Author Archives: samurai

About samurai

I like computers... A lot. So I tend to spend a lot of time doing varied things with them. Often you'll find me playing with Python or PHP, fighting with operating systems, ranting about some off-the-wall concept, or preparing for zombies.

Odd bugs and the case of an aging database

Posted on August 29, 2010 by samurai

I was doing some troubleshooting recently trying to fix some issues reported in the Captcha of a registration system. The Captcha wasn’t always properly displaying and wouldn’t recognize valid code entries intermittently. After tracing some of the PHP to find … Continue reading →

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Defcon 18 – photos and followup

Posted on August 2, 2010 by samurai

Another year, another Defcon has passed. This year I went with CarbonLifeForm (who helped out with this post) and we attended talks, mingled with fellow enthusiasts, spread the psych0tik word, and enjoyed general debauchery. I was asked to take some … Continue reading →

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Preserving partitions when adding datastores to ESXi

Posted on April 15, 2010 by samurai

I was recently building out a new ESXi box and bought a Seagate Barracuda 1.5Tb SATA 2 drive to use as the datastore as well as to backup some data from a laptop who’s hard drive was acting up. The … Continue reading →

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ESXi 4.0 – Management Methods

Posted on March 21, 2010 by samurai

Be it at work or at home, I spend a lot of time in virtual environments consisting mostly of ESXi (3.5 and 4.0.) As part of the psych0tic network I run storm.psych0tik.net, an ESXi 4.0 box that’s currently running our IRC as well as the psych0tik GSProxy. Managing these environments is a task in itself, and I’ve found that no one tool gives me all of the functionality that I need. In this post, I go through some free methods I use to manage my ESXi 4.0 host and guests. Continue reading →

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CSI releases first in a new series of whitepapers

Posted on February 3, 2010 by samurai

The Cyber Secure Institute (CSI), a group looking to raise awareness about cyber security, has released it’s first whitepaper in a new series about cyberwar. This whitepaper, written by retired USAF General Eugene Habiger, addresses the need for a new … Continue reading →

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Anonymous browsing or being a web ninja

Posted on January 29, 2010 by samurai

These days it seems like everyone is looking at what you do online. Online advertisers make money from the ads placed on your site, but they also gather statistics about all your visitors for their own purposes. Search engines store … Continue reading →

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