Network Synapse Blog

So, I upgraded my Parallels Desktop for Mac to build 9130 of 5.x, and it completely destroyed my Parallel Tools on XP, which was on a Boot Camp Partition. Uninstalling, and trying a different guest (Linking to same Boot Camp Partition), system did nothing good for the issue. No matter what I did, my original guest thought it had PT installed, and the new ones, wouldn't never install. So, what does it take to resolve this issue? Well, click below, and I'll tell you.

I've noticed a lot of people have had an issue with Postfix, saying the error log mentioned "Too Many Hops". I had the same issue, using my Postfix, Spamassassin setup. It seems every time Postfix is updated, tweaking is needed to make it work again. What was going on, is that the main.cf and master.cf were sending messages back and forth to each other. Before, lots of people had the same setup were you would set the content filter in the main, and master files. Simply commenting out "#content_filter = spamassassin:[127.0.0.1]:10025" from the main.cf, and leaving this in master.cf:



I hope this helps out people with the same issue. If not, always disable your spam/virus software just to see if you can get send mail without the error.

After getting MySQL setup, and going, you might want to start backing it up. I'll briefly talk about backing up databases, and restoring them.

Even though this isn't anything new, it's always something good to know, and have a reference in case you forget how to set it up. I use it with the utmost sense of security. I will use it for scheduled backups, and the keys always hidden, with root online having access to it. This method works on Linux, all BSD distributions, and MacOS X (And of course Cygwin on Windows).

As you can see, the blog entries have been pretty slow. I've been messing around with FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT, and have done a few things, but have only written how-tos and such in private. NS has had trouble with a few sites committing plagiarism; taking the tutorials, and calling them their own. Of course, this does not work for me. So, instead, I'm hording the information to create a couple books; in which I will try to have published, and offer in HTML/PDF format for free as well (Thank you Mark Pilgram, Author of [u]Dive into Python[/i]; for making me want to be a part of this trend.

I am finally going to take my RHCE test in next month or two, so you might see a few minor Fedora/CentOS/RedHat Tutorials or some sort. It will be nice to get back into Linux a bit, and constantly update my kernel due to the constant exploits from having a patchwork development team (Guys you are doing a great job for being volunteers just jumping in head first). Anyways, I'm not sure how much more I plan to put in this blog due to the copying of my writings without my name on them, but at least they will never get the rest of my MAC tutorials (which are way better than the first 3), unless they buy one of my books in the next year or so.

So, I bid you all farewell for now.

Since the release of FreeBSD 7.0 many things have been changed to allow PostGres to run better than any other database under FreeBSD. To take advantage of this, I'll show how to setup PostGreSQL in FreeBSD jails. Of course, the same method is used to install on your main system as well.

Ever since I took in a roommate, and then started using a VoIP service, I have learned that even having a decent home broadband solution wasn't enough for my network. Many nights I would spend trying to talk to someone and realize they couldn't hear me, or I couldn't hear them. Other nights I would notice a strong bottleneck at the gateway of my network. After monitoring the obvious, the limitation of bandwidth just wasn't allowing me to continue to be lazy. It was time for limitation.

For Windows users, staying secure is a daunting task. Even when you get all the software you need to secure your system as best you can, sometimes the software becomes an even more difficult task, and later you disable it's services just to get on the internet. Today, I'll tell you what you do need, and what you really don't need.

Finally, with the release of FreeBSD 7.0, here's the updated version of the usual jail tutorial tailored to FreeBSD 7.0. Enjoy!

Like any other gamer, after switching all my computers to Apples, I had an itch to play some of games in my free time. With that in mind, I instantly setup Boot Camp on my iMac with my Leopard discs in hand, ready to install drivers. While it wasn't that complicated, there were a few hang-ups that came with the native install on Windows.

Since Apple released their latest release of MacOS X, changing the Terminal application's colors have once again become a pain. Even with the previous release, you could drag and drop colors from the color swatch to the color you wanted to change. This feature has thus been removed in Leopard. Thanks to Ciarán Walsh, of http://ciaranwal.sh, we now have a solution to this issue.

If you have ever had to deal with long hours coding large drop-down menus for various different reasons, then you know finding a better solution isn't far after those first 20 lines. When programming a scheduling application last year, I realized that I didn't want to rely on an employee to know the date format for the database, or even what the current day was. Instead of coding lines upon lines of "select" boxes, and hoping that people would soon learn these simple facts, I decided to create a PHP function to create a dummy-proof Date/Time drop-down menu. Feel free to use this all you want, just always remember where you obtained this code.

Later, I will update this page with the version that automatically reduces the day list depending on the month, and if it is a leap year. Stay tuned!

Back in 2003, aside from messing with wireless networks, I starting really working with IPv6 in its full form (Watch for NS in the IPv6 server list here soon). At the same time, I was studying for my CCNA, and decided that every piece of hardware in my house needed to be running IPv6. In the process, I came up with another tutorial that was on the old site, teaching how to setup IPv6 on a Cisco router.

After going through the archives of the old site, I decided to start posting the various tutorials that were there, and have yet to become obsolete. One is "More Fun With Wireless Hacking", which was published in 2600 Hacker's Quarterly in 2003. Since the practice of wireless hacking, and security has yet to change, I present you with the original article I wrote 5 years ago. Enjoy.

While torrent sharing grows more and more each day, it has started to become a great way to host large archives without sacrificing your bandwidth. Such a case is a remote server, that has a limit on the bandwidth, but you don't want to cripple your user base because of it. So, how do you go about this on a co-location server and such? Well, it's quite simple, you use Azureus. Most may have a weird look on their face, wondering what co-location server, hosting, and offering other services would really have X installed. Well, that's what we're about to talk about. The almost completely undocumented part of Azureus; the console ui.