Hi,
Suramya.com will be down for a couple of hours over the weekend so that I can do some upgrades on the webserver. I don’t think that this will take more than a few hours but lets see…
Will keep you posted.
– Suramya
April 30, 2005
Website will be down for a couple of hours
April 28, 2005
Forum on computer security
Cool forum that touches on every aspect of computer security:
April 27, 2005
Detecting suspicious network traffic with psad
These are light weight tools that alert you to suspicious network activity by analyzing iptables log files. This article contains information on how to install and configure psad.
– Suramya
April 26, 2005
Find and bind key sequences in bash
This Tip was taken from a TechRepublic article by Vincent Danen. It will allow the user to map unused key combinations to run custom commands in the shell.
To obtain the key sequence from a function key, use the read command. The following is an example of pressing the [F12] key:
$ read
^[[24~
Note that different keyboards will produce different key sequences, and modifiers to the function keys (such as [Ctrl][F12] or [Shift][F12]) will produce other sequences as well.
The next step is to bind that key sequence to a particular shell command. For example, you can bind [F12] to the ‘history-search-backward’ shell command:
$ bind ‘’\e[24~’: history-search-backward’
– Suramya
April 25, 2005
LDAP Related sites
LDAP GUI Client: http://luma.sourceforge.net/download.html
Using OpenLDAP: http://www.metaconsultancy.com/whitepapers/ldap.htm
– Suramya
Export xterm to another system
The following command allows you to start a xterm and export its display to another system with a white foreground on a black background . Very useful when working on headless systems
/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm -display
– Suramya
A good collection of Debian Linux hints
A good collection of Debian Linux hints and Tips:
http://www.hantslug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?LinuxHints/DebianTips
– Suramya
April 24, 2005
Allow non administrators to run Autocad etc
Some applications like autocad require the current user to be logged in as an administrator in order to use them and as you can imagine thats not a good idea. Esp if this makes you give admin access to users who are likely to install random software and otherwise mess up a perfectly good system.
To avoid this situation follow the following instructions by Anomic Anomaly posted on the Security Basics mailing list:
1. Grab ‘FileMon’ and ‘RegMon’ (both free) from SysInternals
2. Run AutoCad and monitor the changes made to the filesystem and registry.
3. Modify permissions only on those specific areas and give the user access to them
4. Watch your users happily run AutoCad as a User.
– Suramya
April 22, 2005
Disaster recovery tools
Everyone knows that disaster can strike anywhere and at anytime. These tools will help you recover your system from the unexpected downtime.
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation):
With fai, you configure your updated, armored, well working machine before the installation. In case of a disaster, you simply reinstall without any interaction. Fai is even capable, to leave a partition untouched.
Setting up encrypted tunnels
Sometimes its desireable to setup an encrypted tunnel between two networked computers so that you can transfer data between them without letting anyone snoop the traffic.
The following are some of the programs that enable you to setup secure tunnels:
Cryptcat is the standard netcat enhanced with twofish encryption.
Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL. It allows you to secure non-SSL aware daemons and protocols (like POP, IMAP, LDAP, etc) by having Stunnel provide the encryption, requiring no changes to the daemon’s code.
Zebedee is a simple program to establish an encrypted, compressed â??tunnelâ?? for TCP/IP or UDP data transfer between two systems.
SSH allows you to redirect local and remote ports over a secure SSH connection. The main advantage of this is that no extra software needs to be installed on the systems in order to use it.
In you know of others let me know and I will add them.
– Suramya