2006

First of all, this entry is not being entered in Drupal 4.7, I haven’t had the time to get that set up yet.

The other day I decided to take a look at my server logs, which is something that I should have been doing all along. I found out that more than one host has been brute force / dictionary scanning my ssh server. I decided that even though my passwords are strong, that I really didn’t want people to have the ability to do that. Fortunately for me there are some tools out there that work great for this very purpose. The one that I chose is called DenyHosts.

From the Drupal Homepage:

After more than a year of development we are ready to release Drupal 4.7.0 to the world. More than five years, 13 major releases, 30+ servicing firms employing 100+ Drupal professionals, 300+ third party modules, and over 55,000+ Drupal powered sites later, Drupal 4.7.0 is finally here and it rocks!

Needless to say, I’m going to be updating this version very quickly, aka as soon as my laptop starts up. Look for the next post to be from Drupal 4.7.0!

I’m posting this from a Firefox extension called JustBlogIt. You can find it here. It puts a new item in your right-click menu and let’s you blog links and pages that you find.  Only problem is, that function doesn’t work with Drupal. I’m sure it’s supposed to, but I’m not sure exactly how Drupal works, so all I can get is the page to post content.

I’ve been trying to get my laptop to hibernate on and off for about a year now. Recently I found a great tutorial for Ubuntu, and other similar distros, that makes it really easy to do.

It took me about 10 minutes to get set up, minus the kernel compilation.

Here’s the tutorial that I used.

Later,
Jon Howe

Adding a feed

Click on the RSS button, then click Add. Paste in the feed URL and hit OK. If you want to name the feed, simply type the name in front of the URL, like so:
TV Feed|http://somesite.com/rss.xml (NO SPACE BEFORE OR AFTER THE | )

Note that the RSS Downloader will NOT consume any extra resources if you have no feeds present/enabled. Some feeds do not give direct links to the .torrent files (most notably Mininova) and as such won’t work, but you can use the MiniRSS feed fixer to modify those feeds to work properly. For Mininova’s feeds, you can use MiniRSS.org

This is a little something that I made up this afternoon at school.

It’s an implementation of a search app with out a celing. In other words , there’s no submit button. With each keystoke that you type, the query get’s more accurate.

If you just want to check it out (with source, and an example) then Click Here
The code is commented pretty well.

If you want a little explanation read on.

Most Logitech mice are connected via USB, and I have not tested this with PS/2 mice.

Open xorg.conf

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now find the section that says something like:

Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse" Driver "mouse" Option "CorePointer" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "Buttons" "7" EndSection

and comment it out by putting a # symbol in front of each line. It should look like this:

It’s important to do form validation for obvious reasons. This is an implementation of an email checker that uses php regular expressions, and a little bet if pizzaz with asynchronous javascript and xml, or AJAX.

Here’s the example.

A quick rundown of how this works is:

1. You type in a string
2. You hit submit
3. The data is transfered asynchronously (without refreshing the page) to the server
4. The server checks to see if the email is valid or invalid
5. If it’s valid it tells you so, as well as if it’s not

The guts of the script are here:
if (eregi("^[a-zA-Z0-9_-.+]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+.[a-zA-Z0-9-_.]+$",$email)) { //return confirmation that it worked } else { //return that it didn't work }

Okay, truth told, I’m completely bored, so I’m going to write a quick tutorial on how to install and set up the Snort IDS on a Debian Sarge System (although it should work on other distros as well).

Download and Install Snort
apt-get install snort-mysql

Enter values in the following screen, but forget about the part about the database
cd /usr/share/doc/snort-mysql
mysqladmin -u -p create
zcat create_mysql.gz | mysql -u -p

Since I’ve already been on the topic of doing small beginner PHP tutorials, here’s another one. This one is pretty self explanitory.

You can see it here.

Basically what this does is let you enter a domain or page or whatever and it redirects you to the page. On top of just redirecting you, it logs all of the redirections along with the request date, and requester ip address.

If you have a need for this, you’ll most likely know how to implement it. If not, feel free, as always, to email me (howe -dot- jon -at- gmail -dot- com), and I’d be happy to help you out to the best of my abilities.