HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

Ok, first off I don’t usually write about Windows OS specifically and do not use it, nor have I even tested Windows 7 myself. That being said I decided that since this is a big issue for some I should make one of my exceptions.

If you are using Windows 7 beta then you know (at least you should) that it expires tomorrow (July 1, 2009) and after that it will annoyingly shut down your computer every two hours. Other than that it will function untill August 1, 2009 when the beta will expire completely.

Next step is to either return to your old Windows version or install upgrade to RC. Unfortunately Microsoft does not officially support upgrading from beta to RC (they recommend clean install) - however browsing the web I bumped into this guide at tomshardware.com that tells you how to do the upgrade (and if nothing goes wrong save you from the trouble of re-installing everything): Windows 7 Beta Begins to Expire July 1, 2009.
If you don’t want to read what tomshardware has to say about this, to just skip right into upgrade procedure guide go straight to Microsofts own document, “Delivering a quality upgrade experience” on their Engineering Windows 7 blog.

I just thought that it might be polite to post this here, just in case that some reader is in this particular situation, pondering how to upgrade his expiring Windows 7 beta (even if it’s just running on top of Linux+VirtualBox ;) ), so there.

P.S. Don’t expect that I will take a habit of writing about Windows, because I rarely will. Sometimes but rarely, as I see it this is mostly *nix (and specifically Linux) use and programming related blog :)

Well, guys (and girls <3 )… I haven’t written anything for some while because I decided to take a vacation. Now I feel bad about it because this is not my job, this is my hobby and I don’t really understand why I haven’t just kept on blogging. Well, anyway, expect some new writings here again :)

On another subject, this very server (named salamanteri) was under attack. Surprisingly though it was not an attack through the internet - it was a very physical attack. What can I tell about it? Well, it was me and my friends having a laugh, drinking way too much beer. My friend got in an argument with my other friend, one thing led to another and in the end I was in fight with my friend and he was attacking my computer very physically. Thank goodness nothing on my server was broken (but my desktop system is another case - although weird, nobody remembers anything happening to it, might be just a normal hardware problem). In the end I can only quote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (and ask you to consider alcohol just another drug, and not exactly a mild one): “One of the things you learn from years of dealing with drug people, is that you can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug. Especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eye“.

Well, that’s about it… I will return soon, probably writing about Linux and gamers. A very popular subject I might claim.

Ok, I dont know how long (actually only 2 days according to stats) this site was down. The reasons:

1. I don’t live alone and sometimes my roommate likes to take pills. I got nothing against that, but then he comes to my room, brings some of his stuff here and takes some of mine away… Actioning irrationally he sometimes does other things too - this time he plugged off the power from my switch where my server is linked into. So that caused first problem.
2. My friend restarted computer. Before I had my httpd start automatically at boot but now that it also keeps https server it asks password when starting… Obviously it thus has to be hand started by me right after booting (there was, btw, no need for reboot anyway, that was all my friends stupidity).

Well, I just restarted apache and everything should be working fine again…

I just got some new video files but instead of divx packed inside .avi they came in .mvb files unknown to me. Trying to view them with xine I was surprised that I did not have a correct codec installed and revealed that the format was RealVideo (RV40).

I was so blinded by the thought that I should have almost any possible commonly known codec installed that I spent several apt-cache searches by looking for something else and completely missing on packet - which I then spotted and was humbled by the fact I had forgotten to install it. The command I needed to get it work was simply:
apt-get install w32codecs So never fool yourself, even though your guru mind should know all the switches and gears to make a steampunk computer tick, you might still miss the most obvious package for whatever problem you bump into :)

Most of the image manipulation guides on internet are made for photoshop so I’m always thrilled to find a interesting guide for GIMP.

From blog of Locutus I found an entry 3D Chuck. The Gimp script way.. I have never even thought of this idea - the guide describes how to turn regular image into 3d-image for viewing with red and green or blue and yellow 3d-glasses.

Not only does it tell how to do it manually but also a script-fu code (script language to add effects, etc. to GIMP) that adds “3D Convert” function under filters menu to automatically do the conversion.

Note that you should read also the comments of the entry to get the script function correctly as there are some problems with entering code in blog of locutus and comments provide some minor corrections to code and how to get it show on GIMP.

I have no glasses to try and test this stuff but I thought it might interest people :)

Last sunday I was at Machinae Supremacy concert. The show was great, but hey, what else than pure awesomeness could result from combining good metal music with niiice SID sounds from good ole Commodore 64?

Anyway I just wanted you to hear that Machinae Supremacy made a statement concerning P2P filesharing. First they spoke about some new law in Sweden that is targetted at filesharers and then they made a clear statement: “We want you to download out songs!”. Also they have clearly stated on their website that they support The Pirate Bay.

So go now, you can find some of their songs available for download right from their website at www.machinaesupremacy.com - or you can go to thepiratebay.org and download them via bittorrent. The last option may or may not be legal in you country but what the heck, the guys who make the music not only approve it, they encourage people to do this!

Other than that I also bought a cool T-shirt (the one on the right, linked to Machinae Supremacy online shop catalog). I love it :)

One great milestone for Mozilla FireFox 3 browser and in the battle against the more pathetic dinosaur of the browser world, Internet Explorer, was achieved early this year when FireFox 3 beated Internet Explorer 6 on most used web browsers statistics (at least according to StatCounters statistics).

Currently the lead is however still kept by Internet Explorer with it’s 7th release which is used by approximately 40% of users while FireFox 3 has around 24% of users. Internet Explorer 6 was left behind FireFox 3 with userbase of around 22%.

So despite this milestone Internet Explorer still has strong grasp of users worldwide. However as an example in Finland FireFox 3 is doing even better, having taken a 47% share of all computers in our country and leaving Internet Explorer 7 with only 29% of users we here in Finland are clearly leading the change away from Microsoft controlled browser monopoly (for more detailed statistics of browser use in Finland click here).

I found out just now that Debian, along with couple other major distributions, have decided to drop support for XMMS audio player (See: Considerations for ‘xmms’ removal from Debian). I was really badly surprised when I noticed that apparently dist-upgrading my Debian from Etch to Lenny, the new stable, the old XMMS package had dissapeared! I can live with Debian dropping XMMS but I think that it’s a bit shameless to put an upgrade out that drops the already installed package from my system too! So I had to get it back…

Read the rest of this entry »

On August 20th, 2008 I wrote a post to warn about New MySpace&Facebook Malware.

Now there seems to be a similiar new case in Facebook. It seems like te send a fake message from one of your friends showing your firends name and picture and a link to a video. Opening link seems like YouTube but has a message in middle of screen telling that you need to install new version or Adobe Flash Player.

Cliking on install will however not update Flash but instead instead a new version of Koobface worm. This worm is also spread on MySpace and, unlike the last one I posted about, on Friendster.

Koobface will let black hats to run commands on infected computers. Naturally this will only be a problem for Windows users as the worm cant infect other OS’s but according to stast of my blog quite a few visitors I get are using a Windows system so I decided it to be best to warn people again.

There is more information about this on security site TrendMicro and on F-Secure Malware Information Pages.

There are many reasons why a user might want to use OpenDNS quality dns nameservers instead of service providers dns servers. Maybe the providers nameserver does not work that well, or maybe your country and/or provider is one of those who have set up domain name based internet content filtering that you want to pass - this is the case here in Finland where the claimed use is to prevent access to child porn sites but most of the sites filtered are not of that sort at all, many not even regular porn sites and sometimes there have been really bad mistakes (like w3c site ending on the list).

On opendns.org there is a simple guide on how to set Linux (there is one for Windows too) to use OpenDNS - all you have to do, according to the site, is to edit /etc/resolv.conf and replace IP’s on nameserver lines with ones of OpenDNS. While this works at least on Fedora (and supposedly on most other flawors of Linux), at least with Debian and Ubuntu there is an extra step. This one is for those using cable connection with DHCP:

1st. edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and add followind line to end of file:
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220;
…then find the line starting with “request” that lists the information to read ask from DHCP server and remove the option “domain-name-servers“.

2nd. edit /etc/resolv.conf like instructed on opendns.org. Replace the nameserver lines with these:
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
edit: I’m not sure if the second step is needed or even effective on debian.

3rd. Now you could just wait until the information from DHCP gets renewed or to make the changes work instantly you can run:
/etc/init.d/networking restart

Notes: You need to get root access to edit the files and to restart networking.