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Monitoring network traffic
by Mark Rogers 15 Sep '10

15 Sep '10

Our office LAN is getting painfully slow. It's likely that something is hogging the bandwidth. If I were to put a network hub between the ADSL router and the main office switch, presumably I could run something on a PC also connected to that switch which would point me in the direction of the problem? I'm looking for something fairly simple, that would tell me (eg) which IP address was generating most of the traffic, and perhaps on which ports. Wireshark would probably do what I need but it's not (from what I remember) particularly simple to get simple results from. Or, is there a better option? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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ftp server recommendation?
by Peter Alcibiades 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

Quick question - we have just bought an all in one printer that does scan to ftp. What is the smallest and lightest ftp server I could install on one of our desktops for it to scan to? Its behind a router of course, so (maybe wrongly) I'm not expecting security to be a worry. But maybe this is too hopeful? Thanks for the feedback on proxy servers by the way. Its was not for anything that needs to withstand official investigation, just for privacy from the prying. Peter

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git merge tools over SSH
by Mark Rogers 09 Sep '10

09 Sep '10

I'm slowly getting my head around git. I am trying it out on a large project, which is on a server (in my office) to which I have only SSH access, or access to the files via Samba. I ran a merge (which took quite while) and now need handle the conflicts. Looking for a decent tool to assist with the merge, I find that most are GUI based, and that suits me fine (and will help me get others in the office to buy-in to using it). However, if I access the files over the samba share and run "git status" it takes a while (10 mins?), presumably because my local git is having to deal with a lot of traffic over the network. Is there a better way to use a local merge tool on a remote repo? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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anonymous proxy servers
by Peter Alcibiades 08 Sep '10

08 Sep '10

What does anyone use and or reccommend for an anonymous proxy server? I have come on anonymizer.com and also anonymouse.com. Are these decent? Are there any others to think about? Any that are better? Peter

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IMAP Mail Hosting
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 08 Sep '10

08 Sep '10

Hi Folks, Since it appears that Manchester University has taken a decision that its retired folk shall now be obsolete, email-wise, it is very likely that my current email account will be de-activated soon (I'm already using it on borrowed time). So I shall be looking for a new email address. I'm very happy (in terms of general quality of service) with my ISP (Zen) and would not want to change. However, Zen's email only offers POP3 download and does not offer IMAP access. The webmail interface is clunky and slow, so preliminary sampling and deletion of delivered emails would be very tedious. On the other hand, previewing using IMAP (when it works properly) is very fast. I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability and capable of handling high levels of incoming traffic (for various reasons, I can get up to 500 emails a day -- most of which I delete on the basis of the Subject alone, some others after a quick look at content, leaving typically some 5-10% to download; so I need to be able to do this quickly). Recommendations? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 04-Sep-10 Time: 18:41:52 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Merging the changes between directories
by Mark Rogers 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

Suppose I have: DirectoryA - contains a PHP web application, unchanged, exactly as downloaded DirectoryA2 - contains a customised version of DirectoryA DirectoryB - contains a new version of the PHP web application I want to merge the changes that represent DirectoryA -> DirectoryA2, into DirectoryB to create DirectoryB2. This seems to me the sort of thing that diff can do in its sleep but my past attempts have failed. It also probably points at some kind of version control solution, although there is no version control in place at the moment (if this is a good time to implement it then I'm all ears!) I don't expect this to be completely automated, but I believe and expect that using the right tools I can substantially improve the job from the starting point of comparing individual files manually. I have so far got as far as diff --brief -r DirectoryA DirectoryA2 [If specifics help, DirectoryA is version 1.3.8a of ZenCart, DirectoryB is version 1.3.9f of ZenCart, and DirectoryA1 is a site built on version 1.3.8a of ZenCart, but with obvious changes (changes to stylesheets, new images, new plugins, etc). From a practical point of view, DirectoryA2 is mostly a superset of DirectoryA (new product images, plugins, templates, etc) but there are customisations (usually fairly trivial ones) to core files, and there will be a number of files from DirectoryA that were deleted (installation files, docs, etc). There would also be some file and directory permission changes.] -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Remote access challenge
by Mark Rogers 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

I have a file open on my desktop PC at home, which I want to read now I'm at work. It's just some notes I started writing in a new document in gedit, it's not been saved (I don't think, anyway). I have SSH and NX access to my home desktop. If I connect with NX I get access to my home desktop GUI but not to the session I have currently open with the document in it. Suggestions? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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Re: [ALUG] Remote access challenge
by Steve Engledow 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

On 7 September 2010 10:17, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> wrote: > On 07-Sep-10 08:53:26, Simon Ransome wrote: >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> On 07/09/2010 09:22, Mark Rogers wrote: >>> I have a file open on my desktop PC at home, which I want to read >>> now I'm at work. >>> >>> It's just some notes I started writing in a new document in gedit, >>> it's not been saved (I don't think, anyway). >>> >>> I have SSH and NX access to my home desktop. If I connect with NX >>> I get access to my home desktop GUI but not to the session I have >>> currently open with the document in it. Possibly overkill but you could ssh in, install x11vnc (which is a vnc server that provides vnc access to a running X session), run it and then vnc into your machine - tunnelling through ssh for security of course :) Cheers, Steve

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Malicious Javascript
by Dan 07 Sep '10

07 Sep '10

Dear All, Browsing with Namoroka 3.6.8 on Gentoo, I just stumbled across a webpage containing Javascript that was probably trying to install malicious code on my system. The script - claimed (implausibly) to be a malware scanner, and (even more implausibly, because the places it claimed to have looked were Windows-specific directory names that don't exist on my system) that it had found half a dozen items of malware on my system; - generally made a nuisance of itself by grabbing focus with dialogue boxes (this seemed odd - my browser settings forbid Javascript to raise or lower windows, yet my main browser window was, to all intents and purposes, irreversibly lowered by the presence of the dialogue boxes, and the only browser actions possible were to click on dialogue box buttons or do a window-manager close on the dialogue box) - did a passable impersonation of Windows Update (or at least, it would have been passable if the system I was looking at it with had been running Windows ;-)); and - finished up by offering me a download of an executable Windows binary, which I rejected. I took a look at the Javascript source code, but it was _very_ obfuscated. My question is - could the script have got any sort of access to my local filesystems or otherwise done any damage? -- Thanks, Dan

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Copy files and change case - any ready made utliities around?
by Chris G 06 Sep '10

06 Sep '10

I want to keep two directories in sync but with a slight difference, I want the 'destination' directory to have lower case names only. I.e. any file in the source directory that has an upper case name (or any upper case characters in its name) I want copied to the destination directory with a lower case name. I guess I can come up with solutions that need me to write a wrapper script of some sort for rsync but I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for a ready made solution. This needs to be run as a cron job by the way. -- Chris Green

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