Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

Cracking dictionary passwords

I was talking with a friend a few days ago, and the subject of password security came up. Now, we all know that we’re supposed to pick a secure password, use at least 8 characters and never to pick a word from the dictionary. But then I was asked how long it would take to brute-force a password using a dictionary attack, and I had to admit I had no idea. I knew it would only be a matter of minutes, but wanted to give it a try.

OpenVPN on Windows XP and Vista

Just a quick post this time, as I thought this may help others in the same situation I found myself in recently. At work, we’ve been using OpenVPN which works a treat with Unix clients; Windows clients (Vista in particular) were more problematic, though. None of our regular users have admin privileges (for obvious reasons), but this caused problems with the routing setup: users could use the GUI tool, but could not create the necessary routes required to direct traffic ov...

Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD iostat monitoring with Cacti

I’ve been looking for ages for a tool to parse the output from "iostat" on Linux, and graph it in Cacti. I found a few scripts and templates that did some of what I was looking for (disk I/O etc.), but nothing that gave me the full set of statistics such as queue length, utilisation, service time etc. I finally got round to writing my own set of templates and a data gathering script to provide this information, and it seems to work very well. So that others can benefit, I’...