Well im just chilling waiting till 7 to get ready for tonights new year gig at the moorlands hotel with revival then im going to hit rock night at cuba!!
Id like to wish everybody a new year – the linux user group – lancaster computers clients – musicians & family
All the best
Wayne
all lancaster linux user group blogs will be blogged on the usergroup site here
http://lancasterlug.org.uk/blog/
I thought it was better to integrate the blogs into the site itself 
After figuring out the worn serial number was not XP and vista i proceeded to install vista after making a slipstreamed XP home and pro disk! the serial number wouldnt work on both installs of course with it being a vista serial !
anyway you dont need a sata driver for vista but after the install you will have problems with the wireless network card as there was something wrong with the bios so the wireless shows in device manager after a restore not from a proper reinstall!
anyway booted of a ubuntu disk which told me it was realtek 8187b which is available on the toshiba site with about another 6 drivers which is a pain as you would think it would be intel with the rest of he drivers being intel!!
any way its here
then i just clicked on the flagged video driver and it installed the correct intel video driver and warned me it might not be from the right provider but its direct from intel so go for it! it then updated the driver so happy days
Ubuntu just worked out of the box all drivers and all programs
again linux kills a windows install.
just got round to sending my first email to linux torvald – he is the man who delivered the linux kernel bringing new hope to all computers when all the sheep in the world start to realise they are paying for rubbish and realise there are alternatives such as linux. The world of computing will change. So lets hope I get a reply of him I know he is busy as hell and gets thousands of emails but who knows……
I just got round to redirecting linux torvalds UK domain name to my website !! which is something to be proud of – I might see if he wants it redirecting to his site!!!
Just to let you know we will be running a free linux workshop after xmas – this will be held in the lancaster and will give you free training. Linux history, linux install right through to system administration. Please feel free to email the lugmaster – info@lancasterlug.org.uk for details
If your setting up a smoothwall 3 express and either your snort ids wont update or any errors on snort ids after adding the snort ID key take a look here this works 100% – dont leave snort not enabled it works wonders and stops lots of nasties including tcp port scans and other ways to drop viruses and trojans back on your network.
This fix took me all of one minute.
Look here
what ive noticed so far is smoothwall is pretty closed off and full of features which aint bad updates can be run from inside the gui
without having to download packages to my computer and upload them in. It also offers three options on install closed – open or half open, half open being the default which sounds ok but need to read more into! it has some strange plugins i never seen in ipcop such as sip filter and im filter – which if enabled you can live watch peoples conversations in a console LIVE! talk about snooping! also has a browser based console which could be handy i suppose?.. all the clam engine updates with the update manager and it looks like daily updates are under the hood ill have to poke into this a tad more! snort has been changed you now have to get a code from snort.org which you get after a free sign up and then you enter it when you enable it then it pulls down the latest snort rules. the web proxy has a transparent mode which will build itself into port 80 8080 so you dont have to put proxy settings into all the web browsers! saves hassle and you get a pop3 proxy. all this is passed through clam antivirus and spamassasin. The graphs for useage are live and very nice to look at and very detailed graphs on cpu / memory usage. Ssh is enabled by a tick box and then you have to ssh in using -p 222 switch to access the server, i see you can hack a config file and change this the standard 22 port i dont see much point. I have looked at some of the addons and some look pretty good – ill just leave this as it comes out of the box and install on site and see how it performs then ill expand on top of that to requirements. Ill update this later… Also you can sign up for free to get email updates on packages and the free version is restricted to one processor and I think a gig of ram.
The ipcop basically has the same install as smoothwall as it was a branch from it. I noticed it never asked if i wanted open / closed or half closed so i expect its open?? Its seems very cut down and the packages out of date – infact it was pretty useless till i added the copfilter package were a gained a extra tab with clam & various proxies and monit which emails you problems. The update system could see what needed updating but i had to update the packages manually. Now with ipcop each section has plenty of configurable options which was a bit over the top and if you change something you can quiet easily kill the box. I set this up in a virtualbox with two nics and ran though it for a few days – i then tested it on the box and it was fine – when i came to install on site and use it – it died three times and just ran like a pile of crap? I noticed there are a lot more addons and its very configurable a lot more than smoothwall – but i also noticed as you start adding the functions its starts getting real hungry – i think ill pass on this for a while and come back and try when its a tad better…… ill update soon with some more linux firewalls im testing and the results of the smoothwall in corporate use…
id go for smoothwall so far…..
Im just moving service providers and phone provider and have a 20 day switch over – so I purchased a mifi adapter which I blogged about below. One of the problems stated was it wont let email relay out for my domain name. So ive had to use webmail provided to me from my hosting company. The choices i have are Horde – SquirrelMail and RoundCube. Ive always used horde as being a kolab user it comes bundled with it.. horde it pretty lean and has other features including mail – tasks and its very configurable probably a bit over the top for someone who isnt very technical – one of its good points is a white list and blacklist for killing spam now SquirrelMail on the other hand is very cut down and very lean it comes with address book and you can see your imap folders, you can add a signature and thats about it! id say not very nice to look at but does the job fast. Roundcube now this is basically the same as squirrelmail very cut down with the same features address book and signature and access to imap folders, no tasking or calendars but it looks great – i like the option Focus browser window on new message! so if your looking for lots of features go for horde if you want cut down go for squirrelmail if you want it more pleasing on the eye without all the tasking and other productivity addons roundcube is great. Check out the main sites for more info:
if your car gets a tad hot and you decide to remove the cap if you think you have released the steam and pressure by letting some steam out think again!? use a towel or something incase the top blows off – I never did the day before my holiday and received second degree burns and it burnt like hell!! I kept my hand in cold water (not ice cold thats not good) for three hours which killed the burning pain the next day – trust me it works !! and don’t burst the blisters this only creates infection just cover the damn thing with witch-hazel cream and a fresh bandage every day and keep it clean and it will heal well!! Dont ever take risks like this the day b4 your holiday like a dumb ass like me!!
:-O
Sat up late last night and did some linux installs in virtual boxes to brush up my skills!! In virtual box I installed arch linux which was very nice to install and pretty straight forward, I installed some packages using pacman which was pretty straight forward and got xfce4 installed in a breeze make sure you have hal and dbus as it needs it and gnome extra icons package to fix menu items – nice lean bit of kit!
i then went on to install gentoo mmmmm now i got the new gentoo 10 which is a 2.5 gig dvd? crap – tried it in my virtualbox and it never started up crap! ill try again as i think its something to do with not pressing alt + f1 ??!! anyway got the older 2008.1 install in a flash booted of that followed the handbook as its been a while built the OS in a hour with everything built into the kernel and ripped all the crap out – rebooted 100% – then went on to do a debian 5.0 netinstall this just installed in a breeze i must say gentoo just has this feel about it yes it takes a time to build but on todays hardware and with the price of memory why not build your own OS ??? you want power id say go gentoo defo.
while trying this i was talking to gareth on skype and we was screen sharing we noticed my macbook was running with the 32 bit kernel – you find this in apple sign top left of screen – about this mac – more info – left hand side – software –
64-bit Kernel and Extensions: ??
mine read no – so i rebooted holding down the keys 6 and the key 4 for 64!! and hey presto i got a 64 bit kernel!!! yum yum!!!!
linux is cool and so is my mac
