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But we are proud to say that Dave Cohen contributed 47 entries already.
Most aspiring tech people make a critical mistake when evaluating ideas for a career. They approach the problem from a 30,000-foot view, saying to themselves, “I might like a career in finance.” Then, they try to work out a more detailed niche, before making plans for getting there. This can work sometimes, but if you find […]
I was just talking to a friend about programming. She’s interested for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that she’s read all about how ‘programming is the future’ and that tech people make tons of money. We talked about some things that I thought would be useful to share more openly […]
System Administration and programming are becoming more and more entwined with each passing year. If you’re not programming yet (or don’t view the scripting/configuration-management you do as programming), my hunch is that you will be, soon. There were a few talks at 32c3 about different methods for securing applications on Linux and Unix. You’ve probably heard […]
Here’s something that surprises many people: I actually don’t have a college degree. Before I got into System Administration, I did all kinds of things: I’ve been a soldier, carpet salesman, martial arts teacher, Chinese massage (Tui Na) practitioner, data entry temp, bakery worker, and a few other things. On the surface, these don’t look […]
I just came back from the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany — my brain is going to need some time to process everything that I’ve experienced in the past week. The congress is in some sense a combination of Burning Man and DEFCON. Four days of nonstop talks, workshops/assemblies, impromptu parties and projects, capture the flag, […]
I remember sitting at a system engineering gig a few years ago, fighting an angry LDAP server and talking about my goal of sitting on a beach and doing sysadmin and programming work from my laptop. My manager, a smart and practical fellow, laughed and told me it was a pipe dream and that such work simply […]
I’ve received a lot of requests over the last few months to create some audio content. This is for those times where you want to get some sysadmin training on the train, in the car, or in other commute-related settings where you can’t be staring at a YouTube video the whole time. So…I just uploaded the first in […]
One question I often see has to do with setting up proxies and browsing from a different IP address. While this tutorial isn’t about how to browse the web anonymously, it explains how to tunnel your traffic through a web proxy. This can be used for: circumventing some types of censorship, slightly more private surfing, bypassing stateful […]
The time has come for another edition of tech-timewasters/sysadmin links. This time, there are a few interesting security articles (including one that will give you an idea of what the malware analysis process looks like). What is mathematics? (math geekery for amateurs like me): http://math.coe.uga.edu/tme/issues/v09n1/4rota.pdf The postgres guide! (non-official): http://www.postgresguide.com/ Rowhammer (A nontechnical security article) — http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/07/rowhammer_security_exploit_why_a_new_security_attack_is_truly_terrifying.single.html […]
Sooner or later, we all deploy a PHP web application (Joomla, WordPress, Magento, etc.). I’m currently doing some security work, and I deal with a huge number of sites that have been hacked. The crazy thing is that 90+ percent of these compromises could have been prevented by a few security precautions. Here’s a list […]