If you’re an OnApp user you probably know you can make a VNC connection to your VM’s using the Control Panel. This uses a java applet in your browser as the VNC client.

Wouldn’t it be nice to use your own VNC client (like Remotix) instead?

In fact, you can, but OnApp spawns a VNC server on a (somewhat) random port and a new random VNC password for each sessions which you’ll have to figure out before setting up your connection.

It is possible to monitor fan speeds and temperatures on Dell Poweredge servers under Linux. You can achieve this by reading out the IPMI data that is available on the system.

I used the steps on this website to buffer the data gathered by IPMI to use in Cacti.

However, in addition to Cacti I also use Munin to monitor various system parameters. Wouldn’t it be nice to incorporate graphs for fan speeds and temperatures in Munin? I thought so, so I developed a way to do this.

On my servers I use the nifty program Fail2Ban to perform logbased automatic firewalling of ‘bad’ ip’s.

The idea behind this is easy: Some IP performs an action I don’t approve of. This can be any number of things, e.g. requesting pages in Apache that are commonly accessed by bots and/or scanners, or trying to log in to SSH with accounts that do not exist on the system. This bad behavior gets logged, and Fail2Ban keeps tabs on those logs, and using a number of rules it determines if a host is ‘bad’ enough to temporarily or permanently ban all access to the server. It does so by adding a few chains to Iptables (one for each thing it checks for), and dynamically adding/removing IP’s to/from these chains.

This all works perfectly. However, there’s one issue; When Iptables gets reloaded, it restores its default rules, removing the Fail2Ban chains and all the rules they contain, even if the ip’s in the chain were marked as permanent.

Every programmer uses them.. PRNG’s, better known as Pseudo-Random Number Generators; in PHP represented by the rand(min,max) function.

Unlike True Random Number Generators (TRNG’s) that use true random data like atmospheric noise to create their numbers, PRNG’s rely on software algorithms to come up with seemingly random numbers.. but are they?

And is there a difference between Linux and Windows PRNG results?

Today I faced a quite interesting problem, that originated from pure laziness. I’m developing a backend system for a quite complex database structure. Within this backend, an almost limitless amount of table views have to be created for the end user. Because I’m extremely lazy, and didn’t want to develop the html view code for each table view, I created a PHP html-table-generator-class, which takes a mysql_result_set as parameter, and outputs the html table in string format.

This method works great, unless for some cases, where a value in the query has to be substituted by a user readable value. A boolean is a good example of such a value.