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
Nov
19
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
Nov
19
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…..
Nov
12
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:
Nov
10
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
Oct
14
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 
Oct
11
We had a few more people showing interest this month infact three new members interested – anyway it started with gareth getting to my house for 8pm -> then we went for james at the morecambe hotel and then flew through to the brittania pub – i must say gareth enjoyed the ride!!! When we arrived andy was already at the meeting armed with mini laptop and our new member duncan who was younger than I expected but none the less from the conversations a loyal linux user 
we looked at the sound problem on james HP laptop were he has all the sound working apart from the internal microphone which e tried to fix but had no joy – id say this could be fixed if we had a proper poke around james tried removing pulse audio which im not sure was a good idea!! we talked about installing gentoo and also talked about installing arch linux which im eager to have a play with this week in a virtual machine! Mark turned up for the last hour and we took a look at a site andy has been working on that looked very good.
James girlfriend turned up to give him a lift and me and gareth shot back to mine and stayed up most of the night installing and testing games and other apps on the macbooks!!!! bring on next month more linux chat and CIDER
Sep
28
Ive been struggling getting seo friendly pages on my joomla installs – i assume it must be my service providers or the way its setup – ive tried everything online any way stumbled across sh404sef now this works a treat – you have to sign up and pay a subscription for it but i managed to find it for free some one is giving it up im not sure if they should! i got it from here im not offering it for download because im not sure! it has other features available in it and has enabled seo friendly urls on my servers! so give it a shot even at $35 its worth it…
Sep
22
just working on the lancaster linux user group website please take a look and if your interesting in joining the group please feel free to join the mailing list
the site is here
Sep
22
Just finished my triple boot machine – dual booting etc is usually but hackintosh ubuntu and windows can be trick with boot loaders so done in the right sequence and using chemeleon for the boot loader seems the right way – take a look at this blog for instructions
here