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xen and yoyo

One of the benefits of Xen is that it allows a machine to be easily rebooted. Remote console and remote power management technologies are either expensive or implemented on the motherboards of expensive machines. With Xen the virtual machines can be managed without such expense and also with less effort.

This raises immediate possibilities for […]

phone spam

Recently I had someone call my mobile phone asking whether I wanted to change phone providers. I asked them if they could hold the line – then I put my phone down and went back to work.

It took over eight minutes before they hung up on me.

Next time someone phone-spams you try to […]

classic security mistake

One of the most obvious (and yet most common) computer security mistakes is to take input from an untrusted (and potentially hostile) source. A classic example of this is in Windows Vista where audio output from the system speakers can be taken as input to the speech recognition system. According to the BBC article an […]

ssh tunneling of email

On a Debian mailing list someone claimed that it was inconvenient to use ssh tunneling for sending and receiving email due to the issue of broken connections.

On my source-dump blog I have posted an entry with xinetd configuration for doing this in a reliable manner.

Related posts:

source dump blog Inspired by Julien Goodwin‘s post I created a new blog…
how to run dynamic ssh tunnels service smtps { disable = no socket_type = stream wait…
email disclaimers Andre Pang blogs about the annoyance of email disclaimers. For…
mailing list culture There is currently a big debate in progress in Debian….

how to run dynamic ssh tunnels

service smtps { disable = no socket_type = stream wait = no user = USER server = /usr/bin/ssh server_args = USER@HOST -C /home/USER/bin/localsmtp bind = 127.0.0.1 } service pop2 { disable = no socket_type = stream wait = no user = USER server = /usr/bin/ssh server_args = USER@HOST -C /home/USER/bin/localpop bind = 127.0.0.1 }

I […]

presentation laptops

I suggested in a previous blog entry that conferences should provide computers that speakers can use for their presentations. The reason for this is that getting one computer working with the beamer in each room is an easy task, while getting the laptop of every speaker to work is much more difficult.

It seems that […]

university degrees

Recently someone asked me for advice on what they can do to improve their career without getting a degree.

I have performed a quick poll of some people I know and found that for experienced people there seems to be little need for a degree. People who have extensive experience but no degree report no […]

licence for lecture notes

While attending LCA it occurred to me that the lecture notes from all the talks that I have given lack a copyright notice. So I now retrospectively license my lecture notes in the manner that probably matches what everyone was already doing. The Creative Commons web site has a form to allow you to easily […]

new release of postal

Today I have released a significant new version of my mail server benchmark Postal! The list of changes is below:

Added new program bhm to listen on port 25 and send mail to /dev/null. This allows testing mail relay systems. Fixed a minor bug in reporting when compiled without SSL. Made postal write the date […]

political compass

It appears that some people don’t understand what right-wing means in terms of politics, apart from using it as a general term of abuse.

I recommend visiting the site http://www.politicalcompass.org/ to see your own political beliefs (as determined by a short questionnaire) graphed against some famous people. The unique aspect of the Political Compass is […]