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today's howtos
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University of Toronto ☛ Sometimes we do clean up network oddities
What's now a long time ago I wrote an entry about an oddity in our network setup that was the result of historical evolution. At the time we had our printers on a physically separate set of switches, which carried a single active VLAN for a private sandbox network that all of the printers were on. These switches had shrunk from their original purpose of carrying several of our public networks that weren't on our normal core switch environments because they'd started out as a "protocol based VLAN" on our very old switches, a feature our new(er) core switches didn't support, and we thought we'd had decent reasons to not split the public networks into real separate VLANs.
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HowTo Geek ☛ I spent 15 years memorizing terminal commands the hard way—here’s what actually works
If you struggle to learn terminal commands, I have four perfect remedies I've picked up over many years, some of which will boost your skills instantly.
Terminal commands aren't easy to remember. I often go years before reusing certain flags or utilities. We all forget things, even seasoned shell users. The secret isn't memorizing everything (despite what newcomers think); it's leveraging the right tools not only to facilitate recall, but also to dramatically boost speed on the command line. I've spent 15 years doing it the wrong way, so you don't have to.
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Make Use Of ☛ Hidden Wi-Fi networks aren't hidden at all — I proved it with a single device
Hiding my Wi-Fi network is a bit like switching off my porch light. Yes, my house is still there, but maybe, just maybe, nobody will notice it. I’ve never seriously considered a hidden Wi-Fi SSID to be real security. Still, I was curious enough about what actually disappeared when I enabled the “Hidden network” in my hotspot settings.
So, I created a hotspot called Nothing-To-See-Here and used an old Intel NUC to run a live version of Kali Linux to watch exactly what gets broadcast. From my Windows laptop, the network had vanished. Kali still found it, complete with its channel, signal strength, and security details, but no SSID.