agit8.org » Linux

Don’t update your Apache through Webmin

johannes — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:41:29 +0000

This morning while logged on inside the webmin interface, I saw that there were 10 packages to update. Without much thought, I just hit the “update packages” button and it went on its merry way. Unfortunately, the consequence was not very merry for me and my server, as when the updates were completed Apache would not start, complaining of a problem with mod-apache2-lib-php5.

After much searching and talking to my friend Google, I found that the problem was caused by what is probably a bug with the way Webmin applies the updates. For some reason, the update process removed mod-apache2-lib-php5 so that it became disabled. If you enable the module, you will encounter the same error that I did. The way to fix this module is to reinstall it using aptitude install command such as outlined here

Next time, I will just fire up the shell and do it the old fashioned way.

The life of a hard drive

johannes — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:00:59 +0000

In 1997, I purchased a computer system with a Pentium II 300 processor. At that time, I remember that this computer ate all my savings and I was a poor university student. Inside the box, was 64MB of RAM and a 4.3GB HDD made by Seagate. Thinking about it now, I thought that a 4.3GB hard drive was quite large. Also, with the computer, I bought an Iomega ZIP drive which connected through the printer port.

When I had moved up to a better machine later, I turned the PII 300 machine into a server. I installed Mandrake 8.0 on it and it became my internet gateway/mail server/web server in one box. It served me faithfully for quite a few years without complaint from the machine or me.

Eventually, the motherboard died and I decided to throw the whole lot out, except for the Hard Drive. I was then given a PII 450 from a friend who had just purchased a new machine (it’s funny how people will give you computers once you own one, but not if you have no computers). I installed Mandrake 9.0, Qmail and Shorewall on this machine and it ran on the old Seagate HDD.

The same server configuration ran for many years up until last month when I decided to get a new greener box, which resulted in an Atom box running a flavor of Debian. So the same Seagate 4.3 HDD has been with me since 1997 and still working perfectly well.

OpenBSD IPSEC stack has an FBI backdoor

johannes — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:36:03 +0000

According to a revelation from Theo de Raadt, the IPSEC stack in OpenBSD has a backdoor built in. The code was puportedly inserted by contractors who were also paid by the FBI. This revelation should not come as a big surprise to anyone, as this has been a possibility that has been discussed in relation to a lot of software either open-source or otherwise.

The backdoor (if the report is true), apparently allows FBI access to encrypted sessions (such as VPN) and other sofware that rely on the IPSEC stack in OpenBSD. This will mean that the FBI will have the ability to capture packets from an encrypted session and decrypt them to reveal the contents. While this may not sound like a great deal to most people, for the security conscious, this is a real threat. After all, if the FBI is able to carry out a surveillance of encrypted traffic, who says that criminal elements or other government agencies will not do the same.

It should be noted, though, that other implementations of IPSEC such as FreeSwan and OpenSwan are not affected by this development.

Exim remote exploit in the wild, with root access

johannes — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:00:06 +0000

What seems like a perfect (from attackers’ point of view) remote exploit has been discovered in the mail server software called Exim. In the exploit, an attacker can compromise an entire system remotely and gain access to not only the mail server user privilege, but even root according to an article here. If that is not serious enough, the problem with the mail server agent has been around for at least two years. This vulnerability affects only version 4.69 and earlier versions, but since the upgrade to 4.7 did not mention the existence of any sort of vulnerability, many sysadmins did not upgrade. After all, if it ain’t broke…

If you are running Exim for your MTA, it is recommended to upgrade to 4.7 immediately.

New Server!

johannes — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 01:36:22 +0000

After nearly eight years of near constant running, the server on which the agit8.org website has been hosted, is now officially retiring. The website has been running on an old and outdated (!) hardware that was Pentium II 400Mhz with 256MB of RAM. It happily ran for years without complaint, except for a dead power supply fan and it also handled mail for about four other domains.

The old server was happily serving pages running Mandrake 9.0 and Apache 1.3. The new server hardware is based on the Intel Atom architecture and is quite a bit snappier at 1.6Ghz with 4GB of RAM. Page views should be a little snappier from now on.

Linux Mint 9 Isadora on HP Mini Note 2133

johannes — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:42:12 +0000

I have jumped the bandwagon with the updates this time and downloaded and installed Linux Mint 9 (Isadora) on my old HP Mini Note 2133 which has been a testing bed for all sorts of OS and software. Upon completion, however I have noticed a couple of important issues:

The K3520 Vodafone dongle does not get recognised by the network manager anymore. When I plug it in, it shows up as a CDROM drive, but does not get unmounted an then used as a modem like it was with Linux Mint 8 (Helena).
The Interface seems to be really slow as to make it nearly unusable. The delay between clicking on a program to launch it and the actual launch is around 3-5 seconds. This is unacceptable.

To keep myself sane, I think I will just go back to Helena for now and be happy that everything works well enough to use the netbook on the move.

Linux Mint on HP2133

johannes — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:26:02 +0000

I have not used my HP 2133 for a few months now. I used to use it a lot for writing documents and stuff on the bus or train during commutes, but that was only after I got a larger battery for the laptop. The original battery was for all intents and purposes useless. For a laptop that was designed to be used as a “netbook”, being connected to the internet when away from home, (the marketing deparment? at) HP decided it was a great idea to put a 3 cell battery in the unit.

So in a little over an hour you go from full charge to nothing just by using the laptop the way it was intended to be used. So despite its small size, the 2133 was never really designed to be too far away from a charger for too long. It is almost like having a car like a Honda Jazz with a petrol tank the size of a coffee cup. “Yes it is frugal, sir, but it will only go for a half a kilometre no matter how you drive it.”

Recently I discovered the wonderful Linux Mint 8 (Helena), while searching for a desktop linux distro to install as a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Despite all the misgivings that I have had in the past for the various Linux distros, I must say that they have been improving all the time. The last time I tried to install Linux on the 2133 was when Ubuntu 9.10 came out. What a disaster that was. Wifi did not want to work, then I went back to 9.04 but found that I could just not get my Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband stick to work (K3520). In the end, out of frustration and spite I decided to whack XP back on and because I needed a little mobile word processor.

Linux Mint seems to run with a little bit of lag sometimes, but overall the experience has made my faith in Linux desktop distro strong again. Using Helena I could use my Vodafone Prepaid Broadband to connect to the net and wifi worked right out of the box.

If you need a decent desktop distro that looks half decent (who like brown anyway?) and works well out of the box for your 2133, then I can recommend Linux Mint 8 (Helena).

Google Chrome OS will open new doors (and close windows)

johannes — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:13:08 +0000

With the recent announcement of the development of the Google Chrome OS, the possibilities for the end user has opened even wider in terms of choice of operating system for desktops, notebooks and especially netbooks. An OS with the Chrome browser as its centrepiece will certainly open interesting possibilities for the holy grail of ubiquitous availability of data which is the central tenet in the concept of cloud computing. No longer will the user need to carry their data with them, but the data will come to them wherever they could have an internet connection. This will certainly change how we work, in much the same way as working with Microsoft Word compared to working with Google Documents.

I suspect the new OS will be based on one of the pre-existing Linux distro (Ubuntu?) with the Google layer built on top to enable constant synchronising of data when online and caching mode when offline (ala Google Gears?). When it is released, hopefully it will free us all from having to worry what or which computer we are working on at any given time. To a certain extent, I have already implemented some of the ideas of cloud computing by using Google services to synchronise my calendar on my notebooks and phones. I guess the only other thing that I would like with the Google Chrome OS is cheaper data rates. This issue of data charges is what prevent a lot of people from utlising cloud-based services more often on their wireless devices (phones).

Aptana under Ubuntu 9.04

johannes — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:08:17 +0000

Everybody has a favourite HTML editor on a platform, but does anyone have a favourite on ALL platforms? Well at least on the personal computing platform, that is. Well, I must tell you that my favourite HTML editor has been Aptana, which has served me well since I stopped using Dreamweaver exclusively. For me the major attraction of Aptana is its cross-platform nature. I can start work on my Windows laptop, then continue it on my MacBook and then finish it off on my tiny little Linux laptop the HP 2133 Mini note.

At the completion of my install of Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) on my netbook, I found that Aptana just would not load. It would show the logo for a couple of seconds then it would just come up with an error. After scratching my head for a little while, I tried to look up an answer on Google and I found this thread on the Aptana user forum.

So basically, the issue is the version of xulrunner that Jaunty comes with. Currently it is version 1.9, while Aptana needs version 1.8. To fix this issue you need to download xulrunner 1.8 and unzip it to /usr/lib, so its path would be something like /usr/lib/xulrunner/. Then you create a script which looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8.1.3
if [ $LD_LIBRARY_PATH ]; then
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
else
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME
fi
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME LD_LIBRARY_PATH
~/aptana/AptanaStudio -vm /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Make the script executable and then on your panel add an application shortcut to point to this script file, mine is called “aptanastart”. Oh, and you need to have Java installed, since Aptana requires it.

Jaunty Jackalope on the HP Mini-note 2133 part 2

johannes — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:05:55 +0000

I have found that using Jackalope on the HP 2133 Mini-note to be quite a good experience so far. Compared to installing Intrepid (8.10), the installation process was a complete breeze. There was no need to install using weird methods and there was no need for installing any drivers from VIA to get the display working in the correct setup.

The only issue that can be noted is with the wifi connection manager. It seems after a few hibernates that the connection is stuck at the “getting ip address…” stage. This can be quickly fixed with a reboot. Other than this issue, I have not found any major ones to mention. Sound works flawlessly, Bluetooth works normally and the webcam works with Cheese (I have not tested it to work with Skype or anything like that).

Recently, I also purchased the 6-cell battery for the Mini-note, which makes the notebook (or netbook, if you like) much more usable. Since I use this notebook mainly for writing text, coding and web browsing, I have found that having that extra amount of battery capacity makes the notebook a little easier to use. No longer staring at the battery icon every few minutes to see if I will have time to finish what I am doing. It puts the usability of this little notebook on par with my MacBook and my Dell Inspiron laptop. Using it with little power management and with wifi on seems to give around 3-3.5 hrs of uninterrupted use. What joy!

Had this notebook shipped with Jackalope instead of Windows Vista Basic (standard on all Mini-notes shipped in Australia), it would have been a winner from the start. A 6-cell battery, even though it adds a little to the price should have been standard on all models.