Tuesday 31 May 2011

VMware on Linux: Promiscuous Mode

When VMware Workstation is hosted under Linux, by default it doesn't allow VM Guests to access the network in Promiscuous mode.  There's an easy fix for this...

Fixed: Ubuntu Server shows outdated update info

Just updated some Ubuntu 10.04.2 servers using 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade', then rebooted to find stale information displayed in the login banner, still showing lots of updates pending.  There's a simple fix for this...
  rm /etc/motd.tail
  /usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available --force
The system would catch up eventually anyway.  These commands just speed it up.

Thursday 26 May 2011

Easy sandboxing for Windows apps

Sandboxie looks very interesting....  Yet to try it, but have heard good things about it.  Without the cost of firing up different VMs, it is able to launch programs inside wrappers, to isolate different programs from each other (or to isolate different web pages from each other) - and to protect your Windows machine from the sandboxed program.

Disabling/enabling services in Ubuntu (UPDATED)

Recent versions of Ubuntu have changed the way that system services start up.  Presumably this reflects a policy change in Linux systems.
There are now THREE different ways for Linux services to start automatically at boot...