HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

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 :)

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 disapeared! 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…

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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.

Someone had googled the text in title of this article on google and end up on my site.

To restart sshd on Fedora just run (as root on console): /etc/init.d/sshd restart

I hope that clears things up.

I must say before anything else that this is not guide to installing Safari on Linux. You can find one for installing Safari under wine here.

I want to ask if anyone has had success with this guide? I tried it and apart from succesfully loading the default home page I havent managed to load any other webpage - not even google - with it and the window has really bad graphical glitches all the time…

I would personally like to get this browser to run under Linux just to test my site with it - specially since one commenter here posted a claim that this site does not show correctly on Safari. So if anybody has had success just let me know what version of wine and safari you have and what extra measures you had to take, if any, to get it work correctly.

Perhaps you, like many *nix users, like to remotely connect to your desktop and/or servers and thus are propably running an ssh-server. If so and you have ever checked logs for failed attempts to log in then you know that attempts to login with random usernames and passwords are made constantly. And finally, if you are like me, you are constantly worried that your username and the password, even though naturally a hard one to come up with, might one day be entered by person - or rather a brute force password cracking script - and thus your system getting compromized. There is a simple tool to deny hosts from connecting the ssh-server (couple tools even, but here is one) after failing defined number of times - and if configured to, the program will send email report of new denied hosts and suspicious connection attempts. denyhosts is the program I use for this, and here is how to set up it:

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I decided to enable SSL-secured access to this server. The system running Salamanteri is Fedora 7 Linux + Apache 2 (at the moment of writing) so at least with Fedora 7 anything I did should work too. Yes, I wrote a description for those webmasters without knowlege about everything (should be easy enough to adapt my “guide” for other distributions or unixes.

Whatever the reason you might want to connect securely (https://salamanteri.homelinux.net/wordpress/), my reason was gaining a way to securely login to administration page without separate ssh-tunnel.

How to do it?

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