David L. Farquhar, computer security professional, train hobbyist, and landlord
TP-Link has two inexpensive 8-port switches aimed at the consumer market: the TP-Link TL-SG1008D and TP-Link TL-SG108. If you’re wondering about TP-Link TL-SG1008D vs TP-Link TL-SG108, I can sum it up pretty easily.
Who you’re asking for makes a big difference. If you’re asking for yourself, you probably want the TL-SG108. If you’re asking for a friend, the TL-SG1008D may be worth considering. Read on to see why.
I went to install Linux (Debian) on an old Asus socket 775 motherboard (a P5LD2) and had a litany of problems getting my installation media to boot. Here’s how I finally got it installed.
After I imaged the disks from a failing Debian server to newer hardware, I got the error message ifdown: Interface eth0 not configured after issuing the command ifdown eth0. There’s not a lot of documentation out there about this so hopefully this writeup will help you if you’re getting this puzzling message.
This should be the same in Ubuntu, for what it’s worth.
WordPress occasionally suffers from the dreaded “white screen of death,” where you visit an admin page and, instead of being able to do what you want to do, you get a blank white screen. Meanwhile, the blog continues to function. If you have scheduled posts, they keep going. But with no admin access, the blog essentially becomes a ghost ship.
Several of the causes are pretty well documented, so I’ll talk about mine instead of rehashing old advice you can easily find elsewhere. Read more
A really bad remote code execution bug surfaced yesterday, in Bash–the GNU replacement for the Unix shell. If you have a webserver running, or possibly just SSH, it can be used to execute arbitrary code. It affects anything Unixy–Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and likely many proprietary Unix flavors, since many of them have adopted the GNU toolchain.
This could be really bad. Some people are calling it potentially worse than Heartbleed. Maybe. I’m thinking it’s more along the lines of MS08-067. But there’s an important lesson we must learn from this. Read more
A few months ago I bought a Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H to learn computer forensics on, because at the time I thought that was the direction my career was going. I dropped it into a neglected Compaq case and installed Linux on it, since most of the free forensics tools run on Linux. The current version of Debian loaded effortlessly and ran nicely, as you would expect on a dual-core CPU with 16 gigs of RAM.
Then my career went another direction. Today I analyze Windows threats and vulnerabilities for a living. That’s a better match for my experience and the pay is the same, so I’m perfectly fine with that. But my mind turned to that hotrod computer in the basement. I suppose I could still use it to learn forensics, but I probably won’t, so why not see how Windows runs on it and bring it upstairs? Read more
I picked up a Celeron G1610 CPU last week and I’m using it to build a Linux box. Yeah, it’s a Celeron. But it performs like a 2011-vintage Core i3 or a 2010-vintage Core i5, consumes less power than either, and costs less than $50. It’s hard to go wrong with that. Read more
Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) came out this weekend, and I want to mess with it. Here’s how I wrote the installation media to a USB thumb drive for it using a Windows box. Because sometimes that’s all you have available to work with. If you prefer another Linux distribution, like Ubuntu or CentOS or Fedora, the same trick will work for them too.
Tom Gatermann told me about a nice tool for Debian (and presumably Ubuntu) called checkrestart. Sometimes, even though you did an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade to bring your system up to date, you can still be running the out-of-date version of something. That’s the problem checkrestart helps you solve.
I ran my site through Google Page Speed on Tuesday, and scored a surprising 88 out of 100–higher than I expected. Getting above 90 is going to take some optimizations on files that WordPress updates may change, so I’m hesitant to do that, but one thing it told me to do was to cache more aggressively. That’s pretty easy, as it turns out, and I could definitely feel a difference afterward.
Here’s the trick. Read more