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Red Hat announced the availability of two new North American training offerings that are delivered by open source technology. Red Hat will offer virtual training to students in remote locations and Live Access Labs that allow students access to remotely hosted Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Through Red Hat’s virtual training, remote students will be offered live, streamed Web delivery of Red Hat training courses. Virtual students will register for courses as though they were live students, but will receive course books and kits prior to the start of the class. Courses will initially include eight to 10, 4-hour sessions delivered over two weeks.

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The best and top most posts of year 2007 that were emailed / viewed and printed by our readers over the year (part IV of IV):

=> Howto: Connect MySQL server using C program API under Linux or UNIX
=> Howto Linux rename multiple files at a shell prompt
=> Linux password manager that also works under Windows / OS X
=> Howto Backup PostgreSQL Databases Server With pg_dump command
=> FreeBSD reset or recover root password
=> Linux wget your ultimate command line downloader
=> Comparison: Linux vs FreeBSD (Bsd) oses
=> Browse a Samba or MS Windows share in Nautilus
=> OpenSSH deny or restrict access to users and groups
=> Installing and configuring lighttpd webserver – HOWTO
=> Shell script to watch the disk space
=> Linux Setting processor affinity for a certain task or process
=> Download of the day: Fedora core live CD
=> Linux Shutdown Command and Logfile
=> How do I create CD / DVD database Labels in OpenOffice.Org under Linux / Mac OS X / Windows?
=> Extract and decompile .chm file to view as html file under Linux
=> How to use rsync for transferring files under Linux or UNIX
=> Speed up Apache 2.0 web access or downloads with mod_deflate
=> How much RAM does my Ubuntu / Fedora Linux desktop PC have?
=> Monitoring hard disk health with smartd under Linux or UNIX operating systems
=> Zipping and Unzipping Files under Linux
=> Linux Postfix mail server SSL certificate installations and configuration

Thank you for all your support in 2007. I hope you enjoy this site! What else would you like to see on nixCraft? What you like, do not like or anything you feel I should improve on, please let me know in the comments.

Once again, a very happy and prosperous 2008 for all of you. Cheers!

Related Posts:

• Recovered from database Disaster / Corruption
• Understanding Linux and UNIX Load Average – How It Works
• Copyright notice
• We have moved this blog to wordpress engine
• Best Linux / UNIX Posts of 2007: Part ~ III

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Copyright © nixCraft. All Rights Reserved.

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Filed under: misc hacks

Goodbye 1167627600 -1199167140.

[Justin] is having fun telling everyone that an exploit has been found for the Archos 605 media player. The hack gets you remote root access on the player… need I say more?

[Gene] sent in his polar coordinate based LEGO 3d printer. He’s still working on the driver end, but it’s an interesting project.

[Kyle] sent in the gutting of his flip video camera.

Need some new storage? [forrest] sent in his price/GB price comparison script. It scrapes New Egg and graphs out the results.

Despite the link on our old post being dead, [Txoof] built his own CCFL macro light from a dead laptop LCD.

[Dan] sent in his LED cube matrix. The LEDs are wired in a matrix, so he can actually address them individually.

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The news that AOL is ceasing to support its Netscape browsers is not only the end of an era, it is the end of a story that encompassed just about every major trend in the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, and that was crucially important for free software.

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The first stage of developing the nation operating system in Uzbekistan on the basis of Linux has finished. The project has been initiated by the Uzbek agency on informatization and communication and the Center for training and supporting young programmers.

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Conduit is a synchronization software solution for Linux GNOME desktop. With this software you can take your email, files, bookmarks, and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device. For example, you can synchronization your photos with on line photo sharing service such as Flickr or Picasa.

You can download Conduit here

Related Posts:

• nixCraft FAQ Roundup
• nixCraft FAQ Roundup ~ July, 11, 2007
• nixCraft FAQ Roundup
• nixCraft FAQ Roundup
• nixCraft FAQ Roundup

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The Firefox Web browser community has created thousands of wonderful extensions that make surfing and working with the Internet fun and productive. While many extensions are homes runs, here are a few that just don’t make it out of the ballpark. The object of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is to write a 50,000-word novel in a mere 30 days. That’s stressful enough without being constantly reminded of how far you’re falling behind, yet that’s just what the Nanowrimo Meter does. Most writers won’t want a reminder of their cumulative lack of progress. Unless, of course, you’re the type of writer that can churn out 11,554 cogent words in two days. If that’s the case, we should talk

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Last year at about this time, I made some predictions about the Ruby world in 2007 , and now it’s time to hold myself accountable, and to point out some things I missed. Here are my predictions along with some corrections where needed:

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Sure, it’s been said before, but this time it’s true: 2007 was undoubtedly the year which saw Linux go mainstream. Linux has long accepted as a server platform and a playground for tweakers, hackers and the adventurous, but 2007 saw major events which entrenched Linux on the desktop. Let’s look at what happened.

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It is the dawn of yet another new year – the year 2008. I am sure many among us are busy jotting down our obligatory new year resolutions with the hope and desire to rectify our past mistakes and make a fresh start, or not. The rest of us must surely be in party mode and about to welcome the new year with a song and dance.

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In this article I’ve selected what I consider to be some of the past year’s outstanding achievements in the world of Linux music and sound software. It’s not really a “Best Of 2007″, it’s just my personal choices for what I found most interesting and significant in the past year.

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Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

[More "Linux doesn't innovate" FUD, but this one not so badly articulated as the rest. - Sander]

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There’s one thing for certain: Now is an exciting time to be a KDE user. The much anticipated launch of KDE 4 is slated for January 11th, 2008. This is a major revamp of the look and feel of the KDE desktop, with the inclusion of a built-in compositor (think eye candy) and something called “plasmoids” (little functional widgets embedded into your desktop). It’s a lot of new bling aimed at improving the desktop experience. Will it? More importantly, will it for you? What would make you choose KDE over GNOME (or vice versa)? This week we take a brief look at KDE in both its 3.5.x and 4 incarnations, and outline a few rules of thumb on choosing your desktop environment.

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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 71 for the weeks December 16th – December 29th, 2007. In this issue: Dell adds DVD playback, Ubuntu Live Conference proposals, Hardy Alpha 2, a community approach to commercial training, Kubuntu 8.04 LTS status, Full Circle Magazine Issue #8, new Kubuntu members, IRSeek, a new Official Ubuntu Book, and much, much more!!

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Despite all the claims of improvements, the situation in Iraq keeps getting worse.

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One common misconception about open source software is that it can be changed by anyone and is less secure; however, most open source is strictly governed. For example, the Apache Software Foundation has tight configuration management controls for developers. Its products are so good that most major software vendors include some Apache software in their products including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun.

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I’ve known Bruce Steinberg since we met online, so long ago I don’t remember. I’m guessing it might have been back when SCO was still a leading Unix company and Bruce was its VP of Marketing Communications. Or it might have been through Usenet, or some other pre-Web online service.

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EEI Corporation, one of the Philippines’ leading construction companies, has opted to shift to Linux for their operating system (OS), joining several other industry giants in the country who have already turned to open source. The firm initially used proprietary systems for both OS platforms and various application packages utilized in its operations. However, due to increasing costs of licensing, the company started considering open source applications in order to minimize expenses.

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I’ve always wanted to install Ubuntu on my Mac. So I decided to give myself little christmas present and finally get it done. Here’s my experiences with running Linux on Intel Mac. Other than small inconveniences with Compiz/OpenGl games and sleep mode not working, everything works like a charm. According to Ubuntu wiki sleep should work with custom kernel but I decided to skip it. Ubuntu boots pretty fast so it’s not that big deal especially with machine that’s most of the time just a portable workstation. Installation with all configuration trial & errors took about three hours.

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LXer Feature: 31-Dec-2007

A sizable number of humans have devoted their lives to erecting barriers to learning anything new. You can see it when you talk to them- when something as simple as “click this button” produces a glazed expression and drool, you know you’ve lost them forever. Of course they’ll waste hours of your time complaining about how stupid computers are. But even though it’s easy money to nod and pretend to listen, and then bill them for every minute wasted on empty complaining (I never had enough nerve to charge a whining penalty, and I wish I had), it’s not how I want to spend my time. Life is too short.

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Synovel, a startup based on Hyderabad, India founded by a group of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) graduates, has released a preview of Spicebird, a Mozilla-based collaboration suite. Spicebird is built on Thunderbird and Lightning, the powerful extension that adds calendaring functions to Thunderbird. Additionally it seems to integrate SamePlace, a Firefox extension that provides instant messaging capabilities based on the Jabber protocol.

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The best and top most posts of year 2007 that were emailed / viewed and printed by our readers over the year (part III of IV):

=> Installing VMWARE server on CentOS 5 or Red hat enterprise Linux 64 bit version
=> 10 boot time parameters you should know about the Linux kernel
=> Test mail server for an open relay
=> Linux Iptables open Bittorrent tcp ports 6881 to 6889
=> What is /dev/shm and its practical usage
=> Monitor and restart Apache or lighttpd webserver when daemon is killed
=> Linux last reboot time and date find out
=> 9 Tips to diagnose remote GNU/Linux server network connectivity issues
=> Howto: Performance Benchmarks a Web server
=> Linux: How to Encrypt and decrypt files with a password
=> How to keep a detailed audit trail of what’s being done on your Linux systems
=> Copy MySQL database from one server to another remote server
=> How to: Recovering Linux grub boot loader password
=> Linux Iptables: How to specify a range of IP addresses or ports
=> SSH Public key based authentication – Howto
=> Lighttpd FasCGI PHP, MySQL chroot jail installation under Debian Linux
=> Linux hard drive benchmark & bottleneck testing software suite for performance
=> Redhat Enterprise Linux securely mount remote Linux / UNIX directory or file system using SSHFS
=> How do I test if my Linux server SCSI / SATA hard disk going bad?

Related Posts:

• Recovered from database Disaster / Corruption
• Understanding Linux and UNIX Load Average – How It Works
• Copyright notice
• Best Linux / UNIX Posts of 2007: Part ~ IV
• We have moved this blog to wordpress engine

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Copyright © nixCraft. All Rights Reserved.

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Efforts to promote Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) have gathered momentum in the country, mainly due to emergence of “Linux User Groups” (LUGs) and recognition by academics and government. India’s computing space is witnessing a shift towards free software as more and more people are drifting away from proprietary products due to their exorbitant prices, security issues and restrictions on usage, according to experts.

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The Firefox Web browser community has created thousands of wonderful extensions that make surfing and working with the Internet fun and productive. While many extensions are homes runs, here are a few that just don’t make it out of the ballpark.

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Matthew Szulik became the CEO of Red Hat in November of 1999, the same year that the company went public. Since then, Szulik has been a guiding force for Red Hat, pushing the company’s open source offerings into server rooms with the help of Dell, IBM, and HP. Yesterday, Szulik announced plans to step down as president and CEO for personal and family reasons, but will remain involved as chairman of the board of directors. The board has elected Jim Whitehurst, former COO of Delta Airlines (and the man who guided the airline out of bankruptcy), to fill the role of Red Hat president and CEO.

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Q. Solaris and FreeBSD both provide the truss command to monitor and debug system calls. I’m unable to find this command or package. How can I install truss under Linux?
A. truss is a debugging utility in Solaris and FreeBSD to monitor the system calls used. It is used to trace call and useful debugging [...]

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FTP is insecure protocol, but file-transfer is required all time. You can use OpenSSH Server to transfer file using SCP and SFTP (secure ftp) without setting up an FTP server. However, this feature also grants ssh shell access to a user. Basically OpenSSH requires a valid shell. Here is how sftp works:

SCP/SFTP -> SSHD -> Call sftpd subsystem -> Requires a shell -> User can login to server and run other commands.

In this article series we will help you provide secure restricted file-transfer services to your users without resorting to FTP. It also covers chroot jail setup instructions to lock down users to their own home directories (allow users to transfer files but not browse the entire Linux / UNIX file system of the server) as well as per user configurations.

rssh ~ a restricted shell

rssh is a restricted shell for use with OpenSSH, allowing only scp and/or sftp. It now also includes support for rdist, rsync, and cvs. For example, if you have a server which you only want to allow users to copy files off of via scp, without providing shell access, you can use rssh to do that.

Supported operations using rssh

Restricted shell only allows following operations only:

• scp – Secure file copy
• sftp – Secure FTP
• cvs – Concurrent Versions System ~ you can easily retrieve old versions to see exactly which change caused the bug
• rsync – Backup and sync file system
• rdist – Backup / RDist program maintains identical copies of files on multiple hosts.

Install rssh

CentOS / Fedora / RHEL Linux rssh installation

Visit Dag’s repo to grab rssh package
# cd /tmp
# wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rssh/rssh-2.3.2-1.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
# rpm -ivh rssh-2.3.2-1.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Debian / Ubuntu Linux rssh installation

Use apt-get command:
$ sudo apt-get install rssh

FreeBSD installation

# cd /usr/ports/shells/rssh
# make install clean
Make sure you build binary with rsync support.

rssh configuration file

• Default configuration file is located at /etc/rssh.conf (FreeBSD – /usr/local/etc/rssh.conf)
• Default rssh binary location /usr/bin/rssh (FreeBSD – /usr/local/bin/rssh)
• Default port none – ( openssh 22 port used – rssh is shell with security features)

Continue reading rest of the rssh a restricted shell series.

Related Posts:

• How to: Configure User Account to Use a Restricted Shell ( rssh )
• Howto: Add a new yum repository to install software under CentOS / Redhat Linux
• rssh: Per User Configuration Options For Chroot Jail
• Linux Configure rssh Chroot Jail To Lock Users To Their Home Directories Only
• Download of the day CentOS 5 CD / DVD ISO

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