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10369 discussions

How to remove password having got root access to a system?
by Chris Green 17 Dec '11

17 Dec '11

Well, after a fair amount of hassle, I've worked out how to get root access to the hard disk on the system I have installed xubuntu 11.10 but the main account password is broken. You boot the "Live CD" system and you can then mount the disk and use sudo to become root. So, I can edit /etc/passwd and I can edit /etc/shadow but removing the password field from my main/default user in the /etc/shadow file *still* doesn't allow me to login. Grrrrr!!! What are the requisites for a login to have no password? I thought it was a 'x' in the password field in /etc/passwd and nothing in the password field in /etc/shadow but that seems not to work. -- Chris Green

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Can't get Grub menu to appear, nor the boot sequence text
by Chris Green 17 Dec '11

17 Dec '11

Sort of going on from investigating my boot times I've just realised I seem to be unable to see/start the grub menu on my system. All I see is the BIOS boot sequence, finishing with the SATA drives being detected, then there is a blank screen (though the monitor indicates it is being driven) for several seconds followed finally by the login screen. I have just changed /etc/default/grub to:- GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" ... and I still see absolutely nothing between BIOS and login screen. Any ideas as to what I can do to see the grub screen? Apart from anything else if I have some sort of catastrophe it's going to be a bit difficult to get into single user/command line mode. -- Chris Green

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PCI SATA Card
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 17 Dec '11

17 Dec '11

Why is nothing ever simple? Replacement Sata disks sourced, purchased, plugged 1 in. Spins up, but not detected. Turns out my Motherboard has a SATA 1 controller chip that will not work under any circumstances with SATA 2 disks, even if you tell the disks to pretend to be SATA 1 disks. Don't suppose anyone has a linux compatable PCI SATA controller card with 2 Sata channels lying around that they don't need do they? (Note, that's PCI, not PCI-X, or PCI Express). What a waste of an evening! Harumph!!! Steve

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Have I got a disk failing - or what?
by Chris Green 14 Dec '11

14 Dec '11

My logwatch presented me with this (among other things) this morning:- --------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------ WARNING: Kernel Errors Present [ 7.192693] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 7.386581] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 20.697614] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 20.824819] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 20.861868] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 20.907760] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 20.945476] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 21.031194] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro ...: 1 Time(s) [ 27.012635] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 28.113740] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 28.463488] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 33.145286] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 33.649576] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 34.486168] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 45.508896] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) [ 49.252032] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,comm ...: 1 Time(s) ---------------------- Kernel End ------------------------- Should I be worried? That's my 'root' disk:- /dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) It doesn't have either /home or /bak on it so it's just system configuration that needs to be preserved (which it is). -- Chris Green

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Replacing RAID Disks
by steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk 13 Dec '11

13 Dec '11

Hi Guys & Gals, I have a server running Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. It has 2 sata disks running as RAID level 1 (simple mirror) using MDADM. Recently there's been an error on 1 of the disks. After a reboot, the raid array resynchronised itself, but I'm taking this as a warning and an excuse to replace the disks. I have several questions. First of which is, is MDADM still the way to go? I seem to remember reading that you can set up RAID 1 with just using ext4. Presumably MADAM is still the best. Next, my original partitioning scheme was one / (root) raid device with partition, and one swap raid device swap with partition. I presume that a better layout would be to have / (root), home and swap raid devices with partitions. Should I be using LVM as well, or just shove a partition directly on the raid device? I don't want to do a fresh install, I want to copy the data over from the old disk to the new ones. What's the best way of going about this? I can only have 2 drives connected at a time, but I could put the new disks into a spare computer and transfer files over the network if necessary. I'm hoping that I may be able to get away with this: Using the appropriate raid controls, remove the "faulty" drive from the raid array, then physically remove it. Then physically mount one new, bigger drive. Create 3 raid partitions on the and format one as / (root) and one as swap, leaving the other one empty for a bit. Using the appropriate raid controls, mount the new devices and let them synch. Unmount and remove the remaining old drive. Mount, partition then add the new drive to the raid. Let it synch. Once that's all happened, boot from a live cd, mount the devices, format the spare partition as "home", copy (move) files from the home directory to the new home partition. Would this work? Or is there a better way? Any comments appreciated. Steve

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Where is all the time going?
by Chris Green 13 Dec '11

13 Dec '11

Feeling a bit bored (and waiting for some replies to questions elsewhere) I decided to look and see where all my boot time is going. There are two very obvious pauses in the dmesg output:- [ 2.934091] ata8: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 2.934130] ata7: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 18.251024] Adding 9936892k swap on /dev/sda5. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:9936892k [ 20.088037] <30>udev[292]: starting version 167 [ 20.133565] lp: driver loaded but no devices found ... ... ... [ 23.959982] FS-Cache: Loaded [ 24.133173] FS-Cache: Netfs 'nfs' registered for caching [ 24.143427] Installing knfsd (copyright (C) 1996 okir(a)monad.swb.de). [ 24.353496] type=1400 audit(1323793685.691:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" na> [ 24.353957] type=1400 audit(1323793685.691:11): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name=> [ 34.486168] EXT4-fs (sda1): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro,commit=0 [ 36.986993] svc: failed to register lockdv1 RPC service (errno 97). [ 36.987111] NFSD: Using /var/lib/nfs/v4recovery as the NFSv4 state recovery directory [ 36.996319] NFSD: starting 90-second grace period ... ... ... [ 38.612346] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready [ 49.294292] eth0: no IPv6 routers present I don't think that last gap waiting for IPv6 routers is relevant, I can do just about anything before that happens. So, any ideas what may be causing that first 16 second gap and/or the second ten second gap? -- Chris Green

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X over ssh problem
by mick 12 Dec '11

12 Dec '11

Hi guys I use ssh tunneling to manage my remote systems, but until today I have never attempted to forward X over a tunnel (I don't have X servers running remotely and I have never seen the need to run X based graphical programs on those servers). Today I wanted to run etherape on a remote server so that I could watch the traffic patterns. So. I changed the remote server's sshd_config to enable X forwarding ("X11Forwarding no" becomes "X11Forwarding yes") and restarted sshd. On my desktop I similarly changed my local ssh_config file to allow X forwarding ("ForwardX11 no" becomes "ForwardX11 yes") to obviate the need to use the -X switch on the command line. I then installed etherape on the remote server and fired it up only to get the message "Error: no display specified". Sure enough "echo $DISPLAY" shows nothing. But I thought (and everything I have read confirms) that ssh should take care of setting the appropriate display when X11 forwarding is set. I then tried setting a display manually (export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0 on the remote server) and got the response "Error: cannot open display: localhost:10.0" I must be missing something. What am I doing wrong and how can I fix it? Surely I don't have to have an X server running on the remote host? Thanks in advance. Mick

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Set up Raw Printer with CUPS (Debian+Gnome)
by ted.harding＠wlandres.net 11 Dec '11

11 Dec '11

Greetings all! I am in one of my occasional struggles with CUPS (which I hate -- as compared with good old LPD)! Not helped by the unhelpful Gnome: Desktop --> Administration --> Printing "assistant". Basically, I have an HP LaserJet 1300 which I want to use as a raw printer (I do all my printing via PostScript files which I create myself, and the HP has built-in PS capability, so it's just a matter of piping the PS file straight into the printer, with no intermediate processing). The printer is to be connected to a laptop via a USB cable. So all I want to do is set up printing on the laptop so that when I issue a command lpr filename.ps the PS file gets printed by being sent straight to the printer over the USB port. So how do I set this up as a raw printer? There seems to be no route to this (that I can detect) via the above "assistant". Maybe there is a direct method using CUPS-oriented commands from the command-line, but I can't manage to suss that out either! Any help (especially from people who have done this successfully for themselves) will be highly appreciated! Thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)wlandres.net> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 08-Dec-11 Time: 19:52:40 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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How to test if a cat5 (or cat6) is working as well as it should?
by Chris Green 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

I have a number of quite long (i.e. 30 metres or more) cat5e cables strung about the place and would like to test how 'clean' they are. It's easy enough to test their basic integrity (i.e. if all 8 wires are correctly connected) and I have done that. However I'd like to see if they are actually good enough to provide maximum performance when running gigabit. Presumably if they aren't working too well one will see errors and retries at the hardware level - is there a tool for monitoring this? Mostly these cables have just one switch between the ends but there are a couple where there may be two switches involved. -- Chris Green

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Problems with new[ish] Firefox on Ubuntu 11.04
by Chris Green 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

I have just upgraded my system to xubuntu 11.04 and I have a couple of problems with the version of Firefox it has installed. The first problem is that I can't even see what version of Firefox it is as the main menus have disappeared (that's the File, Tools and other menus, including the Help menu which tells you which version of Firefox you have). How on earth do I get those menus back? Secondly the new Tab layout is a pain, I've turned off 'Tabs on top' but the tabs are still in a sill place because the leftmost tab sits above the sidebar, not above the web display area. Is there any way to get back to the old layout where the tabs are actually above the pages they refer to? -- Chris Green

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Burning to a remote drive
by Wayne Stallwood 06 Dec '11

06 Dec '11

Hi there. So I am on a laptop now which means the built in optical drive has sub par performance, currently I am archiving a good deal of material from old DVD's onto a Media Server (HP MicroServer) The MicroServer has a bay for a SATA optical drive so I am going to add one anyway....for the archiving I can just run local copies on the server which will be fine. However I got to thinking that sometimes I have a bit of a run on making discs as well and it would be nice to be able to burn from CD burning software on the laptop to the remote drive. When the laptop is docked there is a Gig-E connection between the two and I assume that NBD's support burning as it is just native access to the raw block device over the network ? But has anyone actually done this and did it prove reliable ? Or is there a better way, Am I better off using iSCSI rather than NBD's ?

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[ALUG Announce] ALUG Norwich Pub Meet Thursday 8th December
by Viperfang 05 Dec '11

05 Dec '11

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- Hello Aluggers, Our monthly ALUG Norwich social meeting will be held this Thursday, 8th December at The Coach and Horses (82 Thorpe Road, Norwich, NR1 1BA). The meeting officially starts at 8pm, although some people may arrive earlier. More information on those people can be found on the list and the IRC channel. If you are unsure if you will recognise us then make yourself and your intent to attend known by either posting on list or visiting us on IRC so we can look out for you rather than hiding in the corner. Optionally you could ask at the bar if they know where the geeky computer weirdos are and they'll point you in the right direction (seriously!). Another possibility is look for heaps of electronics on a table that may possibly look like movie props that would used for detonating explosives. Feel free to bring electronics/laptops/gadgets to the meet, you will by no means be alone. Ben Bewick aka Viperfang NB: This mail is automated, please refer to the usual sources for more information. ALUG Contact Details: Website : http://www.alug.org.uk/ IRC : #alug on irc.alug.org.uk List : http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo Twitter : http://twitter.com/anglianlug Identica: TBA Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2381613902 ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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ALUG Hello everyone :)
by wiedxma k 03 Dec '11

03 Dec '11

Hi everyone, I joined the mailing list yesterday and I thought I would introduce myself. I am a woman. And I work and live in Ipswich. I’ve been interested in GNU/Linux since 2002/2003. The first distro I saw and got installed on my HP nx9020 laptop was Slackware. Someone told me ‘if you learn Slackware, you will be fine with any distro”, so I gave it a go. I used to work on Windows 98, Windows XP and HP, HP-UX. The job I do now has nothing to do with Linux or computers. I neither am IT professional nor a geek. (OK, maybe a very little one:)) Today I use Ubuntu on my old HP nx9020 and Windows 7 on my brand new, shiny, lovely ThinkPad T420s. It’s just a few weeks old baby and the only reason it’s got Windows 7 on board is that I was curious how it looks and feels like and if it’s any better than XP. I’m not impressed. Actually, it annoys me more and more every day. So, the time to install some nice and working OS is coming. I like reading books, walking, chatting on IRC and learning new things. I’m not a very talkative person (as for a woman!) so you may see me hanging quietly at #ALUG quite often. So, this is me. And I look forward to chatting to all of you ALUGers! Krystyna (Medea)

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USB Port Replicators
by Jim Rippon 02 Dec '11

02 Dec '11

Hi everyone, I'm wondering if anyone has had any luck or otherwise with USB Port Replicators - and specifically the sound and serial outputs on them. I've a system at home that lives underneath my desk, but has no sound card, but given my radio is on the blink I was looking at getting some use out of my mp3 collection and rediscovering some old tunes. Looking at something like the following ebay lot: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Targus-Mobile-USB2-0-Port-Replicator-PAEPR092E-NE… Appreciate any feedback :) Jim

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Energy monitoring
by Mark Rogers 01 Dec '11

01 Dec '11

I'd like to play with one of the various energy monitoring gadgets that seem to be everywhere these days. I'm looking for one that will transfer data to my PC, and obviously that PC is running Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 at the moment, not sure if it will go to 11.10 yet...) Any suggestions/recommendations? I'm as lazy as they come so ideally I'm looking for something that can be permanently connected to my PC (therefore presumably a wireless connection will be involved at some point); I don't really want a box that collects data that I then take to my PC to download it once a week/month/year/never. And I'm also looking for access to the raw data, but also suggestions for suitable GUIs welcome too. Mark -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Any PHP PDO/Sqlite experts here, can't fathom this error message
by Chris Green 28 Nov '11

28 Nov '11

I'm flummoxed by this error, even worse is that the code seems to work sometimes but I can't see any pattern in the data that causes it. The code is as follows:- try { $insQuery = "INSERT INTO log "; // $insQuery .= "(seqno, year, month, day, hour, minute, waterway, pk, place, distance, eng_hrs, fuel_cm, fuel_lt, note, type, sailing)"; $insQuery .= "(seqno, year, month, day)"; $insQuery .= " VALUES "; // $insQuery .= "(:seqno, :year, :month, :day, :hour, :minute, :waterway, :pk, :place, :distance, :eng_hrs, :fuel_cm, :fuel_lt, :note, :type, :sailing );"; $insQuery .= "(:seqno, :year, :month, :day);"; $st = $db->prepare($insQuery); foreach ($rows as $row) { $row['seqno'] = $seqno++; $st->execute($row); } $st->closeCursor; } catch (PDOException $e) { dbglog("PDO() insert error" . $e->getMessage()); dbglog("insquery: $insQuery"); foreach($row as $k=>$v) { dbglog("k is: $k, v is $v"); } } ... and what I'm seeing in the log is:- 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: PDO() insert errorSQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 25 bind or column index out of range 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: insquery: INSERT INTO log (seqno, year, month, day) VALUES (:seqno, :year, :month, :day); 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: year, v is 2011 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: month, v is 11 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: day, v is 12 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: hour, v is 10 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: minute, v is 00e 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: waterway, v is 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: pk, v is 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: place, v is Cappy 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: distance, v is 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: eng_hrs, v is 2695.3 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: fuel_cm, v is 8.5 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: fuel_lt, v is 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: note, v is Engine started after replacing blown mega-fuse, all OK otherwise 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: type, v is TEF 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: price, v is 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: sailing, v is 1 13:53:59 192.168.1.4: k is: seqno, v is 0 So what does "General error: 25 bind or column index out of range" actually mean, I could find nowhere that explains it. Now my guess is that it's telling me that I have a column name wrong somewhere but my 'log' table definitely has columns year, month, day and seqno of the correct type. Maybe I have the syntax wrong somehow for the VALUES() bit but again I can't find any really good explanation of exactly what the syntax is, it seems decidedly woolly. -- Chris Green

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Any WordPress users here - is it really this awful to change a WordPress domain?
by Chris Green 24 Nov '11

24 Nov '11

I've been developing a simple web site for someone using WordPress (along with zillions of others I believe). I've now discovered that it is horrendously awful to move it to another domain! Not only are links in WordPress absolute but there are also loads of database entries which have the absolute URL in them. So one has to fix all the links in pages one has created *and* one has to search through the database and fix URLs there too. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!! Setting the 'WordPress Address' and the 'Site Address' on the dashboard settings page only fixes URLs generated by the code (i.e. the menu links to pages). Apart from anything else it makes doing maintenance/development a nightmare. Is there any way around this or is the only approach for maintenance to have two parallel sites one 'development' and one 'live' where one tries out changes on the development site and then repeats them (hopefully correctly) on the live site. -- Chris Green

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Clam
by Bev Nicolson 23 Nov '11

23 Nov '11

Now it may be that I've missed something obvious here but I've got Clam installed but can't see anyway of running it, either with mouse clicks or otherwise. How do I do that? (Lucid, 10.10) Bev.

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bash getopt
by samwise 21 Nov '11

21 Nov '11

Hi, Has anyone done anything with GNU enhanced getopt in bash to process incoming command line parameters? My understanding is that I have the choice of using the built-in "getopts" command within bash (on a CentOS 5.3 derivative distro), which doesn't support long options (e.g. --long-option as opposed to -l), or I can use the getopt (enhanced) 1.1.4 binary which lives in /usr/bin/getopt. I want to use long options, so I'm using the GNU getopt binary. An example script is below. Note that there is one oddity - for compatibility with some other related scripts, I need the first parameter to be something else ... so the first few lines are intended to munch $1 and pass all the remaining parameters to getopt. I don't think that should affect anything, but I've left it in as that's how I'm currently testing it. My problem is that I don't seem to be able to get the parsing to work as I expect. Specifically: # ./cmd.sh . -i -o 1 input -i is -o So the problem here is that it's quite happy to set the required parameter for -i to be -o ... when actually I was expecting it to catch that -i was missing a parameter. I think I had this working using getopts, but I need to be able to support long options now. I've messed around a bit with several different ways of writing the case script, but not managed to get it working any better. So, idle question ... has anyone got a script like this where the error checking is a bit more robust than the sample below? Cheers, Peter. #!/bin/bash paramArray=("${@}") unset paramArray[0] paramArray=("${paramArray[@]}") getopt -T if [ "$?" != "4" ]; then echo GNU enhanced getopt not detected. Quitting ... exit 1; fi # Override defaults with incoming parameters, if specified PN=`basename $0` ARGS=`getopt --name "$PN" --longoptions input:,output:,noshort:,verbose --options i:o: -- "${paramArray[@]}"` if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "Invalid option specified or expected parameter argument missing. Quitting ..." exit fi eval set -- "$ARGS" while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do case "$1" in -i | --input) echo input $1 is "$2"; shift;; -o | --output) echo output $1 is "$2"; shift;; --noshort) echo noshort $1 is "$2"; shift;; -v | --verbose) VERBOSE=yes; shift;; --) shift; break;; esac shift done exit;

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Relative risks of different ports/services being open
by Chris Green 21 Nov '11

21 Nov '11

I'm wondering what are the relative risks of the different ports I have opened up on my firewall. Currently the ports I have open are:- 22 - ssh (but limited to only allowing two IP addresses to connect) 80 - http 25 - smtp 873 - rsync (not sure if I actually use this now, must check!) I'm considering what the risks of opening up port 443 (https) are to use with shellinabox and ssh. This would allow ssh from a web browser anywhere into my desktop machine (in addition to https access to the apache server of course), is this a significantly bigger risk than the limited ssh access that I have now? My thinking is that the port 443 access to ssh *is* significantly riskier than my existing ssh access, however I'm not sure if I'm being overly paranoid given that I already have open access on port 80 to my web server. What I'm really asking is whether worrying about open ssh access (with a good secure password) is a bit irrelevant given that port 80 is open to web browsers? Or is the damage that could be done if someone *does* guess my password (or it gets out by some other means, quite possible) for ssh much worse than anything using a browser/apache exploit? Any/all help appreciated, including ways that I could limit the shellinabox access to specific clients. As it is the client I'm thinking of is my Kindle but nothing at the shellinabox end can see anything to do with the Kindle because the proxying in between effectively anonymises the connection. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 21 Nov '11

21 Nov '11

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back tonight, Monday 21st November, at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://www.pjmcgintys.co.uk/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. We're usually to be found in the lowest section of the bar, near the library entrance to the pub. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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How can I deny certain countries access to my website
by Ian Douglas 19 Nov '11

19 Nov '11

For about a month one of my websites (or rather the "Contact Us" form on that website) has been under regular, daily, attack from hackers. The attacks are consistently coming from IP Addresses in Rumania and Russia. Each time an attack occurs I use my webhost's cPanel to manually add the IP to my cPanel "IP Deny Manager" list. This is however becoming rather tedious and time consuming and seems the wrong way round to do things as I am denying IP Addresses AFTER they have tried to hack in rather than blocking them BEFORE they attempt it. Is there a way I can simply deny access to my website (or, better, just it's home-made PHP based "Contact Us" form) to all Eastern European visitors? Alternatively, since my website is primarily focused on UK customers, would there be an easier way to deny all visitors access unless they came from UK, USA Canada, Eire or Australia? I realise that this is not specifically a Linux question but any suggestions would be welcome. Ian.

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How to diagnose problem with special characters in a 'shellinabox' ssh login?
by Chris Green 19 Nov '11

19 Nov '11

I have set up shellinabox on my home system to allow me to connect from the web browser in my Amazon Kindle. I have it working OK to the extent that I can log in as a user whose password has no special characters in it, so the basic communications and connections are working. However my own password has non-alphanumeric characters in it and when I try and log in from the Kindle using shellinabox it always fails authentication. It fails if I log in directly or if I try and 'su -' from the login that I can do successfully. Logging in to shellinabox from Firefox works OK. So the Kindle->shellinabox connection is losing/changing something. When I type the non-alphanumeric characters in the working login they are echoed correctly so it's down to something in the interaction with login I think. Can anyone suggest a way of diagnosing this? -- Chris Green

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Apache2 magic
by Barry Samuels 17 Nov '11

17 Nov '11

I have set up a second virtual site on my computer so that I can use www2 instead of www because that's already used and I want to keep it separate. I have a very simple html page in www2 and this is the exact code: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">  <html> <head> <title>6 Hour Live data usage</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10" > </head> <body> <img width="1250" height="800" src="/graphs/Power-6hr.png"> </body> </html> Notice the meta tag in the header which refreshes the page every 10 seconds. If I access this page with a web browser as a file i.e. file/// it works as expected, although I have to change the src= path to include / var/www2, but if I access it using http:// it doesn't update and if I use 'view/page source' I see that: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10" > has been replaced with: <link rev="x-refresh" href="" > Why should that happen? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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BOINC
by Chris Walker 14 Nov '11

14 Nov '11

I've recently installed (using the app manager and not by command line) the boinc program on my Mandriva machine but it's not connecting. I'm stuck now despite looking at the help pages. The manager program fires up and tried to connect to localhost and fails. If I click on the various tabs, it shows that 0 bytes of disc space are being used because it's not connected to any projects. But all the commands under the Projects tab are greyed out. So does anybody have any ideas where I'm going wrong please and what I need to to fix it? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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