Archive
Posts from 2010
My take on Android vs. iPhone
After months and months of research, I finally broke down a few weeks ago and purchased a smart phone. When I first decided to replace my aging Motorola RAZR, I wanted something that didn't cost a fortune and provided a basic 'net experience when i was away from my Mac. After playing around with a number of phones, I narrowed my choices down to theApple iPhone, the Motorola DROID and the Sprint EVO. I went back and forth for weeks, but decided to purchase a Sprint EVO for a couple of reasons: Sprint has the most cost effective plans IMHO…
$ read more →Forcing your Linux users to wait after they input an incorrect password
When I run through my security checklist after building a host, one of the first things I change is the login fail delay. This option allows you to force a user to wait a given number of microseconds after a login failure before being able to try another password. For applications that perform brute force attacks this can be extremely handy, since the application performing the brute force attacks will stall in between unsuccessful passwords, hopefully allowing you to catch them in the act through log event notifications (this of course assumes the password attack occurs serially). To configure a login delay on a CentOS or RHEL server, you can do one of two things…
$ read more →Implementing a home security alarm on the cheap
I currently live in an apartment, and was looking for a cheap and easy solution to sound off an alert if a door or window was opened. Most home security systems are really tailored for houses, and I wasn't real found of paying $30 - $40 per month to monitor a relatively secure apartment. After reading a BUNCH of reviews, I came across theFirst Alert alarm sets. I have now been testing these out for a few weeks, and am extremely happy with them…
$ read more →Using pam_time.so to control when people can log into your servers
Most admins have to support system logins in one form or another. These logins include everything from application service accounts, operations accounts, SysAdmin accounts and pretty much everything else you can think of. Some of these accounts may not need to access your servers 24/7, and you may want to limit the timeframes when users or groups of users can login. This is super easy to do on Linux systems with the pam_time module…
$ read more →ipmitool + LOM = rad amounts of hardware data collection.
There are so many different hardware sensors on machines now. If you have a machine with a iLOM (like Sun's line of x86 hardware) you can probe all of this information over the network using ipmitool and direct it at the iLOM. Usage for ipmitool over the network: Typically Sun iLOMs use either "root" or "admin" as the username. Adjust to your hardware / environment…
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