Why You Need To Think Very Carerfully Before Adopting A Service-Oriented Architecture Model

It's the latest craze - take whatever you can think of in IT and networking, and add "as a service" to the end of it.  Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are the three main types, and all the other xxx-as-a-Service types and aaS abbreviations can be classified as Infrastructure-based, Platform-based or Software-based.

Gerry Cinnamon In Boscombe (Macdonalds)

Whilst waiting for my gourmet food order to be lovingly prepared, cooked and served, a fairly famous singing bloke attended Maccy D's.

Hollywank - Things The Movies Get Wrong

Some things in the movies just plain and simply piss me off because they are so wrong and just don't happen in real life.  Here are my (least?) favourite Hollywood cock-ups and second (least?) favourite in three categories: Health/Human Body, Guns/Weapons and Vehicles/Cars:

How To Create A Wormhole

In this step-by-step tutorial we walk you through the process to create your very own wormhole at home.  It should be noted that wormholes and Einstein-Rosen bridges are not fully understood and that time travel/dilation and apparent faster-than-light travel is potentially dangerous and care should be taken whenever dealing with gravity wells and point singularities.  Black holes can and do kill.

Programmers Are F%$!ing Lazy

It's true.  As Moore's Law still holds true after 50 years and processors double in speed every two years, hard drive density also loosely follows this trend with storage capacities generally also doubling every two years, programmers have just gotten plain lazy.

Grow Your Sysadmin-Fu

There are a few commands that the Linux sysadmin simply can't live without.  The need to see exactly what is going on with your army of *nixs and what any one is doing at any particular time is a must.  Here are a few commands that I would seriously miss, and ones that I make sure are installed on every box I administer.  So, in no particular order....

US Army, US Navy. US Air Force, US Marines, NASA, Google

Google - Rise Of The Cyberspies

Google's parent company is called Alphabet.  Whether this is just a coincidence or whether it has meaning I don't know, but you have to wonder what is Aphabet?  Could it be just 3 of the 26 available letters? NSA for example? Or CIA? DoD?

Subscribe To LDTV For A Chance To Win...

Subscribe to my LDTV YouTube Channel for a chance to win absolutely nothing.  Well, no, not quite true, you will have the chance to win either some sleep, some technical knowledge, or just knowledge of the fact that computers bore you and talking about computers bores you even more to the point of never having anything to do with stories and stuff about them unless there's the chance of getting or winning something in return.

Which reminds me - subscribe to my LDTV YouTube Channel LDTV for a chance to.....

Re-subnet a Cisco Switch, The Easy Way! **With Pictures**

In good old internet backwardness, here is my first Vlog, taking 14 minutes to explain how to re-subnet a Cisco switch in seconds.

Monitoring With MRTG

After much more of a battle than I was expecting, I finally have MRTG running on a Pi and generating some useful graphs about my home network and it's boxes.  If you're not familiar, MRTG is the Multi-Router Traffic Grapher (although it almost stood for Memcard Reformatted Totally Gone).  It gets it's information via SNMP and then draws pretty graphs with the data.

October News

OCTOBER NEWS

Well, it's been a while since my last post, I can only apologise for my absence. I haven't been totally idle in that time, I recently acquired a Cisco Catalyst 3750 which I've been tinkering with.

Enabling WiFi roaming on Raspberry Pi

wpa_roam:-
Gives priority to wireless networks.

Click to read more....

Build a RADAR for Bournemouth Air Festival!

With #BmthAirFest just around the corner, now is the perfect time to build yourself a Radar system for a grand total of about £10!!

All you need is a USB stick with a Realtek RTL2832U chipset -- commonly sold as DVB-T tuners (TV tuner dongle).  You can get them off eBay for around £7-10.

Radar instructions are in this post.

Fact-Up Friday: TimBL - Bournemouth Bloke Who Invented The Web

Did you know that the World Wide Web was in fact invented by an Englishman?  Not only that, but he used to call the South Coast home?

OK, the title is a little white lie - he wasn't from Bournemouth, but the inventor of Web sites lived in Colehill, Wimborne, for a time and worked for Plessey in Poole, J D Nash in Ferndown, and for over 3 years he worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in sunny sunny Bournemouth!  In fact, he is a patron of the East Dorset Heritage trust to this day.

Doc's Deals: Get A GiffGaff SIM And Get £10 Free Credit

 

ONLY AVAILABLE AUGUST 2019

For a limited time get a GiffGaff SIM from the Doc and you'll get £10 free credit.

No strings attached, no contracts, no conditions.  After you top-up at least £10 or buy a Goodybag worth £10 or more, you'll get £5 free credit to do whatever you want with.  Then within a maximum of 72 hours, you'll get another £5 free credit added to your balance.  So £10 free credit that you can use on calls, texts or buying Goodybags.  Offer expires 31/08/2019 after which it reverts to just £5 free credit.

Google Assistant on Ubuntu 18.04

So I decided to do a step-by-step guide to how I got Google Assistant working on my laptop running Ubuntu 18.04.  I can now say, "OK Google" and ask/change/trigger all the usual things.

You will need:

• PC/laptop/SoC running Ubuntu 18.04
• A Google account
• A working microphone (or headset)
• A working speaker (or headset)

Complete guide can be found at https://linuxdoctorafcb.blogspot.com/p/google-a.html

My Head(ache)'s in The (Google) Clouds With Google Assistant on Linux

I decided late last night that the one thing my battered, slow, old and full of crap laptop absolutely could not go without any longer was Google Assistant integration (I want to say "OK Google" to my Linux laptop, basically). I've now done it, understand it and just need to polish it up a bit, write a few scripts, change a few settings and then I'll put up a post on how to do it.

In doing this, though, I have just re-met the Google Cloud Platform... 'Kin' Ell there's a LOT of shit in there, and I mean a lot. So, in summary, Google Assistant on Linux laptop guide to follow, then probably 4 months of posts as I start hacking* the shit out of Google Cloud Platform.

* don't get excited, I mean hacking in the old old sense of the word, not "gaining unauthorised access of a computer or network or device that does not belong to you".

Doc's Deals - Google GSuite

Google's GSuite is a complete solution for managing business communications and assets.  Linuxdoc is proud to be a certified Google GSuite Partner, and in addition to offering you a 14-day free trial period, I also have a limited amount of promotion codes that will give you 20% off the first year of either GSuite Basic or GSuite Business.

Linuxdoc is doing an HTTP 301

Apologies for not posting any drivel for a week or so, I have been preoccupied with giving myself an actual (as opposed to virtual) HTTP 301 redirect (301 for you unenlightened heathens is the HTTP response code for Moved Permanently).

Email Part 2 (Part 3): Ensuring Privacy, Integrity and Authenticity

In Part 2 (which is actually Part 3 just to be confusing) we look at how to secure the 40-year-old email standard and how to secure the three main security problems associated with the world's favourite alternative to an envelope and stamp or facsimilie machine and screaming phone tones.

Email - Your Biggest Security Vulnerability

Email.  Most probably your biggest security vulnerability that you didn't know about.

Email is ancient.  The core of how email works and how your email is transported from you to it's recipient was designed nearly 40 years ago, in 1982 (SMTP - RFC821).  It relies on your email being transported around in plain text from server to server in a manner you have no control over.

Guide To GPG And Other New Pages!

With Security Saturday and Shutdown Sunday appearing yet again, I thought that any updates or new pages or announcements or any of that malarkey can just go on here.  Just one post for all the pages, not a new post per page, d'ja'ge'me, yeah?

So, check out my Shit Guide To GPG, now a live page floating around like some shitty floater...

Public And Shared Keys Page

I've added a static page to this where public PGP keys, public SSH keys and all the like can get added in one ungainly, unordered list.

NFC Tags

NFC tags. They're kinda cool for about 5 minutes... About the only useful things I found are detailed below.  This post is because I've thought of a new one to add!

Fact-Up Friday:You've Been Hacked - No Joke

Your computer/phone/tablet has been hacked.  All of the data on it is available to the hackers, they can listen to your calls, read your texts, emails, see your web browser history, take control of your camera/microphone... This is not a "what if" scenario - this actually applies to YOU.

Techie Thursday: SSH Tunnelling

One of SSH's coolest (IMHO) features is it's ability to transparently tunnel TCP packets.  In fact, it can tunnel IP datagrams over TCP, but that's one for another day.  This looks at SSH's TCP port forwarding ability, and how you can use it to set up secure, fully encrypted point-to-point links between machines (or entire networks) in physically different locations on different networks.

Make your own Air Traffic Control RADAR

Ever wondered where that plane high above your head was going? Ever wondered who the annoying little propellor plane belonged to that keeps doing Top Gun-esque fly-bys of your house? Wonder no more with your own Air Traffic Control RADAR system!

Turing gets his mug on a Nifty, but no Colossal Flowers

I think it's superb news that Sir Alan Turing has been chosen for the face of the new £50 note.  While Turing developed the electromechanical Bombe first used in Poland, he did not design and build Colossus.  Colossus was designed and built by a man from the General Post Office, a man who dreamed of one day having a telephone exchange that was fully automatic with an electronic machine replacing the many human ears and hands and plug boards and wires.  This man was Tommy Flowers.

Use TOR to create your own secure "cloud" drive

With everything seeming to be going back to much more of a 1970's style of network computing in terms of where the power lies in relation to the client/server, and the seeming need and demand for always-accessable network attached storage, I wanted something that wasn't owned by Google where I could store various things like PGP keys, system scripts and other assorted crap that would be handy to have.  I also wanted to be able to add to this non-Google-owned-thing.

Bournemouth featured on new UK passport

I recently renewed my passport, and whilst flicking through it I saw something that looked slightly familiar... It seems Her Majesty's Passport Office has decided Bournemouth is so awesome it deserves it's own double page spread:

Using TOR to provide remote access to anywhere

One of TOR's most useful features for the sysop/sysadmin is it's ability to forward not just web traffic but any TCP port.

Google Drive integration on Linux

Now, I'm in the I.T. minority - I actually use a linux desktop (anyone who knows me know that I hate Micro$oft with a passion, and won't touch even pirated copies of their overbloated insecure counter-intuitive standards-breaking non-rfc-compliant pile of pirated code that they laughingly call an "operating" system).

Add a Full Screen toggle to Quick Settings Menu

I was getting really pissed off with Google Chrome (and other apps) and it's lack of a "View Fullscreen" option like you get on desktop versions (as opposed to Android).  I mean, FFS, surely the option to go fullscreen is much more important when your screen is 2" wide as opposed to 42"... Screen real-estate is at a bloody premium.

I saw some solutions, ranging from buggering about with installing hacky-kludgy apps to modifying each app through ADB.

In the end, I turned to good old TASKER again for a simple and elegant solution that requires no rooting or anything like that, just TASKER, AutoTools Secure Settings plugin and AutoNotification.

Just click on "Immersive Mode" and the menubar, status bar and soft keys (if you have them) will disappear leaving you fully full fully screeny.  Click on Immersive Mode again and 3,2,1 you're back in the room.  Neat.  Links and instructions to follow.

What's in me blog?

I thought I might keep a record of some of the crap I get up to.  I'm sure it'll bore the hell out of most people, but this blog isn't really for most people.  It's mostly about situations when I've had some piece of technology or program or similar that hasn't really done what I've wanted it to, or it has done what I've wanted but I now want to see what else it can do. It's about breaking technology to create technology. It's about hacking, in the old/new/old sense of the word.

And that's it. Mostly. It might also contain little snippets or how-tos of simple things that I find either extremely cool or extremely useful.

Peace out, y'all.