May 2006 - VirtJunkie

Month: May 2006

HowTo: Mount Bin/Cue files in Linux

Posted on May 30, 2006 by Jon

Okay, so I I lied a little bit. I’m not sure how to mount a straight bin/cue file combination in Linux, but I do know that it’s really easy to convert them into an ISO file, and then mount the ISO in debian based linux.

sudo apt-get install bchunk

The syntax from bchunk is as follows:
bchunk [-v] [-p] [-r] [-w] [-s]

So if i wanted to convert image,bin and image.cue into image.iso, I’d run the command:
bchunk image.bin image.cue image.iso

Then to mount the ISO in linux you run the command:
mount -o loop -t iso9660 image.iso /mnt/image, where image.iso is the iso is the image that you want to mount and /mnt/image is the mount directory.

Hopefully you’ll find a use for this like I did. If it doesnt work feel free to leave me an email at howe -dot- jon -at- gmail -dot- com and I’ll respond as quick as I can.

Later,
Jon Howe

Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA!

Posted on May 5, 2006 by Jon

From EFFs Site:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. After over 18,000 lawsuits and counting against P2P users, file sharing has continued to increase rapidly. Meanwhile, music fans, like 12 year-old Brianna LaHara, college student Cassi Hunt, and parent of five Cecilia Gonzalez, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits, and many other innocent individuals are being caught in the crossfire.

This irrational crusade is not generating a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect. The RIAA should be working to create a rational, legal means by which its customers can take advantage of file sharing technology and pay a fair price for the music they love. With artists increasingly turning against the lawsuits, momentum may be shifting in favor of a better way forward.

Copyright law shouldn’t make criminals out of more than 60 million Americans

Protecting Your Server From SSH Bruteforce Attacks and Portscans

Posted on May 5, 2006 by Jon

First of all, this entry is not being entered in Drupal 4.7, I haven’t had the time to get that set up yet.

The other day I decided to take a look at my server logs, which is something that I should have been doing all along. I found out that more than one host has been brute force / dictionary scanning my ssh server. I decided that even though my passwords are strong, that I really didn’t want people to have the ability to do that. Fortunately for me there are some tools out there that work great for this very purpose. The one that I chose is called DenyHosts.

Basically how denyhosts works is it scans your security log (there are several options as to what distro type) for different strings, and if more than X number of failed access attempts occur the attacking host is added to your hosts.deny file.

Now, this functionality is found in a number of programs. The great thing about denyhosts is that (optionally) every hour your list is synchronized with a server so that you’re protection is increased greatly.

I used this tutorial to install it on my computer. The only change that I would make to it is to use denyhosts 2.4 instead of 2.0, which can be found at the denyHosts site.

I got started on security and I didn’t want to stop quite yet. I also set up a portscan detector that blocks hosts that portscan you with iptables. It’s called portsentry, and can be installed with apt using:
apt-get install portsentry.

I set up both of these utilities to email me immediately when an event occurs.

One note that I should add is that when I set up denyhosts for the first time it parsed through my existing security log and found that my current address had more than the threshold of incorrect passwords, so it blocked me from making a ssh connection to my server. To fix this just make sure that you check through your security log and make sure that you have less than the maximum amount of denied login attempts before you terminate the ssh connection.

As always, if you have any questions email me at howe -dot- jon -at- gmail -dot- com.

Later,
Jon Howe

Drupal 4.7.0 Released

Posted on May 1, 2006 by Jon

From the Drupal Homepage:

After more than a year of development we are ready to release Drupal 4.7.0 to the world. More than five years, 13 major releases, 30+ servicing firms employing 100+ Drupal professionals, 300+ third party modules, and over 55,000+ Drupal powered sites later, Drupal 4.7.0 is finally here and it rocks!

Needless to say, I’m going to be updating this version very quickly, aka as soon as my laptop starts up. Look for the next post to be from Drupal 4.7.0!

Later,
Jon Howe