I attended the 2011 Security Professionals Conference in San Antonio last week. I met a ton of really smart people and got a bunch of new ideas for securing my networks. The day after the conference ended, I had the chance to walk around and do touristy things. I thought I’d post some of my photos.

My car just broke down a week or two ago while driving on the highway. The blue dragon (as I call her) had been running a bit odd and missing every now and again – I had originally thought it might be water in the fuel. But, when it broke down, there was fuel coming out of the intake manifold and going into the air cleaner. Sounded like a timing issue. After about a week of after-work effort and a few bloody knuckles, look what I found:

About 3/4ths of the teeth on the camshaft’s timing gear are missing! I have an “Iron Duke” engine from late 1987, the cam and crank timing gears go straight together.

When I got my puller on the gear and pulled, this happened. This is ok, I’ve decided I’m just going to dremel the rest of the cog off of the camshaft.

The gear was really chewed up.

Catastrophic failure.

Using [this .config file] with the git repository located [here], you can build your own pandaboard kernel.

Simply run “git clone” on the repo URL posted above, copy in my config file and rename to .config (add a dot to the front of the filename), and then run “make oldconfig” to update any options that may have changed since I posted it. Once that’s done, a “make uImage && make modules && make modules_install” should finish all the compiling. Then move arch/arm/boot/uImage in the git root directory (where you just ran make) to /boot (which for me is the first partition on the SD card from where the pandaboard boots).

I wrote this bash script to run after a kickstart and convert information that is received by dhcp into a static network configuration. This should work on Fedora, RHEL, PUIAS, CentOS, etc. If your distro is totally different, you can expand upon this script fairly easily by writing 7 functions and grepping for your distro in /etc/issue or what have you. If anyone out there ever does expand upon it and add support for their distro, I’ll be happy to update my copy.

Download: [As always, hope it’s useful].

In switching all of my repositories to a local in-house RPM repository, I needed to figure out which packages were installed on machines in the network that did not come from the mirror to which I synchronize. These packages needed to be added manually into the repository. I wrote this little one-liner to list packages that did not come from the official RHEL repo, and therefore have a different vendor.

for i in `rpm -aq`; do if [ “`rpm -qi ${i} | grep ‘Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.’`” == “” ]; then echo $i; fi; done

You could use this easily on a non-RHEL repo, as long as your system uses RPM packages. Just update the vendor name in the middle there and you’re all set.