Top ten commands used in your bash history:

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cut -d\ -f 1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10 | sed ‘s/.*/ &/g’

The KFC Double Stacker:

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Using parted on my netbook:

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Having found an old 8gb Kingston 2.0 USB hard drive, I wanted to format and use it right away. In doing so I was having issues in Windows first seeing and second using it at all.

After checking the disk management utility I could see that there was 200mb in use, and 7gb unallocated on the hard drive.

Inserting it into a netbook and using eeebuntu allowed me to see that there was a flag on the partition saying: msftres which is supposedly a nasty flag that most people haven’t had much luck removing.

My work around or fix was to simply use parted:

mkpartfs primary ext2 0 8024

Then when I printed the partition table again, the msftres flag was no longer present, and I was able to format it in Windows for use! : )

Quick and easy…

1994 comes crashing back, 15 years later:

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Driving home tonight, I heard Dookie by Green Day on the radio. It, for whatever reason, brought me back to a sleepover I had when I was but a wee lad. I have no idea who it was, but my friend introduced me to Green Day back in 1994, and I thought it was kind of punkish/emo. Good old Yurick Road….back when things were so simple….this one is for you Green Day! : )

Cable Modems and You:

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Hey!, if you are on a cable connection check out this address:

192.168.100.1

There is a good chance you are looking at your modems wee little webserver! : )

Now for some of the technical information that you can arm yourself with.

Downstream power (or the receiving power): -15 to 15.
The closer to the middle the better, so in theory a 0 is best.

Upstream power (or the transmitting power): 30 to 55.
Again the closer to the middle the better off you are, most results in an ideal install will show the power to be in the 40′s range.

Signal to noise ratio (or the SNR): 25+.
Anything higher than 25 for the SNR level will be fine. As a help desk employee I personally witnessed users connecting to the internet with as little signal as 14 and the modem was able to keep it working…somehow.

Notes:

• The cable networks are external 100% of the time.
• This external network is under the strain of weather 100% of the time.
• Lightning, and cold weather effect cable data the worst.
  • Lightning destroys devices
  • Cold weather causes the signals to become inconsistent.

So there you have it, a little information that you can choose to arm yourself with, or make yourself look foolish with if you get it wrong. I spent a little more than a year as a voip/ISP help desk employee and answered more than 10,000 (estimated) questions in regards to residential networks and hardware.

Howto: Squid proxy authentication in Ubuntu

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I’ve set up a squid proxy server again. This time in my acl I defined my work address, and added it to the http_access allow:

acl work src ip.add.res.ss #Work ip

and

http_access allow work

However, as I’m not the only person at my work that could benefit from a “cache-server”, I’ve decided that maybe I’d like to allow other people to use this server, as well as use it from other locations. So I decided to set up some sort of authorization module.

You need to use proxy_auth ACLs to configure ncsa_auth module. Browsers send the user’s authentication in the Authorization request header. If Squid gets a request and the http_access rule list gets to a proxy_auth ACL, Squid looks for the Authorization header. If the header is present, Squid decodes it and extracts a username and password.

Squid is does not start with password authentication turned on, in the squid.conf you will see many lines of code that are commented out that will help you to enable your authentication. I went with the basic/NCSA-style of authentication using a user/password request.

Configure an NCSA-style username and password authentication

Step # 1: Create a username/password

# sudo htpasswd -c /etc/squid/passwd username

New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user user1

Make sure squid can read passwd file:

# sudo chmod o+r /etc/squid/passwd

Step # 2: Locate nsca_auth authentication helper

By default (I’m using Ubuntu 8.04) the location of ncsa_auth is found in this fashion:

# dpkg -L squid | grep ncsa_auth

Output:

/usr/lib/squid/ncsa_auth

Step # 3: Configure nsca_auth for squid proxy authentication

# sudo vim /etc/squid/squid.conf

auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid/ncsa_auth /etc/squid/passwd
auth_param basic children 50
auth_param basic realm Whatever you'd like:
auth_param basic credentialsttl 8 hours
auth_param basic casesensitive off

Also find out your ACL section and append/modify:

acl ncsa_users proxy_auth REQUIRED


http_access allow ncsa_users

Restart squid:

# sudo /etc/init.d/squid restart

Now users will be prompted for username and password.

Source

Rough night, results:

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Was a rough night. Long day of work, full length class with over a dozen formulas to try to memorize and be able to use. Personal life stuff. A full length day with the end nearly in sight!

Here’s the run path. The distance was just over 2 miles, and if I can manage to work through it again on Thursday night I’ll be all set for the Saturday morning stampede down in Seminole. Here’s the path, I didn’t know what type of distance it was, and had it pegged for a flat mile – I didn’t realize how big the apartment complex was:

20090408

My Birthday Weekend:

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It was an interesting one. I’m glad that I got to spend it with all of my closest family members though. My Grandfather made it down for his annual Florida visit, and my grandmother along with my parents and sisters all went out to dinner on Saturday night.

For Sunday Grandpa, Dad, and myself went out to Fantasy of Flight. It was a little late as we just caught the tail end of the daily demonstration, but we did get to see the restoration tour, and the private hangar tour. There are some pictures on this site here:

Click Here for the photos! = )

I apologize for the quality of the site/images, most of it was thrown together so far as the site goes, and the images are from my old continent traveling point and shoot A620.

My new HTPC build:

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LG Black Blu-ray/HD DVD-ROM & 16X DVD±R DVD Burner SATA Model GGC-H20L – Retail $109.99

GIGABYTE GA-MA780G-UD3H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard – Retail $89.99

AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor Model ADH4850DOBOX – Retail $59.99

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM $89.99

2 x Kingston HyperX 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Model KHX8500D2/1G – Retail ($15.49 ea)

Rosewill RG630-2 630W ATX12V v2.3, SLI Ready, Active-PFC Power Supply, UL,FCC,CE,CB,ROHS – Retail $64.99

SILVERSTONE Black Aluminum / Steel LC13B-E ATX Media Center / HTPC Case – Retail $109.99

Total Price: $555.00

Content (images/benchmarks/reviews) to come….

New Perma-linking:

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I changed the way how blog posts are linked now to simply the URL  and the blog title, and now all of the previous links are borked. I’m pretty happy about that let me tell you.

Going to Site Admin > Settings > Permalinking, and then setting your own custom links is apparently not 100% in the wordpress world maybe….I’ve gone back to the default until I can figure that out…