Linux

Recently, my Dad purchased the Linksys WRT54G. If you follow tech news, you probably know that more or less, the device (as well as at least one other Linksys device) was hacked.

All that I have so far is a couple of links, here they are:

Seattle Wireless
Shaneo
I-hacked article (good)
Openwrt
Hyperwrt
Wifi-Box
Ewrt
Sveasoft

The last one looks the most promising.

I’ll be working on this over spring break (next week), so keep an eye out for a little ‘howto’ on this.

I’ve tried and tried to build my own custom kernel over the past year or so, usually only to stop in frustration because of some small part of the process not working.

This is all different now.

I found out that using the took make-kpkg makes things way easier. In fact I configured, compiled, and installed kernel 2.6.15 in about 30 minutes including the time that it took me to build it.

I’ve been messing around with iptables a bit more than usual the past week or so. Through this process, I decided that it wasn’t worth it for me to keep creating / tweaking all of my rules by hand. So.. I found an Excellent (with a capital ‘E’) frontend to iptables.

For me the frontend had to meet some strict requirements.

1. It must have a curses graphical user interface
2. It must be easy to use

Something called Jay’s Iptables Fits these requirements perfectly.

I found a few cool things this morning.

The first being a way to install a rpm file in Debian. You do this using the alien command (apt-get install alien).

To convert a package from an rpm to a deb run the following command:
alias --to-deb

To just install a rpm use the following command:
alias -i

It's that easy.

Also, I was looking at some stories on the front page of Digg, and found a Great New Library for use with Google Maps. It has the features of the one that I was messing around with earlier (I forgot the name of it). It even includes the features that I had to add inot the other library.

If you’ve got more than one computer running Debian that packages are downloaded through apt, then apt-cacher should help you a lot.

Apt-cacher is actually a cgi script that is run by apache. Using apt-cacher is very easy, and installing it is even easier.

Step 1: Install apt-cacher.
(Run this on the proxy computer)

apt-get install apt-cacher

Enter the webpage : http://localhost/apt-cacher
to see that the proxy is running.

Step 2: Backup and Convert Clients sources.list.
(Do this on the computers that you want to access the cache.)

This tutorial works with squid versions < 2.6

Many companies find proxy servers useful for a number of reasons. For example, if a company has fairly low bandwidth and needs a cheap way to streamline the distribution of frequently accessed content, a proxy server, such as squid will help a lot. Another use of a proxy server in the business world is for what I like to call, “Employee Management”. In other words, this is for companies that want to see what their employees are viewing on the internet. They can also be used by companies that have less than perfect infrastructures and need to have a way to take one connection to the internet and spread it to many computers.

So last night I decided to take windows off of my laptop. This probably should have been easy. However, when is anything ever easy? When I woke up this morning I found out that in the middle of the night, during my net-install, the network cord came unplugged.

Apparently when you unplug the network cable during a Debian Netinstall the installer stops downloading the remaining packages and sets up what you have.

In one of my previous posts I told how to create a package that’s contents is dumped from the database, archived, encrypted, and put into a public directory.

I also mentioned that a potential security flaw on this system was that someone with enough time and processing power could decrypt your package and get all of it’s contents.

I thought about this and decided that I wanted a better way. So, I found a way to script an unattended / secure connection between the remote computer and the client computer using SCP and SSH keys.

This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. It’s just this morning that I actually decided to do it. It’s pretty simple.

This small tutorial is based upon the assumption that you already have a samba share set up. However, if you don’t, then keep posted, because I’ll talk about that in a later tutorial. Also, It’s based upon the assumption that you have the samba client and sambafs installed. In debian all that you have to do to install this is type in the following line:
apt-get install smbfs smbclient

What old days you might ask. My answer to that would be the days where windows was under the crosshairs of virus writers and worm writers.

While it wasn’t always completely one sided, things do seem to be changing a little bit.

See CNET’s Article.

Later.
Jon Howe