Category Archives: Howto
Tarsnap Nagios checks
Posted by on January 23, 2011
While I have been using Tarsnap for a while now it is first recently I have gotten around to make Nagios monitor those backups. Given that I really don’t want to give the nagios user any actual access to my backups, I instead take the approach of having my backup script create a status file [...]
Managing passwords using GnuPG, Git and Emacs
Posted by on January 12, 2011
Like any other security conscious and/or slightly paranoid computer geek I have lots and lots of unique and nontrivial passwords to keep track of. My solution to this problem involves having one GnuPG encrypted text file per username/password pair. andreas@stilgar:~/safe$ gpg < example.gpg You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for user: “Andreas [...]
Reassembling Das Keyboard
Posted by on September 12, 2010
Ok, first some background. Earlier this year, I bought myself a Das Keyboard Ultimate. Time passes, and I am still very happy with the keyboard. Accident happen, forcing me into some serious keyboard cleaning. According to daskeyboard.com/support it is perfectly safe to remove the small/regular keys (letters, numbers, etc). The larger keys (enter, shift, etc) on [...]
Using the YubiKey
Posted by on March 7, 2010
One of the keys I carry around on my keyring is a YubiKey. This post really isn’t about the YubiKey itself, but more about me sharing a few insights I’ve gained on using the key. If you already run a WordPress blog you can easily turn it into an OpenID provider to be used with [...]
ssh-agent without the Gnome keyring
Posted by on March 1, 2010
In a default Ubuntu, and probably any other modern Gnome based Linux desktop, the Gnome keyring takes the role of the ssh-agent. If this is not desirable you can tell the keyring not to do that by setting the gconf variable /apps/gnome-keyring/daemon-components/ssh to false. $ gconftool -s –type bool /apps/gnome-keyring/daemon-components/ssh false At the next login [...]
APT::Install-Recommends
Posted by on January 24, 2009
Apparently Ubuntu now has APT::Install-Recommends set to True by default. This happened in version 8.10 (Intrepid) and it results in that packages marked as Recommended are now automatically installed kinda like dependencies. I guess that change can make sense on a desktop system, where it might be nice to by default provide the user with [...]
My ~/private Eee folder
Posted by on August 21, 2008
Inspired by the Ubuntu project Encrypted Private Directory I decided to set something similar up on my Eee PC. Being a regular FUSE user I based my solution on EncFs and pam-encfs. First of all we create our folders. These commands should be run as your normal user. The password you give EncFs has to [...]
Debian – Ubuntu, S/Key and OPIE
Posted by on May 31, 2008
Been looking for a simple way to enabling S/Key support in Linux. Once I found out the magical keyboards being OPIE and PAM it became almost trivial to allow ssh-logins using One Time Passwords (OTP). The following instructions are specifically written to apply on Debian and Ubuntu. On a general note the concept should work [...]
