Category: sysadmin

Ubuntu sucks!

I used to be real pleased with Ubuntu, because it got a couple of things right that Debian didn’t. But I’ve upgraded my Ubuntu install three times now, and every time I upgraded everything broke. The last time I upgraded, everything even remotely having anything to do with sound broke. This was because the geniuses […]

Apache, FastCGI and Python

FastCGI is a hybrid solution to serving web applications written in a wide variety of programming languages. It sits somewhere between CGI, which spawns a new instance of the web application for each request, and the various web server modules (such as mod_php, mod_python and mod_wsgi) which take care of pre-spawning a pool of interpreters […]

Apache 2.2: Multiple authentication providers

For a long time Apache only supported a single authentication provider per location. For instance, you’d have: <Location /> Require valid-user AuthType Basic AuthName “FooCoorporation” AuthBasicProvider ldap AuthzLDAPAuthoritative Off AuthLDAPURL ldap://192.168.1.1:389/ou=foo,o=electricmonk,c=nl AuthLDAPBindDN cn=ldapreader,o=electricmonk,c=nl AuthLDAPBindPassword PASSWORD </Location> In older Apaches, it wasn’t possible to add another Authentication provider. So, in the situation above, you can run […]

Blocking VoilaBot

There’s a web-crawler out there called VoilaBot, which is hammering my site with needless crawls and which appears to ignore robots.txt files completely. Apparently it’s a crawler for a french portal/search engine. If you need to block this bot from your site, there are two things you can do: Firewall If you’ve got a firewall […]

Disable Ubuntu command not found

Ubuntu 7.10 has this feature where, if you mistype a command on the shell, it’ll bother you with useless information about how you can install that application: tiagoboldt@Niath:~$ gedit The program ‘gedit’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install gedit bash: gedit: command not found tiagoboldt@Niath:~$ It’s pretty annoying […]

Transmission 1.x on Ubuntu 7.10

For some reason Ubuntu 7.10 has an ancient version of Transmission. Version 0.74 or somesuch. Unfortunately, that version of Transmission contained some bugs so it’s blocked by certain bittorrent trackers. In order to install a more recent version: You can download a more recent version from the gutsy backports package pool. Uninstall transmission: sudo aptitude […]

VeeDee-Eyes.com: VirtualBox VDI images for download

VirtualBox has been getting more and more attention as of late. It is vastly superior to other virtualization programs due to the simple fact that it actually runs on my system. All the others either don’t install (VMWare), crash (QEMU), or are a real bitch to set up properly (Xen). VirtualBox is Open Source, easy […]

DVTM – dynamic virtual terminal manager

I do a lot of remote UNIX administration on various servers and even some desktop machines. This usually means that I’m doing a lot of SSHing into machines, often opening multiple sessions to the same machine at the same time. It quickly becomes tedious to keep having to type ‘ssh fboender@some.machine.com‘ four times in order […]

chkrootkit false positives filtering

Chkrootkit is a tool that searches for rootkits, trojans and other signs of break-ins on your system. Like most security scanners, it sometimes generates false positives. Chkrootkit doesn’t have a native way to filter those out. From the FAQ: [Q:] chkrootkit is reporting some files and dirs as suspicious: `.packlist’, `.cvsignore’, etc. These are clearly […]

SSH + SOCKS5 = Universal proxy

I didn’t know it, but (Open)SSH supports setting up a Socks5 proxy: -D [bind_address:]port Specifies a local “dynamic” application-level port forwarding. This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local side, optionally bound to the specified bind_address. Whenever a connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over the […]

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