flapjacktastic

The Times [of London] are reporting, 23 July 2008. that a new trojan is now making waves in the UK having already hit US sites:

Eastern European hackers are suspected of placing the Asprox virus on more than a thousand British websites, including those run by the NHS and a local council, in the past two weeks. [...] Last week, Asprox infected the Norfolk NHS website, used by thousands of people a day. Hackney Council’s website was one of 12 local council websites also compromised, meaning that anyone logging on to pay a parking ticket or council tax was at risk over a three day period. [...] In the US, the virus has successfully penetrated mainstream sites belonging to Sony’s Playstation, the city of San Francisco and Snapple.

Asprox is an automated SQL injection attack that (more…)

I hate that .. when organisations (the biggest offenders I see appear to be the .gov.uk sites) don’t do their redirects properly.

I always just type the root domain, example.com. But for sites that I manage I choose “www.example.com” to be canonical - mainly because in print it’s best to use the www. address as it’s easy to pick out as a web address. For .com’s this isn’t as important as for .org or .net, IMO, as nowadays most people recognise that “.com” refers to a website.

Under  Apache this is easy, add this to your .htaccess file in the document root:

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Just taken receipt of a Smart AX MT882 modem from TalkTalk (UK) which will hopefully give us broadband at our studio.

Initial research shows this is an Ethernet (browser based admin at 192.168.1.1) or USB (ditto, 192.168.1.2) model. A manual is available by searching for  SmartAX_MT882_V200R002C01B021_User_Manual.pdf with your favourite search engine or from DriverGuide by having a subscription or viewing ads.

That’s all for now, will add details later if I have any problems installing it. As it has an Ethernet port it should be a breeze compared to previous efforts with USB modems on Linux distros … should be!

Well having come from Slackware I’d obviously been enjoying the ease of installation with Synaptic (an apt-get frontend) too much and the gods of computing were watching my karma count(!) … the simple “update-manager” method of upgrading promised much and didn’t really deliver anything other than a rushed lesson in apt-get, dpkg, aptitude and the use of the recovery console option in Ubuntu’s GRUB menu.

Update Manager, problem!

The update manager appeared to hang when it came to restarting the X font server, it may have been something else that triggered it, what was clear to me was I had a frozen X session mid-way through a graphically managed dist-upgrade. Not great. I left it for a few hours to see if it was just taking its time, no joy.

I tried a few things by switching to a CLI with alt-ctrl-F1: apt-get and aptitude reported problems. Neither would run enough for a fix. apt-get reported that I should run “dpkg –configure -a” to reconfigure. dpkg reported “too many errors, stopping”. Now I didn’t like the sound of that

Reboot

On reboot, I chose the recovery console. After much playing around I found I could run “apt-get update” (after getting my net connection up by running “/etc/rc.local”; which just does a pon for my speedtch USB modem connection). Still not much use. I noticed that the first package being complained about was libgnomevfs2-bin, so attempted to install that by itself. No joy. Aptitude was useful here in listing what was broken, but not much use otherwise.

In the end after frantically reading through several man pages I discovered the –force options for dpkg, in a do or die moment I entered “dpkg –configure -a –force-all”. Well that seemed to do the trick, finished installing things, which all seemed to have downloaded already (so something was working right in update-manager at least).

Reboot to glorious KDE goodness.

Rebooting again I had the new menu options in GRUB for the new kernel, a good sign. Booted up fine and I logged in to my KDE session and was back in the now familiar territory of Ubuntu.

Well, I was kinda expecting something to have changed. Nothing seemed that different, this is however Ubuntu with the kubuntu-desktop package installed.

Didn’t take long to find what had changed … firefox 3 beta4 had been upgraded to 3 beta 5 and was broken! Oh yeah and I couldn’t launch GUI apps from a root konsole either.

Well, I thought it would be nice to do some demo’s for using Inkscape. First up though I need to find a decent way to create video screencaps, preferably with audio and notes - though a video editor could be used later with the resulting video.

I used Google and Sourceforge to expand my search and limited the contenders to those with Linux versions. The top app on SF was VirtualDub but it’s Windows only.

Contenders are:

1. http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
2. http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul
3. http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org/about.php : I got my package from the getdeb site.
4. http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ : Wink version 2 is currently only available for Windows, which might suggest a move away from Linux.
5. http://epresence.tv/ : they call video captures “screencasts”. Their Producer and Player applications aren’t currently available for Linux.
6. http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/

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It turns out it’s pretty simple.

Log in to your dashboard (adminstrative system for Wordpress). Click on Manage and then “edit” the post you want to unpublish. One of the boxes says “Post Status”, choose the “Draft” radio button, then “Save” as usual.

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This page is a repost of one made when searching for mailing list management software for the CrowPoint festival website as part of my work with Communimedia (I’m now at BridgeHosting for web design work, etc.). I’ve used PHPlist on several sites now (including Diverse Manners) and so you could well consider it the winner, but do install at least a couple of apps (or try demos if available, eg PHPlist demo) to ensure you get the app that works best for your situation.

There are several options for open source PHP based mailing lists (and other types). I’m just going to summarise the project names first. I might do some reviews and add details later though.

Note that well known applications used for mailing list management include LISTSERV(TM) by L-Soft (now at version 14.5) and Major Domo by Great Circle Associates (now at version 1.94.5) - these so far as I can tell are console / command line based applications. Major Domo at least has some web-based front-ends made for it though. They might be useful to you, but not to me!

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Firewall administration in Slackware Linux

Which front end?

These programs configure a script, usually rc.firewall, which in turn sets up iptables. Iptables then handles all the filtering mangling and NAT requirements for you.

As ever there are lots of options, I used to use Guarddog which was great. However I now need to do NAT and guarddog required me to use a companion program called guidedog. Instead I thought I’d try the native KDE options, the closest thing to that seems to be KMyFirewall.

KMyFirewall (KMF)

This is pretty good.

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This is a repost of a past page from my old site. Might be useful for someone … you never can tell. I guess I’m just a serial hoarder!

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Hints and Tips for Microsoft Windows XPHere, I’m going to give info about issues I have come across with WinXP and how I solved them …On this page: security centre settings (WinXP SP2) …

Accessing the security centre

First, you’ll need to log on as an administrator. For some this will mean using the Start menu, choosing log off, then from the popup window choosing “switch user” (or in shorthand Start > Log Off : switch user. You will then need to select an administrator account (eg “admin”) from the menu and enter your admin password.

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Knoppix on HP Pavilion 7880 (UK)

This page (started March 2003) gives details about using Knoppix on my HP Pavilion 7880(uk) desktop computer. I say using and not installing because Knoppix (pronounced K’Noppix, created by a German bloke called Herr Knopper) can be booted from CD - just stick it in your drive and reboot.

The computer

A HP Pavilion 7880 (UK) about 2 years old. It’s a AMD Athlon 1.1 GHz with 20 GByte harddrive, Nvidia Gforce 2 graphics. It appears that it has a HCL modem using a PCTel Chipset, ie a Winmodem. sourceforge.net has a useful project on PCTel modems under Linux and there’s a mini how-to.

The distro

Whilst I was trying to get Linux working fully I decided to try Knoppix as it’s bootable off the CD.

I’m stuck with windows at the moment as there are a few programs that we use (particularly MS Money) that I haven’t found a linux alternative for yet [GnuCash might be it though??] - I’m sure there is one but will it read the proprietary format of Money’s files? Due to the winmodem (see above) I haven’t got online with Knoppix but everything else seems to work fine,eg OpenOffice.org and all the games ;0)> .

Where can I get Knoppix (and other Linux distros) in the UK?

Well, funny you asked that! I got my copy from uselinux.co.uk, the proprietor was most helpful and appears to be providing the discs out of love for Linux - ie I can’t see how he’d make a profit unless he has a huge CD generating capacity already.

Your best source for up to date distributions is the internet site, usually www.your-desired-distro.com. They usually have a list of FTP mirrors that you can spend a few weeks trying to get an ISO off - if like me you have 56K dialup. You could get a friend to download a copy. Or you could borrow a copy - remember this is open source and most of it is free-as-in-beer (eg GNU GPL) so you can print as many copies you like - check the license first and if in doubt e-mail the support guys for your distro.

Alternatively, try one of the following sites (none of whom sponsor me), I can only vouch for uselinux.co.uk though.

• uselinux.co.uk Good basic site, limited set of distros, payment by paypal,nochex, postal orders, etc.. Mr Wellstead seems like a nice bloke - any chance of a commission? Knoppix 3.1 comes to £3 with p&p.
• cheeplinux.com - appears to be the most expensive of this pick. Knoppix 3.1 comes to £7.98 with p&p.
• linuxemporium.co.uk - no comments really. Knoppix 3.1 comes to £4.50 with p&p.

General Knoppix places

The first page listed is the creators site. Note that Knoppix is from a German source and so English documentation appears to be sparse at the moment.

• knopper.net
• www.volny.cz/basiclinux/lowmem.html Installing slackware with only 4 MB of RAM
• jetblackz.freeservers.com/ConfiguringSlackware81.html - well duh?
• linuxtips.sourceforge.net/index.php - the SlackFAQ, gives general info about Linux too, in multiple languages!

Knoppix on Pavilion places

I didn’t find any one else logging there use of Knoppix on a HP Pavilion.

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General Pavilion 7880 places

General information about my Pavilion:

• hp.com - drivers and downloads page.
• hp.com - specifications/information about the 7880. There’s also a local copy of this page.