Category: gnu linux

  • How to tunnel all traffic from your iOS device to your own server via IPSec

    TL;DR: A DigitalOcean droplet, strongSwan, and a custom Configuration Profile for iOS routes all the traffic from my iPhone via my droplet. Why? Just because I can. Note: This setup does not require you to download Apple Configurator and switch your iPhone into Supervised mode (we will create a configuration profile by hand instead, and…

  • Download your Coursera lectures using JS, bash and wget

    So, in light of recent events, I was unable to follow up on my Coursera Algorithms course. Trying to find a way to download all the lectures at once, I couldn’t find a way that worked for me – I found two, but they simply didn’t work. With the help of some JavaScript that I…

  • Notes on running the Crippled Turbo C/C++ from Dosbox, within a Linux Env

    Notes on setting up Turbo C/C++ within DosBox 0.74, compiled from source: Install DosBox from source This is the dosbox_shared directory containing Turbo C/C++ This config file is tested and works, modify the last three commands, to set the correct path to where you’ve extracted the dosbox_shared.tar.bz2 Place the config file in /home/username/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf

  • The Unofficial Gentoo Linux x86 uClibC stage3s’

    Update: The catalyst spec files are available here: https://github.com/judepereira/gentoo-development/tree/master/x86/uclibc/catalyst Following this Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441976 We have official experimental uClibC for x86 and amd64 stages. I will not be maintaining these unofficial ones any longer. The link to the official archives is: http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo/experimental/x86/uclibc/ and http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo/experimental/amd64/uclibc/ The uclibc experimental stages on the gentoo mirrors are all outdated(they…

  • Use Ruby to Generate your Shadow Password

    I was initially stumbled on creating the shadow compatible SHA-512 hash. After a little research, the answer was obvious: require ‘digest/sha2’ password = “pass@123” salt = rand(36**8).to_s(36) shadow_hash = password.crypt(“$6$” + salt) And you now have a password hash which you can directly use in /etc/shadow

  • The Puppet Cyclic Dependency Nightmare

    Want to see the wildest cyclic dependency graph ever? Well, here it is: After this was fixed finally, after a lot of frustration, the result was majestic:

  • recursive get from an FTP server

    As we all know, downloading a directory from an FTP server over FTP over the command line is not possible. Some, have found mget to be the holy grail, I certainly do not. I was restoring my music backup from my NAS, and I didn’t want to do it the GUI way, so CLI is…

  • Resetting a User’s Home Permissions

    Recently I managed to mess up my home permissions, to the extent that I owned the files, but couldn’t read them. Fixing an entire user’s home directory permissions is simple and easy. # chown user:user -R /home/user/ # chmod -R u+rwX /home/user/ Done.

  • comparison sheet | plug computers

    A lot of these plug computers are in the market. Which one is right for you? Here’s a comparison sheet to help you decide which one should you be looking for: Plug Computer Processor Memory JTAG WiFi Network USB SATA Price Ionics Cumulus KW 1.2Ghz 512MB NAND, 512MB DDR2 Yes Yes 1 Ethernet 1 2…

  • playing with grsecurity | a brief tutorial

    This howto is intended for those looking for better means to secure the Linux kernel, and the userland by the means of a powerful and simple role based access control policy. Contents What is grsecurity? Setting up grsecurity + gentoo in a VM The real thing: Grsecurity Getting familiar with gradm Generating the policy Fixing…

  • chname: change the hostname for a given command

    Run a command in a utsname namespace with a new hostname. You can essentially chroot with a desired hostname and fool a user. I’ve simply built RPM packages for this neat little utility. The source and package are found below. RPM Package: chname-1.0-0.2.x86_64.rpm SRPM Package: chname-1.0-0.2.src.rpm Visit the project’s home page for further clarifications.

  • the one thing bing.com is useful for : backgrounds

    714 wonderful backgrounds! Yes, in my personal opinion, bing.com is only useful in supplying fresh backgrounds, which are breath taking. These breath taking set of wallpapers, when set to change randomly on your desktop, makes the look and feel more exquisite. Download the file(see below). The script and the images are inside the tar file.…

  • [howto] grsecurity + NOUVEAU + Compiz + Seg Fault

    Assuming that you have a grsec + PaX enabled kernel, you would realise that the nvidia-drivers are a bad choice. Quite a few applications will fail(the ones that use libGLcore.so). Use the nouveau driver for your card, as it’s pretty much stable and works with good 3D acceleration. To get compiz working NOUVEAU under hardened…

  • creating unique environments – chroot snapshots – using aufs2

    What if you decided that you wanted to experiment and test within a chroot(ed) environment? And then something went wrong and you had to start all over again from scratch? Big headache, too much pain, especially with RPM based distributions. Well don’t do that then, here’s an interesting approach. Use aufs2, a stackable filesystem. An…

  • bootstrap CentOS from Gentoo (or any linux distribution)

    To bootstrap CentOS in Gentoo, I did the following. It basically installs the essential CentOS components into the specified directory, and from there on, chroot into that directory and perform tests, etc. First off, you’ll need to unmask a few packages(replace ~amd64 with ~x86 if your on the x86 architecture), and enable the flag sqlite…