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10372 discussions

email addresses starting with asterisk?
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Dec '09

18 Dec '09

Helping a friend change computers, we found that the email login did not work, and after a series of conversations with the provider were told to log in to get messages using *(a)mydomain.com This did indeed work, and the effect appears to be that mail sent to any name at mydomain.com is picked up by the login, and also that any name used results in mail being accepted. So for instance you can apparently send to alexander(a)mydomain.com bacchus(a)mydomain.com calypso(a)mydomain.com and so on, and it will all arrive when you log in for messages as *(a)mydomain.com. Why would anyone set up an email system like this? Does it not make a lot more sense to have specific email addresses, both to reduce spam, and to allow you to segregate, for instance, home and business email? This is the same case where there was the incomprehensible networking with two cards and class B addresses for a three machine network. When set up in the usual way with a five port router modem, it all worked perfectly fine with a lot fewer cables. Very strange. Peter

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Questionnaire software - any suggestions?
by Chris G 17 Dec '09

17 Dec '09

I want to build an on-line questionnaire, a very basic one, are there any ready made applications in the Linux/Open Source world for doing this? I can't find anything obvious in the Ubuntu repositories. -- Chris Green

5 8

[ALUG Announce] POSTPONED: December's 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting
by samwise 16 Dec '09

16 Dec '09

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 has been postponed until January. Off-list five us of have agreed on an ALUG Christmas meal on the evening of Tuesday January 5th 2010 (the only day everybody's calendars agreed!). If anyone would like to join us then, please drop me a line. With no other suggestions, I'll probably try making a booking soon at Mr. Wings - the chinese restaurant we went to last time. Thanks, 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

1 0

Eee bah gum - feature...
by Anthony Anson 16 Dec '09

16 Dec '09

If there is a memory-stic plugged-in to any USB socket, the Vodafone internet dongle will not work. Click on the icon to start the software, and all you get is an egg-timer, for less time than it takes to boil an egg - if memory serves. So, introduced the Eee to a memory card in the slot provided. Dongle software failed to open. Same failure if I have an external HDD or CD/DVD plugged in. This is *VERY* inconvenient. Not tried it using a hub yet. Any ideas/suggetions, O all ye cognoiscenti? -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

1 1

Relative merits/security of Public Key and old-fashioned password with ssh
by Chris G 16 Dec '09

16 Dec '09

I'm probably being totally paranoid but still. Is there any significant difference in security between using password login and Public Key when using ssh to connect to my home server? Just to clarify ssh connections are *only* allowed from two systems 'out there' where I have shell login accounts so an intruder has to get onto one of those systems before having any possibility of connecting to my server. Is it any easier for an intruder to guess my password (remember, no access to the system so I don't think a dictionary attack is possible is it?) or to guess the encryption key for my private key? I can't see any really significant difference between the two but I'm open to any comments. -- Chris Green

3 4

Security thoughts/questions
by Chris G 14 Dec '09

14 Dec '09

I have a small SoHo LAN which is used by the family (mostly just two of us now) for personal use and in running our small Ltd. company. There's no very sensitive (as in confidential) information on any of the systems but I guess there is stuff in E-Mails etc. that we don't really want to escape. More impportant is the *safety* (as in not losing) of a lot of information such as the company accounts, E-Mail trails of work we do and so on. Recently I have set up a small server machine which now handles DNS (using dnsmasq), has the publicly visible web pages (not the company site but bits and pieces that I want to make visible to 'the world') and runs an SMTP server. This means that firstly I can turn my desktop machine off now (it used to be the server) and secondly there's no direct access from the outside world to my desktop machine. The firewall is set up to allow only ssh, http and SMTP connections from the outside and all three of these are routed to the server machine. So far so good. Now I'm wondering whether I have overlooked anything obvious and/or if there's any way I can improve things. The most likely sort of exploit/damage as I see it is someone breaking into the server machine and just making a mess. I keep the server software as up to date as possible with security fixes etc. for apache, ssh and SMTP (postfix) so it should be fairly difficult to break in. I only allow ssh connections from two hosts (where I have shell login accounts) so password guessing needs to get there first and then into the server. All important data from desktop machines is backed up to a NAS in the garage (separate machine from the server) so that should protect against fire damage and even burglars as they're unlikely to break into both the house and the garage as well as notice hardware in both places. I also back up the critical company files 'off site' to my hosting company's site. The final barrier(s) I'm thinking about are the ease (or otherwise) of doing damage if someone breaks into one system in the LAN. For example would I win anything by enabling the root account on the server (currently sudo only) so that if someon breaks in as me they'd still have to guess the root password to be able to do anything nasty. Are there any NFS exploits I should worry about? There are quite a few NFS mounts across the various systems. -- Chris Green

1 0

Forms design for web pages - any ideas?
by Chris G 14 Dec '09

14 Dec '09

I'm looking for a tool a bit like the Forms Design part of Open Office (or MS Access for that matter) that will build web data input forms. I don't want a full-blown CMS or site design package, I just want to be able to build some simple data entry pages to load data into a database from the web (well, actually my intranet). Is there anything out there which can do this? ... and I have looked quite hard, the best I've found so far is phpmyedit. (This is as an alernative to using Open Office Base) -- Chris Green

7 12

How to set up NFS file sharing area for two users to read/write easily?
by Chris G 14 Dec '09

14 Dec '09

I want to set up a 'file sharing' area on my server machine where two users can both easily read and write files. I want this to be an NFS mount on both users' machines so it's just an 'ordinary' directory as they see at and it can also be mounted as a VirtualBox shared drive. Ideally I'd like the shared area to be owned by a third user, i.e. the two users reading and writing files are, say, 'fred' and 'bert' while the shared area is owned by 'shared'. Is there any way to set up NFS so that if fred writes a file to the area owned by 'shared' it automatically becomes owned by shared and similarly for bert? I don't really want to end up with shared's files owned by all sorts of different users. It would be fairly trivial to set up the shared area to have general write permissions for everyone but it would still be only too easy for either fred or bert to write files there that wouldn't then be writeable by the other users. I guess I essentially want both fred and bert to become user shared when they do anything in shared's file system. -- Chris Green

1 1

lp printing and permissions
by Peter Alcibiades 13 Dec '09

13 Dec '09

OK, profiting from the collective wisdom, my gdi printer is set up as raw in CUPS and is now working very nicely with cat myfile>/dev/usb/lp0 At least as far as printing is concerned, there are some issues with sending it control characters, but that's for later after some more wrestling with it myself. Problem is, printing in this way only seems to work with root privileges. Why? And what should be done about it? Printing works just fine as a user via CUPS, what is so special about this process that it needs to be su? I can think of ways of doing it, but would really like to understand what is going on and why before doing any of them. Cheers, Peter

3 3

re lp printing and permissions
by Peter Alcibiades 13 Dec '09

13 Dec '09

Yes, what I seem to have is: $ ls -l /dev/usb/lp0 crw-rw---- 1 root lp 180, 0 2009-12-12 01:59 /dev/usb/lp0 So, is this maybe the consequence of having set up the raw printer as root? But it had to be done as root apparently. Peter

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