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May 11th, 2012

Endian Firewall CE Install Notes

No Comments, Linux, Tips & Tricks, by andarius.

I have installed Endian Firewall CE quite a few times. There have been several times I have run in to odd anomalies during the install that cause problems and force me to try again. I figured it was worth sharing what seems to work to resolve these problems. Each time I boot up a Linux CD of some sort and zero the entire hard drive using “dd” and then the installs go smooth and complete successfully.

A good example of a bootable CD to use would be the System Rescue CD.

The command I use from withing the console (assuming /dev/sda is the HD in question):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Clean and simple…

April 20th, 2012

They are “Events” now?

No Comments, Misc, by andarius.

I have been working with Windows 7 at home to adjust to it faster (we migrated at work recently) and to play some games. Of course, it does crash from time to time. Amusingly, the “Blue Screen of Death” is still there. On top of that it occurs some times in a stealthy fashion. I had a crash that occurred during boot, never even got a screen to display. Windows was kind enough to tell me a “Problem Event” occurred and that it was a blue screen. Go figure!

Problem Event - Blue Screen

Problem Event - Blue Screen

April 18th, 2012

Gentoo Server Config – 3

No Comments, News, by andarius.

This is part 3, but it is really an addendum to part 2. My hard drive SMART data stopped showing up. In fact I am not even sure how I got it in the first place unless perhaps I set the UID bit on smartctl… At any rate, these are the steps required to make sure you get SMART data from your drives when using phpsysinfo.

First, install sudo via:

emerge -aq sudo

And configure it to allow the apache user to run smartctl without the use of a password. This is accomplished with the folowing line added via “visudo”:

## Give apache permissions to use smartctl for phpsysinfo
apache ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/smartctl

Comment included for good measure. Don’t want other admins wondering what is going on.

Next, from the install path find and edit the file “plugins/SMART/class.SMART.inc.php”. The line number 60 should include:

if (CommonFunctions::executeProgram('smartctl', '--all'.((PSI_PLUGIN_SMART_DEVICE) ? ' --device '.PSI_PLUGIN_SMART_DEVICE : '').' '.$disk, $buffer, PSI_DEBUG)) {

Which needs to be changed to read:

if (CommonFunctions::executeProgram('sudo', '/usr/sbin/smartctl --all'.((PSI_PLUGIN_SMART_DEVICE) ? ' --device '.PSI_PLUGIN_SMART_DEVICE : '').' '.$disk, $buffer, PSI_DEBUG)) {

This should get things going.

Source for the fix originally came from:
http://mewbies.com/how_to_install_phpsysinfo_nix_tutorial.html

(No, I was not creative enough to nail this one)

March 21st, 2012

Windows 7

No Comments, News, Rant, by andarius.

I have decided it is time to look in to a few things. Such as how well can my desktop system play games! OK, so it is only one thing, but that one item requires Windows, and the latest is Windows 7. I would like to share something right off the bat, Win7 is a heffer. I mean straight up fat. The image below is a window capture taken right after a clean install and having loaded the drivers for base hardware and Avira. All I can say is holy crap Bat Man!

Win 7 Disk Usage

Win 7 Disk Usage

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March 7th, 2012

WAP54GP Client Table

No Comments, Security, Tips & Tricks, by andarius.

During a recent security scan of the network I manage at work I came across an unauthorized Access Point. I started poking around to locate and lock down the AP but hit one major bump, I could not find a way to show which machines were associated with the AP that was on the network. The AP in use (that is supposed to be there) is a Linksys WAP54GP. The unit does not have very many features but is a PoE 802.11 b/g access point.

After a decent amount of digging and clicking on every link on every page in the web management UI I was able to find a client MAC table. It does not provide any other usefull data like signal level and so on, but the client MAC address was all I needed. Since it is not straight forward I figured I would share the details.

To get to the client MAC table you would log in as usual. Then navigate to “Wireless” -> “Wireless Connection Control” -> Click on “Select MAC Address From Networked Computers” as shown below:

Wireless Connection Control

Wireless Connection Control

Clicking on the link will result in a popup window similar to:

Wireless Client Table

Wireless Client Table

As you can see it is a simple list of the MAC addresses of clients connected via wireless. Nothing elegant about it but it does contain the data I needed.

February 12th, 2012

XFCE & Wireless Signal

No Comments, Code, Linux, Tips & Tricks, by andarius.

Currently if you wish to monitor the wireless signal level and other stats from your WiFi card under XFCE your options are limited. There is only one panel plug-in that is part of the XFCE Goodies project called xfce4-wavelan-plugin. It is nice but not quite what I wanted. I don’t use wicd (for several reasons) nor network manager (also several reasons). For the most part I am old school and use wpa_cli or manual configuration file editing. So the hunt was on to find something better.

In the end I decided to do a little custom solution. One can display most any data using the xfce4-genmon-plugin. This plug-in allows you to display data from just about any application and if the output is xml formatted it can get creative, for example displaying icons, percent bars and a tool tip. More

January 24th, 2012

XFCE Shutdown with polkit

No Comments, Linux, Tips & Tricks, by andarius.

I seem to hit all kinds of issues that I should not with this install of Gentoo on my netbook. First off slim was not allowing consolekit and policykit to work correctly so I have been logging in and starting X manually. I decided to resolve this by trying lxdm tonight and it seems to work rather well. Some theme tweaks and it even suits my visual styling. Problem is it was not letting me shut down the PC.

A lot of digging turned up this thread which finally solved the issue:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/1190/how-can-i-make-shutdown-not-require-admin-password

It boiled down to editing “/usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy” and changing a few lines as noted in the post. Rather than repeat it all, the short of it was to edit the lines containing:

<allow_active>auth_admin_keep</allow_active>

To read:

<allow_active>yes</allow_active>

January 5th, 2012

Netbook, NFS and postup

No Comments, Code, Linux, Tips & Tricks, by andarius.

Since I am up late I will hammer this out while it is fresh in my mind. I am using my netbook more and more. As noted in the previous post “Gentoo Server Config -1” I use NFS on my home server. Well I would like access to the NFS shares from my netbook but I don’t want it taking forever booting or loading the WiFi when those shares are unreachable, like when I travel for example. A little digging online and through the docs turned up a very handy Gentoo solution, postup.

The networking scripts will check for a function named “postup” (among others) in the “/etc/conf.d/net” file. If this function is found it will be executed upon having successfully brought the interface up. This means it won’t hang on boot waiting for it, but once it does come up the function is run. This also avoids nasty hangs and errors from trying to start a service that depends on the interface being actively up, like NFS for example…

Enter my implementation of the function:

postup() { if [ ${IFACE} != "lo" ]; then net_domain=$(grep domain /var/run/dhcpcd/resolv.conf/${IFACE} | cut -d " " -f 2) if [ $net_domain = "Inferno-Valley" ]; then /bin/mount /media/photon/home /bin/mount /media/photon/anime fi fi return 0 }

More

January 5th, 2012

Gentoo Server Config -1

No Comments, Linux, Tips & Tricks, by andarius.

I am continuing the configuration of photon as it is now running Gentoo. I figured I would share notes of the process.

Logs

Log rotation is taken for granted on many distros I have used. Well, not here. logrotate is a common application for taking care of this and is readily available in the ports. The default configuration takes care of the basics out of the box as it will automatically add a cron job and so on. I just had to install it: More

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