Multimedia support in OpenSuse 10.3 (MP3, DiVX, etc.)

Moved : http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2007/10/multimedia-support-in-opensuse-103-mp3.html

It’s time for OpenSuse 10.3, … RIP Windows Vista

here : http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2007/10/its-time-for-opensuse-103-rip-windows.html

Kool login screen for telnet, ssh and console

issue.doc

Just copy the content of above file into your /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net file and see the new sexy login screen (console, telnet and ssh)

Make sure to take the backup of your original issue and issue.net file.

How to disable CTRL-ALT-DEL from rebooting a Linux system

Moved : http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-to-disable-ctrl-alt-del-from.html

Find out the origin of any IP using geoiplookup

Geoiplookup is included in the Maxmind C library that you will probably already have installed in case you are using any geoip related applications. This also includes the free GeoLite Country database that is used for the lookups.
In case you don’t have the GeoIP C library already installed on a Debian system, you can install it very simple (you might have the libgeoip1 already installed but not geoip-bin; the later one includes the geoiplookup utility):

apt-get install libgeoip1 geoip-bin

Once installed you can use the geoiplookup utility from the command line to get the country of any IP (or hostname):

geoiplookup ipaddress|hostname

For example:

geoiplookup www.abc.com
GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States

This shows me in one command line where the IP that resolves to that particular hostname is located.

The GeoLite Country database is quite accurate, but you should update it (they make available a new release each month). To see when the database you are using was build:

geoiplookup -v
GEO-106FREE 20060601 Build 1 Copyright (c) 2006 MaxMind LLC All Rights Reserved

Secure Programming for Linux and Unix [PDF]

This book provides a set of design and implementation guidelines for writing secure programs for Linux and Unix systems. Such programs include application programs used as viewers of remote data, web applications (including CGI scripts), network servers, and setuid/setgid programs. Specific guidelines for C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and Ada95 are included.

This book describes a set of guidelines for writing secure programs on Linux and Unix systems. For purposes of this book, a “secure program” is a program that sits on a security boundary, taking input from a source that does not have the same access rights as the program. Such programs include application programs used as viewers of remote data, web applications (including CGI scripts), network servers, and setuid/setgid programs.

This book does not address modifying the operating system kernel itself, although many of the principles discussed here do apply. These guidelines were developed as a survey of “lessons learned” from various sources on how to create such programs (along with additional observations by the author), reorganized into a set of larger principles.

http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programs-HOWTO.pdf

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Now playing: Metallica – Metallica – Until It Sleeps
via FoxyTunes

Stallman – If you want freedom don’t follow Linus Torvalds

The founder of the Free Software Foundation asks readers whether they will fight for freedom or be too lazy to resist.

“Please don’t call GNU ‘Linux’,” says Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation. In this interview, he also asks readers whether they will fight for freedom or be too lazy to resist.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;211669437
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Now playing: Metallica – Bleeding Me
via FoxyTunes

75million Zombie Computers in USA are owned by China

A former senior U.S. information security official says there are nearly three-quarter million personal computers in the United States taken over by Chinese hackers. “This is a fact that should get everyone’s attention,” Paul Strassmann told Government Executive magazine columnist Bob Brewin. Strassman, who was director of defense information in the early 1990s, is now back at the Pentagon as a senior advisor, according to Brewin.

“As of the morning of Sept. 14, there were exactly (remember, Strassmann is an engineer and likes precision) 735,598 computers in the United States infested by Chinese zombies,” writes Brewin in his Monday column.

Zombies are malicious software packages downloaded by unsuspecting users from infected e-mail messages or Web sites.

They infect computers at a very basic level, making them hard to find and root out, and they enable the hackers who wrote them to create large networks of “slave” computers that can be used in massive, if unsophisticated, cyber attacks using a technique called Denial of Service, or DoS.

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Now playing: Metallica – For Whom The Bell Tolls
via FoxyTunes

How to configure ntp

Moved : http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-to-configure-ntp.html

Linux beats Windows NT

In this senario, the overall size of one million files was about twice as large as the 2 GB of main memory. The total number of requests in test runs for which a reboot had previously cleared the buffer cache was clearly below 500,000. Files would generally have to be loaded from hard disk before being sent through the net.
In this setup, the freeware system clearly shows better results: While NT can hardly manage more than 30 requests per second, Linux can handle more than 166. With 512 client processes, it even manages 274 pages per second. Since more than 400,000 pages are retrieved during this test, however, we cannot be entirely sure that the increase especially towards the end of the graph isn’t down to a caching effect. But who would complain about an overly efficient buffer cache?
When calling CGI scripts, Windows NT is no match for Linux. As the load is not confined to kernel mode in this case, Linux can benefit from additional CPUs. The graph at the top nicely depicts the linear increase for a CGI script with integrated delay.