People often ask "Why does website X force me to change my password? It is annoying" or similar questions.
This page tries to answer that.
It is considered good security practice to change passwords regularly.
Why?
Because the longer you use a password, the larger the chance/probability of it …
Once thing new shell programmers struggle with is error handling. The shell does not use exceptions like the programming languages most developers are familiar with; basically the shell mostly pre-dates the notion of exceptions in higher-level programming languages.
Developers often conceptualise shell commands to be something similar to procedures: You …
You're writing a shell script to do... something. Whatever it is, it will hopefully make your life easier in some way or other.
But what do you call it?
This touches on a pet peeve of mine. Whatever you do, do not call
it somescript.sh. You should never use …
SSH is great. But it does mean typing longer commands than you otherwise would have done.
For example, if your local user name is joe but your user name on a
remote server is jbloggs, then you have to specify the user name
whenever you use SSH to communicate with …
When you use SSH to log into a server, the server wants to make sure you really are who you claim to be: It needs to authenticate you. By convention, this is done using your password.
But entering your password every time you log into a remote server is annoying …
Sometimes companies' security policies dictate the use of "bastion hosts": Hosts that you have to "jump through" to get to the network behind the host - i.e. you cannot connect directly to a host "behind" the bastion host.
This does improve security a bit, but the most visible effect is …
SSH is great. But it does inevitably introduce some delays as whenever you use it, SSH has to:
Although I live in the UK, I often get questions about what is different about Christmas the Danish way.
Well - that deserved a blog post.
First of all, Christmas in Danish is Jul - cognate to the old English word Yule - they're pronounced almost the same way.
Keeping the pre-christian name …
As you may have noticed, we appear to have a lorry driver shortage in the UK. This is causing lack of petrol deliveries to various petrol stations - a number of stations had to close as they ran out of fuel.
In a sane world, this would normally be a temporary …
Many places have password policies. And they often prescribe that your password MUST include things like:
The problem is: That advice is wrong.
Or at least: the advice guides people towards difficult-to-remember passwords and it does not increase security.
The single …