Month: September 2013

  • The Short List #7: wpa_passphrase on #FreeBSD. Because plaintext passwords are dumb.

    If you have configured wireless networks on your FreeBSD laptop/pc. You can use wpa_passphrase to make the password entries more obscure with the use of wpa_passphrase. For example, given the following network entry in wpa_supplicant.conf: network={ ssid=”BRUNO” scan_ssid=1 priority=5 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK psk=”Super Secret Plain Text Password” } wpa_passphrase can give you a psk entry that is […]

  • Wait … Why is this stuff so hard? — Hacking the Dell DRAC

    We recently “destroyed” an Dell Poweredge R720 at the office and it was to be retired to the dust bin.  We ran the Dell updates for firmware things and the machine now is completely unbootable.  Too bad, it was a very nice machine. But, this led me down an interesting road.  I cracked open the […]

  • Cadillac ZFS #FreeBSD

    I had an opportunity at work to build up a new machine to do our FreeBSD builds at work this quarter and wanted to see how far I could take ZFS on high end OEM hardware. After evaluating HP and Dell gear, I settled on the Dell r720xd as my platform to move forward.  Primarily, […]