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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Textpattern 4 is out

Posted on August 16, 2005 by Ajitabh

Finally after a long wait Textpattern 4.0 has been released yesterday. Looks good. Updated the Asha NYC/NJ textpattern installation to this version. Has a lots of new features as well. Still playing with it since the Asha implementation is not yet in production. The only thing which I found lacking is the absence of a list of all TXP tags and their explanatins. Although a Textbook exists, but that is still under development stage. However this is an excellent package with hosts of features. Will definitely recommend it.

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