Here are a few small videos of the shuttle and the hubble from May of 2009 when the shuttle was doing repairs on the Hubble.   These are unclassified for public release. STS125_2009142_VIS_RL STS125_2009142_GEM 20580_200137_AO_RLBD 20580_2008137_AO_PCID STS125_2009142_SSTB_Resize 20580_2008137_AO_MFBD_RL STS125_2009142_SSTB Read More

So it turns out that you can't pass one vpn using ipsec through another vpn using ipsec.  Why, well i've spent some time trying to figure this out the last few days and have discovered that they are taking each others packets apart. VPN that use ipsec for a site to site connection encapsulate packets into udp packets.  These udp packets are then sent across the network to the other side where the receiving device unpacks the udp packet and then decrypts it.  Typically the carrier media that connects your two vpn devices is the internet.  But if your media connecting...

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I love using Mac, as a so called IT professional it's the most professional improvement to come UNIX in over a decade.  I especially like to use it for work,  The problem isall of the systems they use at my company rely on CAC authentication.  More specificaly it's all been geared towards Windows & CAC.  Don't get me wrong Common Access Cards are a great way to handle security.  They work off of industry standard concepts like X.509 Certificates and Public Key Encryption.  I don't have a problem with that.  It's the horseshit support I find for documentation on how...

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There are two schools of thought for how to clone drives under unix. The quick and dirty method is via the unix command dd. This is a bit for bit copy tool So it can even copy master boot records and partition tables. But it also copys empty space and kinda requires the drives be identical. Since it's rare to actually have identical drives I'm going to show you how to use other system tools available under IRIX and Solaris to accomplish this task ask well as even make the new cloned drives better. We start with Solaris. Not much has...

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When ever I come across a command or service in Unix that crashes or fails to run properly I quickly go to the trace tools to trace the system commands.  I often find that If I just follow the system trace i can usually see what was supposed to happen and didn't.  Unfortunatley not every unix flavor uses the same tracing commands. In linux it is very simple prefix any command with strace and it will give you lots of system trace info. In Solaris use the truss command. In Irix use the par...

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So I was looking for a way to authenticate against LDAP with cake but I've found that it doesn't support it by default. I found one that checks the auth against ldap then creates a local mysql account. This also didn't use a actual ldap data sourc e either, it just handeled it's own ldap connection. After I read through the standard cakphp auth component I saw that it wouldn't be that hard to write an LDAP based auth component. First you need to download this file ldap_auth.php to your 'app/controllers/components/' directory. Then just like the original auth...

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I've been using CakePHP for a while now and I've been thinking for a while it was time to see if I could give something back. As an IT leader I'm in love with LDAP. It makes life so simple for me and my team. The big downside to LDAP is it's not very easy to learn how all the objectClasses and attributes work with various applications. Microsoft has eliminated this with the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). It amazes me that no open source project has developed a tools such as this before. ...

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