a day in the life of wayne ward….

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

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

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…

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

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

I managed to break grub while testing a triple boot!

Pop in the gentoo disk let it do its thing
Lets chroot into the broken ubuntu system

I did fidsk -l to find my linux root and its was hda6

mkdir /mnt/root

mount -t ext4 /dev/hda6 /mnt/root

mount -t proc none /mnt/root/proc

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/root/dev

chroot /mnt/root /bin/bash

Now lets fix grub

grub

grub>

find /boot/grub/stage1

grub>

root (hd0,5)

grub>

setup (hd0)

type quit

Now type

fdisk /dev/hda

type p and press enter

my windows partion 1 was active as it has a star
so press a key to toggle and i selected 1 which was windows partition and then press W to write then reboot!! if you press P while in fdisk this tells you which drive is which ..

Just moved over to phoca for my joomla web gallery – i was using easy gallery but its been taken offline for going against the gpl apparantley?… anyway installed nice and easy but wouldnt create directories and upload pictures properly so i poked at some forums and found enabling ftp on the joomla fixes it – so I enabbled this and it fixed it !! went back to my site to be presented by a blank screen?? for some reason something generated a index.hml in the root of my website!! so i just renamed that to index.php and its fine???… some strange happenings but the gallery is awsome

take a look here

I used to setup various security measures when i was running the "big stuff" online
i never chrooted anything to be honest because it was complicated as it was plus I was just moving my internet faced servers
into virtulisation as i was leaving but had some machines running in vmware as this would be easy for me to get support for as things were getting fairly big from smallish company to enterprise
the servers i built from scratch gentoo boxes hardened kernel – hand built iptables firewall although we was behind a firebox i had full control of what was going in and out (real paranoid!) – very cut down install no X of course – remote secure logging with syslog-ng – tripwire (a must) – chrootkit on regular cron – snare or snort
and to top it all of very secure coding if you can !!!
most of the above programs sends emails so i used to get them on my phone any sign of tampering ssh straight into the logging server and see what the hells going down!!!
in them eight years i never had a hack – I had two mail servers online – 4 web servers – 4 database server (behind the firewall) and various other bits of kit – we did play with a honeypot!
When you start playing try bastille – its a script that locks down a box, the thing is you can see the kind of things it starts locking down so puts you in the frame of mind of lock down hey you got to start somewere!
then get loaded up with some tools go to a friends hows get some beers and try crack it if you get in then your server wants setting up properly various goodies to hit it with are available if you want something fast nmap it see if the ports are shut properly then nessus it this will tell you if its vunerable or actually just kill the box then you know it isnt setup right
plenty of howtos about that will help you more on google …
as there are plenty of other things to tighten security :

* User Account Administration
* Filesystem Security
* System Resource Limits

always have a backup always have a plan for that day when you come in and your web page says hAckEd bY……

Regards
Wayne

We held this months lancaster linux user group meeting on the 2nd wednesday of the month this time to fit in with everyones busy schedules! We havent had a meeting for a few months because we have all been to busy hence the change to the second week! Quite a good turn out so thanks to everyome who turned up! Dave brought his open moko and give us a demo of the new OS he had installed which was pretty slick – he connected it to his laptop and updated the phone using wireless from his laptop which worked nicely then he can install the network app and install the updates and proggies straight from the phone nice bit of kit

We talked about installing multiple operating systems on x86 hardware – making it triple boot with linux / mac / windows

We also discussed various laptops – netbooks and using external devices on the units such as external monitors and keyboards etc.

We also talked about video software and capturing video and audio – i mentioned zoneminder which is a opensource Linux video camera security and surveillance solution. Very mature product – with online viewing of cctv

I took a look at a toshiba laptop and used the hotkeys – shift and escape to change the boot order in the bios and kicked of a fedora install – i had to leave before the install finished so ill update the blog to let you know if the install finished ok and the laptop works right!!

we also had a long conversation regarding building web pages and uploading them using a ftp client – we talked about using kompozer aka NVU – cross platform software which can get you bulding web pages in minutes take a look here after the site is finished if you can use various ftp clients I use gftp as its nice and easy and very robust take a look here both items should be installable by apt so i would type apt-get install kompozer gftp  – this should install both apps for you

The linux meetings are held at the brittania pub on ulswater road lancaster on the first wednesday of every month at around 8pm – I would suggest adding yourself to the lug mailing list as some months we may change it to the second wednesday of the month if everyone cant make the first!!!!

Please feel free to come along and talk – newbies welcome!! we cover all areas – linux / mac / windows – servers – laptops – workstations – mobile phones!!! come along and join in – good beer & free wifi!!!!!

Recently my SEO work has overtaken my computer consulting which I cant really grumble about considering I dont have to leave my chair to work!! Yes I do have some techniques i dont want to give away to some of my blog followers but I dont mind sharing my reporting software!! I use a website ranking software called Advanced Web Ranking which is top notch for reporting and is cross platform which is awesome – so you can setup this software on your apple mac – linux box or windows platform and your away!! I have installed this on a linux box and on a apple mac and it was a breeze – applied for a trial licence which i got back the key prompt I then added my first site and got the software to import my keywords in from the site so i didnt have to type it all again which is very handy!! I then moved on to pick which search engines i wanted it to test my keywords on, you can update the search engines every now and then but i know which search engines im interested in so i picked for a quick report google UK, yahoo UK, msn UK for a fast report – on bigger reports i selected ask UK and a few other big UK search angines AOL etc..  just go make yourself a nice cup of coffee ..

The software then looks at the search engines you picked and submits the keywords you have in your site or what keywords you specify the process can take up to a hour deending on internet speed and keywords and search engines you picked. I think its better to pick the UK sites if you are interested in the UK audience and US if you want to extend to .com. After the campaign finishes you can get the software to make specific reports which can be set in the software it will give you your positions for the keywords in the specific search engines. One of my keyword searches was lancaster computers which i was happy to see i am number one in google Uk and google.com, some my other keywords which are not so hot I can work on and then wait till my report re-generates next month to see if my technique has moved up the search engine.

One of the handy things about the software for my company is that my SEO is always ongoing so im always working on search engines and source code for the different sites – the reporting software is just so easy – you can set it up so automatically run at a certain time of day / month etc and then you can get the software to automatically send the reports by email to the client with a specific set of rules on the report also a big bonus it will attach your company logo just giving it that finishing touch !

Ive tested other reporting software on linux and apple mac’s but this is by far the best software i have found – when i first got the software one of the features I wanted was a submit facility which i noticed this had, when i came to submit i just got a list of search engines to submit to but I expected a auto submit – but this is just lazy and not really a good way of doing the job – I now submit manually using the list in the software which is very good and proved and tested in various industries in the area, some of the industries are computers , home care , security  health , home improvement, plasterers – all these companies are number one in google and other good search engines – they basically have gone from no activity to be very active sites.

10 / 10 for this software i just need to play with the advanced link manager to see what this can do to get even more results!!! I see the software comes in three different price ranges starting at $99 which is a good price for the tool you are getting – Lancaster computers fully recommends you give this a trial if you are serious about web results and getting your sites to the top of the search engines

screen shots

http://wayneward.co.uk/pics/awr_screen_shots/main_window.png

http://wayneward.co.uk/pics/awr_screen_shots/keywords.png

http://wayneward.co.uk/pics/awr_screen_shots/search_engines.png

Some of the other awr features I’m going to look at over the next week which sound cool are the keyword research tool as I’ve been using a few other techniques to carry out this operation which can be a bit painful plus I noticed wordtracker plugin to track keyword relevance which sounds handy and is a free service.. I see the project manager is only available in the pro version which would make the useage of the software easier if you are a bigger outfit. Im also looking at the competing site feature which will be handy to see if any other computer outfits can touch me in the area on the web optimisation side! which i doubt it unless they go sponsored ha ha!! so many other features to get my head around in this software package – what a great bit of kit – just ask any of my clients about my SEO im getting results you wouldnt believe – today i got another call from W & J Plasterers got a massive contract in from liverpool from lancaster computers SEO – Please feel free to contact us if you need your site finding in the search engines – as you can see we use all the finest tools and AWR is one of our gems

http://www.lancastercomputers.co.uk

You can download a 30 days trial of the web site ranking software and get more information about it from their website.