Star Wars Ascii Art

I'm writing it here lest I ever forget this gem. Telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl for the show...

Debugging .NET HTTPS apps

We're currently going through a security audit at work hardening a third party application. One of the improvements is to switch from HTTP to HTTPS which makes verifying the rest of the changes is tricky.

The way I did it was to download/installed Fiddler (http://www.fiddlertool.com/) which is an inspecting proxy. I followed the instructions to enable https decryption, and told Windows to trust the fiddler root certificate (Moved from Personal->Certificates to Trusted Root Certificate Authorities->Certificates).

Checked IE worked and it was fine, then I modified the application.exe.config file under the Docs and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Vendor\App and added

<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <defaultProxy>
      <proxy proxyaddress="http://localhost:8888" />
    </defaultProxy>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

I thought I was being very clever, but it turns out I couldn't get it to work. So I switched to using HTTPS instead.

Fiddlertool is pretty cool though :)

Dora the Explorer World Adventure workaround

My daughter was heartbroken when we bought this cheap and it didn't work under IE7, so with a little investigation I came up with this workaround rather than 'downgrade to IE6' as Activision recommend.

Download the 'standalone' IE6 from http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

Uncompress it into C:\Program Files\Activision Value\Dora World Adventure

Then bring up a command prompt (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories under Windows XP) and type

        cd "C:\Program Files\Activision Value\Dora World Adventure" 
        copy IEXPLORE.EXE.local DoraAdventure.exe.local 
        exit 

And voila, it should just work. I'd expect this would work for any of your games that rely on IE6 for their presentation engine

iptables rules to lock out multiple failed ssh attempts

Two simple lines to run at boot:

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set &

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -i eth0 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 4 -j DROP &

Minimal Debian 4.0r0 install on VMWare

Did the install and unchecked all uses except 'base system'. To install the VMware tools, had to add the following packages

psmisc - for killall
linux-headers-`uname -r`
gcc (with deps binutils, cpp, cpp-4.1, gcc-4.1 libssp0)
make

Accepting the defaults for vmware-config-tools seemed to do the trick. Except for the HGFS module - that didn't load on reboot.

Dualboot VMware

I got fed up with running out of disk space so I stuck an old EIDE disk (PATA?) in my Dell to stick my virtual machines on (using the advice from the previous post).

Having two different drive types worked out well. I want to play with Xen when I get a chance, so I thought I'd try setting up CentOS 5 for dual-booting and for running inside a VM when I'm running Windows.

After a quick read of the old docs for VMware 4.5 I found by Googling (http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_dualboot_ws.html) I created a custom machine configuration that exposed the physical disk to the virtual machine.



Installed CentOS using VMware (because I couldn't get my machine to boot of the DVD-ROM for some reason) without a hitch, rebooted and hit F12 for the boot menu, selected the Master Primary IDE disk (rather than the SATA Master) and it booted right into CentOS.

There are a couple of issues to resolve - the graphics and audio drivers change depending on which environment CentOS is booted in. I need to add something to the init process to switch around the configuration files depending on the boot configuration. I suppose there could be a mechanism built into the OS...

VMWare Workstation Tweaks

I found a useful little article on VMWare disk performance

http://www.virtualization.info/2005/11/how-to-improve-disk-io-performances.html

It recommends disabling anti-virus auto-scanning of the VMDK and VMEM files - I also followed the .ISO recommendation as I attach a lot of them for installation/liveCD testing.