Archive: Linux Tech Support

Just a quick note for what is really a simple fix. I have been using rsnapshot to back up several machines lately. If you haven't taken a look at rsnapshot on linux for managing snapshot backups (whe…

This post is going to be somewhat of a "link dump" for me of some pages that I've been perusing lately. After playing with RT (request tracker) - I added a few ticket items for the home network. Now,…

Once upon a time I wrote of manually extracting a file from a mondorescue backup. Sometimes it's just easier to do that, than have mondorescue go through 30 some cds or dvds just to find one file. (N…

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It's rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windo…

So, I've spent some time recently working with Zarafa. It's an exchange replacement that has a completely open source version as well as a version with licenses for outlook if you want that level of …

To make sure you've go the idea that mplayer is really a swiss army knife for media files that can do most anything. I wanted to get a post JUST on this idea. Any media format that mplayer recognizes…

There is a lot of software out there that can capture realmedia online streams for a fee. I've found a way in linux to do the same without buying third party software. The main motivation for this is…

On my (somewhat older) laptop, I've noticed that MPlayer sometimes gets the audio and video out of sync. The audio is moving faster than the video. I've noticed this in octoshape streaming as well as…

Sometime back I setup my home server running Ubuntu Linux (6.06 - Dapper Drake LTS). I used two pairs of drives to do raid cloning. Two IDE drives were for the main system structure and two SATA driv…

Recently I had a request for help with some free pdf's I've published elsewhere. I wasn't really keen to spend a lot of time for free supporting free pdfs and really just wanted to give an alternativ…

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck... users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there's also a utility called TestDisk that looks p…

I'm tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house - and use VOIP for additional lines. Here's an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.

For quite a while I've used ghost4linux (g4l) for my disc cloning needs. What I REALLY like are the ability to do a network copy of the image to an ftp server and the built in dd_rescue to rescue dat…

The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I've installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what's what and so far haven't had much time to play around. I seem to recall the loca…

Good article

I've been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps - it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn't know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image …

For years I've been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I've absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I've had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an …

A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it's a windows installer style download that can bootst…

One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu do…

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn't find the article, so I'm posting it now... if it's a duplicate, sorry... I'm still using Ubuntu's Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a…

Might should have typed this up sooner, but... a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these…

In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate p…

As I've mentioned, there are a few older Mandrake (now Mandriva) systems that I maintain and one of the packages that I'm frequently rebuilding for those systems is clamantivirus. Well, 0.90 came out…

http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit... is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it's something that would be done when you've had a suspected rootkit on the system and you …

This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that wo…

It seems silly with multiple machines to download the same file multiple times. At some level it's not THAT inconvenient. It really depends on your connection speed and the size of the files in quest…

In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it's not available...) In some parts of …

Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen.... I thought why don't I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but wa…

This is a good quick reference for some command line linux commands.... pixelbeat.org - linux command line tips. Nice reference. (of course you can also make use of man/apropos and -h to find out mor…

One of the slickest video editing tools I've used in linux is kino. The only problem is that it's geared towards dv files which comes straight from a camcorder (using the dv format.) Most of my video…

One of the utilities under Linux I've made use of in the last few months is Dvdstyler. It essentially will take your dvd ready video and make the DVD filesystem (as well as menus). Simple menus are v…

A long time ago I had found how easy it was to reject messages outright with Postfix that came from non-existent domains. You know... junk from asdflkjuasdlfkjh@imadethisupmyselfanditsnotregisteredan…

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 sever…

Postfix has a NUMBER of tools for rejecting unwanted messages before they get in the door and waste your CPU time on deciding "hey this mail is spam". Up until recently I've mostly used the relays.or…

Haven't had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I've been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions o…

Anyone that's setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I'd mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my serve…

One of the tools I looked at having for my expanding kit has been a usb wireless adapter that would work with minimal install on Windows/Mac or Linux. As you can imagine.... it's not as straightforwa…

I've noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false p…

I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here.... The situation is this... Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has us…

One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key - web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to…

Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First... from the software raid howto, I've…

I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it's quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but…

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 th…

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…

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 th…

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 …

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 …

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 tim…

Now... available in Beta form... The Linux version of the Flash player has been stuck at 7 for some time, while many sites require flash 8 for video/etc... (The page to find the beta download is here…

Ebay is apparently aware of some problems with their new "Sell your item" tool and linux web browsers. The linux.com article above says that they tried with several browsers windows/linux/mac and the…

Yikes, what an evening..... it started innocently enough in the afternoon. I have an old Mandrake 10.0 server that I was upgrading clamav on (recent security update). While I was at it, I was reviewi…

I've been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I've mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating syst…

There appears to be a working root exploit against the binary NVidia driver for *nix based systems. It's reported at kerneltrap.org It was resolved a few weeks back by the release of version 1.0-9625…

The other day I was trying to partition a drive hooked up via usb. (So it get's /dev/sda as it's device in linux)... I tried a few utilities to access the partition table and all failed, finally, I r…

OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking.... "Hello where has he been?" when I'm talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but.... in spite of all …

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 base…

First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, bu…

Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare's virtualization products. The converter also can convert images…

Several days ago there were announcements of the release of Mandriva 2007, only thing was, the download wasn't available yet. Well, today the download appears available. I haven't looked to see what …

I saw a comment somewhere else that zero-day was overused and in essense ANY previously unknown vulnerability in open source software is technically zero day... the intent here though is to use the w…

Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it's monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn't quite a huge update day by recent stand…

More than once I've wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it's capable of hosting multiple graphi…

For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though... it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I've mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERY…

First, Linspire released the freely available "freespire" release of their operating system (based on debian linux). Now, users will no longer have to pay an annual subscription for the click n run s…

I've got to admit, I hadn't caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don't currently administer sendmail on any machines, but.... Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to a…

One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one …

Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No... many things that seem impossible, well... aren't This morning there's a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on l…

I NEVER knew you could use screen for this.... Let multiple users connect to the same Console (command shell/bash shell) session simultaneously. I've looked at screen before. It's a great *nix utilit…

Sarc is still in their month of security tips per day and todays is another good one. Todays tip is about monitoring machines, particularly those that "defend" your network. (Mail antivirus scanners/…

This morning I was doing a fresh install of Windows XP SP2 into a Virtual Machine. So far, things are fine I went through windowsupdate and found 3 updates the first time, then rebooted and hit windo…

One of the things I didn't mention in my first skype post was the "getting skype to work with linux" bit... The version available via urpmi in Mandrake was 1.2, so I installed it (before I had the us…

Incidents.org has been running their security tip a day this month and I really liked this one. It's essentially a way to encrypt your wireless traffic using ssh. That's something I've covered here b…

WMV and WMA file formats (Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio) have been one of those sore spots for desktop linux. Yes, I KNOW mplayer and other players can handle them. (If the codecs are i…

It looks as though Ubuntu has released the first maintenance release in the Dapper Drake life cycle. So, now 6.06.1 can be downloaded. (In analagous terms this might be considered the first service p…

I finally got the Mandriva 2006 rpms rebuilt for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6. I 've been running it for a bit and it and all seems well. Of course, this is always at your own risk. https://www.averyjpark…

You can find updated rpms for Mandrake 10.0 of the recent clamantivirus update at https://www.averyjparker.com/wp-content/downloads/clamav-0.88.4/.

In my wife's profile on the desktop she said she was getting an error message sending and receiving messages so.... when doing a send/receive of mail I saw evolution giving an error message of "summa…

HDR - recently I heard someone talking about this with regards to digital imaging. The idea is that you have three identical images (landscapes) taken from a stationary (tripod) camera. The only diff…

Linux.com has a great writeup on making banner images quickly and easily from the command line (or a script). The catch here is that text is the content for the image. Under linux that will require t…

According to incidents.org a denial of service vulnerability has been noted in all versions of clamav prior to 0.88.4 (inclusive). At incidents last report the download for 0.88.4 was back after disa…

I use wget a LOT. Many times in working with a website I've got a ssh console opened to the site and if there's a plugin that I'd like to download it doesn't make sense to download and then upload, I…

Linux.com has a good explanation of using binfmt_misc to directly launch a windows (or java or python) application just by typing in the application name. *(without all the contortions of ... /home/u…

That was a quick turn around.... It appears as though some of the multimedia streaming issues were severe enough to require a quick turnaround for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 Sans had the initial heads u…

There are a couple notes to pass along with regards to some pretty serious vulnerabilities in various wireless network adapter drivers. First, Sans has information on some Intel Centrino updates that…

Just by way of information..... I've seperated out the www.computerrepairasheville.com and www.ashevillecomputerhelp.com domains now to point to a seperate web site with the main goal of simplifying …

Sometimes you run across a site that's a browser snob. You know the type.... you visit it in Mozilla Firefox or (anything other than IE) and it says, "you must use Internet Explorer version 6 or newe…

Again.... this article referring to an exploit related to the cross platform plugin capability in firefox, is a GOOD reminder to be cautious when looking at potential plugins to install for mozilla f…

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.…

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…

Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables. For starters, I've tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download…

SANS has a story on another local kernel vulnerability for linux. I've got to say that I typically haven't looked as much at "local" vulnerabilities on this site as I have talked about remote vulnera…

Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS …

I've been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they've released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as…

I don't know much about the dv format, except that it is a standard format that many camcorders use. For this reason, many video editors (such as kino for linux) prefer to see files coming in dv form…

I have spent about a week with the 2x page open in one of my browsers. I've been trying to get to know PXES' new incarnation. For background. PXES was hosted on sourceforge.net and was an attempt at …

I've got to say, I haven't spent ENOUGH time with rsync to really be fluent in how I could put it to use.... A week or so ago I was reading this list of essential Linux software by a guy that moved f…

A couple days ago I had a brief article on the vandals banging away at the door of my ssh server. Like I said, I've, at times, been fairly smug abou the futility of their actions, but.... the persist…

I hope there aren't too many browser developers that have planned on taking July off..... I ran across browserfun.blogspot.com where it is planned to release information on a web browser vulnerabilit…

Sometimes I wish I wasn't curious about things.... The other night I was working on something on the testbox in the back room and saw the switch lights flickering fairly actively between the server a…

As I was searching online this weekend for something ubuntu related... I ran across this nice reference Wiki.... ubuntuguide.org. They've got a good Ubuntu new user guide and also a few things Mandri…