Home Heating Hacking with the Raspberry Pi (Links)

It seems that to some degree, if you can dream it, you can do it with a Raspberry Pi.  We are constantly amazed with the uses that people find for the little computers.  And we are big fans of anything that will save someone a trip outside in a bitter cold winter such as we are having this year!  Therefore, we found these articles by alaskanshade interesting:

Home Heating Hacking Part 1 or How to Measure an Oil Tank

Home Heating Hacking Part 2 or How to (Almost) Audit a Furnace

We don’t know if there will be more to come in this series, but you can always check alaskanshade’s blog to find out.  To us, this seems a bit more practical than, say, a Raspberry Pi Power Cat Feeder (yes, someone really built that).

Link: Manage Multiple SSH Connections Easily With PAC Manager [Linux]

If you have used SSH to connect to a remote machine before, you know the procedure: open a terminal, type in the SSH command and the host IP, enter the password. This is probably easy for a single connection, but if you are a system administrator looking after several remote machines and have a need to manage multiple SSH connections, you will need a better and easier solution. You need PAC Manager.

Full article here:
Manage Multiple SSH Connections Easily With PAC Manager [Linux] (Make Tech Easier)

Link: Midnight Commander Custom Interface Colors

Most Linux users are already familiar with the popular Midnight Commander console file manager so I will forego the introduction. This file manager supports custom user interface color schemes for increased personalization. The color scheme can be modified conveniently at any time by editing a single configuration file.

Full article here:
Midnight Commander Custom Interface Colors (Linux Library)

Link: Setting up VNC on Raspberry Pi

Although the Raspberry Pi can be connected to a TV or monitor via HDMI or DVI, there are times when running a Raspberry Pi “headless” (without a monitor) is desirable. In a headless setup, you could connect to your Raspberry via SSH but if you want the full desktop then you will need to connect using a remote desktop protocol. The easiest is to setup VNC on Raspberry Pi. Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a graphical desktop protocol that allows you to access the full Raspberry Pi desktop from another machine. Typically you would run the VNC client on a PC running Windows, OS X or Linux and access the Pi’s desktop over the network.

Full article here:
Setting up VNC on Raspberry Pi (Make Tech Easier)

Related link:
VNC Starting Automatically on Raspberry Pi (School Pi Club)

Link: Record Audio from System/Microphone/Applications with ‘Audio Recorder’, Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

Audio Recorder is an amazing audio recording program, this small tool allows user to record audio from microphones, webcams, system sound card, media player or web browser & etc. It can save recording in various formats listed: Ogg, Mp3, Flac, Wav (22khz), Wav (44khz) and Spx.

Full article here:
Record Audio from System/Microphone/Applications with ‘Audio Recorder’, Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint (Noobs Lab)

Link: Install And Learn How To Use ufw Firewall In Linux

Ubuntu does not have many open ports by default, but there are times when you want to restrict access to a port(ports) or a specific ip adress. Maybe you run a ssh server in your ubuntu machine and want to block everyone from connecting to it, except yourself. Have you ever thought how to accomplish such things or tried to do it? You need a firewall to do that. In this article I will explain what is a firewall and teach you how to use the ufw ubuntu firewall by giving real world examples of it.

Full article here:
Install And Learn How To Use ufw Firewall In Linux (LinOxide)

A possible way to thwart SIP hack attempts on your Asterisk (or other) PBX server

If you’ve had the problem of hackers trying to break into your Asterisk server, you probably know that you can use tools like Fail2ban to at least slow them down.  But why let them know you even have an Asterisk server in the first place?  Maybe you need to leave port 5060 open so that remote users (not on your local network) can connect to the server, but that doesn’t mean that you have to advertise to the bad guys that you might have something of interest.  With that in mind, we direct your attention to this post in the DSLReports VoIP forum:

The Linux netfilter/iptables firewall is capable of stopping these attacks before they even start.

At a bare minimum, this stops 99% of the attacks when added to your iptables ruleset:

-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -m string --string "REGISTER sip:your.pbx.dns.name" --algo bm -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -m string --string "REGISTER sip:" --algo bm -j DROP
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -m string --string "OPTIONS sip:" --algo bm -j DROP
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j ACCEPT

Warning
IMPORTANT: Be sure to have a separate iptables rule (higher on the list than those above) that allows connections to port 5060 from devices on your local network. Otherwise, you may find that new extensions that you are adding for the first time will not register with your Asterisk server, or that after a system reboot, none of your local extensions will register!

To understand how this works, read the original post by DSLReports user espaeth.

For another line of defense against such attacks, see the article Stop SOME SipVicious attacks from reaching your Asterisk, FreeSwitch, YATE, etc. PBX server.

Link: Using the Zilog PIR sensor with the Raspberry Pi

For my latest Raspberry Pi project I wanted to be able to detect when a person was in the room. I happened to have a Zilog PIR sensor from SK Pang that I’d bought, but not used. This provides details to get the PIR sensor working with the Raspberry Pi.

Full article here:
Using the Zilog PIR sensor with the Raspberry Pi (PenguinTutor)

Link: 8 Little-Known Tips For Mac OS X Users

OS X includes a number of commands in various system and application menus which give you quick access to file and windows management. In addition to these, there are also hidden options which can be found by holding the “Option“, “Shift and ”Command” keys with the various menus open.

Along with all these commands, there are several useful, but somewhat unfortunately hidden behaviours which can be beneficial to some people. These behaviours include information about various system controls, manipulating items in Spotlight and moving windows around on screen.

We’ve compiled 8 of the most useful tips for Mac OS X, so check them out:

Full article here:
8 Little-Known Tips For Mac OS X Users (Make Tech Easier)