Sep. 27, 2009
I have written about my Bubba|Two NAS before and I am still very happy with it. It’s not a performance beast but so quiet that it’s not noticeable in our living room which has always been the most important for me. Even though it runs RAID-1 and mirrors the 1TB internal disk to an external eSata disk I wanted to add some additional security by moving some of the most important files off-site. This article will describe some of the challenges and my final solution. The setup can be used on any Debian or Ubuntu based distribution.
Posted by patrik in Howto | 7 Comments
Sep. 22, 2009
A part from my Mac running OS X I am running quite a few Ubuntu and Debian servers and workstations. One thing that has been bugging me for quite a while is the fact that the backspace key has not been working properly in the nano editor on these systems when accessed over ssh from my OS X laptop. Instead of deleting the character immediately to the left of the cursor, it deletes the character to the right as if I was hitting the delete key.
I got some creative suggestions such as: “Well, don’t use nano use vi/emacs/pico instead”. Those are all great suggestions but I still wanted to solve the problem with nano as it’s installed on all of my systems, and I find myself using it a lot.
Doing some Googling I came up with one solution, which I wasn’t entirely happy with as it involved changing the TERM settings on the remote computer. This isn’t all bad but I wanted to try to find a solution that actually just affects nano rather than every other program that uses the TERM environment variable. For those of you that don’t consider this to be a problem you can simply place the following in your .bash_profile or equivalent file.
export TERM=xterm
By studying the /etc/nanorc I immediately found something interesting which turned out to be a better solution:
## Fix Backspace/Delete confusion problem.
set rebinddelete
In order to set this option for everyone on the system it needs to go in /etc/nanorc, however for me it’s sufficient to fix it for my own accounts. This can be done by issuing the following command:
echo "set rebinddelete" >> $HOME/.nanorc
Now, the next time you start nano the backspace should behave as backspace rather than delete. Delete still works by pressing fn+backspace as usual.
Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments
Sep. 18, 2009
Well, it finally bit me in the … Storing sensitive information, such as passwords for encrypted volumes, in the system keychain is a *REALLY* *REALY* bad idea! Why? Well, in contrast to the login keychain that is unlocked by a user’s password (transparently, if the same as the login password) the system keychain is accessible by any administrator on the system. So basically anyone with root access can dump all passwords from the system keychain.
If this wasn’t bad enough you can simply boot the system using the installation DVD and reset any administrator password, login and have instant access to the system keychain. So, well, using the system keychain for passwords to encrypted disks is not a great idea.
I therefore removed the articles referring to how to setup TrueCrypt with the keychain.
Posted by patrik in Security | No Comments
Sep. 17, 2009
Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard my MacBook took for ever to go into sleep when closing the lid. This was very frustrated as being a time optimist I usually work until I really need to leave and then I don’t want to spend 20 seconds before being able to put the computer into my computer bag. Anyway, looking in to the problem I found that OS X provides several sleep (hibernate) modes where some are considered more safe than others and therefore require more time.
In short when closing the lid the MacBook can either:
- Sleep and keep the RAM memory powered on
- Hibernate and write memory contents to disk and power down completely
Writing memory to disk is considered safer as even if your battery runs out of juice memory contents are still preserved and the OS can bring you back to where you were. This of course comes with a time penalty. The following article explains everything in more detail and also provides information on how to change between different sleep and hibernation modes:
http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html
I changed my settings from hibernation to sleep and went from 22 seconds to 1 second of wait when closing the lid.
Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments
Sep. 15, 2009
UPDATE 2009-10-22: Truecrypt 6.3 has been released, no need for this anymore
UPDATE 2009-09-18-2: Removed ref. to Fink as it requires to be built from source on Snow Leopard
UPDATE 2009-09-18: Added a missing requirement: pkg-config. See “installing pkg-config”
Unfortunately licensing issues prevent me from publishing my pre-compiled versions of TrueCrypt. So the next best thing I can do until there’s a new version of TrueCrypt that supports Snow Leopard, is to publish a “simple” do it your self guide.
In order to compile TrueCrypt for Mac OS X Snow Leopard you need the following:
- XCode (it’s under the Optional folder on the Snow Leopard Install DVD)
- macFUSE
- TrueCrypt and wxWidgets source code
- Header files from the RSA Security Inc. PKCS #11 Cryptographic Token Interface (Cryptoki) 2.20.
- pkg-config
- A patch that modifies the source code so it compiles under Snow Leopard.