Monthly Archives: October 2010

Sysadmin shell oneliner: update serial in all DNS zones

Posted by on 10/22/2010 No comments

Sometimes you just need to force updates on slave DNS servers. The easiest way to do it is to increase zone serials on master server. what if there are hundreds of zone files? Here is one way to do it
Read more »

Centos5: OCFS2 cluster FS on dual primary DRBD: why it doesn’t mount OCFS2 on boot?

Posted by on 10/20/2010 No comments

I have couple of these – how to configure it pretty easy to found (may be later I’ll go over the setup here too). The problem is – with everything else running perfectly fine OCFS2 partitions are never mounted automagically on boot. Just recently I found out why
Read more »

Looking for the backdoors or performance bottlenecks with lsof

Posted by on 10/19/2010 No comments

When server is compromised via some PHP script security hole intruders are getting relatively low level of access to the server. Although its enough to install PHP shell script or start some backdoor network daemon or proxy server or network scanner.

Lets see if we can find them
Read more »

VPN from Vmware Guest OS on windows 7

Posted by on 10/17/2010 No comments

I have couple of Vmware VMs that I am carrying with me from computer to computer and using on regular basis. One of these VMs is used for corporate PPTP VPN.
After my last transition to Windows 7 this VPN stopped working. It took me some time to find the solution to this problem. Read more »

Register any browser as Windows7 default (including portable)

Posted by on 10/16/2010 5 comments

As the matter of choice I’m using only portable versions of non-MS browsers – Chromium portable, FireFox Portable, Opera@USB.

Everything was nice and dandy while I was using WinXP. Not so easy with Windows7 – let me explain how you can control list of default browsers with simple registry files.
Read more »

Accessing Vmware guest OS behind NAT from another computer

Posted by on 10/15/2010 No comments

Sometimes you have to do things that make sense only to you. And by no way approved by the software manufacturer.
I needed to get access to Vmware Guest OS, behind Vmware NAT interface from another computer.

Read more »

.htaccess anti-RFI mod_rewrite rules

Posted by on 10/15/2010 No comments

RFI – Remote File Inclusion (or “nesting” – though last term is not so widely used, and it’s not the same as XSS I beleive) is very serious security threat – especially in webhosting environment where there is no time and manpower available to audit and vet all customers PHP scripts. Let’s see if there are other ways to reduce the threat

Read more »

Disable Chrome default browser

Posted by on 10/13/2010 2 comments

no-chrome As it turned out Google Chrome is quite hard to get rid of when it set to be default browser – even Google help page doesn’t give 100% reliable instruction on how to disable this behavior. There is a quick and efficient way to do so
Read more »

Macbook Pro 2010 (A1278,MC374LL/274LL) RAM upgrade

Posted by on 10/13/2010 No comments

mbproA week ago we’ve bought [amazon_link id=”B003GSLU3E” target=”_blank” ]MacBook Pro MC374LL/A 13.3″[/amazon_link] for my wife. I had 4Gb SO-DIMM lying around – leftover from my unsuccessfull attempt to stuff HP Mini 311 with 5GB ram, so I decided to bump Macbook RAM to 6Gb.

As it turned out this is not your regular Macbook Pro – “just press the tab on the bottom to unlock battery cover…”

Since I couldn’t find any instructions on the web I decided to try it myself and put together short instruction.
Read more »