New Theme
Today, I decided to go with a new look for this website. It might still change a little bit in the next days.
Restarting the blogging effort
Ok, I have not been that good in updating my blog here this last month. Main reason for that was that most of my free time in the weekends and last weeks went to studying for the CISSP exam.
But since I took the exam last week in Amsterdam, I should have some more time now to write here more regularly again. If you are curious if I passed the exam… so am I 
. It will take 4-6 weeks until I know if I passed or not. If you want to know my gut feeling: it can swing either way. I won’t be surprised if I passed but I won’t be surprised too if I have to go for a second try later this year.
Besides studying, going out, barbequing and regular work stuff I went to a Sourcefire product training in the UK in August. After my previous rant about product trainings, you might understand that I was very skeptical about the training. However this one was different. It was actually a good training to my surprise!
On a more materialistic note, I also ordered a new company car (VW passat ComfortLine 2.0 TDi) to replace my current Peugeot 407 2.0 HDi and I got myself a new mobile. If all goes well the new car should arrive early November.
Website outage
The colocated server where this site is hosted went down this morning. My monitoring system detected this but since I only read the alert an hour ago, the outage was bigger then expected. After I raised a trouble ticket, the tech support dude replaced the power supply withing 15 minutes (!) and the server was back up and running.
Actually, since we have more than one colocated server, the outside world shouldn’t have noticed a thing. But since I didn’t (yet) set up the web service high availble over all servers, this website had an outage of about 4 hours
Time to update more frequently!
I noticed that, again, I did not update this blog for quite some time now. Of course, I have been busy with all kinds of stuff. But part of maintaining a blog is actually blogging about the stuff you are busy with and not using it as an excuse not to blog. Therefore I am going to try to update this site more frequently with all kinds of stuff.
On a technical level, this month I have been busy (apart from my day job as a security consultant) with some fun security topics including WEP cracking (the new and faster method), USB switchblades and some other stuff. I just ordered a new Bluetooth stick to play with so I will probably blog about that somewhere in the future
I also discovered google reader which is the best feed reader I have ever seen. Thanks to this excellent google tool, I can read my news, blogs, websites, etc in one interface accessible from everywhere.
Running on the Etch
This Sunday, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 codenamed ‘Etch’ was released as the next stable release of Debian. Therefore, both the servers where this site is hosted on have been upgraded to the latest version.
Although not as easy as just running ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’, the upgrade went very smooth. I just had to follow the release notes and after a reboot both servers ran the newly released version fine. Well, actually one server did not came up right away but that had nothing to do with the upgrade. A manual file system check was needed. Thanks to the quick support from the techies at serverpronto, the server was back up within the hour.
If it takes as long as it took Etch to become a stable release, the next major upgrade will be somewhere 22 months from now.
For those interested, these were the steps taken to upgrade from Debian 3.1 (sarge) to Debian 4.0 (etch):
- aptitude update
- aptitude -y -s -f –with-recommends dist-upgrade
- aptitude upgrade
- aptitude install initrd-tools
- aptitude install linux-image-2.6-686
- aptitude dist-upgrade
- aptitude update
- reran ‘aptitude upgrade’ and ‘aptitude dist-upgrade’ until no packages were kept back and nothing remained to be done.
- reboot
- removed obsolete packages from old sarge.
- recompiled home-built soft. (This was not really necessary but I liked to have the soft compiled with the new gcc4)
If, for some reason, you would like to know more about the steps taken, just drop me an email.
The next blog post was written between 15:55 and 16:00
A long time since I updated this blog. Main reason is that I went skiing to Austria a few weeks ago and that I became addicted to 24. I started with season 1 in January/February and am now finishing up on season 5. Fortunately, season 5 is the last season available on DVD in Europe so I will (hopefully) find more time to update this blog in the future
Oh yeah, some pictures of the skitrip can be found here.
Welcome (again)!
As of today, I decided to go with the current layout of the website.
Maybe, I will write a more complex theme of my own somewhere in the future or alter an existing one but time is not on my side for this now.
This website will (hopefully) become a blog-style site with topics which may vary a lot. It may be interessting for you or not.
Anyway, you can always drop a comment to let me know what you think about it.
Tom
Welcome!
Welcome to vandeneynde.net!
Still playing around with this site. The content/design might differ on your next visit
Tom