Month: September 2013

Link: How to Really Secure Your Linux VPS SSH Service (also works for non-VPS environments)

Let face it, the Secure Shell (SSH) daemon running on your VPS is the most sensitive service open to attack on your system. Any hacker worth their salt will first try to gain access to your VPS via SSH and 99.9% of all VPS connected to the internet run this service by default and on their public IP.

If somebody gains access to your VPS via the SSH service, you can kiss your data and entire VPS goodbye. This is the ultimate goal for any would-be hacker and as such, needs to be the first thing you secure as a VPS administrator.

In this article I’m going to show you how to take three simple precautions with the SSH service that will stop most hackers and script kiddies in their tracks.

Full article here:
How to Really Secure Your Linux VPS SSH Service (Linuxaria)

Note that while the article and title makes reference to a Virtual Private Server (VPN), there is no reason these techniques would not work with any version of Linux that offers SSH access.

Link: Autotrash – Purges files from your trash based on age and/or filename

Autotrash is a simple Python script which will purge files from your trash based on their age or the amount of free space left on the device. Using autotrash -d 30 will delete files which have been in the trash for more then 30 days. It uses the FreeDesktop.org Trash Info files included in the new GNOME system to find the correct files and the dates they where deleted.

Features:
Remove files that are older then a given number of days (see the -d option)
Purge older files to ensure a specific amount of disk space is free (see the –min-free option)
Check for remaining disk space, and only delete if you are running out (see the –max-free option)
Delete regex matching files first (see –delete-frist option)

Install autotrash on ubuntu

Full article here:
Autotrash – Purges files from your trash based on age and/or filename (Ubuntu Geek)

Link: The Complete Guide to Run Android 4.3 in VirtualBox

If you are keen to get your hands on the latest Android 4.3, but your phone’s manufacturer/carrier is not ready to push the update to your phone yet, you can try it out on your desktop. You doesn’t have to install the Android SDK or emulator. As long as you have VirtualBox in your computer, you can run Android 4.3 in a virtual machine.

We have previously shown you how to do so with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), but the build back then was not working well and the WiFi module is not working. This latest Android 4.3 build is more complete and a lot of things just work out of the box, even when you run it as a LiveCD.

Full article here:
The Complete Guide to Run Android 4.3 in VirtualBox (Make Tech Easier)
Similar articles:
How to install Android on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers [Guide] (dotTech)
Install Android OS on Computer (Windows, Mac, Linux) (Android Galaxy)

Link: Pipelight – Using Silverlight in Linux browsers

Pipelight, which allows to run your favorite Silverlight application directly inside your Linux browser. The project combines the effort by Erich E. Hoover with a new browser plugin that embeds Silverlight directly in any Linux browser supporting the Netscape Plugin API. He worked on a set of Wine patches to get Playready DRM protected content working inside Wine and afterwards created an Ubuntu package called Netflix Desktop. This package allows one to use Silverlight inside a Windows version of Firefox, which works as a temporary solution but is not really user-friendly and moreover requires Wine to translate all API calls of the browser. To solve this problem we created Pipelight.

Pipelight consists out of two parts: A Linux library which is loaded into the browser and a Windows program started in Wine. The Windows program, called pluginloader.exe, simply simulates a browser and loads the Silverlight DLLs. When you open a page with a Silverlight application the library will send all commands from the browser through a pipe to the Windows process and act like a bridge between your browser and Silverlight.

Full article here:
Pipelight – Using Silverlight in Linux browsers (Ubuntu Geek)

Link: HOWTO: Configure Ext4 to Enable TRIM Support for SSDs on Ubuntu and Other Distributions

Most current SSDs support the ATA_TRIM command for sustained long-term performance and wear-leveling. On Linux TRIM is supported by the Ext4 and Btrfs filesystems but the latter is out of the scope of this tutorial. We need two things in order to enable TRIM:

Having met the two requirements, all we need to do to enable TRIM is the following:

Full article here:
HOWTO: Configure Ext4 to Enable TRIM Support for SSDs on Ubuntu and Other Distributions (Forked by Nicolay)

Breaking: Will this spoil the Raspberry Pi? Tiny $45 cubic mini-PC runs Android and Linux

Consider that a Raspberry Pi costs $35 (for the higher end model) and for that money you get no case and no power supply. Now look at what you can get for $45, or perhaps a bit more if you want a more powerful device. If you were going to use a Raspberry Pi with XBMC or some other media center software, you might want to wait until the reviews for this device come in (we’d love the chance to review one, if anyone from SolidRun happens to read this!). Note that it has optical audio SPDIF out, which is something the Raspberry Pi doesn’t offer!

More information here:
Tiny $45 cubic mini-PC runs Android and Linux (LinuxGizmos.com)
SolidRun introduces a small, modern and impressive mini-computer that fits everybody’s budget (cubox-i.com)

Link: Asterisk: Blacklisting For Multiple Users

Spotted this article referenced in a thread on DSLReports.com, and even though it’s from four years ago we thought it might be worth mentioning:

There are a number of tutorials for people trying to setup blacklisting for their Asterisk server, but they all seem to assume that there is only one user on the server, or at least all users want to share the same blacklist.

Since I host for multiple, unrelated people, they don’t necessarily want to share the same blacklist, so I had to come up with a configuration that would work for all customers.

Here are the changes I made (for Asterisk 1.4)

This may or may not need to be tweaked a bit to work with newer versions of Asterisk. Unfortunately, the thread on DSLReports leaves the impression that it might take a bit of work to integrate it into FreePBX, so you are on your own if you want to attempt that.

Full article here:
Asterisk: Blacklisting For Multiple Users (Lime Daley)
Related Link:
How to hack the FreePBX blacklist for better call blocking capability

Links: My Raspberry Pi Powered ‘Personal Cloud’

I literally have 500GB external USB drives strewn all over the place with multiple copies of multiple things and I have NO clues what is where. So when I sat down to list the things I wanted, I came up with the following:

  1. A central place in my Home Office to store all my backup, training videos, music, documents and pictures.
  2. Accessible by Macs, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8 RT and if possible on iOS.
  3. Low powered, always on, Uninterrupted Power Supply backed.
  4. Accessible over WiFi. All my machines are connected via WiFi and that includes my desktop. The only thing connected to the Router ‘was’ the printer. So my ‘Network Storage’ had to be available over wifi.

Full articles here (from The Lazy Blogger):
My Raspberry Pi Powered ‘Personal Cloud’
Completing my Pi powered personal (Media) cloud

Link: 10 VirtualBox Tricks and Advanced Features You Should Know About

VirtualBox is packed with features that you may have never used, even if you frequently use it to run virtual machines. VMware keeps many of its best features to its paid versions, but all of VirtualBox’s features are completely free.

Many of the features here require Guest Additions installed in your virtual machine. This is good to do anyway, as installing the Guest Additions package will speed up your virtual machines.

Full article here:
10 VirtualBox Tricks and Advanced Features You Should Know About (How-To Geek)