Archive for July 2008
- Easily forwarding arbitrary TCP connections with rinetd
In the past we've examined the use of firewall rules for forwarding incoming connections from one machine to another. But there is a simpler approach using the rinetd package. Read on to learn about this tool.
- DNS Survivial Guide
Hopefully you've all heard of CERT VU#800113, this is for people who didn't understand it.
- Commands you might have missed
There are a lot of articles upon this site, and it appears that many of the most popular are those that are written with the complete beginner in mind. After realizing this I've got a decided to introduce a miniseries covering a few easily-overlooked tools and commands over the next week.
- Postfix Smarthost using Auth and SMTPS
My email server uses SMTP AUTH with PLAIN or LOGIN. Thus the password is send without encryption (base64 doesn't count honest). The server listens on port 465 so that the password can be encrypted using SSL, if people prefer not to send their password in plain text (my users generally know not to do that, or at least let me set up their mail clients).
- Commands you might have missed: watch
There are many times when it is useful to be able to repeatedly run a command, or set of commands, repeatedly. You could do this yourself with a simple shell script, but using watch makes it simple.
- Commands you might have missed: tree
tree is a very simple utility which will draw a tree of a directory structure. It isn't a command which is generally useful, but it can be very handy to know about if you're writing articles!
- Commands you might have missed: pstree
If you're using a system which has a lot of users, and you'd like to see who has started a particular script, daemon, or binary, then the pstree utility is very helpful. It draws a tree of all currently running processes - allowing you to see which processes are related.
- Patching denyhosts to allow correct plugin reporting
Imagine you have denyhosts installed and it is adding new attackers to /etc/hosts.deny. Wouldn't it be great to inform the relevant people so that some action could be taken? With the right plugin that is possible, but there is a problem with the default reporting that we'll explain here.
- Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 updated with support for newer hardware
The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). In addition to correcting several security problems and a few serious defects in the stable release, for the first time in Debian's history an update for a stable distribution also adds support for newer hardware by giving users the option to install newer drivers.