Shoal Research

Upgrading the graphics/video capabilities of the Dell PowerEdge 2950 has proved to be problematic for some people.  This short how-to details a couple of tricks I used to achieve a dual monitor setup with a 1Gb graphics card using Windows 7.

I've just been working with  GTK+, a GUI toolkit for C/Linux - but ported to pretty much everything.  Initial impressions are quite good, although I am starting to miss Qt/Creator   Anyhow, I hit the age-old problem quite quickly.  The GUI thread just isn''t enough.  To start with, I just slapped in a ''normal'' thread (pthread_t) but when the time came to update the GUI, things started to go pete tong.  Here is how I sorted it;

 

Command interfaces are essential to embedded systems and any applications without a GUI.  This article will introduce X-Macros as a means of creating a clean and tidy command parser, which I regularly use in systems to respond to serial and ethernet requests.  X-Macros are a way of using the C and C++ preprocessor which results in code 'writing itself' in a pre-defined manner, perfect for repetitive but subtly different programming tasks.

 

After spending countless hours trying to optimise Apache2.2 to run with the smallest memory footprint possible, I decided to give lighttpd a try.  This is my 'hack guide' to convert your server from Apache to Lighttpd.

 

In the lastarticle [ Multi-user Linux security - insider resource attacks ] I discussed several methods an attacker with user-level access to a multi-user Linux environment could use to cause harm through forms of Denial of Service (Dos).  As noted, everything I mentioned had the theme of resource wastage.  To combat this issue, it is necessary for the administrator to restrict users to reasonable parameters that, if done correctly, the average user will not notice.

It is commonly assumed that the largest threats to computer systems come from 'the outside' and can be prevented by decent anti-virus and firewalls.  Attacks from the inside (usually legitimate users, or compromised accounts) are often overlooked, which could be devastating in large multi-user environments.  The resource issues outlined in this article may be exploited both deliberately or through bugy software, but prevention can be simple.

A very common post-install issue for simple websites is sending email with PHP. Fortunately it is usually quite easy to debug, I have documented the most likely here.

 

YaST in OpenSuSe doesn''t allow multiple WPA networks to be configured with different configurations.  This simple hack allows multiple network configurations to be saved and loaded automatically.