But I can’t remember!

In unrelated news I’m also about to sober up, which will probably suck…. (also lol)

Now quick! Put out another episode so I don’t have to actually do work today! ;-P

I listen to the podcasts when I have free time. Right now they are perfect to listen to as I fly back home.

Keep up the hard work! I enjoy listening to them… Even if the podcast internet connection sucks.

Glad it’s still enjoyable!

Podcast even if you did have some connecti

Connection issues….

Surprised you did not look at the connection details in Skype and see how many packets were being dropped etc. Can I issue a challenge for a future podcast: Try to get through with no dropped packets at all!

Good that you are dogfooding and buying the products you talk about although given time since last podcast we have experienced the heat death of the universe 3 times over. Civilizations have risen and fallen. OK maybe a bit over dramatic but would truly love to have more of these podcasts!

Passwords are well past their use by date. We are basically trying to use something that computers are better at than humans to prove which human we are. I personally love the Yubikey solution by Yubico, their new Neo Yubikey also works via NFC and is a virtual GPG smart card.

I was very unsure about the mains power Ethernet plugs however decided to get a few when I moved house last year and they have been fantastic. Just remember that they turn the power cables into a hub not a switch so the more you connect the slower they get if all in use at the same time.

I’m also loving the price of Bitcoins although not 100% confident we are not headed for another crash. I’m planning to keep mine long term though so will probably see a few more crashes before I cash in. I’m wondering if the ASIC miners are the cause of the current price hike – lots of people see the ASIC’s coming and have to either buy bitcoins or accept they are unlikely to ever get any more as they will not be able to mine soon. On the plus side the ASIC’s put mining bitcoins well out of the scope of any botnets which had me worried early on – a massive botnet set to only generate blocks that did not include specific bitcoin transactions could in theory work as a denial of service attack if they controlled a significant percentage of the processing power of the network. Now you would need to own a significant number of ASIC miners to have the same effect which puts this attack out of reach of almost everyone.

Keep up the good work, looking forward to the next PFP! Hope you all get your internet and computer problems resolved by then!

Neal.

With all this said, I wouldn’t dare install it on any of the machines in my biz office or warehouse where I work… my god, simply moving an icon freaks my users out! In due time, people will get used to win8, as there really is no looking back at this point… My guess is win9 will be much wider accepted… there is a trend that just about every other OS from M$ people hate, often without ever even trying it out… this is usually due to radical changes/updates to the OS… like when Vista came out everyone freaked, really for no good reason. Vista with SP1+ was quite usable and actually quite nice (until win7 came out)…But people buy into the hype and didn’t even give it a shot.. .i see the same happening with win8… unfortunately….

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/11/8ca4aa827c1151851324895f5ffb778b.jpg

http://www.smartergeek.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/exploits_of_a_mom1.png

LOL! Enjoy!

Personally I’m avoiding Windows 8 for the time being – Microsoft might be able to polish it into a workable system for business users but until they do Windows 7 (and apart from lack of security updates in a years time Windows XP) seem like better systems for just getting stuff done!

I’m a strong believer in self taught (with real world experience) being better than formal education, mainly because someone who has learnt things on their own has proved they can adapt and expand as new challenges come along. I may be biased though both because I have very little formal IT education myself (degree in Physics) and because I have always worked in very general purpose roles dealing with everything from end user support to Virtual server infrastructure so an ability to learn new things fast has been very helpful. That said I’m always wishing I knew a subject more thoroughly which is a big benefit of formal education.

I’ll check out direct connecting with Skype next time I use it – I never need perfect call quality but have had problems before and now I know the UDP ports to open for a direct connection I might as well dig in and see if I can get it sorted. I wonder if opening the ports will allow other skype users to use my client as a relay in their calls or only calls I’m involved in?

Re turning off the internet to get a faster web browser – I prefer to save the sites I visit often in a folder in chrome’s bookmarks. Then I open a new tab, right click on the folder (top of the window before you load any web page in the tab) and select “open all bookmarks”. This then loads them all at the same time and by having one folder for work sites, another folder for tech news, etc I can choose to load a batch of pages easily and only leave pages I have found but not read open when I close chrome so they pop up first next time I start the browser.

Its an HTML5 page that allows you to put in any wikipedia topic/page, and it will crawl the first link on every subsequent page until it reaches the “Philosophy” page. Very funny to watch it graphically… oh wikipedia!

Ya PeerBlock is a MUST. I was also extremely surprised at how many ips are on the blacklist. It blows my mind how “dirty” torrents are. Oh well good thing I only use torrents to download Linux ISOs.

anyways, i wanted to add that with the Recaptcha audio — they purposefully obfuscate the sound so that it’s harder for a “bot” to pick up the letters and enter them.

Also, i’ve used peerblock forever! its amazing, super happy to see you guys talking about it. I use the standard lists, but also add in china, and a few other select countries. it’s crazy to see how many people are trying to track your torrent… instantly pops up tons of ip’s that are being blocked… nuts!

Keep up the good work guys!

BTW:

Use the “.OVF” files for importing directly to XenServer… the OVF is Open Virtualization Format – and XenServer accepts this directly as an import, and you can also export VM”s in the same format. Using the ISO’s for install is great, if you have a storage repo setup. If not, use the OVF.

Thanks!

Thanks!
Mike

Search for “btn-small” in the source and add ‘type=”submit” ‘ to that line.

Might explain the lack of comments since the theme update – maybe you do have more than 13 listeners!

Change this line:

Must be a problem with the btn-small class?

Ben, I feel the same way about reinstalling servers – it feels like you are admitting defeat with whatever technical problem besets you. Sometimes a wipe and reinstall is the best way to stay sane!

I’m surprised you do your VM migrations with dd – is that not a bit wasteful on bandwidth? Although if you are using Amazons fast connections and the bandwidth charges are not too high then it may well be better than spending time working out a “better” way with marginal improvements.

Not sure if its just me but the “Post comment” button seems to be broken (tried in Chrome and Firefox under Linux). Editing the form to try and get it working…

Looking forward to the next podcast.

Cheers,
Neal.

Maybe I’ll get the guys together and do a full CouchDB review. I also want to make a blog post about how we are using it to log all network traffic. Stay tuned!

Moon breakers is another good example of a game played in a (chrome) browser, full 3d space combat. Its impressive what web browsers are capable of these days.

I would not have expected you to use flat file DB for your system Ben – but then I deal more with systems that have already been developed and released. I guess it allows you to prototype and change really quickly which helps with a new start-up full of fresh ideas. If you later want to normalize your database and apply indexes etc you will have a lot of exceptions to work through though – especially given how much you are logging!

Keep the podcasts coming, they make my drive to/from work pass a lot more quickly and its interesting to hear about the challenges you face and the tools & techniques you use to solve them. It sounds like Dart is something to keep an eye on!

Cheers,
Neal.

We should totally put this on our webpage somewhere!

Thanks for reinforcing the opensource vs closed argument. More eyeballs also means more changes of a white-hat person taking the right action when bugs are found… just don’t let Merrick in the group or your credit card will be sold to china for sure!

Arch Linux sounds very interesting. I ran Gentoo for about 6 months and like Josh says with Arch it was an amazing learning experience – however I spent far more time keeping the system working than actually using it. Overall my favourite distro is Debian but I’ve been lazy for the last couple of years and have been using Mint at home. Debian is definitely still my preferred distro for servers.

With open source software anyone can stumble on a bug at any time just by working on the project. With proprietary software the only people with the source code are either the company developing it or hackers – fewer people to find the bugs but a far higher percentage will be inclined to use anything they do find maliciously and less chance of warning before a zero day exploit goes wild.

Instead of Ubuntu they should be loading suicide linux!

We’re all waiting for the next cast!

http://www.qrpixel.com

Keep the awesome shows coming!

I believe Apple claim they removed CarrierIQ in iOS5 – which was released before the whole CarrierIQ thing blew up. Makes me wonder what they replaced it with as I have not seen them say that they do not and will not use anything like CarrierIQ.

Was great to hear Mike’s knowledge of CarrierIQ – he obviously knows a lot about the subject and was a good guest to have on. Worked really well and I hope you keep doing it.

Sam still using FTP to monitor Acronis backups at work? Given people are trying to brute force (as someone will on any publicly accessible service) and FTP sends user/pass over the net in plain text have you considered upgrading to SFTP? Could even start using SSH keys so random password attempts will never work.

Getting a logo identifiable in a QR code would be awesome, I’m sure that if you could script that a lot of people would be very interested.

Another great show guys! Cheers for all the effort that goes into them.

I’d noticed the different intro each time but just assumed you had found a collection of creative commons music or something, not mixing them yourself! My bad – I keep forgetting how awesome you guys are…

I also run Vista at home! Erm. I’m not doing much for my credibility here am I? In my defence I spend 90% of my time in Linux and only boot to Vista to play games that will not run on Linux.

I can sympathise with bunny’s eating power cables – I lost two Wii nunchuks to a rabbit before I realised that he thought they were the tastiest thing ever and was actually trying to find them. I’ve somehow managed to avoid getting a shock myself but since we run at 230V here that is probably a good thing.

I’ll be trying Yumi, looks like a very useful tool. Also given that I have only just listened to your 30th Nov Podcast I can definitely agree that kids can be a bit of a handful! Very rewarding but you can forget half of the things you did before you had them – including having time to find a replacement for an MP3 player that suddenly went very hot…

Another great podcast guys, I hope to catch up with the next one soon! A guest talking about CarrierIQ sounds very interesting…

I would say no, you are not paranoid. Forming good habits at plastic ATM’s is a great way to prevent your money from getting stolen. Fraudsters usually go for the lowest hanging fruit, so if you heat all the pads, they will probably ignore your pin.

I like your point about getting on the internal network using an external rfid reader. This thought had not crossed my mind. This reminds me of a story that Kevin Mitnick tells in his book “The Art of Deception”. A business man enters a business and tells the secretary that he has a meeting, but that he has arrived early. He asks if he can use a conference room to get internet access. Even though she leads him to the public conference room, the ethernet jack gives him access to the internal network. He is able to perform his exploit and leave without being seen!

Yes! Neal! I’m so glad you got the airplane reference. I just listened all the way through the episode so I could remember the context of the airplane reference and respond to your comment here. I’m glad that you and I understand the 4th wall and the importance that airplane plays.

With that being said, we’ll see you next time Neal! Thanks again!

Ben I hope your hands have thawed out after the sub zero coding – it definitely sounds like a fun challenge. You mentioning that the touch pad stopped recognising your finger reminded me of this sidechannel with ATM machines – http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/08/thermal-imaging-camera-can-read-your-atm-pin/ Not quite sure how my brain made that leap – or even if you have already mentioned it on a previous podcast, apologies if you have. I’ve been resting my fingers on a couple of non-pin buttons while waiting for my cash since reading that – even though the odds of it actually being used in the real world are probably vanishingly small. Is this paranoia?

Not quite a side channel but something many places do not recognise is that those RFID security tag readers on the wall for access to business premises often have a normal network cable going in the back. Its often possible to just break one off a wall and you have the network cable for an internal network exposed. Sometimes trying to add modern security misses the basics. This can be secured with a dedicated subnet / monitoring of devices / security cameras if people think of it.

RAM Cloud sounds like a very cool idea – although completely out of budget for most applications. Just the speed improvement of something like Puppy Linux which loads completely into RAM can give a good feel for the kind of performance difference vs normal hdd’s.

I got the Airplane reference Ben – maybe you need an inflatable auto pilot on the show to help out? Not sure about the idea of a bucket of beer with keyboard and the option to drink your way out – given some of the crud that ends up inside your average keyboard.

I’m definitely adding the term “Network architect” to my C.V. tonight – last time I needed a C.V. it did not apply, but it certainly does now.

I’ve added my email for sendnaO.com – spent ages flicking through the podcast trying to find you talking about it, can you add a link in the show notes for other listeners to find it easily? Not easy to make notes when driving

Looking forward to the next instalment in 2 weeks, thanks for another great podcast guys!

Thanks for your complements on my web crawler!! I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuPtCM5fNi4

Thanks for your comments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rugby_union_matches_between_Argentina_and_New_Zealand
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy

24 steps.

What is the longest chain?

Web Crawler syncing files on Dropbox – storing a copy of the internet on the internet – epic!

Note to self : Must buy Seagate shares…….

I can’t wait to listen to #16 and I have been noticing that the podcasts are becoming shorter. I think the length was one of the main problems it had when I tried to introduce it to people. I mean, personally. I don’t care and listened to all of them.

But I remember that 3 hour one was pretty crazy

Keepass is great for less important situations. Most of my passwords are generated on the fly using a rule – eg “H1gH1ySecur3#” followed by the 3rd letter of the domain name in uppercase, the number of letters in the domain name, a ! if its a financial site or a * otherwise, then the last 3 letters of the domain name. The first part I use in every password so I use it all time and therefore remember it. The rest always follows the same pattern so if I forget a password it only takes 10 seconds of looking at the domain name and mumbling under my breath to work it out. This falls down with sites that don’t allow special characters or have other silly restrictions which is where Keepass comes in very handy especially as it runs on Windows & Linux so I can keep the database in Dropbox and call it up whenever I need to. Oh and no – that is not the actual rule I use…

VMWare charging is per physical CPU when you get to the higher end offerings. The lower end has the VMWare Essentials bundle which allows 3 servers with up to 2 CPU per server. No limits on the number of cores per CPU or the speed of the CPU and this is all “real” hardware – you can run as many virtual machines as you want on that I think (of course run too many and it will grind…) Also ESXi has a completely free version which does not have some of the more advanced features and can’t create clusters, support moving VM’s while they are still running etc. An excellent podcast on this can be found here http://portforwardpodcast.com/?p=195 that is out of date now though – VMWare have released version 5 which changed the licensing a bit. I’d like to play with Xen at some point as I think you are right that it gives you more in the free version and moving VM’s between one system and another is pretty easy. Something I’ll look at when my current VMWare subscription is up for renewal in a year and a bit.

I’m sure there was something else I wanted to comment on. Bad side of listening to podcasts while driving to/from work is that its hard to remember all the cool subjects you have covered. Especially when I listened to the last two before commenting!

Looking forward to the next one guys (& Girl unless she manages to escape).

I think Ben is showing off now – the hackathons might start banning him from entering the competitions if he never lets anyone else win!I look forward to hearing what you get up to with your epic Dropboxes!

The new direction of the podcast should be interesting – its obviously something you are all into (essential ingredient number 1!). Also startups – especially if you lot are involved – are more likely to try out new and interesting ideas/technologies.

You mentioning microscopic systems etched on silicon for detecting the attractive force of the earths gravity reminded me on miniature generators I read about a few years back. I could not find the one I was thinking of but a slightly larger version is here:
http://www.economist.com/node/1020811 – not to practical for powering your mobile phone but could be useful in many situations where noise & heat are not such a big issue.

Virtual Monkeys write Shakespeare : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310

Thanks for listening from afar! That VAX/VMS OS sounds like a mess, I remember my drives back in the 30MB days were ALWAYS full without full copies of incremental changes.

We’ll add the WEP/WPA/WPA2 to the proposed topics. How does iOS not officially support it? I’ve been able to connect to all WEP networks from my non-jailbroken iDevices.

Take care!

I’m with Neal – forget the day job and focus on entertaining and informing us, your loyal listeners!

Re Version Control systems – Digital’s VAX/VMS Operating System would create a new copy of the file every time you saved it, so you’d get README.TXT;1, README.TXT;2 README.TXT;3 … for every edit – and at a time when a 30MByte hard disk was massive!

For a future topic, can you explain the difference between the different WiFi Encryption standards (WEP, WPA etc.) and why WEP is supposed to be soooo bad that iOS doesn’t officially support it, according to our local Apple reseller.

Keep up the good work, and don’t worry about distraction depth – that can be when some of the most interesting and useful snippets of information come out.

Thanks again – all the way from Auckland, New Zealand.

In Ubuntu’s case, only users who are added to the “wheel” group are allowed to become root.

Thanks for the great Fail2Ban article!

You should follow the show on twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/portfwdpodcast or @portfwdpodcast

If your not into twitter (I’m still skeptical) it’s cool to know that there are tech nerds on there: For instance:
http://hashtags.org/fail2ban

http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/7/29/fail2ban

Also, allowing someone to use sudo WITHOUT the root password sounds like it breaks the security model. Maybe I’m just an old unix dog.

Clyde

I haven’t tried out Fail2ban, however I have heard of it. I think I will install it tomorrow and report back.

Yes, it is simpler to su, but this requires that you know the root password. Sometimes sudo is setup to ask for your user’s password twice, and then give you root access. In this case, if you don’t know the root password, ‘sudo bash’ is the only way to go.

Regards,
Ben

Just sayin.

Clyde

Glad you liked the clip, it almost made me want to watch those films again…

Regarding the Gyroscope, I think it depends on what Ben meant when he asked if it could detect gravity. Directly probably not but it could observe the effects. Best I have thought of so far is if the gyro was unbalanced. If it was aligned vertically then as it spins it would get faster as the heavy side moves down and slower as the heavy side moves up. By watching the variation in spin speed which would vary by the same amount over each revolution you could detect that gravity was there. If you knew the precise imbalance in the mass you could use the amount that the heavy side accelerated and decelerated by to deduce the force of gravity. Of course with a gyro the difference in speed would be infinitesimally small given how fast they rotate anyway so the odds of it being possible to detect the variable speed at all let alone measure it with commercial gyro’s are negligible. So I’m still going with “no” for now but its definitely had my brain working…

I look forward to the physics lesson – although knowing Ben I’m sure that even if the answer has nothing to do with physics at all it will still be interesting.

Looking forward to the next episode, try not to melt too many GPU’s

Sorry to keep ya waiting! Ben recently took on an additional workload and is now busier than ever!

I’m kinda curious about what happened to the BTC market too; if any listeners have been keeping tabs on the situation and would like to guest on the show please shoot us an email! I’d still love to get into mining if for no other reason than to overclock the !@#$ out of some high end GPUs.

The Ghost Busters clip was pretty funny. I haven’t seen that movie in ages, I definitely forgot about that scene too.

Without looking I guestimate that a 3 axis gyro can detect G. (looking now) Damn! I was wrong. A gyro (or any sensor) cannot directly measure G. Ben must have had a physics lesson oriented around this question.

Thanks again for being a devoted listener and for the great feedback!

I hear you on losing USB drives, I was up to four at the beginning of this year, and now have (just rummaged through backpack) zero! Ever since Dropbox I have pretty much stopped using them, which is probably why I lost them all.

SSD’s are supposed to be near impervious to drop damage, the washing machine may be more deadly… lol

Losing data sucks no matter how it’s lost!

Thanks for the feedback!

With Bitcoin I looked into mining but the numbers were too close to see it working for me. With people doing it seriously combined with malware which I thought would start having an effect on generation difficulty (I was thinking more of normal bot nets burning through CPU cycles than the recent GPU malware) anything I purchased would not give a realistic return on investment. Plus not sure my wife would have been happy with my computer running 24/7… However I did think bitcoins would increase in value so I purchased some as an investment. Since then the price has dropped about 30% (Doh!) but I was planning for the long term (2-3 years) and I still think that over that timescale the price per bitcoin will go up. Hopefully Merrick will prove me wrong and become a giant among the GPU miners!

All the micro controllers stuff was veeery interesting. Ben you are lucky to have a job that obviously interests you so much. Please come back with more similar subjects. Can you reveal any particularly challenging tasks your company has solved with them? Obviously only if your company is happy – Don’t want to get you in trouble for spreading company secrets.

Can a 3 axis gyroscope detect gravity? My first thought was sure – but it would not be able to tell the difference between gravity and acceleration so would not know for sure it was gravity it was detecting. Then I spent about 5 min trying to remember how gyroscopic accelerometers work before deciding I was just plain confused. Since the Gyroscope is not accelerating (force of gravity is exactly countered by the force of the table top which does not want a hole in it) or moving (ignoring the Earths rotation etc) my gut feeling is no – but you put the challenge out to us which makes me think the answer is yes. This is going to bug me but I’ll resist the urge to google it for now.

I have heard about uNetBootin before but last time I checked it only supported a few iso’s – its come on a long way and looks very good now. Avira live CD I did not know about and it will come in very useful – cheers!

Am I the only one who flashed to Ghost Busters when you were talking about old CD’s not being able to restart if they suffer a buffer under run? Don’t cross the [data] streams! I was expecting at least one of you to pick up on that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyaLZHiJJnE

Can I donate for a new pack of CD Rewriteables for Sam? I think he deserves some fresh ones… I tend to only use CDR’s but that is mainly because I keep a pile of useful CD’s (live linux, system install etc) arround in case something goes wrong at work and I need them quickly for disaster recovery. I also tend to stick to just a few distro’s now – when I used to try a new distro every other month I used CDRW for those.

Not sure if you will have seen this already but a cool way to do encryption using just a piece of paper covered on a recent TWiT episode https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm – might be an interesting subject to cover (encryption generally or how O.T.G. works)

Keep up the excellent work & please don’t make us wait so long for the next episode!

Login and clone it!
http://susegallery.com/a/wpuhha/time-machine-server

Ps: Code Red is awful, we drink redbull.

If you want more direct communications with us, you can follow us on twitter! Lots of cool linux stuff posted up there. Also feel free to send us messages with stories you would like us to discuss:

http://twitter.com/#!/portfwdpodcast

Stay tuned, the next show is on it’s way!

If you want to change the ip, type “yast” from the cli. A blue screen will come up. go to “Network Devices” -> Network Settings. From here a new window will open up. Press tab till you get to “edit” on the bottom, and press enter. From this screen you can put in all your fixed ip information. You will want “Static assigned IP Address”. After you are done, tab to “next” and then tab to “ok”. Finally you will be back to the first screen. Go to quit, and the blue screen will disappear.

You should restart your computer now to make sure that your IP settings are correct.

I’m really sorry but I haven’t tested it out with lion. I don’t have a lion mac, but my roomate has one at home. I will ask him if things are working!

I want this to work for you!!! Good luck

mkdir /home/macbackups
chmod 777 /home/macbackups
cd
nano AppleVolumes.default

change beginning of the very last line in the AppleVolumes.default to:
/home/macbackups

Please let me know if you have any further questions!

I could argue the reverse, and say that at the end of the day, the LICENSE doesn’t hardly matter at all. For proof of this, take a look at the legal threats posted publicly on ThePirateBay.org — because they are out of the jurisdiction of the US, and other cooperating countries, they openly mock the DMCA requests served on them incessantly. So how much would my license matter if someone in Sweden or China were to take my cleverly-crafted HTML code and make it their own?

Even here in the USA. Let’s say I stumble across your website that has some really neat HTML and in the source you made a note which indicates that it is protected by a license. I choose ignore your “protected license” and copy it. The only way for you to enforce this license is to sue me, and you’d have to make a very compelling case to a judge that your HTML was truly so unique that it merited copywrite/license protected status. That might be a tough sell, and I could easily see the case being thrown out.

In my nine years doing legal work, I’ve seen lots of cases with even stronger evidence be thrown out — so this wouldn’t be much of a stretch.

But hey! That’s just my $0.02. Thanks again for tuning in!

I agree with you that websites aren’t licensed with an open source license. However when I was young I viewed the entire internet as a garden of code examples that I could use to expand my knowledge. I spent a large period of my life viewing the source of every webpage that had a cool design. By reading through this HTML I learned many tricks and techniques that I turned around and used myself. I spent many hours making local .HTML files on my PC and opening them to see how they would render. At that age i didn’t even really know what a “web server” was or how I could go about getting my own domain. Because the technology forces you to expose the source, it promotes growth, and lowers the barrier for entry for new users.

Thanks again for listening! We love to have user feedback! I’ll make sure to pimp your blog on the next show.

Just wanted to say you seem to be confused about ability to access vs granted RIGHT to access with regards to website source.

Websites are absolutely NOT Open Source despite your ability to see the source code. I could, for example, make a piece of software that I charge for and distribute the source with it. This doesn’t mean just because you HAVE the source, you can do something with it. At the end of the day, it’s the LICENSE that matters, not how easy it is to access the content.

I’d love to take your offer to come on your show, but unfortunately, I’m about to move to my GF’s, and already cancelled my internet/cableTV/landline at home, and she lives in a neighborhood so new, they have no service there yet with any of the local ISPs. To make matters worse, I only have a dumbphone, and at work it’d be impossible. And having me on a text only chat, I think, is an unatractive option. So I’ll take your offer, just not yet.

Have you noticed, that Sam’s voice is identical to that of… what’s his name? The guy from the Green Hornet.. Googlling… Seth Rogen? So whenever I hear your podcast, I keep a mental picture of that actor, speaking. Sorry Sam!

Had some good laughs in the last episodes when you mentioned the kid who went into a tantrum for his Echo the Dolphin game… I’m 44, and I still swear like a sailor when things don’t go my way, game-wise or not. LOL

We’re here currently going though some layoffs, with more waves of layoffs coming every week for a few more weeks. We’ve lost 40% of the workforce so far this year… ;-(

Rushing to listen to Show #13…

Social networks – I’m not on any yet (except a minimal Linkedin account) – Google + is the first one that has the right sense of privacy about it – I actually trust them to “not be evil” for some reason. Facebook just felt like I would be broadcasting everything to the world and I can’t see my family following my posts if I always post about tech stuff or tech people following my posts about my son. Unfortunately I use Google Apps which can’t join plus yet. Typical – first social network I want to join and I can’t…

Interesting use of git is Sparkleshare (http://sparkleshare.org/) – an open source system like Dropbox which uses a git server to host all the files. Not convinced that git is a suitable choice for dealing with *very* large collections of files but will be interesting to keep an eye on it. An interesting alternative to hosted file sharing/storage/backup for companies with remote workers at a much nicer price point than Dropbox or the like.

Distraction Depth is a great idea – Just the fact you mention it when you get to depth > 2 shows you are keeping track of your tangents and you will be getting back to whatever you were talking about. The distractions are often extremely interesting/useful nuggets of information.

You mentioned Bitcoin using the key that coins were sent to when it send those coins onwards. It also sends the “change” from that address to a new address from your own wallet. This has an effect on how often you should backup your wallet files – I covered this on my blog a short while ago but basically you should back up your wallet before you complete 100 transactions (both sending and receiving money if you use the fresh key every time you receive money) or you risk loosing chunks of your Bitcoins.

Oh and I just dropped a Bitcoin to your donation address – got to check its working! Although it looks like you were testing yourself with payments of 0.05 and 0.02 BTC at the end of June… Bitcoin is only anonymous until someone knows one of your public keys, then it can start to unravel and become very public. It will be interesting to see what happens when a “stolen” bitcoin ends up in a wallet with a known person behind it – will the original owner be able to sue to get his property back?

Phew! Sorry for the essay!

Can you please describe the problem you are having in iTunes? Most people use iTunes and other RSS readers (podcatchers) , to listen to the show. It’s very important to us that all of these mechanisms are working correctly. If you have an iPhone, I recommend the “RSSRadio Lite” application. For android I recommend the “AudioPress” application. Please ask any questions on this page, or send them to the official show email (above) if you are having any further issues. Thanks for your feedback!!

Regards,
Ben

Glad you enjoyed it! It’s good you like the pseudo-organization; we don’t have to change anything this way (I’m busy & lazy, lol)

And about segmenting the podcast. I thought that you already had structured the podcast into segments. So keep it as it is!

Consider Ben’s offer, we’d love to hear more about your operation & the interesting stuff that relates!

In the mean time, thanks again & keep the feedback coming.

I’m impressed that your managing so many LPARs! It sounds like quite the operation. If you are able to share details we would love to have you on the show as a guest. The format will be similar to our interview with Neal on our almost bitcoin show (#11). If you would like to take up this offer, please sent an email to the official show email address, shown above. We will contact you and setup a time that works for all of us. It would also be cool to hear from a Linux user who games on windows. Aka if you dual boot and how you share files between the operating systems.

Thanks again for your compliments! Stay tuned

Just when I had all my virtualisation sorted I get a batch up upgrades to test, work out what new features I need, how to set it up for my servers. I hate this upgrade treadmil it never… Oooh it supports 3d graphics for Aero in Windows! Shiny!

Seriously though it looks like a few decent improvements to the storage speed, virtual machines can now support USB3 devices, OS X is supported, you can now run the vSphere management software inside a linux based virtual appliance and there is a web based management client (before the web interface was pretty basic compared to the installable client program). Lots of new features to experiment with and see if they live up to the sales hype.

After listening to Ben’s cameo on the Linux Action Show, I headed to Google to search for your podcasts, and honestly, they are awesome!

They being 2 hours long, each, they are perfect for my commutes, or my 12-hour shifts at work (6pm to 6am). I’m on Monterrey, Mexico, working as Mainframe Console Operator, helping take care of 180+ LPARs, with mainframes spread out across different datacenters in the US and Europe, with teams in different countries (US, Mexico, India, Malasia) watching over them simultaneously. :-O

Of course, I also build personal computers for me and others. I’ve been a proud Linux user at home for years (more specifically a PCLinuxOS user), and of course, I’m also a Windows gamer.

So yes, my IT interest goes deep, same as with all of you. It’s refreshing to listen to a group of talented guys talking about things that interest me so much. Keep up the excellent work! I already look forward to the 100th podcast!

Greg Holguin

I agree with your assessment of the podcast… lol. Thanks again for coming on the show, we had a great time. I have not jumped into virtualization yet, but am definitely still curious. I checked out the link you mentioned & I’m not sure if that link was for thin clients, or just something else we mentioned towards the end of the show.

I’m not sure if we have any Bitcoin donations yet; I can’t imagine what kind of madness would drive me to playing Ecco, however I do look forward to replaying Jungle Strike (& maybe the sequels/prequels) one day!

For managing services on another computer you could “right click -> manage” on my computer then select “connect to another computer” from the Action menu. Not as flexible as psexec but has a nice GUI and lets you do other stuff like look at the event viewer, manage local user accounts and check what hardware is installed in device manager. psexec is far more powerful and flexible if you know the syntax to use.

Your tinyurl link for thin clients seems to point at a google products search for servers – was that what you intended?

Are you going to use some of your Bitcoin donations to buy a copy of Echo the Dolphin?

Thank you for your offer to donate time / money to our podcast. I have made a donations page at your request As far as donating time I would love to hear about the cool stories that you scout out on the net. Maybe you could post anything you find in the comments for the most recent show? If you think that we should have a listeners submission page I can also make one of those. If you have any photoshop, html, or css skills we could also use those here at PortForward. I am considering installing a forum but I don’t know if it would get used. If we go this route will definitely ask for help with moderators.

Thanks for the story and for highlighting key comments by users. I think that running a vm 100% from ram is a pretty cool idea. I have recently been playing with XenServer’s Intellicache feature:

http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/06/22/xendesktop-and-local-storage-intellicache/

This allows you select a local fast disk for caching reads and writes to a slower network attached storage. This technology can also be used with RAMdisks to really increase reads and writes. The nice part about Intellicache is that you don’t have to worry about moving VM’s in and out of your special RAMdisk. Also when you shut the VM down, all of the pending writes are flushed back to the underlying storage. We will discuss Intellicache in an upcomming episode, and I will make sure to mention your post.

Thanks for listening! Reading comments like these helps keep me excited about all the stuff were doing here at PortForward!

Your right about this attack being limited to dialup modems, however the paper mentions that 56K modems were vulnerable too. DSL and broadband modems don’t seem to be affected. Also it specifically says that not a single network card was susceptible to this attack.

Thanks for bringing up this epic side channel!

That’s a really cool story about the CRT o-scopes. That reminds me of a funny story my dad used to tell me: His dormitory at his college was equipped with an elevator with capacitive touch buttons to select each floor. He figured out that if he shuffled his feet to build a static electric charge he could shock the housing and light up the buttons for each floor!! ahahaha must have been super annoying to people in a rush

I have only seen a few shows of Numb3rs but i really enjoyed it. I have not heard of Van Eck Phreaking, but it is very similar to what I was describing. The cool part about Van Eck is that it works against LCD monitors like you said! I will go in-depth about the differences on the next show. (By the way we are taking a week off, sorry about that)

Thanks for the note about Ctrl+Backspace. I can’t get this to work on Mac or Windows, so I’m assuming this a desktop linux thing. This shortcut sounds much simpler than Ctrl+Shift+Left .. Damn! another reason to switch to Linux

In windows 7 you can choose custom behavior per icon. Do this by right clicking on the “show” up arrow, or on the clock and choosing “Customize notification icons”. In here you can set a default show or hide behavior, and also customize per icon. I wonder if icons can override the settings in this menu on their own?

Every post you make here encourages us to keep the show amazing. Thanks for the great feedback!

On the regular I also scout out web news/gadgets/how-tos/pretty much anything which catches my eye and save the links. If there is a particular subject I could keep an eye out for you guys; I could help out with that.

Also have an idea for a part of the show. VMs installed and running completely in RAM. There are so many angles here for your show. Especially security wise.

Found this on Reddit. highlighted some good parts: http://diigo.com/0i2wk

“So, I decided to put my entire OS in ram. Results?” : hardware
http://tinyurl.com/3ukhtzc

Sorry for being slack replying! I’ve dropped an email to your official address as you suggested. I use computers a lot but being more general IT management and maintenance than programming I’ve managed to avoid any RSI issues (touch wood). I’ve been using Mint as my desktop OS for a few years now (and XP Pro for gaming…) and after selecting the correct keyboard template most of the extra keys just work. volume, play, browser home page/forward/back/reload, calculator, email client all fine. My keyboard has 10 extra buttons I never use (5 down either side). Just tried them and can’t get them to do anything – great now you have given me something to fix!

Half way through episode 10, I’ll put some comments on that podcast tomorrow when I’ve finished it. Another great episode so far though!

Damn Freudian slips!

Have you heard of Van Eck phreaking? Maybe this is exactly what you were talking about. But this HAS been used to detect LCD screens. First I heard of Van Eck was on Numb3rs.

Dude, I used to use Ctrl+Shift+Left, a lot. But know I just use: Ctrl+Backspace.

Side note- I love uTorrent and I know you guys love it too but it also one of those applications you have to right-click on the taskbar just to show it!

Thanks for mentioning nircmd. I will take a look into this for the next show! Im glad to hear that your a dedicated linux user. I can’t seem to make the switch to a full linux desktop because of all the tools I use. I’m certainly jealous Thanks again for the great feedback!!

Your welcome for the mention to your blog! We are really into promoting our listeners, and we hope you’ll do the same for us (aka tell your friends!!) If you’d like an even better opportunity to promote your blog, you should come on the show! Consider this an official invitation to join us on the Port Forward Podcast. We record the show sunday night (10pm pacific time) using skype. If you’d like to join us, please prepare a short tutorial. The tutorial can be anything about linux or computers; something cool and interesting to share with our audience. Send an email to the official email address of the show if your interested

Regarding sony, I’m glad we agree. I think sony made themselves a huge target by going after geohot, but in the end they really should have focused more on their security. Maybe Merrick has more to say on this topic

Regarding Das Keyboard, im a huge fan of this keyboard to date. One thing that disappoints me about this keyboard is the lack of an ergonomic version. I’ve had wrist pain in the past due to heavy computer use, and I tend to go for the ergonomic keyboards these days. That’s cool that your using a “Linux” keyboard. I’m curious to hear what distro your using it with, and how the extra features work (or dont).

Thanks again for listening to the show, episode 10 is in the audio production oven, and will be released soon!

I have to agree with you on the Sony mess – Sony seems to have greatly underestimated to trouble that a large group of hackers who believe they are anonymous and immune from retaliation can cause. In any multinational company the size of Sony there will be mistakes made, systems left unpatched or weak passwords used somewhere. Sony has shown bad judgement before (Audio CD’s installing rootkits). Overall a very expensive mistake for Sony but probably one they will survive fairly easily – Most people with PS3′s are probably back playing their games and will continue to buy new ones as they don’t want to waste the money they already spent buying the console and games.

Re keyboards: the Das keyboard is a nice idea but when I first saw it my first thought was that it is probably cheaper to buy a scouring pad and just scrub the letters off a budget keyboard Personally I have a Cherry Cymotion Master Linux keyboard I was lucky to get as a free gift with a magazine subscription. It only makes a small difference but given the hours I spend at my computer its a difference worth having.

It’s been a long time since I read these, but I think L&M’s point was
that the small advantage gained by persons who train only on Dvorak is
eaten up by the inconvenience of not being able to use a Pc without
special software, and there is no advantage at all for those of us who
must unlearn qwerty if you subtract the time we waste unlearning from
the time we save typing slightly faster.

As for your discussion of bash…. To a guy who has only ever used a
hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you hand the guy a screw, he
will think it is a pretty crappy nail. If you’re writing a bash
script, and you are using a lot of ifs or wanting to return a function
value, you’re that guy hammering away at a screw. There is bound to be
a more elegant solution, but you’re blocked by your php instincts.

The unix paradigm involves piping output from one small program to
another, using standard input and output and modifying it, filtering
it, or combing it as it goes. Return values are just for status- it
found what you’re looking for, it didn’t find it, your input is
garbage etc. The real output goes to standard out. If you learn how to
use both the hammer and the screwdriver, you’ll know when to use each
to it’s best advantage, as a true craftsman would.

Thanks for an interesting show.
Dave

So, yeah, TeamViewer it is. Thanks again for listening! Episode #8 will be up soon.

When I have a VM that is only running a nameserver and nothing else.. what good does an 8gig harddrive do me? Nothing!! “sudo lvreduce” !!!!

-Ben

I’m lucky – my “clients” work for the same company as me and almost all of the ones who need remote support are very low tech. Defrag, CCleaner etc they would not have a clue about – they just need the web browser, Word, Outlook and maybe Publisher for work. I install several things they have requested by default (Firefox, VLC, iTunes, flash, Skype) and they know if they ask for something else I’m fairly likely to install it happily unless it will cause a problem – in which case I normally suggest better alternatives. Just the fact that they will need to call me and get me to log in remotely stops most of the free trial installs.
I have two who are reasonably computer literate and they know the admin password and have promised to behave with it.

In case you are interested the commercial UltraVNC SC replacement I used was TeamViewer and I’ve been very happy with it so far (about 9 months).

Oh can you say thanks to Ben for me? He just put the first comment on my blog in the middle of me listening to your podcast #7.

Glad to hear it isn’t just me re the issues with UltraVNC SC. My client was indeed using Aero, and the delay time was almost 20 seconds. Granted, I was also in China at the time, so there was heavy latency. My regular VNC connections only had an unscientific delay of about 1 to 3 seconds, though.

About having UAC enabled, don’t you find that your clients complain a lot about not being able to install new software. They essentially need to call you every time a UAC prompt appears — and they appear a lot. Let’s say they want to defrag their hard drive — UAC prompt. Move a file on the root drive? UAC prompt. Open CCleaner? UAC prompt.

The fake AV programs, though… those are the times I wish I had UAC to stop ‘em.

I used to use it a lot but switched to a commercial alternative because UltraVNC SC has issues with the UAC security feature in Win 7 – basically the user gets a popup asking for an admin password and you do not even see it. I do not really want all my remote users having admin passwords as they have a tendency to install lots of games, addons, trials etc. Its a real pain to support a remote laptop which is running slow because of a program I’ve never even heard of before – let alone when they get tricked into installing a fake AV program….

To see if a jailbroken app is phoning home to the jailbreaker. Connect to your local network. Put a hub between the router and the modem. Run wireshark on a computer plugged into the hub and you should be able to view all of the packets being sent out from the jailbroken app.

Here’s the link I found for heat pipes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heat_Pipe_Mechanism.png