Older blog entries for brain (starting at number 10)

Yesterday was a busy day - wrote two whole (and both very long) articles about linux networking (from an administrator's point of view) for a printed magazine. Spent some time rebuilding some graphics, and then went on to write two articles for the university (damn teachers!)

I managed to write an article on the Free Software Economic Model for my IT class - maybe I can publish it somewhere. Probably both ESR and RMS would be mad at me if they could read it, but I had to show both points of view to people that still think that free software and freeware games are the same.

The new computer arrived, I'm back to business, and I promise to post more frequent diary entries from now on :)

I am creating more and more imaginative ways to get my free-software works done. I wish there were more hours on my days, 24 aren't enough.

One of the DDS tape units went out of order, tomorrow night I will have to watch the hardware maintenance guy do his work on the server. There will be like 2 or three hours (including the wait until everybody stop doing their jobs on the network) for me to write things. I intend to write some nice words about two mostly unsung heros of unix: cron and man.

BTW, the server that hosts the DDS unit is an ancient PA-RISC HP server. I hope I'll have the chance to install linux on it someday, somehow.

Today I wrote a review (in portuguese) of 'Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls' - great book!

I'm running out of cash and I badly need a new workstation, so maybe I'll have to do something interesting (and not cheap) very fast.

Published the long awaited review of Conectiva Linux 5.0, the brazilian linux distribution. Finished reading the 'DocBook' o'reilly book, will soon restart the book project...

This was not a good week - the Palm I used to love was stolen, among other bad things that I don't want to mention again.

New week, new hopes :)

my grandfather is dead, and I'm away for a while. just sent an article to the printed magazine, and now I'm setting mode +mourn

now I'm really a network operations guy again - php, html no more; just kidding about php and html, but now they will get far less of my attention span. Expect lots of articles on firewalls, packet filters, routing, NAT and so on, now that I got my hands on it again.

Fiddled a little with nessus today; I am reading some concept books (garfinkel, spafford, bellovin) and some practical ones, and can't get much time to write too; but things are gonna change soon

installed suse 6.4, liking every moment of it. realised how much the linux distributions (in general) are getting easier to install; this one recognized by itself every single bit of my hardware; conectiva linux 5.0 did the same - I think it's amazing.

wrote a piece about mail-based worms, and how to stop them on sendmail. seems like everyone and their mother are interested on this topic these days.

managed to publish 2 articles on the site today - one text about migrating NT passwords to unix, and the other about expect. both in portuguese, of course.

finished reading 'building linux and openbsd firewalls' (thanks Livraria Tempo Real!). Good 'real world' book, maybe deserving a review.

I am going to fly to Recife this week - anybody from there reading this? :)

After a long (~1.5 week) interval, I'm back to the free software world. Missed it while I was gone :)

Things are going mad on my day job; now I'm back to the network operations arena, no more web development. More and more command-line and network stuff, but less html and php.

Two of my articles were printed on 'revista do linux' (www.revistadolinux.com.br) while I was away; one talking about text-mode browsers (mostly links - not lynx - and w3m), and the other on tomsrtbt. In portuguese, as usual.

Today I posted two more articles on the site. Both about the same event: 'software livre 2000', pretty interesting stuff.

For the next days, I'll try hard to finish reviewing Conectiva Linux 5.0, or else they'll have a new release before I write about this one.

busy day. really.

published a text about Canvas 7, a (paywere) publishing suite available for linux - not mine, but sent by a reader. interesting stuff...

need to attend to more classes, school is getting a heavy burden

Another day full of dull admin activities; against all odds, managed to write a small (3 printout pages) security checklist for Linux networked workstations. In portuguese, of course. Seems like people keep reading this kind of stuff, and the more we write it, the more they want it. It makes a guy wonder about the role of technical writers on our community.

I hope to publish it tonight, after some classes I can't skip.

A very busy day, mostly admin stuff. Every day learning new ways to dislike the need to use closed source programs at my day job...

Somehow I've managed to edit and publish (www.linux.trix.net - Portuguese only) a quick tutorial on how to "secure" single mode boots using lilo on linux - all the (not so) obvious stuff. I'm sick and tired of seeing people (mostly - but not only - newbies) expect "security" from a server wide open to physical access to anyone, and hope to clarify the common mistake of thinking that "single mode boot" == "security flaw" - and that's a feature, not a bug :)

Also defined a new article - mostly a wrapup on common installation doubts - a newbie installation checklist, so to speak. Expect more about this, but not very soon.

And the next nights will be devoted to school - nothing interesting, I think...

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