php5-fcgi/supervisord

Some collegues have been pushing me to try out nginx. I hesitated for quite a while, but I figured to see and try it out. Coming from apache one could just lazily install mod_php and mod_wsgi for all PHP and Python needs, in nginx you need a bit more complicated setup. Running PHP, welcome supervisord [...]

25
Mar 11

Speed up RoundCube webmail

We have been using RoundCube webmail on various occasions, it’s a good looking, intuitive webmail interface with all the fancyness you can expect from a modern webmail client. RoundCube can, at time, be a bit sluggish with all the features enabled. You can speed up RoundCube quite a bit. Proxy IMAP connections With the IMAP [...]

11
Feb 11

How to improve Ubuntu part 2

In my previous post I wrote about improving Ubuntu, this article mainly focussed on using Ubuntu as a server. There are also issues with using Ubuntu as a desktop, I will try to clarify why and how to fix these issues. Windows layout Since Ubuntu 10.04 you get a new looking theme, with all window [...]

30
Jan 11

How to improve Ubuntu

First of all, remove all unwanted crap you get installed without asking: maze@valentine ~$ sudo apt-get purge \ command-not-found{,-data} \ landscape-{client,common} \ canonical-census Secondly, I want to manage /etc/motd myself: maze@valentine ~$ sudo sed -e '/^session[ \t]*optional[ \t]*pam_motd\.so/d' -i \ /etc/pam.d/login \ /etc/pam.d/sshd or, alternatively, make /etc/motd immutable (this could raise warnings at login time): [...]