BLUG

[BLUG] [Novalug] Linux Admin Position Available - Fairfax, VA (fwd)

2012-02-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

Forwarded with the OP's blessing. -- rrn

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:38:40 -0500
From: Dan Lavu <dan@lavu.net>
To: NOVALUG <NOVALUG@calypso.tux.org>
Subject: [Novalug] Linux Admin Position Available - Fairfax, VA

Just thought I'd post this here because I'm feeling lucky.
Anyways we are a software company that is in the spend cost
analysis market. The majority of the software is written in Java
that runs on tomcat using modjk to connect to apache. We have
offices in Boston, Kentucky, Virginia, New York, China and the
UK.

Well I won't go into a lot of detail but it's a small team and we
manage over six data centers using enterprise equipment (sans,
blades and some other cool toys); below is the public job
description for the position.

Last thing and it's a pretty big deal too, we have been acquired. We are no
longer Emptoris but IBM, neat right?

Please send all resume's to dlavu@emptoris.com

----

Hosting Systems Engineer
Emptoris, Inc.
www.emptoris.com <http://www.emptoris.com/>

This position will be a member of a team responsible for system
administrations of all Emptoris Hosting Systems. The candidate will assist
in deploying and administrating leading edge technology to support Emptoris¹
enterprise applications within Emptoris¹ hosting facilities. The successful
candidate will work closely with other members of the internal teams to
support client requirements.

Work on any given day might include proactive maintenance on the systems
environments and applications, systems software modification, install and
configure new servers, assisting in develop process/policy from a systems,
network and administrative point of view.

Specific Responsibilities:

· Manage the daily activities of configuration and operation of servers
which are collocated in a remote data centers
· Deploy new systems in Emptoris¹ hosting facilities (Windows and
Linux)
· Manage and monitor core application hosting components including web
farm (IIS and Apache), database servers, virtual and physical servers.
· Document installation and data center process and procedures
· Monitor system and application availability
· Administer and attend to all system backups and recovery as assigned
· Maintain a secure and highly available hosting environment
· Maintain accurate inventory of asset management system
· Optimize system operation and resource utilization
· Manage user accounts of various servers and internal applications,
· Install, configure, and upgrade OS, applications and hardware on
servers
· Troubleshoot and debug OS and application issues where appropriate,
monitor for problems,
· Perform system capacity analysis; provide assistance to users in
accessing and using web-based systems.
· Maintain data files and system configuration for system availability
· Work with Engineering & Customer Support during project deployments.

Requirements

· 4+ years of experience in the installation and maintenance of
Linux/Windows operating systems in high availability environment
· 4+ years of experience in troubleshooting Windows and Linux systems
· 2+ years of experience in administration a Virtual Server Environment
using VMware
· Knowledge of scripting for automation of systems admin tasks
· Exposure to networking and oracle databases is a plus
· Experience with web based applications like IIS, Apache,
Weblogic,Websphere, or JBoss/Tomcat
· Knowledge of TCP/IP as a network protocol and Internet application
protocols
· Knowledge of Windows Active Directory
· Clear and concise oral and written communication skills
· Ability to convey complex or technical information comprehensively to
non-technical individuals and ability to work with all organizational levels
is desirable
· Participation in a rotating on-call schedule

The successful candidate will have a strong work ethic, good analytical and
problem solving abilities, be motivated to learn and work effectively in a
fast-paced software development company.

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T18:33:00.001-08:00

Oh, for the record ignore any media more than 6 months old. Ubuntu has a new release every six months and other distros frequently try to release about that frequently, too. (I think GNOME has an official twice-a-year release.)

Linux isn't like Windows. Linux has new releases a lot faster. You can upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to 11.04 but with the amount of data to copy it will be faster to download and burn a new ISO.

http://ftp.ussg.indiana.edu/linux is an Indiana University mirror for a lot of Linux projects. It includes "mepis" and "ubuntu-releases" for ISO images for SimplyMEPIS and Ubuntu/Kubuntu. (It includes others, but since those have been mentioned I thought I would point them out.)

Ubuntu actually has multiple flavors. Regular Ubuntu is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. Xubuntu is XFCE. Though that's only the initial interface -- they have a common package repository and one install can later also install the other interfaces. I actually prefer Kubuntu to Ubuntu.

When you're starting out it is good to keep at least one machine stable -- that way you can hit the web for answers. It sounds like that won't be a problem for you. ;)

Cheers and good luck,
Steven Black

On Nov 23, 2011 7:38 PM, "Paul W. Proctor" <proctor710@comcast.net> wrote:

Hi,
Got several spare machines with about 2ghz processors. All I really want to
do with them is internet access and email. All experimental machines, backup
not an issue. Got a bunch of spare time, on SSDI. I have a couple of 2 yr
old Ubuntu disks somewhere.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Black" <yam655@gmail.com>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Linux

> My middle school niece switched to Linux. It can be quite easy -- and
> I mean far easier than Windows. I installed it for her once, and let
> her do all the administration with it -- next thing I know she's
> installed it on replacement laptops and on friends' laptops. She had
> no prior experience with Linux and hadn't read anything about it
> before I installed it for her. I was tired of repairing problems with
> viruses. I said I would fix it one last time and she would never have
> a problem with viruses again: I installed Ubuntu.
>
> Hardware compatibility isn't a given. This is known to bite people
> when they initially convert.
>
> Also, make sure you back up anything on the computer that you want to
> keep. You should be keeping backups as a normal part of your computer
> life, but unfortunately this isn't a given.
>
> Any time you use any tool to repartition a hard drive expect the
> possibility that something could go wrong and you could lose all data
> on that drive. If you have multiple drives and are not absolutely sure
> which is which when you repartition you need to expect to lose all
> data on the drive you were not planning to use.
>
> What do you need to do with the computer and how fast do you need it
> to be usable? How much time do you have to play with Linux before you
> need to be productive with it?
>
> For a simple "is my hardware compatible with Linux" test there are
> "Live" CDs. Personally, I'm a fan of Ubuntu. Their desktop
> installation CDs are also "live" CDs. You can boot up Ubuntu and
> verify the hardware is supported before you install upon it. At this
> point, I think most Linux distributions have Live media when they're
> not the same as their desktop installation media. Some distributions
> may require DVDs but most have just one required installation CD and
> the rest of the packages can be downloaded from the Internet. (Debian
> is available on 52 CDs, 8 DVDs, or 2 BD. You can get a bootable system
> that can go online to download more packages with just the first CD.
> Many packages are alternatives to other packages.)
>
> The gentlest installation of Linux has got to be Wubi -- the Ubuntu
> Windows Installer.
> http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer -- It is
> actually easier to try out Linux with Wubi than it is to try it out
> with a Live CD. It installs Linux like a Windows application -- no
> repartitioning needed (though you need to reboot to boot in to Linux)
> -- and this means it can be uninstalled just as easily. There are some
> caveats with using Wubi -- disk access isn't as fast -- but
> performance is more realistic than a Live CD and it is super fast and
> easy. Since Wubi installs Linux in to space allocated within your
> Windows partition there's no risk of loss of data stored in your
> Windows partition.
>
> If you know the hardware will work with Linux, there is no reason to
> stick with the first distribution of Linux that you try. There are a
> lot of different flavors. Some distributions are easier to use than
> others, and most have slightly different hardware requirements. Linux
> will run on a wide variety of hardware. Most Linux distributions have
> similar hardware requirements to modern version of Windows. Some Linux
> distributions specifically focus on lighter hardware requirements for
> older hardware.
>
> Personally, I started using Linux when my system had few enough
> resources I only used a GUI if I wanted to see pictures on a webpage.
> Everything else was done through the console. This meant that system
> was still doing all kinds of stuff when it would have been unsuitable
> for anything in Windows. If you're comfortable with something very
> light-weight, I think the modern hardware requirements are a
> Pentium-class processor or better. The GUI (and Live) CDs won't work,
> but Ubuntu has an "alternate" CD that should work. Even when you need
> to install in text-mode you should be able to use one of the
> lighter-weight window managers. ([Off-topic] Though you need not throw
> away even older hardware. FreeDOS released a 1.0 release -- compatible
> with MS DOS 6.0 -- and ships with a lot of software.)
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Do you have a spare machine you can load it on? My suggestion is to just
>> load up a flavor of desktop Linux (my personal preference is
>> SimplyMEPIS) and have at it. Be prepared to have numerous WTF! moments
>> and to totally trash the system out and having to reinstall. Eventually
>> it will all come together, and you'll wonder why you waited so long.
>>
>> JMO. YMMV.
>>
>> Paul W. Proctor wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user
>>> for decades.
>>> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend
>>> one near IU.
>>> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
>>> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
>>> Thanks,
>>> Paul Proctor
>>> proctor710@comcast.net <mailto:proctor710@comcast.net>
>>
>> --
>> Mark Warner
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
>
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 2012.0.1873 / Virus Database: 2101/4634 - Release Date: 11/23/11
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T18:14:00.001-08:00

Drivers are typically not an issue. Usually it either works out-of-the-box or it won't work at all. There are a few exceptions, but you should be notified if they are available. (The OS will notify you.)

Cheers,
Steven

On Nov 23, 2011 7:30 PM, "Paul W. Proctor" <proctor710@comcast.net> wrote:

Hi,
Yup, actually got at least six spar working machines. What are minium specs?
What about drivers?
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Warner" <mhwarner@gmail.com>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 9:44 AM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Linux

>
> Do you have a spare machine you can load it on? My suggestion is to just
> load up a flavor of desktop Linux (my personal preference is
> SimplyMEPIS) and have at it. Be prepared to have numerous WTF! moments
> and to totally trash the system out and having to reinstall. Eventually
> it will all come together, and you'll wonder why you waited so long.
>
> JMO. YMMV.
>
> Paul W. Proctor wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user
>> for decades.
>> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend
>> one near IU.
>> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
>> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
>> Thanks,
>> Paul Proctor
>> proctor710@comcast.net <mailto:proctor710@comcast.net>
>
> --
> Mark Warner
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
>
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 2012.0.1873 / Virus Database: 2101/4634 - Release Date: 11/23/11
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T17:00:00.001-08:00

A 2GHz proc and 1G of RAM should be sufficient for most installs.

My suggestion would be to download, burn, and boot to the Live disks the
latest versions of these four distros, in no particular order:

SimplyMEPIS
PCLinuxOS
Ubuntu
Mint

Running them through their paces in Live mode will give you an idea of
hardware compatibility. If it works Live, it will work installed. (Do
understand that performance will be greatly degraded while in Live mode.)

The first two are native KDE distros, while that latter two are native
Gnome distros. Gnome is in transition now to version 3, and Ubuntu is
moving to what's known as the Unity desktop on top of Gnome, while Mint
is using a desktop (MATE?) that runs on Gnome 3 but is designed to
operate like Gnome 2.

MEPIS is built on Debian stable, is known for it's stability and ease of
use, and NOT for being the "latest and greatest".
PCLinuxOS is a rolling release, with constant and continuous updating.
That said, it rarely suffers from serious breakage.
Ubuntu is based on a snapshot of Debian unstable/experimental, is then
modified/reworked, and released in six month cycles.
Mint is based on Ubuntu, and follows its release cycle. Many consider it
more "user friendly" than Ubuntu.

Once you've taken these for a spin, you'll have an idea of what kind of
hardware compatibility you've got (probably very good -- most
difficulties arise with brand new hardware), and what the various
distros look like and a basic idea of how they operate. I suspect one of
these four will just feel right. If so, just hit the Install Icon on the
Live disk desktop, tell the installer to take the whole disk, and turn
it loose.

Then the fun begins.

---
Mark Warner
MEPIS Linux
Registered Linux User #415318

Paul W. Proctor wrote:
> Hi,
> Got several spare machines with about 2ghz processors. All I really want to
> do with them is internet access and email. All experimental machines, backup
> not an issue. Got a bunch of spare time, on SSDI. I have a couple of 2 yr
> old Ubuntu disks somewhere.

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

Hi,
Got several spare machines with about 2ghz processors. All I really want to
do with them is internet access and email. All experimental machines, backup
not an issue. Got a bunch of spare time, on SSDI. I have a couple of 2 yr
old Ubuntu disks somewhere.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Black" <yam655@gmail.com>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Linux

> My middle school niece switched to Linux. It can be quite easy -- and
> I mean far easier than Windows. I installed it for her once, and let
> her do all the administration with it -- next thing I know she's
> installed it on replacement laptops and on friends' laptops. She had
> no prior experience with Linux and hadn't read anything about it
> before I installed it for her. I was tired of repairing problems with
> viruses. I said I would fix it one last time and she would never have
> a problem with viruses again: I installed Ubuntu.
>
> Hardware compatibility isn't a given. This is known to bite people
> when they initially convert.
>
> Also, make sure you back up anything on the computer that you want to
> keep. You should be keeping backups as a normal part of your computer
> life, but unfortunately this isn't a given.
>
> Any time you use any tool to repartition a hard drive expect the
> possibility that something could go wrong and you could lose all data
> on that drive. If you have multiple drives and are not absolutely sure
> which is which when you repartition you need to expect to lose all
> data on the drive you were not planning to use.
>
> What do you need to do with the computer and how fast do you need it
> to be usable? How much time do you have to play with Linux before you
> need to be productive with it?
>
> For a simple "is my hardware compatible with Linux" test there are
> "Live" CDs. Personally, I'm a fan of Ubuntu. Their desktop
> installation CDs are also "live" CDs. You can boot up Ubuntu and
> verify the hardware is supported before you install upon it. At this
> point, I think most Linux distributions have Live media when they're
> not the same as their desktop installation media. Some distributions
> may require DVDs but most have just one required installation CD and
> the rest of the packages can be downloaded from the Internet. (Debian
> is available on 52 CDs, 8 DVDs, or 2 BD. You can get a bootable system
> that can go online to download more packages with just the first CD.
> Many packages are alternatives to other packages.)
>
> The gentlest installation of Linux has got to be Wubi -- the Ubuntu
> Windows Installer.
> http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer -- It is
> actually easier to try out Linux with Wubi than it is to try it out
> with a Live CD. It installs Linux like a Windows application -- no
> repartitioning needed (though you need to reboot to boot in to Linux)
> -- and this means it can be uninstalled just as easily. There are some
> caveats with using Wubi -- disk access isn't as fast -- but
> performance is more realistic than a Live CD and it is super fast and
> easy. Since Wubi installs Linux in to space allocated within your
> Windows partition there's no risk of loss of data stored in your
> Windows partition.
>
> If you know the hardware will work with Linux, there is no reason to
> stick with the first distribution of Linux that you try. There are a
> lot of different flavors. Some distributions are easier to use than
> others, and most have slightly different hardware requirements. Linux
> will run on a wide variety of hardware. Most Linux distributions have
> similar hardware requirements to modern version of Windows. Some Linux
> distributions specifically focus on lighter hardware requirements for
> older hardware.
>
> Personally, I started using Linux when my system had few enough
> resources I only used a GUI if I wanted to see pictures on a webpage.
> Everything else was done through the console. This meant that system
> was still doing all kinds of stuff when it would have been unsuitable
> for anything in Windows. If you're comfortable with something very
> light-weight, I think the modern hardware requirements are a
> Pentium-class processor or better. The GUI (and Live) CDs won't work,
> but Ubuntu has an "alternate" CD that should work. Even when you need
> to install in text-mode you should be able to use one of the
> lighter-weight window managers. ([Off-topic] Though you need not throw
> away even older hardware. FreeDOS released a 1.0 release -- compatible
> with MS DOS 6.0 -- and ships with a lot of software.)
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Do you have a spare machine you can load it on? My suggestion is to just
>> load up a flavor of desktop Linux (my personal preference is
>> SimplyMEPIS) and have at it. Be prepared to have numerous WTF! moments
>> and to totally trash the system out and having to reinstall. Eventually
>> it will all come together, and you'll wonder why you waited so long.
>>
>> JMO. YMMV.
>>
>> Paul W. Proctor wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user
>>> for decades.
>>> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend
>>> one near IU.
>>> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
>>> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
>>> Thanks,
>>> Paul Proctor
>>> proctor710@comcast.net <mailto:proctor710@comcast.net>
>>
>> --
>> Mark Warner
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
>
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 2012.0.1873 / Virus Database: 2101/4634 - Release Date: 11/23/11
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T16:30:00.001-08:00

Hi,
Yup, actually got at least six spar working machines. What are minium specs?
What about drivers?
Paul
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Warner" <mhwarner@gmail.com>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 9:44 AM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Linux

>
> Do you have a spare machine you can load it on? My suggestion is to just
> load up a flavor of desktop Linux (my personal preference is
> SimplyMEPIS) and have at it. Be prepared to have numerous WTF! moments
> and to totally trash the system out and having to reinstall. Eventually
> it will all come together, and you'll wonder why you waited so long.
>
> JMO. YMMV.
>
> Paul W. Proctor wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user
>> for decades.
>> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend
>> one near IU.
>> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
>> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
>> Thanks,
>> Paul Proctor
>> proctor710@comcast.net <mailto:proctor710@comcast.net>
>
> --
> Mark Warner
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
>
> -----
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 2012.0.1873 / Virus Database: 2101/4634 - Release Date: 11/23/11
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T09:12:00.001-08:00

My middle school niece switched to Linux. It can be quite easy -- and
I mean far easier than Windows. I installed it for her once, and let
her do all the administration with it -- next thing I know she's
installed it on replacement laptops and on friends' laptops. She had
no prior experience with Linux and hadn't read anything about it
before I installed it for her. I was tired of repairing problems with
viruses. I said I would fix it one last time and she would never have
a problem with viruses again: I installed Ubuntu.

Hardware compatibility isn't a given. This is known to bite people
when they initially convert.

Also, make sure you back up anything on the computer that you want to
keep. You should be keeping backups as a normal part of your computer
life, but unfortunately this isn't a given.

Any time you use any tool to repartition a hard drive expect the
possibility that something could go wrong and you could lose all data
on that drive. If you have multiple drives and are not absolutely sure
which is which when you repartition you need to expect to lose all
data on the drive you were not planning to use.

What do you need to do with the computer and how fast do you need it
to be usable? How much time do you have to play with Linux before you
need to be productive with it?

For a simple "is my hardware compatible with Linux" test there are
"Live" CDs. Personally, I'm a fan of Ubuntu. Their desktop
installation CDs are also "live" CDs. You can boot up Ubuntu and
verify the hardware is supported before you install upon it. At this
point, I think most Linux distributions have Live media when they're
not the same as their desktop installation media. Some distributions
may require DVDs but most have just one required installation CD and
the rest of the packages can be downloaded from the Internet. (Debian
is available on 52 CDs, 8 DVDs, or 2 BD. You can get a bootable system
that can go online to download more packages with just the first CD.
Many packages are alternatives to other packages.)

The gentlest installation of Linux has got to be Wubi -- the Ubuntu
Windows Installer.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer -- It is
actually easier to try out Linux with Wubi than it is to try it out
with a Live CD. It installs Linux like a Windows application -- no
repartitioning needed (though you need to reboot to boot in to Linux)
-- and this means it can be uninstalled just as easily. There are some
caveats with using Wubi -- disk access isn't as fast -- but
performance is more realistic than a Live CD and it is super fast and
easy. Since Wubi installs Linux in to space allocated within your
Windows partition there's no risk of loss of data stored in your
Windows partition.

If you know the hardware will work with Linux, there is no reason to
stick with the first distribution of Linux that you try. There are a
lot of different flavors. Some distributions are easier to use than
others, and most have slightly different hardware requirements. Linux
will run on a wide variety of hardware. Most Linux distributions have
similar hardware requirements to modern version of Windows. Some Linux
distributions specifically focus on lighter hardware requirements for
older hardware.

Personally, I started using Linux when my system had few enough
resources I only used a GUI if I wanted to see pictures on a webpage.
Everything else was done through the console. This meant that system
was still doing all kinds of stuff when it would have been unsuitable
for anything in Windows. If you're comfortable with something very
light-weight, I think the modern hardware requirements are a
Pentium-class processor or better. The GUI (and Live) CDs won't work,
but Ubuntu has an "alternate" CD that should work. Even when you need
to install in text-mode you should be able to use one of the
lighter-weight window managers. ([Off-topic] Though you need not throw
away even older hardware. FreeDOS released a 1.0 release -- compatible
with MS DOS 6.0 -- and ships with a lot of software.)

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Mark Warner <mhwarner@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Do you have a spare machine you can load it on? My suggestion is to just
> load up a flavor of desktop Linux (my personal preference is
> SimplyMEPIS) and have at it. Be prepared to have numerous WTF! moments
> and to totally trash the system out and having to reinstall. Eventually
> it will all come together, and you'll wonder why you waited so long.
>
> JMO. YMMV.
>
> Paul W. Proctor wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user
>> for decades.
>> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend
>> one near IU.
>> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
>> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
>> Thanks,
>> Paul Proctor
>> proctor710@comcast.net <mailto:proctor710@comcast.net>
>
> --
> Mark Warner
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T06:44:00.001-08:00

Do you have a spare machine you can load it on? My suggestion is to just
load up a flavor of desktop Linux (my personal preference is
SimplyMEPIS) and have at it. Be prepared to have numerous WTF! moments
and to totally trash the system out and having to reinstall. Eventually
it will all come together, and you'll wonder why you waited so long.

JMO. YMMV.

Paul W. Proctor wrote:
> Hi,
> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user
> for decades.
> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend
> one near IU.
> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
> Thanks,
> Paul Proctor
> proctor710@comcast.net <mailto:proctor710@comcast.net>

--
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Re: [BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T06:00:00.001-08:00

you might want to check out indianalinux.org. We will be running ILF
2012 april 13th to the 15th this coming year and working on the event
currently.

Cheers

Matthew Williams
President Indiana F/OSS Society
Lead Organizer Indiana LinuxFest

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Paul W. Proctor <proctor710@comcast.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user for
> decades.
> I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend one
> near IU.
> I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.
> I AM READY TO CONVERT.
> Thanks,
> Paul Proctor
> proctor710@comcast.net
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
>

--
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with ketchup
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[BLUG] Linux

2011-11-23T05:49:00.001-08:00

Hi,

I am ready to take the plunge with Linux! Been a diehard Windows user for decades.

I would like to know when the next Linux Fest is. I would like to attend one near IU.

I would also be open to any advice for a newbie.

I AM READY TO CONVERT.

Thanks,

Paul Proctor

proctor710@comcast.net

[BLUG] xfce4-terminal, gnome-terminal and guake security issues

2011-11-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

I just posted this to my G+ account. Read this if you use any of these terminals:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104947878052533251426/posts/Q9JmPiEckD9

---------
Just discovered a major security flaw in xfce4-terminal, gnome-terminal
and guake on Linux, but probably other OSes are affected as well that
uses these programs. Filing bug reports now. If you use any of these
terminals, I'd recommend switching to Konsole, Eterm, xterm, rxvt, aterm
or some other one for now until these bugs are fixed. Also, you should
probably scrub your /tmp filesystem pretty good. At least write over it
with 0s, use shred, etc.

Basically, the problem is that the terminal buffers are stored within
filehandles on the tmp filesystem. If you run strings on your /tmp
filesystem as root you should see quite a bit of your previous terminal
buffer history, including that of old closed terminals. I consider
terminal buffer history to be a sacred thing, so I was quite surprised
to find out about this behavior.

On Linux, if you want to check if your terminal is exhibiting this
behavior, run some commands that produce some terminal output (ls ~/,
find /, etc). Then find the process id for your terminal process (pgrep
gnome-terminal), cd /proc/<pid>/fd. Then run ls -l | grep deleted, you
will see the file handles that are still open for deleted inodes. Some
of these will contain the contents of existing and closed terminal
windows. You can just view them with cat, less, etc.

Bug report status:

xfce4-terminal: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8183

gnome-terminal: working on it.

guake: some kind of website error right now
---------

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

Sent from Mutt using Linux
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[BLUG] [OT] Amiga 1000 System for sale

2011-11-16T06:22:00.001-08:00

Hey all...

I've listed an Amiga 1000 on craigslist at

http://bloomington.craigslist.org/sys/2705176012.html

to raise some Christmas money

I know it doesn't run Linux*, but its still a pretty cool system.

Brian

* My A2500 will run Linux but I've never gotten around to trying it.
Maybe I'll tinker with that or AMIX over break.

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Re: [BLUG] Celebrating the life of Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-15T12:40:00.001-07:00

Hm, That's the guy that gave us strcpy(), right?
I would be there but am out of town.

On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 4:59 PM, Paul Purdom <pwp@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:

Mark Krenz wrote:
> If you'd all like to have a beer tonight and we can honor him,
> share stories and remember. Maybe around 6pm at Max's Place unless
> someone has a better idea. We'll probably be there for a while so if you
> can't make it at 6, then maybe 7 or so.
>

Since I don't drink beer, I will come by at 6 or a little later and eat
some supper with who ever comes.

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Re: [BLUG] Celebrating the life of Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-14T13:59:00.001-07:00

Mark Krenz wrote:
> If you'd all like to have a beer tonight and we can honor him,
> share stories and remember. Maybe around 6pm at Max's Place unless
> someone has a better idea. We'll probably be there for a while so if you
> can't make it at 6, then maybe 7 or so.
>
Since I don't drink beer, I will come by at 6 or a little later and eat
some supper with who ever comes.

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Re: [BLUG] Celebrating the life of Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-14T13:50:00.001-07:00

I'll be there at six

On Oct 14, 2011 4:39 PM, "Mark Krenz" <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:

If you haven't heard, Dennis Ritchie, the co-creator of the C
programming language and co-creator of Unix, has passed away last
Saturday at the age of 70.

Rob Pike's Eulogy:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZDtY

This humble man basically as someone put it, created air for us all to
breathe. If you'd all like to have a beer tonight and we can honor him,
share stories and remember. Maybe around 6pm at Max's Place unless
someone has a better idea. We'll probably be there for a while so if you
can't make it at 6, then maybe 7 or so.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

Sent from Mutt, which was written in C
using Linux which was written in C,
which is a derivative of Unix,
which was written in C.

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[BLUG] Celebrating the life of Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard, Dennis Ritchie, the co-creator of the C
programming language and co-creator of Unix, has passed away last
Saturday at the age of 70.

Rob Pike's Eulogy:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZDtY

This humble man basically as someone put it, created air for us all to
breathe. If you'd all like to have a beer tonight and we can honor him,
share stories and remember. Maybe around 6pm at Max's Place unless
someone has a better idea. We'll probably be there for a while so if you
can't make it at 6, then maybe 7 or so.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

Sent from Mutt, which was written in C
using Linux which was written in C,
which is a derivative of Unix,
which was written in C.

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Re: [BLUG] How to utilize these unused spaces?

2011-10-05T11:08:00.001-07:00

One tip I'd like to make about LVM. Don't feel the need to use up or
allocate all your physical volume space at once. You should grow it as
needed. This is important because AFAIK none of the commonly available
filesystems out there for Linux let you shrink the filesystem size, so
once you've grown it, you can't go back.

I see some people setup LVM and then allocate all their space to one
large root partition or something like that. Granted, there are other
uses for LVM. But I think they are missing the point, which is
flexibility.

On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 05:20:41PM GMT, Shei, Shing-Shong [shei@cs.indiana.edu] said the following:
> <html>
> <head>
> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
> http-equiv="Content-Type">
> </head>
> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
> <tt>Thanks, Thomas.  So you don't need to extend the physical volume
> first and the </tt><tt class="computeroutput">lvextend will
> magically know which free space to use (since in this case there
> are 4 possibilities here)?  I was trying to find a way to extend
> the pv on each disk first before trying to use lvextend (so that
> lvextend sees extra space to use). 
> 
> Thanks, 
> Shing-Shong 
> </tt> 
> On 10/5/2011 1:14 PM, Thomas Smith wrote:
> <blockquote
> cite="mid:CAHCWDdawRgPQFs3-V5VUnXv0zKq_Hxh6L_y3q9=8_qaC3i5vLw@mail.gmail.com"
> type="cite">Yes! 
> 
> Here is the page I've used to do this before: 
> 
> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> href="http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html">http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html</a> 
> 
> Hope this helps, 
> -Thomas 
> 
> <div class="gmail_quote">
> On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Shei, Shing-Shong dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
> href="mailto:shei@cs.indiana.edu">shei@cs.indiana.edu</a>>
> wrote: 
> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
> .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
> <div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <tt>Hi, 
> 
> I have a lvm2 system that's currently not utilizing all
> available disk space as shown in the following pvs output: 
> 
> # pvs 
>   PV         VG      Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree   
>   /dev/sdb1  pool_vg lvm2 a-   931.51g color="#ff0000">118.26g 
>   /dev/sdc1  pool_vg lvm2 a-   931.51g      0 
>   /dev/sdd1  pool_vg lvm2 a-   931.51g color="#ff0000">528.00m 
>   /dev/sde1  pool_vg lvm2 a-   931.51g color="#ff0000">150.26g 
>   /dev/sdf1  pool_vg lvm2 a-   931.51g color="#ff0000">150.26g 
> 
> Is it possible to incorporate the free spaces into the
> existing logical volume? 
> 
> Thanks, 
> Shing-Shong</tt> </div>
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
> BLUG mailing list 
> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:BLUG@linuxfan.com">BLUG@linuxfan.com</a> 
> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
> href="http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug"
> target="_blank">http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug</a> 
> 
> </blockquote>
> </div>
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://resc.smugmug.com/">http://resc.smugmug.com/</a> 
> 
> <fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
> 
> <pre wrap="">_______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:BLUG@linuxfan.com">BLUG@linuxfan.com</a>
> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug">http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug</a>
> </pre>
> </blockquote>
> </body>
> </html>

> _______________________________________________
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--
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Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

Sent from Mutt using Linux
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Re: [BLUG] How to utilize these unused spaces?

2011-10-05T10:40:00.001-07:00

Hi,

Yes, lvextend will magically figure out that it can use the free parts of the volume group. The "PFree" column from "pvs", or the "Free PE" (physical extents) line in "pvdisplay", shows how much space is left *within* the physical volume, so you don't need to grow the physical volumes at all.

Good luck,
-Thomas

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Shei, Shing-Shong <shei@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:

Thanks, Thomas. So you don't need to extend the physical volume first and the lvextend will magically know which free space to use (since in this case there are 4 possibilities here)? I was trying to find a way to extend the pv on each disk first before trying to use lvextend (so that lvextend sees extra space to use). Thanks, Shing-Shong

Re: [BLUG] How to utilize these unused spaces?

2011-10-05T10:20:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Thomas. So you don't need to extend the physical volume first and the lvextend will magically know which free space to use (since in this case there are 4 possibilities here)? I was trying to find a way to extend the pv on each disk first before trying to use lvextend (so that lvextend sees extra space to use). Thanks, Shing-Shong
On 10/5/2011 1:14 PM, Thomas Smith wrote:

Yes!

Here is the page I've used to do this before:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html

Hope this helps,
-Thomas

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Shei, Shing-Shong <shei@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:

Hi, I have a lvm2 system that's currently not utilizing all available disk space as shown in the following pvs output: # pvs PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/sdb1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 118.26g /dev/sdc1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 0 /dev/sdd1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 528.00m /dev/sde1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 150.26g /dev/sdf1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 150.26g Is it possible to incorporate the free spaces into the existing logical volume? Thanks, Shing-Shong

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Re: [BLUG] How to utilize these unused spaces?

2011-10-05T10:14:00.001-07:00

Yes!

Here is the page I've used to do this before:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/extendlv.html

Hope this helps,
-Thomas

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Shei, Shing-Shong <shei@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:

Hi, I have a lvm2 system that's currently not utilizing all available disk space as shown in the following pvs output: # pvs PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/sdb1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 118.26g /dev/sdc1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 0 /dev/sdd1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 528.00m /dev/sde1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 150.26g /dev/sdf1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 150.26g Is it possible to incorporate the free spaces into the existing logical volume? Thanks, Shing-Shong

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[BLUG] How to utilize these unused spaces?

2011-10-05T09:58:00.001-07:00

Hi, I have a lvm2 system that's currently not utilizing all available disk space as shown in the following pvs output: # pvs PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree /dev/sdb1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 118.26g /dev/sdc1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 0 /dev/sdd1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 528.00m /dev/sde1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 150.26g /dev/sdf1 pool_vg lvm2 a- 931.51g 150.26g Is it possible to incorporate the free spaces into the existing logical volume? Thanks, Shing-Shong

[BLUG] [OT] Stuff for Sale

2011-09-23T07:25:00.001-07:00

I'm cleaning out my computer room of things I don't use much anymore.

I'm mostly looking to sell, but there are things I might be willing to
trade for:
* 400+ MHz Alpha workstation since both of my alphas died :(
* DECstation 5000 since mine died as well

Location: Bloomington, IN 47408.

Terms:
* Unless noted, everything worked the last time I turned it on
* Cash only for local pickup
* Paypal for shipped items + actual shipping costs

SUN
---

* Sun Ultra 5 $75
333 MHz UltraSPARC IIi, 256M RAM, CDROM, Floppy, No ATA HD

* Sun 501-2520 $10
75MHz SuperSPARC II MBus Card

* Sun Type 5 Keyboard 320-1073-01 $5
No cable & Missing keycaps: Right arrow, whatever is right of
'compose'
and whatver is below 'open'

* Sony CDU-8012 SCSI CD-ROM (50 pin) $10
Apparent Sun part number 370-1312; Caddy Load

IBM
---
* IBM RS/6000 43p 7248 $35
133MHz PPC 604, 96M RAM, 2.2G SCSI Disk, CD-ROM

Digital
-------
* Digital VT-420 [will not ship] $50
Amber, No Keyboard, MMJ connectors only

* Digital VT-220 [will not ship] $50
Green, With Keyboard

* Digital BCC08 Console Cable $10
Used with a MicroVAX II console

* DECserver 200/MC $25
8 db25 ports, photocopy of the manual in binder

* VAX C 3.0 Manuals $5
Run-Time Library Reference, Guide to VAX C

* RA82 User Guide $2

* StorageWorks SBB w/o Drive $10 each
2x SCA Interface (DS-RZ1CB-VW)
4x 68-pin Interface (3x RZ28M-VW, 1x RZ28D-VW)
4x 50-pin Interface (3x RZ28M-VA, 1x RZ29B-VA)

Apple
-----
* Apple BNC Cable $1
Labeled "<<-/->>" on each end, Part 590-0540-A

* Apple DB9 Cable $1
Part 590-0197-A

* Nuvotech TurboNet Transceiver (2x) $10
Phone Net, with terminating resistor

* Farallon PhoneNET Plus Transceiver $5
No terminating resistor

Networking
----------
* Motorola SURFboard Cable Modem $10

* Xircom CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIps $5
PS-CE2-10

* 3Com Megahertz 10/100 LAN PC card $5
3CCFE574BT

* Accton ISA 10Base-T Ethernet (2x) $5 ea
Plug-and-play

* 3Com 3C595-TX PCI 10/100 Ethernet $5

* 3Com 3C905-TX PCI 10/100 Ethernet $5

* Realtek 8029AS PCI Ethernet $5
Twisted Pair & BNC connectors

* Cisco Catalyst 1900 24-port 10BaseT Switch $15
Some cosmetic damage

* 10Base-T AUI tranceivers (10x) $5 each
12" cord

PC Stuff
--------
* NEC CDR-512 SCSI CD-ROM (50 pin) (2x) $5 ea
6x according to the web; Caddy Load; Cannot be used to boot Sun
boxes

* Sony CDU-561 SCSI CD-ROM (50 pin) $5
No Face Plate; Caddy Load; May work for Sun boot, depends on PROM
version

* 6' DB25 M-M Cable $5
Black/green dot; probably scsi cable

* Quick Shot Skyhawk Joystick $5
PC Compat, 15 pin.

* Mustek Matador 105 Handheld Scanner w/ISA Interface card $5

* 10' Printer cable $5

* Adaptec AVA-1505Ae ISA SCSI Card $5
db25 external connector (only); solder pads for internal 50-pin

* Adaptec AVA-2902E PCI SCSI Card $5
db25 external connector (only); solder pads for internal 50-pin

* Mitsumi ISA CDROM Interface Card $5

* GVC PCI Modem $5
model 5-1156/R2F

* Turtle Beach TB400 PCI Sound card $5

* Creative Technology Audio PCI CT5803 $5

* Trident TVGA 8800CS ISA Video card $3
Supports VGA and TTL output

* PS/2 3-button Mouse (w/o scroll wheel) (3x) $3

* PS/2 2-button Mouse (w/o scroll wheel) (2x) $3

* PC Serial Mouse (3 button) $3

* Industrial Computer Source PC-73 $15
8-bit ISA card; Software (5.25") & Manual
Looks like 8 channels of 12-bit A/D for thermocouples

Other
-----
* Serial to RJ45 adapter $5
DB25 (3x), DB9 (1x)

* 8" Floppy Disks $25
2x Verbatim Unformatted 1S/1D
5x Tandy Unformatted 1S/1D
15x IBM Previously Formatted "Diskette2" 2D?

* Logical Devices Prompro-XP Serial connection $10
Memory and Logic programmer; No software; Unknown condition; UV oven

* HP HIL->PS/2 Keyboard Adapter Module $10
With 12" HIL cable and PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse ports

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[BLUG] [OT] Anyone have an Alpha collecting dust?

2011-09-19T06:14:00.000-07:00

Over the last week or so I've been powering up my old machines in
preparation for rearranging them and to my dismay both of my DEC Alpha
machines have bit the dust :(

Does anyone have either an alpha workstation or smallish server that's
capable of running VMS that they'd be willing to trade for a Sun Ultra
5? The sun needs a hard drive, but its bog-standard ATA.

I'm probably going to part out the Alphas since I'm stumped on how to
get them working again. One is a PWS 500au (21164A @ 500MHz, 192M,
Miata MX5, qlogic scsi controller, powerstorm 3D30, cdrom) and the other
is an AlphaServer 1000A (21064 @ 266MHz, 256M, lots of empty
storageworks cans, onboard scsi & video, DAT, cdrom), so if anyone needs
parts...

I'm also looking to replace my DECstation 5000/120 which also failed,
but since its a power supply issue I might be able to modify an ATX
supply to do the trick.

On the plus side, my VAXes came up ok, so I'm not VMS-less!

Brian

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[BLUG] Celebrate 20 Years of Linux at Ohio LinuxFest!

2011-08-31T18:14:00.001-07:00

The premier Linux event in the Mid-West USA will run Sept. 9 through
Sept. 11 in Columbus, Ohio, and registration
<http://www.ohiolinux.org/registration> is now open to all.
Keynoters include Cathy Malmrose, Bradley Kuhn, and Jon 'maddog' Hall.
There is an extensive Medical track focusing on the use of Open Source
in various aspects of medicine, training from the Ohio LinuxFest
Institute, and a great slate of presentations. Register now and reserve
your place.

As always, we have a "Enthusiast" category for those short on funds. If
you pre-register at the Web site, you can join us free of charge.
Walk-ins will be charged a small fee.
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[BLUG] OT: Need AGP/PCI video card -- 128MB+

2011-08-18T06:07:00.001-07:00

Doing a charity update/upgrade on an old box, and could use a decent
video card to replace the old 64MB that's in it. Something like an
nVidia FX5200 would be ideal. Would prefer nVidia for Linux compatibility.

--
Mark Warner
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[BLUG] Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

2011-08-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Alan

Alan Polis
Information Technology and Services Professional
Bloomington, Indiana Area

Confirm that you know Alan

Re: [BLUG] Looking for some hardware

2011-08-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Some hp, some dell, as well as a dell kvm

On Aug 1, 2011 5:44 PM, "Michael Schultheiss" <schultmc@cinlug.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Lord Drachenblut
> <lord.drachenblut@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wanted to see if anyone had some server rails that they might be looking to
>> part with?
>
> What kind of server? I think I have some HP and Dell rails.
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Re: [BLUG] Looking for some hardware

2011-08-01T14:44:00.001-07:00

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Lord Drachenblut
<lord.drachenblut@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wanted to see if anyone had some server rails that they might be looking to
> part with?

What kind of server? I think I have some HP and Dell rails.
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[BLUG] Looking for some hardware

2011-08-01T14:36:00.001-07:00

Wanted to see if anyone had some server rails that they might be looking to part with?

Cheers

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T15:02:00.001-07:00

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 5:28 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ultimately we're talking risk mitigation. There is no way to remove all
> risks and have a usable system.

Exactly right. My personal paranoia is directed toward the grey hats
surrounding me. So I optimize my habits to thwart them. Joe Mafia
trying to get to me from botnets-r-us worries me much less and is,
imo, much easier to deal with.
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

With botnets the pam_unix 2 second delay is meaningless. That's two seconds per IP and depending on the size of the botnet it could be longer than 2 seconds before the same IP attacks due to not wanting to DOS your system. Even banning IPs after wrong passwords is useless, as I was never seeing the same IP attempt to attack within 5 minutes or more.

They have near limitless IPs. They have near limitless computing power. They also get bored very, very quickly. The key is to appear uninteresting. Public key auth does that.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Jul 21, 2011 3:23 PM, "Brian Wheeler" <bdwheele@indiana.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-07-21 at 18:23 +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
>> Here is a summary to give you an idea of how large of numbers we are
>> talking about:
>>
>> simple 5 character password combinations (a-z)
>> 26^5 = 11881376 (0.01 seconds)
>>
>> full alphanumeric 5 character password (a-zA-Z0-9):
>> 62^5 = 916132832 (0.9 seconds)
>>
>> complex alphanumeric 5 character password (above + all symbols)
>> 94^5 = 7339040224 (7.3 seconds)
>>
>> 3 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
>> 2000^3 = 8000000000 (8 seconds)
>>
>> simple 8 character password combinations (a-z)
>> 26^8 = 208827064576 (208 seconds)
>>
>> 4 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
>> 2000^4 = 16000000000000 (4.4 hours)
>>
>> full alphanumeric 8 character password (a-zA-Z0-9):
>> 62^8 = 218340105584896 (2.5 days)
>>
>> complex alphanumeric 8 character password (above + all symbols)
>> 94^8 = 6095689385410816 (70 days)
>>
>> 5 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
>> 2000^5 = 32000000000000000 (1 year, 5 days)
>>
>> 5 word passphrase drawing from 5000 word vocabulary
>> 5000^5 = 3125000000000000000 (99 years)
>>
>> The time shown in parens is the maximum time that it would take for a
>> system capable of encrypting 1 billion passwords per second would take.
>> Apparently, home desktop systems with high end GPUs have been built that
>> can do this.
>>
>> Lesson learned from all this? Sentence based passphrases are much much
>> stronger. The downside is that they are easier to accidently say in your
>> sleep.
>>
>
> The time needed to generate the encrypted keys is only important if you
> already have the encrypted key and you want to reverse the password.
>
> For scanning SSH hosts that isn't important. What is important is the
> number of combinations for the password character set and the amount of
> time that each wrong answer takes. If the SSH server (and basically
> anything that uses pam_unix.so) waits 2 seconds after each wrong
> attempt, the amount of time needed to guess the correct password becomes
> huge.
>
> For the worst case example above [a-z]{5} it would take 275 days to try
> every combination. The [A-Za-z0-9]{5} one takes 58.1 years. The
> shortest reasonable set/size (all symbols, 6 characters) would take 1801
> years
>
> How many threads would an attacker have to use to make it worth it?
>
> The biggest problem is social engineering, not password complexity. Too
> many people share or write down their passwords. Or they use really
> obviously bad passwords (the account name, 1234, "password", etc). The
> bots hitting the ssh servers, at least from what I've seen, aren't doing
> a brute force attack: they're trying to pick up low hanging fruit where
> passwords of well known accounts were chosen stupidly.
>
> Brian
>
>
>
>
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> BLUG@linuxfan.com
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T14:36:00.000-07:00

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 5:28 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you really want to protect a PC you need a boot-time password and to
> power it off whenever it will leave your sight. This is what I do with my
> laptop when at conventions.

Quick, someone hand me a screwdriver! ;-)

> Ultimately we're talking risk mitigation. There is no way to remove all
> risks and have a usable system.

Amen.

> Cheers,
> Steven Black

Cheers,
Simón

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T14:28:00.000-07:00

Hey! I said "short password" not a bad password. ;)

For me, "short" is 12 to 24 characters, no embedded words, no 1337 substitutions, upper and lower case, includes at least one number and punctuation. Yeah, it can be brute-forced, but it isn't low-hanging fruit. More than that a casual aquantance can't learn I like "yams" and know the key to my password. ("Hey, he turned 34, let's try 'yams77'... Bingo!")

Now "long" is 240 characters or more. I have had one of those before, but they just feel so slow to type I am loathe to go that big.

I usually aim for 70 to 90 characters. Comfortably fast to type, and still long enough to thwart all but the most determined.

Yeah, there's the whole sneak-in-and-copy-key thing. It is suitably low risk for the reasons Mark mentioned.

If you really want to protect a PC you need a boot-time password and to power it off whenever it will leave your sight. This is what I do with my laptop when at conventions.

Ultimately we're talking risk mitigation. There is no way to remove all risks and have a usable system.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Jul 21, 2011 12:53 PM, "Thomas C. Knoeller" <tck@pretend.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 12:28 AM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [...] Using
>> a short passphrase and a key agent that forgets the passphrase
>> immediately with public key authentication is still better than being
>> botnet attacked for months on end.
>
> Heh. This touches on the other part of my paranoia with PKI; the
> short passphrase. Imagine that your passphrase encrypted key gets
> loose in the wild.[1] At that point, you can brute force the file
> without anyone knowing you are doing it. No matter how many thousands
> of bits the key itself is, if the passphrase is simple or small
> enough, there is a possibility of it being decrypted. Whereas, if you
> are doing the password checking during the login process, if a failure
> happens, it is logged and you have a chance of seeing the attack
> before to many guesses of the password can be made.
>
> I agree that the script kiddie login attempts are annoying. But they
> are not likely to succeed if you use password best practices. And if
> you are really worried about them, and cannot lock down the ssh port
> to known remote hosts, using a port knocker of some sort is an easy
> way to only open the port when needed.
>
> As someone else said, 2 factor auth (something you have plus something
> you know) is still the best thing to do, but if you don't do that, and
> need to open ssh to the public, local password is my preference over
> keys.
>
> -Tom
>
>
> [1] Using the stroll to the kitchen example again, if you forget to
> lock your screen, and someone gets to the machine before the 2 minute
> auto kick in of auto screen locker, they can easily open a terminal
> and run a curl command to upload the public key[2] from your machine.
>
> [2] If you are using security by obscurity, while in the daemon rc
> file to change the port number, you should also change the default
> location of the public key file.
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T12:23:00.001-07:00

On Thu, 2011-07-21 at 18:23 +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:

> Here is a summary to give you an idea of how large of numbers we are
> talking about:
>
> simple 5 character password combinations (a-z)
> 26^5 = 11881376 (0.01 seconds)
>
> full alphanumeric 5 character password (a-zA-Z0-9):
> 62^5 = 916132832 (0.9 seconds)
>
> complex alphanumeric 5 character password (above + all symbols)
> 94^5 = 7339040224 (7.3 seconds)
>
> 3 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
> 2000^3 = 8000000000 (8 seconds)
>
> simple 8 character password combinations (a-z)
> 26^8 = 208827064576 (208 seconds)
>
> 4 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
> 2000^4 = 16000000000000 (4.4 hours)
>
> full alphanumeric 8 character password (a-zA-Z0-9):
> 62^8 = 218340105584896 (2.5 days)
>
> complex alphanumeric 8 character password (above + all symbols)
> 94^8 = 6095689385410816 (70 days)
>
> 5 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
> 2000^5 = 32000000000000000 (1 year, 5 days)
>
> 5 word passphrase drawing from 5000 word vocabulary
> 5000^5 = 3125000000000000000 (99 years)
>
> The time shown in parens is the maximum time that it would take for a
> system capable of encrypting 1 billion passwords per second would take.
> Apparently, home desktop systems with high end GPUs have been built that
> can do this.
>
> Lesson learned from all this? Sentence based passphrases are much much
> stronger. The downside is that they are easier to accidently say in your
> sleep.
>

The time needed to generate the encrypted keys is only important if you
already have the encrypted key and you want to reverse the password.

For scanning SSH hosts that isn't important. What is important is the
number of combinations for the password character set and the amount of
time that each wrong answer takes. If the SSH server (and basically
anything that uses pam_unix.so) waits 2 seconds after each wrong
attempt, the amount of time needed to guess the correct password becomes
huge.

For the worst case example above [a-z]{5} it would take 275 days to try
every combination. The [A-Za-z0-9]{5} one takes 58.1 years. The
shortest reasonable set/size (all symbols, 6 characters) would take 1801
years

How many threads would an attacker have to use to make it worth it?

The biggest problem is social engineering, not password complexity. Too
many people share or write down their passwords. Or they use really
obviously bad passwords (the account name, 1234, "password", etc). The
bots hitting the ssh servers, at least from what I've seen, aren't doing
a brute force attack: they're trying to pick up low hanging fruit where
passwords of well known accounts were chosen stupidly.

Brian

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T11:38:00.001-07:00

Mark Krenz wrote:
>
> Lesson learned from all this? Sentence based passphrases are much much
> stronger. The downside is that they are easier to accidently say in your
> sleep.

And to remember if overheard. :-)

--
Mark Warner
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T11:23:00.001-07:00

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 04:52:43PM GMT, Thomas C. Knoeller [tck@pretend.net] said the following:
>
> Heh. This touches on the other part of my paranoia with PKI; the
> short passphrase. Imagine that your passphrase encrypted key gets
> loose in the wild.[1] At that point, you can brute force the file
> without anyone knowing you are doing it. No matter how many thousands
> of bits the key itself is, if the passphrase is simple or small
> enough, there is a possibility of it being decrypted. Whereas, if you
> are doing the password checking during the login process, if a failure
> happens, it is logged and you have a chance of seeing the attack
> before to many guesses of the password can be made.

It depends on what type of passphrase you are using. You might think
that a passphrase could be cracked easier, but it turns out that a
sentence is a lot harder to crack than an 8 character password.

I give an example like this on my SSH tutorial here:

http://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for_Linux#Generating_a_key

An 8 character password that uses a set of characters made from upper
and lowercase, numbers and symbols has 94^8 or 6,095,689,385,410,816
combinations.

Now if you use a 5 word sentence for a passphrase, you are probably
pulling from a vocabulary of 5000 or so words. "For instance this
measly sentence" could be such a passphrase. The number of combinations
rises to 5000^5 or 3,125,000,000,000,000,000, which is 512 times more
combinations than an 8 character password. And you're probably more
likely to remember the passphrase.

If an attacker had to try to crack the passphrase they could either do
it based on combinations of letters, which on a 33 letter sentence would
be about 28^33 combinations. If the attacker had to try combinations of
words in a dictionary, they are probably going ot have to use a
dictionary larger than your vocabulary, so maybe 50,000 words. This
would be 50000^5 to try. Of course, they don't know how many words, so
they may start with 3 words, then 4, then 5, etc.

Here is a summary to give you an idea of how large of numbers we are
talking about:

simple 5 character password combinations (a-z)
26^5 = 11881376 (0.01 seconds)

full alphanumeric 5 character password (a-zA-Z0-9):
62^5 = 916132832 (0.9 seconds)

complex alphanumeric 5 character password (above + all symbols)
94^5 = 7339040224 (7.3 seconds)

3 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
2000^3 = 8000000000 (8 seconds)

simple 8 character password combinations (a-z)
26^8 = 208827064576 (208 seconds)

4 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
2000^4 = 16000000000000 (4.4 hours)

full alphanumeric 8 character password (a-zA-Z0-9):
62^8 = 218340105584896 (2.5 days)

complex alphanumeric 8 character password (above + all symbols)
94^8 = 6095689385410816 (70 days)

5 word passphrase drawing from 2000 word vocabulary
2000^5 = 32000000000000000 (1 year, 5 days)

5 word passphrase drawing from 5000 word vocabulary
5000^5 = 3125000000000000000 (99 years)

The time shown in parens is the maximum time that it would take for a
system capable of encrypting 1 billion passwords per second would take.
Apparently, home desktop systems with high end GPUs have been built that
can do this.

Lesson learned from all this? Sentence based passphrases are much much
stronger. The downside is that they are easier to accidently say in your
sleep.

> I agree that the script kiddie login attempts are annoying. But they
> are not likely to succeed if you use password best practices. And if
> you are really worried about them, and cannot lock down the ssh port
> to known remote hosts, using a port knocker of some sort is an easy
> way to only open the port when needed.
>
> As someone else said, 2 factor auth (something you have plus something
> you know) is still the best thing to do, but if you don't do that, and
> need to open ssh to the public, local password is my preference over
> keys.
>
> -Tom
>
>
> [1] Using the stroll to the kitchen example again, if you forget to
> lock your screen, and someone gets to the machine before the 2 minute
> auto kick in of auto screen locker, they can easily open a terminal
> and run a curl command to upload the public key[2] from your machine.
>
> [2] If you are using security by obscurity, while in the daemon rc
> file to change the port number, you should also change the default
> location of the public key file.
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 12:28 AM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...] Using
> a short passphrase and a key agent that forgets the passphrase
> immediately with public key authentication is still better than being
> botnet attacked for months on end.

Heh. This touches on the other part of my paranoia with PKI; the
short passphrase. Imagine that your passphrase encrypted key gets
loose in the wild.[1] At that point, you can brute force the file
without anyone knowing you are doing it. No matter how many thousands
of bits the key itself is, if the passphrase is simple or small
enough, there is a possibility of it being decrypted. Whereas, if you
are doing the password checking during the login process, if a failure
happens, it is logged and you have a chance of seeing the attack
before to many guesses of the password can be made.

I agree that the script kiddie login attempts are annoying. But they
are not likely to succeed if you use password best practices. And if
you are really worried about them, and cannot lock down the ssh port
to known remote hosts, using a port knocker of some sort is an easy
way to only open the port when needed.

As someone else said, 2 factor auth (something you have plus something
you know) is still the best thing to do, but if you don't do that, and
need to open ssh to the public, local password is my preference over
keys.

-Tom

[1] Using the stroll to the kitchen example again, if you forget to
lock your screen, and someone gets to the machine before the 2 minute
auto kick in of auto screen locker, they can easily open a terminal
and run a curl command to upload the public key[2] from your machine.

[2] If you are using security by obscurity, while in the daemon rc
file to change the port number, you should also change the default
location of the public key file.
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T08:42:00.001-07:00

Yes, I gave a talk on this 4 years ago. I did have an article for it on
the BLUG wiki and a graph showing the growth of the worm over a few
months, but I haven't had time to recover the wiki since it broke after
a PHP upgrade. Sorry about that.

Anyways, hashlimit has worked quite well. The problem that I was
running into was that the worm that was running around trying every
first name as a username was hitting my servers so hard that it opened
up enough connections to prevent normal users from logging in. So I
turned on hashlimit in the firewall and that stopped the problem. I
also decided at that point that I would move my servers that don't need
ssh access by customers to a custom port. I found one suitable by
searching a years worth of firewall logs and found one that hadn't ever
been hit by port scanners. There are actually several ports like this
so don't ask me which one I use. This is an exercise left to the reader.
;-)

So you can see, there are other issues besides just "if they get the
right username and password", they can practically DOS your system.
Back in 2005 I think I was getting somewhere around 60,000 login
attempts per day.

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 08:51:55PM GMT, Williams, Jeffery Allen [jefjewil@indiana.edu] said the following:
> A while back (3 or more years) there was a discussion about ssh brute force attacks. (I think Mark sent something related to SUSO getting hammered.) Since then, I have limited the number of connection attempts per source IP to 4 / minute using hashlimit in iptables. I have other lines that limit service connections to a few per second from any source (ntp for instance). I also have a few things where I reject the first few connection attempts and after that all attempts are dropped until things quiet down.
>
> I also have notes in my firewall script about portsentry. But I don't know if that's still a thing.
>
> Finally, my router is a piece of crap. If too many connection attempts happen at once it just locks up until it's power cycled. This further prevents brute force attacks (but is more than a little annoying).
>
> Jeffery Williams
> Software Engineer
> ISAT Hall
> 867-5309
> _______________________________________________
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> BLUG@linuxfan.com
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--
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http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 02:32:04AM GMT, Thomas C. Knoeller [tck@pretend.net] said the following:
>
> Disagree here. I am more worried about coworkers then script kiddies.
> My coworkers know that I have ssh-agent running all the time, and
> they know the vanity domain of my home server. It would take a
> coworker less time to hack me then it takes for me to walk to the
> kitchen and back. Since I am not religious about locking the screen
> each time I walk away from the laptop, and because of the nature of
> the kids I (used to) work with, I would never use public key on a
> public facing interface.

Not knowing what you do and putting the kids issue aside. Let me
easy your worries a bit here with some logic. Yes, your coworkers
probably could gain access to your systems faster, but in most places
this would be crossing the line and grounds for immediate termination.
At least if I was in your shoes and someone did this, I would make sure
that they got fired, damn anyone who tries to say "You shouldn't have
left your screen unlocked".

This is not to say that you shouldn't lock your screen as you should
do that even at home, but what I'm trying to show here is that your
likelyhood of threats is more based on fear than ease of access.

A malicious hacker in Romania basically has nothing to fear because
they know that we won't be able to do anything about it (historically)
if they hack your system. But people that you know have a lot to fear,
losing their job, being arrested, etc. You have to remember that people
are still people with basic motivations to have their life be ok.

Also, if there was someone on my team that I couldn't trust, it would
be better to know about it sooner and have them just hack into my home
server before they do something worse or before you trust them with more
information and access.

I think the biggest time that you have to worry about coworkers is
when they are fired, but hopefully they are out of the building before
they can do anything and likely would try to remote in somehow and
probably wouldn't care about your home computer.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Thomas,

If you're not religious about locking your screen, you're asking to be
compromised in any event. There is nothing more potent than console
access when it comes to providing an easy route to break in to a
system.

For instance: If you're not religious about locking your screen, are
you religous about logging out of all root shells you may use before
you walk away? I find I need to slip away while mid-process once and a
while. If I wasn't religous about locking my screen someone could walk
up to my system, create a nefarious account, and clear the screen
before they walk away and I would be unlikely to notice.

If you're not religous about locking your screen, you need an
automatic screen saver that locks your screen, and you need that
screen saver configured to go off after no more than about 2 minutes
of inactivity. I have used such configurations in the past. These days
I do that *and* I'm religous about locking my screen.

If you normally use GNU Screen while you're su'ing on a remote
machine, you should at least configure the internal GNU Screen
screensaver with locking. It is simple to configure and it can prevent
someone from walking up and gaining access to a remote root shell.
Configured to "rain" or something it can be a handy visual reminder
"finish the task here and log out!"

Also a note, any reasonable key agent can be configured to forget the
passphrase after a particular period of time (even immediately). Using
a short passphrase and a key agent that forgets the passphrase
immediately with public key authentication is still better than being
botnet attacked for months on end. (With public key authentication
your site gets dropped from the attack list of the botnets -- they'll
know they can never succeed. Otherwise they keep consuming your
precious upstream bandwidth with requests.

Personally, if I have a server, I want to preserve my upstream
bandwidth. These days it tends to be crazily lopsided from the
downstream bandwidth. It also removes any possibility of an attack
showing up in logs which frees a lot of mental resources for me.
(While on personal machines typically only 3 folks will have SSH
access, I've administered systems where they guessed account names of
users that can log in -- rarely but it has happened to me. In no case
did they actually catch a password/passphrase, but knowing the
username is enough of a scare.)

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Thomas C. Knoeller <tck@pretend.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Make sure you use Public Key authentication and disable system
>> password authentication. A lot of the SSH attacks are done by botnets.
>> [...]
>
> Disagree here. I am more worried about coworkers then script kiddies.
> My coworkers know that I have ssh-agent running all the time, and
> they know the vanity domain of my home server. It would take a
> coworker less time to hack me then it takes for me to walk to the
> kitchen and back. Since I am not religious about locking the screen
> each time I walk away from the laptop, and because of the nature of
> the kids I (used to) work with, I would never use public key on a
> public facing interface.
>
> But I should mention that I also got really sick of the script kiddie
> login attempts, so I did my own homegrown solution. Since I have a
> publicly accessible web server running on the gateway host, I created
> a small ssl'd cgi script that, when invoked, adds the connecting ip
> address to the /etc/hosts.allow file for the sshd service. Since it
> is ssl'd, the web server password auth is not seen cleartext on the
> wire. And since it is just opening up the ssh port, I don't worry
> about having a strong auth password. It's worked pretty well for me
> for several years now.
>
> That said, I do enable PKI access when inside my firewall, so I have
> mostly a false sense of security. With easily installable keyloggers
> and with wifi access to the gooey center of my home network, there are
> still easily accessible vectors for someone determined to get in...
>
> -Tom
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Jeremy L. Gaddis <jlgaddis@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> I also recently discovered an app that provides free two-factor
> authentication and wrote about it:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/69uqplc

+1 for the Duo Security product. Caveat, I used to work with one of
the developers. But he really is one of the brightest people I have
ever known. Anything he does has a very high trustworthiness level,
imho.

-Tom
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T19:32:00.001-07:00

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Make sure you use Public Key authentication and disable system
> password authentication. A lot of the SSH attacks are done by botnets.
> [...]

Disagree here. I am more worried about coworkers then script kiddies.
My coworkers know that I have ssh-agent running all the time, and
they know the vanity domain of my home server. It would take a
coworker less time to hack me then it takes for me to walk to the
kitchen and back. Since I am not religious about locking the screen
each time I walk away from the laptop, and because of the nature of
the kids I (used to) work with, I would never use public key on a
public facing interface.

But I should mention that I also got really sick of the script kiddie
login attempts, so I did my own homegrown solution. Since I have a
publicly accessible web server running on the gateway host, I created
a small ssl'd cgi script that, when invoked, adds the connecting ip
address to the /etc/hosts.allow file for the sshd service. Since it
is ssl'd, the web server password auth is not seen cleartext on the
wire. And since it is just opening up the ssh port, I don't worry
about having a strong auth password. It's worked pretty well for me
for several years now.

That said, I do enable PKI access when inside my firewall, so I have
mostly a false sense of security. With easily installable keyloggers
and with wifi access to the gooey center of my home network, there are
still easily accessible vectors for someone determined to get in...

-Tom
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

Speaking of "knocking at the door"... for the person who wants access to their server from random locations... there are "port knocking" solutions where your SSH port (whatever the port number) is normally locked, but if you try to hit port A, B, and C (where A, B, and C are arbitrary closed ports) in quick succession the port opens -- but only for a brief period of time (and maybe only for that IP).

I forget the product, but there's (I think) a product to do this in the standard Debian/Ubuntu repos.

Personally, I have an SSH client (and a public key) on my cell phone. I must note that my primary requirement for a cell phone was a decent SSH client.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Jul 20, 2011 5:10 PM, "Jeremy L. Gaddis" <jlgaddis@gnu.org> wrote:
> David Ernst <david.ernst@davidernst.net> wrote:
>> I didn't realize that these brute force attempts were so common. Had
>> to go check and see if I was getting hit with such attempts. Indeed,
>> I am. About 1500 failed attempts in the last month. As Jeremy says,
>
> [...]
>
>> I supposed using a non-standard port would keep your log files
>> cleaner, but I don't know that it really makes you any more secure.
>
> More secure? Not necessarily but, for comparison, in the last 30 days I
> see exactly zero failed attempts against SSH on a box at home (with sshd
> running on a high port). Obviously it would only take one attempt if
> the attacker guessed the right username and password, but I certainly
> have a lot less people "knocking on the door".
>
> Somebody will chime in that running sshd on a high random port is
> "security by obscurity", but I don't agree with that.
>
> --
> Jeremy L. Gaddis
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T14:09:00.001-07:00

David Ernst <david.ernst@davidernst.net> wrote:
> I didn't realize that these brute force attempts were so common. Had
> to go check and see if I was getting hit with such attempts. Indeed,
> I am. About 1500 failed attempts in the last month. As Jeremy says,

[...]

> I supposed using a non-standard port would keep your log files
> cleaner, but I don't know that it really makes you any more secure.

More secure? Not necessarily but, for comparison, in the last 30 days I
see exactly zero failed attempts against SSH on a box at home (with sshd
running on a high port). Obviously it would only take one attempt if
the attacker guessed the right username and password, but I certainly
have a lot less people "knocking on the door".

Somebody will chime in that running sshd on a high random port is
"security by obscurity", but I don't agree with that.

--
Jeremy L. Gaddis

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T14:03:00.001-07:00

On 20 July 2011 16:51, Williams, Jeffery Allen <jefjewil@indiana.edu> wrote:
> A while back (3 or more years) there was a discussion about ssh brute force attacks. (I think Mark sent something related to SUSO getting hammered.) Since then, I have limited the number of connection attempts per source IP to 4 / minute using hashlimit in iptables. I have other lines that limit service connections to a few per second from any source (ntp for instance). I also have a few things where I reject the first few connection attempts and after that all attempts are dropped until things quiet down.

Do you have examples of each of those restrictions you added to your
iptables? I would definitely be interested in seeing them, and I
suspect others paying attention to this thread might as well.
Otherwise, a link to an appropriate tutorial might also be nice.

--
Jonathan
http://jnw.name/

> I also have notes in my firewall script about portsentry. But I don't know if that's still a thing.
>
> Finally, my router is a piece of crap. If too many connection attempts happen at once it just locks up until it's power cycled. This further prevents brute force attacks (but is more than a little annoying).
>
> Jeffery Williams
> Software Engineer
> ISAT Hall
> jefjewil@indiana.edu
> Work (812) 856-1165
> Home (812) 219-5061
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu [mailto:blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu] On Behalf Of Jim McKean
> Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 3:32 PM
> To: blug@cs.indiana.edu
> Subject: Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?
>
> This is a great thread! I am learning a lot. Thanks everyone.
>
> On 07/20/2011 12:22 PM, Steven Black wrote:
>> I wanted to note:
>>
>> Make sure you use Public Key authentication and disable system
>> password authentication. A lot of the SSH attacks are done by botnets.
>> This means blocking an IP after three unsuccessful login attempts does
>> absolutely nothing to actually help security.
>>
>> Most of my available services are done via SSH port-forwarding. I get
>> to them, but random folks can not. Then again, the services I run on
>> my non-work servers are not for general consumption. When you can lock
>> it up with SSH port-forwarding, this is by far the best approach.
>>
>> When you can use HTTPS (or another SSL-wrapped service) consider using
>> this instead of an unencrypted service. If it is an authenticated
>> service you're sending your password in clear-text if it isn't over
>> SSL -- and that is the case regardless of the protocol. Consider SSL
>> client certificates if your HTTP-based service has a limited audience.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Steven Black
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:52 PM, David Ernst <david.ernst@davidernst.net> wrote:
>>> There are countless ways to try to break into a server. But in my
>>> experience, the only one I've ever seen actually used - and I've seen
>>> it a LOT of times - was people exploiting known security problems on
>>> installed software. In other words, the server maintainers were
>>> guilty of what Jonathan confesses to below: not applying security
>>> updates. I should also confess that I have made this mistake before
>>> and paid the same price.
>>>
>>> It's definitely overstatement to say "just keep your system software
>>> up to date and you'll never get hacked." So, I won't say that.
>>> However, I think I can stand by this: "if you have a publicly
>>> accessible server that is running out-of-date software on a publicly
>>> accessible port, you WILL get hacked". All of the best password
>>> selections and firewall policies and such will do you no good if
>>> you're running a version of apache with a security hole in it. Or
>>> something like that.
>>>
>>> Next best advice: do not open any ports that you aren't intentionally
>>> offering services on. Many many people will want to run SSH and HTTP
>>> and nothing else. Some maybe just HTTP. Use a port scanner like nmap
>>> to see which ports are available on your machine. The theory is
>>> simple: it's fewer software programs that might be entry points to
>>> your system if security holes are discovered in them.
>>>
>>> But, once again, I'll just say: keep your software up to date. Ubuntu
>>> makes this really easy. Lots of other distros do too. So, do it.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:37:48PM -0400, Jonathan North Washington wrote:
>>>> I run a server out of my house too, and have been doing so for about
>>>> 10 years. Actually, these days it's run out of my parents' house,
>>>> ever since I was out of the country for a year and needed it to stay
>>>> up; before that I ran it out of my own apartments and dorm rooms (with
>>>> the exception of one year--see below).
>>>>
>>>> The server hosts a handful of sites for various people, mostly for
>>>> myself (firespeaker.org , jnw.name) and my father
>>>> (salonaexploration.com , northeasterngeoscience.org).
>>>>
>>>> I'm also curious about the questions Ben asks, though I suppose I can
>>>> add some of my own experience to the conversation.
>>>>
>>>> In about 2005, when my server was hosted for a little over a year out
>>>> of Brandeis University's LUG (also BLUG :)'s server room, it got
>>>> rooted. This was partly my own fault for not running debian security
>>>> updates very often and allowing root ssh (which reminds me that I need
>>>> to check that again). This is the only real problem I've had, besides
>>>> thunderstorms and wind taking the server down at my parents' house
>>> >from time to time. While Comcast doesn't seem to be providing a
>>>> static IP address service, the IP address does not seem to have
>>>> changed at all in the last four years (since I started hosting it at
>>>> my parents' house).
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Jonathan
>>>>
>>>> On 18 July 2011 15:20, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
>>>>> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
>>>>> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
>>>>> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
>>>>> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
>>>>> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
>>>>> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
>>>>> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
>>>>> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
>>>>> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
>>>>> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
>>>>> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
>>>>> and any little home servers you may be running!
>>>>>
>>>>> Ben
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> BLUG mailing list
>>>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> BLUG mailing list
>>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> BLUG mailing list
>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
> _______________________________________________
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> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T13:59:00.003-07:00

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 03:03:20PM -0400, Jeremy L. Gaddis wrote:
>Jonathan North Washington <jonwashi@indiana.edu> wrote:
>> However, I still want to be able to open up putty from a public
>> machine somewhere and ssh to my server. Is there any way to allow
>> myself to do this short of memorising my public key or carrying it
>> around with me on flash drive or something?
>
>Just change your /etc/ssh/sshd_config to run the daemon on some high
>random port and be sure you have a strong password and you'll be fine.
>
>The automated brute force attacks are looking for the "low hanging
>fruit" -- servers w/ the SSH daemon running on 22/TCP with weak user
>passwords.

I didn't realize that these brute force attempts were so common. Had
to go check and see if I was getting hit with such attempts. Indeed,
I am. About 1500 failed attempts in the last month. As Jeremy says,
they seems to be looking for low-hanging fruit: most of the failed are
attempts are to log in as 'root', which is actually not possible on my
system. Many other popular usernames are being tried: "oracle",
"mysql", "www", etc. no one has attempted to log in as a username
that is actually has a password or a shell configured. I only have
one account that is open for ssh logins, and no one has even tried
that username. At 1500 attempts per month, it would be a really long
time before they got the password correct even if they knew the
username.

I supposed using a non-standard port would keep your log files
cleaner, but I don't know that it really makes you any more secure.
However, realizing that these brute force attempts are so common, I
would definitely make sure that root cannot ssh in, and use a
non-obvious username and a strong password for any accounts that can
ssh in. Then, it seems like you should be fine.

David
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[BLUG] Blug administration question.

2011-07-20T13:59:00.001-07:00

Crud. I forgot to edit my standard signature work which has phone numbers. Any way to back edit a post? It's been sent to the user list. I can handle that, but being kept forever on the internet at large is a little unsettling.

Jeffery Williams
Software Engineer
ISAT Hall
jefjewil@indiana.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu [mailto:blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu] On Behalf Of Williams, Jeffery Allen
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 4:52 PM
To: Bloomington LINUX Users Group
Subject: Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

A while back (3 or more years) there was a discussion about ssh brute force attacks. (I think Mark sent something related to SUSO getting hammered.) Since then, I have limited the number of connection attempts per source IP to 4 / minute using hashlimit in iptables. I have other lines that limit service connections to a few per second from any source (ntp for instance). I also have a few things where I reject the first few connection attempts and after that all attempts are dropped until things quiet down.

I also have notes in my firewall script about portsentry. But I don't know if that's still a thing.

Finally, my router is a piece of crap. If too many connection attempts happen at once it just locks up until it's power cycled. This further prevents brute force attacks (but is more than a little annoying).

Jeffery Williams
Software Engineer
ISAT Hall
jefjewil@indiana.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu [mailto:blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu] On Behalf Of Jim McKean
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 3:32 PM
To: blug@cs.indiana.edu
Subject: Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

This is a great thread! I am learning a lot. Thanks everyone.

On 07/20/2011 12:22 PM, Steven Black wrote:
> I wanted to note:
>
> Make sure you use Public Key authentication and disable system
> password authentication. A lot of the SSH attacks are done by botnets.
> This means blocking an IP after three unsuccessful login attempts does
> absolutely nothing to actually help security.
>
> Most of my available services are done via SSH port-forwarding. I get
> to them, but random folks can not. Then again, the services I run on
> my non-work servers are not for general consumption. When you can lock
> it up with SSH port-forwarding, this is by far the best approach.
>
> When you can use HTTPS (or another SSL-wrapped service) consider using
> this instead of an unencrypted service. If it is an authenticated
> service you're sending your password in clear-text if it isn't over
> SSL -- and that is the case regardless of the protocol. Consider SSL
> client certificates if your HTTP-based service has a limited audience.
>
> Cheers,
> Steven Black
>
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:52 PM, David Ernst <david.ernst@davidernst.net> wrote:
>> There are countless ways to try to break into a server. But in my
>> experience, the only one I've ever seen actually used - and I've seen
>> it a LOT of times - was people exploiting known security problems on
>> installed software. In other words, the server maintainers were
>> guilty of what Jonathan confesses to below: not applying security
>> updates. I should also confess that I have made this mistake before
>> and paid the same price.
>>
>> It's definitely overstatement to say "just keep your system software
>> up to date and you'll never get hacked." So, I won't say that.
>> However, I think I can stand by this: "if you have a publicly
>> accessible server that is running out-of-date software on a publicly
>> accessible port, you WILL get hacked". All of the best password
>> selections and firewall policies and such will do you no good if
>> you're running a version of apache with a security hole in it. Or
>> something like that.
>>
>> Next best advice: do not open any ports that you aren't intentionally
>> offering services on. Many many people will want to run SSH and HTTP
>> and nothing else. Some maybe just HTTP. Use a port scanner like nmap
>> to see which ports are available on your machine. The theory is
>> simple: it's fewer software programs that might be entry points to
>> your system if security holes are discovered in them.
>>
>> But, once again, I'll just say: keep your software up to date. Ubuntu
>> makes this really easy. Lots of other distros do too. So, do it.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:37:48PM -0400, Jonathan North Washington wrote:
>>> I run a server out of my house too, and have been doing so for about
>>> 10 years. Actually, these days it's run out of my parents' house,
>>> ever since I was out of the country for a year and needed it to stay
>>> up; before that I ran it out of my own apartments and dorm rooms (with
>>> the exception of one year--see below).
>>>
>>> The server hosts a handful of sites for various people, mostly for
>>> myself (firespeaker.org , jnw.name) and my father
>>> (salonaexploration.com , northeasterngeoscience.org).
>>>
>>> I'm also curious about the questions Ben asks, though I suppose I can
>>> add some of my own experience to the conversation.
>>>
>>> In about 2005, when my server was hosted for a little over a year out
>>> of Brandeis University's LUG (also BLUG :)'s server room, it got
>>> rooted. This was partly my own fault for not running debian security
>>> updates very often and allowing root ssh (which reminds me that I need
>>> to check that again). This is the only real problem I've had, besides
>>> thunderstorms and wind taking the server down at my parents' house
>> >from time to time. While Comcast doesn't seem to be providing a
>>> static IP address service, the IP address does not seem to have
>>> changed at all in the last four years (since I started hosting it at
>>> my parents' house).
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jonathan
>>>
>>> On 18 July 2011 15:20, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
>>>> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
>>>> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
>>>> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
>>>> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
>>>> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
>>>> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
>>>> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
>>>> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
>>>> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
>>>> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
>>>> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
>>>> and any little home servers you may be running!
>>>>
>>>> Ben
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> BLUG mailing list
>>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> BLUG mailing list
>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
_______________________________________________
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

I also have notes in my firewall script about portsentry. But I don't know if that's still a thing.

Jeffery Williams
Software Engineer
ISAT Hall
jefjewil@indiana.edu
Work (812) 856-1165
Home (812) 219-5061

This is a great thread! I am learning a lot. Thanks everyone.

_______________________________________________
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

This is a great thread! I am learning a lot. Thanks everyone.

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T12:03:00.001-07:00

Jonathan North Washington <jonwashi@indiana.edu> wrote:
> However, I still want to be able to open up putty from a public
> machine somewhere and ssh to my server. Is there any way to allow
> myself to do this short of memorising my public key or carrying it
> around with me on flash drive or something?

Just change your /etc/ssh/sshd_config to run the daemon on some high
random port and be sure you have a strong password and you'll be fine.

The automated brute force attacks are looking for the "low hanging
fruit" -- servers w/ the SSH daemon running on 22/TCP with weak user
passwords.

--
Jeremy L. Gaddis

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

With all this talk of public-key authentication, I'm rethinking
leaving my server open to password authentication over ssh.

However, I still want to be able to open up putty from a public
machine somewhere and ssh to my server. Is there any way to allow
myself to do this short of memorising my public key or carrying it
around with me on flash drive or something?

--
Jonathan

On 20 July 2011 13:36, Jeremy L. Gaddis <jlgaddis@gnu.org> wrote:
> Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
>> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
>> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
>> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
>> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
>> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
>> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
>> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
>> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
>> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
>> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
>> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>
> As others have mentioned, if you have SSH open you'll likely be hit
> constantly by attempts to brute force usernames and passwords. Using
> public key authentication will take care of that.
>
> I also recently discovered an app that provides free two-factor
> authentication and wrote about it:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/69uqplc
>
> I'm not using it on a home server, but I am using it on a web server
> that's exposed to the world. Works great (with my Android phone) and you
> can't beat the price.
>
> --
> Jeremy L. Gaddis
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

_______________________________________________
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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T10:36:00.001-07:00

Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?

As others have mentioned, if you have SSH open you'll likely be hit
constantly by attempts to brute force usernames and passwords. Using
public key authentication will take care of that.

I also recently discovered an app that provides free two-factor
authentication and wrote about it:

http://tinyurl.com/69uqplc

I'm not using it on a home server, but I am using it on a web server
that's exposed to the world. Works great (with my Android phone) and you
can't beat the price.

--
Jeremy L. Gaddis

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Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T10:23:00.000-07:00

I host a few services from home like a MOO (Mud-like service), but I keep ssh on a high-numbered port along with other basic security measures. At the very least it keeps the ssh grinders off my front door although it's no substitute for iptables, denyhosts, and security updates. I also keep my photo albums on my home web server, I don't have the patience to upload pictures to flickr and the like. I also have a cron that does a yum update on all internet-facing services at regular intervals we well.

On Jul 20, 2011, at 1:04 PM, Kirk Gleason wrote:

> I have a couple of home servers, but none of them are publicly accessible anymore. I used to host DNS for myself and some friend off of my Comcast connection a few years ago, as well as a small mail domain for myself; but I got bored with it, so now I just have file and proxy servers at home.
>
> When I did run public services, I only allowed through what I explicitly needed from the outside -- smtp, DNS, and ssh. Every other service that I needed access to I would access through an SSH tunnel. I also would test my firewall frequently, and I used to ask my IRC friend to test it for me as well.
>
> Maybe I'll need to build myself up a new server, and give my son that web page he has been asking for ...
>
> Kirk

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of home servers, but none of them are publicly accessible anymore. I used to host DNS for myself and some friend off of my Comcast connection a few years ago, as well as a small mail domain for myself; but I got bored with it, so now I just have file and proxy servers at home.

When I did run public services, I only allowed through what I explicitly needed from the outside -- smtp, DNS, and ssh. Every other service that I needed access to I would access through an SSH tunnel. I also would test my firewall frequently, and I used to ask my IRC friend to test it for me as well.

Maybe I'll need to build myself up a new server, and give my son that web page he has been asking for ...

Kirk

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:

I wanted to note:

Make sure you use Public Key authentication and disable system
password authentication. A lot of the SSH attacks are done by botnets.
This means blocking an IP after three unsuccessful login attempts does
absolutely nothing to actually help security.

Most of my available services are done via SSH port-forwarding. I get
to them, but random folks can not. Then again, the services I run on
my non-work servers are not for general consumption. When you can lock
it up with SSH port-forwarding, this is by far the best approach.

When you can use HTTPS (or another SSL-wrapped service) consider using
this instead of an unencrypted service. If it is an authenticated
service you're sending your password in clear-text if it isn't over
SSL -- and that is the case regardless of the protocol. Consider SSL
client certificates if your HTTP-based service has a limited audience.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:52 PM, David Ernst <david.ernst@davidernst.net> wrote:
> There are countless ways to try to break into a server. But in my
> experience, the only one I've ever seen actually used - and I've seen
> it a LOT of times - was people exploiting known security problems on
> installed software. In other words, the server maintainers were
> guilty of what Jonathan confesses to below: not applying security
> updates. I should also confess that I have made this mistake before
> and paid the same price.
>
> It's definitely overstatement to say "just keep your system software
> up to date and you'll never get hacked." So, I won't say that.
> However, I think I can stand by this: "if you have a publicly
> accessible server that is running out-of-date software on a publicly
> accessible port, you WILL get hacked". All of the best password
> selections and firewall policies and such will do you no good if
> you're running a version of apache with a security hole in it. Or
> something like that.
>
> Next best advice: do not open any ports that you aren't intentionally
> offering services on. Many many people will want to run SSH and HTTP
> and nothing else. Some maybe just HTTP. Use a port scanner like nmap
> to see which ports are available on your machine. The theory is
> simple: it's fewer software programs that might be entry points to
> your system if security holes are discovered in them.
>
> But, once again, I'll just say: keep your software up to date. Ubuntu
> makes this really easy. Lots of other distros do too. So, do it.
>
> David
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:37:48PM -0400, Jonathan North Washington wrote:
>>I run a server out of my house too, and have been doing so for about
>>10 years. Actually, these days it's run out of my parents' house,
>>ever since I was out of the country for a year and needed it to stay
>>up; before that I ran it out of my own apartments and dorm rooms (with
>>the exception of one year--see below).
>>
>>The server hosts a handful of sites for various people, mostly for
>>myself (firespeaker.org , jnw.name) and my father
>>(salonaexploration.com , northeasterngeoscience.org).
>>
>>I'm also curious about the questions Ben asks, though I suppose I can
>>add some of my own experience to the conversation.
>>
>>In about 2005, when my server was hosted for a little over a year out
>>of Brandeis University's LUG (also BLUG :)'s server room, it got
>>rooted. This was partly my own fault for not running debian security
>>updates very often and allowing root ssh (which reminds me that I need
>>to check that again). This is the only real problem I've had, besides
>>thunderstorms and wind taking the server down at my parents' house
>>from time to time. While Comcast doesn't seem to be providing a
>>static IP address service, the IP address does not seem to have
>>changed at all in the last four years (since I started hosting it at
>>my parents' house).
>>
>>--
>>Jonathan
>>
>>On 18 July 2011 15:20, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
>>> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
>>> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
>>> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
>>> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
>>> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
>>> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
>>> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
>>> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
>>> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
>>> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
>>> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>>>
>>> Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
>>> and any little home servers you may be running!
>>>
>>> Ben
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> BLUG mailing list
>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>BLUG mailing list
>>BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

--
Kirk Gleason

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-20T09:22:00.001-07:00

I wanted to note:

Make sure you use Public Key authentication and disable system
password authentication. A lot of the SSH attacks are done by botnets.
This means blocking an IP after three unsuccessful login attempts does
absolutely nothing to actually help security.

Most of my available services are done via SSH port-forwarding. I get
to them, but random folks can not. Then again, the services I run on
my non-work servers are not for general consumption. When you can lock
it up with SSH port-forwarding, this is by far the best approach.

When you can use HTTPS (or another SSL-wrapped service) consider using
this instead of an unencrypted service. If it is an authenticated
service you're sending your password in clear-text if it isn't over
SSL -- and that is the case regardless of the protocol. Consider SSL
client certificates if your HTTP-based service has a limited audience.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:52 PM, David Ernst <david.ernst@davidernst.net> wrote:
> There are countless ways to try to break into a server. But in my
> experience, the only one I've ever seen actually used - and I've seen
> it a LOT of times - was people exploiting known security problems on
> installed software. In other words, the server maintainers were
> guilty of what Jonathan confesses to below: not applying security
> updates. I should also confess that I have made this mistake before
> and paid the same price.
>
> It's definitely overstatement to say "just keep your system software
> up to date and you'll never get hacked." So, I won't say that.
> However, I think I can stand by this: "if you have a publicly
> accessible server that is running out-of-date software on a publicly
> accessible port, you WILL get hacked". All of the best password
> selections and firewall policies and such will do you no good if
> you're running a version of apache with a security hole in it. Or
> something like that.
>
> Next best advice: do not open any ports that you aren't intentionally
> offering services on. Many many people will want to run SSH and HTTP
> and nothing else. Some maybe just HTTP. Use a port scanner like nmap
> to see which ports are available on your machine. The theory is
> simple: it's fewer software programs that might be entry points to
> your system if security holes are discovered in them.
>
> But, once again, I'll just say: keep your software up to date. Ubuntu
> makes this really easy. Lots of other distros do too. So, do it.
>
> David
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:37:48PM -0400, Jonathan North Washington wrote:
>>I run a server out of my house too, and have been doing so for about
>>10 years. Actually, these days it's run out of my parents' house,
>>ever since I was out of the country for a year and needed it to stay
>>up; before that I ran it out of my own apartments and dorm rooms (with
>>the exception of one year--see below).
>>
>>The server hosts a handful of sites for various people, mostly for
>>myself (firespeaker.org , jnw.name) and my father
>>(salonaexploration.com , northeasterngeoscience.org).
>>
>>I'm also curious about the questions Ben asks, though I suppose I can
>>add some of my own experience to the conversation.
>>
>>In about 2005, when my server was hosted for a little over a year out
>>of Brandeis University's LUG (also BLUG :)'s server room, it got
>>rooted. This was partly my own fault for not running debian security
>>updates very often and allowing root ssh (which reminds me that I need
>>to check that again). This is the only real problem I've had, besides
>>thunderstorms and wind taking the server down at my parents' house
>>from time to time. While Comcast doesn't seem to be providing a
>>static IP address service, the IP address does not seem to have
>>changed at all in the last four years (since I started hosting it at
>>my parents' house).
>>
>>--
>>Jonathan
>>
>>On 18 July 2011 15:20, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
>>> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
>>> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
>>> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
>>> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
>>> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
>>> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
>>> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
>>> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
>>> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
>>> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
>>> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>>>
>>> Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
>>> and any little home servers you may be running!
>>>
>>> Ben
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> BLUG mailing list
>>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>BLUG mailing list
>>BLUG@linuxfan.com
>>http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-18T12:52:00.001-07:00

There are countless ways to try to break into a server. But in my
experience, the only one I've ever seen actually used - and I've seen
it a LOT of times - was people exploiting known security problems on
installed software. In other words, the server maintainers were
guilty of what Jonathan confesses to below: not applying security
updates. I should also confess that I have made this mistake before
and paid the same price.

It's definitely overstatement to say "just keep your system software
up to date and you'll never get hacked." So, I won't say that.
However, I think I can stand by this: "if you have a publicly
accessible server that is running out-of-date software on a publicly
accessible port, you WILL get hacked". All of the best password
selections and firewall policies and such will do you no good if
you're running a version of apache with a security hole in it. Or
something like that.

Next best advice: do not open any ports that you aren't intentionally
offering services on. Many many people will want to run SSH and HTTP
and nothing else. Some maybe just HTTP. Use a port scanner like nmap
to see which ports are available on your machine. The theory is
simple: it's fewer software programs that might be entry points to
your system if security holes are discovered in them.

But, once again, I'll just say: keep your software up to date. Ubuntu
makes this really easy. Lots of other distros do too. So, do it.

David

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:37:48PM -0400, Jonathan North Washington wrote:
>I run a server out of my house too, and have been doing so for about
>10 years. Actually, these days it's run out of my parents' house,
>ever since I was out of the country for a year and needed it to stay
>up; before that I ran it out of my own apartments and dorm rooms (with
>the exception of one year--see below).
>
>The server hosts a handful of sites for various people, mostly for
>myself (firespeaker.org , jnw.name) and my father
>(salonaexploration.com , northeasterngeoscience.org).
>
>I'm also curious about the questions Ben asks, though I suppose I can
>add some of my own experience to the conversation.
>
>In about 2005, when my server was hosted for a little over a year out
>of Brandeis University's LUG (also BLUG :)'s server room, it got
>rooted. This was partly my own fault for not running debian security
>updates very often and allowing root ssh (which reminds me that I need
>to check that again). This is the only real problem I've had, besides
>thunderstorms and wind taking the server down at my parents' house
>from time to time. While Comcast doesn't seem to be providing a
>static IP address service, the IP address does not seem to have
>changed at all in the last four years (since I started hosting it at
>my parents' house).
>
>--
>Jonathan
>
>On 18 July 2011 15:20, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
>> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
>> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
>> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
>> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
>> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
>> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
>> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
>> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
>> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
>> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
>> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>>
>> Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
>> and any little home servers you may be running!
>>
>> Ben
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>
>
>_______________________________________________
>BLUG mailing list
>BLUG@linuxfan.com
>http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

I run a server out of my house too, and have been doing so for about
10 years. Actually, these days it's run out of my parents' house,
ever since I was out of the country for a year and needed it to stay
up; before that I ran it out of my own apartments and dorm rooms (with
the exception of one year--see below).

The server hosts a handful of sites for various people, mostly for
myself (firespeaker.org , jnw.name) and my father
(salonaexploration.com , northeasterngeoscience.org).

I'm also curious about the questions Ben asks, though I suppose I can
add some of my own experience to the conversation.

In about 2005, when my server was hosted for a little over a year out
of Brandeis University's LUG (also BLUG :)'s server room, it got
rooted. This was partly my own fault for not running debian security
updates very often and allowing root ssh (which reminds me that I need
to check that again). This is the only real problem I've had, besides
thunderstorms and wind taking the server down at my parents' house
from time to time. While Comcast doesn't seem to be providing a
static IP address service, the IP address does not seem to have
changed at all in the last four years (since I started hosting it at
my parents' house).

--
Jonathan

On 18 July 2011 15:20, Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
> I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
> was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
> wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
> on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
> and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
> terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
> about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
> dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
> spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
> than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
> I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?
>
> Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
> and any little home servers you may be running!
>
> Ben
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] How many of you run home servers?

2011-07-18T12:20:00.001-07:00

I've been running a server on my home machine for some time now and
was just curious how many others out there do the same? And I'm also
wondering about security of my home machine. I'm running AjaxXplorer
on this machine to serve up some photos/videos from my home computer,
and, while it does us https, I wonder sometimes about how wise it in
terms of a security risk. I also use Dyndns so I don't have to worry
about my changing IP and wonder if having a domain redirect from a
dyndns hostname makes me more of a target? I like to imagine that
spyware and viruses on my windows machine are a much bigger threat
than someone trying to hack into my little ubuntu server machine, but
I thought I'd ask anyone out there if they have any opinions?

Thanks, and I hope everyone's A/C is working well both for your sanity
and any little home servers you may be running!

Ben
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Mounting a Linux drive in Windows

2011-06-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

Kelly McEvilly wrote:

> Any ideas on what I need to do or a shop where I could take the drive in
> Bloomington to have the stuff pulled off would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

--
Mark Warner
MEPIS Linux
Registered Linux User #415318

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Mounting a Linux drive in Windows

2011-06-15T14:00:00.001-07:00

There is always a live CD. I have used live CDs to copy things to/from problem systems for years. The Windows-based access is nice, but if it uses an unusual partition table (or something other than ext[23]) a live CD may be easiest/fastest.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Jun 15, 2011 4:44 PM, "Richard Knepper" <rknepper@indiana.edu> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> I use http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/ to access ext2 files on
> windows machines. It's pretty simple to install/manage.
>
> - -Rich
>
> On 06/15/2011 04:35 PM, Kelly McEvilly wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I had a Buffalo Linkstation NAS die on me. It is linux based.
>>
>> I believe it was the NAS device itself that died and that the hard drive
>> is still OK. I still spins up fine and show up as a ATA/ATAPI drive
>> when plugged in via a USB cable to a Windows box. I just can't figure
>> out for the life of me how to access the drive via Windows so I can copy
>> the files off of it.
>>
>> Any ideas on what I need to do or a shop where I could take the drive in
>> Bloomington to have the stuff pulled off would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Kelly
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>
> - --
> - ------------------------------------------------------------
> Richard Knepper rknepper@indiana.edu
> Research Technologies Core Services 812.855.9574
>
> "You deserve free software."
> PGP Public Key:
> http://php.indiana.edu/~rknepper/rknepper_pubkey.asc
> - ------------------------------------------------------------
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAk35GZEACgkQ9hxTT7Mzu7oBkwCg3H5rgpCjrolk6obHUeCiWR1R
> FRcAnR8r+7WmkgaqSuE6mQg7XErn9q8w
> =jLVX
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Mounting a Linux drive in Windows

2011-06-15T13:44:00.001-07:00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I use http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/ to access ext2 files on
windows machines. It's pretty simple to install/manage.

- -Rich

On 06/15/2011 04:35 PM, Kelly McEvilly wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had a Buffalo Linkstation NAS die on me. It is linux based.
>
> I believe it was the NAS device itself that died and that the hard drive
> is still OK. I still spins up fine and show up as a ATA/ATAPI drive
> when plugged in via a USB cable to a Windows box. I just can't figure
> out for the life of me how to access the drive via Windows so I can copy
> the files off of it.
>
> Any ideas on what I need to do or a shop where I could take the drive in
> Bloomington to have the stuff pulled off would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Kelly
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

- --
- ------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Knepper rknepper@indiana.edu
Research Technologies Core Services 812.855.9574

"You deserve free software."
PGP Public Key:
http://php.indiana.edu/~rknepper/rknepper_pubkey.asc
- ------------------------------------------------------------
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk35GZEACgkQ9hxTT7Mzu7oBkwCg3H5rgpCjrolk6obHUeCiWR1R
FRcAnR8r+7WmkgaqSuE6mQg7XErn9q8w
=jLVX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] Mounting a Linux drive in Windows

2011-06-15T13:35:00.001-07:00

Hi,

I had a Buffalo Linkstation NAS die on me. It is linux based.

I believe it was the NAS device itself that died and that the hard drive is still OK. I still spins up fine and show up as a ATA/ATAPI drive when plugged in via a USB cable to a Windows box. I just can't figure out for the life of me how to access the drive via Windows so I can copy the files off of it.

Any ideas on what I need to do or a shop where I could take the drive in Bloomington to have the stuff pulled off would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kelly

[BLUG] Totally off topic -- need a connection

2011-06-14T17:23:00.001-07:00

This is going to be off the wall, and may be considered illegal,
immoral, and fattening, but here goes...

My wife runs a United Way charity that caters to the disabled, aged, and
infirm. One of her clients is a middle aged lady that has become
homebound due to various medical conditions. I've kept her machines
running for several years, including upgrading or replacing them as
needed or when new hardware falls into my lap.

She has had a dialup connection for several years that she was given by
an acquaintance. I have no idea where it's dialing into. I suspect it's
dialing into a company server of some sort, which then gives her access
to the WWW. It's nothing more than a username, password, and phone
number. This connection stopped working two months ago. Her acquaintance
is no longer in town. And she is really bummed. The WWW was her window
to the world, and it's been closed to her.

I'm hoping that somehow, some way, one of you good people that might be
affiliated in an IT capacity with IU or Ivy Tech or Cook or whatever
might be willing/able to provide her with account credentials that she
could use to dial into a server and gain access to the WWW. There's
nothing it it for me. All I'll do is set up the DUN for her and turn
her loose. She doesn't need an email account or anything other than a
connection. It would make all the difference in the world to her. It may
be hard for some of us to believe, but yes there are people out there
that after food, rent, utilities, and especially medication, can't
afford a $10 dialup account. But this gal is one of them.

If you would be willing to respond, you can contact me off-list at
mhwarner@gmail.com, or phone me at 360-7252 (cell).

--
Mark Warner
MEPIS Linux
Registered Linux User #415318

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Equipment for sale at Restore

2011-06-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday 01 June 2011 12:45:00 PM Josh Goodman wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Apologies if this is an unwanted list intrusion. A friend at the
> Habitat for Humanity Restore office just informed me that they
> received a donation of some computer equipment that they want to sell.
> Since they don't usually get customers there looking for geekware
> they asked me for help in alerting the right people and I thought that
> there might be a few BLUG users who would be interested. The only
> information I have is that they received a "Panduit server rack and
> some peripherals such as a 48 port switch, tape drives, etc." They
> are asking ~$200 for everything. I'm sure if you call or head over
> there they can give you more specifics.
>
> http://www.monroecountyhabitat.org/restore/
>
> Josh
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
i'm on my way

--
Matthew Williams
President Indiana F/oss Society
Organizer of Indiana Linuxfest http://indianalinux.org

PGP e-mail is welcome! Get my 1024 bit signature key from:
<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x00D1EABB>

[BLUG] Equipment for sale at Restore

2011-06-01T09:45:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

Apologies if this is an unwanted list intrusion. A friend at the
Habitat for Humanity Restore office just informed me that they
received a donation of some computer equipment that they want to sell.
Since they don't usually get customers there looking for geekware
they asked me for help in alerting the right people and I thought that
there might be a few BLUG users who would be interested. The only
information I have is that they received a "Panduit server rack and
some peripherals such as a 48 port switch, tape drives, etc." They
are asking ~$200 for everything. I'm sure if you call or head over
there they can give you more specifics.

http://www.monroecountyhabitat.org/restore/

Josh
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Re: [BLUG] Javascript Linux

2011-05-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

On Tue, 17 May 2011, David Ernst wrote:

> Yeah... wow... amazing... and what a nerd!! :)

Indeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

--
Beartooth Senectoflatuloid, Neo-Redneck, Linux Convert
Hunting is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
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Re: [BLUG] Javascript Linux

2011-05-17T07:05:00.001-07:00

Yeah... wow... amazing... and what a nerd!! :)

David

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 09:31:57AM -0400, Steven Black wrote:
>That's awesome.
>
>Personally, I think the tech details are a little more interesting:
>http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html
>
>"Some of the code is inspired from my x86 dynamic translator present in
>QEMU" -- Now we know how he had the underlying knowledge to pull this off.
>
>Cheers,
>Steven Black
>
>On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 8:09 AM, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> In case you miss this news. A brilliant hacker by the name of Fabrice
>> Bellard has written a simple x86 emulator in Javascript and it runs
>> Linux:
>>
>> http://bellard.org/jslinux/
>>
>> What he is able to pack into this mini Linux distro is amazing and
>> reminds me of the old QNX demo disks that fit on a 1.44MB floppy. It
>> even has a networking stack, emacs, vi, ping, wget, etc. and it boots in
>> about 5 seconds. Which is surprising for javascript to be that fast and
>> responsive.
>>
>> Try rm -fr / then press F5 to reinstall. ;-)
>>
>> Amazingly, the emulator and terminal code is under 100KB!!!
>> You'll need Firefox 4 or Google Chrome 11 to run this.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Mark Krenz
>> Bloomington Linux Users Group
>> http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
>>
>> Sent from Mutt using Linux
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>>

>_______________________________________________
>BLUG mailing list
>BLUG@linuxfan.com
>http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

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Re: [BLUG] Javascript Linux

2011-05-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

That's awesome.

Personally, I think the tech details are a little more interesting: http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html

"Some of the code is inspired from my x86 dynamic translator present in QEMU" -- Now we know how he had the underlying knowledge to pull this off.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 8:09 AM, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:

In case you miss this news. A brilliant hacker by the name of Fabrice
Bellard has written a simple x86 emulator in Javascript and it runs
Linux:

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

What he is able to pack into this mini Linux distro is amazing and
reminds me of the old QNX demo disks that fit on a 1.44MB floppy. It
even has a networking stack, emacs, vi, ping, wget, etc. and it boots in
about 5 seconds. Which is surprising for javascript to be that fast and
responsive.

Try rm -fr / then press F5 to reinstall. ;-)

Amazingly, the emulator and terminal code is under 100KB!!!
You'll need Firefox 4 or Google Chrome 11 to run this.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

Sent from Mutt using Linux
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[BLUG] Javascript Linux

2011-05-17T05:09:00.001-07:00

In case you miss this news. A brilliant hacker by the name of Fabrice
Bellard has written a simple x86 emulator in Javascript and it runs
Linux:

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

What he is able to pack into this mini Linux distro is amazing and
reminds me of the old QNX demo disks that fit on a 1.44MB floppy. It
even has a networking stack, emacs, vi, ping, wget, etc. and it boots in
about 5 seconds. Which is surprising for javascript to be that fast and
responsive.

Try rm -fr / then press F5 to reinstall. ;-)

Amazingly, the emulator and terminal code is under 100KB!!!
You'll need Firefox 4 or Google Chrome 11 to run this.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/

Sent from Mutt using Linux
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[BLUG] Samba 4

2011-05-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Has anyone given Samba 4 a whirl yet?

I am wanting to test this:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/domain-controller

as a PDC replacement but from what I've read it's not gonna work for my purposes unless I update the Samba 3 currently installed on it with Samba 4.

With my noob level skills this might be easier:

http://www.resara.com/index.php/resara-server

especially if it really can integrate with my Zimbra server.

Anyway, if you've used Samba 4 or the TurnkeyLinus PDC or Resara I'd sure appreciate your feedback.

Thanks!
Kelly

Re: [BLUG] Music for Naught: My first attempt at a non-school programming project

2011-05-07T20:46:00.001-07:00

I find the biggest PITA with Actionscript is integrating it with a site. You can have an Actionscript function trigger a Javascript function and vice versa, but having to work in both the Flash SDK and your text editor of choice while tweaking the two things is super annoying, as is recompiling and reuploading your Flash SWF whenever you want to test a change. Keeping everything in one world (Javascript) is definitely nice...

If you are interested in learning more Javascript, I might recommend taking a look at YUI (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/) too, this is what I'm using for as much as I can these days, pretty much. jQuery seems to be the framework of choice for building simple little widgets such as slideshows and rotating banners and stuff, and there are a lot of these to choose from, but you sort of have to install these yourself and hope that they integrate nicely with what you are doing. YUI is a framework designed for full-fledged app development.

YUI provides a whole structure for developing widgets and includes a great lazy loader to dynamically load these widgets off the Yahoo server as needed, including prerequisites that are needed. In fact, not only widgets are handled this way, but a lot of core functionality is as well - you add the link to the seed file in your document's head tag (which can be local or accessed from Yahoo's CDN), and you just indicate what components should be loaded dynamically within your Javascript.

The main value of YUI I find is that if you want to use the data table widget, the imageloader, the rich text editor, the uploader tool that provides a progress bar, or any of the tools/components included via the above URL, you basically just learn one syntax and way of doing things and all of these components will comply by this. There is an entire gallery of third party widgets that do the same. I would say that YUI's learning curve is higher because of this, but the framework is generally more powerful, and if you start to rely on these widgets and things, it makes it easy to build stuff really quickly. YUI will do everything that jQuery does, the only upsides to jQuery that I'm aware of is being easier to jump into, and the existence of many simple little widgets (some are also written in Prototype.js, which is another framework that does some of the same things). If you are interested in app development, YUI is definitely a good choice because of not having to integrate different programming styles and initialization techniques and such..

You don't have to stew over committing to one or the other as if it is a one-way street though, you can include jQuery stuff in your YUI projects and vice versa. Because the two sets of classes operate (or can operate) under their namespaces they shouldn't interfere with each other. If anything in that list looks like it would be useful, I'd learn some YUI, because like I said once you "get it", it is easy to incorporate all of those components without having to wrestle an overwhelming learning curve.

Just my two cents!

Ben Shewmaker
May 7, 2011 11:21 PM

Thanks for the feedback, and yeah, I'm not really a big fan of flash especially now that there are much better methods out there for serving audio. Learning some jquery, javascript, and ajax is next on my free time to do list. Now that I have some basic PHP down I can work on some of that stuff. Plus, just glancing at jPlayer it looks so much more tweakable to fit whatever I'd like it to do where this flash player (which I believe is pretty old itself) is quite rigid.

Ben

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Joe Auty
May 7, 2011 4:51 PM

Whoops... Reading your blog post I can see that you're already hip to jPlayer. Sorry!

I do like the whole directory browsing thing, that is an interesting and useful feature :)

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Joe Auty
May 7, 2011 4:19 PM

Hey Ben!

Congrats on this project!

Have you considered about an HTML5 version of this? My favorite player is jPlayer (http://jplayer.org/), because it supports making your own HTML5 player for browsers that support this, as well as a Flash fallback for those that don't. The Flash fallback does not require the UI to be assembled in the Flash SDK, the buttons are all HTML/CSS/Javascript in both HTML5/Flash playback modes.

As a web developer, unless you are deeply entrenched in Flash (I'm not), not having to skin a player inside Flash simply being able to use HTML/CSS is definitely a plus. This site is a work-in-progress, but here is an implementation of jPlayer with my own tweaks and customizations:

http://musicromm.netmusician.org

I'm not suggesting that you make a jPlayer clone, but leaving the reliance on Flash to a minimum I think would be a plus. As you know, one obvious reason for this is that your player will not work on iOS devices at all, and from what I understand Flash kind of sucks balls on Android devices too in terms of its performance/battery strain.

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
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Ben Shewmaker
May 7, 2011 2:51 PM

Hi everybody,

Between classes, I was attempting to teach myself some PHP this last
semester, and to test out my skills, I've been working on a simple
(actually, really really simple) little web based music player
(perhaps browser is a better term) project off and on. I think I've
finally reached a point where it is usable and so have uploaded the
project for others to poke around at. If anyone is interested, I'd
love some feedback on the little project as a whole, or, especially,
any comments on the code. What things did I do totally stupidly?
What things work but could be more efficient? What things don't work
at all? There's still so much I don't know so having others poke
around at my code (I hope) will give me some ideas on where/how to
improve.

I've only tested it on one server and so have no idea if it will work
at all on other systems and configurations. You can get more
info/download/view a demo here:
http://www.shewbox.org/music-for-naught/

Thanks!

Ben Shewmaker

p.s. I kinda suck at CSS, so it looks rather bad in IE. It looks
fine in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (haven't tried it in Opera yet).
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

--
Joe Auty, NetMusician
NetMusician helps musicians, bands and artists create beautiful, professional, custom designed, career-essential websites that are easy to maintain and to integrate with popular social networks.
www.netmusician.org
joe@netmusician.org

Re: [BLUG] Music for Naught: My first attempt at a non-school programming project

2011-05-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the feedback, and yeah, I'm not really a big fan of flash especially now that there are much better methods out there for serving audio. Learning some jquery, javascript, and ajax is next on my free time to do list. Now that I have some basic PHP down I can work on some of that stuff. Plus, just glancing at jPlayer it looks so much more tweakable to fit whatever I'd like it to do where this flash player (which I believe is pretty old itself) is quite rigid.

Ben

On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Joe Auty <joe@netmusician.org> wrote:

Whoops... Reading your blog post I can see that you're already hip to jPlayer. Sorry!

I do like the whole directory browsing thing, that is an interesting and useful feature :)

Joe Auty
May 7, 2011 4:19 PM

Hey Ben!

Congrats on this project!

Have you considered about an HTML5 version of this? My favorite player is jPlayer (http://jplayer.org/), because it supports making your own HTML5 player for browsers that support this, as well as a Flash fallback for those that don't. The Flash fallback does not require the UI to be assembled in the Flash SDK, the buttons are all HTML/CSS/Javascript in both HTML5/Flash playback modes.

As a web developer, unless you are deeply entrenched in Flash (I'm not), not having to skin a player inside Flash simply being able to use HTML/CSS is definitely a plus. This site is a work-in-progress, but here is an implementation of jPlayer with my own tweaks and customizations:

http://musicromm.netmusician.org

I'm not suggesting that you make a jPlayer clone, but leaving the reliance on Flash to a minimum I think would be a plus. As you know, one obvious reason for this is that your player will not work on iOS devices at all, and from what I understand Flash kind of sucks balls on Android devices too in terms of its performance/battery strain.

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Ben Shewmaker
May 7, 2011 2:51 PM

Hi everybody,

Between classes, I was attempting to teach myself some PHP this last
semester, and to test out my skills, I've been working on a simple
(actually, really really simple) little web based music player
(perhaps browser is a better term) project off and on. I think I've
finally reached a point where it is usable and so have uploaded the
project for others to poke around at. If anyone is interested, I'd
love some feedback on the little project as a whole, or, especially,
any comments on the code. What things did I do totally stupidly?
What things work but could be more efficient? What things don't work
at all? There's still so much I don't know so having others poke
around at my code (I hope) will give me some ideas on where/how to
improve.

I've only tested it on one server and so have no idea if it will work
at all on other systems and configurations. You can get more
info/download/view a demo here:
http://www.shewbox.org/music-for-naught/

Thanks!

Ben Shewmaker

p.s. I kinda suck at CSS, so it looks rather bad in IE. It looks
fine in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (haven't tried it in Opera yet).
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

--
Joe Auty, NetMusician
NetMusician helps musicians, bands and artists create beautiful, professional, custom designed, career-essential websites that are easy to maintain and to integrate with popular social networks.
www.netmusician.org
joe@netmusician.org

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Music for Naught: My first attempt at a non-school programming project

2011-05-07T13:51:00.001-07:00

Whoops... Reading your blog post I can see that you're already hip to jPlayer. Sorry!

I do like the whole directory browsing thing, that is an interesting and useful feature :)

Joe Auty
May 7, 2011 4:19 PM

Hey Ben!

Congrats on this project!

Have you considered about an HTML5 version of this? My favorite player is jPlayer (http://jplayer.org/), because it supports making your own HTML5 player for browsers that support this, as well as a Flash fallback for those that don't. The Flash fallback does not require the UI to be assembled in the Flash SDK, the buttons are all HTML/CSS/Javascript in both HTML5/Flash playback modes.

As a web developer, unless you are deeply entrenched in Flash (I'm not), not having to skin a player inside Flash simply being able to use HTML/CSS is definitely a plus. This site is a work-in-progress, but here is an implementation of jPlayer with my own tweaks and customizations:

http://musicromm.netmusician.org

I'm not suggesting that you make a jPlayer clone, but leaving the reliance on Flash to a minimum I think would be a plus. As you know, one obvious reason for this is that your player will not work on iOS devices at all, and from what I understand Flash kind of sucks balls on Android devices too in terms of its performance/battery strain.

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Ben Shewmaker
May 7, 2011 2:51 PM

Hi everybody,

Between classes, I was attempting to teach myself some PHP this last
semester, and to test out my skills, I've been working on a simple
(actually, really really simple) little web based music player
(perhaps browser is a better term) project off and on. I think I've
finally reached a point where it is usable and so have uploaded the
project for others to poke around at. If anyone is interested, I'd
love some feedback on the little project as a whole, or, especially,
any comments on the code. What things did I do totally stupidly?
What things work but could be more efficient? What things don't work
at all? There's still so much I don't know so having others poke
around at my code (I hope) will give me some ideas on where/how to
improve.

I've only tested it on one server and so have no idea if it will work
at all on other systems and configurations. You can get more
info/download/view a demo here:
http://www.shewbox.org/music-for-naught/

Thanks!

Ben Shewmaker

p.s. I kinda suck at CSS, so it looks rather bad in IE. It looks
fine in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (haven't tried it in Opera yet).
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Music for Naught: My first attempt at a non-school programming project

2011-05-07T13:19:00.001-07:00

Hey Ben!

Congrats on this project!

Have you considered about an HTML5 version of this? My favorite player is jPlayer (http://jplayer.org/), because it supports making your own HTML5 player for browsers that support this, as well as a Flash fallback for those that don't. The Flash fallback does not require the UI to be assembled in the Flash SDK, the buttons are all HTML/CSS/Javascript in both HTML5/Flash playback modes.

As a web developer, unless you are deeply entrenched in Flash (I'm not), not having to skin a player inside Flash simply being able to use HTML/CSS is definitely a plus. This site is a work-in-progress, but here is an implementation of jPlayer with my own tweaks and customizations:

http://musicromm.netmusician.org

I'm not suggesting that you make a jPlayer clone, but leaving the reliance on Flash to a minimum I think would be a plus. As you know, one obvious reason for this is that your player will not work on iOS devices at all, and from what I understand Flash kind of sucks balls on Android devices too in terms of its performance/battery strain.

Ben Shewmaker
May 7, 2011 2:51 PM

Hi everybody,

Between classes, I was attempting to teach myself some PHP this last
semester, and to test out my skills, I've been working on a simple
(actually, really really simple) little web based music player
(perhaps browser is a better term) project off and on. I think I've
finally reached a point where it is usable and so have uploaded the
project for others to poke around at. If anyone is interested, I'd
love some feedback on the little project as a whole, or, especially,
any comments on the code. What things did I do totally stupidly?
What things work but could be more efficient? What things don't work
at all? There's still so much I don't know so having others poke
around at my code (I hope) will give me some ideas on where/how to
improve.

I've only tested it on one server and so have no idea if it will work
at all on other systems and configurations. You can get more
info/download/view a demo here:
http://www.shewbox.org/music-for-naught/

Thanks!

Ben Shewmaker

p.s. I kinda suck at CSS, so it looks rather bad in IE. It looks
fine in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (haven't tried it in Opera yet).
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] Music for Naught: My first attempt at a non-school programming project

2011-05-07T11:51:00.001-07:00

Hi everybody,

Between classes, I was attempting to teach myself some PHP this last
semester, and to test out my skills, I've been working on a simple
(actually, really really simple) little web based music player
(perhaps browser is a better term) project off and on. I think I've
finally reached a point where it is usable and so have uploaded the
project for others to poke around at. If anyone is interested, I'd
love some feedback on the little project as a whole, or, especially,
any comments on the code. What things did I do totally stupidly?
What things work but could be more efficient? What things don't work
at all? There's still so much I don't know so having others poke
around at my code (I hope) will give me some ideas on where/how to
improve.

I've only tested it on one server and so have no idea if it will work
at all on other systems and configurations. You can get more
info/download/view a demo here:
http://www.shewbox.org/music-for-naught/

Thanks!

Ben Shewmaker

p.s. I kinda suck at CSS, so it looks rather bad in IE. It looks
fine in Chrome, Firefox and Safari (haven't tried it in Opera yet).
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] Fwd: IU E-waste drop-off days

2011-05-06T13:13:00.001-07:00

> From: dosman@bloominglabs.org
> Date: May 4, 2011 5:31:20 PM GMT-04:00
> To: Bloomington LINUX Users Group <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
> Subject: IU E-waste drop-off days
>
>
> FYI, I thought folks on these lists would appreciate this info.
> Also, if you are looking to build your own Dr. Evil Dungeon of
> Expired Technology [TM] you can probably snipe equipment before it
> ends up in IU's hands ;-).
>
> -Nathan
>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> [1] Electronic Waste Collection Days: May 12-14
>>
>> Electronic Waste Collection Days, a free electronic waste recycling
>> drive, will take place in the Purple Lot of Memorial Stadium in
>> Bloomington and at the Glendale Town Shops in Indianapolis.
>>
>> * Institutional and Small Business Drop-Off Days
>> Thursday and Friday, May 12 and 13
>> 9am-2pm
>>
>> * Public/Consumer Drop-Off Day
>> Saturday, May 14
>> 9am-2pm
>>
>> Recycle your used computer, VCR, microwave, camera, television, and
>> more. It's free, and event staff will be on hand to help unload.
>>
>> For more information, visit:
>>
>> https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194795687231525
>> (Bloomington)
>>
>> https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=162704267123911
>> (Indianapolis)
>>
>> Watch a video about the event at:
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndDlTp3vgag

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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Simón Ruiz <simon.a.ruiz@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't endorse DD-WRT over OpenWRT or Tomato. I've used them all, and
> they all do what we need done. I've never needed anything from them
> besides what's available from the basic web config menus.

My only complaint with DD-WRT on my old Buffalo router was the slow
performance on wireless when transferring large files. That never
happened with the stock Buffalo firmware.

I ended up replacing it with an HP AP420, which I think is now
discontinued but can be found cheap online. It doesn't have 802.11n,
but its 802.11g is plenty fast for my needs.

Kevin

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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-03T08:25:00.001-07:00

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Steven Black <yam655@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been using OpenWRT <https://openwrt.org/>, though, and I've been a
> little lax on installing updates. I should either check out the features of
> the latest version, or I should try another product.
*snip*
> It looks like DD-WRT is completely web-based?
>
> I can't find any list of reasons why I would use DD-WRT in preference to
> another Linux-based product. Does anyone know of such a list?
*snip*

It is meant to configured via http, just like the original WRT54GL
(you have to install it over http, for example, using the original
WRT54GL's firmware update page). However, through the web-based
interface you can activate an SSH (and/or telnet, if you're into that
sort of thing...) server.

I don't endorse DD-WRT over OpenWRT or Tomato. I've used them all, and
they all do what we need done. I've never needed anything from them
besides what's available from the basic web config menus.

If you have specific needs, though, one might be better than another.
For example, I think there's a DD-WRT build that acts as a VoIP
server.

Just some thoughts.

Simón

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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

On Monday 02 May 2011 2:59:54 PM Kelly McEvilly wrote:
> I like that idea. I had a h*ll of a time config'ing iptables on a dual
> ssid dd-wrt wrt54g and could really use the practice!
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Krenz" <mark@slugbug.org>
> To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
> Sent: Monday, May 2, 2011 10:04:08 AM
> Subject: Re: [BLUG] Att dsl
>
> On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:32:44AM GMT, Kelly McEvilly [kellym@wbhcp.com]
said the following:
> > Sadly, I have the same crappy Westell modem from Smithville at home.
> > Soon, they are gonna cut a trench across my yard and run fiber to my
> > house and I'm hoping I'll get a serious upgrade in equipment from them
> > when that happens.
>
> Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when you get
> fiber to the house that you change your router to a Linux router setup
> on a low end PC. You should still pick reliable parts, but you can find
> some old Pentium 3 or 4 for $50 that you could slap an extra network
> card in and be fine. It will be much more reliable and flexible. You
> can even use one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
> SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The only
> thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home broadband
> routers.
>
> Smithville basically just gives you an ethernet jack hooked up to
> their fiber-ethernet adapter, which you don't have to mess with.

thanks for all the feedback guys.

I am currently running pfsense 2.0 rc1 and it is actually looking like the
reason I can't get bridge mode working on my router is a bug currently in
pfsense.

cheers
--
Matthew Williams
President Indiana F/oss Society
Organizer of Indiana Linuxfest http://indianalinux.org

PGP e-mail is welcome! Get my 1024 bit signature key from:
<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x00D1EABB>

Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-03T08:16:00.001-07:00

The only problem I have with my WRT54GL is the older hardware (and thus only supporting the slower wireless speeds).

I've been using OpenWRT <https://openwrt.org/>, though, and I've been a little lax on installing updates. I should either check out the features of the latest version, or I should try another product.

OpenWRT was once based upon Debian, though it has evolved in to something unique. I picked it long ago now and at this point for reasons I can no longer remember. I do like configuring it completely through an SSH session and using the same firewall product on my router as I use for the rest of my systems. (I am a fan of Shorewall.)

It looks like DD-WRT is completely web-based?

I can't find any list of reasons why I would use DD-WRT in preference to another Linux-based product. Does anyone know of such a list?

Is DD-WRT purely prepackaged or does it have a package management system?

I like package management systems. Had I ever been a fan of RPM-based distros, I may be more fond of letting someone else making all my package choices, but being from a DEB-based background, I like to have choices.

It looks like there are a number of derivatives to OpenWRT at this point, too. I'm not sure if that's a good sign or a bad sign, though.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Kelly McEvilly <kellym@wbhcp.com> wrote:

I like that idea. I had a h*ll of a time config'ing iptables on a dual ssid dd-wrt wrt54g and could really use the practice!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Krenz" <mark@slugbug.org>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>

Sent: Monday, May 2, 2011 10:04:08 AM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:32:44AM GMT, Kelly McEvilly [kellym@wbhcp.com] said the following:
>
> Sadly, I have the same crappy Westell modem from Smithville at home. Soon, they are gonna cut a trench across my yard and run fiber to my house and I'm hoping I'll get a serious upgrade in equipment from them when that happens.

Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when you get
fiber to the house that you change your router to a Linux router setup
on a low end PC. You should still pick reliable parts, but you can find
some old Pentium 3 or 4 for $50 that you could slap an extra network
card in and be fine. It will be much more reliable and flexible. You
can even use one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The only
thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home broadband
routers.

Smithville basically just gives you an ethernet jack hooked up to
their fiber-ethernet adapter, which you don't have to mess with.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

I like that idea. I had a h*ll of a time config'ing iptables on a dual ssid dd-wrt wrt54g and could really use the practice!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Krenz" <mark@slugbug.org>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 2, 2011 10:04:08 AM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:32:44AM GMT, Kelly McEvilly [kellym@wbhcp.com] said the following:
>
> Sadly, I have the same crappy Westell modem from Smithville at home. Soon, they are gonna cut a trench across my yard and run fiber to my house and I'm hoping I'll get a serious upgrade in equipment from them when that happens.

Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when you get
fiber to the house that you change your router to a Linux router setup
on a low end PC. You should still pick reliable parts, but you can find
some old Pentium 3 or 4 for $50 that you could slap an extra network
card in and be fine. It will be much more reliable and flexible. You
can even use one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The only
thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home broadband
routers.

Smithville basically just gives you an ethernet jack hooked up to
their fiber-ethernet adapter, which you don't have to mess with.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Yep. That's the setup I use already except I don't think it's a WRT54GL. I think it's just a WRT54G.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Simón Ruiz" <simon.a.ruiz@gmail.com>
To: "Bloomington LINUX Users Group" <blug@cs.indiana.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 2, 2011 12:00:25 PM
Subject: Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Beartooth <beartooth@beartooth.info> wrote:
> Along that line, you might want to get the Linksys
> WRT54GL and flash it to dd-wrt. I have that behind a cable modem
> (can't get DSL at all, much less fiber), and it's doing fine.
>
> --
> Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Power User
> Remember I know little (precious little!) of where up is.

Vote two for dd-wrt, and WRT54GLs. A little older technology (100Mbps
wired, G wireless), but solid.

The only issues I've had with the dozens of them that we've been using
for years is that, sometimes, when there is a power surge, one of them
will freeze up and needs to be power cycled.

Simón

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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T09:00:00.001-07:00

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Beartooth <beartooth@beartooth.info> wrote:
> Along that line, you might want to get the Linksys
> WRT54GL and flash it to dd-wrt. I have that behind a cable modem
> (can't get DSL at all, much less fiber), and it's doing fine.
>
> --
> Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Power User
> Remember I know little (precious little!) of where up is.

Vote two for dd-wrt, and WRT54GLs. A little older technology (100Mbps
wired, G wireless), but solid.

The only issues I've had with the dozens of them that we've been using
for years is that, sometimes, when there is a power surge, one of them
will freeze up and needs to be power cycled.

Simón

_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T08:32:00.001-07:00

On Mon, 2 May 2011, Mark Krenz wrote:

> On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:32:44AM GMT, Kelly McEvilly
> [kellym@wbhcp.com] said the following:
>>
>> Sadly, I have the same crappy Westell modem from Smithville at
>> home. Soon, they are gonna cut a trench across my yard and run
>> fiber to my house and I'm hoping I'll get a serious upgrade in
>> equipment from them when that happens.
>
> Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when
> you get fiber to the house that you change your router to a
> Linux router setup on a low end PC. You should still pick
> reliable parts, but you can find some old Pentium 3 or 4 for
> $50 that you could slap an extra network card in and be fine.
> It will be much more reliable and flexible. You can even use
> one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
> SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The
> only thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home
> broadband routers.

Along that line, you might want to get the Linksys
WRT54GL and flash it to dd-wrt. I have that behind a cable modem
(can't get DSL at all, much less fiber), and it's doing fine.

--
Beartooth Staffwright, Not Quite Clueless Power User
Remember I know little (precious little!) of where up is.

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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T08:14:00.001-07:00

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Kirk Gleason <kgleason@gmail.com> wrote:
> This I am interested in. We recently moved to UVerse, and I have what I
> think is a relatively new config. I have an external (as in outside) iNID,
> and then a 2Wire wireless router inside. I *think* that the STBs are all
> hooked into the iNID, and the router is only used for wifi. Problem is that
> the DHCP server keeps quitting on me, and I can't figure out why. If I could
> turn it off I would, but as it is I have to reset the thing about 2x per
> week. If they have a bridge mode that tech support can enable, then I will
> be calling them tonight.

Try this:

http://forums.att.com/t5/Residential-Gateway/U-verse-for-BUSINESS-2Wire-3600HGV-bridge-mode-or-another-AT-amp/td-p/2707013

IIRC, these are similar to the instructions I followed, and the bridge
mode is actually called DMZPlus.

I didn't have to call support, I was able to configure it myself
through the web interface on the residential gateway.

Don't know if that'll work with your setup or not.

Kevin
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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T07:49:00.001-07:00

This I am interested in. We recently moved to UVerse, and I have what I think is a relatively new config. I have an external (as in outside) iNID, and then a 2Wire wireless router inside. I *think* that the STBs are all hooked into the iNID, and the router is only used for wifi. Problem is that the DHCP server keeps quitting on me, and I can't figure out why. If I could turn it off I would, but as it is I have to reset the thing about 2x per week. If they have a bridge mode that tech support can enable, then I will be calling them tonight.

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Kevin Ratcliff <kevin@kevinratcliff.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:
> Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when you get
> fiber to the house that you change your router to a Linux router setup
> on a low end PC. You should still pick reliable parts, but you can find
> some old Pentium 3 or 4 for $50 that you could slap an extra network
> card in and be fine. It will be much more reliable and flexible. You
> can even use one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
> SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The only
> thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home broadband
> routers.

I use an PC Engines ALIX board running pfSense and couldn't be happier:

http://pcengines.ch/alix2d1.htm

Very low power consumption and no moving parts. Uptime on mine is over
400 days now. I've had some power outages during that time, but even a
very small UPS will keep it running for a long time.

You should be able to find one for ~$100.

I have AT&T U-Verse and had to put the provided modem in some sort of
bridging mode before it would pass traffic to pfSense. Don't recall
the brand or model though.

Kevin

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--
Kirk Gleason

Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:
> Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when you get
> fiber to the house that you change your router to a Linux router setup
> on a low end PC. You should still pick reliable parts, but you can find
> some old Pentium 3 or 4 for $50 that you could slap an extra network
> card in and be fine. It will be much more reliable and flexible. You
> can even use one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
> SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The only
> thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home broadband
> routers.

I use an PC Engines ALIX board running pfSense and couldn't be happier:

http://pcengines.ch/alix2d1.htm

Very low power consumption and no moving parts. Uptime on mine is over
400 days now. I've had some power outages during that time, but even a
very small UPS will keep it running for a long time.

You should be able to find one for ~$100.

I have AT&T U-Verse and had to put the provided modem in some sort of
bridging mode before it would pass traffic to pfSense. Don't recall
the brand or model though.

Kevin

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BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
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Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T07:04:00.001-07:00

On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:32:44AM GMT, Kelly McEvilly [kellym@wbhcp.com] said the following:
>
> Sadly, I have the same crappy Westell modem from Smithville at home. Soon, they are gonna cut a trench across my yard and run fiber to my house and I'm hoping I'll get a serious upgrade in equipment from them when that happens.

Since this is the Linux Users Group, I would suggest that when you get
fiber to the house that you change your router to a Linux router setup
on a low end PC. You should still pick reliable parts, but you can find
some old Pentium 3 or 4 for $50 that you could slap an extra network
card in and be fine. It will be much more reliable and flexible. You
can even use one of the free router/firewall distributions such as
SmoothWall, pfSense, Endian, etc. There are a ton of them. The only
thing is that it'd use more power than one of the home broadband
routers.

Smithville basically just gives you an ethernet jack hooked up to
their fiber-ethernet adapter, which you don't have to mess with.

--
Mark Krenz
Bloomington Linux Users Group
http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-02T04:32:00.000-07:00

My own 2-cents on a topic that is constantly vexing me...

I have 4 locations using ATT DSL. The Netopia's I have (3477's I think) are better then the Westell's. Unfortunately, Motorola bought out Netopia and I honestly think what ATT supplies me with now from Motorola is even worse. They set on a shelf as last ditch alternative in case the the Netopia's die.

Based on my own experience, your best bet is to call ATT tech support and ask them to help you put your modem into 'full bridge' mode. You can then stick a router on the back side of the modem to handle authentication, NAT, SPI, encryption, port assignments, VPN's etc. Most of my locations have a Cisco firewall behind the modem but two smaller locations use RV042 series firewall and they work very well

Seriously, even the simplest Linksys router/firewall like the BEFSX41 is an electronic Fort Knox compared to the crappy modems the ISP's provide you. Verizon is the same way. I have their junk Westell's in a couple of location too.

Sadly, I have the same crappy Westell modem from Smithville at home. Soon, they are gonna cut a trench across my yard and run fiber to my house and I'm hoping I'll get a serious upgrade in equipment from them when that happens.

Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-01T08:58:00.001-07:00

It is awestell modem that has really crappy firmware that has zero capability for such things

On May 1, 2011 7:51 AM, "jim marple" <jimmarple@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> YES i had to basically go into my netopia's i think they are and reset everything from scratch and update the firmware.
> For both it took me a while to find all the diffrent spots to open ports and all i setup was printer shareing,vnc,ftp if you have a netopia they are a pain to setup.
> and att will argue with you every step of the way.
>
> Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:40:32 -0400
> From: lord.drachenblut@gmail.com
> To: blug@cs.indiana.edu
> Subject: [BLUG] Att dsl
>
> Was curious if anyone else had run into att provided dsl modem acting as a firewall and blocking all ports on them?
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Att dsl

2011-05-01T04:51:00.001-07:00

YES i had to basically go into my netopia's i think they are and reset everything from scratch and update the firmware.
For both it took me a while to find all the diffrent spots to open ports and all i setup was printer shareing,vnc,ftp if you have a netopia they are a pain to setup.
and att will argue with you every step of the way.

Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:40:32 -0400
From: lord.drachenblut@gmail.com
To: blug@cs.indiana.edu
Subject: [BLUG] Att dsl

Was curious if anyone else had run into att provided dsl modem acting as a firewall and blocking all ports on them?

_______________________________________________ BLUG mailing list BLUG@linuxfan.com http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

[BLUG] Att dsl

2011-04-30T17:40:00.001-07:00

Was curious if anyone else had run into att provided dsl modem acting as a firewall and blocking all ports on them?

Re: [BLUG] looking for (linux friendly) offsite backup options

2011-04-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Ben Shewmaker <ben@shewbox.org> wrote:
> Does anyone have any recommendations on offsite backup options? I

Here's another: https://spideroak.com/
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Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-25T13:07:00.001-07:00

Also most custom roms include usb tethering as well

On Apr 25, 2011 4:01 PM, "Simón Ruiz" <simon.a.ruiz@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Lord Drachenblut
> <lord.drachenblut@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This isn't strictly a carrier issue.
>>
>> In the case of the captivate on att samsung wants to charge att for updates
>> for that phone.
>>
>> In the case of htc phones because of sense ui they have to rebuild the
>> system with every update
>
> If you're willing to jailbreak your phone anyhow, it's worth
> mentioning that with Android phones there are usually other firmware
> options which tend to give you more freedom and features (like wifi
> tethering) than the stock firmware.
>
> You're not usually bound to the phone manufacturer or carrier's idea
> of what your software must look/behave like.
>
> Of the four people I know with Heros (including myself), I'm the only
> one not running Cyanogen Mod.
>
> Simón
>
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug

Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-25T13:01:00.001-07:00

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Lord Drachenblut
<lord.drachenblut@gmail.com> wrote:
> This isn't strictly a carrier issue.
>
> In the case of the captivate on att samsung wants to charge att for updates
> for that phone.
>
> In the case of htc phones because of sense ui they have to rebuild the
> system with every update

If you're willing to jailbreak your phone anyhow, it's worth
mentioning that with Android phones there are usually other firmware
options which tend to give you more freedom and features (like wifi
tethering) than the stock firmware.

You're not usually bound to the phone manufacturer or carrier's idea
of what your software must look/behave like.

Of the four people I know with Heros (including myself), I'm the only
one not running Cyanogen Mod.

Simón

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Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-25T12:44:00.001-07:00

This isn't strictly a carrier issue.

In the case of the captivate on att samsung wants to charge att for updates for that phone.

In the case of htc phones because of sense ui they have to rebuild the system with every update

On Apr 24, 2011 1:02 PM, "Joe Auty" <joe@netmusician.org> wrote:
> My major (and unrelated) wish is for carriers to stop jerking around
> with holding back OS updates. The single-most useful feature to me is
> tethering, and I absolutely resent paying extra for this while having
> the same data plan (which is not something universal among all
> carriers), so I went and bought an iPhone, jail broke it, and installed
> MyWi on it rather than setup tethering for an Android phone. I was
> concerned that if I bought a particular phone that within a period of
> time AT&T/Verizon would pull the plug on that phone and I'd be stuck
> with the version I have. I don't need the latest and greatest, but I
> didn't want to be paying the same price and locked into a phone that may
> be lacking nifty features available in future versions, or stuck with an
> OS version that is not widely supported anymore.
>
> As much as I recognize the risk of relying on jail breaks to use
> tethering with my iPhone, I do appreciate the whole concept of a single
> OS version that is available for all versions of the iPhone for as long
> as the hardware is supported (and my second generation iPod Touch ran
> the latest iOS version, so it seems like Apple is done a fairly good job
> at supporting older gear). Technically speaking, I believe that the AT&T
> and Verizon iPhone versions are different right now, but as far as user
> features and overall experience go the two versions are identical, and
> if Apple hasn't already done so I'm sure they will consolidate on a
> single version.
>
> One other rationale I had (flawed or not) was that since I'm not much of
> a phone person I just wanted something that just worked without having
> to tinker (please let me know if this assumption on my part was stupid
> so I'll know for next time :). Finally, because I'm doing web
> development for these devices I figured not relying on the simulator to
> get a feel for the entire experience would be smart. At some point I'll
> have to look into setting up the Android simulator.
>
>
>
>
>> Simón Ruiz <mailto:simon.a.ruiz@gmail.com>
>> April 20, 2011 10:10 PM
>>
>>
>> HTTP proxy settings for the WiFi interface.
>>
>> It really sucks that I can set up our students and faculty with iOS
>> devices to get out to the Internet through our proxy, but not the
>> Android users.
>>
>> Anyone know of a good apk that might give me HTTP proxy functionality
>> on Android?
>>
>> If I could at least offer them an app to install, that'd be *something*.
>>
>> Simón
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> BLUG mailing list
>> BLUG@linuxfan.com
>> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> --
> Joe Auty, NetMusician
> NetMusician helps musicians, bands and artists create beautiful,
> professional, custom designed, career-essential websites that are easy
> to maintain and to integrate with popular social networks.
> www.netmusician.org <http://www.netmusician.org>
> joe@netmusician.org <mailto:joe@netmusician.org>
>

Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-24T10:02:00.001-07:00

My major (and unrelated) wish is for carriers to stop jerking around with holding back OS updates. The single-most useful feature to me is tethering, and I absolutely resent paying extra for this while having the same data plan (which is not something universal among all carriers), so I went and bought an iPhone, jail broke it, and installed MyWi on it rather than setup tethering for an Android phone. I was concerned that if I bought a particular phone that within a period of time AT&T/Verizon would pull the plug on that phone and I'd be stuck with the version I have. I don't need the latest and greatest, but I didn't want to be paying the same price and locked into a phone that may be lacking nifty features available in future versions, or stuck with an OS version that is not widely supported anymore.

As much as I recognize the risk of relying on jail breaks to use tethering with my iPhone, I do appreciate the whole concept of a single OS version that is available for all versions of the iPhone for as long as the hardware is supported (and my second generation iPod Touch ran the latest iOS version, so it seems like Apple is done a fairly good job at supporting older gear). Technically speaking, I believe that the AT&T and Verizon iPhone versions are different right now, but as far as user features and overall experience go the two versions are identical, and if Apple hasn't already done so I'm sure they will consolidate on a single version.

One other rationale I had (flawed or not) was that since I'm not much of a phone person I just wanted something that just worked without having to tinker (please let me know if this assumption on my part was stupid so I'll know for next time :). Finally, because I'm doing web development for these devices I figured not relying on the simulator to get a feel for the entire experience would be smart. At some point I'll have to look into setting up the Android simulator.

Simón Ruiz
April 20, 2011 10:10 PM

HTTP proxy settings for the WiFi interface.

It really sucks that I can set up our students and faculty with iOS devices to get out to the Internet through our proxy, but not the Android users.

Anyone know of a good apk that might give me HTTP proxy functionality on Android?

If I could at least offer them an app to install, that'd be *something*.

Simón

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Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-24T09:54:00.001-07:00

Huh, looks like another case where Android behaves differently on
certain devices.

I've got a Nexus One running stock Android that has always connected
automatically to IU Secure. This has been the case on both 2.2 and
2.3.

Josh

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Chris Shelton <cshelton@indiana.edu> wrote:
> Andrew,
>
> On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 at 1:08pm, Andrew Dabrowski wrote:
>
>> As someone who is toying with the idea of getting an Android phone
>> and/or tablet, I'd appreciate it if you would explain the problem
>> more precisely. Does this mean Android users can't use IU's wifi
>> system? Is this only an issue with phones, or tablets too?
>
> Regarding accessing IU secure with an android phone, it works with
> only minor tweaking and is documenting here:
> http://kb.iu.edu/data/azle.html
>
> I have an LG optimus T running android 2.2, and it connects without
> problems to IU secure. The only minor nit is that it doesn't
> automatically connect; I have to tell the phone to connect to IU
> secure. The phone connects to my home wireless network automatically.
>
> chris
>
> --
> Chris Shelton
> Indiana University - Financial Management Services
> -
> _______________________________________________
> BLUG mailing list
> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
>

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Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-24T09:19:00.001-07:00

Andrew,

On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 at 1:08pm, Andrew Dabrowski wrote:

> As someone who is toying with the idea of getting an Android phone
> and/or tablet, I'd appreciate it if you would explain the problem
> more precisely. Does this mean Android users can't use IU's wifi
> system? Is this only an issue with phones, or tablets too?

Regarding accessing IU secure with an android phone, it works with
only minor tweaking and is documenting here:
http://kb.iu.edu/data/azle.html

I have an LG optimus T running android 2.2, and it connects without
problems to IU secure. The only minor nit is that it doesn't
automatically connect; I have to tell the phone to connect to IU
secure. The phone connects to my home wireless network automatically.

chris

--
Chris Shelton
Indiana University - Financial Management Services
-
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Re: [BLUG] Simple wish list for Android

2011-04-23T16:34:00.001-07:00

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Andrew Dabrowski <dabrowsa@indiana.edu> wrote:
> As someone who is toying with the idea of getting an Android phone and/or
> tablet, I'd appreciate it if you would explain the problem more precisely.
> Does this mean Android users can't use IU's wifi system? Is this only an
> issue with phones, or tablets too?

You'll need more local help on that, as I'm in Fort Wayne these days
and had no idea how IU's WiFi system worked, even when I live in
Bloomington.

My problem is that we don't allow Internet access except through our
proxy, which does content filtering and caching.

There does not seem to be a way to set most stock Android images to
use a proxy, including my HTC Hero, the HTC Droid Incredible, and my
new Motorola Xoom.

If you're comfortable rooting and/or re-flashing your device, it seems
there are apps on the market that will do the job and/or most
community versions of Android have the setting available by default.

That's my read of the situation, anyhow.

Simón

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