To all my loyal (but most likely few, and mainly with the same last name as me):
I think I’m going to redo the structure of my site, yes, it is about time. I’ve been using a CMS (Content Management System) to categorize everything, but it is time to ditch that and write something. Time to stop being lazy. Time to stop procrastinating. Time to learn something new.
Let me make this clear: version 3.0 surely won’t be based off PHP.
As you may know by now, I’m in Taiwan. Live is pretty good here, especially the internet – I’m sitting on a pretty decent 12M/1M connection. But the company I have my internet through seems pretty laid back about network usage
-- which for me isn’t good. Their entire IP subnet appears banned from IRC, which means I have to be a little sneaky when I want to talk to my I.T. friends in New Zealand. Worse, some websites even banned the entire subnet:
Your access to this site has been denied because of the large amount of abuse produced by the users from your country. The access will be enabled once we perform the investigation of the abuse issues. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Luckily, Tor+Privoxy+FoxyProxy provides a quick way around any blocks that might be setup. So, to the developers of these solutions, my kindest thanks.
I love my Snort, I really do. But sometimes, I just don’t need all the extra overhead – sometimes the resources on a server are somewhat, limited. Looking for a solution I stumbled upon PSAD , a way to detect port scans. Since port scans are often one of the first tactics used to find vulnerabilities on a server, it is a pretty good idea to detect them. Depending on the attack, I receive a nice little email telling me what is going on. To test it out I first fired up nmap, and received a few emails. Next I fired up nessus with updated plugins – you can be the judge. I now have 50 emails from myself telling me somebody is doing something naughty:
\=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Tue Jan 23 10:30:04 2007 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Danger level: [5] (out of 5) Multi-Protocol
Scanned tcp ports: [11-41111: 337 packets]
tcp flags: [SYN: 337 packets, Nmap: -sT or -sS]
iptables chain: INPUT, 337 packets
Source: 218.167.75.27
DNS: 218-167-75-27.dynamic.hinet.net
Destination: 64.79.194.165
DNS: kelvinism.com
Syslog hostname: kelvinism
Current interval: Tue Jan 23 10:29:54 2007 (start)
Tue Jan 23 10:30:04 2007 (end)
Historically I’ve used the ever-so-popular AutoMySQLBackup script. While it seems to work just fine, I’ve decided to give another solution a whirl. This solution, provided through Zmanda, seems to be less hackery and more enterprise. The instructions are very clear, and the backup test went as planned. Looks like this is another gem for the toolchest.
My buddy Ian mentioned Amazon’s S3 service, and the potential for using it for fun webapps. While utilizing it for webapps will have to wait a few months, I was able to use it as a cheap backup for my home server (pictures, documents, etc,.) – and my server that houses my email and websites. The setup is pretty quick, and most of it can be detailed here. The ruby package is here I’ll toss in my recommendation to use the jets3t Cockpit application for viewing the buckets, especially considering the Firefox extension didn’t work as advertised. My only two comments will be this:
export SSL_CERT_DIR=/etc/ssl/certs/
s3sync.rb -r --ssl --delete /home/kelvin/test kelvinism:/test
I’ve run into this error quite a few times, might as well toss blog entry about it:
ERROR 1064 at line 17: You have an error in your SQL syntax near ‘ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1’ at line 7
One likely reason this comes about is because the data being imported/exported is not compatible with the database version. For instance, at home you export the information from a mysql5 database. Then you try to import it on a mysql3.23 database somewhere else – and it fails on you. Bummer.
The solution is quite simple:
mysqldump --compatible=mysql323 -u root -p database > exportName.sql
Ian keeps bugging me at how great Quicksilver is. Knowning that there must be an alternative built for linux, I accidently stumbled across Katapult.
While it still has a little room to grow, Katapult makes a great tool in any KDE toolchest. Press ALT+SPACE, and your widget fires up, ready to take your orders. Since words don’t really do this justice, I created a screencast.
Katapult Screencast from Kelvin Nicholson on Vimeo.
In the next year I plan to make a little video, nothing fancy likely, but something that will require an editor. However, I don’t own a mac (which rules our Final Cut Pro + After Effect and iMovie, which Ian and I both have had too much fun with. Inside joke.) I’m also a die-hard Linux fan, trying to hold out buying a mac for as long as possible.
SF to the rescure. There are four editors listed, and in the next year I’ll try them all. Overalll, they look quite promising.
Jahshaka – Beta. Good reviews from what I’ve seen.
Kdenlive – Alpha/Beta. Looks a lot less mature than Jahshaka, especially since I’m going to have to check it out via svn. But, the screenshots look quite impressive.
LiVES – Beta.
Yea, you read that right. Three commands and you can run a pen-test on your website/webserver. So, how?
kelvin@home:~$ sudo apt-get install nikto
kelvin@home:~$ sudo nikto -update
kelvin@home:~$ nikto -h www.thoughtdeposit.net
As you can see, Nikto is a web server scanner, apparently for over 3200 dangerous files/vulnerabilities. Additional features can be seen at the Nikto website, yet you will certainly want to add this old gem to your webserver toolbelt as soon as possible.
I’ll admit, I think one of the thickest barriers to entry regarding Linux is variety. I love variety, but general end users don’t adjust well to change (IMHO). Thus enter the stage: Portland. So, what does this mean to the end user? This means that, eventually, the UI throughout linux will all look similar – regardless if it is designed to utilize GTK, QT or anything else (that is, if it is built off the Portland standard).
And as a runner-up, worth mentioning, the user driven Tango Desktop Project