This hit my feed reader this morning…

Atsec information security is pleased to announce the successful Common Criteria Certification of Mac OS X Snow Leopard at EAL 3

Reference: http://www.atsec.com/us/news-atsec-apple-mac-os10-6-common-criteria-evaluation-snow-leopard-184.html

It took me a few minutes to find it, but if you want a certifiably secure mac you need to follow Apple’s Admin Guide on their Common Criteria page, I know what I’ll be doing later

It took me a couple of Googles to work this out… I have a Belkin f5u103v USB-to-Serial adapter and needed a console connection to a Cisco switch.

To get started install this driver from apple (I think it needed a reboot).

If this was successful when you connect the USB-to-Serial you’ll be asked if you want to setup a modem / network connection… say no. From a terminal you should now see a new device similar to mine…

NickBook:~ nick$ ls /dev/cu*
/dev/cu.Bluetooth-Modem	/dev/cu.PL2303-00001004	/dev/cu.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
NickBook:~ nick$

The PL device disappears when I unplug the USB adapter. Next you then need a copy of minicom, I installed macports and did port install minicom.

Since I don’t want to re-invent the wheel now go to http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040521145713551 and Start at STEP 3 to configure minicom (Obviously you’ll replace /dev/cu.USA19QI191P1.1 with something similar to /dev/cu.PL2303-00001004 ) once finished you’ll be set.. happy terminal session!

It’s been a bit quiet on here; x-mas was “louder” than normal there seemed to be more to do than normal and I forgot to schedule some seasons greetings on the 25/12 & 01/01 so my apologies. I’ve acquired extra time-sinks, I’m now a MAC Fanboy as I’ve brought a shiny new toy (expect mac related posts) . My Cisco Certification is due for renewal so I really really should study and I have “Project R” which is a weekend project … basically a website for a friend…. oh and thanks to all the recent snow around here the car really needs a clean!

So, I should get on, get organised and be grateful that this time-sink helps organise my thoughts.

I’ve recently received this message thru my contact form, now it is either a very odd spam/phishing message or Edgar made a mistake on his email address as the domain doesn’t exist. Either way I’ve been asked QU 2 before so here’s my response while I update the FAQ

Dear Creator of Plugin, thank you very much for your great job. I am trying to use it in web site.
i am trying to use your plugin LINICKX LifeStream v0.2 and i have 2 questions.
1. I inserted 23 URL of Feeds but plugin loading only 3 of them, why?
2. Could I load also content of posts, if yes than how?
great thanks!
best regards
Edgar

Actually Edgar I’ve only tested with about 5 feeds, so I will load up my test site and see what happens, it could be possible that your feed 4 is corrupt and blocking the rest.

If you wish to create posts from feeds see FeedWordPress by Charles Johnson, I was planning to include this functionality but issues mean that now I’m not bothering, see line L236 of run.php, feel free to submit a patch if you can fix it.

Festive Regards,

This issue wasted an hour of my life

Recently users visiting google mail via the bluecoat proxy started complaining of popups which said…

Your request is being scanned for security purposes

Instead of “botching” it on the blue coat I offered my users a work around… something that they should be doing anyway… switch on encryption…. So within gmail -> settings -> general, tick the box…

This did the trick, my users mail is now more confidential than it was before and there were no more pop-ups

I’m learning a lot with this plug-in development, it seems to be a lot more difficult than stuff I’ve done in the past.

In just a few days I’ve had to push out 3 bug fix releases! 0.1.3 has fixed the following..

0.1.2 broke auto updates.
Basically there was an error message in the dashboard that a user was complaining about, upon fixing this I realised that auto-updating stopped working… I’m using cron updating so I didn’t spot this right away. I have now re-tested auto updates, and it is working for me in 0.1.3

Execution timeout issues
linickx.com was having execution timeout issues, i.e. the script was being terminated by a low value in php.ini. set_time_limit(20) now happens before each fetch_feed to give each http request an extra 20seconds of execution time, I’ve also setup an is_running variable so multiple fetchs don’t happen at the same time, this should fix the multi-post issue I’m having here too!

config.php
I’ve also introduced a config.php so that upgrades do not overwrite $WPDIR set by users. It’s become apparent that users want to use cron to update their feeds, since run.php gets overwtitten on every upgrade then users would need to re-edit the file, this would become quiet annoying. Copy config.sample.php to config.php and users shouldn’t have to worry about upgrades breaking this as the package will be re-pushing the sample leaving your file un-changed… this is exactly how WordPress handle this issue in the core.

Fingers Crossed!
I’m hoping that’s the end of the bug fix releases and I can get on with Version 0.2 will be a feature release

So the first few issues are flowing in… the package on wordpress.org didn’t work… I developed the plugin in a folder called lnx_lifestream but wordpress.org’s fancy system changed the path to linickx-lifestream – DOH!

There was also an FAQ missing from the readme.txt, ie how to resolve the error message…

Can’t find Wordpress, edit $WPDIR in run.php

This has now been fixed (link to faq)) but does shed light on a new issue… any changes to run.php get over-written on upgrades, I will need to think of a new plan to overcome this!

Colleagues have noticed that in my spare time at work I’ve been “getting my geek on!” the definition being a vi window of code on one screen and google open in the other

Linickx LifeStream will be a new WordPress plugin which allows you to life stream ANY feed. I’ve been having issues with FeedWordPress and to be honest it didn’t really do what I wanted; now there are already may wordpress lifestream plug-ins, but mine will be different.

Difference 1: The plug-in isn’t service dependant… i.e. you don’t stream your twitter account or your LastFM account, you stream the feed. What this means is that when tomorrows-wizzy-new-service is launched you don’t have to wait for me to update the plug-in. It also means you can stream odd stuff, such as I’m going to stream my commits to the WordPress plug-in repo

Difference 2: No Requirements. The requirements for this are the same as the WordPress requirements. What this means is yes it works on PHP4 and no you don’t need a separate installation of simplepie.

Difference 3: No Lifestream Pages, extra databases or tables. LifeStream feeds get created as “normal” WordPress posts, so if you digg something a post is created and you can do all the normal things like tag & categorize the post.

I’m in the process of finishing the package and installing the plug-in here on linickx.com but when it’s ready you’ll be able to…

Download LINICKX LifeStream Here

With a little luck I’ll be able to remove this annoyance and directly stream delicious and get google reader working again.

BBC iPlayer trivia…

During peak times it pumps out 12GB of data per second

Reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8270663.stm

WOW!

He-he-he, this makes me laugh….

Can not say that I can {argu|disagre}e with this post {at all |in the slightest|in any way}

The above is a recent commit submitted to my blog. The SPAM-Numpty obviously can’t work his software properly… {argu|disagre}e is supposed to perform either/or substitution to randomize comments and make detection harder but if that fails it’s very obvious – lol !!!

I’ve been wondering lately if linickx.com needs a more minimalist touch, something like the Gnome Zeitgeist blog or thpinfo.com, getting the balance right in my themes is always a problem for me. If I can find some time I think I’ll have a play.

Security kit creates logs, aparently some people use something called windows server instead of linux as their file & log servers

Recently I had a requirement whereby if a folder was larger than 30Gb (approx 95% of a partition) then the oldest files should be deleted, usually bash would be the answer but in this instance I needed to use a visual basic script.

This is what I came up with, it’s not neat (cause I don’t know vbs) but it works, if you want to use it find and replace “D:\Files” with your directory then find & replace “35000” with your required size in Mb (35000Mb is approx 35Gb) , save the attached script .txt file (vbs_script_disk_clean_up.txt) as script.vbs, then use task scheduler to run everyday, job done!

I had lost this bookmark, saved here so I don’t loose it again

• Solution Title: How do I control / change access using defaultfilter and initialpolicy?
• Solution ID: sk41117

There are various options given in the article, this…

ipso[nick]# cp -p $FWDIR/conf/initial_module.pf $FWDIR/conf/initial_module.pf.OLD
ipso[nick]# cp $FWDIR/lib/defaultfilter.ipso $FWDIR/conf/initial_module.pf
ipso[nick]# comp_init_policy -g
initial_module:
Compiled OK.
ipso[nick]#

… will do in most cases!

I’ve switched off my google reader lifestream because recent “shares” are being posted to my blog rather than links to the content; for the time being if this interested you see my current google reader profile.

I’ve heard and read a lot of grumbling about how twitter/facebook status’s pose security issues, and to be honest I’m not going to disagree; if I post an update stating “this big mac is cold” it’s an indication that I’m in a macdonalds and not at home, the fact that the twitter timeline shows “from mobile web” or “from iphone appX” only re-enforces the issue.

Some recent news coverage on digg has prompted some “that’s not the same for me!” type responses; just because you don’t have a house full of video equipment doesn’t mean you don’t have something worth stealing, maybe you don’t live alone or you house isn’t empty when you tweet, would you want your loved ones put at risk?

The most secure approach would be not to tweet… but where’s the fun in that? … another step is to not post location based tweets… “this laptop is running slow” … doesn’t give anything away, I might be at home, I might not…. a lot of old-skool tweeters always recommend counting to 10 before hitting send (similar to the sleep on blog concept) to ensure that your current mood is appropriate for the web.

So now we come to why I’m posting, in the same way we obscure / hide information about what services we run on our computers / networks, is there a way to obscure the time at which we tweet? Well the tweet time will always be there – that’s what twitter wants – but the content is up to us. I propose a last week hash tag – #lastweek - this tag suggests that the status isn’t now, it happened at some point in the past.

Of course this approach is no more effective than leaving the light on when you leave the house, but it does add some uncertainty… if my living room light is on it could be because I’m sat in there, or it could be because I left the light on when I went to the restaurant… if I tweet “#lastweek meal at Joes rocked!” it suggests I’m not at Joes and where I am now is debatable.

What’s interesting is that as with all things on the internet, this idea isn’t original; there are posts tagged like this already, I wonder if these status’s really did happen last week? With this is mind I wonder what my next tweet will be? “#lastweek blogging” maybe?