When I’m not working, reading, studying for exams, training for races, or plotting to save the world, apparently I’m writing PHP?  I know–scary thought for a server/network guy.  Just the same… Happy Gilmore was a hockey player, not a golfer.

I’ve updated the site to include a projects page, where my latest & greatest will be available for anyone who wants to check it out.

Speaking of which, I’ve recently built a mobile application called Cybertool.  It’s a collection of utilities that might help to diagnose and resolve network issues.  For a while, I’ve used a handful of different sites to fix DNS, mail, or firewall stuff.  Cybertool is an aggregate of those sites for your mobile device.  As an added bonus, there are tools like Cisco password decryption, a default passwords list, and a subnet calculator.  It’s still a work in progress, so there’s a small list of bugs to iron out yet, but I’ve worked really hard to make sure it’s invulnerable to XSS/SQL injection, and have hardened Apache (obviously from my previous post, as well as part II about mod_security which is coming soon).  All activity is logged and monitored, so don’t try anything funny!  It will get you banned faster than Paris Hilton at a spelling bee… faster than Kanye West at a charity event… you get the point.

Be sure to leave comments over at the Cybertool projects page.

If you’ve ever been responsible for maintaining an Apache web server, you know how important security is.

Nikto provides an easy way to scan for known (and unknown) vulnerabilities within your Apache server.  Actually, it does a fairly comprehensive scan on over 200 web servers, not just Apache.  To run a security scan, download the tool, then extract the archive to the desired location.  To initiate a scan from the Nikto directory, type:

Note: when specifying an IP address, make sure you use the external IP of your webserver, not the internal IP.

Here is what my results look like:

I would then look up the results and fix each issue until there have been no issues detected.  See the OSVDB-ID?  These IDs are found in the Open Source Vulnerability Database.  Each ID will contain a description, classification, and solution.

To aid in your research, I have created an OSVDB Firefox search plugin.  Install the plugin and then search for 3092, 3268, 3233, etc.

Hopefully this makes securing your web server quick & painless.

You could also try sensors-detect and then sensors, but I had some trouble detecting the correct modules on 8 year old hardware.

Pompous? Maybe. Fun? Yes. If you like music as much as we do, you probably want to be wearing it around your neck 24/7. In my case, you want it to listen to on your public transportation commute to work. Right? Or you’re having a hard time transporting 100+ gigs of music to your FreeBSD workstation. I know the feeling.

In this article, I am going to show how to set up your Sansa e260 as a “dual boot” with Sandisk’s original firmware and the Rockbox software.

I am not an expert on the technical differences between MSC or MTP, but in order to install the Rockbox software, you MUST have your Sansa in MSC mode. In Sansa’s original operating software, you will need to navigate to the “Settings” part of the wheel menu. Within there, you will find an option to switch between MCP and MTP. Many Google searches will give you quite intoxicating information of the minute details of both protocols.

The first thing it would be nice for you to do is update the firmware (since mine was refurbished, I had to update the firmware). Download the firmware updater and install it. I cannot always guarantee the accuracy of that link, but if it ever goes down, go to sandisk.com and look around.

Once you have updated what I called the “OG” Sansa software, you are ready to start installing Rockbox. You can begin by going to the install page and selecting the appropriate device.

At the time of this version, we are working with version 3.1 of Rockbox and SanDisk Sansa e200. I tried Option 1, the Automatic Install, but this did not work for me as it constantly claimed it could not detect my Sansa device, so I opted for the manual install.

Download the archive for the Rockbox installation and extract the contents to the root of your Sansa’s file system. For example, H:\.rockbox

Once that has been completed, you can access both the Rockbox software and Sandisk original firmware by installing sansapatcher.exe.

You should now have a pretty sweet “dual booting” mp3 player. Upon reboot, it will default to Rockbox, but you can get to the “OG” by pressing left on the main control.

You have any problems, please let us know!

http://www.sandisk.com
http://www.rockbox.org

Recently, a friend moved his website (the Astropope) from my server to that of a hosting company (for which he presently works). Along with his account comes 3 GB of storage, except he currently uses about 5 GB. To help with the transition, we decided to move the majority of content over to S3.

In order to do this, we got an account, uploaded everything, made a DNS record, and then ever-so-slightly modified a WordPress plugin.

The steps we took are detailed for your convenience:

1. Sign up for an S3 account.

2. Download, install & configure the S3Fox plugin for Firefox.

3. Amazon uses a bucket as a means for organizing information. You may refer to a bucket as a unique, top-level directory. Many directories may exist within a bucket, but the most absolute of those contained within is a ‘bucket’. Create a bucket named s3.[yourdomain].com. In that bucket, make an audio directory. So now we have something along the lines of s3.[yourdomain].com/audio.

4. Using S3Fox, upload your mp3 files to the newly created audio directory within the bucket.

5. Right-click the audio directory and specify an ACL with read access for public requests. Note: Without specifying an ACL w/ public read access, it won’t work.

6. Within WordPress, install the Audio Player plugin.

7. Once installed, modify the plugin as such:

edit audio-player.php

Under // Options Default add:
add_option(‘s3_url’, ”, “Amazon S3 URL”, true);

Under // Global variables change $ap_audioURL to:
$ap_audioURL = get_settings(‘s3_url’) . get_option(“audio_player_web_path”);

Under // Update plugin options add:
update_option(‘s3_url’, $_POST['s3_url']);

edit options-panel.php

Alternately, you can upload/replace with these pre-modified files:
wp-content/plugins/audio-player.php
wp-content/plugins/audio-player/options-panel.php
(be sure to rename from .ph_ to .php)

Login to WordPress, then go to Settings -> Audio player and add http://s3.[yourdomain].com to the new field below the audio files directory.

8. Add a cname (alias) at your domain registrar:
S3 -> bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com
(e.g. s3.[yourdomain].com.s3.amazonaws.com)
where S3 points to bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com. (TTL of 1 hr is acceptable.)

9. Post a song according to the directions for the plugin.

Did it work for you? Did you run into any trouble? (I’d be happy to help you set this up if you’d like assistance.)

– Edit:  9.16.09 –

Version 2.0 beta 6 of the Audio Player plugin includes an option for a custom URL.  When upgrading to this most recent version, there is no need to modify any source code.  Nice!

Also, the most recent version of the WordPress S3 plugin version .4 adds a setting for virtual hosting:

Make sure you check the ‘Bucket is setup for virutal hosting’ box.  If you see DNS warnings at the top of the plugin screen, refresh the page and it should go away (if you had this setup previously).

Also, we’re going to configure the Asterisk-IM plugin to interface with our Asterisk PBX. This plugin can be configured to display Caller ID information, and view the phone status of other users.

We’ll be using Spark as the chat client, also from Ignite Realtime.

Installing Openfire on Fedora is simple:

When the transaction has completed and Openfire has started, access http://hostname:9090 to finish the remaining portion of the setup process.

In this demo, I used a domain name for the system that would be considered inadequate in most cases. It is always best to use the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) of your system. Also, don’t forget to allow client traffic through your firewall (TCP 5222-5223), with each client as well. Did you run into configuration issues or problems? How did this install go for you?

I copy these super sensitive files to an encrypted volume on my external disk. I created this volume with TrueCrypt, a free encryption utility that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

There are a few ways to go about encrypting a removable volume. (Before we begin, make sure you’ve downloaded and setup TrueCrypt.)

Part 1: Create an encrypted container on a flash drive

This works pretty good on flash drives, though a few caveats exist. First of all, Windows XP & Vista don’t support multiple partitions on removable drives. Because of this, we must create a container file that resides on one partition.

Note: Some flash drive manufacturers (such as Lexar) have created utilites that allow you to set the removable media bit, effectively fooling windows into thinking the flash drive is a real hard drive. Unless you know of a way to do this on your flash drive, a container file is the way to go.

Part 2: Create an encrypted volume on an external disk

Notice how we’ve previously created one large encrypted partition, and one smaller unencrypted partition. This can be done within the Disk Management subset of Computer Management (when right-clicking My Computer > Manage). The traveler files will live on this smaller partition.

Any type of TrueCrypt volume will secure your data with very strong encryption (using a password of at least 20 characters). Attempting to break this would bring the best cryptographers and supercomputers to certain resignation. This is real government-grade security (and certainly good enough for 007).

There is a setting that will make Firefox swap its memory when minimized, which, if you’re low on memory to begin with, could mean a tremendous performance boost.

In Firefox’s location bar, type: about:config and agree to clear the warning message.

Right-click anywhere and create a new boolean value called:

Then select true for the value. Click Ok and restart Firefox.

When firing up the browser again, we should see immediate improvements in memory consumption when the browser is minimized, as the memory it ties up will be swapped to the disk instead.

Substitute table and column, and a proper date option. The date_sub function subtracts a time period from the date specified. In this statement, NOW() grabs the current date from which INTERVAL 3 MONTHS is subtracted (along with the < operand).