I’ve been looking for a pure python implementation of the ping command. Now that I found one, I am not sure if I want to use it, as it has a restriction: only privileged users can ping other hosts. I’ve used the ping command successfully as a normal user on all operating systems I have [...]

During the last months, I’ve been experimenting with Xen virtualization. An old computer, equipped with a Pentium III running at 700Mhz, 512MB of RAM and an 160GB IDE HDD runs four installations of my favorite Linux distribution, CentOS, one as a Dom0 and the other three as DomUs with 64MB of memory each.

This is mainly a note to myself about two patches, just in case I ever decide to use OpenSSH for networking, in addition to remote administration.
First, is the cipler-none patch that adds none as a valid argument to the -c command line option. By using it, the transferred data is not encrypted. Pros: eliminates the [...]

They say that by disabling IPv6 things get a bit smoother and faster regarding networking. I don’t really know if this is true, but I guess, if you’ve decided to disable this feature, you probably care to do it the Right Way™. As far as I know, trying to disable IPv6 through anaconda during the [...]

This article describes how to use the command line download managers wget and curl in order to download files from your Rapidshare Premium account.

A while back I had mentioned dircproxy as a solution for an IRC proxy server. Although dircproxy is good and effective, recently I’ve been reading many positive comments about another similar application, BIP. I hope I find some free time in the next days to give it a shot. Judging by its extensive feature set, [...]

Yesterday, I wrote about my need to be always connected to an IRC channel in order to keep a log of the chat even when I don’t follow the conversation in real-time. Under the given circumstances and not taking into account the possibility to keep my desktop machine always on, so XChat can log everything, [...]

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol or just DHCP provides networked devices with all the necessary parameters, IP addresses, network masks, the gateway or DNS servers IP addresses, so that they can actively participate in the network and start exchanging data with other devices or workstations. This automated operation, which greatly relieves the system administrator from [...]

This is an excellent article that describes in detail how P2P applications can bypass the firewall and accept incoming data without opening any ports in the firewall configuration. This trick is used by the majority of VoIP software. In this article, the author not only describes how the popular internet telephony software Skype manages to [...]

In some of my older articles, at least where an SSH tunnel is involved, I keep mentioning a specific way of initializing such an encrypted tunnel, which results in the automatic closure of the tunnel after the job on the remote server is finished. Since this is my method of choice, I decided to provide [...]