The Answer Squad

So you like going to your local coffee shop, mall etc, and using the free Wi-fi. Have you ever done something like pay that cellphone bill you forgot was due, or log in to your work email? It has become increasingly easier for people to sniff the traffic you are sending through those public access point.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know all the traffic you are sending out is encrypted and safe from prying eyes? Well today we are going to show you how to do this with a few simple and free tools. Ready? Here we go.

What you will need.

Putty-Putty is a free telnet SSH client available for Wndows and Linux. Putty

Firefox- You can use any browser but I find it easier to have a specific browser set up for tunneling. Firefox

A server that supports SSH. You can set this up at home or if you have a hosted web server you can set it up there. If you are doing it at home, i suggest ubuntu Linux its easy to setup and get running.

Now lets fire up Putty and setup our tunnel settings.

Source Port: 7070 (this number can be pretty much anything)
Destination: localhost
Select Dynamic and Auto

Now Click ‘Open’ and log in to your box. Once you are connected we are going to open up Firefox.

In Firefox , go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings and set the following proxy configuration

Manual Proxy Configuration

Socks Host should be set to ‘localhost’ or 127.0.0.1 with the same port you set in putty 7070 here. With Socks V4 Or V5, it does not matter. Once you are done hit OK and test it out. You can try going to a website that will show your IP like Whatsmyip You should see the ip of your server.

Recommendations: Just from my personal experience there are a few things that will make this easier if you are setting it up at your house. The first one is setup a dyndns account, or something similar. Most home internet connections have a dynamic Ip this will allow you to remember a url instead of trying to keep up with when your ip changes. The second thing is your probably need to setup port forwarding in your router. You will need to forward port 22, which is the default ssh port to the server ip at your house that is your ssh server. For that reason i recommend setting a static ip to that box.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-spunix_greattools/index.html

Ran across this while doing some research for a project. They run through wget, pwgen and a some other tools that will help you out in your daily unix task

Let me preface this by saying I had used Amahi before when it was first coming out, beta if you will. It was not everything I thought it would be. But with that said, I just installed it to give it another shot and I am very happy with the progress hey have made.

The Amahi server takes over DHCP and DNS for your network. After you install you simply turn off dhcp on your router and the Amahi server takes care of the rest. I am not going to go into the install right now, just kind of give a run down oh what it gives you the ability to do. Anyone with comcast will welcome the dns change, Amahi uses Opendns so you can stop dealing with Comcast and their lousy dns highjacking.

Once you are up and running you simply open your web browser and use the short url: http://hda to get to your amahi dashboard. Here you can see what programs you have installed and a number of other things.

Once you click on setup you can see a number of tabs.

If you move to the applications tab you can see the ton of applications they are offering now. The main thing I wanted Amahi for was to use Ushare easily to stream music and movies to my xbox in another. Ushare with Amahi works fantastic, much better than using it stand alone on a separate server. There are somewhere around fifty applications that can be installed on your server through the Amahi Dashboard with a simple click. Everything from multiple databases, database managers, games, media managers and streaming tools. Tools to help you collaborate on projects (Horde) Wiki software, Blog software, even a fantasy football manager. For a complete list of all the programs available or to suggest a new one head over to http://www.amahi.org/apps?category=sbs

Another great feature for access is the ability to use the server for VPN access, you simply use any web browser and you have access to your network. You can see all the upcoming applications at http://www.amahi.org/apps/upcoming

Overall since this is my second time around with Amahi I would definitely recommend it. It allows a ton of features that if you were to try and install yourself on a server would take time and more than likely be a pain. As they state on their website:

Just for starters you can:

This is a call i have been getting a lot from the help desk users lately. Thought it might help some of guys out.

Assume the computers are call XPMACHINE and W7MACHINE.

1) Ensure Printer on XP machine is shared – assume it’s called SHAREDPRINTER.

2) On the Network Browsing on your Windows 7 machine ensure you can “See” the Printer share.

Now on the Windows 7 machine do the following (doesn’t matter if it’s X-86 or x-64).

3) Control Panel==> add LOCAL (Yes LOCAL).

4) Create NEW port==>Local port

5) Portname is \\XPMACHINE\SHAREDPRINTERNAME

6) Now Windows 7 will load a driver and you’ll be able to print on the XP machine.

Simple

I wanted to a share a few Linux commands I found myself using this weekend while moving some data around and extracting some video files from an iso.
The first one is used to mount an iso file in Linux so that you can browse it like any other directory.
You will need root credential for this

First thing we need to is make a directory to mount to:
mkdir -p /mnt/disk

Next we will mount the iso to that location

mount -o loop disk1.iso /mnt/disk

Now move to the directory,

cd  /mnt/disk
and list the contents.
ls

The next command we are going to explore is df
The df command is used in this syntac df [OPTION]… [FILE]…
-a, –all include dummy file systems
-B, –block-size=SIZE use SIZE-byte blocks
-h, –human-readable print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
-H, –si likewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024
-i, –inodes list inode information instead of block usage
-k like –block-size=1K
-l, –local limit listing to local file systems
–no-sync do not invoke sync before getting usage info (default)
-P, –portability use the POSIX output format
–sync invoke sync before getting usage info
-t, –type=TYPE limit listing to file systems of type TYPE
-T, –print-type print file system type
-x, –exclude-type=TYPE limit listing to file systems not of type TYPE
–version output version information and exit

df -h

The above command is one of the most commonly used commands as it displays the sizes in an easy to read format as shown in the below example.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              71G   32G   35G  48% /
tmpfs                 691M     0  691M   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                691M  312K  690M   1% /var/run
varlock               691M     0  691M   0% /var/lock
udev                  691M  140K  690M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 691M  272K  690M   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   691M  2.4M  688M   1% /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile

Installing most things on a debian based system is as easy as typing Apt-get. Webmin is not that way, almost it is not much more difficult.

First thing we need to do is prepare the system to install webmin. For that we need to install some dependencies.

sudo apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl libmd5-perl
Next we will download the Webmin debian package. The newest version is 1.490

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.490_all.deb

Nest step is to install the package using dpkg:

sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.490_all.deb

If you get complaints about something missing simply input the command:
sudo apt- get install -f

Now you should be able to get to your server via any browser at

https://serverip:10000/

Notice the https:// it is a secure site.

Just wanted to pass on a couple word press tips I have figured out so far.

1. If your host has C panel and fantastico use that to upgrade your word press install. It works flawless and backs your files up before doing its deed.
2. Install Akismet, I know that WP has some sort of spam filter installed but Akismet does a great job. You can find it by going to “Plugins” “Add New” and searching for Akismet.
3. If you do any sort of coding, or how to post it gets hard to keep commands, and syntax in check. I  “SyntaxHighligher2″ Works great and make it easier for people to copy and paste what your saying. 

If you have any more tips for blogging or word press in general let me know, leave a comment I would be glad to edit the post to reflect your thoughts.

I have been using my Xbox 360 as a media device lately. I’m running Linux on an older P4 machine running U-share. It allows me to stream media be it pictures, music, or videos to my Xbox in the other room. The problem is when I am doing things I am usually on my laptop so if I download a video or some music that I want to be able to stream and its on my laptop it has to get to the server some how. Being as the server is running ubuntu server with no monitor, the only real access is ssh or ftp. Since ssh is much more secure and I don’t have ftp installed that’s how I move the files. It is actually a lot simpler than you might think.

From the command line type:

scp filename username@server:~/

Example:

# scp thistext.txt root@192.168.20.101:~/

That’s all there is to it. Stick around for a tutorial on installing U-share and setting up to stream media to your Xbox.

Want to get snmp up and running quick and dirty, then here it is.

sudo apt-get install snmpd

Answer yes

Configure:

Move existing /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf configuration file to /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf.org

sudo mv /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf /etc/snmpd/snmpd.conf.bak

Create a new /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf file:

sudo nano  /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

Inside this file put

rocommunity  public

syslocation  “Main Datacenter”

syscontact  “Your contact information”

Change the default snmpd file by editing

Edit /etc/default/snmpd

# snmpd options (use syslog, close stdin/out/err).

SNMPDOPTS=’-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid 127.0.0.1′

To:

# snmpd options (use syslog, close stdin/out/err).

#SNMPDOPTS=’-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid 127.0.0.1′

SNMPDOPTS=’-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid -c /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf’

Now restart snmpd

sudo /etc/init.d/snmpd restart

We can now test this with snmpwalk

Go to your cacti box, or your snmpd monitoring server and type:

snmpwalk -v 1 -c public -O e 'hostname'

You should get some output letting you know it works!

ERS 8600 Directed Broadcasts using Wake on LAN Application
Wake on LAN, WOL, application sends UDP Broadcast packets to establish communication between server and clients. The server generates UDP broadcast packets which can be routed by the ERS 8600 by enabling directed subnet broadcast on a per VLAN basis. Using Java Device Manager, connect to the ERS 8600 and enable the Direct Broadcast feature under the IP VLAN tab, which is disabled by default on all VLANs.

The corresponding CLI command to enable this feature on VLAN 20 is: vlan 20 ip directed-broadcast enable. Directed broadcast received on VLAN 20 for the WOL application will be forwarded by the ERS 8600 based on its routing table. Note that ERS 8600 UPD Forwarding filters are NOT configured or used, since the WOL application uses directed broadcasts to establish communication between the server and clients.