Find non-ASCII characters in text files on Linux

grep --color='auto' -P -n "[\x80-\xFF]" textfile

Split a PDF file into multiple pages

If you ever needed to split a PDF file into separate PDF documents, say when someone sent you a PDF file with details for one customer on pages 1-2, and the next one from 3-4 etc. There is a quick and easy way under Ubuntu.

We will need to install qpdf first.

sudo apt install qpdf

After which we can use the program to extract and create the PDF documents for us.

 qpdf --split-pages=2 infile.pdf outfile.pdf

This will use the infile.pdf as source and output PDF files as outfile-001-002.pdf, outfile-003-004.pdf...

LibreSWAN setup for heavy usage

After setting up libreswan you might find that the tunnel disconnects when there is a lot of sessions. On the libreswan machine, if you try and ping a host on the other side of the tunnel you get the following:

connect: No buffer space available

This is caused  by the xfm_gc_thresh setting being too low. This controls the size of the IPSEC routing table and when the limit is reached the table is cleaned up which removes information related to active connections. You can verify the value by doing the following:

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/xfrm4_gc_thresh

1024

If you get a low value like 1024 you will have the problem. Increase the value:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.xfrm4_gc_thresh=32768
sysctl -p

Add the setting in /etc/sysctl.conf to make it permanent

net.ipv4.xfrm4_gc_thresh = 32768

ICINGA2: Disable ping check for hosts

Sometimes you need to monitor services on a server where ICMP is not feasible to check whether the host is up. In Icinga2, even if you change your host definition to use 

check_command = "dummy"

it will still do a ping4 service check on the host. The issue is with the definition of the ping4 service as it will apply the ping4 service checks to all hosts that have "address" set.

One of the ways to bypass this is to change the ping4 service line to the following:

assign where host.address && host.vars.ping == "yes"

This way we can add a variable to only allow certain hosts to be pinged. This solution will force you to add the variable

vars.ping = "yes"

for every host you want checked via the ping4 service. An easier way is to modify the generic-host template to include the vars.ping = "yes" variable. You also need to create another template let us say generic-host-no-ping to not have the variable set to "yes" and to use the "dummy" check service which will always return 0 (OK)

template Host "generic-host-no-ping" {

   max_check_attempts = 5

   check_interval = 1m

   retry_interval = 30s

   check_command = "dummy"

   vars.ping = "no"

 }

Now when you create your host definition you just need to import the correct template.

Using DELL SUU 7.2 on Centos 6.4

After readming through a couple of posts and blogs on how to use SUU on CentOS the following worked for me.

Please note that if you do not have the right rpm's installed the update process will delete your /tmp directory, so try this on a non production server first.

 Install the relevant rpms:

yum -y install glibc.i686 compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 zlib.i686 libxml2.i686 libXp.i686 libXtst.i686 ncurses-libs pam.i686 ncurses-libs.i686 compat-libstdc++-296

Mount the ISO image or dvd and run the following from the mountpoint

 ./suu -c (check if there are any updates)
./suu -u (update)

 you can do a tail -f /var/log/dell/suu/* to see what is happening.

Windows 8 UI

Read the post from Microsoft on the feedback they had for the Windows 8 pre-release. They keep missing the point. The user experience should be the key focus, not trying to fit the tablet experience to the desktop experience. One of the reasons people are moving to Apple products is the user experience. Windows 8 should not force a context switch when you try and use the product.

Compare the following, how does the start screen differ?

Tech-Ed Africa 2010

If you ever have the opportunity to see Andy Malone speak on security, do so. Well worth the effort.