gmane.org.user-groups.linux.ilugc

Govt of India proposes to ban SSH (Or wants you to use 40bit keys)

Manokaran K — 2012-05-26T14:31:17

Stumbled on this via Hacker news:

http://www.dot.gov.in/isp/guide_international_gateway.htm

*

II. LEVEL OF ENCRYPTION

   1.

   Individuals/Groups/Organisations are permitted to use encryption upto 40
   bit key length in the RSA algorithms or its equivalent in other algorithms
   without having to obtain permission. However, if encryption equipments
   higher than this limit are to be deployed, individuals/groups/organisations
   shall do so with the permission of the Telecom Authority and deposit the
   decryption key, split into two parts, with the Telecom Authority.

*
regds,
mano

[ILUGC] Happy News

priya cst — 2012-05-24T12:16:42

Hello friends,

I am glad to share this with you all.

I have joined in Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay as a project staff.




















Regards,

Priya K
Project staff
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
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Login Page for Mediawiki --need suggestions

vijayaraghavan seshan — 2012-05-24T09:13:13

Hi Team,



Recently installed mediawiki in GNU/Linux box. We have a requirement
that mediwiki to be accessed through secure login. Purpose is to give
access for particular teams and not for all. Any suggestions will be
very much appreciated.

initramfs UBUNTU

Ranjith Rajendran — 2012-05-24T06:20:16

While booting ubuntu i got initramfs error .

What is initramfs in ubuntu?

How to fix that problem?

[Jobs] Software Engineer with 1-3 years Experience - Global Analytics India, Chennai

Parth — 2012-05-23T13:11:50

Opening for Software Engineer:

 Job Description :

    Developing web services for high transaction rate application
    Participate in and contribute to design and architecture process
    Testing and debugging software over an n-tier architecture

Skill Set :

    Qualification: BE/MCA or equivalent
    1 – 3 years experience in Python/Java/C++/C # Programming
    Strong Object Oriented programming skills and general
programming/system concepts
    Good understanding of Data Structures and Relational Database
Systems. Experience in SQL/PLSQL is added advantage.
    Knowledge on shell scripting is a plus
    Experience with software design/development
    Should have passion for analytics, must be detail oriented and
good problem solver.
    Excellent communication
    Team Player willing to take initiatives.

To apply, please post your resume to hr< at >global-analytics.com and refer
me in your email.

IPTABLES features ??

Dipin Thomas — 2012-05-23T10:49:07

Hi All,

    Can any one tell what all things we can do using IPTABLES for hardening
of Linux system.


Thank you.
Dipin
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Chennaipy May Monthly Meet

Vijay Kumar B. — 2012-05-23T03:16:52

= May Monthly Meet

== Date & Time

26 May
3:00pm to 5:00pm

== Venue

Zilogic Systems,
Fourth Main Road,
Kamaraj Nagar,
Thiruvanmiyur,
Chennai

Location map: http://www.zilogic.com/contact.html

== Agenda

  1. Lightning Talk: Dictionary Revisited
     by Rengaraj

  2. Lightning Talk: Random Numbers
     by Reegan

  3. Lightning Talk: String Methods
     by Arunram

  4. Lightning Talk: Docstring Conventions (PEP 257)
     by Vijay Kumar

  5. Video: Kivy Demo

If you would like to give a lightning talk, just come prepared,
we will be able to accommodate you.

If you are new to Python, the tutorial "Learn Python in 10 Minutes"
http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/ will give you a quick
overview of what Python is all about.

Regards,
Vijay 

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Need help on LDAP Client configuration.

Yuvaraj — 2012-05-22T08:56:56

Hello all,

I am new to LDAP server. I've Installed LDAP Server in fedora successfully.
(using Google). The problem which I am facing now is I couldn't
authenticate Linux client using LDAP server. Please help me on this issue
asap.
****

*Yuvaraj.G*
**9841371006
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Product engineering

Girish Venkatachalam — 2012-05-22T02:50:56

Creating products is not hard if you have around 7 years of experience
programming and solving hard problems.

The reason India does not have any worthwhile product companies is
that all the people I find here are too scared of
 doing great things; they are constantly slavishly following the
environment or trying to play safe.

This does not work. No it does not. By not being globally competitive
and by fearing to speak the truth and live
 by the truth you don't get very far.

Of course you avoid some immediate inconveniences but in the long run
you live somebody else's life and die a
 loser.

It is much better to die in the battle of living by one's values than
to simply play second fiddle.

I don't think it is easy to change.

K7 took 17 years to establish itself as a product brand, and even
today they are not the world's best.

Zoho and Vembu and few others are almost there but even they aren't top brands.

Only developed nations seem to produce product brands. But I dunno a
single Japanese brand in IT world.

And Samsung is from Korea, I dunno how developed they are.

Okay leave all that. Let us focus on our immediate task.

How to create a software product?

If you create worthwhile software people will purchase it off the
Internet; some US presence and contacts in
 nations with strong currency will help you but it is not a must.

The key thing is having a product that is truly unique and technically
superior to everything else.

This may sound like some MBA talk or something foreign from human
nature, education and culture but it has
 a lot to do with all that.

I consistently find that the top performers in engineering are from
very good colleges. Not necessarily with a
 computer science background; even I don't have it. In fact it is
better to have an electronics background as
 the curriculum is much harder.

Ultimately it is all individual initiative and one should truly enjoy
hard work and learning.

I used to have an employee who was interested in making it big but he
never enjoyed hard work and he was a
 narcissist, someone with an inflated idea of oneself.

The qualities needed to outperform everyone else is indomitable
patience, quiet courage and habit of hard
 work cultivated through years and years of academic success and study.

I was not great at scoring grades but I was very good at academics, I
study much more now than when I was 15
 and I truly enjoy studying.

Hard work is the credo. This is what makes developed nations what they
are. They work work and work as their society
  has no place for losers.

In our world mediocrity is the rule of the game; and if you are better
than others people are scared of you and refuse to
 use you to their advantage. People do not wish to give credit; they
want to hold on to their own foolish ideas breaking
 the universal law of karma and evanescent success.

Now let us think that you have the aforementioned qualities.

Now how to develop a product?

Take anything you love. First identify what you love. It is not easy;
takes a long time and as they say in romance, let it go.

It it comes back you know it is yours.

So identify your romance.

Then pursue it with all your heart.Does not matter whether there is
competition or not. Make sure that what you do has a
 market and buyers.

Don't live in the past of future. Think of the present.

There are plenty of problems that require solving. Apply yourself to
it and give it your best.

But remember, your success depends on several factors including your
karma. Unless you are destined to win no victory
 is guaranteed.

But work is the reward. No job satisfaction in making 10000$ a month
in a foreign land can stand up against the satisfaction in
 living life of your conviction.

Vivekananda never knew where he would sleep, how he would eat the next
food. But today he is a hero. He lived by what he
 believed it.

So first find your conviction and work hard to realize your dreams.

Product development is not really that hard.

If you are convinced that you love some technology, make sure that you
use as many components that are readily available in
the open source world for it. Don't sit and do it yourself. Do what is
not already there.

Create real value, real meaning.

Just writing a 2000 line ruby on rails or python script that does a
faster download is not a product.

A product has to be fairly big.

But not too big. Don't write an operating system or an ERP engine.

Instead create something of medium size:

Some ideas are:

1)  Anything to do with SQL migration
2) ISP link load balancer
3) Firewall
4) Some LiveCD or LiveUSB focusing on a particular domain like
multimedia, crypto or even Tamizh
5) E-mail based solutions like mobile phone clients
6) Some iPhone app

And so on.

Basically build on top of some open source technology that is quite popular.

Make something easy. Or find a new application for a new field.

Basically try to ride on some other success by someone else and create
your own niche.

Be honest, satisfy your technical libido and add unique value.

Now after you create your product what next?

You have to monetize it and convert that into money, find users, find customers.

How to do that?

Not easy. But doable.

Google Adwords is one choice but that costs money. Look for friends
living in foreign lands and find out
 if they can talk to resellers.

Look for competition, use linkedin and find partners of competitors.

A lot of ways are there to push your technology.

The real challenge however is creating something of great value. That
takes great engineering lot of time and
 great talent.

And after you work for one year or more on something then talk to
people to find out how to market it.

Don't try to sell weekend projects.

I have fallen into this trap before.

It is something very hard to convince ourselves that only when our
product is ready in all respects the market will
 pay money for it.

-Girish

[Job] Wanted - Mail Server Admin

Shrinivasan T — 2012-05-21T18:32:32

Wanted:
Linux Admin 2 years experience in handling Postfix /zimbra mail, Web,
Samba and Proxy server.
Any  educational qualification is fine.  But candidate must have good
knowledge in linux open source solutions.

Work Location : Chennai

Send your resumes to remo6979 AT gmail.com

How to edit a file in a web interface?

Girish Venkatachalam — 2012-05-21T14:44:23

In this tutorial I am talking about file editing in the backend as
that is what gets things going when you
 write a web interface.

Even if you are developing a user interface for making your product
user friendly the main backend operation
 is file editing.

So I have done quite a bit of this since the general mime for my
product is web panel for configuration
 and statistics and all the backend file manipulations are performed
by user input in the web panel.

Editing a file can be done in many languages, even C. But who will
write a C CGI?

I use perl and use it extensively. And you can directly edit a file
using perl CGI.

But I did something better.

I use Tie::File which is a standard perl module for manipulating files.

Basically it ties the file into a perl array using which you can
remove lines, add lines or edit lines
 using the same perl functions you use for array elements.

This does not make things really simple but I live with it.

I don't think there is a better way.

How do you do it?

I also do one more thing. When you save a value in the web interface,
the next time user clicks at
 that page the old value should be displayed. So editing a file also
means parsing it to display correctly.

I use Tie::File here also; except that I open the file in read only mode.

Here is a simple sample.

use Tie::File;
tie < at >f, "Tie::File", "/etc/passwd", mode => O_RDONLY;

for(< at >f) {
       print;
}
untie < at >f;

This will print the file contents. But you want only the patterns you
are interested in
 to show in a web interface.

Inside the for() loop you have to use regex.

for(< at >f) {
         if(/foo/) {
            ($dummy, $val) = split / /;
          }
}

Here, $val gets assigned to the value of interest.

Okay now let us get to editing it.

use Tie::File;
tie < at >f, "Tie::File", "example.conf";

for(< at >f) {
     if(/set/) {
          $_ = "changed line";
    }
}

untie < at >f;

Remember,  only when you untie the file,the internal array
representation is written back into the disk.

You can use array operations like appending lines to a file, deleting
lines using:

push < at >f, "another line";

or

< at >f = < at >f[1..3];

Lot of possibilities exist.

-Girish

[ILugC] Ethical Hacking course

Yogesh Girikumar — 2012-05-21T11:17:08

Hi,

Just found this in the Anna University web site. I was surprised to
find that there is an elective paper titled "Ethical Hacking &
Forensics" and that the recommended book is by Ankit Fadia. I think
this says a lot about the quality of the course itself..

http://cs.annauniv.edu/academic/mecse2009.html


Ankit Fadia related links:

http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ankit_fadia/
http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ankit_fadia/fadia10.html

The term "Ethical Hacking" is IMO not a good term :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy

Note: I'm CC-ing Dr. K. S. Easwarakumar of CSE, Anna Univ.
(http://cs.annauniv.edu/easwara/)

--
Y
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Incoming redirection, port forward, DMZ, skype et al

Girish Venkatachalam — 2012-05-21T09:47:01

Okay this tutorial will cover how you can get packets into you network.

Not as replies or ACK packets to outbound traffic but hosting local
apps which can be accessed from the
outside world.

I dunno a single Indian company that is doing web hosting or any
hosting of applications with success.

There is a big player called Ctrl-S in Hyderabad but according to me
they are not a technical outfit just like
 any other Indian company. Started by people who are more business
focused than technically motivated
 the company does not seem to be making big inroads in local data
centers and stuff.

Even if you take God forsaken Reliance, Airtel, Tata or our own Sarkai
BSNL, they all suffer from technical
 incompetence in equal measure.

Anyway let us leave aside big boys that host websites, cloud and
applications with real public IP and stuff.

I have successfully run my mail server with an optic fiber static IP
block and nowadays I have at least
 3 machines in America which I can access publicly; so I have no
trouble about running any application
 with full access to the Internet.

In general to be able to run a website or any TCP application that
works on a public IP and public port that
 can be accessed from anywhere you should know how to let packets into
your network using your MODEM.

There is no need to run a real static IP but that will surely help.

You should be able to access a local machine's local port from a
public machine on the Internet by changing
the configuration on the MODEM.

How to achieve that?

This is a big complex , so I will cover this with care.

I really don't understand the concept of DMZ very well but I know this
much for my practical need that every MODEM
out there has a DMZ setting where you can give a local IP like 192.168.1.3.

And lo, all your packets showing up on the public interface of the
MODEM get automatically forwarded to this
 local IP with the effect that you can now run any service on any
port, UDP or TCP or even lower level and you can
 access it from the Internet.

This is somewhat easy.

Now if you are only interested in running a website just for the heck
of it,then you can port forward 80 to a local
 machine running Apache.

This is one idea.

Another is that you can use ssh remote port forwarding.

Just like you can port forward HTTP, you can port forward any TCP or
UDP port, of course this will not work with
 FTP, but this will work with rsync, ssh and many other protocols.

Okay you run broadband and don't have a static IP.

Now what?

Use my dynamic DNS service or create your own and use the DNS name to connect.

More on this later. What has skype and bittorrent got to do with all this?

Just that all these protocols allow incoming calls and connections
though they run behind a NAT in a broadband connection.

How is this done? There are many techniques to allow incoming
connections without active intervention like what we
 talked above using the MODEM configuration or running ssh port forwarding.

They mostly use a technique called UDP hole
punching(http://linuxjournal.com/9004) or some such to
 notify the public port we are running on and by simulating an
outgoing packet the incoming call is sent as a
 reply thus allowing incoming packets.

All firewalls/MODEM devices allow replies to outgoing packets on the
same port. They do not allow connections
 to machines inside the local LAN which is running on private IP
addresses anyway.

In a way NAT leads to a local of security eh?

-Girish

career options in Open source projects- For Non Programmers

ARUN PALANIAPPAN — 2012-05-20T14:24:21

Dear Friends,

I am trying to make few of my junior friends to take part in Open Source
activities. They are willing to come forward but,  they are hesitating with
the view that they are nil in programming and translation. Again, they wish
to know if that could help them in their career point of view.

Kindly help me to get know about the career options in Open Source
projects- For Non Programmers.

Deleting duplicate files

Parikshith Mechineni — 2012-05-19T21:13:09

I have two folders with jpeg files,
I am trying to figure out how to delete files that are in folder one that
also exist in folder two.
The file names of the two identical files are not the same, but the Hashes
are the same ( tried md5 and SHA-1)
Does any one have any idea how to do it?
Thanks in advance

Regards,
Parikshith
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dynamic DNS a solved problem anymore

Girish Venkatachalam — 2012-05-19T15:33:11

I happened to get dynamic DNS updates working beautifully.

Thanks to a free Hurricane DNS service. http://dyn.he.net

All you have to do is purchase a domain either from a typical low
quality Indian
 player like net4india or anyone say register.com, and remove all the NS
 type records. You only need to have the NS pointed to ns1.he.net.

And then you have to go ahead and add the domains and the IP address using
 the DNS A record.

If you have dynamic DNS, then you have to generate a key. Once you have that
 whenever you send a HTTP request in the form,

http://domain:key-U72Z3M8gumY5etPau2IXcQ< at >public.gmane.org/nic/update?hostname=domain

then the IP is automatically gleaned from the packet header and updated in the
 database.

Obviously this update program should run in the machine which is
behind the dynamic IP.

Now, anywhere in the world you can reach the dynamic IP using the domain name
 you pointed to.

Plain and simple.

In other words, your dynamic IP now has features of static IP for all
practical purposes
 except of course...as you well know e-mail...

-Girish

webmail security filters

mohan s — 2012-05-19T13:48:46

Hi All....

            We have installed  webmail in our Centos server using our
static IP. Thanks to all of you for your valuable suggestions.
           Now  we would like to have the following functionality : Each
email that is being sent out or coming in to be CC d to an admin email., so
that we can check the content of each email. Plus we need to filter email
with attachments having certain extention or ablove a certain size . How do
we implement these features.? Any help is welcome

Regards
Mohan
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[JOB-Short Term-Trainer] LAMP(HP) Trainer needed

Asokan Pichai — 2012-05-19T12:33:58

Hi folks

I need a PHP trainer, for 2--3 weeks.

Please contact me offlist or by phone: +91 98406 94837

Thanks

Service failed during startup

Prasanna Venkadesh — 2012-05-19T10:54:38

Dear Luggies,

I am running Fedora 16 in my HP laptop and everytime during boot up i get
this error

Starting LSB: Builds and install new kmods from akmod packages
Failed to start akmods.service, see " systemctl status akmods.service " for
more details  [FAILED]

Due to this failure GDM display manager takes nearly 30 seconds to start
its service, so i have to wait till i get the login screen.

After i logged in and in terminal i followed as what it said

#systemctl status akmods.service

and here is the ouput of it:-

" akmods.service - LSB: Builds and install new kmods from akmod packages

  Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/akmods)

  Active: failed since Sat, 19 May 2012 16:01:44 +0530; 15min ago

  Process: 1061 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/akmods start (code=exited,
status=0/SUCCESS)

  CGroup: name=systemd:/system/akmods.service "

How can i resolve this? i googled for this but unable to find a proper
solution. This increases my boot time.

[Commercial] Low Cost FOSS Resource Server

Baskar Selvaraj — 2012-05-19T07:46:15

Dear all,

LinuXpert Systems is happy to announce that, we have introduced a low cost
'FOSS Resource Server' at an unbelievable price with unmatching features
for the
benefit of everyone.

Hardware Specification:

Intel® Atom™ processor D425 (512K Cache, 1.80 GHz)
4 GB DDR-3 Memory
1 TB Seagate Hard Disk
V4 Type Cabinet
USB Keyboard / Mouse

Software Resources provided:

Fedora - 14,15,16 (complete repository for i386, x86_64, source) + 17 (once
available)
Ubuntu - 11.10, 12.04 (complete repository for i386 only)
LinuxMint - 12 (complete repository for i386) + 13 (once available)
Debian - 6.0.4 (complete repository for i386, amd64, source as ISOs)
OpenSuSE - 11.4, 12.1 (complete repository for i386, x86_64)
CentOS - 5.8, 6.2 (complete EPEL repository for i386, x86_64)
Cinnamon Repository Packages for Fedora-16/17, Ubuntu 11.10/12.04, OpenSUSE
12.1
http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/
(Bringing back the favourite GNOME 2 experience in all latest GNU/Linux
distros)
FreeBSD - 8.3, 9.0 (i386,amd64 only)

Features:

* OS Installed in FOSS Resource Server: CentOS 6.2
* Remote installation services available for most of the above distros to
install on client side using PXE Network Booting (with a nice graphical
menu interface to choose from)
* Configured Services include DHCP/TFTP, DNS, Samba, Apache etc.
* DSpace Digital Repository with Pseudo Video streaming support for MP4,
FLV, MOV Formats
http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2009/05/27/easy-pseudo-video-streaming-for-dspace-repositories/
* LTSP Ready


Price:

Rs.19,950/- + VAT Extra as applicable.


Warranty:

1 Year


Delivery:

Free delivery and one day training (within Tamilnadu only).


Support:  1 Year (remote support only)

Updates: 2 Free updates (all future releases of the above distros upto June
2013).


The above offer is valid till June 30, 2012 only.

For commercial and other details, contact me offlist: baskar < at > linuxpert.in

Pl. spread the word to the world.


With warm regards

S. Baskar
Chief Executive
LinuXpert Systems
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more on firewall

Girish Venkatachalam — 2012-05-18T15:40:43

We saw what a firewall can do at the kernel level with port numbers,
ip addresses and other filter criteria found
 in the packet headers.

It is easy to block by tcp or udp port numbers, block all ping
packets(wrong), and you could block all
 packets with TOS byte fields of TCP flags corresponding to a SYN packet.

But all that is only good for very basic firewalling.

Not very useful in the real world.

In the real world we want to block instant messaging, inspect https,
look at p2p traffic and not just block but
 allocate bandwidth fairly and so on.

These things require real engineering.

The soft of things a networking engineer is supposed to do.

QoS is nothing but traffic shaping or rate limiting of packets leaving
our network.

We can easily control that but what about packets coming to us?

Nothing much we can do there.

But with QoS we can get fairly good results in controlling network abuse.

What if there is a buffer overflow attack or router worms?

A firewall should be able to deal with such things. What if you want
to do passive OS fingerprinting?

A firewall can do that; block all SMTP traffic from Windows hosts.

Now URL filtering is what people need.

That a firewall cannot do. Only a userspace application can do that.

And for that you have to redirect traffic by proxying.

That is how you also get SIP, FTP and other traffic work across NAT boxes.

A firewall has the important job of port forwarding. What is that?

All incoming packets are blocked by default and being a local RFC1918
network they are
 anyway not going to reach inside.

In order to enable that you can do the reverse of NAT.

The packets to IP address and port can be rewritten to a local
machine's IP and port.

This is similar in functionality to ssh port forwarding but it is
different in semantics.

For port forwarding to work the routing should be symmetric and
packets should be seen by the
 address rewriting engine(firewall) in both directions.

We normally get this wrong and suffer in agony.

There is a lot of other load balancing, traffic distribution and other
advanced stuff that a firewall should
 do but even to get this far is quite a challenge.

Firewalls should be able to separate network segments and manage what
is called as DMZ where you can
 host your applications; which are accessible from outside world but
you can't get into any other local machine from there.

Unless of course you run the VPN software in it. ;)

-Girish