Skip to main content

DONT - Sudo without password

Reading this post, I feel the urge to burst out. This kind of tweaking is not really *adminy* . A true Admin would rather kill the terminal he sudo-ed in, to be even sure.

Enabling your user to become a sudo-er is a privilege. Like in the movie, Spider-man - Great power comes with great responsibility. The extra prompt for password might be a little annoying for frequenters. But completely overriding it is appalling at best, if not awful abuse of the said privilege.

For all the interns who joined as admins, a friendly advice - security defaults have a place in unix. They are set after a lot of research in usage (especially by admins before you). So leave them alone, as much as you can. Security is not for ease of use. The harder a password the better, so read that post with admonition.

For the new *nix users - If you just want to do this, Dont bother installing *nix. Go with an easy mac or better yet, stick with Windoze ME (I am rude, am I not?).

Well that feels happy now. I had a stressful week, taking our new web services into production. (Sorry for the guy who wrote the post - This reply is only to emphasise the importance of security, your tip has nothing to do with measuring your performance.. good luck)
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Powered By

As it goes, We ought to give thanks to people who power us. This page will be updated, like the version page , to show all the tools, and people this site is Powered By! Ubuntu GIMP Firebug Blogger Google [AppEngine, Ajax and other Apis] AddtoAny Project Fondue jQuery
Read More >>

Decorator for Memcache Get/Set in python

I have suggested some time back that you could modularize and stitch together fragments of js and css to spit out in one HTTP connection. That makes the page load faster. I also indicated that there ways to tune them by adding cache-control headers. On the server-side however, you could have a memcache layer on the stitching operation. This saves a lot of Resources (CPU) on your server. I will demonstrate this using a python script I use currently on my site to generate the combined js and css fragments. So My stitching method is like this @memize(region="jscss") def joinAndPut(files, ext): res = files.split("/") o = StringIO.StringIO() for f in res: writeFileTo(o, ext + "/" + f + "." + ext) #writes file out ret = o.getvalue() o.close() return ret; The method joinAndPut is * decorated * by memize. What this means is, all calls to joinAndPut are now wrapped (at runtime) with the logic in memize. All you wa...
Read More >>

Faster webpages with fewer CSS and JS

Its easy, have lesser images, css and js files. I will cover reducing number of images in another post. But If you are like me, You always write js and css in a modular fashion. Grouping functions and classes into smaller files (and Following the DRY rule, Strictly!). But what happens is, when you start writing a page to have these css and js files, you are putting them in muliple link rel=style-sheet or script tags. Your server is being hit by (same) number of HTTP Requests for each page call. At this point, its not the size of files but the number server roundtrips on a page that slows your page down. Yslow shows how many server roundtrips happen for css and js. If you have more than one css call and one js call, You are not using your server well. How do you achieve this? By concatinating them and spitting out the content as one stream. So Lets say I have util.js, blog.js and so.js. If I have a blog template that depends on these three, I would call them in three script tags. Wh...
Read More >>