Sean’s Obsessions

I was reading an announcement about PostgreSQL releasing replication under the BSD licence. Someone commented “Maybe GPL will be a better choice for a licencing “, to which someone else replied, and it got me thinking. Why? (Posted Aug 27, 2003 16:37 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy) (Post reply) Why would GPL be better for PostgreSQL [...]

I’ve posted another article over on Uptime. This one is about “screen”, which lets you multiplex several VTYs into one single login window.

RMS has long called for Linux to be called “GNU/Linux”. Here, he even goes as far as calling it “the GNU operating system”. Personally, I think he needs an ego check. Tim O’Reilly made a great post to an author’s list about this very issue. Couldn’t find an archived copy, so I’ve copied it below. [...]

I was reading a funny article called SCO Group to Shoot Babies, when I glanced at the “Ads from Google” off to the right. According to the Google AdSense information page, the ads are based on keywords in the page on which they’re being displayed. Unfortunately, in this case, I think the code needs some [...]

It looks like W32/Blaster is making its rounds. For interests sakes, I’ve started collecting connection attempts to port 135 and 445: Not sure if the flatline last night was because I lost data when I changed the collection program, or if there was just no attempts (doubtful) Also updated the extended entry to show a [...]

I’ve finally got into aggregating RSS feeds of my favourite news sites into one page. Rnews is what I’m using, it’s a PHP based system that puts all the rss feeds onto one page: . Small problem with RootPrompt.org, but other than that, it’s pretty good. Trivial setup, just untar, create a database, edit a [...]

I’ve posted an article on Uptime about automating routine tasks with some shell scripting. Take a few minutes to read it here. Sean

Sometimes, if an RPM operation is interrupted, the RPM database gets corrupted, and any subsequent RPM operation hangs the process. You can’t even ^C it. If you strace the process you’ll see the same system call getting invoked in an infinite loop. How to fix? [root@bob root]# cd /var/lib/rpm/ [root@bob rpm]# ls Basenames __db.003 Installtid [...]

Before you truck off to buy your Linux Licence, you need an “I’m stupid enough to fall for the SCO IP license” license. Damn!

A couple of links over at Linux Security caught my eye: A paper on how to attack LDAP based web forms. SQL injection attacks are old school now, but I’d never thought to apply it to LDAP queries. A cool use of Net::Pcap — write a daemon that promiscuously listens for a door knock, and [...]