I guess now is a good time to fill you all in on the super kick ass DNS and mail infrastructure at T3CH.com….

Since what feels like the beginning of time, I have been a smiling DynDNS user. I primarily used the free dynamic DNS hosting service back in the day to battle the dynamic IP’s issued by the ISP for my basement servers. In 2006, I upgraded to paid services. While I am fully capable of running my own Bind services (and do for some internal stuff), public DNS is not something I care to be responsible for. DynDNS has the infrastructure in place to handle any size load of queries with a history of zero downtime. That being said, the T3CH.com DNS infrastructure is exclusively managed with DynDNS’ Custom DNS Service making T3CH.com SEXY!~

A very important feature to me (with any service) is the API. These guys did it right, check out their Developers’ Connection site and you too can build an update client for any platform or device.

I almost forgot to mention… Email. In a world full of free Gmail/Yahoo! mail services and awesome providers such as Apple’s MobileMe, it is in your best interest to maintain the sanity of your email routing. I rely on MailHop Outbound and MailHop Forward to be the entry/exit points of my mail infrastructure. This allows me to switch around to different mail services (usually my own servers or Apple’s MobileMe, and sometimes Google’s Gmail) without having to risk losing any incoming email. Most MTA’s will keep trying to send mail for a few days, but there is no guarantee. By having my MX records pointing to MailHop Forward servers, I don’t have to worry — ever! MailHop Outbound benefits me in several ways. First, I can set SPF records to ensure that my mail recipient’s servers will know that the IP of MailHop Outbound is an authorized sender for my domain. This helps to prevent evil spammers from using your domain name as their email address. Second, no matter which email service I am using — I always have the same outbound server and never have to modify my email clients, which can become time consuming now a days with multiple devices (for me: laptops, iPads, iPhone, Droid, etc…). Yea I have multiple iPads now

Anyway… If you give a shit about your DNS, I recommend Dyn Inc. Get the full scoop at http://dyn.com.

“An option to only transfer new files since your last transfer.”

90% of feature requests were for this functionality. We are hesitant to add new features since the goal is to keep Image Transfer simple and lightweight, but this feature should have been included since the beginning!

Several performance tweaks and bug fixes are also implemented in this release.

Download the free version: Image Transfer v2.0

New settings menu:

First, plug in the MIME type for ‘.apk’ files. This line needs to end up in your Apache config. If your running a default config, just search your ‘httpd.conf’ file for ‘AddType’ and insert this line:

AddType application/vnd.android.package-archive .apk

Don’t forget to reload your http daemon after modifying the config.

Next, you should explicitly set the MIME type within the links to your Android packages. Here is an example:

<a href="downloads/ImageTransfer.apk" type="application/vnd.android.package-archive">Download App</a>

Have fun.

Paul Burke and myself developed Random Reuters for Android and entered it into the StreetApps Challenge.

Check out the demo video and full details at www.RandomReuters.com

Vote for us now at http://streetappschallenge.com/solutions/21

Check it out, contribute, tell your friends..  http://github.com/joet3ch/wordpress-dev-tools

The bluetooth keyboard and trackpad fit together perfectly.

The finger gestures are going to increase productivity.

I was able to ditch the wrist-rest for the mouse.

It is much larger than the trackpad on the MacBook Pro, but small enough to throw in the bag.

Now it is time to order a second one!

[root@bubbles.t3ch.com ~]# vmware-toolbox-cmd disk list
/
/boot
[root@bubbles.t3ch.com ~]# vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink /
Progress: 100 [===========>]

Click for full size

While I’m taking pics, here is my command center:

Click for full size

And the Sewell adapter in production:

Click for full size

** Definitely backup your stuff (If your not already, omg.) before attempting this on a live system.

** Proceed at your own risk! This process works great for me, but you may have different results. I am not responsible for anything

Pre-requisites:
- Access to a win* box
- TrueCrypt v6.2a installed on win* box
- Download extcv binaries, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/extcv
- TrueCrypt volume must not have any ‘hidden’ volumes (they will be destroyed)
- Filesystem on the TrueCrypt volume must use the GUID partition scheme and be formatted as HFS+ (aka Mac OS Extended Journaled)
- Unmount the TrueCrypt image before starting.

Ok, now lets get down to business…

1. Launch ‘extcv’ on the win* box.

2. Select the file that contains your TrueCrypt volume.

3. Enter the new size and go.

** I am assuming you have a solution to move or access your TrueCrypt file from the win* and Mac boxes. I personally just used a WinXP vm in Parallels and used shared folders to access the TrueCrypt file on the Mac.

4. Mount the TrueCrypt volume on your Mac.

5. Launch ‘Terminal.app’.

6. View your volumes and current sizes by executing ‘diskutil list’

laptop01:~ root# diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            319.7 GB   disk0s2
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *128.0 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS hd                      127.7 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            t3ch                  *37.6 TB    disk2
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme untitled               *524.0 MB   disk3
   1:                  Apple_HFS part1                   100.0 MB   disk3s1

In my scenario, ‘/dev/disk3′ is the TrueCrypt volume and you can see that the size is now 524MB. The partition I want to expand is ‘disk3s1′ which is currently 100MB.

7. View the size limits by executing ‘diskutil resizeVolume disk3s1 limits’

laptop01:~ root# diskutil resizeVolume disk3s1 limits
For device disk3s1 part1:
        Current size:  100.0 MB (100028416 Bytes)
        Minimum size:  100.0 MB (100028416 Bytes)
        Maximum size:  389.8 MB (389767168 Bytes)

Clearly you see that the max size our new partition could be is 389.8MB

8. Now we are going to do the live resize. This is the scary part (double check your backups before completing this step)!

I want my partition to be approximately 250MB. Please read the docs ‘man diskutil’ to see if you want to use different syntax.

Execute ‘diskutil resizeVolume disk3s1 250M’

laptop01:~ root# diskutil resizeVolume disk3s1 250M
Started partitioning on disk3s1 part1
Verifying disk
Resizing
Finished partitioning on disk3s1 part1
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *524.0 MB   disk3
   1:                  Apple_HFS part1                   250.0 MB   disk3s1

Confirm the data is still there:

laptop01:~ root# ls -l
total 80
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel      3 Nov 19  2008 .CFUserTextEncoding
-r--r--r--  1 root  wheel     10 Jun 23  2009 .forward
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel    102 Feb 23 19:48 .gem
-rw-------  1 root  wheel     35 Jul 22  2009 .lesshst
-rw-------  1 root  wheel   1204 Nov 20 11:30 .localized
drwx------  3 root  wheel    102 Nov 21  2008 .macports
-rw-------  1 root  wheel    253 Dec 10  2008 .mysql_history
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  10139 Mar 12 18:54 .sh_history
drwx------  5 root  wheel    170 Dec 22 11:01 .ssh
drwxr-xr-x  6 root  wheel    204 Nov 21  2008 .subversion
-rw-------  1 root  wheel   9190 Jan 22 13:45 .viminfo
drwx------  9 root  wheel    306 Feb 10 11:49 Library
drwx------  5 root  wheel    170 Nov 19  2008 Library (from old Mac)
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel     68 Mar  8 00:05 test1
laptop01:~ root#

Great, you made it to the end! Hope you enjoyed… Please post comments if you figure out better solutions.

-joe

This tutorial is specific to CentOS 5.4 x86 64-bit. Other flavors will vary.

** Make sure you are root or using Sudo

1. Upgrade to OpenSSH 5.x

## fetch the packages
wget http://fs12.vsb.cz/hrb33/el5/hrb-ssh/stable/x86_64/openssh-5.1p1-3.el5.hrb.x86_64.rpm
wget http://fs12.vsb.cz/hrb33/el5/hrb-ssh/stable/x86_64/openssh-clients-5.1p1-3.el5.hrb.x86_64.rpm
wget http://fs12.vsb.cz/hrb33/el5/hrb-ssh/stable/x86_64/openssh-server-5.1p1-3.el5.hrb.x86_64.rpm

## upgrade OpenSSH
rpm -Uvh openssh-*

2. Comment out the following line in ‘/etc/ssh/sshd_config’

Subsystem     sftp     /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

3. Append these lines to the end of ‘/etc/ssh/sshd_config’

Subsystem     sftp     internal-sftp
Match Group sftponly
    ChrootDirectory /home/%u
    ForceCommand internal-sftp
    AllowTcpForwarding no

4. Add the ‘sftponly’ user group

groupadd sftponly

5. Modify the user’s group and shell

(I’ll use the completely random username: bree_olson)

usermod -g sftponly bree_olson
usermod -s /bin/false bree_olson

6. Set the proper filesystem permissions

(Bree’s home directory is /home/bree_olson and her website is in /home/bree_olson/public_html)

chmod 755 /home/bree_olson/
chmod 755 /home/bree_olson
chown root:root /home/bree_olson
chown bree_olson:sftponly /home/bree_olson/public_html

7. Restart the SSHD daemon

/etc/init.d/sshd restart

And that is it! Just be sure to repeat steps 5 and 6 for all the pornstars users that you wish to lockdown.