End of Journey – 4th Jan 1999 to 23rd Sept 2005

Posted on September 23, 2005 by Ajitabh
Dear Friends,

I wanted to take a moment to let you know that today is my last day at NIIT / British Airways. I will be joining a new position at Broadcasting Data Systems (a BBC Broadcast company) on Monday, 26th Sept 2005.

I have enjoyed my 81 months tenure with NIIT with the last 22 months at British Airways and appreciate having the opportunity to work with all of you. Thank you for the support, guidance and encouragement you have provided me during my time at NIIT / British Airways. Even though I will miss my colleagues and the company, I am looking forward to this new challenge and to starting a new phase of my career.

Please keep in touch, I can be reached at my personal email address
ajitabhpandey (at ) ajitabhpandey.info.

You can always read about me and my whereabouts at my website http://www.ajitabhpandey.info/
Thanks again for everything.

I seal it with a kiss,
because you I will miss.
I’ll sign it with a sigh,
because we went so high.
I wish I could tell you with a touch,
Why I care to write this..,
and why so much.

Yours truly,
Ajitabh Pandey

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A laptop for me

Posted on September 22, 2005 by Ajitabh

Yesterday I received my IBM Thinkpad R50e. R50e is a solid IBM machine and cost me around £750. The specs are

Pentium M 735 1.7 GHz

RAM 512 MB

HD 60 GB

DVD-Writer

Mdm – LAN EN, Fast EN 802.11b, 802.11g – Centrino

15″ TFT XGA (1024 x 768)

It came preloaded with WinXP Pro. I made a recovery disc set of 7 discs and replaced WinXP Pro with Ubuntu Linux. Almost everything has worked out of box and it is nice to see that Ubuntu recognized the Wireless chip as well.

As I am writing this, another window on this box is running debootstrap to build  a pure Debian Sarge system. Further plans are to install a Linux from Scratch system on this laptop.

I am still playing with it.

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Cracking attempts on my PC

Posted on August 26, 2005 by Ajitabh

Since the day I switched on ssh server on my home PC I saw a very increased number of people attempting to crack into my PC. For few days I kept quite as I saw clearly that none of the attacks were able to go anywhere near my user-id. But then I realise that the log size of the auth file is increasing and number of desperate attackers is growing day by day. So I installed a software called Denyhosts from http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net.

Denyhosts is a python script which can be run as a daemon or as a cron job to analyse the auth log file for invalid number of authentication attempts. This blocks the ip-address of the machine from which successive invalid authntication attempts are coming. To block this ip-address it creates and entry in /etc/hosts.deny file. I have so far blocked 23 different hosts. Let’s see what happens next.

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I am looking forward to joining BBC

Posted on August 26, 2005 by Ajitabh

Yesterday I got a call from BBC HR that my Work Permit has come through. Today I finally resigned from NIIT. Nothing much to say here, its just another milestone passed in life.

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Security Softwares

Posted on August 16, 2005 by Ajitabh

On Unixreview.com came across a secrity tool to be used for SSH servers. Denyhost is a python script which finds out invalid login attempts from the log files and can add the IP address from where the login attempt was made to /etc/hosts.deny file automatically. Can be run manually, through command line or as a dameon. Worth giving a try.

mod_security is a an Apache module meant to work as an intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications or a web application firewall. It is stable and worth giving it a try. It has a  very beautiful way of making Apache installation in chroot jail.

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