Tag Archives: linux

Apro29

Christian Decker

6

Are macs more insecure than Windows / GNU/Linux?

While I am not a big Mac OS fan, I think unbiased analysis of its advantages and downsides is fundamental, to build a personal opinion. This article is a little biased against Mac OS, but I think it got the main point right:
I have developed this analogy of someone who wants to buy a nuclear reactor. There are two organizations interested in providing you with their nuclear reactor.
  • Provider # 1 gives you the reactor plus all the design information, all blue prints, everything but the kitchen sink!
  • Provider # 2 gives you the reactor and doesn’t give you a clue as to how it is built inside. It’s a black box (or a massive gray one). All you have is the control panels and the documentation that this provider is kind enough to provide with (you know…. they can’t give you everything for security reasons).
Given those two choices… which would you consider to be more secure/stable/reliable? Which one would you choose? I’d personally go for Provider 1. At least I know what I’m getting. And the guys are so comfortable with their design that they even give it away to buyers. Perhaps the guys at Chernobyl chose provider # 2.

Great analogy, but the same is true for Windows :D

[via Technology FLOSS]
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Apro15

Christian Decker

0

Automatically throttling rtorrent

I’ve been wondering how to get rtorrent to stop downloading while I’m working and go full throttle when I’m not. Even more so because I share my internet connection with 30 other people, and I can tell you, they get mad pretty fast :)

It would be nice to have a cronjob(Cron) that slows down the network load at, let’s say, 8 o’Clock in the morning and put it back full speed after 1 AM. Luckily since I already have rtorrent running in a screen instance to detach it from the console I can use the -X parameter which passes keystrokes on to the running program.

If I started rtorrent with the following command $ screen -dmS rtorrent rtorrent which creates a new, detached, screen with the name rtorrent and executes rtorrent, then I’d add the following to my crontab: 

0 1 * * * screen -r rtorrent -X stuff CCCCC
0 1 * * * screen -r rtorrent -X stuff ccccc
0 7 * * * screen -r rtorrent -X stuff S
0 7 * * * screen -r rtorrent -X stuff s

What this does is, at 1 AM, remove up to 250KB/s limit (never put in more or the limit won’t be lifted) and at 7 AM throttle all uploads and downloads to 5KB/s.

Alternatively I could kill the rtorrent instance and restart it, but by doing it this way I can still use the web interface and I don’t have to preform hash checks as often (your disk will thank you).

Any better idea? Feel free to comment:D

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Novo07

Christian Decker

2

iPhone under VMWare: still a pain

I’ve spent the last few hours trying to update the firmware on my iPhone to version 2.1 as most of the applications in the Apps Store are starting to require it.

First a bit of background info: I’ve been a passionate Linux user for the last 4 years and I don’t see why I should switch to Windows just to sync my iPhone (which btw. isn’t working as my Thinkpad T400 has successfully blocked as the Windows installation crashes with a BSOD) and I don’t see why Apple can’t support Linux too.

So I was thrilled when I heard that I could use VMWare Workstation v6.5.0 to sync my iPhone and all worked well for a while. But then I thought “why not try a firmware update?”, and all hell broke loose. After waiting for iTunes for more than an hour to give me back an absolutely generic failure message I gave up on my first attempt. Today on my second attempt I got a little bit farther. I now realize that it has something to do with the updater disconnecting the device and then waiting for it to reappear (why that is, I have no idea) but instead of the iTunes updater to respond to the device in recovery mode, it is Linux jumping in as it should and thus invalidating the update.

It’s getting really annoying by now, and resetting (15 seconds holding both home and power and then holding 2 seconds the power button, for those like me who can’t remember how) isn’t too nice…

When will Apple finally learn that there is a huge market for their devices if they’d only open up a little bit or provide us with the tools to use them under Linux?

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Sepo09

Christian Decker

0

Make Firefox more Chrome like

Like the look of Google Chrome but don’t want to ditch Firefox? Try the Chromifox theme, a “coat of Chrome for Firefox.” While you’re at it, why not enable more of Chrome’s best features in Firefox.
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Febo29

Christian Decker

8

I moved to Firefox 3 and so can you

I’ve been trying the newest Firefox betas for some time and I love its incredible speed and cleaner looks, but not having my extensions with me because they were incompatible with FF3 was a showstopper for me. Now however I have found a workaround:

extensions.checkCompatibility

With this value set to true in the about:config screen you can use extensions on FF3 that have not yet been enabled like the awesome Gmail Manager, All in one Sidebar and Download Statusbar. Be careful though that these have not been tested and you’ll probably run into some problems (like I did with FireBug).
If I conviced you to try Firefox 3 then there’s a super easy way to install it with one command:

wget -P ~ ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0b3/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 && tar xjf ~/firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2 -C ~
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