How to burn a big file to DVD

If you want to write a big (> 4 GB) file to DVD, you must use a burning program that allows you to choose UDF as the format...  Otherwise, the burn process will fail, and you will end up with a useless coaster!

Apple Airport Utility: Upgrade for a Downgrade

Airport Utility v6.0 looks very shiny, but has lost lots of features since the old version.  It no longer supports IPV6, syslog, connection monitoring graphs, or WDS (extending a network wirelessly).  Happily there is an easy fix...

FIXED: Ubuntu 11.10 hangs after upgrade from 11.04: "Waiting for network configuration" then black X screen

Here's a fix for this problem, which I saw after upgrading a VMware Fusion 4.1.1 machine from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10.

Preparing a new Ubuntu VM Server

Here is my crib sheet on setting up a new Ubuntu server, including notes on enabling Virtualisation.  These notes include discussion of Kimsufi / OVH dedicated hosting, but the principles apply to all dedicated servers.  I use Kimsufi because they are the only dedicated hosting provider that I can afford for non-profit purposes...

Multi-WAN + Multi-LAN + No-NAT routing with pfSense 2.0.1

This notes summarise how to run multiple No-NAT LAN and WAN connections using version 2.0.1 of pfSense (an excellent open-source routing/firewalling appliance operating system).   My setup didn't work out of the box initially, so I thought it was worth writing up a summary of the settings that are now working here.

HOWTO: Disable touchpad when mouse is plugged in

My Dell M4400 laptop runs Ubuntu Linux 10.04.  When writing reports, I kept making mistakes due to hitting the trackpad during typing.  To solve this problem, I'm using this script to disable the touchpad when my favourite mouse is plugged in.  When the mouse is unplugged, the script restarts the touchpad.  Very nice.

Mac OS X Lion: Saved Versions considered harmful

Lion has a new feature designed to take safety copies of files you are editing.   But this isn't a good idea if you edit confidential documents, as it will result in copies of your sensitive documents spreading beyond the folder you put them in.  There's no easy way to disable it..

Gmail Contact Sync: Mac, iPhone, iPad... [UPDATED]

How to keep your address book synchronized across an iMac, MacBook, iPhone and iPad...

Accessing an Ubuntu desktop from Mac OS X Lion [UPDATED]

I've got this working now, but it's more complicated than it ought to be...

Booting Acronis True Image from a USB stick

Today I needed to restore a netbook PC from a backup image taken with Acronis True Image Home 9.0 (which is excellent). The backup image was stored on an external USB hard drive. The problem was how to boot the Acronis recovery image, as the netbook has no CD drive.

AWSTATS on Apache with Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS

Got this working today.   Nice guide here covers most of it.  Another good guide is here.

UK SIM cards with static IP addresses

Should you have a need for 3G Data SIMs with "real" fixed public IP addresses (rather than the usual dynamic NATted private IPs), I have found three options...

How to disable GMail's spam filter

GMail's spam filtering is usually excellent, but sometimes it can get over-zealous.  The first thing to know is that mail from people in your GMail Contacts list is never flagged as spam. So regular correspondents should be added to to your GMail Contacts.

If you want to turn off GMail spam filtering altogether, here's how...

More thoughts on Sandboxing for security

From a security perspective, perhaps today's desktop operating systems are missing the point. With the increase in carefully-targeted spear-phishing attacks, we need to change our approach if we are to stop our computers being compromised.  Firewalls, content-checkers, anti-virus programs, whole-disk encryption: these are all necessary, but they are not enough.

We must assume the worst and plan accordingly.  From time to time, you or a colleague will receive malware-infected files that will get past the virus scanner.  How can we remain secure?

Given the security threats from the Internet today, I believe that all web pages, images and documents need to be be opened inside a sandbox container by default.

Accessing a VM image from a QEMU host

Just a quick note of the commands needed to mount a VM disk image from the QEMU host server...