Tunneling socks via http/s

Nowadays many govermental authorities or network administrators think that blocking all the network traffic for security reasons is a good idea. One common approach is to block everything, but allow some traffic that is whitelisted. Thus it is not possible to do all the interesting stuff that the firewall prevents to do. But by blocking http or https no webserver would be available any more. So normally these ports are open and thus this is the way to go. Continue reading

How to debug encrypted HTTP traffic

When developing software, sometime it’s necessary to sniff the traffic that is transmitted between two computer systems. For that purpose tools like wireshark or tcpdump may be useful. Wireshark is a great tool, but when handling encrypted connections it is not possible to decrypt the traffic without having the key used for encryption. When sniffing http traffic the private key of the certificate is required to decrypt the information. But when talking to a foreign server, without having its private key another approach is necessary. Continue reading

Compressed Memory

When using swap the system is going to be dramatic slow and maybe hangs for seconds as the performance of the next level memory is dramatically slower then random access memory. In case there is not enough physical RAM and swapping happens really often, there is a way to compensate this approach a little bit by using compressed in-memory swap space. Continue reading

Adding new resolution to the X window server

When running Debian Linux with VirtualBox there is limited support for high display resolutions. Per default a maximum resolution of 1024x768 is possible. For a modern operating system this resolution is definately not state of the art.

But there is a way to support a higher resolution than 1024x768. It is possible to switch to a resolution like 1920x1080 or more. Even more than one display is possible. Continue reading

Installing Chrome / Streaming Netflix on Ubuntu

Currently using legal video streaming is a quite tough topic. As drm mechanism prevent most of the users to use legal video streaming on Linux. I don’t want to make some advertisement, but using Amazon Prime/Instant Video, Google Play, Netflix etc.. is not working out of the box. But Netflix provided a way to use Google Chrome for streaming. Continue reading

Generating secure passwords

Normally for each device, service and software there should be used a unique password. As this isn’t an easy tasks, many people use a default password for a number of services and devices. But using Linux there is a small smart tool that generates passwords easily. This tool is called apg. Furthermore storing all the passwords in a safe enhances comfort and security dramatically.
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