I’ve had my n800 a little over two weeks, and the length of this post will propably explain why I haven’t posted about it before. I love the box, it looks sooo good, and the linux inside means that the scope of potential is just unimaginable… but… the experience isn’t perfect. I guess the experiece is very much like the windows / linux thing as a whole, what works is great, but sometimes getting linux “just so” can be more of an effort than in windows.

I’ve taken to using CentOS on my servers, and fedora on my Laptop. New job, means new laptop, and to avoid fedora update hell, I thought I’d try CentOS on my laptop.

All seems good other than my wifi card not being detected, and for some reason googling for “centos 5 intel 3945” didn’t provide a working anserwer, actually I found the answer by googling for “supplementary disk centos 5” which finds this thread that says…

Install dag’s repo (this rpm), and then install dkms-ipw3945 (yum will pick up the dependancies)

yum install dkms-ipw3945

Next enable network manager…

Simple,effective and necessary…

Gmail Notifier :: Firefox Add-ons
A notifier for Gmail…

I’ve been using this for a while, and most firefox users probably have something in place already, so nothing new here, but I use my firefox page for prepping new installs, so perhaps this is more of a “post to self”

The holy grail of computing is security and performance, it’s all well and good having the most secure system in the world, but if it’s rubbish at doing the job it’s supposed to do then you’ve kinda missed the point. Tools like psad and denyhosts provide excellent security, but to do so actively use resource. Let’s take the example of a mail server, if some unsociable person starts heavily scanning your machine, and the above two applications slow down the delivery of mail, your users won’t be happy. That’s where “nice” comes into effect; nice allows you to add priorities to the applications that are important to you. Now I hear what you’re saying, psad and denyhosts are so light how could they possibly consume resource ? So let’s look at a real world example….

• Honey Pot & http:BL Simple PHP Script « planetOzh
  A useful resource on how to write a honey pot http:BL php script
  (tags: security PHP honeypot anti-spam)
• Add This! Social Bookmark and Feed Button
  Saved for future reference, could be a good replacement for “share this” plugin if my server load gets high.
  (tags: blog del.icio.us plugins wordpress)
• Honey Pot Project for phpBB
  Honey Pot Project “How to” for phpBB forums
  (tags: anti-spam phpbb)
• http:BL WordPress Plugin
  http:BL WordPress Plugin allows you to verify IP addresses of clients connecting to your blog against the Project Honey Pot database.
  (tags: antispam blogging honeypot plugins security)

Could that title get any longer !

Hopefully you get the point, sometimes you need different tools for different jobs, if you want a full development platform with SVN support I suggest you take a look at eclipse (with subclipse ) but what if you already have done the development and you just want to do a quick upload.

My phpbb_recent_topics plugin is hosted here, and when the nice guys at wordpress gave me an svn account, I just wanted a quick way to upload what I’ve done. Now I must stress this may not be the “proper” way to use svn (there’s a book for that) but it is enough to achieve what we want, a straight forward upload.

• Project Honey Pot
  Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP add
  (tags: security anti-spam)
• Bad Behaviour
  Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs
  (tags: wordpress antispam plugins)

I’ve posted about the popularity or wordpress having a negative effect before. Here I pointed out only days after a security bug being patched by the WP Team, an exploit was freely available….. the up-shot being that we’ve only days to respond and patch our blogs (this could be a real problem should we dare to take a holiday ! )

The thing is, the problem appears to be getting worse, now plug-in exploits [1] [2] [3] are being posted, this is worse because many of us use a lot of plug-ins and without some kind of updating mechanism it’s difficult to stay onto of patching.