According to Western Digital, there is no known way under Linux to disable (and hide) the “Virtual CD” (VCD) partition that can often be found on their external hard disks (such as the popular My Passport series). No results with Google either, so I had to dig a little further. Please keep in mind that the following solution worked well for me, but that it could, potentially, brick your hard disk. You’ve been warned.
Today I wanted to mount an iPhone inside a KVM-based VM. My host is Ubuntu 15.04, the guest is Windows XP. Well, it didn’t quite work at first because the host kept stealing back the phone’s USB connection. The culprit was usbmuxd, a “USB multiplexing daemon” that handles communications with iOS devices and Linux. To temporarily overwrite its behavior I added an empty udev rules file: $ sudo touch /etc/udev/rules.d/39-usbmuxd.rules This rule file (which does nothing) takes precedence over the original rules in /lib/udev/rules.d, with the result that it would no longer trigger the usbmuxd daemon whenever an iPhone is detected on the USB host. ...
I was fiddling with the fonts on my Linux notebook today, and I thought, why not upgrade all the Windows-based fonts with the latest fonts from Windows 10 (preview version)? Well, something definitely got changed and I don’t think I like it.
Recently I purchased a Samsung 840 Pro SSD for my frayed old notebook (a Thinkpad X200s). It’s a self-encrypting drive where data is always stored with AES-256 encryption. But first, to benefit from the encryption, I needed to encrypt the underlying encryption keys. One way of doing that is to set an ATA user password for the drive, which is supported by the BIOS of most notebooks. But there is a problem.
BoringSSL is a Google fork of OpenSSL. It includes various interesting patches, including an implementation of the ChaCha20 cipher. In addition, BoringSSL allows you to group cipher suites of equal preference: Equal preference cipher groups. This change implements equal-preference groups of cipher suites. This allows, for example, a server to prefer one of AES-GCM or ChaCha20 ciphers, but to allow the client to pick which one. When coupled with clients that will boost AES-GCM in their preferences when AES-NI is present, this allows us to use AES-GCM when the hardware exists and ChaCha20 otherwise. Source In this article I show you how you can tweak your nginx configuration to take advantage of this feature.
tcpdump -i lo -s 65535 -A -ttt port 11211| cut -c 9- | grep -i '^get\|set'
Windows doesn’t automatically reconnect VPN connections when you resume from standby mode. Sometimes this can be annoying - for instance when you are using someone else’s Internet and want to make sure that your connection is always secured through the VPN. To fix this, I created a task that automatically connects to a predefined VPN whenever you resume Windows.
Did you follow the guide how to install strongSwan 5 on Debian Wheezy? You may have noticed that strongSwan doesn’t automatically start when you reboot the server (tested with 5.1.0-3~bpo70+1). The fix requires a small modification to /etc/init.d/ipsec.
udpnat is a useful tool to figure out the optimal interval for sending out UDP keepalive packets in a specific environment. From the description:
Today I ran into a problem with IPsec Xauth PSK and the built-in Android VPN client (Android 4.1.2), resulting in some sites (such as www.yahoo.com) not loading through the VPN tunnel. Turns out I was dealing with MTU issues. When the Android VPN is started, it sets the MTU to 1500 on the tun0 interface: