Ever had some alerting software spam your production mail queue with 1000’s of alerts?
And you dont want to delete every message individually…

Here is the solution to delete all messages destined for user@example.com:

mailq | tail -n +2 | grep -v '^ *(' | 
gawk 'BEGIN {RS = ""} /user@example.com/ {print $1}' | 
tr -d '*!' | postsuper -d - 

Thanks to http://www.keithscode.com for that one!

This was a tricky one. I kept getting alerts for:

-----BEGIN MESSAGE-----
[2012-07-09T23:40:37+1000] server8.somedomain.com
CRIT   :  [2012-07-09T23:40:34+1000] msg=<POLICY NODIRECTORY>, path=</var/log>
-----BEGIN SIGNATURE-----
EA6AB852FD5E03118A95B8507E514F264CCFE3CC35E3330F
000154 1340761939::server8.somedomain.com
-----END MESSAGE-----

And for the life of me wasn’t sure why but after reading the source code the cause is explained:

{ MSG_FI_NODIR, N_("File found where directory was expected"), IDMEF_IMPACT_TYPE_FILE },

And you know what it was correct! /var/log was a softlink to /data/logs!

echo “YAY HTML Works” | mail -s “$(echo -e “Subject Goes HerenContent-Type: text/html”)” to@yourmum.com

I recently moved my website to a cheap VPS I had the fun journey of trying to get it work without grinding to a halt everytime I clicked on a page, which you ‘should’ have noticed is fixed.

Firstly I needed to be realistic this blog wouldn’t have more than two simultanious connections at once, with that known I could then edit the amount for apache server threads to an un-godly small number in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 2
MaxSpareServers 2
MaxClients 20
MaxRequestsPerChild 0

With that noted a quick look at ‘top’ shows MySQL eating lots of Virtual Memory a quick swap of the configuration file: /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-5.1/examples/my-small.cnf to /etc/mysql/my.cnf sorts out that problem. (Don’t forget to backup your originals)

And finally modifying the WordPress max memory limit as noted in this post
suhosin[10882]: ALERT – script tried to increase memory_limit to 268435456 bytes

This article has an updated version -> Here

Today at work a client he needed to access a cisco router but no-one new the password but we had the config files saved which included the MD5 hashes of the enable and enable secret passwords. So I set about cracking the hashes, which was done successfully btw, following on from that I then remembered a John the Ripper MPI patch which I had seen some time ago I ended getting it going at home and the results are good!

Directions for installation are as follows (on Fedora 11)

yum install mpich2 mpich2-devel
wget http://www.bindshell.net/tools/johntheripper/john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
cd john-1.7.2-bp17/src
make linux-x86-64 (for 64bit version duh!)
cd ../run
touch ~/.mpd.conf && echo "MPD_SECRETWORD=secret" > ~/.mpd.conf && chmod 600 ~/.mpd.conf
mpd &
mpiexec.py -n 4 -path ./ -wdir ./ ./john --test

Initial Benchmarking looks good. Below is 1 core vs 4 cores

Traditional DES [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
1591K c/s real, 1594K c/s virtual / 6131K c/s real, 6380K c/s virtual
BSDI DES (x725) [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
Many salts: 53222 c/s real, 53329 c/s virtual / Many salts: 207665 c/s real, 215407 c/s virtual
FreeBSD MD5 [32/64 X2]
Raw: 9718 c/s real, 9816 c/s virtual / Raw: 37720 c/s real, 39581 c/s virtual
mysql [mysql]
Raw: 2571K c/s real, 2571K c/s virtual / Raw: 9397K c/s real, 10254K c/s virtual

About a 100% increase per core! Life is good!