TrueCrypt is a very good tool when one wants to encrypt its entire hard disk. This article describes a minor flaw in the design of TrueCrypt (and probably any other disk encryption tool) that leads to a backdoor on the attacked system.

An Apache Tomcat server, I administrate, used to go away every now and then some time ago. To investigate the issue, I connected to the server via SSH, restarted it and monitored the log for a while. Tomcat ran well during this time. I disconnected and went home. Then the phone ringed, server had gone [...]

Before there was OpenJDK, Linux distributions often lacked Java support at all or provided gcj as a very unpleasant alternative. A project that aimed at this issue was jpackage, who provided Source-RPMS to put Sun´s java downloads into sane RPMs. Unfortunately they do not seem to provide support for current versions of Sun´s java, now [...]

Recently I had to debug some SSL certificate issues. Task was to use a chained certificate file in Java. I imported the files using keytool with the usual steps. Unfortunately it didn´t work.

Recently I set up a CentOS based mysql server (Actually I used RPMs from mysql.com since the ones that come with CentOS 5.4 contain some ugly replication bugs). I overlooked, that the default storage engine was MyISAM while our corporate standard (and applications requirement) is InnoDB.

Sun Java got added a great utility named jconsole with version 5.0. Basically it is a Swing-based JMX console. It shows a lot of the inner state of JVM processes.

Erstmal möchten wir uns ganz herzlich für die lange Blogpause entschuldigen. Heute aber wurde mir auf Arbeit so ein fetter Wurm vor die Nase gehalten, dass der arme Karpfen gar nicht anders kann als zuzubeißen, also quasi loszubloggen. Die Spitzeneliteuni von Weltrang Passau hat sich ganz ein originelles Konzept einfallen lassen, um Studenten an sein [...]

Diese Debatte zwischen Christopher Hitchens und Rabbi Boteach ist für jeden, der sich mit der Frage nach der Daseinsberechtigung von Religion beschäftigt, absolut sehenswert, schon allein weil Hitchens total lustig ist:
If you are interested in questions of religion, or atheism and fan of Richard Dawkins for that matter, please watch this excellent debate between Hitchens [...]

Heute gibt’s auf perlentaucher.de einen Vorgeschmack auf den Roman von Friedrich Christian Delius über Konrad Zuse, der auch von Ada Lovelace erzählt. Wir finden sowas gut. Hier geht’s lang.

Das Befreien von Hardware aus dem Diktat der Hersteller (Jailbreaking) ist spätestens seit dem iPhone zum Mainstream geworden. In diesem Artikel beschreibe ich, wie ich auf einer LaCie Big Ethernet Disk NAS-Appliance einen ssh-Zugang für root eingerichtet habe. Neben dem Spaß an der Sache erhält man dadurch einen kleinen aber feinen Linux-Server, den man mit [...]

In this somehow weekly series of posts I summarize noteworthy problems I encountered during my work week and how I solved them.
This week I tried to set up a fully automated installation for Centos 5.3 and ran into some problems.

In this somehow weekly series of posts I summarize noteworthy problems I encountered during my work week and how I solved them.
This week one Windows 2003 Domain Controller crashed badly and left behind a struggling network. So I made up some optimizations.

I am currently in the process of switching some servers from Debian 4.0 to CentOS 5.3. Almost all Linux distributions provide convenient tools to keep the software selection safe and current by installing updates. As I run multiple servers, these update processes are unnecessarily bandwith-hungry, because by default every host connects to the distributions update [...]

A howto explaining how to get synchronization between Macintosh computers and iPhone working using MobileMe, Foxmarks and Unison.

Sun is getting down on this wonderful π-day. If you don´t know what to watch tonight, try the wonderfully disturbing movie π:

While I was celebrating π-day I found that incredible video on MAKE:

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– echo “scale=3141; 4*a(1)” | bc -l

When I went to underground train this morning I passed an ad which was stating “The only place in the world you wish time stood still”. So what would you get from this, I asked myself. When time stood still, I wouldn’t care because MY time stood still, too.
This leads to the conclusion, that our [...]

A galaxy seems red
When it recedes from you.
And when it approaches
It will look nicely blue. 
– ninan
This little poem refers to the famous Doppler effect (Doppler shift) which is named after the austrian scientist Christian Doppler. In fact this is the relativistic version of the Doppler effect, which considers the effects of the special theory of [...]