Microsoft launched a while ago an intresting game, “Are you certifiable?” There is two paths avaiable, developer and IT Professional. Both consists 20 (questions per episode)*4 (episodes per season)*5 (seasons)=400 questions total. In the IT professional path, the questions vary from some random trivia ("When Windows was introduced?") to quite advanced questions in various Microsoft products (Vista, various 2008 server features like AD, CA and HyperV; Exchange, SQL server etc).

If you are considering taking a some certification exam, you might want to check it out. Bassicly it’s like a free mock exam. The program even tells you why some answer are correct (they seem to be from Microsoft’s Self-Paced Training Kit books).

So, I recently came across dsniff’s webspy. It’s quite intresting application (bassicly it opens the pages target is viewing if you have access to it’s traffic (hub network, arp poisoning or something similar). However, it does not support “Host:” field, so it’s fairly useless on the modern web as most of the web sites rely on it.

Due to this, I decided to make a little patch for it.

So, I wanted to create a completly virtualized lab enviroment, including virtualized network devices.

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So, since my network is getting bigger, I decided to finally switch to LDAP authentication. However, I provide shell access to certain boxes for friends, so I had to make sure they will only get access to their current system and nothing else.

After a bit of searching, I found out about pam_groupdn attribute. It allows to specify a group that can access the selected PAM resource. Unfortunally it doesn’t support nested groups.

While configuring the ldap authentication, I ran into some problems. The biggest problem was the fact that the pam authentication wasn’t working. It was sending “[few non-printablechars]INCORRECT” to LDAP server. After a while, I discovered why: It was using SASL. And I couldn’t find any way to disable that (my ldap server is only accesiable within LAN and to VPN clients, so I don’t need to worry about encrypting the authentication).

Anyway, once I figured that out, rest was easy.

The Finnish Pirate Alliance writes:

Finnish Copyright Information and Anti-piracy Centre (CIAPC) toughens its fear campaign against filesharers. CIAPC has now used the new Finnish copyright law from January 1st 2006 to close an internet connection because of suspected filesharing. It came as a surprise to even CIAPC itself that the closed connection did not belong to a private filesharer but instead to the Provincial Government of Ã…land. A government employee had seemingly used the connection to share music.

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