Friday was my first time attending a PGP key signing party. We had it in one of the buildings on campus and I thought I would share some of the commands I used to handle all the certificates. I created a method for handling key signing parties while I did this one, but I think this is a fairly good method. What it basically does is keeps specific users in your pubring.gpg, while people at keysigning parties are in specific keyrings. When defining them in your gpg.conf file they will be included in all of your GPG operations so it will be like they were in your pubring.gpg keyring. It also means that if you don’t associate with anyone in the keysigning parting you can just comment out the file and still have the keys for later use or for archival purposes.

I first wanted to have these be in a specific keyring for the purposes of knowing who was at each keysigning. To make sure your key gets added to the keyring you need to specify not to use the default keyring and use a specific keyring.. Make sure you include your keyid in the list of keys to pull from the keyserver as it will be needed when PIUS runs against the specific keyring.
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When I first started out with Linux permissions were sorta hard to grasp, most likely because I never took the time to really sit down and understand them, but also because they are quite different than Windows permissions.

In Windows you can really put some detail in the ACLs, but with Linux you either need ACLs implemented or you need to understand how file permissions work. So first off, lets use the following example

# ls -l /
drwxr-xr-x  13 root root  4096 Apr 27  2007 usr
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root  4096 Oct  3 00:33 var

As you can see these are both owned by user root and group root and that the user has read, write, and execute permission permissions, while the group and others do not. So lets make a change to that to better explain permissions. So lets say we created /home/johndoe/usr and /home/johndoe/var.
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Social Networks

My friend Jermaine was asking what some of my social network accounts were, because lately I have become a whore to the social network world. For the longest time I used handles and didn’t have a thing for social networking, but since I have been able to catch up with so many people and make some really good connections I am enjoying it much more. Also not all of these sites are that important to me in respect to adding friends. Sites like Dopplr that let you enter information about trips and your travels is just cool.

Security Cameras

I was curious the other month what my dog was doing while I was gone, and I wanted to be able to monitor my apartment. I have found a Linksys wireless webcam on Newegg for about $85. I am considering picking up a couple of them and setting up some surveillance. In one hand I think it would be just plain cool and in the other I think it is a bit paranoid.

Kind of a quiet day.