The following commands will let the adm group run Wireshark without elevated privileges – the adm group is the group that allows you to read log files, etc., I always add myself to it anyway.

That’s all pretty self explanatory – the setcap command allows that binary to use special capabilities, namely to control NICs (to set promiscuous mode for Wireshark) and capture raw traffic from NICs.

That said, I love the latest presenter of Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes, and I wanted to read just his articles posted on The Drum. I asked if it was possible to get an RSS feed for specific authors but I didn’t get far so I decided to fire up the ever-useful Yahoo! Pipes to do the job:

You can filter by any Author’s name from The Drum (just copy and paste the name from the by-line) and then select Run Pipe then Get as RSS to add it to your feed reader of choice. If you find this useful or have other suggestions for how this could be used, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

In openSUSE this is a trivial affair of opening up the Gnome mouse preferences and unchecking the Enable Touchpad option. When I went searching for this option in Ubuntu 10.04 I couldn’t find it, so I searched the Ubuntu Software Centre for “touchpad” and installed GSynaptics, which looked very similar to openSUSE’s tool.

GSynaptics disabled the touchpad just fine – until the machine transitioned power state, such as suspend/resume or a reboot. I’ve found that the reliable way of disabling the touchpad in Gnome is to fire up gconf-editor and locate a setting similar to the following and disable it:

Protip: you can also just copy and paste the lines into your terminal so you don’t have to save it as a script.

It took me ages to work out where these magic feed addresses were but once you know, it’s trivial. In iCal, just select the calendar you want to subscribe and select File, Get Info:

Enter your server address and port, eg. http://yourserversaddress:8008/, then put the CalDAV URL in the image above into the Sunbird CalDAV subscription wizard and you’re good to go:

To monitor Apache 2.2, you need to add a similar Processes class as httpd has. Navigate to Processes>Apache and then select Add process. Type apache2 as an ID (it’s just a unique identifier) and select OK.

Under the Edit tab, type apache2 for the Name and ^.*\/*apache2 as the RegEx. That should be all you need.

To start monitoring a device, just remodel it manually or wait for a day or so for remodelling to happen on all your devices for Apache 2.2 to start to be monitored.

So it seemed like the Gmail SSL certificate for IMAP or POP wasn’t validating. That’s weird as it would be a major problem if it didn’t and they’re certainly not using a self-signed certificate.

I checked the keystore and it appeared empty so it looks like FreeBSD’s Java doesn’t ship with the normal list of CAs. To fix this I did:

The files mirrored from the original site had a question mark in the file name due to them being queries and the fact that Unix supports question marks in file names. This wasn’t a problem for most modern browsers as they encode the question mark before doing the request and Apache happily serves up the file. After doing a test migration of the site I noticed heaps of 404s coming from visitors to the site via search engines.

I got around this with some painful mod_rewrite hacking:

In semi-human-speak:

• Turn the mod_rewrite engine on
• Look for queries that have a query string (i.e. a ? and anything after it)
• And where the filename requested is a .asp file
• Rewrite the whole request to http://example.com
  • Then the original request (sans query string)
  • Then %3F (question mark encoded)
  • Then the query string and make sure there’s no other query string appended (the ? at the end)
  • Also, don’t encode the stuff we’re throwing back to the client (the [NE])

That’ll convert all .tif files in a directory to JPEG (using default processing setting).

I didn’t have exiftool installed, and no internerd or media to install it from, otherwise I would’ve looked at doing the metadata too.