JDPFu.com 2025

Yes, SSDs tend to be faster than other storage. That is true, but unless you look deeper at the specs, you may end up with poor performance. Let me explain. This is a general knowledge article. Without a huge sample size, anything beyond generalizations don’t mean anything.

The fix stolen from here

1. Run Windows PowerShell as ‘Administrator’ on the Win10 box
2. Enter the following commands:
   1. sc.exe config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi
   2. sc.exe config mrxsmb20 start= disabled
   3. reboot

FIDO-u2f is a newish standard to provide low-cost security devices as a second form of authentication. The normal way this works is

• userid
• password
• on-time token (OTP or U2F or Oauth)

This provides added assurances that a week password won’t lead to account compromises. The U2F protocol makes the setup and daily use of a small USB device fairly simple.

Also, u2f is cross-platform primarily because it acts like a keyboard as far as the OS thinks, so Linux, OSX and Windows are each supported.

That’s the theory. Everyone seems to forget a few minor details.

Below I spell out what I’ve learned when setting up a Yubikey u2f device for use at a few online accounts. Google accounts, dropbox and github are the main accounts, but because google is an authenticator for many other online accounts, those are indirectly secured as well.

A YubiKey NEO firmware v3.3.x will be used as well.

cat file.txt | curl -F 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us

Simple.

It returns a sprunge.us URL that can be shared world-wide that contains “file.txt”. Sprunge is like pastebin.com, they just have an easy to use API.

5/2016 Updated below:
Pressing the X to close the update will cause the update to occur according to a slashdot article. Desperate. Really desperate. Also, they’ve added a new recommended patch, so anyone with automatic patching will be screwed. Need to add more more patch to the ignore list.

When you run a small business, one of the lessons to learn is that sometimes you need to fire some customers. This is mainly due to bad pricing in an initial contract when we just start out. The rates in early contracts don’t usually reflect the real-world, competitive rates from other competitors.

As a small biz gets other clients, those new clients are usually given higher rates. That can make service providers less-than-happy dealing with other clients for less money.

3/2016 update – Microsoft is back at it pushing Win10 advertising as part of critical updates which aren’t critical.

So – back to Microsoft and their situation …

Saw this over at Schneier’s Security site.

How your phone tracks your every move

His phone was leaving traces about 3x an hour and it wasn’t just GPS coordinates.

It is an ABC (Australian) report. They asked normal people to look at some metadata to figure out what they could know about a person. Bingo!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

For everyone who doesn’t have an issue with this – fine. Send me all your emails, texts, tweets, G+ posts, FB posts, all contacts in every device you own, a list of everything you watch on TV, through Netflix, popcorn, all the torrents and photos from the last 6 months. After all, you don’t have anything to hide. Oh – and I don’t want just the nice, sanitized stuff. Send it all.

After all, you have nothing to hide.

Here’s what the public found in his metadata.

His final thoughts:

Having strangers poring over your data can be an unnerving experience but whether we’re aware of it or not that’s increasingly the case in the world we live in.

Updated 2020 – a few better commands
Updated 2017 – tested on Ubuntu 16.04.

When you ask for computer help, the people who you ask could really use some basic information about the computer. That information includes

• CPU
• Memory
• Video
• Networking
• Disk, partitions, LVM

Basically, I find myself asking for this same information over and over, day after day. The more accurate and detailed the provided information is, the better. However, gathering the information needs to be easy for the beginner too. That is the attempt here. Simple and easy to use for everyone, while not being so hard to audit that people have to make a huge leap of faith to trust it.

Ever wanted to remove the Canonical nags shown at every login about landscape? I’ve seen those messages since 2007-ish and didn’t think much about it.

Someone online complained about the New release available – looked up how to make that go away and decided to remove the landscape nags too:

sudo apt-get purge landscape-common landscape-client landscape-client-ui landscape-client-ui-install 

Really, only the landscape-common package seems necessary. With Ansible, removing those packages was pretty easy:

tasks/common_etc_landscape.yml

---
- name: Remove Landscape 
  action: apt pkg={{ item }} state=absent  
  with_items:
      - landscape-common
      - landscape-client-ui-install
      - landscape-client-ui
      - landscape-client

Recommended settings from the Linux Foundation Workstation Security

I do about 80% of their recommendations. Need to look over the things I’m not doing.

There are some smart items in there for Windows users too around password managers and web browsers. Read carefully.

First, we all know that wired ethernet is best. If the bandwidth specified isn’t seen, there are other issues. It isn’t the wires.

However, here are times when some other network method is needed. Typically, that is wifi, but we’ve learned over the years that wifi sucks too. The advertised connection rates do not reflect real-world bandwidth. Getting even half that amount is lucky. We’ve learned to live with it, since for most people anything over 10 Mbps is fine.