I learnt something new today!
I was wondering why when using TLS/SSL for secure POP3 Email, you still connect on port 110 instead of the POP3S port 995.
Well it seems there are two methods for secure POP3:
Implicit TLS – connect to port 995 using TLS, the whole stream is encrypted.
Explicit TLS – connect to port 110 in plaintext, then issue a ‘STARTTLS’ command, and the stream is encrypted from there on.
I’ve just bought a 37″ LCD TV, 1080i FullHD all the bells and whistles. Its lovely. I’m awaiting a HDMI->DVI cable for my Mac Mini, and then that will be hooked up to replace my Xbox as my media centre box (running Plex).
Someone is seriously inflating the cost of computer accessories in France though – a 1.5 metre HDMI->DVI cable was 30e in the supermarket where the LCD came from, or four quid including postage from ebay UK for 2m!
I was faced with a possibly mammouth spreadsheet task – making 2000 file permissions to be made into a Nessus audit file. Urgh, this was going to be a major copy’n’paste nightmare, a bad case of RSI was looming.
So putting the lazy hat on, I decided this had to be automated, fire up the editor…. tap, tap, tap…. #!/usr/bin/perl ….
55 lines of code later and I had the 2000 rows into a nice audit file, and had expanded on the capabilities of the script so that it now even fetched the
file permissions itself instead of using the spreadsheet, and was creating 22,000 file audits – I wonder how well Nessus4 will cope with that lot!
I’ve been looking for ways to securely backup my encrypted partitions – what’s the point of having a secure place for your data if the backups are in plain text?!
So instead of having another encrypted partition for backup, say on another machine or disk, I thought I’d use GnuPG 2 to encrypt and sign my backups.
The command would be:
tar -cf directory/ directory.tar
gpg2 -ser myuser directory.tar
However, I found nice a nice little utility called Seahorse, which has Nautilus integration that allows you to right-click a directory, and then it tar+bzip2’s (or zips, whatever), encrypts and signs it in one operation, so you go straight from directory/ to directory.tar.pgp, it also does things like SSH key management, GPG signature checking etc.
Just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.8, doesn’t seem to be much new for a major version, other than Widgets are a bit easier to configure now – instead of editing the theme, you can just drag’n’drop them onto the left/right sidebars.
Upgrading from 2.7.1 went easily, helped by using a non-default theme I guess – no more editing the CSS every upgrade; although for the first time I had to disable, re-enable and re-configure a plugin to get it to work.