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For everyone who’s interested in Check Point Firewall, find some valuable cheat sheets over at Jens Roesen’s Website.

Great thing indeed, and yet very helpful if you need just a quick lookup instead of going through the full official documentation.
Here’s the direct links:

Check Point CLI Cheat Sheet
Check Point’s “fw monitor” Cheat Sheet

Thanks to Jens for assembling these.

German Unix Magazine freeX has published my latest article on FreeBSD: How to shrink FreeBSD to fit embedded system by the help of NanoBSD and bsdbox.

Read more about this story in the current issue 3-4/2012.

After making a backup from a hard disk ta a disk image using plain old ‘dd’, I was just looking into mounting it using the Linux loopback device.

If you ‘dd’ a single partition into an image file, then this is very straight forward. But if your image file contains multiple partition partitions including the partition table itself, then you need to take additional steps.
Read more…

It’s not hard to install Icinga on FreeBSD, at least if you’re satisfied with default options.
Should you however require Icinga with IDOUtils and MySQL support, then you need to take additional steps.

Read more…

Think about retrieving a data set from MySQL, where you need to add distinct, auto-incremented ID to each row retrieved. Sounds easy?

Well, the ID has to be generated on-the-fly and out of nowhere. Still easy?

One might think about using MySQL user variables to accomplish this, sure. But what if your framework does not allow injecting chained queries because of SQL injection countermeasures?
Read more…

While working on my newest project, a PHP- and AJAX-based network management application, I came along the need to run multiple commands on the server and track their return states (basically if they were run successful or not).

While sticking together my framework, I found that forking a process into background from PHP requires some additional steps if you don’t want to break AJAX functionality.
Read more…

Apple introduced a new feature called “mobile backups” with OS X Lion.
The idea behind that: Use a temporary part of the local hard drive to store backups until the backup drive is connected again.

True, this is a good feature for most. But if you can spare some backups, because you – let’s say – store your files to a dropbox folder, which is synchronized to a cloud service, then you may not need the mobile backup feature of OS X.
In fact, you may notice running out of disk space, that you could use otherwise.
Read more…

For a project of mine, I wanted to convert a Perl data structure, a so called Hash of Hashes, into an XML.

The simple solution to this is to use the XML::Dumper module.
Read more…

As seen in Check Point SupportCenter, there’s also a (win32) GUI Version of the DBEdit CLI tool, located at C:\Program Files\CheckPoint\SmartConsole\PROGRAM\GuiDbEdit.exe.

Great visual debugging aid if you’re doing automation stuff with CLI dbedit.

As seen over there at CheckPoint SupportCenter

Use ‘cpconfig’ on the CLI (may need ‘expert’ mode)