I will say that I am liking Rhythmbox as my music player and started using Miro for my video podcasts or videocasts…whatever you want to call them. I really only watch Hak5 so far but I’m sure I’ll be adding more in the future.

I had been having some problems staying connected to my VPN at work via the Cisco VPN app so I really haven’t been interfacing to my work from home a lot except from my eeePC. I want to do a site to site from home to work but I’m sure my employeer wouldn’t want that. Sorry for the boring update, hopefully some good stuff coming up.

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.

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.

First, let’s make sure we have the right packages installed.

apt-get install openssh apache2 apache2.2-common php5

Now let’s enable SSL for apache2

sudo a2enmod ssl

Now lets create the server SSL key.

cd /etc/ssl/private
openssl genrsa -des3 -out dns.server.com.key 1024

Ok, now that we have the key, let’s create the CSR to be given to the CA.

openssl req -new -key dns.server.com.key -out dns.server.com.csr

It will prompt you for the passphrase and some other bits of information.  The most important one is site name.  This must match the name of your server.  Something like mail.domain.com or www.domain.com would be appropriate here.

The CSR can now be uploaded to whatever CA you choose.  I use GoDaddy because they are so cheap.

If you do not want to purchase a certificate you can create your own self signed cert with the following command.

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in dns.server.com.csr -signkey dns.server.com.key -out dns.server.com.crt
cp /etc/ssl/private/dns.server.com.crt /etc/ssl/certs

Now that we have the cert created, let’s configure Apache to use it. Add the following 3 lines to your website configuration.  The default one is located in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/dns.server.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/dns.server.com.key

Save that config file and enable Apache to listen on 443 for HTTPS traffic.  Add the following line to /etc/apache2/ports.conf

Listen 443

Restart your Apache2 process and you should have a fully functional SSL enabled website.

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload && /etc/init.d/apache2/restart

vi /etc/network/interfaces - opens /etc/network/interfaces in vi

i - insert
/ - search
G - [Shift] g - go to bottom of page
dd - delete the line
d <- or d -> - d [left or right arrow] delete 1 character in that direction
10G - 10 [Shift] g - move to line 10 (obviously number can be replaced)
10dd - delete 10 lines from cursor and below (again, number can be changed)
:q - quit (no changes may have been made)
:q! - quit (do not save changes)
:wq - write quite (save and quit)
:w - write (save)

Ok, now that you have mastered the basics of vi, please refer all other needs to the link provided above.  Hope you like vi as much as I do.

NOTE:  Ubuntu (and maybe debian) have a few things that the built in vi program have that seem a little strange.  I usually install vim just to be safe.  to do this run sudo apt-get install vim-full.


To put a package on hold use this command.

sudo aptitude hold snort-mysql

To remove the hold use this command.

sudo aptitude unhold snort-mysql

To keep your entire system (I think) from being updated simply use this command.

sudo aptitude hold

And to remove the hold use this command.

sudo aptitude unhold

Very easy isn’t it.  Yep, that’s what I thought. I’ll be able to deploy appliances in the field now without worrying if an update is going to break something before I get a chance to fix the issue.

apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client

That’s it. If you want to play around a little more you can configure Ubuntu’s firewall in just a few simple steps as well. In my example I will enable tcp/80, tcp/443, tcp/22 and udp/53 inbound.

ufw disable
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow udp/53
ufw enable

And then you can validate what you have entered with:

ufw status

The output will be similar to this:

Firewall loaded

To Action From
– —— —-
80:tcp ALLOW Anywhere
443:tcp ALLOW Anywhere
22:tcp ALLOW Anywhere
53:udp ALLOW Anywhere

And that’s really all I do…it’s definately not much but it will be enough to get you started connecting remotely.

Windows vs. Linux (Ubuntu)

Internet Browsing
W – Internet Explorer
U – Firefox

Email Clients
W – Outlook, Outlook Express
U – Thunderbird, Evolution

Chat Clients
W – MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, mIRC
U- Gaim / Pigdin, xChat, BitchX

Com Port Communications
W – Hyperterminal
U – MiniCom

FTP Client
W – Filezilla FTP Client
U – Filezilla FTP Client

Remote Access Servers
W – Terminal Server, RealVNC, TightVNC, WinVNC
U – FreeNX, RealVNC, TightVNC

P2P Filesharing
W – Limewire, Bearshare, Bittorrent
U – Limewire, Azureus

VoIP Clients
W – Skype, X-Lite
U – Skype, Linphone, Twinkle

Drawing / Photo Editing
W – Paint.net, Photoshop, MSPaint
U – GIMP
3D Annimation / Rendering
W – 3D Studio MAX, Blender
U – Blender, Maya

DVD Players
W – Windows Media Player, PowerDVD
U – MPlayer, Kaffine, VLC

MP3 / Music Players
W – Winamp, iTunes
U – RhymeBox, K3b

Office Productivity
W – Microsoft Office
U – OpenOffice.org

Network / Relation Mapping
W – Microsoft Visio
U – Dia

Accounting / Financial
W – Quicken, Microsoft Money
U – GnuCash

Desktop Publishing
W – Microsoft Publisher, Quark
U – Scribus

PDF Editing
W – Adobe Acrobat Professional
U – PDFEdit, pdftk

Imaging
W – Norton Ghost
U – G4u, dd

Partition Resizing
W – Norton Partition Magic
U – GParted

Backup Software
W – Symantec Backup Exec
U – BackupPC, Amanda

Web Servers
W – Microsoft IIS
U – Apache

File Servers
W – Microsoft File Services
U – Samba

Email Servers
W – Microsoft Exchange
U – Postfix, Sendmail

AntiVirus Software
W – Symantec AV, Mcafee
U – ClamAV, AVG

For more of these “like” software lists, please visit what I believe to be the most complete list on the internet, Table of Equivalents.

Home Computer

I have a Panasonic Toughbook laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 that I really haven’t modified too awful much because I like the look and feel of the OS as it is. Here’s a list of things that I use everyday or every so often to accomplish a task without spending any money.

Operating System – Ubuntu 7.04 – Stable, clean, easy to install, based on GNOME and very well supported by the community. I would say that the forums for Ubuntu are better than most and for some reason, the users of Ubuntu are much nicer than that of Red Hat and others.

Blogging – Blogger.com attached to my Gmail account (I do my own hosting)

Firewall - pfSense – I mentioned this a few post’s ago. I absolutely love this firewall.

Document Management – Google Doc’s and Spreadsheets – This one is really neat, you can upload your Microsoft Office Word and Excel files as well as OpenOffice equivalent documents up to Google, edit them, and even save off as PDF documents if need be.

Music – Pandora.com – This site has been around for a little while now, It allows you to basically make your own radio station, and it dynamically learns what music you want to listen to. A side spawn of this project is Squeezebox which allows you to turn your music library into a radio station with streaming music.

Chat – Gaim – It’s easy to use, installed by default on Ubuntu, and supports multiple accounts. On Linux and Windows you can use Pidgin and for Mac OS X you can use Adium.

VoIP – Twinkle – So far this is the best SIP capable client for Linux I have found. You can installed it through apt-get or Synaptic on Ubuntu or download it here. On Windows and Mac OS X I use X-Lite from CounterPath. I would say X-Lite is the best of the two but the Linux version sucks in my opinion.

PBX – trixbox – I just started using this because I’m trying to get my company or rather the company I work for into a new market so that we can make some more money as a company which personally helps me through profit sharing. Though, if I didn’t get that last bit, I would still peruse doing phone VoIP systems because I think they are interesting. I have it installed on an old PIII 500 with 256Mb of ram and it suits the needs of my wife an I just fine. A larger scale deployment would need a better server though.

Email – Gmail and Evolution – I just started using Evolution about a month ago because Outlook Web Access on Microsoft Exchange 2003 sucks when viewed from Firefox. Damn Microsoft. Kidding. Evolution seemed to be a logical choice for me because well, it was already installed on my computer and quite frankly I needed a way to check my mail. Sounds like a match made in heaven. Gmail, as you all probably know, is free and has cool features like web sharable calendars, documents and photos. You will probably see a trend here for me liking everything Google.

I think that’s enough for now. I’ll make a part 2 to this one pretty soon with quite a few more added programs and services that I use everyday for free. Compute free or die.

To get the wireless hardware working with the OS most people recommend NDISWrappers but the easiest and most supported was is to use Synaptic (the package manager) to install bcm43xx-fwcutter which is nothing more than the firmware that the kernel needs to load during the boot process to make the Wireless NIC usable. After installation just reboot and the viola you have a working Broadcom wireless NIC which supports pretty much any encryption method available.