November 2011 - main

How can I deny certain countries access to my website
by Ian Douglas 19 Nov '11

19 Nov '11

For about a month one of my websites (or rather the "Contact Us" form on that website) has been under regular, daily, attack from hackers. The attacks are consistently coming from IP Addresses in Rumania and Russia. Each time an attack occurs I use my webhost's cPanel to manually add the IP to my cPanel "IP Deny Manager" list. This is however becoming rather tedious and time consuming and seems the wrong way round to do things as I am denying IP Addresses AFTER they have tried to hack in rather than blocking them BEFORE they attempt it. Is there a way I can simply deny access to my website (or, better, just it's home-made PHP based "Contact Us" form) to all Eastern European visitors? Alternatively, since my website is primarily focused on UK customers, would there be an easier way to deny all visitors access unless they came from UK, USA Canada, Eire or Australia? I realise that this is not specifically a Linux question but any suggestions would be welcome. Ian.

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How to diagnose problem with special characters in a 'shellinabox' ssh login?
by Chris Green 19 Nov '11

19 Nov '11

I have set up shellinabox on my home system to allow me to connect from the web browser in my Amazon Kindle. I have it working OK to the extent that I can log in as a user whose password has no special characters in it, so the basic communications and connections are working. However my own password has non-alphanumeric characters in it and when I try and log in from the Kindle using shellinabox it always fails authentication. It fails if I log in directly or if I try and 'su -' from the login that I can do successfully. Logging in to shellinabox from Firefox works OK. So the Kindle->shellinabox connection is losing/changing something. When I type the non-alphanumeric characters in the working login they are echoed correctly so it's down to something in the interaction with login I think. Can anyone suggest a way of diagnosing this? -- Chris Green

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Apache2 magic
by Barry Samuels 17 Nov '11

17 Nov '11

I have set up a second virtual site on my computer so that I can use www2 instead of www because that's already used and I want to keep it separate. I have a very simple html page in www2 and this is the exact code: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">  <html> <head> <title>6 Hour Live data usage</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10" > </head> <body> <img width="1250" height="800" src="/graphs/Power-6hr.png"> </body> </html> Notice the meta tag in the header which refreshes the page every 10 seconds. If I access this page with a web browser as a file i.e. file/// it works as expected, although I have to change the src= path to include / var/www2, but if I access it using http:// it doesn't update and if I use 'view/page source' I see that: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10" > has been replaced with: <link rev="x-refresh" href="" > Why should that happen? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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BOINC
by Chris Walker 14 Nov '11

14 Nov '11

I've recently installed (using the app manager and not by command line) the boinc program on my Mandriva machine but it's not connecting. I'm stuck now despite looking at the help pages. The manager program fires up and tried to connect to localhost and fails. If I click on the various tabs, it shows that 0 bytes of disc space are being used because it's not connected to any projects. But all the commands under the Projects tab are greyed out. So does anybody have any ideas where I'm going wrong please and what I need to to fix it? -- __ __| |_ __ __ .----------------------------------------------. / _/ _` \ V V / | mailto:cdw_alug@the-walker-household.co.uk | \__\__,_|\_/\_/ |______________________________________________|

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Re: [ALUG] Need to add remote screen to linux box
by Mark Rogers 14 Nov '11

14 Nov '11

On 09/11/11 17:29, Tony Tibbenham wrote: > Or you could go for something like > http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/testimonials/ for a truly tiny PC Thanks for this, I think this one looks pretty promising: http://fit-pc.co.uk/Trim_Slice_Value--product--41.html -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Re: [ALUG] Energy monitoring
by Mark Rogers 14 Nov '11

14 Nov '11

On 14/11/11 11:23, Andy Taylor wrote: > Take a look at this - > http://www.retrocomputers.eu/2011/01/11/how-much-electricity-are-you-using/ > > Software logs to a MySQL database with a web front end. My meter is > connected to my server via a serial to USB cable. Thanks, that looks like the sort of thing I'm after. I've found what I hope is a suitable meter on eBay and will have a play. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Network magic
by Barry Samuels 13 Nov '11

13 Nov '11

My computer has two network interfaces, eth0 (wired) and wlan0 (wireless), to connect to my router. The wired connection goes via a small network switch to which a laser printer is also connected. The computer normally uses the wired connection but sometimes I need to disconnect that and use the wireless so that I have a wireless connection to the router but the cable is disconnected from the router leaving my computer connected to the switch which also has a laser printer connected to it. Is there any way that I can use the laser printer via eth0 when my computer is running on wireless? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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Need to add remote screen to linux box
by Mark Rogers 10 Nov '11

10 Nov '11

I have (or will have) a small Linux server running a minimal desktop distro and web server. The server will be used daily by someone sat next to it (using a web browser). In addition, I need to put a 42" display elsewhere in the building which will use a web browser to show a page from the same server. There'll be no local mouse or keyboard. There may be more than one such display in future. Any good options? Presumably I could use an extra video card for a second display (not sure the server will have a spare slot but maybe a USB video card would do) and run everything from the server, however I don't think I can be sure to stay within distance limits for USB. On the other hand I could just stick a PC with the 42" display, but that would be overkill. Having something that sat on ethernet (and perhaps could be configured via SSH) would be ideal, I'm just not sure what exists? Note that the web application makes use of jQuery and AJAX so it may place some limitations of the choice of browser. The ability to restart the browser periodically would be useful, knowing how they all seem to leak memory! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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basic question about scripts, change user in midstream
by James Bensley 09 Nov '11

09 Nov '11

Hi Peter, I dont understand exactly what you're getting at here. Is the -u option of the `sudo` command what you're after? sudo -u fred whoami This would echo "fred". James.

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basic question about scripts, change user in midstream
by Peter Alcibiades 09 Nov '11

09 Nov '11

How do I change user in a script, and then carry on with the task at hand? What I need to do is get the user to su to root, give the password of course, then carry on. For instance: su [and this then prompts for his password of course] cd /home/fred/Desktop [ now I would get him to enter a file name of a folder on his desktop and then...] chown -R fred filename What happens when I try this is that after changing accounts, the script stops. Very basic question.........., sorry. Peter

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