alan.lamielle.net

I am doing some MPI development on my notebook using the MPICH MPI implementation.  This implementation needs an rsh/ssh connection to work properly.  I was reluctant to run a full sshd instance on my notebook as I didn’t want to open up port 22 to the world to attempt to gain access (even with password authentication disabled, root login disabled, etc.).  I did some digging and found that the sshd_config setting 'ListenAddress' would allow me to force sshd to bind to the interface associated with the specified address.  So, for example:

ListenAddress 127.0.0.1

tells sshd to bind to lo, the loopback device. This means connections over eth* and wlan* will not work as sshd isn’t even listening on these interfaces. As far as I can tell this will do exactly what I’m looking for as I only want ssh working on my local machine and not over interfaces other than lo.

I’ve finally moved permanently to Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04).  Initially I installed it by following the instructions found here and here.  However, I didn’t put the time in to update my extensions, so I ended up reverting back to the 3.0.* series.  I installed by adding the Security Team’s PPA to my package sources list, but that is apparently no longer necessary.

The two extensions I couldn’t live without were Tab Mix Plus and Google Gears.  After some digging, I found a TMP thread with a link (xpi) to a development build that works with Firefox 3.5.  Also, I found a Google groups thread and a blog post with a few links to Linux x86_64 builds of Gears.

Once I upgraded these two extensions I was happy enough to continue using 3.5 permanently rather than just playing with it for an hour or so.

Note: The builtin support for OGG video is amazing.  The problem is it’s only in Firefox right now, so I don’t really expect to see widespread adoption of it.  However, it is one great step towards getting rid of plugin-based video based on flash.