Not really, news, but I was reminded again this evening that mail is not available at the command line in recent default installs of Ubuntu (or kubuntu /xubuntu). If you’re like me and make use of this for scripting notifications…. you’ll need to sudo apt-get install mailx (and a MTA like postfix.) Mailx requires postfix/sendmail/qmail and that’s why it’s not installed by default so users don’t have an MTA sitting on their system for no good reason.
Category: Computers
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Live filesystem “capture” into a virtual disk image
ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.
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Firewire/USB card and ethernet incompatibilities on Ubuntu 6.06
I’ve had a machine for quite a while that I’ve been working on as a “backup server”. My goal with it is to have a RAID1 setup with two 250GB drives and I also wanted USB2/firewire functionality so that I could even add a USB drive to the array for the purpose of having a hot-swapped spare drive that could be taken offsite. Well, the biggest frustration I’ve had has not been with software raid, or any of the rest of the software setup, but that something about the firewire/usb card didn’t like the built in ethernet. I FINALLY got things working… let me document what I went through.
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Scanning over the network, or sharing a scanner on a network
I remember the question from long ago, we had just shared a printer across a windows network and…. wait for it…. “oh, well could I share my scanner too?” On windows the typical answer was NO, at least not unless there was a driver from the scanner manufacturer that supported it, but on linux the answer is an unqualified YES as long as the scanner is supported under linux (so many are..) Using SANE (which is the linux scanner driver backend) you can share out scanners across a network and tips.linux.com has an article on just that topic. I’ve set it up before on my network and it was relatively easy to do and VERY convenient. At that time, I don’t recall a good functional windows client for the SANE driver, but it may have matured a bit by now (last I looked into it was 3-4 years ago.)
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Wireless exploits coming to Metasploit 3…
and the script kiddies rejoiced… It reads as though Metasploit 3 will make it easier than ever for script kiddies everywhere to take full advantage of the local wireless hotspots. Of course, metasploit has it’s good uses by people legitimately testing systems that they are responsible for, for vulnerabilities. But, it does make it very easy for the less skilled to pull off some exploits.
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Lightscribe writing under linux
Lacie has released a tool to write the back of cds using HP’s lightscribe technology under linux. I seem to recall there being a possibility of future support in k3b, but I don’t think that has been done yet. From what I remember about lightscribe is that it would require that you buy specially made cds that support being written using lightscribe. They were a bit more expensive than a standard cdr, but it is an impressive effect.
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IE 7 address bar spoofing issue
Another issue was reported with the new IE 7 and confirmed by Microsoft. It seems that it’s possible for a malicious link to spoof the information in the address bar (make it look like you’re at a site that you’re NOT at.) Incidents.org gives the following possible workaround…
As a quick workaround you may want to configure MSIE 7.0 to open new windows in a new tab. In order to do this, Tools -> Internet Options -> Tabs Settings -> When a pop-up is encountered: Always open pop-ups in a new tab.
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 out…
The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.
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Roll your own search engine… sort of…
Several blog posts have heralded the arrival of Google’s newest toy, a custom search engine setup… sort of Through Google Coop you can design a search engine that only covers the sites you want it to cover (or favor, it can search the web and just be biased towards the sites you prefer.) Of course, this relies on googles existing index, so if a site has not been crawled and indexed by the googlebot, you seem to be out of luck. I’ve tried a test at http://www.southcarolinagenealogy.org/search for my North and South Carolina genealogy sites…. a merged search between the two would be handy…
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Cutting Short, splitting or truncating mp3 files…
from the command line in linux… or generating them from Wavs…. So, I’ve got this CD that I’ve made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as “chimes”. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recording to hard drive, editing and getting the wav files as good as possible and I’ve uploaded them, but I also want to make the individual songs available as mp3 downloads too. AND I want to give a preview, either a low quality mp3 of the whole, or a high quality 30 second clip…. Hmmm… how to do it.