My name is Rich Jerrido and I am the person behind www.outsidaz.org I am a geek hailing from the city of brotherly love. I started this blog a couple of years back as a dumping place for a lot of working knowledge of mine that I could have available online regardless of where I was. Over time it has evolved into being a full-fledged blog, complete with RSS feeds, comments, and pictures.When I am not hacking on computers for profit, I hack on them for fun.Read more about me »
This past Friday, I took (and passed ) the EX429 exam. This exam was a little weird for me as it is the first exam that I have completed since I began my employment at the crimson habadashery. Under normal conditions, completing the EX429 exam post-RHCA means that one would become an RHCSS, but since [...]
Travelling fairly frequently has caused me to re-evaluate the way that I travel and my workflow. In the process, I’ve learned some new tools, as well as learning new tricks for existing tools that I have. Most of my toolkit is designed around security and backups, since while I am away from 127.0.0.1 ::1, data [...]
Given the pending doom exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, I have begun to dabble around with IPv6, the set of extensions to the IP protocol stack. Given that most major ISPs have not implemented IPv6 end-to-end, subscribers such as myself generally have to resort to IPv6->IPv4 tunnel brokers to allow us IPv6 access to the Internet. [...]
With the existence of collision vulnerabilities within the MD5 hashing algorithm, it is a very good time for us sysadmins to start looking at migrating our systems over to stronger hashes. Granted, if a miscreant can read /etc/shadow on any of your systems, you’ve already lost. But considering that the change to replace MD5 with [...]
Well, after almost a year of running a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato, I have decided to return to running a x86 based firewall with OpenBSD for the following reasons: I want to run OpenVPN on a non embedded platform. I need to setup an Apache Reverse Proxy I need a Dual WAN router without paying [...]
The other day while looking over the RHEL5.2 release notes, I noticed that RedHat made a huge amount of changes from RHEL5.1, one of which stuck out to me: * Improved Audit and Logging + Added rsyslog logging facility Finally!!! A real syslog daemon. sysklogd can finally go the way of the dinosaur. Well, at [...]
One of the biggest challenges that small businesses & parents have to face is dealing with the plethora of threats on the Internet. Spyware, ads, porn, and that abomination of web design known as Myspace have made the internet an inhospitable place. Additionally, many of the tools intended for small/home office users are very feature [...]
OpenSSH is probably one of the most widely deployed software packages on *NIX systems, other than vi. One of my favorite uses of OpenSSH is to tunnel insecure traffic. OpenSSH provides a means via the -D & -L switches allow you to do various forms of traffic manipulation to help with breaking out of restrictive [...]
