Strav's blog

The debian default setup for SNORT has the daily summary mail sent out from 'root'. While accurate, this is not ideal when it comes time to file (for some reason, it's easier for my brain to locate the 'snort' folder when I'm looking at mail from 'snort' instead of mail from 'root'). In any case, modify the /etc/cron.daily/5snort file and add 'echo "From: Snort <root>";' after the 'echo "To: $DEBIAN_SNORT_STATS_RCPT";' section.

I had a problem recently trying to use rsync on a WinXP system across drives. The ':' is significant in rsync so it doesn't work with the windows drive lettering scheme. The following line shows how to use the cygwin drive addressing to make it work.

C:\WORK\* --> /cygdrive/c/work/*

OK - Here's a solution for another issue that has been bothering me. Opening MS help files (.CHM) over a network. What I've seen is that the file opens, displays a tree in the left pane but refuses to display content in the right pane.

The problem is apparently with IE security settings. The following registry file has generally fixed it for me.

chm network registry fix

Occasionally I get errors during the apt-get upgrade process. Here's a simple solution to one - the 'file or dir already exists' error:


dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/package (--install):
  trying to overwrite 'file/dir', which is also in package other_package

Errors were encountered while processing:
  /var/cache/apt/archives/package


So - here's what to do:



dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/package

OK - I went ahead and set up the other 3 DNS sites as secondary servers. I had a bit of trouble with vcsweb, (strav.com, strav.net, and egiveit.com showed errors, but zilliox.us didn't even though they were all set up the same). I sent an e-mail to support at vcsweb and they responded quickly that they were confused as well and that zilliox.us should be displaying the same errors. These errors should disappear once the delegation (registration of name servers at the registrar level - Dotster in my case) is complete. So, within 72 hours, I should have 8 nameservers from 5 different companies for each of the sites. That should pretty much eliminate outages from DNS attacks. :)