MrVerrall's Blog

Just for a delicious change from geek speak, here is my recipe for Banana Bread (more of a cake really). 225g self raising flour ½ teaspoon salt 100g butter or margarine (unsalted) 170g soft dark brown sugar 75g raisins (or sultanas) 2 ripe bananas ½ teaspoon vanilla essence 1 egg, beaten 3 tablespoons milk (or dark rum!) Oven: 160 oC, 325 oF, Gas Mark 3 If you have time, or are prepared far enough in advance, it's extra tasty if you can soak the raisins overnight in dark rum, any rum that doesn't get adsorbed can substitute the milk in the recipe. 1)Line the bottom of a loaf tin with greaseproof paper and grease it up. 2)Put the flour and salt into a bowl, cut the butter up and add. Rub in until it resembles fine bread crumbs. 3) Stir in sugar and raisins. Mash banana with a fork (Well duh) and add to the mixture with the vanilla essence, egg and milk. Beat. 4) Put in tin. 5) Sift or sprinkle some of the dark sugar over the top of the mixture to give it a delicious sweet crisp...

There are may reasons why would might like to run a headless Debian server on your home network. I have mine primarily as as file-store, serving video, music and pictures to my Windows MCE PC (you see I'm not one of these Windows hating Linux nerds, use the right tool for the right job I say!). Being headless and tucked away in a dark corner it's important to be able to manage the system with little fuss, and I use ssh to login and administer the system remotely. The question here though is 'When do I know that I need login and do something?'. I ideally want to know asap if there are some important security updates ( apticron ), or that the raid ( mdadm ) has run into some trouble or if some important cron job has spewed some helpful output. Lucky for me is was fairly straightforward to configure the server to email my google mail (gmail) account whenever it has something important to say, and here's how I did it! I have this working on both Lenny and Squeeze. ...

Securing data on a USB pendrive can allow you to carry around useful, yet sensitive data with very few concerns. This post outlines a way of cryptographically securing a USB pendrive using crypsetup and LUKS in such a way that a drive may be unlocked on most Linux system without the addition of extra software (e.g. TruCrypt). As an added bonus it's possible to mount the drive in a Windows environment as well. Hurrah! The first thing to decide is how you are going to partition your drive. I find it useful to have an unencrypted partition as well as the encrypted as this affords the convenience and functionality as well as offering security. The primary consideration here is that natively Widows will only recognise the first partition on the pendrive, so if you wish to have an open data partition let it be the first. Below shows how an 8GB pendrive (in this case the device is /dev/sdh) is split roughly is half with an ~4GB FAT32 partition at the front. Use you favorite partition...

Having spent some not inconsiderable time trying to get my Linux based laptop to connect to the eduroam wireless network at Lancaster University I thought the nice thing to do would be to share my toils with the world. There were various other blogs and the such I drew inspiration from, but no one provided a total solution. Now if you are using a desktop manager like Gnome or KDE the built in network-manager should do most of the magic for you, however if you want a minimal setup without relying on gui tools this may be useful to you. I use a Debian derivative on my laptop as it has better hardware support for the wireless (intel 5100). I'll assume you have the necessary packages installed as that is outside the scope of this discussion (otherwise the Debian Wiki may be a good place to start). First off you'll need a wpa_supplicant configuration file, " /etc/wpa_supplicant/eduroam.conf " would seem to be the logical choice and mine looks just like this: #############...