I’m a big Bash fan, I know Perl is the more popular scripting language, and I’m slowly using it more, but hey, if I need something done, I can do it quicker in Bash (keeping in mind that I’m a systems guy, not a dev guy). While at work looking up Bash related syntax [...]

On the monit mailing list today someone asked how they could monitor a process that didn’t have a pidfile associated with it.  Without thinking I jotted this down, there’s likely a better way, but this should work and may be all I need for some init.d scripts for a couple of apps on ramon (the home server).  In the the beginning of the [...]

BACKGROUND:  The following is a proposal I submitted to the Varnish developers in order to make it simpler to integrate Varnish (an HTTP accelerator for web sites) into production environments.  fak3r uses Varnish in front of its webserver, Lighttpd, so it’s likely that the page you’re now reading was served to you not by the webserver, [...]

I thought the days of crashing IE with just some malformed code were over, apparently not. I just takes a misplaced wildcard in a style declaration to send it down.
<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input /></table>
This took out IE on my work computer which is fully patched. I’ve read that people running IE under Wine in Linux have it crash [...]

By now you should know that if you surf the web, you should be using Firefox. Earlier this week they released version 2.0 with a host of improvements (many small) and some needed polish. While the jump to 2.0 may have been a bit of a reach, the direction Firefox is heading is [...]

From the great Freakonomics.com, an article about an online database that’ll get you through the ‘phone trees’ or mazes anytime you have to call some company for customer service. “One solution to Phone Tree Hell is the beautifully named GetHuman database, which provides a nearly encyclopedic list of companies’ phone numbers and the string of [...]

The Roundcube Webmail Project is moving along, and my Roundcube HOWTO install is one of the more popular ones on my site. Today I updated to the latest SVN version, since they’ve recently moved from CVS to SVN for version control, and wrote a script to automate this so I can just run it [...]

NOTICE: Before you try this, see the update below - this could mess things up if you have more than one user, and you’re not trying to fix the Admin login
fak3r.com runs the latest (greatest?) Typo code, but sometimes this leads to problems. After an update a few days ago I could no longer [...]

Amazing, so today Microsoft releases Beta 2 of IE 7, and almost simultaneously comes a tailor made DoS attack! ”Overview: A denial of service vulnerability exists within Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 which allows for an attacker to cause the browser to crash, and or to execute arbitrary code on the targeted host. [...]

There’s a Firefox buffer overflow script listed on Packet Storm. The Javascript can be embedded into HTML and make Firefox log a very long topic line into its history.dat file. Any ensuing Firefox starts will cause a crash due to a buffer overflow. The fix would be to delete the history.dat file, [...]