Ubuntu for 30 Days - Day 2
Posted by clamasters in Linux, Ubuntu on July 2nd, 2009
Until about an hour ago, tonight’s Ubuntu experience was “meh”. I really couldn’t think of anything that I actually wanted to do. I then remembered that the pictures needed offloaded from our camera from Jessica’s baby shower. After a little wrestling with a bad cable connection (camera’s fault) I was greeted with a happy to import greeting from “f-spot”. For such a simple application it has some neat features including the ability to export as a gallery which I like to do from time to time. Here is a quick example. I do have to say, the photo management in f-spot is pretty good. I still went ahead and installed the Ubuntu package for Picasa. I use the web albums as a backup for any of my photos so it makes sense. It appears that all the features of the Windows version are in the Linux version as well so no lack luster there.
I’m still enjoying the simplicity of Rhythmbox as the music player. Connected to last.fm it plays much like Pandora does and I really like the popups to let me know what song/artist is playing.
Doing my everyday tasks (gmail, wordpress, etc.) really is not effected by the use of Ubuntu as they are all browser based. I upgraded my install of wordpress today and needed an application like WinSCP for Ubuntu. Turn’s out that it’s built in. NEAT… Go to “Places” –> “Connect to Server” then using SSH as the connection type I was given a file/folder manager access to my server via SFTP/SSH.
So far so good.
Ubuntu for 30 Days - Day 1
Posted by clamasters in Linux, Ubuntu, blog on July 1st, 2009
Tonight was a little rocky for Mr. Ubuntu. I was trying to help my father out with an Outlook Express issue obviously on a Windows machine. My typical remote access solution would not work as it requires Windows as the support PC. However, I went ahead and tried to do a terminal server connection to a server on his network and then launch the application. In this case ShowMyPC. The connection was SLOW!!! I then started searching around for something that was cross compatible. I found YuuGuu but apparently am too dumb to figure it out.
Does anyone have a recommendation for remote support TO Windows and OS X workstations and servers FROM linux? Preferably Ubuntu. I prefer free solutions but would be willing to pay a small fee if needed as long as it also supported support from Windows as I could use it from my job.
On a softer note, I do like RhythmBox. I want to get Pandora playable inside there but that can come later.
Setting up VPNC and the Network Manager VPN piece was pretty easy. All through apt-get… I needed this to connect into my work place and do time entries and remote support stuff.
So far so good. With the exception to remote support to Windows based clients, I’m pretty rock solid on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu for 30 Days
Posted by clamasters in blog on June 30th, 2009
Alrighty, I know it’s been a while and you are all bored or have already deleted my RSS from your reader but hopefully I’ll peak your interestes a bit. My goal for the next 30 days is to use Ubuntu 9.04 at home (sorry Windows required at work). I know this has already been done but as everyone is different, hopefully my experience will differ. If you have any feedback please let me know. Just for info, I’ll be using my new home hardware here.
Terminal Server Aware Web Proxy Server with pfSense
Posted by clamasters in Microsoft, pfSense on March 17th, 2009
At work, I have a client that was requesting the ability to monitor/block sites that their users were visiting. This is traditionally quite easy with just a squid proxy server or a Barracuda Web Filter but they really didn’t want an extra server to be installed during this process AND they were using a terminal server.
I started looking for server side applications that I could install and just have the admin pull the data from there, however, the costs I was finding were a bit too much. I setup a pfSense in a quick lab to demo this up. After installing pfSense on some old hardware, did a basic configuration of the box, and then installed the Squid proxy package. I configured this to be a traditional proxy where I had to send traffic on a specific port, and the user was required to login. That was really the trick to get the terminal server users broken apart. I know it could probably use a little masaging with NTLM authentication or some other clean mechanism but for the lab and the purposes of this client, this hit the mark for a great price.
I did mention that they did not want to install new hardware during this process, but the knew they needed to upgrade their Linksys “router” that was currently firewalling their network. I am once again impressed with the flexibility and ease of use that pfSense gives you. I truly only have 1 complaint about the system at all but it has nothing to do with this and as I understand it, that feature has been added in pfSense 2.0. The management of OpenVPN clients/certificates is somewhat of a nightmare for large installs unless you use a single certificate for all users (not recommended).
Cisco - tcp-small-servers and udp-small-servers
Posted by clamasters in Cisco, blog on February 19th, 2009
For some truly unknown reason, Cisco’s devices still have support for “small servers” or “simple services”. Examples of these include echo, chargen, daytime and discard. An attacker could possibly start a denial of service attack (DoS) against one or more network devices with those configured. In this case; echo and chargen are to blame by allowing an attacker to cause the chargen service to hit the echo services causing an endless loop of character generation and echo between the two hosts. To disable this, simply enter the following commands:
configure terminal
no service tcp-small-servers
no service udp-small-servers
These commands can be run on nearly all IOS based Cisco equipment.