OpenMediaVault is looking quite promising. Development is still underway, and author has provided no taste to his loyal fans. This is another project from the same developers that brought you FreeNAS, an OS designed to store all of your files safely and secure, and make them accessible via a wide array of different networking protocols. It was based on FreeBSD. However, OpenMediaVault will be based on Debian GNU/Linux.
Do you really dislike being forced to use Adobe Download Manager (DLM) just to download flash for your favourite browser? Look no more! Get Adobe Flash directly! If Adobe leaves you high ‘n’ dry and the link fails, try their Troubleshooting page.
There is a great thread about endianess, Unicode, BOM (byte order marks), and other interesting topics.
UPDATE: I changed ‘>’ (erase file, then write to file) to ‘>>’ (append to file). This avoids you overwriting your, or other peoples’, public keys.
Setting up password-less logins is both dangerous, and mighty. It allows one to authenticate to an OpenSSH server without typing in a password. Authentication is gained via knowledge of a private key.
$> ssh-keygen -t rsa Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/felipe/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): <ENTER> Enter same passphrase again: <ENTER> Your identification has been saved in /home/felipe/.ssh/id_rsa. Your public key has been saved in /home/felipe/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. The key fingerprint is: d7:79:c3:01:ce:90:71:a2:a2:3d:83:26:fb:9a:1f:5b felipe@linux.local
You will then find two files inside your directory. Keep them safe, secure, and secret. The public key (the one with .pub at the end) can be widely disemmindated. It represents the antonym of secrecy and privacy. The private key, however, must remain private and secret at all times.
You must copy your public key to a remote host. The host will verify that you own the private key by encrypting a “challenge” and forcing your ssh client to decrypt it. If successful, you are authenticated, and admitted entrance. A password isn’t required.
$> cat /home/felipe/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh felipe@remote-host.com \ "cat - >> .ssh/authorized_keys" felipe@remote-host.com's password: <PASSWORD>
This copies your public key the authorized_keys file (NB: authorized_keys2 is deprecated and no longer recommended for use. OpenSSH checks both).
‘logout’ or ‘exit’ and try:
$> ssh felipe@remote-host.com
It should not ask you for a password. You should automatically be logged into the remote system.
‘scp’ and ‘rsync’ both use a ssh client at the backend, and so will also authenticate automatically utilising your public and private key pair. Try:
$> scp file_a felipe@remote-host.com:file_b
This should transfer without pausing to ask for your password. Likewise try:
$> rsync -r /backups/2010/Jan felipe@remote-host.com:/backups/2010
This should backup your entire directory to remote-host.com without pausing to ask for a password. You can put a line similar to this one in a shell script, and run it with cron once a week or so. It will automatically backup your system, using OpenSSH, and proven secure and safe method for authentication of human and machines across an untrusted public network, away from curious eyes.
I will never again buy a RAID Controller card from Promise again! They claimed to support GNU/Linux, and they don’t. They said they didn’t have drivers for Windows 7, and then suddenly they magically appear on their Downloads page. We weren’t even notified.
I’m going to go with mdadm and try my luck with software RAID on Mint. If I must buy another card, for whatever reason (namely software RAID is much too slow, and hardware RAID will offload the work to the card itself) I’ll go with Adaptec.
I just ripped some of my CD’s to MP3, but I was just curious what OGG would do for me. I had never actually compared the two encoding formats, side-by-side, but today, I was simply stunned.
A song compressed with MP3 (VBR 128Kbps Normal Quality) was around 5.1 – 5.8 MB. It sounded good, but ‘clearly’ inferior to the actual CD Quality sound.
The OGG rip (VBR 128Kbps), on the other hand knocked my socks off! It was around 3.0 – 3.1 MB and sounded ‘nearly’ as good as the original CD!
I hesitated, at first, to rip them all to MP3, in case I wanted to share them (!gasp!) with others. However, now that I can see a 17% – 20% compression gain using OGG over MP3, I no longer feel that way. I wholeheartedly endorse the use of OGG Vorbis for ALL compressed lossy compression.
Most [good] audio/multimedia players already support OGG (except, MS programs, obviously!) so you should have no problem listening to them.
If you have a portable media player (PMP) without native OGG support there are two options
I’ve been having some problems with charsets (character sets) when using FreeNAS, rsync, deltacopy, and cygwin.
The filenames on a Windows box are either in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 (Latin1). The FreeNAS uses rsync to backup the files on the windows box, and saves them to a RAID array. I wasn’t sure if it was rsync, or FreeNAS causing the problem, but all characters with more than 7 significant bits (8 or more) were being “escaped” such as \#303 instead of Ñ.
I found the solution by using the “-8″ flag in rsync. Also, I overwrote the cygwin.dll file supplied by DeltaCopy with a UTF-8-modified cygwin.dll, restarted DeltaCopy, and the filenames appeared correctly and in UTF-8 (instead of ISO8859-1).
As always, remember to BACKUP before journeying on with this! Good Luck!
As part of National Cyber-security Awareness Month, Googleblog posts some important tips regarding password security.
Creating a new password is often one of the first recommendations you hear when trouble occurs. Even a great password can’t keep you from being scammed, but setting one that’s memorable for you and that’s hard for others to guess is a smart security practice since weak passwords can be easily guessed. Below are a few common problems we’ve seen in the past and suggestions for making your passwords stronger. — Choosing a smart password.
New BSD magazine, available in stores or online at bsdmag.org
How new issue includes:
In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license.
The code consists of four drivers that are part of a technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization. The drivers, once added to the Linux kernel, will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Microsoft will provide ongoing maintenance of the code.
Linux backers hailed the submission as validation of the Linux development model and the Linux GPLv2 licensing.
Microsoft said the move will foster more open source on Windows and help the vendor offer a consistent set of virtualization, management and administrative tools to support mixed virtualized infrastructure.
Kroah-Hartman said Microsoft’s submission was routine. “They abided by every single rule and letter of what we require to submit code. If I was to refuse this code it would be wrong,” he said.
Sam Ramji, who runs the Open Source Software Lab for Microsoft and is the company’s director of open source technology strategy, called the Linux kernel submission the company’s most important Linux/open source commitment ever. Read more…