How to reduce your home router’s attack surface …by taking away its IP address. Excuse me?

I remember an old job as a network administrator where my boss told me I needed to get a firewall in place. I installed iptables, and set up a firewall. iptables is part of the Linux netfilter module, and it is brilliant - like so many things in the *nix world it gives you a simple-yet-powerful and …

Cyber: What’s the fuss about?

Not a week goes by where we don't see another organisation hacked, its data stolen, or its services disrupted, or its customers exposed. So if it's the big organisations being hacked, why should you and I care about being safe online? Who cares about your phone, or your tablet, or your data? It turns out …

Why Anti-virus is not Enough

As long as we have connected our computers to the internet, miscreants have endeavoured to steal our data, disrupt our businesses, siphon off funds and generally make themselves a pain in the ass. When the "World Wide Web" and "E-Mail" started to take off in the '90s, Windows 9x and MS-DOS was prevalent. Viruses at …

Why Firewalls are not Enough

This week the  head of the UK's new National Cyber Security Centre floated the idea that the UK should get more 'active' in its cyber defence, and suggested sharing some of GCHQ's filters with private-sector ISPs in order to counter cyber attacks at the UK's perimeter. The press have duly labelled it the UK's Great …

SSHFS, keys and chroots

SSH (or more precisely SFTP) has always been a popular protocol for copying files across machines. It gives you the security of SSH over any link, and the use of keys makes it possible to use headlessly, for example with backups. The leading desktop environments also gave users ways of opening 'folders' on remote machines …

Jonny’s Python utilities

Over the years I've built up many scripts for automating aspects of my life. Some of these have developed into projects in their own right, even over years of gradual work. I realised that these may be of use to other coders and so I have put some of these projects onto Github with FOSS …

Hassle-free diskless Virtual Machines with Xen and Alpine Linux

Sorry for the hiatus in posting, but I am now back. Many years ago I worked as a sysadmin running a departmental network which was all Linux. (Including desktops - you don't get that every day!) We had a server running SuSE, and needed to harden it; one of the key elements of harding is …

debootstrap – installing Ubuntu from Ubuntu

I run several Ubuntu servers, and although I usually keep them up to date via apt-get upgrade and do-release-upgrade, it is occasionally useful to start with a completely clean slate and re-install the operating system. For example, if I want to upgrade my system from Ubuntu Natty to Ubuntu Oneiric, apt-get dist-upgrade (or its equivalent in aptitude) will upgrade all …

pCacheFS – persistently caches other filesystems

Imagine you have a mount to a remote filesystem which houses lots of data which you access regularly. Perhaps it is your music library on a remote NFS server, or via SSHFS. Imagine that this filesystem is slow to access - perhaps it is over a wireless network.If, like me, you have music playing in …