Tim Bowler

I just installed the latest Debian, and realized that the packages are not as up-to-date as I would like. For example I installed PHP and MySQL. PHP was at version 5.2.6 and MySQL was at version 5.0.15a. Considering PHP 5.2.11 and MySQL 5.1 are already released, made me think am I better off compiling from source?

After going down the compiling route, as in my previous post due to the same out dated problems I actually found a useful and up-to-date repository. Along with this, my bias towards Debian drastically strengthed. Which after many years of working on a a variety of other distro’s never quiet happened. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the key tools for ssh automation is keychain, which is pretty much available in most flavors of linux. Its usually not installed by default, therefore using your package manager install ‘keychain’

Ubuntu users:

$sudo apt-get install keychain

After its install, you set it up by entering the keychain command followed by your private key (not the public key).

$ keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa
KeyChain 2.6.6; http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/ Copyright 2002-2004
Gentoo Foundation; Distributed under the GPL</pre>
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh file...
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-csh file...
* Initializing /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-fish file...
* Starting ssh-agent
* Adding 1 ssh key(s)...
Enter passphrase for /home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa:
Identity added: /home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa (/home/timmy/.ssh/id_rsa)

Keychain then creates three files which correspond to various shell environments. As I am using bash, the file I will be referencing will be /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh.

$ source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh

To make sure everything is fine run the following to make sure the the environment is in fact set up:

$ env | grep SSH_A
SSH_AGENT_PID=9607
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-bMoLeb9606/agent.9606

Of course you will want this to happen automatically on login so add the following to your ~/.bashrc

keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa
source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh

The last step is to add the following line to your backup script (including the .)

. /home/timmy/.keychain/hostname-sh

Backup Scripts
Ill only mention the two methods that i use.
1. scp: To copy files from one location to another
2. rsync: To sync a remote location to local location

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Over the last few weeks the server logs, especially /var/log/messages seems to be filled with consistent ssh dictionary attacks. Of course this cannot continue, so what do you do to prevent it?

Well there are a few things:

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After googling the internet for hours I managed to get the perfect trac + svn setup. Because we use contractors at work, I needed a setup where the security is global but at the same time based on project by project basis. Therefore trac uses a global .htaccess and svn uses the authz file for authentication. At the moment this is working greate. To set up a new trac project is simply a case of creating the project, copying a base projects database and config file and then editing the new project’s config file.

We use a base project that is configured for all our core developers, which means im not adding the same permissions and groups all the time.

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Ubuntu 8.04 does not have sendmail installed by default. This was annoying when some of the php web apps that I created rely on sendmail to send out email notifications. But before going ahead and installing sendmail, I thought that I would try exim4. Installing on Ubuntu is very straight forward:

apt-get install exim4  exim4-config

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There are two ways of doing this

svn export . ../new_dir

or

find . -name .svn -prune -exec rm -rfv {} \;

Either way, both will work. I personally use export, because if there is a problem it means that I do not have to checkout an entire project

Today I finally installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my Sony vaio sz4. It runs like a dream, better than the SUSE setup which it replaced. My first thoughts are that the system runs very fast and all the components work out of box(web cam, finger print scanner have not being tested yet). I have noticed the wifi throughput has increased, using the eclipse IDE runs like a dream and best of all compiz fusion works on both the laptop and on a dual monitor setup. The synaptic package manager seems more complete overSUSE’s yast package management.

Although it is my personal laptop,  Ubuntu (7.10) was rolled out on all developer workstations at Or Media. This was a little shock to some of the developers, but everyone has seen the benefits. Some of which are: Read the rest of this entry »