The Blog Thing

Just read this essay about why security guards are so many times just window dressing and had a good laugh while reading it. Very well done, mr. Clarkson!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/article7060873.ece

I came across a story that describes how a security report on the Canadian Electronic Health Records system was pulled from publication because of the many flaws found.

Reading the story, you can see that roughly same applies to the Dutch ” Electronisch Patientendossier – EPD”. Isn’t it time for the Ducth government to do as the Canadians did and order an independent security review, rather than continuously repeating that “everything will be all right”? We’ve heard that one before…

http://www.vancouversun.com/health/health+security+report+withheld/2590803/story.html

O, I love this one.
I’d almost start taking lunch with me again just to have a reason to use one of these security devices

http://design-milk.com/anti-theft-lunch-bags/

First off all, this will not be a comprehensive review of the Spot Satellite Messenger.
That has been done well by others. See Google.
So what will this be? Well, I’ve been using this device for a while and thought I would write down some of my experiences and findings. Here they are:

• The documentation says the device floats and needs the logo on the front to point to the sky to function.
  Well, when it floats, it does not point to the sky! The center of gravity is on the front of the device, somewhere below the operating buttons. The effect is that the front will point slightly downward. This makes it not a very serious life saver for marine use. Get an EPIRB or PLB for that.
• When the device gets wet, water will actually collect under the battery compartment lid. It won’t enter the battery compartment itself, because that is sealed by a rubber ring. It will however wetten up the screws that keep the body of the device closed and my guess is that these aren’t rust proof.
  So when you know it has been wet, Read the rest of this entry »

You might want to have the Internet Explorer version number of a Windows system available as an environment variable, for instance to get an inventory of all systems and the IE version installed.

You can do so by running the script below from the login script on your Windows system.
The script assumes that %TEMP% points to some writable location. Replace “SomeFile” with a file on your network (f.i. on the NETLOGON directory) or remove that “echo” line to only have the environment variable available.

@echo off
SET IE_Ver=
SET RegQry="HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v Version
REG.exe Query %RegQry% > %TEMP%\CheckCC.txt
Find /i "Version" < %TEMP%\CheckCC.txt > %TEMP%\StringCheck.txt
FOR /f "Tokens=3" %%b in (%TEMP%\CheckCC.txt) DO SET IE_Ver=%%b
Echo %COMPUTERNAME%,%IE_Ver% >> SomeFile.csv

When you use the ping command, sometimes you get a “pipe” value at the end of the rtt statistics. So what does this mean? I had to dive into the actual ping source code to find out. Here it is

The “pipe” number is the maximum number of echo request packets that have been under way at one time, without having been answered by an echo reply packet (but did get answered in the end).

Normally, ping will send a so called echo request, wait for a second an then send the next echo request.
When it has sent the second echo request before the first has been answered, the pipe number is raised Read the rest of this entry »

First, I’ve renamed my Vbackup project to Yabs.
Vbackup proved to be an already existing project for a backup solution, so I decided to look for a more unique name.
The new name didn’t turn up in Google, and that’s enough for me

From now on, vbackup will be known as yabs, which is an acronym for “Yet Another Backup Script”. How original

Together with the renaming, I’ve released a new version, numbered as 1.1.0. Here are the most important updates:

# Revision history
#
# version 1.1.0 -
#       – Renamed the program from vbackup to yabs. Vbackup was an existing project by someone else.
#       – Changed the logic for logging erros. You can now use a log file, syslog, both or none.
#       – Added some extra checks for consistency in user defined variables.
#       – Added the backup destination to the exclution list. No more backing up the backups.
#       – Added the -xdev switch logic to “find”. Gives the possibility to exclude other file systems or not.
#         I’ve set this to YES by default, so things like /proc, /sys, /dev, etc will not be included in the backups.

You can download the new version here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~vincentv/yabs-1.1.0.tgz
Again, make sure to save this as a .tgz file. Some browsers get this wrong.

A long time ago I started writing a Bash script to create backups for my systems.
Over time this script has developed into something I and some collegues and friends find useful, so I decided to publish it and see if more people are interrested in using it. If so, I’ll try and maintain it.
The program is released under the GNU GPL v3.

My backup regime consists of making a full backup once a week and then a daily differential backup since the time of the full backup. This script obviously concentrates on that. If you need incremental backups, adapt the script to your needs.
The script was written for CentOS 4 and 5 systems, and most likely will run without a hitch on all Red Hat derivates like Fedora.

The main features of this script are:

• Option to exclude files and directories from the backup by specifying exclusions as regular expressions. Sound difficult? Isn’t! See the included example. Google “perlretut” for excellent documentation on learning regular expressions.
• Options to set the location of the backup files, temporary files, etc.
• Options to have backup files and/or log files stored uncompressed or compressed with gzip or bzip2.
• Option to have sha1 checksums generated and stored to check file integrity afterwards.
• Options to have custom commands executed right before and after the backup. You could use these to rsync files to an off site location, mail backup logs, whatever. See the script for some simple examples.

All options are documented withtin the script file. Open it, browse through them and change them before using the script!

Let me know when you find serious errors. Suggestions are always welcome. How to contact me is on the end of the README file. I may not get back to every single email, but I’ll try

You may download the script here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~vincentv/vbackup-1.0.0.tgz
Make sure you save the script as a .tgz file. Some browsers get the extension wrong.

Happy backupping

As of now you may access this blog not only via “www.vincentverhagen.nl”, but also via one of:

• vincentverhagen.com
• theblogthing.com
• theblogthing.net
• theblogthing.eu
• theblogthing.nl

Pick the one you remember best

I’ve had some trouble installing rsync today. May this post help out someone in the future

I wanted to set up rsync as a daemon. I run CentOS 5 (or RHEL 5), by default that will start rsync from xinetd.

First, make sure that you have "disabled = no" in /etc/xinetd.d/rsync .
Second, set up your /etc/rsyncd.conf and /etc/rsyncd.secrets to your liking.
Third, don’t forget to give xinetd a HUP when you change it’s configuration. You can do so by doing a:

kill -HUP <current pid of xinetd>

Now, when you keep getting this error from your client side:

rsync: connection unexpectedly closed.....
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream....

You’ve probably got an SELinux issue like I had.
Check if your /var/log/messages contains something like:

rsync: unable to open configuration file "/etc/rsyncd.conf": Permission denied

If so, SELinux is likely to be the culprit.
To test, do echo 0 > /selinux/enforce and retry. If your problem has gone, you might want to disable selinux all together, depending on your security policy.
To do so, change /etc/sysconfig/selinux so that SELINUX=[whatever] reads SELINUX=disabled.

Happy syncing!