Token Problem with SafeNet MobilePASS Smartphone App

SafeNet MobilePASS provides Two-Factor Authentication to access my company’s VPN network. They provide client apps for smartphones running on Android, IOS, BlackBerry or Windows Mobile to generate one-time passcodes. I have been using their Android app for around 2 years but there is one big problem – the app likes to randomly lose the token information. I have experienced this at least 3 times in the last 12 months. Once the token information is lost, one-time passcodes cannot be generated anymore and this effectively locks me out from accessing the VPN network.

Special Shell Variables

As I always have a tendency to forget the special variables used in shell scripts, I am going to document down the variables here.

How to Reduce Xbox Live Gold Membership Cost

Microsoft charges SGD $88 (Singapore Dollars) for a 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription. But I have been getting at least a 25% discount for the past 3 years of membership. Read on to find out how.

Free Cloud Storage Space of 20GB

When we hear of “Cloud Storage”, the first thing that usually comes to our mind is Dropbox. But Dropbox only offers 2GB of free cloud space, which is a bit on the low side for me.

Shell Script with Password Prompt

shell script

At work, I have a couple of shell scripts to perform LDAP queries. Initially the scripts were hard-coded with the login credentials of a read-only user. But as the scripts were enhanced to handle LDAP query updates, I realised that it was not a good idea anymore to hard-code the username and password as I was just inviting trouble. And the scripts will be a big NO during system audit.

Shell Script: Check If Weekend

I have some shell scripts that will perform certain actions only on a weekend (Saturday or Sunday). There are two ways to solve the “is it a weekend” logic.

Bypass 25 Likes Facebook Page Username Restriction

Facebook require pages to have at least 25 likes or fans to signup for a username, custom URL or Vanity URL. This means that newly created Facebook pages will come with a messy URL with a lot of numbers. This is bad news for newly launched companies as the URLs do not provide any brand recognition.

Create a tar.gz File in a Single Command in Solaris

Solaris does not ship with the GNU tar and by default, the tar command in Solaris does not allow you to create gzip or bzip2 files, but only pure tarballs. You will need to create a tar file first and then compress the tarball with the gzip command.

K, Ki Key Conversion Tool for AUC / HLR

I have been looking for a tool to encrypt Ki values (into eKi) using AES encryption. Ki is a 128-bit value used in authenticating the SIMs on the mobile network.