My Linux Life

Perl: Terminal does not support AddHistory

2012-01-24T23:53:00.001+08:00

If you see the error when running Perl shell, you need to install Term::ReadLine::Perl.

That's all there is to it. Have fun!.

changing manually wireless connection to be controlled by knetworkmanager

2012-01-24T23:03:00.000+08:00

knetworkmanager is a Network Manager for KDE4. It is hated or liked by users and usually not in between. I personally like it although it has its fair share of bugs. But I like Mandriva's net_applet more. It is stable and more reliable. It is prefered by many Mandriva users. However, if you are stuck with recent problems (bug?) of perl in Mandriva Cooker like me, you are forced to use command line of wpa_supplicant or iwconfig or using gui application like knetworkmanager.

In Mandriva, you can change which network manager control the wireless connection by changing the option in net_applet or you can manually change in file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0. If you want knetworkmanager in control of it, you just have to change this line to yes:

NM_CONTROLLED=yes

Connecting to wireless AP with WPA/2 security using wpa_supplicant

2012-01-22T18:22:00.000+08:00

Recently, my cooker updated perl packages and it broke all of drak* family especially drakconf and net_applet. net_applet is the network manager for Mandriva in applet form. I can also use draknetcenter. Now the problem is I cant open net_applet and knetcenter due to this error:

/usr/bin/perl: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libDrakX/auto/c/stuff/stuff.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Gthr_key_ptr

So how do I connect to wireless AP? I dont know how to use iwconfig to connect to such AP or can I? After googling, I found a solution: wpa_supplicant.In Mandriva, I just have to run this command (as root):

wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf &

If you have setup the connection before with draknetcenter, you dont have to edit the file wpa_supplicant.conf. If not, you have to manually edit the file to suit your environment. it is heavily documented.

Then you have to run dhclient to get IP address from the AP or other dhcp server:

dhclient wlan0

wlan0 is my wireless interface. Please change it according to your environment. I bet the broken packages will be updated sooner so that I can use net_applet again.

Have fun!

Happy New Year and distros for router

2012-01-02T05:14:00.000+08:00

Happy New Year everbody. Hope 2012 will be a great year for Linux. In 2011, I tested several distros for different purposes. For routers, I found several free distros that serve as a really good gateway for my network. Among others are:

Zentyal - this is the best distro for routers. Fully featured with webcache, url filtering, load balancing for multiple lines and has 32-bit and 64-bit version. It is based on Ubuntu.
ClearOS - Also the best but it doesn't have 64-bit version (at the time of this writing. recently there's a 64-bit release but still in beta stage). Has many features as Zentyal. Based on Redhat.
pfSense - this is not Linux-based. It is freeBSD-based firewall and router. It has bug with my servers pertaining to PCI-E. So I dumped it. It's good but the bug prevent it from being operational.

Others:

Untangle - didn't try it because the free version has no webcache feature.
Zeroshell - tried it but a little awkward to use.

So I chose Zentyal as my distro for my server router and info from its web, I need to add more RAM and bigger hard disk to serve more than 500 users.

Happy New Year everybody! Thanks for reading.

Changing konqueror web browser's engine to WebKit

2011-10-17T11:06:00.000+08:00

Konqueror is a native KDE web browser and it uses KHTML as the rendering engine. Fortunately, the smart developers of Konqueror has made it possible to change not only the interface but also the engine that renders the webpage we visit and so far only webkit is supported. We hope many more in the future. or maybe not. :)

What is Webkit?

Webkit engine is derived from KDE's KHTML engine and contains many enhancements that made it better than its mother. It has been used for Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome web browsers.

For Mandriva 2011 users, to be able to change the engine to Webkit is by installing the engine package. It's called webkitkde. (for other distro, the package name might be a bit different) You might have installed it. Install it using this command:

urpmi webkitkde

Now open Konqueror (or restart if it is open) and go to Settings --> Configure Konqueror --> General --> Default web browser engine. You should have 2 options in there. KHTML and WebKit. Screenshot below.

That's all there is to it. You should now enjoy browsing the web using WebKit engine.

Mandriva 2011 codenamed Hydrogen is out

2011-08-30T21:14:00.002+08:00

I just copy this as announced on Mandriva blog:

Hooray! As promised earlier, we are happy to announce that Mandriva 2011 is out. You can download ISO images from here.

When downloading an iso-image, perhaps you will want to read the Release Notes.

We prepared a small manual of how to upgrade to the new release for users of the Mandriva Desktop 2010.2.

If you have never tried Mandriva, take a look at the Mandriva 2011 Tour.

Happy upgrading :)

Merging video files

2011-08-22T01:30:00.002+08:00

Recently I downloaded 2 video files which is actually a video file splitted into two for faster upload by the uploader. To merge them on Linux, we can use the command cat like this:

cat video1.mkv video2.mkv >> video.mkv

And it took seconds to complete merging. Now I can watch the video in 1 file.

Have fun!.

Testing bloggeroid

2011-06-19T16:06:00.001+08:00

This post is for testing purposes only. Please <<ignore>> it.

posted with Bloggeroid

Mageia 1 is out!

2011-06-04T00:35:00.003+08:00

A distribution forked from Mandriva, Mageia, released its important milestone, Mageia 1 stable. Read the Changelog here to get an insight of this release after 9 months it was born.

My Mandriva desktop

2011-05-26T01:06:00.009+08:00

Sorry for not posting anything for a rather long time. I have been using Mandriva Cooker 2011 for about 2 months now since I bought my new ASUS laptop from someone with half the current market price. :) With RPM5, ROSA, and many exciting features of KDE 4 in Cooker, I didn't want to miss the chance to test and have fun with them.

Here is the screenshots of my desktop with urpmi and 3D effects in action.

Please click on the image to see bigger picture.

Load balance 2 WAN links BASH script

2011-04-08T02:02:00.002+08:00

BASH script to load balance 2 WAN links.

#!/bin/bash

# bal_local Load-balance internet connection over two local links

# Version: 1.0.0 - Fri, Sep 26, 2008

# Author: Niels Horn

# Set devices:

DEV1=${1-eth0} # default eth0

DEV2=${2-ppp0} # default ppp0

# Get IP addresses of our devices:

ip1=`ifconfig $DEV1 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }' | awk -F: '{ print $2 }'`

ip2=`ifconfig $DEV2 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }' | awk -F: '{ print $2 }'`

# Get default gateway for our devices:

gw1=`route -n | grep $DEV1 | grep '^0.0.0.0' | awk '{ print $2 }'`

gw2=`route -n | grep $DEV2 | grep '^0.0.0.0' | awk '{ print $2 }'`

echo "$DEV1: IP=$ip1 GW=$gw1"

echo "$DEV2: IP=$ip2 GW=$gw2"

### Definition of routes ###

# Check if tables exists, if not -> create them:

if [ -z "`cat /etc/iproute2/rt_tables | grep '^251'`" ] ; then

echo "251 rt_dev1" >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tables

if [ -z "`cat /etc/iproute2/rt_tables | grep '^252'`" ] ; then

echo "252 rt_dev2" >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tables

# Define routing tables:

ip route add default via $gw1 table rt_dev1

ip route add default via $gw2 table rt_dev2

# Create rules:

ip rule add from $ip1 table rt_dev1

ip rule add from $ip2 table rt_dev2

# If we already have a 'nexthop' route, delete it:

if [ ! -z "`ip route show table main | grep 'nexthop'`" ] ; then

ip route del default scope global

# Balance links based on routes:

ip route add default scope global nexthop via $gw1 dev $DEV1 weight 1 nexthop via $gw2 dev $DEV2 weight 1

# Flush cache table:

ip route flush cache

# All done...

To use the script, copy it to /usr/local/bin, make it executable with 'chmod +x' and call it with:

bal_local

source

Moving your mysql database to another hard disk

2011-01-31T23:36:00.004+08:00

Recently, my server's only hard disk was almost full. I bought a new hard disk with bigger size and I decided to just add it as a second hard disk. Since I need to move it to the 2nd hard disk, I need to find a proper way to move the db with minimum downtime. So I googled around and found a solution.

First, I needed to format the 2nd hard disk and I chose xfs as the filesystem. I created 2 partitions using Linux's fdisk for this task. First partition is 10 GB and 2nd one is around 900 GB. That's approximately added up to 1 TB. Then I mounted the 2nd partition in current partition eg /media/hd2 as follows:

mount -t xfs /dev/sdb5 /media/hd2

where /dev/sdb5 is the partition and /media/hd2 is the mounting dir.

Stop mysql db before doing anything:

service mysql stop

Afterthat, I copied the entire db to newly mounted hard disk:

cp -rv /var/lib/mysql /media/hd2

It will take a while if you have huge databases.

Then, change the ownership of the dir to user and group of mysql:

chown -R mysql:mysql /media/hd2/mysql

You need to change the mysql config file in /etc/my.cnf to point to the dir:

[mysqld]

user = mysql

datadir = /media/hd2/mysql

port = 3306

socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

Now you can restart mysql db:

service mysql start

If there are no errors on startup, you can test by login to your mysql db and do sql query.

You can leave other settings as it is. If this doesn't work and if you use innodb, you may want to change these lines:

# Uncomment the following if you are using InnoDB tables

#innodb_data_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/

#innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend

#innodb_log_group_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/

#innodb_log_arch_dir = /var/lib/mysql/

Make sure you test your dbs before deleting the old ones. Have fun!

The easiest way to 'burn' iso to USB disk.

2011-01-18T23:28:00.002+08:00

The easiest way to 'burn' iso to USB disk is by using dd command. Let's say you don't want to burn your newly downloaded iso to CD/DVD but want to use USB disk instead, you can run this command :

dd if=/path/to/file.iso of=/dev/sdb

This assumes your USB disk is /dev/sdb. You can use mount command to check what device your USB disk is using. Now you can install your new distro using USB disk.

Have fun!

/usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4.h:53: error: ‘INT_MIN’ was not declared in this scope

2011-01-04T11:00:00.008+08:00

This error happened when I was compiling dansguardian 2.10.1.1 with Linux netfilter support.

In file included from ConnectionHandler.cpp:48:

/usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4.h:53: error: ‘INT_MIN’ was not declared in this scope

/usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4.h:64: error: ‘INT_MAX’ was not declared in this scope

/usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4.h:65: error: ‘INT_MAX’ was not declared in this scope

make[2]: *** [dansguardian-ConnectionHandler.o] Error 1

To solve it, you have to edit netfilter_ipv4.h and type #include <limits.h> just below or after other #include lines.

Have fun!.

How to change the plymouth default theme

2011-01-04T00:21:00.004+08:00

Plymouth is a graphical boot system that runs very early in the boot process. It provides graphical animation while the boot process happens in the background. Starting from Mandriva 2010 Beta, it replaced splashy to manage boot splash. Many latest distributions now are using plymouth. Since it displays graphical boot login, users usually do not bother to tinker with it.

What is the default theme?

To know the current default theme, run this command without any options:

plymouth-set-default-theme

Changing theme

To change plymouth theme, we have to know what themes are installed. To list them, run (as root):

plymouth-set-default-theme --list

You'll get something like this:

details

fade-in

Mandriva-Free

spinfinity

text

So to change to a particular theme as the default, for example fade-in, run :

plymouth-set-default-theme fade-in --rebuild-initrd

--rebuilt-initrd option is a must or the change won't take effect. You can explore other options by running plymouth-set-default-theme -h

Have fun!

urpmi: /bin/mv: cannot stat `/var/cache/urpmi/partial/descriptions': No such file or directory

2010-12-30T23:35:00.003+08:00

If you got this problem (or something like it) while updating packages with urpmi.update -a or urpmi --auto-updates :

/bin/mv: cannot stat `/var/cache/urpmi/partial/descriptions': No such file or directory

Can't move file /var/cache/urpmi/partial/descriptions to /var/lib/urpmi/Main Updates (Cooker2011.0-2)/descriptions

Then the solution is by removing the file /var/cache/urpmi/mirrors.cache for urpmi to use different mirror. This is because the mirror has problem. So issuing this command should solve the problem:

rm -fv /var/cache/urpmi/mirrors.cache

That's all there is to it. Have fun!

Solving squid's pinger error: IcmpSquid.cc(155) Recv: recv: (111) Connection refused

2010-12-18T17:02:00.003+08:00

I've installed latest squid (3.2.0.3) recently from source. I configured it with --with-icmp to enable incoming icmp request. After compiling and installing it, it's time to run it. From the log I noticed that the pinger program produced an error like this:

IcmpSquid.cc(155) Recv: recv: (111) Connection refused

and filtering the log of the word pinger (using grep) :

pinger: Initialising ICMP pinger ...

2010/12/18 10:57:16| pinger: Unable to start ICMP pinger.

2010/12/18 10:57:16| pinger: Unable to start ICMPv6 pinger.

2010/12/18 10:57:16| FATAL: pinger: Unable to open any ICMP sockets.

From the errors above, I knew that they were related to permission problem (connection refused, unable to open socket). It solved when I setuid the pinger program to enable it to open the required socket :

chown 4755 pinger (run this as root of course)

This pinger program is usually located in the bin directory of squid path e.g /usr/local/squid/bin (this is the default if you compile from source). Please consult your distro if you install it using package manager.

After restarting squid, I could see in the log as below:

pinger: Initialising ICMP pinger ...

2010/12/18 16:58:48| pinger: ICMP socket opened.

2010/12/18 16:58:48| pinger: ICMPv6 socket opened

That I think solved the problem. Have fun.

What's coming in Mandriva 2011

2010-12-05T19:29:00.003+08:00

After the wonderful news that Mandriva would be continuing as usual despite financial difficulties and an exodus of developers comes the technical specifications and other tidbits for Mandriva 2011. There are quite a few exciting changes ahead, many of which prove that Mandriva is still a cutting edge distribution.

With 2011, Mandriva will be switching to RPM5. This news was announced by Per Øyvind Karlsen last week and is the first item in the list. RPM5 is actually a fork of RPM with the main goals of supporting XAR, an XML based archiving format, and featuring an integrated dependency resolver. This move has been in the works for quite some time but Mandriva 2011 will be the first release fully committed. Per Øyvind Karlsen said RPM5, "is the only sensible choice." Relatedly, their software center is scheduled a face-lift for a "more modern and simple to use interface."

Mandriva 2011 will be using the Galbraith Latency patch whether the kernel that will be used has it or not - meaning they will backport it if necessary. This latency patch, first brought to wide attention by Phoronix.com, is said to help speed up desktop processes especially in the areas of graphic and video rendering.

It is listed that Mandriva would be adopting systemd for the boot process. Several other distributions started out trying to move to systemd, but so far, they have changed their minds due to difficulties associated with such a major subsystem replacement. But Mandriva is going to give it the ole college try for 2011. The advantages of systemd are faster boots for some setups because of parallel, early background, and dependency booting of processes.

Like several other distributions have done, most of Mandriva's configuration tools will be integrated into the KDE Control Center (System Settings) in 2011.

All the logins and desktops are getting new a new look and improved resource consumption. No further details on any of these items are given at this time, but it's always exciting to see what the new releases will look like.

The installer is supposed to be simplified in order to be more new user-friendly. Desktop selection and installation summary steps will be removed, meaning those will personal preferences or cranky hardware will have to wait until after the install.

During this cycle, Cooker will no longer be frozen before release and instead continue to be developed in parallel. The release code will be branched off and Cooker will proceed as a rolling release.

Finally, something originally asked for over three years ago is finally being implemented. A new user Welcome application will be added in order to help new and migrating users to acclimate to Mandriva. Again, no further details what will exactly be included, but one can speculate it will give links to online resources such as forums and documentation; perhaps a tour of the desktop, menu, and applications; and maybe offer to install popular applications, codecs, and drivers.

And unfortunately, there are still no plans posted about a 64-bit One release. One has the advantage of being shipped with proprietary codecs and drivers that aren't available in the other versions, so a 64-bit version would be extremely handy.

Of course, there are lots of other highly technical deep code improvements ahead as well. But just looking at the items that users will notice easily, Mandriva 2011 certainly sounds very exciting. A release candidate is scheduled for April 25 and final is planned for May 30.

Source

Firefox 4 Beta and Greasemonkey Add-on

2010-10-29T17:35:00.002+08:00

If you are using Firefox 4 Beta (i'm using Beta 6) and want to install Greasemonkey add-on through Tools --> Add-ons, you're out of luck. But there's a website that provides nightly build Greasemonkey:

https://arantius.com/misc/gm-nightly/

Click Allow if prompted before installing. This add-on is for testing purposes and may not stable. Please remember that you're also using Firefox Beta.

Have fun!

A preview of next flash player released

2010-09-16T12:24:00.004+08:00

A preview release of the next Flash Player released. Codenamed as Square, designated as version 10.2.161.22) and available for download right from Adobe Labs. It is not only available in 32-bit but also in 64-bit for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. For the 64-bit release,this is the first time preview for Mac and Windows OS users.

This release has an advantage for IE9 Beta users where it has been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE. Flash Player "Square" leverages the new GPU support available with IE 9 Beta to deliver a faster and more responsive user experience (more than 35% improved performance).

Users are encouraged to test this release especially for the 64-bit. If you encounter any issues, please file a bug report here: https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

KDE 4.5 stable released

2010-08-11T19:53:00.003+08:00

KDE 4.5 stable released. For Mandriva users, please add KDE 4.5 repo (as root):

64-bit:

urpmaddmedia kde-4.5 http://ftp.twaren.net/Unix/X/KDE/stable/4.5.0/Mandriva/2010.1/x86_64/

32-bit:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5 http://ftp.twaren.net/Unix/X/KDE/stable/4.5.0/Mandriva/2010.1/i586/

You may want to remove the old KDE repo first.

or if you prefer KDE server as your repo thusly:

64-bit:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.5.0/Mandriva/2010.1/x86_64

32-bit:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.5.0/Mandriva/2010.1/i586

Have fun!

KDE 4.5 RC3 released for Mandriva

2010-08-02T02:27:00.003+08:00

KDE 4.5 Release Candidate 3 is released for Mandriva users. The final version will be available next week. This last RC is intended for verifying no showstoppers will creep into the final release of 4.5.0. It will also interest those who want an early look at what is coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer.

To install, please add KDE 4.5RC3 repo first:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5rc3 http://ftp.twaren.net/Unix/X/KDE/unstable/4.4.95/Mandriva/2010.1/x86_64/

I use above mirror for my repo for faster access. You may want to use main KDE server for your repo thus:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.5rc3 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/4.4.95/Mandriva/2010.1/x86_64/

For x86 (32-bit) users, please change the path x86_64 to i586. Then run urpmi --auto-select to update your KDE packages.

Have fun with your new KDE!

Mandriva Linux Spring 2010 released

2010-07-09T16:10:00.006+08:00

Mandriva Linux 2010.1 aka Mandriva Linux Spring 2010 code named Farman released. For more information please check out Mandriva's Blog and website especially the new features in this release. You can download it here. Please also read the errata page for know bugs and other issues.

Have fun with this latest Mandriva offering.

Batch resize your images using mogrify

2010-06-24T14:04:00.003+08:00

Let's say you have lots of images and want to upload them to Facebook or to your website but you have to resize or edit all the images to suitable size for faster web access without losing too much of the quality of them. One tool to help you in this situation is mogrify.

mogrify is in imagemagick package. So you just need to install the package to get it. How to use it? Let's see some examples below:

1. mogrify -resize 320x240 *.jpg

This command will resize all files ending with .jpg (jpeg image) to resolution of 320x240 and replace all the files with the same name. mogrify may not produce the exact resolution to preserve aspect ratio.

2.mogrify -path Image-Small/ -resize 800x600 -density 25x25 *.gif

This command will resize all images ending with .gif to 800x600 with density 25x25. The resized images will be saved in Image-Small directory. So the original files is unmodified.

3. mogrify -resize 50% rose.jpg
This will resize the image to 50% and the original file replaced.

4. mogrify -format jpg *.png
This will convert all png files in currect directory to jpeg.

mogrify has many options for you to explore. Just man mogrify to read the manual or go to http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html. For more command-line examples, go here.

Mandriva 2010 Spring RC released

2010-05-21T22:24:00.002+08:00

The Mandriva developers have announced the arrival of a release candidate (RC) for Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring (2010.1). This is to be the last development release for Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring and the final version is scheduled for release on the 3rd of June, 2010.

Building on the previous beta releases, the RC is based on the 2.6.33.4 Linux kernel and features the latest GNOME 2.30.1 and KDE 4.4.3 desktops. A number of changes have been implemented in the Nautilus file manager in anticipation of the GNOME 3.0 release with the GNOME Shell. Built-in desktop applications include version 3.2 of OpenOffice.org, Firefox 3.6.3, the Chromium web browser and version 1.92 of the Transmission BitTorrent client. Other changes include use of the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware and improvements to the Mandriva tools, such as data encryption, parental control and network profiles.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter. It's not for the faint of heart.

More info can be read here: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2010.1_RC

Current Mandriva situation

2010-05-13T19:14:00.002+08:00

These last days, numerous rumors have been spread about Mandriva’s situation. Out of respect for our clients and community, we want to clear the situation.

Mandriva has always been involved in investment and aquisition processes. Over the past years, Mandriva bought Edge-IT, Conectiva and Linbox FAS. Today, Mandriva is in takeover talks with various investors. These discussions concerning new investments in Mandriva are not new, they have happened all throughout the life of the company, and there are still going on today. We want to stress out the fact that Mandriva has not been bought by anybody.

Like many other companies, Mandriva has been impacted by the economic slow-down and took advantage of this period to develop and improve its products: an operating system dedicated to a uniquely ergonomic server (MES5.1), the most reliable free machine-management software on the market (Pulse2), Mandriva Smart Desktop to simplify the use of office desktops, education-dedicated distribution. Mandriva is also involved in many research projects, and is constantly working with the community to increase the efficiency and ease-of-use of its distribution.

We are beginning to harvest the results of this development work with hundreds of thousands of PCs using the Mandriva OS sold in South America, Asia and rapid sales of Pulse2 and MES5 in Europe. So it is unsurprising that Mandriva has once again attracted the interest of industry decision-makers.

Arnaud Laprévote
Mandriva’s CEO

Source

Mandriva is up for sale - The Inquirer

2010-05-13T16:14:00.000+08:00

Mandriva is up for sale - The Inquirer

imapproxy will find a new home

2010-05-04T00:15:00.005+08:00

This is a message sent out to imapproxy-info mailing list by the maintainer Dave McMurtrie:

Good morning,

I'm writing today to let you know that I'm officially retiring from my duties as, well, the sole keeper of all things imapproxy.

You've probably noticed that over the past year I haven't exactly been lighting this project on fire. In fact, I've been doing pretty much the bare minimum I had to do to keep it alive. Patches have come in and I've ignored them. Questions have been raised to me and I've ignored them, too. I can assure you all that it's been a matter of laziness and not hubris. Well, it's been a mixture of laziness and the fact that I've been extremely busy in my day job. I never took the time to make imapproxy into a "real" project with a real team of people working on it
and it suffered because of that.

I had considered just shutting the whole thing down, but there are still a couple people who run it so I embarked on a quest to find a new home for the software. The first group I thought of was the Squirrelmail team. imapproxy and Squirrelmail are a great complement to each other, and the Squirrelmail team is actually a team and not one guy like I am, so they're much more likely to be responsive to patch review and putting out new releases. Also, I've been running Squirrelmail myself for many years at more than one place of employment and I've been very impressed with their level of user support. They're a fine group, and I felt they would make for a much better caretaker of imapproxy than I have been.

With much trepidation, I contacted the Squirrelmail folks to gauge interest. I'm pleased to let you know that after much thought and discussion they're willing to take over the imapproxy project and keep it alive. Details of the transition are still being discussed, but it's already in the works. The imapproxy.org domain has been transferred over and they're now hosting the old website.

Many thanks go out to all the kind folks who have supported imapproxy (and indirectly, me) over the years.

Thanks!

Dave
--
Dave McMurtrie, SPE
Email Systems Team Leader
Carnegie Mellon University,
Computing Services

I myself, have been using imapproxy for 7 years and impressed with its performance. 4 years with squirrelmail and 3 years with roundcube. It helps a lot to enhance the performance of my mailserver. Hope the new maintainer will keep up the good job of Dave.

Thanks Dave. :)

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 2 available

2010-05-03T19:52:00.004+08:00

Second Beta release of mandriva Linux is available for test now. Download the DVD iso for your architecture. You can also dump it on USB key as an installation media. This second beta release comes with many updates and improvements on major softwares. Mandriva tools have also been updated and propose new functionalities:

data encryption: you want to protect your data. Encrypt your home directory or your system: it’s as easy as clic!
parental control: many bug fixes, you can now control not only network access but also applications
network profiles: add your network services in your network profiles.
Mandriva Directory Server: this new release proposes new functionnalities to help you manage a LDAP directory (userquota module, massive users import, OpenSSH LDAP public keys management..)

More details on this Beta2 release can be read here. See here for download mirror.

Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring Beta 1 available

2010-04-04T19:37:00.003+08:00

First beta of Mandriva 2010 Spring Beta 1 released. Mandriva Spring final will be out on June 6th as planned by Mandriva Team. For those who want to test it, you can download it from your nearest mirror. For those who use Cooker like me, you don't need to download because you may get the upadates via drakrpm.

This release includes GNOME 2.30 (released on April 1st) and a preview edition of GNOME-Shell, which will be part of GNOME 3 (which is planned for release on september 2010). Of course, KDE 4.4.2 is also available, as well as various updates for many programs in the distribution.

As usual all your feedbacks are really important to help in improving global quality of distribution. You can report improvements proposals and/or bugs in Mandriva Bugzilla.

Mozilla 3.6.3 released. Fixed critical security hole.

2010-04-02T23:55:00.002+08:00

Mozilla has just announced the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3. It only fixed a critical security flaw that could potentially allow remote code execution (see bug 555109).

The memory corruption flaw, demonstrated by Nils of MWR Infosecurity at Pwn2Own 2010, is caused by moving DOM nodes between documents and triggering garbage collection at the right time, leaving an incorrectly retained node which would be used later. This, in turn, could be used to execute remotely injected code. Mozilla say the exploit only affects Firefox 3.6, but that it plans to patch Firefox 3.5 in a coming release "just in case there is an alternate way of triggering the bug".

There are no other changes in Firefox 3.6.3.

KDE 4.4 is ready for Mandriva

2010-02-17T15:16:00.004+08:00

Run one of these to add KDE-4.4.0 repo (depending on your OS of course):

32 bits:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.4.0 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.4.0/Mandriva/2010.0/i586

64 bits:

urpmi.addmedia kde-4.4.0 ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/4.4.0/Mandriva/2010.0/x86_64

After adding the KDE 4.4. repository you will need to update, download and install all of KDE 4.4 packages. You can do all of this in one command, but, I, for safety, prefer to do it in two steps. First, update the repositories and download all the packages before installing them to make sure that the installation is possible:

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select --test

When all packages finish downloading and you see a message at the end saying that the installation is possible, you can run the same command without the --test parameter to now actually perform the installation:

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select

After the package installation finishes, logout and log back in, that's it !! you will have a brand new, shiny, awesome and rocking KDE 4.4 desktop :D

Enjoy!!

Credit goes to Juan Luis Baptiste for the info.

originalip option in dansguardian

2010-01-22T10:08:00.004+08:00

I upgraded my firewall on Mandriva 2009.1 to 2010 and got into problem with dansguardian. Client computers got DansGuardian 400 - Bad Request , url is malformed for certain sites such as google and facebook. I suspected it must be related to new option introduced by newly installed dansguardian (2.10.1.1). In changelog, I got this:

Jan 21 17:18:39 firewall6 dansguardian[1090]: Destination host of dnl-15.geo.kaspersky.com did not match the original destination IP of 95.211.85.42
Jan 21 17:18:40 firewall6 dansguardian[1111]: Destination host of www.google-analytics.com did not match the original destination IP of 72.14.213.113
Jan 21 17:18:40 firewall6 dansguardian[1074]: Destination host of us.bc.yahoo.com did not match the original destination IP of 216.252.124.30
Jan 21 17:18:40 firewall6 dansguardian[1072]: Destination host of dnl-11.geo.kaspersky.com did not match the original destination IP of 38.117.98.202
Jan 21 17:18:41 firewall6 dansguardian[1091]: Destination host of dnl-04.geo.kaspersky.com did not match the original destination IP of 38.117.98.199
Jan 21 17:18:42 firewall6 dansguardian[1083]: Destination host of dnl-07.geo.kaspersky.com did not match the original destination IP of 38.117.98.199
Jan 21 17:18:42 firewall6 dansguardian[1116]: Destination host of newsrss.bbc.co.uk did not match the original destination IP of 212.58.226.73
Jan 21 17:18:43 firewall6 dansguardian[1076]: Destination host of dnl-11.geo.kaspersky.com did not match the original destination IP of 38.117.98.202
Jan 21 17:18:43 firewall6 dansguardian[1086]: Destination host of dnl-02.geo.kaspersky.com did not match the original destination IP of 38.117.98.196
Jan 21 17:18:49 firewall6 dansguardian[1270]: Started sucessfully.

After diff'ing between previous dansguardian.conf (currently in use) and the current version of the file (not in use). It turned out that originalip option was the culprit. It was on by default if it wasn't in there. To turn it off, I must tell it off as below:

# Network Settings
#
# the IP that DansGuardian listens on. If left blank DansGuardian will
# listen on all IPs. That would include all NICs, loopback, modem, etc.
# Normally you would have your firewall protecting this, but if you want
# you can limit it to a certain IP. To bind to multiple interfaces,
# specify each IP on an individual filterip line.
filterip = 192.168.6.6

# the port that DansGuardian listens to.
filterport = 8080

# the ip of the proxy (default is the loopback - i.e. this server)
proxyip = 127.0.0.1

# the port DansGuardian connects to proxy on
proxyport = 3128

originalip = off

This is what changelog says about originalip option:

Fri 5th June 2009 - DansGuardian 2.10.1.1 - stable

Add "originalip" option to dansguardian.conf, for determining the original destination IP in transparent proxy set-ups, and ensuring that the destination domain of the request resolves to that IP. This can help to address a particular transparent proxy security vulnerability (US-CERT VU#435052), but because of certain limitations - only implemented on Linux/Netfilter; potential breakage of websites using round-robin DNS - the code is not enabled by default. Enable by passing "--enable-orig-ip" to the configure script. Fix a crash which could occur when dealing with simultaneous incoming connections in configurations using more than one listening socket. Fix a crash when checking time limits on item lists. Fix potential usage of uninitialised memory during phrase filtering.

Luckily, Mandriva package was built with --enable-orig-ip enabled.

Cheers.

Stripping comments from a file

2010-01-20T15:42:00.003+08:00

You can run this command to strip comments (line starting with a #) and empty lines from a file in Linux:

cat /etc/squid/squid.conf | grep -v ^# | grep -v ^$

I usually run this command on squid.conf, a file heavily commented.

To save the lines to file squiD.conf, you can run:

cat /etc/squid/squid.conf | grep -v ^# | grep -v ^$ > squiD.conf

Have fun!...

Nat Friedman leaves Novell

2010-01-09T12:42:00.002+08:00

Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza were the founders of Ximian project. They both were known for their famous GNOME project where Ximian bornt. You can read what Nat will do next in his blog.

We are using MySQL, help save it

2009-12-17T11:15:00.002+08:00

As Oracle are progressing to acquire Sun, the future of MySQL is at stake. Read Monty's article about this at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html to understand this issue better.

How to change KDE 4 startup sound

2009-12-06T02:31:00.006+08:00

It may not obvious for beginner. These are the steps on how to change startup sound in KDE 4.

1. Open KDE System Setting

2. Double click on the notifications to open it.

3. For Event source, select KDE System Notifications as below.

4. From the list, select Login and click browse button to change the sound file.

From here, there are lots of options for you to try. Have fun!

Google Chrome 64-bit for Linux

2009-12-04T02:27:00.006+08:00

After searching for hours for Google Chrome 64-bit for Mandriva 2010, I found this one works great. Please expect some bugs. At least flash plugin works with the help of Mozilla's. This package may work for other distro too. You have to try it yourself.

Mandriva Linux 2010 released

2009-11-05T18:24:00.004+08:00

Announced on Nov 4th 2009, the release of Mandriva 2010. It is available in three editions : One, Powerpack and Free, for architectures i586 and x86-64. One and Free can be downloaded for free from official Mandriva mirrors and via BitTorrent.

To know what this edition has to offer, read here.

What really attracts me is this:

Mandriva Linux 2010 includes Go-OO branch of the popular OpenOffice.org. That means more features, like SVG support, 3D transitions, VBA support, KDE 4 integration and Includes useful extensions.

So for those who *really* need these features of Go-OO, should consider use this edition of Mandriva Linux.

Have fun!

how to solve urpmi or rpm database locked error?

2009-10-03T12:45:00.003+08:00

I'm sure for those using package manager for rpm-based distro had encountered "rpm database locked". For Mandriva users, they will encounter similar error such as "urpmi database locked". Those errors are produced when other application is using rpm or urpmi database and to prevent simultaneous access to those databases. In many cases though, there is no application accessing rpm/urpmi database simultaneously but the stale locks are still there. This could happen when the application accessing the database terminated abnormally.

To overcome this problem, you have to remove the lock files manually. For rpm lock file it is in /var/lib/rpm/.RPMLOCK and urpmi lock file is in /var/lib/urpmi/.LOCK. Depends on what error produced, you need to remove either one. Obviously, for error "urpmi database locked", you need to remove file in /var/lib/urpmi/.LOCK and afterthat if you receive error "rpm database locked", you need to remove the other one. Usually if you receive error "urpmi database locked", you need to remove both stale lock files. This is from my experience.

Have fun!

Slackware 13 is ready

2009-08-30T11:56:00.006+08:00

Slackware, the first distribution I have been using since 1995 , one of the oldest distributions, has released version 13. One of the most important to note is that this is the first version that comes with 64-bit port. Slackware Linux known as a stable and rock-solid distribution has its unique fans even there are many modern distributions suitable for beginners and experts.

More details about the release can be found in the release notes and in the changes and hints and packages text files.

KDE 4.3 released

2009-08-05T19:34:00.002+08:00

KDE 4.3 (Caizen) was released on 4th August 2009. KDE 4.3 is the latest major release in the KDE 4 series, delivering a more polished user experience. The KDE community has fixed over 10,000 bugs and implemented almost 2,000 feature requests in the last 6 months. Close to 63,000 changes were checked in by a little under 700 contributors. Read on for an overview of the changes in the KDE 4.3 Desktop Workspace, Application Suites and the KDE 4.3 Development Platform.

More info can be read on kde.org

Maatkit: A great MySQL toolbox

2009-07-21T14:13:00.000+08:00

What is Maatkit? (copied verbatim from its website)

Maatkit makes MySQL easier and safer to manage. It provides simple, predictable ways to do things you cannot otherwise do. It would be nice if these features were included with MySQL, but they are not. That's why Maatkit is now shipping by default with many GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian and CentOS. Unfortunately, it isn't included in Mandriva repo. In that case, we can download it here or read here for more ways to download it.

You can use Maatkit to prove replication is working correctly, fix corrupted data, automate repetitive tasks, speed up your servers, and much, much more.

Maatkit is sponsored by Percona, who releases it under the GPL and offers paid support and sponsorship of new features. Maatkit is hosted on Google Code and free support is available in the Maatkit Discuss Google Group.

What can Maatkit do and more can be read on the website.

Jeremy Zawodny highlights a few of his favorite utilities here.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 released

2009-07-01T10:13:00.005+08:00

Yeah. You've heard it. The latest firefox has been released. It supports the new HTML elements such as audio and video tags. It also supports Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora natively and speed improvements. I haven't experience it myself though because I'm waiting for it to be in Mandriva Cooker's repositories and it will be there soon. You guys can download it from Mozilla's mirror if you don't want to wait.

Release notes can be read here.
Download latest firefox here.

Getting IP address from computer name using samba

2009-06-24T09:54:00.002+08:00

If you know the name of a computer from your network and want to know the IP address of it using samba (if you're using Linux or UNIX-based OS), issue this command:

nmblookup -I computername

Have fun!

Permanently redirect your client to https using apache webserver

2009-06-10T18:34:00.004+08:00

If your webserver has no problem with https service, this is a working solution that I found to permanently redirect your visitors (clients) to https port of your webserver. I found many solutions but this one worked for me as I tested it. Why permanent secure connection? This is really important for applications that need higher security to protect your data. For more info on this topic please google. :)

These 3 lines are needed to put in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf :

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]

Where to put them? Search Directory directive in httpd.conf. Below is sample from httpd.conf
on Mandriva.

# Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
# or any combination of:
# Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
# Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
# doesn't give it to you.
# The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see
# http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#options
# for more information.

Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

#
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes

AllowOverride None

# Controls who can get stuff from this server.
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

After putting those 3 lines:

RewriteEngine On
# Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
# or any combination of:
# Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
# Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
# doesn't give it to you.
# The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see
# http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#options
# for more information.

Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

#
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes

AllowOverride None

# Controls who can get stuff from this server.
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]

So now test it. Should be ok. If not, check the log and troubleshoot.

That's the whole ball of wax.

Handling tif image produced by MS Office Document Scanning

2009-05-28T19:36:00.003+08:00

I scanned a paper using MS Office Document Scanning (on Windows XP) and the output was a tiff image file. Using file command, I could see the file type as below:

image.tif: TIFF image data, little-endian

As usual, I wanted to open it with a image editing software like gimp or imagemagick or krita or even with document viewer like okular but to no avail. The error produced by GIMP was: unsupported layout, No RGBA loader. The error produced by Krita was: Cannot create storage. I tried convert a utility packaged with imagemagick to convert the image to jpg :

[zamri@triniton KINGSTON]# convert image.tif -quality 90 kpd.jpg

I got this error:
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 512 (0x200) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 513 (0x201) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image: unknown field with tag 514 (0x202) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 37677 (0x932d) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 37678 (0x932e) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: image.tif: unknown field with tag 37680 (0x9330) encountered. `TIFFReadDirectory' @ tiff.c/TIFFWarnings/525.
convert: compression not supported `image.tif' @ tiff.c/ReadTIFFImage/811.
convert: missing an image filename `kpd.jpg' @ convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/2776.

So I searched the internet and I found the solution on this website. I installed foremost by issuing this command: urpmi foremost. Luckily Mandriva has this utility in its repositories. Then I issued this command:

foremost -i image.tif -o image

The first argument -i is the input file and second arg -o is for the dir where we want to extract the content of the image. It appeared that the tif file was compressed and contained many files including the jpg file that of interest to me. The output of above command was a directory (folder) named image. In the directory,I got:

audit.txt jpg/ ole/

In directory jpg, I got :

00000000.jpg 00000703.jpg

The file named 00000000.jpg was the image file type jpeg that can be opened with any image viewer. The other one was the thumbnail.

Mounting Mac OS X partition from Linux

2009-05-15T14:11:00.004+08:00

My friend asked me to save his data on a Mac OS X partition since his machine couldn't boot properly into Mac OS X GUI mode. So I booted the machine with Ubuntu 5.04 Live CD. I know it was an old version but who cares as long as it supports hfsplus filesystem used by Mac OS X.

So I mounted one of the partitions where he saved his work with this:

sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda5 /mnt (for Ubuntu)

(If you are using other distro and logged in as root, just omit the sudo from above command.)

where /dev/hda5 is the partition and /mnt is the mount point.

From now, insert usb drive and copy file to it. After this, he can wipe out all partitions and/or reinstall Mac OS X.

KDE 4.3 Beta 1 released for testing

2009-05-14T18:51:00.002+08:00

KDE.org announced the release of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 for testing. This is the first review of the 3rd iteration of KDE 4 desktop.

Some highlights of this beta release are:
1.Integration of PolicyKit and Geolocation services
2.More usable Run command pop-up (press alt+F2 to activate)
3. Many new and improved add-ons for plasma
4. Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform
5. New tree mode in System Settings

and many more. For a complete list of changes, you can browse subversion log.

Reference
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.3-beta1.php

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring released

2009-04-30T10:29:00.003+08:00

Mandriva has announced the launch of the final version of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (codename Pauillac). This new version comes with a host of improvements and changes, as always. Fun fact: this is the first release reported to us by Anne Nicolas instead of Adam Williamson. For those that keep score.

The Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring comes in the flavour of your choice, KDE, GNOME or LXDE, in more than 70 languages. There's the Free edition (100% open source software) in 2 DVDs for 32 and 64 architecture and the One edition (installable live CD, available in KDE and GNOME versions). Major updates includes KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26, Xorg server 1.6, Linux kernel 2.6.29, Xfce 4.6, Qt Creator 1, Tcl/Tk 8.6, syslinux 3.75, and much more.

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring comes with an improvement in boot time. The tools of Mandriva Control Center have also been optimised. Network center now supports advanced network configuration together with additional pre-configured Internet providers, integration with new network devices and support for different wireless regulatory domains. msev, the Mandriva security framework, has been also redesigned.

The ext4 file system is now supported in the stable version and proposed during installation. Last update of syslinux comes with the HDT module (Hardware Detection Tool), which brings you a way to detect all your hardware before booting your system.

You can take the 2009 Spring tour, read the Release notes and Errata, and of course, download.

Source

Firefox 3.0.10 fixes critical vulnerability

2009-04-28T22:40:00.003+08:00

The Mozilla developers have announced the release of version 3.0.10 of their open source Firefox web browser. The security and stability release addresses a critical security vulnerability introduced in Firefox 3.0.9.

The vulnerability is a regression which in some cases caused frequent crashes. Users running the HTML Validator add-on were particularly affected, although other users also experienced the crashes. The problem was due to memory corruption, similar to problems identified as security vulnerabilities in the past.

More details about the release can be found in the release notes. Firefox 3.0.10 is available to download, or Firefox users can use the Firefox update service by selecting Help, then Check For Updates.

Source

Testing Red Alert 2 with wine

2009-04-25T18:48:00.011+08:00

I had unsuccessful attempt to run (old) Red Alert 2 game with sound using wine 1.x.x. After ignoring to test it for a few months due to my busy work, yesterday I decided to try it again. It worked. My wine version is 1.1.17. My Red Alert 2 is Yuri's Revenge with no-cd patch. Below is how I set wine to make sound works. The graphics setting is just an additional setting to set virtual destop to make the game runs in a window (and not in full screen as default).

Audio Setting
Run winecfg to change audio setting for wine.

Click on the Audio tab. Make sure PulseAudio (recent wine support PulseAudio driver) and OSS driver checked and in DirectSound section make sure Hardware Acceleration is set to Emulation. And then click OK button to save the settings.

Graphics Settings

Click on Graphics tab and check Emulate a virtual desktop setting and set Desktop size to 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768.

Now it's ready to be run. See screenshots below.

postfix can't connect to MySQL

2009-04-13T18:15:00.000+08:00

I got this error in syslog when postfix was trying to connect to MySQL:

Apr 13 17:34:53 webmail postfix/smtpd[6726]: warning: connect to mysql server localhost: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)
Apr 13 17:34:53 webmail postfix/smtpd[6726]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from rv-out-0506.google.com[209.85.198.233]: 451 4.3.0 : Temporary lookup failure; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=

I got a reference to MySQL database in my main.cf which triggered the error:

local_recipient_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/sql-recipients.cf

From the error it was obvious postfix couldn't connect to MySQL. Email from outside wouldn't be received properly by dbmail. I checked MySQL service and it was running and I could log into MySQL manually. I found a solution after googling a bit. The cause was in file /etc/postfix/master.cf. I got smtp service of postfix to run chroot'ed (see y below).

#service type private unpriv chroot wakeup maxproc command + args
smtp inet n - y - - smtpd

So I changed the line to:

#service type private unpriv chroot wakeup maxproc command + args
smtp inet n - n - - smtpd

Voila!. It worked. See log below:

Apr 13 18:03:02 webmail postfix/smtpd[7039]: connect from rv-out-0506.google.com[209.85.198.239]
Apr 13 18:03:03 webmail sqlgrey: grey: domain awl match: updating 209.85.198(209.85.198.239), gmail.com
Apr 13 18:03:03 webmail postfix/smtpd[7039]: B3246A3075: client=rv-out-0506.google.com[209.85.198.239]
Apr 13 18:03:04 webmail postfix/cleanup[7042]: B3246A3075: message-id=<23c8d5620904130314j7f4c619di57c7d8c0d217ed62@mail.gmail.com>
Apr 13 18:03:04 webmail postfix/qmgr[7033]: B3246A3075: from=, size=2277, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/smtpd[7046]: connect from webmail.myfakedomain.net[127.0.0.1]
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/smtpd[7046]: 26BBFA3076: client=rv-out-0506.google.com[209.85.198.239]
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/cleanup[7042]: 26BBFA3076: message-id=<23c8d5620904130314j7f4c619di57c7d8c0d217ed62@mail.gmail.com>
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/qmgr[7033]: 26BBFA3076: from=, size=2751, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/smtpd[7046]: disconnect from webmail.myfakedomain.net[127.0.0.1]
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail dbmail/lmtpd[20480]: Message:[serverchild] serverchild.c,PerformChildTask(+349): incoming connection from [127.0.0.1] by pid [20480]
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/lmtp[7043]: B3246A3075: to=, relay=127.0.0.1[127.0.0.1]:10025, delay=2, delays=0.96/0.01/0/1, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok, id=01032-05, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10026): 250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 26BBFA3076)
Apr 13 18:03:05 webmail postfix/qmgr[7033]: B3246A3075: removed

CUPS: Unable to open device and permission denied

2009-04-08T17:04:00.000+08:00

I use CUPS for my printer system and I got this error:

Unable to open device "hal:///org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_3f0_217_00SGKGB09615_if0_printer_noserial": Permission denied

How to solve this problem? The settings of the printer was correct and was just a permission problem. Googling a bit, I found this site.

These steps what I did to solve it:
1. cd /usr/lib/cups/backend
2. chmod 700 hal (previously 755)
3. chmod 700 usb (previously 755)

For step 2 and 3, I found out that you have to change the mod to 700 although the file hal and usb has 'rwx' on them on the 'user' part. The culprit was the 'group' and the 'other' part of the permission. They should be chmod'ed to 0. On my system, the 'group' and 'other' part of both files was 5 (r-x) previously.

I hope this saves some people's time of head scratching.

clamav detects conficker

2009-04-01T18:42:00.000+08:00

Taken from http://www.clamav.net/2009/01/29/conficker-aka-downadup/

Some of you may have heard of a current major outbreak of a virus known as Downadup that has been reported at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7842013.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7832652.stm. It has been estimated that move than 9 million PCs are infected across the world.

ClamAV detects Downadup, also known as Conficker, as Worm.Downadup. Once on a system it downloads components that ClamAV detects as members of the Trojan.Downloader- family of signatures.

The virus primarily exploits MS08-067; it can also spread through USB sticks. Since the virus is not spread by email we don’t expect to see much activity in our core user-base, which tends to use ClamAV to scan emails. We are, nevertheless, keeping an eye out for it through freshclam’s statistics gathering system – we are yet to see any obvious spike of activity from it. If we hear anything we’ll let you know.

Saving date and time to hardware clock manually

2009-03-14T17:11:00.000+08:00

If you change date and time in console, the hardware clock may not be updated instantly. There's a script usually find in many distros that save the date and time to hardware clock before the computer off or restart. Some GUI apps changed the hardware clock if you change the software clock. If you want to change the hardware clock manually, here's the command:

hwclock --systohc

and obviously, you have to run it as root.

dbmail and database default character set

2009-03-14T13:40:00.000+08:00

I migrated my mailserver to another server recently. I installed dbmail from scratch and restored my database into new mysql server. When I started dbmail to connect to the database server, I found out in syslog (see below) that the dbmail-imapd couldn't connect to the server because of the different character set. It's a FATAL error!. I found out that my old database used latin1 as the default character set and dbmail used utf8 as I defaulted in /etc/dbmail.conf. So I just change the default character set of my dbmail database in MySQL to utf8 (see below). This solved the problem.

In syslog before changing the character set:
Mar 14 13:01:54 webmail.fakedomain.com.my dbmail-imapd[13986]: Error:[sql] dbmysql.c,db_mysql_check_collations(+138): collation mismatch, your MySQL configuration specifies a different charset than the data currently in your DBMail database.
Mar 14 13:01:54 webmail.fakedomain.com.my dbmail-imapd[13986]: FATAL:[server] server.c,StartServer(+129): Unable to connect to database.

To change default character set of a dbmail database:
ALTER DATABASE dbmail DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

In syslog after changing database default character set:
Mar 15 13:20:29 webmail dbmail/imap4d[14107]: Message:[server] pool.c,child_register(+299): register child [14107]
Mar 15 13:20:29 webmail dbmail/imap4d[14109]: Message:[server] pool.c,child_register(+299): register child [14109]
Mar 15 13:20:29 webmail dbmail/imap4d[14111]: Message:[server] pool.c,child_register(+299): register child [14111]
Mar 15 13:20:29 webmail dbmail/imap4d[14113]: Message:[server] pool.c,child_register(+299): register child [14113]
Mar 15 13:20:29 webmail dbmail/imap4d[14101]: Message:[server] pool.c,scoreboard_state(+590): Scoreboard state:children [4/10], spares [4 (2 - 4)]

packagekit and Mandriva Cooker

2009-02-26T18:49:00.000+08:00

I use Mandriva Cooker. A bleeding edge distro. packagekit is the latest offering from Mandriva for package management. Coupled with KDE's kpackagekit, it integrates nicely with KDE 4. It's still not recommended for general though. The interface is confusing for first time user. Every button can be clicked while the other process running and it crashes often. Please use Mandriva Control Center for it.

Let's see some screenshots of it.

Login with admin privilege can make matters worse

2009-02-05T18:26:00.000+08:00

Many windows users don't know that they login with administrator privileges. When viruses or worms attack, they use the user's privileges and they can make a catastrophe.

A new analysis claims that over 90% of the Windows security vulnerabilities reported last year were made worse by users logged in with administrative privileges -- an issue Microsoft has been hotly debating recently.

BeyondTrust Corp. (BTC), a software development company specializing in enterprise rights management, has indicated that the act of giving users administrative rights may leave systems more open to risk.

The report issued by BTC was prepared by assessing security vulnerability bulletins released by Microsoft in 2008, and identifying specific "mitigating factors" (those that could reduce or negate the risk of an attack) within the bulletin. If Microsoft reported that having fewer security privileges would negate or eliminate risk, BTC concluded that the vulnerability was admin-privilege related.

The result of the analysis of the 154 critical Microsoft vulnerabilities indicated that a full 92% could have been prevented if users were not logged into their systems with administrator status. BTC believes that restricting the number of users who can log in with these privileges will "close the window of opportunity" for attackers. This is particularly true for users of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. (Source: computerworld.com)

Microsoft has been relatively transparent in their revelation of security vulnerabilities, and has worked with organizations such as Cert.org to identify and address security concerns to the online community. (Source: cert.org)

While Microsoft is not denying the vulnerabilities present in its various Windows operating systems, they have not been exactly forthright about how internal programming "holes" (such as increased vulnerability for users with admin privileges) may make users susceptible to threats or attacks.

I think Microsoft users should be told that using admin privilege accounts is a potential security risk. I found out that many of them don't want to use normal/limited account for their daily account.

Linux users always use ordinary account (non-root acount) to do tasks that do not require admin/root privileges. Ubuntu users for example used to sudo command to do admin tasks like installing packages, upgrade packages etc. Other Linux users are very familiar with su command to do the same tasks. Certain apps will warn you if you run them as admin (ie root). This way Linux users reduce the risks of being infected or attacked by viruses, worms and other types of malwares.

Source

How to setup a https server with apache

2009-01-22T18:51:00.000+08:00

Setting up an https server in Apache is easier by watching video. Don't you agree? :)

Linux 2.6.28's five best features

2009-01-10T11:41:00.000+08:00

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Created Jan 9 2009 - 3:29pm

While you were likely to be opening up Christmas presents, Linus Torvalds was giving Linux users around the world a special present: the release of the next major Linux kernel: Linux 2.6.28 [1].

We had some time to tinker with this latest and greatest Linux, and it's my kind of Christmas present: solid improvements to my favorite operating system. Here are the five features that I think most of us will appreciate the most as we move into the New Year.

1) Ext4

The next step up in Linux file systems, has finally arrived. Ext4 [2] improves, well, everything about hard drive storage. It gives you larger file-system and file sizes, faster I/O, better journaling, and it can defragment your drive on the fly.

In particular, its delayed allocation functionality greatly improves hard disk write performance. This won't help your PC hard drive that much, but if you're running a database server, you'll see significant improvements. How fast is 'significant?' In my informal tests with MySQL 5.0, I saw write-speed boosts of approximately 30% on a 400GB database. Try it yourself on your servers, you'll be impressed. In addition, since Ext4 can handle up to 1024 petabytes per volume. I expect Ext4 and Sun's ZFS are going to be fighting it out for top server file-system for the next ten-years.

2) GEM Memory Manager for Graphics

Linux is finally getting decent support from the major graphic vendors, like ATI [3] and NVIDIA [4]. That's great, if you have a high-end graphics card with its own memory and processor. But, say you're like the rest of us without much money and you're using the graphics that are built into your motherboard? Linux will run fine on your PC, but your graphics won't be that fast. Until now.

With Linux 2.6.28, GEM (Graphics Execution Manager [5]) Linux finally includes a graphics memory manager. This will matter your graphics memory whether it's on a dedicated card or part of your main memory. By providing a central, common memory manager, GEM enables even ordinary graphics, like the popular and cheap Intel 915 chipset, to run 50% faster [6]. That's a performance boost that anyone can see.

GEM is still very much a work in progress. At this time, only the 915 is fully supported. Other graphic chip developers though are already hard at work getting their drivers to work with GEM. This graphics memory manager will not only make their lives easier, it will also deliver much faster performance for both low-end and top-of-the-line desktop users. In short, GEM may not be much now, but it's going to be a win-win for everyone by this summer.

3) Disk Shock Protection

Ever drop a laptop? I have. So far, I've been lucky and I have smacked a hard drive silly. Laptop vendors know they can't count on everyone being lucky so they've been incorporating drop protection into their notebooks and netbooks.

This works by moving the hard drive read/write heads away from the disk if the laptop detects that it's moving quickly and is likely to be slamming on the floor in a few milliseconds. Until now, though, Linux didn't know a thing about this kind of protection. So, you could end up with Linux trying to get the drive heads to write while the drive firmware was trying to move the out of the way before laptop and concrete had a sudden, violent meeting. Now, Linux will work with most of these fumble-finger proof hard drives. Speaking for klutzes everywhere, I'd like to say thank-you.

4) Staging Drivers

Did you ever want to use a device for Linux where there was 'some' support for it, but it wasn't good enough to be in the main kernel? If you use a lot of new hardware, you've probably been there. As Jake Edge reports [7], "There has been an ongoing struggle between those who want to see drivers get included as quickly as possible versus those who want to see them approach or attain normal kernel quality levels first." He's got that right.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has been leading Linux hackers' efforts to create drivers [8], created the -staging tree for these, not quite ready for prime-time drivers. You don't have to use them, but they're available there if you need them. For example, I wanted access to USB/IP. This driver enables you to USB devices over a TCP/IP network. I'm using it to access printers that are attached to a Belkin Network USB Hub [9]. Is it perfect? No. But it does let me get to those printers so that's a win in my book.

5) Network improvements

The 2.6.28 kernel includes new support for UWB (Ultra Wide Band), Wireless USB, UWB-IP, and Nokia's mobile phone Phonet Network Protocol. That's all well and good, but unless you're one of the few who work with UWB or Phonet, I'm not sure how important that will be. I do think Wireless USB will end up being a big deal. That said, what I think is easily the neatest improvement in 2.6.28's improved networking is that it now supports the minstrel Wi-Fi rate control [10].

Chances are you haven't heard about minstrel. Once you have it on your Wi-Fi equipped computer though you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. Minstrel keeps a constant watch on which Wi-Fi AP (access points) in your area are delivering the fastest possible performance and automatically hook you up with it. With minstrel, you're pretty much guaranteed to always get the best Wi-Fi connection that's available. I like this. I like this a lot. Frankly, based on what I've been seeing while using it with my Linux-powered ThinkPad R61, I'd upgrade to 2.6.28 for this feature alone.

So, my advice to you, is that it any of this sounds good, you can either upgrade your PC to Linux 2.6.28 manually, which is what I did, or you can start encouraging your favorite Linux distribution group to move to 2.6.28 sooner rather than later. You'll be pleased you did.

Source URL:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/linux_2_6_28s_five_best_features

Links:
[1] http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/24/105
[2] http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
[3] http://practical-tech.com/infrastructure/amd-partners-with-novell-to-open-source-ati-graphic-drivers
[4] http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
[5] http://lwn.net/Articles/283793
[6] http://lwn.net/Articles/283798
[7] http://lwn.net/Articles/301192
[8] http://practical-tech.com/infrastructure/linux-hackers-offer-to-create-device-drivers-for-free
[9] http://www.belkin.com/networkusbhub
[10] http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Documentation/mac80211/RateControl/minstrel

How to connect to the internet using Celcom Broadband Modem

2008-12-21T20:43:00.000+08:00

Luckily, I got my hand on my friend's Celcom Broadband USB HSDPA Modem. The model is E220. Fortunately on Mandriva, you don't need to type a command. It's all in the comfort of GUI.

below is the step-by-step process:

1. Open MCC (Mandriva Control Center) and then select Network & Internet (left frame) and then open Setup a new network interface.

2. Select GPRS/Edge/3G and click Next button.

3. The device should be shown and selected here. If not, you have to check whether Linux detected it using lsusb command. In many cases, this shouldn't be a problem for Linux detecting a USB device. Then click the Next button.

4. It will ask you for PIN number. One problem here. You have to enable PIN Protection for your card by going into MS Windows and use the software provided by TM to enable the PIN Protection. It is disabled by default. If it is disabled, you will get error after this even the PIN number is correct. After enable the PIN Protection, you can boot back into Linux and enter the PIN number as in the pic below. Then click Next.

5. This dialog opens and you can just click Next.

6. Select the option as below and then click Next.

7. For dialog as below, just leave all fields blank. Click Next.

8. Finish. A window will appear telling you that the settings has been configured successfully. Click Finish button to close it.

9. You can see the /var/log/messages on what's been going on and important info like IP address, APN, netmask, gateway and handshakes during the connection process.

Example log:
Dec 21 23:50:42 localhost ifup-ppp: pppd started for ppp0 on /dev/ttyUSB0 at 115200
Dec 21 23:50:42 localhost pppd[2605]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
Dec 21 23:50:49 localhost pppd[2605]: Serial connection established.
Dec 21 23:50:49 localhost pppd[2605]: Using interface ppp0
Dec 21 23:50:49 localhost pppd[2605]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
Dec 21 23:50:53 localhost pppd[2605]: Could not determine remote IP address: defaulting to 10.64.64.64
Dec 21 23:50:53 localhost pppd[2605]: local IP address 10.58.182.246
Dec 21 23:50:53 localhost pppd[2605]: remote IP address 10.64.64.64
Dec 21 23:50:53 localhost pppd[2605]: primary DNS address 202. 188.0.133
Dec 21 23:50:53 localhost pppd[2605]: secondary DNS address 202.188.1.5

That's all there is to it. Good luck guys!

Queuegraph - a RRDtool frontend for Postfix queue-statistics

2008-12-12T09:12:00.000+08:00

queuegraph is a very simple mail statistics RRDtool frontend for Postfix that produces daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs of Postfix's active, deferred, incoming and bounce queues.The postfix's queue is usually in /var/spool/postfix. queuegraph is created by Ralf Hildebrandt and based on mailgraph by David Schweikert. Below is the dirs in my system:

# ls /var/spool/postfix/
active/ corrupt/ deferred/ etc/ flush/ incoming/ maildrop/ postgrey/ public/ tmp/ var/
bounce/ defer/ dev/ extern/ hold/ lib64/ pid/ private/ saved/ trace/
#

In connection with qshape it can be used to find out if your server is having performance issues:

a large deferred queue indicates delivery problems
a large active queue points to slow destinations (e.g. a content_filter)

You can download queuegraph here.

Before you download it, pls check the requirements:

rrdtools (Mandriva users: urpmi rrdtool)
librrds-perl (Mandriva users: urpmi perl-rrdtool)

After finish downloading it, extract it: tar xzvf queuegraph.tar.gz
List down the extracted files: ls -l (see below)

# ls
queuegraph.cgi* queuegraph-rrd.sh* README
#

Create a cronjob that runs queuegraph-rrd.sh every minute -- this populates the *.rrd database:

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/queuegraph-rrd.sh

Note: On Mandriva, i created a dir under /etc named cron.minutes and copied file queuegraph-rrd.sh into it: cp queuegraph-rrd.sh /etc/cron/minutes

And then I edited crontab by adding this line:
* * * * * root nice -19 run-parts --report /etc/cron.minutes

Then I copied queuegraph.cgi into the cgi-bin directory of my webserver: cp queuegraph.cgi /var/www/cgi-bin/ or where your webserver's cgi directory is (consult your distro manual.) Then chmoded it to 755 so that my webserver can run it: chmod 755 queuegraph.cgi

To see the statistics created by queuegraph, point your web browser to http://yourwebseraddress/cgi-bin/queuegraph.cgi

This is the graph for my postfix queue (without the Month and Year graph):

That's all there is to it.

sdparm: a utility for SCSI device

2008-11-19T15:35:00.000+08:00

You may have heard of hdparm - a utility for getting info and changing certain parameters for IDE-type hard disk. It can't be used for SCSI hard disk though. So is there any similar utility for scsi hard disk? Yes there's one utility called with almost the same name: sdparm.

You may think that it has the same or at least similar to hdparm. No it is not. Well let's see what we can do with it below.

How to install it?
Ubuntu/Debian: apt-get install sdparm
Mandriva: urpmi sdparm
Redhat: yum install sdparm

A few examples:
list common mode parameters of a disk
sdparm /dev/sda

Sample output:
/dev/sda: COMPAQ BF03697B5A HPB2
Read write error recovery mode page:
AWRE 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
ARRE 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
PER 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
Caching (SBC) mode page:
WCE 0 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 0]
RCD 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
Control mode page:
SWP 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
Informational exceptions control mode page:
EWASC 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
DEXCPT 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
MRIE 4 [cha: y, def: 4, sav: 4]

To list the designators within the device identification VPD page of a disk

 sdparm --inquiry /dev/sda

Sample output:
    /dev/sda: COMPAQ    BF03697B5A        HPB2
Device identification VPD page:
  Addressed logical unit:
    id_type: EUI-64 based,  code_set: Binary
      [0x0010b9fd080c1129]
    id_type: T10 vendor identification,  code_set: ASCII
      vendor id: COMPAQ
      vendor specific: E20C9MKK

To see all parameters for the caching mode page
sdparm --page=ca /dev/sdc

Sample output:
/dev/sda: COMPAQ BF03697B5A HPB2
Caching (SBC) mode page:
IC 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
ABPF 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
CAP 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
DISC 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
SIZE 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
WCE 0 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 0]
MF 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
RCD 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
DRRP 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
WRP 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
DPTL 512 [cha: y, def:512, sav:512]
MIPF 256 [cha: y, def:256, sav:256]
MAPF 512 [cha: y, def:512, sav:512]
MAPFC 512 [cha: y, def:512, sav:512]
FSW 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
LBCSS 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]
DRA 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
NV_DIS 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
NCS 226 [cha: y, def:226, sav:226]
CSS 0 [cha: y, def: 0, sav: 0]

To set the "Writeback Cache Enable" bit in the current values page
# sdparm --set=WCE /dev/sda

Sample output:
/dev/sda: COMPAQ BF03697B5A HPB2

References:
Cyberciti.biz
sdparm manpage

NAT and ip forwarding

2008-11-03T15:04:00.000+08:00

NAT (be it SNAT or DNAT) relies on ip forwarding. You enable it, they are effective. I forgot to think about it last time ( I think 3 months ago) I setup Linux as a router. This is because server distros, enable it by default. Some distros however do not and most of them distros targeted for desktop/home users (pls check all popular distros to confirm). To enable it, you have to run this 2 commands:

sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

Of course you have to root to run those.

The first command is to write 1 in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward. It is equivalent to this command:

echo 1 > /proc/net/ipv4/ip_forward

The second command is to apply all changes in file /etc/sysctl.conf.

Whatever you set in sysctl.conf will be applied every system restart. So that's important if you want to enable it permanently as in the case of a router. First command doesn't do that. You have to edit sysctl.conf to make it permanent because it will be read every system restart. Edit the file with your favorite text editor (i personally use joe) and make sure it contains this line:

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

This is just a quick solution for this topic. It doesn't cover everything you should know about sysctl.conf and ip forwarding. You can just google to find more info about them.

FOSS.my 2008

2008-10-28T18:05:00.000+08:00

What is FOSS.my?

(excerpt from the website)
FOSS.my 2008 is Malaysia’s premier Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) event. Whilst this is our first go at it, we aim for this to be an annual event bringing together professionals and enthusiasts from Malaysia, Singapore, Asia and the rest of the world for a two day grassroots driven FOSS conference.

FOSS.my is different from other events in that we focus only on FOSS and that this conference is purely non-commercial. There will be no marketing/sales talks by vendors (we are very strict on this!) so all that is presented is FOSS goodness! Instead, vendors will be encouraged to speak on the FOSS technical aspects of their projects/tools. This approach works better as it benefits all through knowledge sharing within the community.

When?
It will be held on 8 and 9 Nov 2008

Where? ( Map )
APIIT TPM Campus
Lot 6, Technology Park Malaysia (TPM)
Bukit Jalil, 57000 Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia.

What are the agenda?
Go here: http://foss.my/schedule/ for more info.

What should I do?
Register here: http://foss.my/register/

Mandriva Linux 2009 released

2008-10-12T20:17:00.000+08:00

Mandriva has released its latest desktop edition which comes in 4 edition: One, Free, PowerPack and Mandriva Flash.

Mandriva One comes in CD and suitable for those who want to start using Mandriva Linux in no time. You can boot in to live CD and start working. It has the option to install to hard disk. This edition comes with proprietary softwares.

Mandriva Free is the free edition. It doesn't contain proprietary softwares. You can add those later though if you add the relevant repositories.

Mandriva Powerpack is a commercial pack containing proprietary packages such as flash plugin, nvidia, nvidia, ati, mp3 codec etc.

Mandriva Flash is a USB disk version of Mandriva. It now uses 8GB USB drive instead of 4GB in previous version. You have to order it from Mandriva Store.

More info on this release

I have been using Mandriva Linux for almost 7 years now and in my opinion it is one of the best distributions out there.

compiz-fusion: Cylinder anyone?

2008-08-29T09:32:00.000+08:00

If you enable 3D desktop effects in your desktop, we can change the shape of the desktop when we 'spin' it to cylinder.
The steps are as follows:

1. Run ccsm - Compiz Config Settings Manager. In Mandriva, it's under Tools menu or you can type ccsm in terminal. Afterthat, click on Cube Reflection and Deformation.

2. Go to Deformation tab and click on Deformation menu to and choose Cylinder.

3. Test it by pressing Ctrl+Alt and press left button of your mouse and move your mouse to spin your desktop.

Here some screenshots of my desktop on Mandriva Cooker.

It takes two to tango

2008-08-19T16:49:00.000+08:00

Yeah.. You may well confused with the title of this post. What the hell it has to do with Linux? Yeah. You got it wrong. Make people confuse is one of the tactic to make readers read your blog. Am i right? Well it doesn't matter.

Last week, I setup 2nd router for my office to make traffic smoother. We experienced slow internet connection lately and no wonder since we have 500 clients accessing the only one router to go to the internet. So after thinking a plan on how to solve it, I came out with a soultion to buy a new and powerful router. 3 days later, I was thinking it was a good idea to split the traffic since we have 2 internet connections. So I setup a second router and split up client connections to the two router evenly. After 2 days, I can say it is successfully make our internet experience a pleasure.

In the new router I installed squid 3.0, BIND and dansguardian. All on Mandriva Spring 2008. So every client connected to one of the router has been setup with gateway and dns point to the router.

So If your office internet connection is becoming slower and slower and you have 2 internet connections, you may to think to split up for smooth traffic to the internet and make your users happy.

cheers!

Iptables: DNAT

2008-07-14T22:16:00.000+08:00

DNAT stands for Destination NAT. It is a type of NAT. The other one is SNAT which stands for Source NAT. What's the difference I hear you ask. Good question! :) DNAT changes destination of relevant packets. SNAT changes the source of relevant packets. Last week, my boss asked me to open an internal system in order to be accessed publicly.

Let's say my internal system server's IP is 192.168.2.123 and the system is a web-based system (port 80). It is behind a firewall which has a public IP say 111.222.333.444. To access the internal system from internet, the firewall IP should be used as a gateway to reach the internal system server.

Internet ----> Firewall ----> Internal system

I want to make any packets destined to port 3256 on firewall should be NAT'ed to internal system server on port 80. So the DNAT in firewall is:

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -s ! 192.168.2.0/24 -p tcp --dport 3256 -j DNAT --to 192.168.2.123:80

There you go. All packets destined to firewall on port 3256 will be redirected to internal system server on port 80. There are other ways to achieve this using other tools like xinetd but I leave that one for exercise for readers. :)

Linux : Before Munich, it was Extremadura

2008-07-08T18:27:00.000+08:00

I remembered 3 years ago I read a Linux magazine about Munich. The government were going to convert all Windows PCs to Linux. Then I just came across an old news about how one of the poorest region in Spain migrated their all pcs using by civil servants duirng a weekend.

We changed the desktop systems from Windows to Linux during the weekend, when the civil servants came back next Monday morning they found Linux running on their desktop machines.

The public government of the Spanish region of Extremadura has now a long tradition of promoting and using free software. Extremadura is a region located in the South-West of Spain, in the center of a triangle formed by the cities of Madrid, Seville and Lisbon.

Firefox download fiesta : Awesome record indeed!

2008-06-20T10:00:00.000+08:00

Firefox download day was on June 17, 2008 (US timezone). The original target was 5 million downloads in 24 hours. Not only they reached the target but exceeding it by 3 millions. The best record ever for firefox downloads in a single day. The people of Guiness World Record has yet to validate the record. Please check back here again after a few days.

Rank	Country	Pledges
1	United States	3,915,375
2	Germany	1,068,315
3	Japan	714,845
4	United Kingdom	488,031
5	Iran	480,550
6	Spain	440,801
7	France	436,447
8	Lithuania	370,750
9	Canada	365,852
10	Italy	364,634

Although the time to set the record has over, you are encouraged to download firefox 3 because it has over 15,000 improvements over previous versions. See release notes for more details.

(Excerpt from Mozilla page)

What’s New in Firefox 3:

The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with dozens of new features to deliver a faster, more secure and customizable Web browsing experience for all.

User Experience. The enhancements to Firefox 3 provide the best possible browsing experience on the Web. The new Firefox 3 smart location bar, affectionately known as the “Awesome Bar,” learns as people use it, adapting to user preferences and offering better fitting matches over time. The Firefox 3 Library archives browsing history, bookmarks, and tags, where they can be easily searched and organized. One-click bookmarking and tagging make it easy to remember, search and organize Web sites. The new full-page zoom displays any part of a Web page, up close and readable, in seconds.

Performance. Firefox 3 is built on top of the powerful new Gecko 1.9 platform, resulting in a safer, easier to use and more personal product. Firefox 3 now uses less memory while it’s running, and its redesigned page rendering and layout engine means users see Web pages two to three times faster than Firefox 2.

Security. Firefox 3 raises the bar for security. The new malware and phishing protection helps protect from viruses, worms, trojans and spyware to keep people safe on the Web. Firefox 3’s one-click site ID information allows users to verify that a site is what it claims to be. Mozilla’s open source process leverages the experience of thousands of security experts around the globe.

Customization. Everyone uses the Web differently, and Firefox 3 lets users customize their browser with more than 5,000 add-ons. Firefox Add-ons allow users to manage tasks like participating in online auctions, uploading digital photos, seeing the weather forecasts, and listening to music, all from the convenience of the browser. The new Add-ons Manager helps users to find and install add-ons directly from the browser.

For more information about Mozilla Firefox 3 and how it delivers an easier, faster, and safer online experience, visit http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/features.

Mozilla Firefox 3 is available now for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems as a free download from http://www.getfirefox.com.

Other related stuffs

See youtube video what people said about Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Digital Memory Bank
Press coverage on standblog

openSUSE and iMac G3

2008-06-05T10:40:00.000+08:00

If you have an iMac G3 and want to install Linux (instead of throwing it out of your window and kills 2 people :P), you may want to try openSUSE. From my experience, openSuse is the best distro for it. What about other distro? Well, i've tried Ubuntu. It is not suitable for this type of iMac. YDL? The installation went smoothly but i had to tweak the X before it worked. One caveat though. If your iMac doesn't have DVD drive, you have to install via internet. First you have to download the install iso and burn it to CD. Boot from the CD and there's menu for you to choose. Choose installation and update. For more info on this, click here.

You will be asked for repository IP address. You can put name address instead of IP. Then, you will asked for directory for packages. Enter the directory. You can find them here. Please choose a repository near you.

Any question regarding installation, just ask here. Maybe I can help. :)

upgrading zlib

2008-05-21T18:22:00.000+08:00

I have to upgrade my zlib to version 1.2.3 to upgrade clamav 0.93. If you have recent version (after July 18,2005), you might have it installed already. For older distros, upgrade is a must to avoid security vulnerabilities in 1.2.1 and 1.2.2. You can download the source code here : http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

Install from source.
1. unpack the source : tar xzvf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
2. change to source dir: cd zlib-1.2.3
3. configure it: ./configure --shared --prefix=/usr
4. 'make' it: make
5. install it: make install (this will install the library in dir /usr)

Extra check:
1. Go to /usr/lib and check whether symbolic links are ok :
[root@proxy lib]# ls -l libz*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 16 06:29 libz.so -> libz.so.1.2.3*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 May 16 06:29 libz.so.1 -> libz.so.1.2.3*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 82305 May 16 06:29 libz.so.1.2.3*

If old libraries are still lying around or libz.so and libz.so.1 point to old library e.g libz.so -> libz.so.1.2.1, delete them.

That's all there is to it.

Reference:
zlib home

Installing CentOS 5.1

2008-05-07T16:50:00.000+08:00

Hi all,

I am installing CentOS 5.1 to a machine at my friend's office. I had to download 7 ISOs beforehand but it needs only 5 CDs for complete installation (depending on what packages I want to install). I might have downloaded the DVD iso but since I don't have DVD-RW drive, I chose to download the CD ISOs.

The machine is HP Proliant 350 G5 with Intel Xeon processor and it is a 64-bit machine (as all modern Xeon processors are). The machine has been installed Fedora Core 5 before and it had many problems as FC5 is designed for desktop and not server. This should be expected. The machine will be used for database, dhcp and DNS server.

Compiz-Fusion on Mandriva Spring 2008

2008-04-19T14:18:00.000+08:00

Upgrading Mandriva 2008 to Mandriva 2008.1 aka Mandriva Spring

2008-04-17T10:28:00.000+08:00

Screenshot of KDE 4 on Mandriva Spring 2008

Here are the steps to upgrade mandriva 2008 to 2008.1 via online repos.

1) Back up the current urpmi.cfg
2) Change the repos mentioned in urpmi.cfg from 2008.0 to 2008.1
3) Run urpmi.update -a to verify repos
4) urpmi --auto-update -v

If there are problems with dependencies, remove the old versions (notably KDE4 as in my experience, yours maybe with different packages). Then in some cases you have to run this command:

5) urpmi --auto-select

Relax and sit back while watching the packages being upgraded. For my system, almost 1600 packages upgraded. Lastly, you will be instructed to reboot the system because of kernel and dbus upgrade. So far the new system is running smoothly without problem.

reference: Mandriva Forum

My history of commands

2008-04-15T15:13:00.000+08:00

Based on kagesenshi's post titled Me! Me!, I also want to know what commands were used by me regularly. So:

[zamri@localhost ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
126 ssh
100 ls
97 smbclient
86 cd
76 su
58 wine
48 ping
35 joe
32 exit
17 ps

There you go. The ouput isn't surprising. I did lots of ssh to my servers and wine (ahaaa!! surprise!), I played windows games a lot for the last 4 months. Now I stop playing 'em completely. It is boring when you always win. :P

clamav 0.93 released

2008-04-15T12:16:00.000+08:00

I just feel like it was yesterday I upgraded my clamav to 0.92.1. Now it is version 0.93. I gotta upgrade it ASAP. Thanks to the spirit of OSS. The excitement will never end. :)

Changes since 0.92.1:

  * libclamav:
   - New logic in scan limits: provides much more efficient protection against
     DoS attacks but also results in different command line and config options
     to clamscan and clamd (see below)
   - New/improved modules: unzip, SIS, cabinet, CHM, SZDD, text normalisator,
     entity converter
   - Improved filetype detection; filetype definitions can be remotely updated
   - Support for .cld containers (which replace .inc directories)
   - Improved pattern matcher and signature formats
   - More efficient scanning of HTML files
   - Many other improvements

 * clamd:
   - NEW CONFIG FILE OPTIONS: MaxScanSize, MaxFileSize, MaxRecursion, MaxFiles
   - ** THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS ARE NO LONGER SUPPORTED **: MailMaxRecursion,
     ArchiveMaxFileSize, ArchiveMaxRecursion, ArchiveMaxFiles,
     ArchiveMaxCompressionRatio, ArchiveBlockMax

 * clamscan:
   - NEW CMDLINE OPTIONS: --max-filesize, --max-scansize
   - REMOVED OPTIONS: --block-max, --max-space, --max-ratio

 * freshclam:
   - NEW CONFIG OPTION CompressLocalDatabase
   - NEW CMDLINE SWITCH --no-warnings
   - main.inc and daily.inc directories are no longer used by ClamAV; please
     remove them manually from your database directory

Please note the new config file options.

Well... happy upgrading!. :)

Yakuake - An easy access console

2008-04-01T16:28:00.000+08:00

Yakuake (Yet Another Kuake KDE terminal emulator) is a KDE console application that I use the most for months now. Before, I used to use konsole but after installing yakuake, I rarely use konsole anymore. The most important feature is the quick easy access to it by pressing a key. The key is configurable. I can't remember what is the default key for it but I choose F8 because the default is used by another application.

Installing yakuake
Debian - use synaptic or aptitude or apt-get install yakuake
Mandriva - use graphical rpmdrake or urpmi yakuake
other distros - please consult your distro documentation.

I have read a Linux mag (don't know which) that it is favorite among KDE developers and will be replacing konsole. I don't know whether this is true. Anyone can confirm this?

References:
Yakuake home page (new update)
Yakuake - An easy access konsole for KDE
More info : http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=29153

dbmail 2.2.10 released

2008-03-25T21:05:00.000+08:00

I have just upgraded my dbmail to 2.2.10. There are bugs fixed. So upgrade is highly recommended.

Changes since 2.2.9:

- - PostgreSQL 8.3 compatibility (# 676).
- - Duplicate key errors and other insertion problems ( #685, #686).

Download:
http://www.dbmail.org/download/2.2/dbmail-2.2.10.tar.gz

Debian etch backport:
deb http://debian.nfgd.net/debian stable main

Full changelog:
http://git.dbmail.eu/?p=paul/dbmail;a=shortlog;h=v2.2.10

Refer my previous post on how to upgrade dbmail (without database schema change).

Transparent proxy with squid 2.6

2008-02-27T16:13:00.000+08:00

I have upgraded my squid from 2.5 STABLE13 to 2.6 STABLE18. Transparent proxy is setup differently in this version. You need this directives in squid.conf (usually in /etc or /usr/local/etc or /usr/local/squid/etc, check with your distro).

acl our_networks src 192.168.2.0/24 127.0.0.1
http_access allow our_networks
http_port 192.168.2.1:3128 transparent
always_direct allow all

where 192.168.2.1 is your proxy server IP address.


If you have flushed your iptables, create new rule:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i  eth0 -p tcp –dport  80 -j REDIRECT –to-port 3128

where 3128 is the port where squid is running.

References:
http://www.deckle.co.za/squid-users-guide/Transparent_Caching/Proxy

Squid - File size limit exceeded

2008-02-16T12:26:00.000+08:00

Yesterday (15th Feb 2008) my squid died unexpectedly. I tried to restart it several times but to no avail. So I tried to see what went wrong by debugging and ran it in foreground. So,

squid -NCd3

N = put it in foreground
C = don't catch fatal signals
d = set debug level (3 is the level)

It threw a bunch of messages with the last line was File size limit exceeded. Just like this but I got no core dumped!. With no clue how to solve it, I recompiled squid (2.6-stable17) with extra parameters (with-max-fd=8192 and --with-large-files):

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --enable-icmp --enable-kill-parent-hack --enable-ssl --enable-linux-netfilter --enable-large-cache-files --enable-follow-x-forwarded-for --with-large-files

It solved it. Shane reported here that this happens when file store.log is bigger that 2 GB. Disabling the use of store.log (or other relevant files for that matter) will get rid of this problem.

dbmail 2.2.9 released

2008-02-12T17:20:00.000+08:00

From dbmail mailing-list (Feb, 9 2008):

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of DBMail version 2.2.9, the latest in the stable/production series.

THis is a bugfix maintenance release.

Bugs fixed since 2.2.8:

DBMail - 2.2.9
==============
- 0000668: [Command-Line programs (dbmail-users, dbmail-util)]
dbmail-export segmentation fault and mbox compatibility (paul)
- 0000663: [Authentication layer] Authldap module reloads when it try to recconect
- 0000662: [Authentication layer] Ability to bypass authentication on Active Directory
- 0000660: [IMAP daemon] imapd provides better inetd compatability (paul)

Changelog:

http://git.dbmail.eu/?p=paul/dbmail;a=shortlog;h=v2.2.9

Download:

http://www.dbmail.org/download/2.2/dbmail-2.2.9.tar.gz

kind regards,
Paul Stevens paul at nfg.nl

What is dbmail?
Read here

up-imapproxy-1.2.6 released

2008-01-29T10:08:00.000+08:00

From imapproxy-info mailing list:

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce that up-imapproxy-1.2.6 has been released and is
available for download from http://www.imapproxy.org.

Updates since 1.2.5 include:

* General daemon enhancement (closing extra file descriptors at startup,
pidfile support)

* OpenSSL is now threadsafe.

* ipv6 support added.

* In general, this code should be in sync with the debian distribution now.

Many thanks to José Luis Tallón, Jan Grant, Matt Selsky and Antonio Querubin
for their contributions to this release.  As always, thanks to Ray Link for
hosting the imapproxy.org site. If I had to pay for hosting, there probably
wouldn't be an imapproxy.org site.

Please send any bug reports, requests, questions, comments, praise, hate,
etc to this mailing list.

Thanks,

Dave

More info: imapproxy

KDE 4.0 released (at last!)

2008-01-12T17:58:00.000+08:00

The much-awaited KDE 4.0 has been released on Friday 11 Jan 2007.

From the announcement page:

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better power management.

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

Lots of KDE Applications have seen improvements as well. Visual updates through vector-based artwork, changes in the underlying libraries, user interface enhancements, new features, even new applications -- you name it, KDE 4.0 has it. Okular, the new document viewer and Dolphin, the new file manager are only two applications that leverage KDE 4.0's new technologies.

To install KDE 4.0, the experimental branch must be enabled. Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list, then update APT.

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

APT will not install packages from experimental unless specifically requested. To install a package from experimental, run the command:

aptitude -t experimental install kdebase kdebase-workspace


or

apt-get -t experimental install kdebase kdebase-workspace


Those are the basic packages. For other packages, please look here.

Have fun!

Testing compiz-fusion on debian

2008-01-11T17:06:00.000+08:00

My system:
debian lenny

Installation:
apt-get install compiz-fusion-kde
apt-get install compiz-fusion-gnome

Optional packages:
apt-get install compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported
apt-get install compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
apt-get install compiz-fusion-icon

Above commands install kde and gnome-specific compiz-fusion backends and all other packages will be automatically installed depending on dependencies. To start compiz-fusion for KDE, go to System -> Compiz Fusion Icon.

Repo:
Put this in /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/shames/debian-etch/desktopfx/stable/ ./

Some screenshots:

Upgrading gcc to upgrade clamav to 0.92

2008-01-04T09:57:00.000+08:00

I have problem upgrading my clamav 0.91.2 to 0.92 due to bug in gcc 4.0.1 on my Mandriva 2006. So I upgraded my gcc to 4.1.2. I chose to compile from source. It is advisable to refer to successful builds pertaining to the version of gcc to get a clue whether it will successfully build on your target system. I didn't choose later version because I couldn't find any successful build for my system. So I played safe. :P

Download: GNU gcc 4.1.2 (China Mirror)

You have to download at least gcc-core-4.1.2.tar.bz2 and gcc-4.1.2.tar.bz2. I also downloaded gcc-g++-4.1.2.tar.bz2, and gcc-objc-4.1.2.tar.bz2. I didn't download the others because I didn't need them. You may want to download them depends on your requirement.

Untar the tarballs
tar xjvf gcc-core-4.1.2.tar.bz2
tar xjvf gcc-4.1.2.tar.bz2
tar xjvf gcc-g++-4.1.2.tar.bz2
tar xjvf gcc-objc-4.1.2.tar.bz2

The above commands will untar the tarballs into a dir that is gcc-4.1.2. Then, as usual, run ./configure, make and make install. Before you run ./configure, please run ./configure --help to view what parameters needed. Some of the options are autodetected and included by configure itself (ie c/c++ libraries,headers ,etc).

configure
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

then you can run make and make install to install it to your system. clamav 0.92 will be successfully compiled with this version of gcc.

UPDATE: Reported that gcc < 4.0 can compile clamav 0.92 successfully. So you don't need to upgrade if you use that version of gcc. Also reported that using the 'buggy' gcc, one can use -O0 as optimization flag to avoid the bug.

upgrading clamav from source
Please read my article here. The steps are still the same.

Good luck!

Converting phpBB2 to phpBB3

2007-11-28T20:11:00.000+08:00

phpBB is my favorite bulletin board system. After 4 years running on phpBB2, I tried to convert my board to phpBB3 RC7 (this is the latest at the time of writing). My phpBB2 version was 2.0.21. I read many in phpBB community forums, many people had some kinds of problem in conversion with the built-in convertor. I tried it myself and failed for 3 times. The problem was connection timed-out during conversion. Googling a bit, I found a solution. Thanks for the problem solver. You are a hero!. :-) Check it out here. This is how I did it:

Open phpbb3/install/install_convert.php

Find these lines:

/**
*
* @package install
* @version $Id: install_convert.php,v 1.53 2007/10/11 08:12:25 acydburn Exp $
* @copyright (c) 2006 phpBB Group
* @license http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php GNU Public License
*
*/

/**
*/

After those lines, add:

@set_time_limit(0);
@ini_set('memory_limit', '256M');
@ini_set('upload_max_filesize', '128M');
@ini_set('post_max_size', '256M');
@ini_set('max_input_time', '-1');
@ini_set('max_execution_time', '-1');
@ini_set('expect.timeout', '-1');
@ini_set('default_socket_timeout', '-1');

(Adjust timeouts and size as needed.)

Next find:

var $batch_size = 2000;

Change to:

var $batch_size = 6000;

It worked for me. I hope this benefits others. Good luck! :-)

apt-get: dynamic MMAP out of room

2007-11-19T10:18:00.000+08:00

Recently after upgrading wine and a few other packages, apt-get threw errors like these:

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Error occurred while processing libedataserverui1.2-6 (NewFileVer1)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

I also could not use apt-cache and it threw the same error messages. The solution is just one-liner:

APT::Cache-Limit 12582912;

put that line in /etc/apt/apt.conf . It solved the problem at least for me. :-)

If it still hasn't solved the problem, try increasing the cache-limit value.

fail2ban - Yet another tool to protect your server

2007-10-26T10:37:00.000+08:00

What is Fail2ban?

Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/auth.log or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address. These rules can be defined by the user. Fail2ban can read multiple log files such as sshd or Apache web server ones. You need python >= 2.3, gamin >= 0.0.21 (optional) and one of these : iptables, shorewall or tcpwrapper.

What does the version number of Fail2ban mean?

The structure of the version number is major.minor.revision. Currently the major number is 0. The policy for minor is:

odd numbers (0.5, 0.7, etc) are development versions.
even numbers (0.6, 0.8, etc) are stable versions.

Fail2ban is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Where can I get it?

fail2ban source can be downloaded from here. Distro-specific packages can be downloaded from http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Downloads. You might want to try using package manager first. It might be in your distros repositories. Chances are it is the older version. That's why I like to install from source :). For debianista, apt-get install fail2ban will take care of it.

Installation

As of this writing, the latest version is 0.8.1.
1. Extracting : tar xjvf fail2ban-0.8.1.tar.bz2
2. cd fail2ban-0.8.1
3. python setup.py install

This will install Fail2Ban into /usr/share/fail2ban. The executable scripts are placed into /usr/bin.

Fail2Ban should be correctly installed now. Just type:

fail2ban-client -h

to see if everything is alright. You should always use fail2ban-client and never call fail2ban-server directly. UPDATE: to be able to activate and control fail2ban server, you need to copy init file specific for your distro in fail2ban-0.8.1/files directory. For Mandriva, you can use RedHat one. Copy file redhat-initd to /etc/init.d directory :

cp redhat-initd /etc/init.d/fail2ban

There are also init files for SuSe and Gentoo.

Configuration

1. Edit file /etc/fail2ban/fail2ban.conf using your favorite editor. I used joe for it. So:

cd /etc/fail2ban
joe fail2ban.conf

In this file, you may want to increase the loglevel to 4 for more verbose log for troubleshooting purposes.

2. Edit file /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf
joe jail.conf

In this file, uncomment sections that you want to activate and change enabled = false to enabled = true. Say, you want fail2ban to monitor port 22 (ssh) for login attempts :

[ssh-iptables]
enabled = true
filter = sshd
action = iptables[name=SSH, port=ssh, protocol=tcp]
# sendmail-whois[name=SSH, dest=you@mail.com, sender=fail2ban@mail.com]
logpath = /var/log/auth.log
maxretry = 4

There are many sections in there for monitoring other ports like ftp, http, etc. It's up to you to monitor which ports. Just uncomment the sections you want and change enabled = true to activate in those sections. If you want to be notified, uncomment the commented line above and replace your email address for dest (and for sender too to reflect your system mails). I change the log path to /var/log/auth.log because this is the authentication log for my system. Change it accordingly for your system. All fail2ban actions are logged and can be reviewed by tail /var/log/fail2ban.log. Example of fail2ban.log on my system:

-- START --
2007-10-26 00:24:56,880 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG /var/log/auth.log has been modified
2007-10-26 00:24:56,880 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Opened /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 00:24:56,881 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Setting file position to 783921 for /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 00:24:56,882 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Found 200.32.73.4
2007-10-26 00:24:56,883 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Found 200.32.73.4
2007-10-26 00:24:56,883 fail2ban.filter.datedetector: DEBUG Sorting the template list
2007-10-26 00:24:57,868 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh-iptables] Ban 200.32.73.4
2007-10-26 00:24:57,868 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -n -L INPUT | grep -q fail2ban-SSH
2007-10-26 00:24:57,886 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -n -L INPUT | grep -q fail2ban-SSH returned successfully
2007-10-26 00:24:57,886 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -I fail2ban-SSH 1 -s 200.32.73.4 -j DROP
2007-10-26 00:24:57,891 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -I fail2ban-SSH 1 -s 200.32.73.4 -j DROP returned successfully
2007-10-26 00:26:57,873 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG /var/log/auth.log has been modified
2007-10-26 00:26:57,873 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Opened /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 00:26:57,874 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Setting file position to 784190 for /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 00:26:57,875 fail2ban.filter.datedetector: DEBUG Sorting the template list
2007-10-26 00:34:58,860 fail2ban.actions: WARNING [ssh-iptables] Unban 200.32.73.4
2007-10-26 00:34:58,860 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -n -L INPUT | grep -q fail2ban-SSH
2007-10-26 00:34:58,867 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -n -L INPUT | grep -q fail2ban-SSH returned successfully
2007-10-26 00:34:58,867 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -D fail2ban-SSH -s 200.32.73.4 -j DROP
2007-10-26 00:34:58,872 fail2ban.actions.action: DEBUG iptables -D fail2ban-SSH -s 200.32.73.4 -j DROP returned successfully
2007-10-26 06:07:39,998 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG /var/log/auth.log has been modified
2007-10-26 06:07:39,998 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Opened /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 06:07:39,999 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Setting file position to 784279 for /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 06:07:40,000 fail2ban.filter.datedetector: DEBUG Sorting the template list
2007-10-26 11:23:50,076 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG /var/log/auth.log has been modified
2007-10-26 11:23:50,087 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Opened /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 11:23:50,116 fail2ban.filter : DEBUG Setting file position to 784372 for /var/log/auth.log
2007-10-26 11:23:50,123 fail2ban.filter.datedetector: DEBUG Sorting the template list
-- End--

As you can see above, there's IP being banned by fail2ban by way of iptables and after a period of time, it will be unbanned. All these can be modified in /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

To see whether the actions really happen, see iptables rules:

iptables -L -n

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
fail2ban-SSH tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:22
REJECT all -- 85.185.250.20 0.0.0.0/0 reject-with icmp-port-unreachable

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination

Chain fail2ban-SSH (1 references)
target prot opt source destination
RETURN all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0

Please read the documentations in the tarball for latest updates and on how to configure it. With fail2ban, it is another weapon for system administrators to combat brute-force attacks. Enjoy :)

apt-get remove Fedora; apt-get install Debian

2007-10-04T12:06:00.000+08:00

After giving a thought about possibility of converting my Fedora box to Debian,yesterday morning, with DVD I got from LFY, I gave it a try. Why? I fed-up with problems like crippled mp3 support (for obvious reason for a pure OSS distro),slow and error-prone yum and problem with incompatible and conflicted packages from 3rd-party repositories. My journey with Fedora has ended. Maybe I'll meet her again in the future :). We'll see.

Debian 4.0 aka Etch
Installation went smooth in text mode. It took longer as I was expecting because without my knowledge,I opted to download updates from internet during installation. There was a flaw when I tried installing LILO boot loader. The installer said it failed to install. I opted to continue and after rebooting, the boot loader was fine. GNOME was the default Window Manager installed when I select the Desktop installation but as usual, with beloved apt-get, I could install other window managers too.

Some basic commands
apt-get update <--- find new updates if any. apt-get install package_name <--- install a package. Dependencies will be taken care of. apt-get --reinstall install package_name <--- reinstall a package. apt-get remove package_name <--- uninstall a package but the config files remain intact. apt-get --purge remove package_name <--- completely uninstall a package. apt-get -u dist-upgrade <--- completely upgrade the whole distribution to the latest. dpkg -i package_name.deb <-- install a local package apt-get reminds me of slapt-get in Slackware world. slapt-get got the idea from this excellence apt-get.

A few confusing matters
Firstly, I couldn't see Firefox in GNOME or KDE menu. So I fired up apt-get. To my surprise, it had been installed. I found out that it had been 'rebranded' to IceWeasel. What a name? More info on this matter can be read here.

Secondly, I couldn't find pidgin. Instead, the old GAIM was installed. After googling, pidgin could be installed by downloading from here.

The experience so far is good. It has its share of Ubuntu which is one of my favorite distro too. I like the responsiveness of KDE and GNOME. It seems quicker than on Fedora and of course, apt-get is a lot quicker than yum.

Compiz on Slackware

2007-09-09T21:22:00.000+08:00

I installed Slackware 12.0 on an old laptop (P3 , 256 MB RAM). This laptop has no CDROM and No Floppy drive. I installed it using PXEBOOT install method introduced in Slackware 12.0. It means, I have to boot from network card to get Slackware's installer running (Disk 1). Installing packages can be done using NFS. I'll story about that next time. :-)

The laptop's vga is i830M. I can use whether i810 or intel for the driver of xorg. To run compiz was a bit tricky for this chipset. After googling for awhile, I managed to get it running good. Your mileage may vary though.

Command to run compiz :
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=true compiz --replace ccp && emerald &

Note : emerald is the window decorator I have chosen to run. There are other window decorators but emerald is one of the famous.

KSalup - Winpopup for Linux

2007-08-28T10:30:00.000+08:00

Searching popup messaging application for Linux is not hard. Kopete has the feature but the default installation fails in receiving message. Sending message works though. Due to this problem, I try to find another application that can send and receive winpopup message via SAMBA.

Enter KSalup. I couldn't find this package in major Fedora repositories. However, it can be downloaded from the project's download page. After installation, entering basic settings like WORKGROUP, HOSTNAME, ways to find other hosts in LAN, one can use it straight away. Sending and most importantly receiving are OK. However KSalup lacks of add-on feature like some of other winpopup-like applications have, that is sending files.

Put that feature aside, KSalup is a nice winpopup application for Linux. At least you can send and receive messages with your friends who using Windows in your LAN. By not connecting to IM servers outside like Yahoo!, Google Talk, IRC or MSN, one can save a little bit of bandwidth :P.

Some screenshots

Main view

Samba settings for name lookup

Sending message setup

About

Restoring grub

2007-08-24T16:12:00.000+08:00

Recently, I installed RHEL first with 3 partitions(/, /boot and /home) and I also created one FAT partition for installing Windows XP. After installing RHEL, I installed MS Windows XP. This left grup being replaced by MS Windows boot loader in MBR. How to restore grub?

Restoring grub boot loader should be trivial if you have the installer CD. In case of RHEL (or Fedora or CentOS), what you have to do is by inserting disc 1 of RHEL disc sets and type linux rescue. After answering a few questions, you will be dropped to console. What next? Type grub-install /dev/hda. This command will install grub boot loader into MBR.

Before this I have been googling for about an hour. The answers I found always like this:

1. chroot /mnt/sysimage
2. /sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/hda

I had error with those steps. Step 1 means to change your root dir to installed partition which is mounted under /mnt/sysimage directory. If you have no luck, skip step 1 and go straight to step 2. Good luck!.

RPM hung on me

2007-08-16T20:21:00.000+08:00

Couple of days ago, I killed yumex because it hung. Afterthat, everything hung. I couldn't run rpm or yum in command line. I tried rebuilding the database with rpm --rebuild but to no avail. Found a solution after googling. The solution :

 rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.*

The above command removes any locks left on the rpm database and now you should able to use rpm command. Make sure you run the above command as root for obvious reason.

Upgrading to latest clamav for impatient sysadmin :)

2007-08-03T18:57:00.000+08:00

I've just upgraded clamav to the latest (at the time of writing is version 0.91.1) for my firewall (Mandrake 10.1). For impatient sysadmin like me, waiting for official packages to release might take longer than u might expect. So the best way to upgrade is by compiling from source. This was how I did it.

Stopping the service
It's advisable to stop clamav service before installing the new one.

service clamd stop

Downloading the package
wget http://freshmeat.net/redir/clamav/29355/url_tgz/clamav-0.91.1.tar.gz

Extracting the package
tar xzvf clamav-0.91.1.tar.gz

Configure...
cd clamav-0.91.1
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --enable-id-check --enable-dns-fix --enable-bigstack

Note: this configure arguments matching with the previous installation by rpm except for --enable-big-stack and --enable-dns-fix (I think).

Compile and install
make
make install (as root)

Restart the service
service clamd start

Updating the virus database definition
freshclam

Checking clamav version
clamav-config --version

Writing a blog entry has never been easier

2007-07-27T12:51:00.000+08:00

This blog entry was created using Gnome Blog. Without going to blogger.com, I can now write an entry by just opening this application. It's good to have this kind of app don't you think? Oh, you can insert pictures too by way of drag and drop (look at cutie meowie below :) ). --update: you can't see the picture because BloggerAPI doesn't support it (yet).

Where to get it?

You are recommended to use your distro's package manager. Just search for gnome-blog or something like that. In Fedora just run yum install gnome-blog.

More info can be found here.

dbmail 2.2.6-rc1 released

2007-07-18T19:38:00.000+08:00

I have just upgraded my dbmail to dbmail 2.2.6-rc1.

Announcement : http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/dbmail/users/22531
Changelog : http://nfg3.nfgs.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=dbmail.git;a=log;h=dbmail_2_2
Download : http://www.dbmail.org/download/2.2/dbmail-2.2.6-rc1.tar.gz

How to upgrade from previous release (2.2.5)

1. Stop postfix, dbmail-imapd, dbmail-lmtpd and dbmail-timsieved using service command.
2. Download the tarball and extract it.
3. Enter the installation folder and run :

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --with-mysql --with-sieve

4. make
5. make install
6. Restart all the stopped services.

That's all there is to it.

df - A disk usage reporting tool

2007-07-10T16:11:00.000+08:00

What is df?
It is a command to report filesystem disk space usage (on Linux).

Problem
Recently I checked my backup server's disk space. I issued df for that. The output was:

df: cannot read table of mounted filesystems: No such file or directory

Something wrong here. After some googling, I managed to get the solution. I issued this command:

grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab

After running this command, df worked again. One lesson learned. df relies on /etc/mtab for it to work. Now I can easily know how much disk space left for each partition. Thanks df!.