Computing

After a number of unsuccessful attempts to get dban on a USB stick using unetbootin, I found the Universal USB Installer instead. This appears to do a better job, making a bootable installation from the latest preview build of dban.

So I thought I was being a good internet citizen when I received the following email a week ago: Dear User; Please update to our new server click here to begin

Occasionally I see packet captures which have been saved as Raw IP, which can really mess up many of the tools developed to deal with pcap. Anything based on libnids, including the Perl module I maintain, cannot deal with it and will produce no (or bizarre) results. Wireshark displays these captures just fine, with “Raw packet data - no link information available” just above the IP layer.

Whilst the Sharp Architecture maintainers have little interest in Razor (see here), I have been using it recently and like the syntax. Swapping out a default project to use Razor instead of (or in addition to) the default engine isn’t too difficult.

Anybody who has used command-line systems for a serious amount of time will love grep. But today I stumbled across ack, which (for many things) is better than grep and a whole lot nicer to use.

It is sometimes useful to limit the running time of a process, either to stop it from using up all resources or to make sure nightly cron jobs don’t continue into working hours.

I noticed tonight that my Cisco 837 was using hard-coded DNS servers which were no longer valid, hence breaking my internets. In order to keep them updated automatically, I added the following to the appropriate dialer configuration (interface Dialer0 on an 8xx):