Robin Smidsrød

Yesterday I helped my father to install his new computer with Windows 7. For several reasons I shall not mention, it was in the best interest to take the hard drive of the old (broken) computer and copy all the data from it to the new. What he (and me) wanted was to keep all the settings and other stuff and just reinstall his programs. That meant copying the entire AppData folder under his user account in addition to his normal files. During this process obviously all files had kept the old SIDs, and as they weren't matching his new SID (on the new computer) I was having problems accessing the files. Lots of stuff didn't work. I was getting "No access" messages left and right when I tried to change the permissions of those copied files. That is when it dawned on me that even though his user account was registered as an administrator, it wasn't able to change the permission bits on those files. more »

Have you ever noticed that the sshd on your publicly facing machines gets bombarded with dictionary attacks several times per day? This problem is mostly an annoyance, as it fills up the logs with lots of "User authentication failed, wrong password for " messages. There are of course several ways to work around this problem, and the most common one is to run sshd on another port than 22. I find that approach cumbersome, because it means you'll always have to configure your client software to connect to a non-standard port, and in lots of cases a firewall at your location might be blocking the traffic as well. Isn't there a way to block these bothersome users instead? more »

The default text console on Ubuntu 10.04 uses a graphical mode that uses a planar memory layout. Apparently this graphics mode is extremely hard to virtualize efficiently. Setting another (graphical) text mode that is fast, even on virtualized machin… more »

I just wanted to inform you about a talk I'll be making on my local college about the differences in philosophy of the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement.Feedback about content, accuracy etc. most wanted.The talk is mostly about… more »

After reading NPEREZ's blog article DarkPAN SchmarkPAN -- STOP THE MEME, it suddenly comes to me: We need a tool that enable users to profile their codebase to verify if they are using any removed, deprecated or changed features of a new version of th… more »