Notes from Linux Magazine - May 2009

• Graphics design book using FLOSS tools available from http://en.flossmanuals.net
• Hyperic HQ looks an interesting tool for enterprise monitoring.
• 'Beginning Portable Shell Scripting' from Apress looks like a good book.
• WebHTB is a tool to manage network bandwidth allocation, although it does seem to need kernel modules compiled in first.
• agedu is a handy tool for finding old files in a file system
• Here's a list of fuzzing tools:<
  • mangleme
  • browser fuzzer 2
  • fzem
  • fsfuzzer
  • FileP
  • ProxyFuzz
  • Peach Fuzzing Platform
  • GPF
  • SPIKE
  • QueFuzz
• Fsniper processes new and updated files for you
• Chandler is interesting again. Might be the way to put the calendar, email and contact lists for the family together. Might need to run a Chandler Hub.
• Security web sites to take a look at
  • InvisibleThings
  • Matasano
  • The Fake Name Generator
  • The Milw0rm exploit database
• Take a look at the digital subscription options at http://www.linux-magazine.com/DigiSub
• Linux Magazine is published from Manchester. Add that to the list of reasons for civic pride.

How did the man at the Termini Station in Rome con us by typing in a number into the ticket machine?

The wife and I recently went to Rome for our tenth wedding anniversary. As is typical of our travels without children, we didn't really leave enough time to get from the hotel to the airport to get back home. We were doing battle with the automated ticket machine at the Termini station when a man approached us and offered to help. Now the con-artist alarm bell should have been going off at this point, but we were really late and so we ignored it. He pressed the buttons and got the ticket that we wanted for the correct price. Only one thing was odd: as part of the booking process he typed some number into the automatic ticket machine. Neither the wife nor I were quick enough to see what the number was for. It was about 6-10 digits and he had memorized it. We can't see how we've been conned here but it must have happened. My wife thinks it was a loyalty card scheme. I'm not convinced. Anyone with any ideas please leave a comment?

'Upgrade' Killed my ADSL

My ISP upgraded my ADSL to version 2+ and now my router won't connect. I tried all the usual troubleshooting steps of rebooting and unplugging the ADSL wire to no avail. Next I got on the phone to my ISP, Demon. Demon ran line checks during which I was disconnected. Humph! Calling back I had to wait in the queue again. Try to be calm. Take deep breaths. Demon persuaded me to buy three new micro-filters which had no effect. Finally they told me that they would have to pass the call to a BT engineer. To top it all they asked me to pre-approve that I would pay £170 if BT found that the fault originated in my house. Naturally enough I declined their kind offer. Only thing now is to wait until Monday to see if they can fix it. Until then we're back to 1993 and dial-up internet.

E61 Mercurial Solution

Mercurial to version control files on my E61 phone. That would be sweet. I could edit text in PED then push and pull changes from my server using SSH. Only problem is that, as of writing, there is no mercurial client for the Symbian S60v3 operating system. Mercurial is a combination of Python and C code. In my dreams of spare-time nirvana I could attempt a port to S60, but realistically that isn't going to happen. I need a plan B.

Engineering Compromise

So, I'm not going to be able to have a command-line like experience of mercurial on my E61. What about the next best thing? My next idea was to use putty to: (1) ssh into a directory on my linux server (2) Update the mercurial repos there (3) Grab all the files from the linux server to the phone (4) Make edits on the phone (5) Upload the modified files back to the linux server (6) From putty on the linux server commit the changes into mercurial I've got this working. The tricky bit was to decide what to use to move the files about. I've ended up with MobyExplorer doing FTP to my local linux box. Inside the firewall I felt the FTP was safe enough. I'm a little nervous at opening up an FTP server on my public facing boxes. I had to set up secure FTP.

Secure FTP Set Up

I installed the Very Secure FTP Server (vsftpd) using aptitude. I made the following changes to the config in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf (1) local_enable=YES (2) write_enable=YES (3) anonymous_enable=NO (4) chroot_local_user=YES ...then restart the server with sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Why does cygwin pick up 'f' as my home drive?

I installed cygwin on my new work laptop. For some reason when ever I ran cygwin it said:

mkdir: cannot create directory `/cygdrive/f': No such file or directory
Copying skeleton files.
These files are for the user to personalise
their cygwin experience.

These will never be overwritten.

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

/usr/bin/install: cannot create directory /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory

bash: cd: /cygdrive/f: No such file or directory
Your group name is currently "mkgroup_l_d". This indicates that not
all domain users and groups are listed in the /etc/passwd and
/etc/group files.
See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run
mkpasswd -l -d > /etc/passwd
mkgroup  -l -d > /etc/group

This message is only displayed once (unless you recreate /etc/group)
and can be safely ignored.
cp: cannot create regular file `/cygdrive/f/group.mkgroup_l_d': No such file or
directory

So, I must have got something set up incorrectly. Looking at the environment variables I see:

$ set
...lots of stuff
HOME=/cygdrive/f
...more stuff

So where is HOME set? The work laptop is running Vista and I'm farily new to it. Looked in Control Panel >> System >> Advanced System Settings >> Environment Variables, but there was no reference to HOME. Next stop was Google, obviously. It told me to edit /etc/passwd. Sure enough there was a setting against my username for /cygdrive/f. I changed it to /cygdrive/c/dave and it all worked great.

Video Editting Software

We were going to visit the National Media Museum, but due to son #2 getting a stomach bug on Saturday night that wasn't to be. Instead we made a video diary of the weekend. My camera records quicktime (.mov) files. I had about twenty of these to splice together by the end of the weekend. I didn't have a video editing program to use. A little wikipedia led me to avidemux. This seemed lightweight and just right for what I needed. To get a rough cut done to show the wife I just appended the files together. This worked fine, but after about three minutes the sound was a long way out of sync with the video. A quick scan of the avidemux wiki suggested I do Audio->Build VBR Time Map. I tried that but it didn't seem to do anything. Clicking somewhat at random, I don't know much about video, I tired Tools->Rebuild I & B Frames. That didn't help. I'm parking this one for now. See if inspiration strikes while doing the tidying up.

Debian NSLU2 Stopped Working

My slug, NSLU2, stopped working. The power went off and it didn't come back on after booting. It just sat there with the ready light on yellow and the ethernet on green, but not showing anything on the disk 1 light. I couldn't ssh to it or ping it. Google led me to the NSLU2-linux-debian-readme page. This led me to suspect something wrong during booting. I turned off the slug and attached the USB drive to my debian PC. In the procees the entire USB hub stopped working. If I took the USB hard drive out the USB hub started working again. So I rebooted into windows, put the USB drive in and got an instant blue screen of death. Not good. Last attempt I plugged the LaCie USB drive into my laptop. The laptop didn't die, but windows said "Please insert disk" when I tried to browse to it. I'm thinking it is dead. Looks like I need to be buying a new USB hard drive and re-installing debian on the slug. If anyone has a better idea please leave a comment!