Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 5, 2005

My Weekend visiting friends

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 9:49 PM

Well I am still alive here. Met up with Karishma and Priya over the weekend. We were supposed to meet for lunch and Priya picked up Karishma and then came to pick me up from the hotel but managed to get lost about a mile from the hotel. Since they were so close to the hotel I went to the lobby to see if the attendant over there knew how to get to the hotel from where they were.

That lady had no clue of what she was doing, she managed to confuse all of us even more so we decided that it would be easier if I walked up to the road they were on and hope that they will see me while driving by. Thankfully though, Karishma noticed that one of the streets they were crossing was a street I had mentioned. This gave me an idea of where they were and I walked to the car .

After finally meeting up we all were very hungry so we went to the mall nearby to get lunch/dinner (It was ~3:30 by then). We got to the place at 4 pm, had some really good Pizza and Pasta and we talked a lot.

After lunch we decided to go for a movie. I wanted to watch either the transporter 2 or The Brother’s Grimm. Priya was undecided, Karishma wanted to watch either The 40 year old virgin or An unfinished life. To make things interesting, Nitin wanted to watch the Constant Gardener and P wanted to see ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ or An unfinished life. To make a long story short we finally ended up watching ‘An Unfinished life’ which was not a movie I would usually watch but it was ok. A lot better than the last movie I saw with Karishma (Devil’s Rejects)

After the movie we talked a little more and then they dropped me home without getting into any problems.

Overall a fun day but I could have done without the silly movie. The problem with going to a movie with girls is that if they outnumber you, you tend to get outvoted. In this case we were outvoted 3-2 (Girls/Boys) so we saw ‘An Unfinished life’.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

Some Perl Tricks

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 8:52 AM

Installing perl modules can be a pain if you don’t have root access on the server you are installing them. However the creators of Perl did think about this and added a PREFIX switch that we can use to give the module an alternate installation directory. So to install the module in /home/suramya/modules the command we would run is:

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/suramya/modules

Then we follow the regular installation steps of make, make install.

Once the module is installed we need to tell the Perl scripts where to find the new module, there are a number of ways that we can do this but the one I like is modifying the PERL5LIB enviorment variable. This method has the advantage that we don’t need to modify any of the scripts etc.

The easiest way to modify the variable is to add a line that looks like this to your .profile or .bashrc file:

PERL5LIB=/home/suramya/module:/usr/local/lib/perl/5.6.1:/usr/local/share/perl/5.6.1:
export PERL5LIB

Hope this helps someone.

– Suramya

Restricting SSH to allow users to only run allowed commands

Filed under: Computer Security,Security Tutorials,Tech Related — Suramya @ 7:54 AM

To restrict access to a server by allowing an authorized user to only run a specific command add an authorized_keys file entry that looks like (this is all in one line one line)

from=”202.41.95.13″,command=”rsync -aCz –server –sender $SRCDIR .”,
no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty
ssh-dss
AAAAB3NzaC1kc3M

Here you must put the appropriate source directory in $SRCDIR.

The authorized key file can be put in a dummy users directory. This dummy user should have appropriate read/write permissions for the directory in question.

As an alternative you can use a configuration file “–config=$FILE” in place of $SRCDIR.

Once this is done, the owner of the SSH private key associated with the public-key (which is the bit that starts ssh-dss AAA….) can connect to the ssh server and start the above command and *only* the above command.

– Suramya

PS: Thanks to Kapil from the Linux Gazette Answer Gang for the above tip.

September 1, 2005

Learn two ways to disable Internet Explorer

Filed under: Computer Security,Security Tutorials,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:04 PM

Techrepublic has a really nice article that tells you how to disable IE. Keep in mind that this just disables IE not remove it.

Article Extract:

The easiest way to remove users’ ability to browse with IE is to add a bogus proxy server to IE’s Internet Settings.

Follow these steps:

1. In IE, go to Tools | Internet Options.
2. On the Connections tab, click the LAN Settings button.
3. In the resulting dialog box, select the following check box in the Proxy Server section: Use a Proxy Server For Your LAN (These Settings Will Not Apply To Dial-up Or VPN Connections).
4. Enter 0.0.0.0 in the Address text box.
5. Enter 80 in the Port text box, and click OK.

Please note that adding a bogus proxy server to your Internet settings won’t affect Automatic Windows Update from connecting and updating your operating system.

You can also restrict Internet settings via Group Policy. Follow these steps:

1. On your domain controller, right-click the organizational unit that contains your domain users, and select Properties.
2. On the Group Policy tab, click Edit.
3. Expand User Configuration to set restrictions on a per-user basis.
4. Expand Windows Settings, and expand Internet Explorer Maintenance.
5. Select Connection, and double-click Proxy Settings.
6. Select the Enable Proxy Settings check box, add 0.0.0.0 to the HTTP entry, and click OK.
7. Expand Administrative Templates, and expand Windows Components.
8. Select Internet Explorer, and double-click Disable Changing Proxy Settings.
9. Select Enabled, and click OK.

Article Source :
Learn two ways to disable Internet Explorer

– Suramya

Converting IP address to Geolocation

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 12:55 AM

This site allows you to geolocate IP’s in bulk so that you can know where in the world a given IP address is located.

Note that might not be that accurate. For example I am currently in california but my IP address is showing up as being from Ohio. Probably recause this IP range is registered to some company in OH.

My IP Address Lookup

– Suramya

August 31, 2005

Me alive in California

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 2:08 PM

Like some of you might know, I am currently in California working on a project. Life here is cool,
the weather is awesome, the people a lot nicer and the commute a lot shorter (I am staying across the parking lot from work. No, I am not staying in the cardboard box… Someone else was already using that. 🙁 )

The only downside to staying at this place is the lack of Highspeed internet in the room. I can always goto work and get online from there but thats a pain. So I spend my time watching TV, exploring the area around the hotel and generally relaxing.

Since I don’t have anything major taking up my time I have started going through my email and replying to all the mail’s I haven’t replied to. I am all the way up to May now so hopefully I will be done in the near future.

Since I don’t have net access, work on gWifi is frozen till futher notice. Sorry. 🙁 Have a couple of other projects on the works (IM2Email and the Yahoo Search Collage) so have plenty to kill time with. Will also probably be updating the website backend to make it more efficient, but lets see.

Well this is all for now. Will keep you posted.

Cya,
Suramya

August 19, 2005

Linux Certification Preparation links

Filed under: Tutorials — Suramya @ 4:06 AM

There are a lot of different Linux Certifications out there. Here are a few links I have found that help you prepare for them.

List of Public DNS servers

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 3:32 AM

OpenNIC has a list of public dns servers that honour requests from any client available here or at the end of the page here

– Suramya

PS: Thanks to Raj Shekhar for sharing this.

PPS: Knowledge @Suramya.com is now officially back from the dead. Lets hope it stays that way. )

August 16, 2005

SIP Tutorial

Filed under: Computer Tips,Funny News — Suramya @ 11:04 PM

Was doing some research on SIP and was looking for SIP tutorials and found the following link:

HotSip

This is a hillarious explanation on how SIP works. Check it out.

– Suramya

Response to the feedback on my Hinduism article

Filed under: My Thoughts,Website Updates — Suramya @ 10:44 PM

Hi Everyone,
Over the past few months I have recieved a lot of feedback on my article on Hinduism and some of it is good some bad and one or two quite rude. I know that there are a lot of religions in India and that Hinduism is not the only religion in India. Come to think of it some of my best friends ar not Hindu’s. So I don’t know why people would think that I don’t like other religions and send me mails saying that I am showing India in a wrong light.

I only wrote about hinduism as I had done a lot of research on it and being from a hindu family I learnt a lot about it by osmosis. I would love to write about Islam or christianity but the simple fact is that I don’t know enough about these religions to be sure that what I am writing is accurate. Me talking about something that I have only a little idea about would make no sense. Thats why I don’t have articles about other religions.

Then there are those other guys who keep sending me links about how the aryan invasion theory has been disaproved. So far I havn’t read anything that either proves or disproves the theory so until I know it for a fact I don’t think I will be re-writing any articles (Plus it takes time and effort to rewrite an article and I don’t have that much free time). This article was written as a research paper for a class. I got an A in the class and I am happy with it. If you don’t agree with me too bad. I like a good debate but don’t mail me and tell me that I am an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about without proof. I will ignore you. I have better things to do with my time.

I will however, respond to people like Carl who make sensible suggestions (Carl: I will be adding links to other religons soon) and not come through like idiots.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

Cya,
Suramya

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