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Posted On January 5, 2012
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Written By Masen Marshall
Earlier today I was reading Marcus J Raymuns Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security ( which is a fabulous editorial on it’s own ) and followed a link to a very old article by R.P. Feynman titled Personal observations on
the reliability of the Shuttle.
It details Feymans personal observations about the complex systems involved in the space shuttle and how reliability was achieved. It’s not written about modern day computer systems but it’s a great read and the message can be applied elsewhere.
Raymun says of the article “Unless your system was supposed to be hackable then it shouldn’t be hackable.” . This is only one of the really solid pieces of knowledge one can glean from the paper.
If you spend any time managing systems of any complexity this paper is a must read.
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Posted On January 4, 2012
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Written By Masen Marshall
Over time I’ve subscribed to dozens of different mailing lists in an endless attempt to keep up on the latest security news. Below are a few of the best ones that I would recommend to anyone also trying to stay up to date.
[email protected]
Bugtraq is a very active full disclosure mailing list for discussing vulnerabilities. It’s not Linux only but many of the threads are Linux focused and it’s a great list overall.
[email protected]
Discussion of basic security topics, a great resource for the beginner.
[email protected]
The source for release announcements about everyone’s favourite secure shell, useful to stay up to date with changes in this critical program. Very low volume.
[email protected]
Open source security updates. Discussion of best practices and recent exploits, great active list.
Those four will go a long way in getting general security updates as they happen. Something important to remember is that for any specific application you’re using there is more than likely a corresponding announcement and possibly even security specific mailing list. For example Slackware Linux has a list just for security updates in the form of [email protected] .
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Posted On January 2, 2012
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Written By Masen Marshall
Let me preface this by saying if you aren’t already reading the Doug Vitale Tech Blog you either don’t know what’s good or are just uninformed. Now that you are informed all excuses are nil.
There is a great post over there titled Deprecated Linux networking commands and their replacements that I cannot recommend enough.
I consider myself a person who keeps up on all the comings and goings of my field but somehow I totally biffed this one. In the article Doug goes into detailed one-to-one mappings from apparently outdated Linux networking commands to their modern replacements. Most of these are now contained in the ip command, including goto commands like ifconfig, netstat and route.
I’m not going to copy paste any of the content over here because you should really go read it for yourself. I for one had no idea the commands that I use every day had become unmaintained or that they had replacements. Now that I can map my previous knowledge over to the ip command I feel like the coolest sysadmin on the block.