NX server and client is a GREAT remote X approach that can tunnel over fairly narrow links well and does phenomenally well over a LAN. I frequently use NX in place of VNC when working with Linux based systems because the performance seems much better and the client has a nice way to choose from preset sessions. (You can also do individual applications, etc…) One of the benefits over X tunneling is the compression…. Anyway, I’ve gone through setting this up several times on various ubuntu 6.06 installs and thought I’d go ahead and document this on the web page so I didn’t have to keep hunting links each time….
Tag: links
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Being cautious with web links
Once upon a time the bad payload of a malicious email was it’s attachment, that still happens, but in many cases the links are the real lure – like a worm dangled in the water in front of a hungry fish…. the links though hide a danger on the other side…. the hook in our analogy. Brian Krebs writes about a utility called linkscanner that scans a given link to see if it’s hosting up malware. It’s from a place called Exploit Prevention Labs. I don’t know that I’d trust it completely as a safety net, but it might be worthwhile as another level in the defences.
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Privacy concerns abound…
Well, the weekend saw news stories of Google planning to eavesdrop over pc microphones to hear what you’re watching on tv to target ads….. (I’m not holding my breath on that one, but… I do know how to disconnect the microphone.) Also, there was the story of Browzar which was supposedly THE solution for private web browsing…. well, it turns out it set’s it’s own search engine as the default and uses your search information to give sponsored links. Sans also mentions that the last visited url may be saved to disk as well. Really, we have several places where information is kept on us anyway (ISP/etc.) But, if you’re really concerned about private browsing you might try out the vmware browser virtual machine (or a portable web browser on a usb-key.)
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Saving you from yourself or specifying which index file to use with apache
As I said, I mistakenly uploaded a page of links that I use for the main administration across many sites to this domain. Unfortunately, the server preferred using the index.html to the index.php that serves up the USUAL home page. So, for about an hour after my slipup…. the main page for this site showed a page full of links to admin logins/stat monitors, google utilities, etc. etc. (At least I’m not dumb enough to have put in password information.) Anyway…. I thought, how should I protect myself from doing that again? .htaccess is the answer….
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Whoops!
I have a page that I’ve been working on that gives me direct links to the administration and stat pages for many sites including my own, but also those that I host. It also has links to various and sundry other tools (Googles adsense/adwords/analytics/sitemaps/etc.etc.etc.) as well as other links that I’ve found useful in managing/monitoring the various sites. I accidently uploaded it to the site a while ago (index.html supercedes index.php)… whoops – corrected around 10:30 – sorry about that. I forgot that at one point I had it hosted on the site in a password protected directory and recently chose to keep it on the local machine. I’m not quite sure I’m here this morning now.
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WordPress Category RSS feed links
In working on the post related to software updates and making sure it was easy to find the category feed JUST for that led me on a “round the world” kind of quest to find a way to put the category feeds in the footer of pages in WordPress. The first thing I tried was this this category livebookmarks plugin, which gives some options to browsers that recognize feeds in the header of the page. It’s interesting, but I may wind up uninstalling. What I HAVE found is this solution which was EXACTLY what I was looking for.
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Time for Apple Mac OS X updates again
From the look of it Apple has released a bunch of updates for OS X. A number of security issues are detailed. As always, SANS has some good details and links to more info on each of the ~13 issues. Many of them are legacy bugs if you will from older *nix-based systems. This is as good a time as any for the now familiar lesson – NO operating system is invulnerable, you must keep any software install updated with current security patches.
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Konqueror 3.5 not recognizing JPG’s
I noticed this evening that I wasn’t getting the usual thumbnails of jpg images in Konqueror (KDE’s file browser.) On investigation, there were error messages like this…. konqueror: WARNING: Pixmap not found for mimetype application/x-crossover-jpg being given. So, I looked in my home directory’s kde folder (.kde) and deeper in .kde/share/mimelnk/application There, I found a lot of x-crossover **.desktop files and deleted x-crossover-jpg.desktop We’ll see if that works on a logout/login. YES – that worked…. I should also note there are a lot of x-crossover file associations in that folder and if one conflicts, I suspect others may. The effect of this problem was that previews didn’t work in konqueror, neither did image recognition in a couple of kde related programs.
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Google search for malware accessible to all…
The metasploit project is now hosting a malware search that uses Google. It essentially uses a binary google search technique that was referenced last week to find malicious files hosted on the web. Of course, this will be partly limited by Google’s indexing which recently has not been quite as thorough as before, but… all you have to do is search by a virus name and find matches. I can see where this is useful for research. What I DON’T understand is why Google doesn’t integrate scanning of content into the googlebot indexing. It would take a lot of processor power. Well…. I think Google would come close to having enough to take a stab at this. I think they should AT LEAST…
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The Spam fight turns to blogs….
I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?)