Sudo and DNS

So, come to find out sudo can be configured with the following option:

(sudo man page)

fqdn
Set this flag if you want to put fully qualified host names in the sudoers file. ...

Ok, story time...

There I am minding my own business when my buddy comes up to me asking why it is taking so long for him to use sudo. It was taking almost a good 3 minutes to run a single sudo command.

After stupidly restarting the machine and having the issue come back my little brother asks me if the same thing is happening with root (`su -`), no it wasn't. Come to find out CentOS was nice enough to enable the nice little feature that requires DNS to resolve properly in order to run any sudo commands.

In the documentation it gives the following warning:

Beware that turning on fqdn requires sudo to make DNS lookups which may make sudo unusable if DNS stops working (for example if the machine is not plugged into the network).

So remember, if you are going to enable the fqdn option with sudo make sure to always be connected to the network and have your DNS properly resolving otherwise things are going to get messy.

Does anyone else know of any distributions that enable fqdn with sudo?

Blue Box - Clarification

I tried to email gadgetsandgizmos but their "contact us" form does not accept html, uri's etc…

"Possible malicious code detected. No HTML, URIs, or anchor tags are allowed in message."

How are we supposed to provide evidence of incorrect information if we can't link them to the correct material?

Anyways, I was interested to see that gadgetsandgizmos had published an image titled "HACK ATTACK: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW". It was a very interesting title but I was a little worried to see what they were going to say. However, I am going to skip over my opinions and simply correct a piece of information they have placed under Steve Wozniak.

gadgetsandgizmos hackers.jpg

Please, don't get me wrong, I like Steve Wozniak he has done a lot of great stuff but he was not the one that created the blue box as the image says. A matter of fact if you watch the documentary "History of Hacking" Steve actually says that the article from Esquire about the blue box had already come out. It was after the article came out the Steve built his own blue box.

History of Hacking - Youtube

Also, in the document "Steve Wozniak" on page 8 it says the following:

(Steve Wozniak)

"John Draper explained to Wozniak the Blue Box, a device with which one could (mis)use the telephone system by emulating pulses (i.e. phone phreaking). Although Draper instructed Woz not to produce and especially not sell the gadgets on account of the possibility of being discovered, Wo- zniak built and sold Blue Boxes for $150 a piece."

Again, nothing against Steve Wozniak, Steve Wozniak has done a lot for the industry but I just want to make sure that credit for the blue box gets put in the right place.

Additional reading:

Secrets of the Little Blue Box (1971)

Does anyone have any other information that I am missing?
Am I correct in the information I am providing?

John Draper, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs ... Any clarification?

Google docs to Excel (somethings wrong here...)

It appears that if you are using Google docs to do excel work you might run into a little trouble with dates (1/1/11) when you move to Microsoft Excel (Mac OS X).

If you create a google spreadsheet and insert the date 3/1/11, save it to your desktop and open it with Microsoft Excel (Mac OS X) everything appears to look fine, but it isn't. If you attempt to copy the date from the original spreadsheet to another spreadsheet the date will change to four years in the future, 1/1/15.

Come to find out, Google has Day 1 listed as 1/1/1900 where Microsoft has it listed as 1/1/1904, a difference of 4 years, hence the leap from 11 to 15.
(special thanks to MichaelRH, http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Docs/thread?tid=2d848674b93637f6&hl=en)

However, as pointed out by my brother Mike if you use libre office you get the date you want and none of the funny business. So as Mike so eloquently put it, "libre office ftw".