technical posts and today's howtos
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University of Toronto ☛ Alerting on our NTP servers having a high NTP stratum hasn't been useful
One of the concepts and jargon of NTP (the Network Time Protocol) is a NTP server's stratum, which is roughly how far away (in NTP servers) you are from an external source of time. External sources of time are stratum 0, NTP servers that are directly connected to them are stratum 1, servers that talk to those are stratum 2, and so on. For load reasons, organizations with stratum 0 time sources often put an extra level of NTP server in between the public and those time sources; an internal NTP server talks directly to the clocks (and is at stratum 1), while the organization's public NTP servers that you can use are at stratum 2 (or higher, depending on the architecture). The Natial Research Council Canada's public NTP servers are at stratum 2, for example.
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University of Toronto ☛ Switching Linux software RAID disks around in (early) 2023
Back at the start of this year I moved my (software RAID) root filesystem on my home Fedora desktop from a mirrored pair of SATA SSDs to a pair of NVMe drives, and this time I kept notes (although I didn't necessarily follow them). For my future use, I'm going to write this up, complete with the steps that I should have done but didn't.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Answers to my analytics inquiry
I’m aware it’s not Saturday but I realised I didn’t need to collect a full week worth of data to get an answer to my question and so I decided that three full days were enough. I have data for December 30th and 31st and January 1st. That’s more that enough. So let’s do some digging shall we.
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Pi My Life Up ☛ Using the PiAlert Network Security Scanner on a Raspberry Pi
PiAlert is a Network Security Scanner and notification framework that can run off of a Pi. While originally developed by Pucherot, this project is now actively maintained by jokob-sk.
Using this scanner, it can immediately notify you about any network changes, whether a new network device or a port change.
This software also features a web interface that lets you easily visualize your entire network and view information such as their open ports.
The Raspberry Pi makes a great device to install PiAlert as it is relatively cheap to run 24/7 with more than enough power to process your network.
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[Repeat] SANS ☛ Fingerprinting SSH Identification Strings
For HTTP, logging and fingerprinting browser user agents is standard practice. Many anti-automation tricks use the user agent and compare it to other browser artifacts, for example, supported JavaScript APIs, to detect bots. SSH offers an "identification string" with a format mandated by RFC 4253.
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Ubuntubuzz ☛ What To Do After Installing Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur
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OSTechNix ☛ How To Manage Clipboard Contents With CopyQ In Linux
In today's fast-paced digital world, staying organized and getting work done efficiently is super important. Imagine having a tool that helps you manage and keep track of everything you copy and paste on your computer. That's where CopyQ clipboard manager comes in!