The use-case might be a little specific but I’ll describe it nonetheless, hoping it may help someone. A while ago I read Practical Forensic Imaging by Bruce Nikkel and tried out the sfsimage script that he presented therein.

The idea is as simple as it is brilliant: combine open-source disk recovery tools like dc3dd with the great compression and usability of readonly squashfs filesystems. The imaged disk is piped directly into a virtual file inside the archive and some metadata of the acquisition is added alongside it to create a “forensic image”. This image can be mounted and inspected without elevated privileges using squashfuse – all the while usually only taking a fraction of the original disk size.

I am supposed to have a 500 Mbps internet line at home. Last week it really didn’t feel like that (again). Pages would take ages to load, streams would stutter miserably or simply abort and downloading OS updates simply timed out. So I set out to measure my actual bandwidth over a longer period of time.

Sooner or later when setting up a server you’ll want to create some MySQL databses and users. If you’re not proficient in writing SQL queries or just wanted to use a nice GUI tool for the task, you’d need to connect remotely to your databse host. But of course you do not want to expose your MySQL port to the internet … Or suppose you want to debug some remote service, which is only accessible locally on the remote machine …

Freifunk explained#

The vision of Freifunk is the establishment of free networks, the democratization of communication media and the promotion of local social structures.

Basically, if you want to participate in a Freifunk community, you take a router capable of running OpenWRT and flash it with a special community-flavored version of OpenWRT based on Gluon. If there are other Freifunk nodes in reach, your router will mesh with them and connect you to the network. If you have an internet connection you want to share, then connect the WAN port of your router accordingly and become an uplink for other clients.