In my last post I used MRTG to monitor the network equipment. MRTG works great with SNMP, but it only present a graph per network port of the switch/router. So, unless you are the network guy, these graphs do not make much sense.

It would be nice to plug in the data from MRTG into a Network Weathermap of some sort. After searching around and trying different weathermaps, the choice fell on "PHP Network Weathermap". It is actively developed, has good documentation and works great for small/medium-sized networks (the map is hand crafted).

If you work with any kind of networks, the chances are you've heard of, or even used, MRTG. There are not active development of MRTG today, but bugfix patches are still being added now and then.

So why are we still using it? MRTG just works. It stable and robust. And it does what it is supposed to do and nothing else. This makes MRTG still king of monitoring network equipment over SNMP. Well, that is, until Munin 1.4 is released in a couple of days. Munin 1.4 have greatly added SNMP support and aiming at MRTG.

Slackware 13 was released yesterday. It's the oldest currently maintained Linux distribution out there, and with good reason. It is clean, simple and without the "bells and whistles" that clobbers up so many other distributions.

Slackware was for myself (and for many of my friends and colleagues) my first encounter with Linux. I used Slackware for many years, and still do on occasions. Its a great distribution to really learn Linux and not learn a Linux distribution. I will say that if you really know Linux (and Slackware), you will know most Linux distributions as well.

You would think Slackware was abandoned for other more popular distributions nowadays, but there is still a large active Slackware community and user base out there. It is in fact, one of the most downloaded Linux distributions (in both MB and number of hits) for Norway's largest ftp-site:

http://ftp.uio.no/stats/usage_200907.html#TOPURLS

To quickly encrypt a file with a password of your choice you can use OpenSSL. OpenSSL supports a whole range of ciphers, including government approved encryption algorithms. The encryption algorithm AES is the only accepted open confidentiality algorithm here in Norway (read more here). AES is the new algorithm replacing DES. You can read all about AES and DES elsewhere.

I really would like to have an encrypted swap, tmp and home partition on my laptop. In case it gets stolen or if I should forget it somewhere, I can be sure that no-one would be able to read my private files. In this mini-howto I set my home partition using LVM, but using a regular partition should work just fine. This howto should also work, with minor modification, if you use another distribution than Ubuntu.

Updated:
May 2009: Updated for Ubuntu 9.04. Added encrypted /tmp.
May 2008: Init for Ubuntu 8.04.

Me and my girlfriend are staying in a hotel here in Sha Tin, Hong Kong. Since the hotel only allow one computer per room connected to the Internet at the time - I found out it would be a nice time to look into Internet connection sharing over bluetooth.

I'm out traveling and I forgot to change the timezone on my camera again. So the EXIF time stored in the pictures are all wrong. My first though was to write another Perl script to fix this. But I found out that the program jhead can do all sort of magic EXIF manipulation.

A short little script I stumbled across when cleaning my $HOME. I do not think I wrote it myself - at least I can't recall that I did. Quite handy and it's small and compact using the commands ps, awk, sort and head:

The first request for comments (RFC 1) was published 40 years ago today (7. April 2009). RFCs are standard documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Today over 5000 RFCs have been published by IETF. Stephen Crocker, the author of RFC1, recollect some thoughts of the early days:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html

There are numerous articles on the importance of creating strong secure passwords that are hard to guess and break. However, the harder the password, the harder it is to memorize. Another problem arises when we have several different passwords, usually one for each device or service. How can we store and manage the increasing number of passwords? Console Password Management (CPM), created by Harry Brueckner, does a great job for exactly that.