iPhone messaging lameness

I like my iPhone, but today I discovered another behavior I'm not too thrilled about. I didn't realize that people can send email directly to your iPhone. I'm used to connecting to Gmail with the Mail client if I want to receive email. I saw in someone's post that you can email directly using someone's phone number "@txt.att.net" (ex. 5551234567@txt.att.net).

I tried it out from my Gmail account through the web browser, and sure enough, I got this SMS message.

FRM: My "From" Name
SUBJ: test
MSG: does this work?

However, all it says is that it came from some non-descript number. I was able to successfully reply to it and received it in my Gmail Inbox.

That's fine and all, but that's an odd way to get a message. Someone could change their "From" full name in their mail client and send deceiving emails, since there is no way to verify the actual sender.

TaoSecurity's thoughts on the future

REF: http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2008/11/dont-fight-future.html

The points he raises are interesting, and some seem very probable. The ones I think are interesting are

Prediction 1: VPN connections will disappear.
"Some of you might limit the type of connection to certain protocols, but why not just expose those protocols directly to the outside world and avoid the VPN altogether?"

This may have some merits, but it makes me uncomfortable. It's quite possible I may be looking at it from a narrow point of view of performing my job remotely, and not looking at normal day-to-day work. Some internal assets such as email, collaborative web tools (ex. wikis, Microsoft Share Point), and code repositories (ex. CVS, SVN) might be able to to be exposed with proper strength of authentication and encryption. However, I would think it would be difficult to do many remote administration tasks securely. Maybe the title implies that the VPN connections dramatically decrease, but not totally disappear?

Prediction 2: Intranets will disappear.

This prediction builds off the previous one. I suppose this is a semantics argument. The assets are still going to exist, but since they are exposed to the internet, they would no longer be considered intranet?

The other predictions are definitely plausible to happen in the future. It's a fairly quick and interesting read, so I'd recommend clicking the link above. He has other good posts too, so you may want to add him to your RSS feed if you haven't already.

Bash debugger

This is for all of you hardcore bash scripters that sometimes want better debugging than placing "echo" statements in your scripts.

A co-worker sent this out to our internal sysadmin mail alias today.

http://www.linux.com/feature/153383

It references the bashdb project (bash debugger). I didn't know one existed.

Red Hat Satellite 5.2 released

In an earlier post, I mentioned I was unable to fit Red Hat Satellite or Fedora Spacewalk into our infrastructure. The previous version of Red Hat Satellite required Oracle 9i (we run 10g), and Spacewalk requires a derivative of RHEL/CentOS 5 (our standard is version 4). I saw this release today by Red Hat announcing Satellite version 5.2. It now supports Oracle 10g, and still runs on RHEL4 or RHEL5. Too bad everyone is hurting now and pulling the purse strings on their budgets. It would be tough for me to ask for a RHEL AS4 and a Satellite 5.2 license now.

I wonder how hard it would be to backport Spacewalk to RHEL4?

Another iPhone security problem

Reported by El Reg, it appears that the "Emergency Call" feature on PIN protected iPhones are not discriminatory to certain numbers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07/iphone_passcode/

I've confirmed this on my iPhone 3G (version 2.1), and was able to dial a non-emergency number (my landline phone number). This number is also not listed as a contact in my phone either. So, word to the wise, if you lose your iPhone, people can still make unauthorized calls on it.

Should you learn vi?

There are so many arguments about which editor to use. Some people are quite passionate about their editor of choice. I came across this blog post today through Planet SysAdmin discussing why one person uses vi for system administration.

http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/WhyViForSysadmins

It pretty much sums up why it was stronly suggested to me to use vi at the beginning of my career. At that time, I only knew pico and a few commands in emacs; although now, I couldn't tell you how to edit a file in either. Over the years I've noticed the author's point is true. Almost any unix type system you encounter, it will have at least vi installed. It's definitely handy to have a basic proficiency with vi if you do any command line *NIX administration.

So, while you get your caffeine fix at work, this could come in handy as well.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/mugs/7bbe/

Howto Quickly wipe a disk in Solaris

I've had to wipe disks in Solaris because of re-installs or other reconfiguration. I was disappointed that using "format" would take hours. Obviously I'm using the wrong tool.

I came across this thread.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/solaris-opensolaris-20/quick-format-a-hard-drive-496294/

It's strange, but I'm noticing people are posting Solaris questions on a Linux website. I wonder how Solaris admins would've felt 10 years ago if people were posting Linux questions on a Solaris site or Usenet group. But, I digress.

The response is to use "newfs" instead of "format", and it seems to work so far. Thankfully, I learn something new every day.