• Got a job at a media giant, that is somewhat sinking.
• Got enganged
• Picked up ruby and python (python is winning)
• Built a CCNA lab
• Got into microprocessors
• Started to brew beer
• Got more networking experience than ever before
• xbox with netflix changed my life.

Best Tech Things of the Year / Found Out About this Year (to me.. in all seriousness)

1. Adafruit Industries ( actually useful kits)
2. Ponoko ( next best thing to owning a laser cutter)
3. SlugPower (seriously my favorite hack of the year, it’s not hard to control a relay over serial.. but the integration and thought is awesome)
4. Netgate (for the diy router/firewall maker)
5. Drobo ( I’m allowed to say that.. I’ve built almost a dozen different NAS’s)

Here’s some stuff I got:

“We’re all mushroom men, … We’re all in the dark eatin our own shit -LLL”

“It’s a sacrifice to Murphy -LLL”

“Silence is agreement -LLL”

To list all files without extension:
======================================
ls -R | grep -v “\.”

To sum the first column of values:
======================================

awk ‘{tot=tot+$1} END {print tot}’

Today’s name abbreviated:
======================================

date +%a

Send an email message:
======================================

mail -s “subject line” blah@blah.com < /path/to/file

Traverse syslog directory, find all files with no extension, find out size
======================================

#Get Kilobytes for Today’s files into <date>daily with full path
find -f /data/ | grep -v “\.” | grep -e [Wed]/[0-9][0-9]$ | \
xargs du -k  > /home/staff/akonkol/scripts/$filename

• “find -f” will list the all the files/directorie’s full path
• “grep -v “\.” will find everything that is not a directory
• “grep -e” will find all paths that end with today’s abbreviation slash num num
• “xargs  du -k” will perform a “du -k” on every path that is piped in.

Scenario: You are VPN’d into your company and you wish to browse the web without any traffic traversing your corporation’s network.

If you company has split-tunneling configured on their vpn, chances are that traffic destined towards the internet will not touch the corporate network. One downside to split tunneling is that in Leopard your /etc/resolv.conf is replaced with your company’s DNS servers.

What does this mean? Although http/https traffic to the public internet never touches your company’s equipment, they can still log dns queries.

How do you keep your typical vpn connectivity EXCEPT for web traffic? simple, ssh -D and socks.

1. Open terminal and type in the following: ssh -D 2001 <username>@<remote host>
2. This will open port 2001 on your local interface (127.0.01)
3. Open firefox in the address bar type: about:config <enter>
4. In the filter bar type “proxy”
5. You should now see a few rows, set the following values:

• network.proxy.socks = 127.0.0.1
• network.proxy.socks_port = 2001
• network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true
• network.proxy.socks_version = 5

This tells firefox that all requests that it makes (including DNS) should go to 127.0.0.1:2001 which is actually a tunnel back to the remote host you specified.

This is a clientside configuration, meaning that only firefox will be effected, you should be able to still ssh to remote hosts on your company’s network, as well as RDC.

Caveat: Any browsing to intranet sites will be broken, since external dns is being used.

Fix: Use safari or other browser to view intranet sites.

**And of course, don’t trust me…. open tcpdump on your local machine and on the remote and see where traffic generated via firefox goes**

I’ve procured a few cisco devices for a network lab and needed serial console access.  I don’t have any windows machines anymore so there was no teraterm or hyperterminal…. but I forgot about screen!

1. Get a usb to serial cable - link
2. Install driver - link
3. Open Terminal

To make sure the USB to serial adapter is connected:

akonkol$ ls -l /dev/tty.*
crw-rw-rw-  1 root  wheel   10,   0 Oct 24 23:08 /dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem
crw-rw-rw-  1 root  wheel   10,   2 Oct 24 23:08 /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
crw-rw-rw-  1 root  wheel   10,   4 Oct 24 23:09 /dev/tty.PL2303-000013FD

Now to start the terminal session:

akonkol$ screen /dev/tty.PL2303-000013FD

To quit the session press: control + a, then control + \

And of course for more info: akonkol$ man screen

I’ve created a simple bash script for this….

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#!/bin/bash
# script to start screen with usb to serial adapter
# akonkol 2008-11-02
 
#VARIABLES
 
#adjust adapter filename for manuf (works for iogear)
adapter="/dev/tty.PL2303-000011FD"
 
if [ -a $adapter ]; then
    echo "*** Adapter $adapter exists ***"
 
    echo "*** Starting screen on $adapter ***"
    echo 
    echo "Don't forget: control + a, control + \ to kill"
    sleep 5
    screen $adapter
else
        echo "!!! No Adapter Found !!!"
 
fi
 
#exit to parent shell
exit 0;

1. Took a picture of the guy off one of my shirts

2. Did some touch up in photoshop

3. Layered it with clear packing tape and cut out the stencil

4. Placed the stencil on the pumpkin and outlined the design, then cut it out.

I think next year I’m going to get an electric pumpkin jigsaw… because.

http://www.publiccollectors.org/MSPaintAlbumCovers.htm

Looking for a replacement/general web surfin’ laptop I decided to buy an asus eee 1000h.  Newegg had a $100 price drop and I pulled the trigger.  I just got it today and I’ve got to tell you its like deja vu.

The eee has a pretty big following, mainly with ubuntu (eh.) and debian users.  I decided to go with ubuntu just because someone had gone through all the work to make a specific kernel for it.

Installation of Ubuntu:

1. I followed these steps
2. To get the fn keys to work I used elmurato’s script found here
3. To test out the webcam I used “Cheese”  sudo apt-get install cheese
4. oh yeah! the way volume is controlled is a little weird, right click on your volume control, set the master to 100%, then right click on the volume control select preferences and select “front”…. then you will be controlling the front audio channel only (which is the speakers).

I’m pretty happy with it so far, it has nearly the same keyboard as my old lifebook, its decently speedy, I can mount smb shares to my NAS… it’s awesome.

Oh yeah, and whomever complains about the gloss finish leaving fingerprints or the right shift key needs to shut it… its $450..

]]> http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/16/asus-netbook/feed/ http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/15/hello-goodbye-subtext-to-wordpress/ http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/15/hello-goodbye-subtext-to-wordpress/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:59 +0000 Andrew Konkol http://www.copyandwaste.com/?p=28

I moved from my previous IIS/Subtext platform to the old LAMP/wordpress standby.  There are a few reasons why I didn’t like subtext, it sucked.  I left the wordpress world and I just came back, and the changes are awesome!

Subtext chokes on exporting to BlogML if any posts contain embedded youtube videos, so I removed them from my post(s).

Migration steps:

1. Recursive ftp get from old host (grabbed all the files and directories)
2. Wrote down all the links to posts that I had
3. Exported subtext blog to ml file and saved to local machine
4. Changed nameservers at my registrar (directnic.com)
5. Used Fantastico to setup wordpress instance for www.copyandwaste.com
6. Configured Wordpress settings to my liking
7. Downloaded and installed BlogML import plugin, instructions here
8. Imported BlogML file to wordpress
9. FTP put for my images directory on my new host
10. Wrote edited .htaccess for my site’s root and inserted RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^.]+)\.aspx$ http://www.copyandwaste.com/$2/$3/$4/$5 [R=301,L]
11. Fixed some dates for posts using mysql cli

“Pretty URIs” in subtext look like this:

http://www.copyandwaste.com/archive/2008/07/29/building-a-mouse-picture-post.aspx

“Pretty URIs” in wordpress look like this:

http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/07/29/building-a-mouse-picture-post/

As you see, all I had to do was remove the “archive” part.. right?  Wrong.  Subtext allows periods in the URI, therefore I ended up writing 3 more rewrite rules:

RewriteRUle ^archive/2008/05/26/alix-2c.3-openbsd-4.3.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/05/26/alix-2c3-openbsd-43/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archive/2008/06/23/blueboss-v2.0---bluetooth-proximity-alerting.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/06/23/blueboss-v20-bluetooth-proximity-alerting/ [R=301,L]
 
RewriteRule ^archive/2007/12/25/parsing-webrequestmethods.ftp.listdirectorydetails-and-listdirectory.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2007/12/25/parsing-webrequestmethodsftplistdirectorydetails-and-listdirectory/ [R=301,L]

The RSS URI in Subtext looks like: http://www.copyandwaste.com/rss.aspx

The RSS URI in Wordpress looks like: http://www.copyandwaste.com/feed

So yet an other RewriteRule:

RewriteRule ^rss.aspx$ http://www.copyandwaste.com/feed/ [R=301,L]

And that’s it! (Hopefully)

If I were to do this again, I would probably just create my own custom string for permalinks, which would cut about have my mod_rewrite use.  Unfortunately, creating my own custom string for permalinks wouldn’t fix the periods in the URI problem.