Computer Tips -Tech Info

In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate port 85). The problem was that I wanted different content at each port. Port 85 was to be an .htaccess redirect for another domain (with some port forwarding magic at the firewall.) Port 80 was to remain an internal intranet page. So…. this was all done with vhosts (virtual hosts.)

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http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ is an interesting bundle of linux designed to be an out of the box network service swiss army knife of sorts. Here are the network services that it provides…. Kerberos 5 authentication, LDAP, NIS, Radius authentication, x509 certificate authority, unix and windows compatible active directory services, router, implements bridging and vlan protocols, full radius server, captive portal capability, firewall, QoS management, multizone dns server, dhcp server (capable of managing multiple subnets), ntp server, dyndns client, ppoe client, syslog server, lan to lan vpn…..

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As I’ve mentioned, there are a few older Mandrake (now Mandriva) systems that I maintain and one of the packages that I’m frequently rebuilding for those systems is clamantivirus. Well, 0.90 came out recently and on an attempted rebuild from the src. rpm that I acquired from ftp.neocat.org, I got this error message libtool: unrecognized option `–tag=CC’ in the rpm –rebuild process. The process bailed out fairly quickly.

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http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit… is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it’s something that would be done when you’ve had a suspected rootkit on the system and you boot to another operating system with sluethkit installed (maybe livecd/etc.) and want to try to analyze and hunt for traces of the rootkit. However you do have some similar procedures for forensic analysis that you would for the “I accidentally deleted a file” syndrome… For both situations you DON’T want to be running the live filesystem that’s affected.

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There are all sorts of these things out there on the market – I saw an ad for the Hawking HWL1 802.11b/g WiFi Locator… and it looked interesting (directional)… I’ve seen mixed reviews, but some might find it good/useful. I know, I know…. “why buy a wifi locator when you could pull out a laptop/pda”…. part of it is probably because you DON’T want to drag out a laptop, part of it is looking for a device that will give just a quick scan of what networks are available and what kind of encryption if any.

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There is a nice collection of tools at www.iwebtool.com, specifically at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/. It’s more than just how google sees your site, there are tools that show how your page ranks at alexa, etc.

http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank for instance is the Visual Pagerank tool and http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction is the google pagerank prediction tool.

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A little over a year ago I was doing a web search for my email address (something that’s worth doing from time to time.) I ran across my name in a text file hosted at a domain called…..
http://www.freestuffengine.com/ There is a different site active at that domain now (although I don’t know if it’s owned by the same group, it may be….) Anyway, there were VERY large text files with (according to the file name) a million addresses. And YES… mine was in there.

my address was in a file called…. nima_1million_1of2.txt

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There could be a record number of vulnerabilities addressed next week when Microsoft releases an expected dozen updates for its Windows and Office products. (According to Brian Krebs at the Security Fix.) Tuesday February 13th is the date scheduled for the release of updates. One critical udpate will affect Microsoft’s security software (onecare/defender/etc.) 3 patches will affect Office. Most of the updates to be released are rated as critical.

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This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?

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If you’re upgrading to Vista and use an ipod (true Apple branded iPod)… you might want to refrain from hooking the ipod up to the Vista pc. theregister has reported that Apple is sounding the alarm over a serious data corruption issue due to an incompatibility with Vista. It sounds as though users should wait for the next release of iTunes before using their iPod with Vista… there is a workaround….

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