Linux: March 2007 Archives

I've been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for the last couple of years both at home and in the office. The time has come for me to replace the keyboard at home, as it's beginning to have issues with certain keys etc., So what kind of keyboard should I get? I've looked at some of the really cool projector style ones, but they're totally impractical. I've got quite large hands and hate small keyboards I don't mind noisy keys, but the quieter the better

I only spotted this today, but it's still open for another few days, so get on there! Dell Linux Survey It would be great if Dell offered people the option of choosing a linux distro preinstalled on desktops and laptops. I'm getting rather tired of having to reformat them and others are wasting a lot of time trying to get refunds for an OS they have no intention of using.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was having some "interesting" issues getting Ubuntu to play nice with my new graphics card (GeForce 7900GS). You can get a full spec of the card on the Nvidia site. It's a pretty powerful card: Graphics Bus Technology PCI Express Memory 256MB Memory Interface 256-bit Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 42.2 Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec) 9 Vertices/Second 822.5 Million Pixels per clock (peak) 20 RAMDACs (MHz) 400 While it will work without the extra power cable plugged in the nVidia control centre will give you a warning as soon as you boot into Windows. Under Ubuntu the opposite is the case. If you try to install Ubuntu with the card's power cable plugged in you will end up bashing your head against your keyboard (at least I did!), as the installer doesn't have the correct drivers to handle it. Solution - unplug the power lead. Install Ubuntu as normal. Once you've done that you can pop over to Alberto Milone's site and grab the .deb that you need. Run the following command as root (use sudo if you're that way inclined): dpkg -i envy_0.9.1-0ubuntu3_all.deb It will probably whine about a load of dependencies being missing - ignore that for the moment. You can then run: apt-get install -f Which basically tells it to download any required packages and install the .deb Once installed you'll find that you've now got a new icon under Application > System Tools Run "envy" and you will be prompted for your admin password. You can then choose how you want to install it. I went with the autoinstall. Once the autoinstall is run it may prompt you to reboot your PC. Don't. Shutdown your PC completely. Once it is safely shutdown plug the graphics card power cable back into the PC and restart. If X still crashes on boot, then unplug the power again. Boot into recovery mode, login as root (if you have it enabled) and then run: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg If you don't have root enabled simply run the command as: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg The driver you need is "nvidia". Follow the reconfiguration wizard all the way through and remember to set the screen resolutions you want to use. Use the spacebar to select them. Shut down the PC again and plug the power cable back into the graphics card. It should boot properly and X should work This worked for me and I'm currently running at 1280*1024 (I may up that - just need to check what the monitor will support). Your mileage may vary and I may have left out a stage - I wasn't documenting this as I was doing it.

I've just installed this PC and have run into some interesting issues with the graphics drivers. Which nvidia drivers should I be using? If I try "nvidia" and change the resolution settings X crashs completely, so I'm stuck with a really low resolution which is making me miserable :( Any suggestions?

Years ago when I got my first server I remember installing some scripts to check its integrity and warn me about attacks. I was amazed and quite frightened by the number of SSH attempts. I soon learnt, however, that this was quite normal. It maybe worrying, but it's normal. Put a server on a public IP and people will try to crack it. There's no avoiding that. Well, there is, but it's a bit impractical to disconnect a web server from the internet :) So what can you do? One of the solutions is to use iptables to block the IPs of failed login attempts. If someone (or something) makes more than X connection attempts from a particular IP then you block it. Of course that's easy if you can program. I can't! Luckily I don't have to, as there are solutions like the rather excellent Fail2Ban available:

Fail2ban scans log files like /var/log/pwdfail or /var/log/apache/error_log and bans IP that makes too many password failures. It updates firewall rules to reject the IP address.

So not only can you block SSH attacks, you can also use it to defend yourself from other bruteforce attempts. There are debian / Ubuntu versions available, so all you need to do (as root) is run: apt-get install fail2ban This will install the daemon and its basic config, which is to silently block SSH attacks. You can easily customise the configuration by editing /etc/fail2ban.conf The developers have left nice clear comments in the file, so even I was able to make the necessary changes, including whitelisting my own IPs ie. you don't want to lock yourself out just because you've forgotten your login details. There's also a nice writeup here which goes into some depth about the various options available.

RedHat have released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. From what I've heard and seen this could be a really exciting release, as they have placed a lot of emphasis on virtualisation Of course Centos has already started work on a 5.* release, with a beta currently available. I'll be interested to see what kind of things people can do with this new shiny toy :)

Every time I install Ubuntu I end up struggling with changing the default editor to use vi or vim. If only I'd found this page before! So simple! All you have to do is run (as root): update-alternatives --config editor

As I mentioned before, I have been using a number of different linux firmware versions on my LinkSys WRT54G. For the last few weeks I was using SveaSoft's firmware, as the previous firmware had caused me headaches. The Sveasoft solution worked quite well, but I had some crazy routing issues which left me rather confused. It was as if certain blocks of the internet simply ceased to exist! In any case I decided to dump SveaSoft for OpenWRT. The routing issues seem to have vanished and I can visit sites that were "banned" again!! Hopefully the connection issues will also have been resolved, though I won't know for sure for a few hours.

I use a linksys WRT54G on my home network. It was running the standard Linksys firmware at one point, but I've been running a variety of Linux variants on it over the last few months. This evening, while looking for information on OpenWRT I stumbled across HotSpotSystem.com. While several of the alternative firmwares offer hotspot functionality this is the first one I've come across that offers a builtin revenue stream. I'm not sure how the revenue share works with the commercial offerings from Bitbuzz, Eircom, BT etc., but this alternative does look very appealing. Pity I don't live somewhere where I could actually make use of it :)