JDPFu.com 2025

Most Popular Articles for 2012, in order

• Solution for Slow Ubuntu in VirtualBox
• DIY HTTV Antenna Building
• Quicken on Linux
• Installing VirtualBox Guest Extensions
• Improving VirtualBox Performance

So it seems that our readers use VirtualBox, want to run Quicken on Linux and are tired of paid TV.

The Quicken article is from 2010 and so is the last VirtualBox Performance article. Both are still extremely popular articles. I wish more people used KVM than VirtualBox. It is a better solution for servers – by far.

Blog Growth

Our little blog has really grown since it was first brought on-line in August 2006. Before that time, I had been writing my notes into a tiddlywiki file before outgrowing it.

About 17K pages are viewed by different people monthly here and over 1M pages per year with non-unique visitors. Not many hits for a commercial website, but just right for this blog. Thanks.

Older Articles

Anyway, we are happy you’ve decided to stop by. Enjoy. You may find some interesting articles here if you look into the archives. Accessing older articles is easy … just use URLs like blog.jdpfu.com/yyyy/mm/

An article that I refer to myself is about the dangers of web-based system administrative tools.

Another article on Reducing IT License Costs over 50% also isn’t as popular as I would like. With the release of Samba4 from Beta, we don’t even need to have Microsoft for ActiveDirectory anymore. Start with small F/LOSS deployments that have been proven, gain experience, and slowly switch more and more of your infrastructure over. Every replacement will save upfront, license and maintenance costs. I’m 100% serious folks. Only keep proprietary software were it is absolutely required – it definitely has a critical place in businesses. Heck, even my businesses use proprietary software and we happily pay the license+maintenance costs. But we don’t use it were it isn’t required.

I’d think more of our readers would be interested in those types of articles. Oh well. After reading them, forward to your CxO for more consideration.

Here is us wishing you the best in 2013!

If you use Linux for any time, you’ll probably need or want to connect to MS-Windows shares at some point using Samba. While it has become easier to point-n-click a connection, sometimes we want to use other connection tools to have the SMB share connected even when we are not logged in, but the machine is running.

Knowing which shares are available is the first step. Normally, I’d attempt to use

smbclient -u windows-user -L //server/

to discover shares on a specific server. There’s an easier way.

 $ smbtree -U windows-user

This will check the entire subnet for guest and user specific connections on all servers. The output list is easy to read and includes any CUPS printer shares.

As always, to learn more, just check the man page – man smbtree

An old dog can be taught a new trick.

When traveling, we probably are not paranoid enough.

Here’s an article about your smartphone and/or laptop being hacked when overseas.

I’m fairly paranoid, but it had me wondering if I am paranoid enough when traveling overseas.

Are you? What steps do you take to be more secure than the next person? Do you believe that is enough?

You will need to be in Marietta, Georgia, USA next week for this to be useful.

• Event: ALE and ALE-NW : GPG Keysigning Party
• When: Thursday, December 13th at 7:30pm
• Where: SPSU Campus, Atrium “J” Bldg. rm J266

Visit http://ale.org/ for more information.

Advanced prep is required so be certain to visit the link ASAP to get your keys setup and added to the list. Do this at least 2 days prior to the meeting to allow time for the organizers to complete their preparation.

GPG is useful if you want to send secure email like General Petraeus should have.. Having signed keys is not strictly required for gpg to be used, but it does increase the trust similar to how the W-O-T does for internet websites.

Other articles here about using GPG.

By now most people that I know are using Anki techniques to learn things with memorization. Anki quizzes on facts and tracks whether we get them correct or not.

Anki learning gets a little tedious to me. Boring. There is at least one less boring option.

A few readers might be interested in this article about eReader privacy from the EFF.

Sadly, the privacy ratings for the eReader that many people are considering or already have is not included in the chart or article. If you have an eReader device and use the most popular reading softwares on it, chances are that what you read is being tracked and shared more than you'd like. I haven't seen any tinfoil hats available to block the eReaders from reporting back to the home office that don't also break the features. If you care about personal privacy, the 1 pg article is definitely worth your time.

The last few years I’ve been manually fighting blog spam here. Usually it isn’t all that bad, but recently it became significant, hundreds of messages a day. Since that happened, I’ve been looking for a simple and built-in way to address the blog spam issue. I don’t know when it happened, but the blog software added recaptcha support. I’ve had a key for that service some time now … Nov 2009 … but have just deployed it today. It seems to be working, but obviously having a 3rd party able to track all pages viewed here is less than ideal. I’m sorry.

Anyway, if it works well this week, I’ll probably enable live comment posts.

Help me test this solution over the next few weeks by posting on-topic comments please.

This week we’ve all read how General Petraeus was forced out of his position because the FBI was able to read his emails. I’ll leave the moral question about affairs for you to determine on your own, however, from a technology perspective, he did many things wrong.

I’ve added an update below, since new technical information has become known.

Happiness is …. seeing Repair complete.

Remote Desktops Rock! Sometimes an ssh shell into another box just isn’t enough.

Just a few minutes ago I wanted to add a new TV recording on PBS. Normally, I do that through a web interface to Windows7 Media Center, but due to recording conflicts, that wasn’t possible. Remoting into the virtual machine where Windows7 Media Center runs was needed. Simple enough since that VM runs Windows7 Ultimate AND has RDP, the Windows Remote Desktop Server, running.