I almost forgot to pass along a link to a more comprehensive detailing of postfix’s anti-uce controls…. here. Also, in the last article I briefly mentioned whitelisting. IF you intend to have several blacklists active it will pay to learn how to whitelist before you HAVE to. To do so, I simply created a text file at /etc/postfix/whitelist and int hat file you enter IP address or hostname followed by OK…. like this….
1.2.3.4 OK
goodmachine.com OK
But… of course, there’s a bit more.
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.
One of the “project machines” I’ve had that’s been retired from other service was to become a “storage server” this week. The twin 250GB drives had arrived and I was ready to setup a RAID1 array (mirroring essentially…) in software and use Ubuntu 6.06 as the base operating system. I had already wiped the other drive and removed the drive, plugged in the new ones (master on the primary and secondary channels) and…. BIOS only reads 136GB. Shoot…. it was a relatively recent system (maybe 3 years…) SO…. BIOS update was my best bet I thought.
This was weird and now that the switch is replaced I haven’t been able to duplicate it, but let me explain. There was a netgear fs608 (8 port unmanaged) switch plugged into a linksys router (model number not noted.) The cable was straight (although the fs608 has support for link through straight or crossover cables.) This setup worked well for quite some time. 4 computers and a printer hooked up. 3 pcs with fixed address and 1 with DHCP for their IP address. Well, I had a call that two pcs were unable to connect to the network and when I got there and looked… sure enough 169.**** ip addresses from Microsoft’s “auto configure” pool.
SunbeltBlog is talking about a new sign that Google is stepping up to try to protect users against potentially malicious sites. They have a screenshot, which I was able to verify, that gives a warning before allowing a user to proceed to a page that “Warning – the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!”. Very good, I suspect they’re either tagging sites based on certain keywords or perhaps even binary blobs found?
It has been a few days now, but I noticed that WordPress 2.0.4 has now been released and is highly recommended due to the fixing of a few security issues. They also list a number of bugfixes as well. So, if you’re running a site based on wordpress it’s time to update. It’s really a fairly painless process. I do recall upgrading ONE site to 2.0.3 and it was quite painFUL…. things went quite wrong and I had to restore the database from a backup. BUT… I’ve now upgraded 5 or so installs to 2.0.4 without a hitch. (One was a 2.0.3 install and the others were (I believe) 2.0.2).
Well, let’s start with the extensions first. Like ANY software, you should be cautious installing something from an untrusted source. If you think an extension looks neat and cool – look for reviews and third party information before installing it. That much said…. never install an extension that comes attached as an unexpected email…. Apparently, just that has been happening a password stealing trojan has been showing up as an email attachment that appears to be a firefox extension. OK – quick review – what’s the weakest link in computer security (grab mirror and look….) Now… Mozilla has also released some security updates for Firefox….
Yesterday I had a bit of a realization. I had just been looking at a wireless router/firewall setup and was thinking about the firewalling rules (which seemed to be geared at the WIRELESS lan… i.e. blocking that activity on the Wireless segment.) You know, traditionally firewalls have had the attitude of defending the internal network from the outside. Of course, these days firewalls sometimes protect the internal network from a WLAN (Wireless segment as well.) But, I put a few events together and started looking for a new feature in a firewall.
This is one worth checking out anybody using vnc for remote administration. It looks as though intelliadmin has come across a vulnerability in Real VNC 4 (the slashdot post I saw suggested “any machine running VNC 4.1”) I haven’t tested yet, so I don’t know if this ONLY affects REALVNC’s implementation or is broader. They have a proof of concept page which attempts to connect to the ip of the browser at the vnc port and display a screenshot. The site is getting slashdotted at the moment, so revisit this page and link until you get a chance to test out your VNC serving machines.
There’s a utility called Thumbs that looks like a good quick way to make a cd launch a web documented on autoplay in Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/ …Of course, autoplay under windows is fairly easy to setup. If you have a program on the disk you can just have autorun.inf in the root directory of the cd and in that you can specify WHAT program to autorun. The problem with html documents on a disk is telling the computer how to run it. (Yes you can adjust the icon as well.)