JDPFu.com 2025

Has anyone checked out OwnCloud?

Did an install a few days ago. Of course, used MariaDB instead of MySQL. Haven’t had a chance to try everything or even the synchronization across more than 1 machine, but I did try the photo gallery, music files and fought to get contacts into the system – LDIF is not a supported contact file type?

Anyway, any tips?

10 Reasons You Should build your own cloud

There are many Metro Atlanta Linux Groups.

• Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts – ALE – be certain to sign up for the “ALE Mailing Lists” to stay informed. Emory area.
• Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts-Northwest – ALE-NW and http://tomshiro.org/twiki/view/ALE/AleNwOrg As a sub-group to ALE, be certain to sign up for the “ALE Mailing Lists” to stay informed. This is my home LUG near SPSU in Marietta and Kennesaw
• Northeast Georgia Linux User Group – NEGALUG and their own redirect page
• GA-400 Linux Group – meets near I-285 and Powers Ferry Rd SE.
• Georgia Tech LUG
• Newnan Linux User’s Group
• Classic Hackers UGA Linux User Group – CHUGALUG – Gussing this is Athens
• Middle Georgia Linux Users Group – Macon

Other Georiga LUGs are listed here

Drop me a comment if you’d like your LUG added.

Do not assume a meeting location based on the LUG name!

• ALE Central tends to meet at Emory Law School.
• ALE-NW tends to meet at SPSU (South Loop 120 exit in Marietta)
• GA-400 LUG has meetings at a few different locations – near the top I-285 perimeter at Powers Ferry.
• NE-GA LUG meets at different locations and is experimenting with Google Hangouts.

A few of these were new to me – I just googled and looked that they had recent meetings. One even meets nearby, but the name threw me off their true location. You can google too.

Seems that we can all work together to have an organized installFest Saturday every quarter. Just a thought.

Ubuntu, Redhat, CentOS, Arch, Slackware, Debian, SUSE are the most popular distros used in these groups.

Sometimes the hardware inside our PCs is not immediately discovered by Linux so we need to

• figure out the hardware vendor and chips
• understand the device driver (or a close relative in the same family of drivers)
• locate/install the driver
• load it as a kernel module
• configure it through the kernel module
• maintain the driver going forward – this can be 100% automatic or manual, depending on the driver involved.

After all this, there are some unsupported devices out there, so getting them to work under Linux is too difficult for most users. Even for an expert, the hassle-factor might become too great for seldom used hardware.

Determining the actual hardware and the chips used is the first step to getting it working.

Last fall a patch from Microsoft broke RDP access to Windows7 Media Center here. It has been a small hassle to manage the schedule of shows to be recorded ever since, but I didn’t take the time to research a fix. Until today.

Updated: 2/2016

I don’t travel all that much, just 3-4 weeks out of the country every year, usually for pleasure, not work. Below are the Android apps that consistently work well for me.

• without a data plan
• disconnected
• using wifi-only access
  The few times that I’ve looked for a data plan overseas to add to a smartphone, the costs were simply 10x more than I was willing to pay. In Europe, sometimes the data is fairly cheap, so it becomes more of an option. £15 for 2G is a bargain. For 10 days in Turkey, would you pay US$100 for a data capable GSM-SIM? Further, after 7 day, my friend’s SIM stopped working. Seems the Turkish government wants to know about all the cell phone users in their country. Moving the SIM to a different device did make it work again.

If you have a data plan, then translation tools work easier, but we’ll assume no data or wifi connection when you are away from the hotel.

I just returned from central and south east Asia, so the apps that worked are fresh in my mind. Some have been updated, since it is 3 yrs later now and I’ve been around the USA, Africa and to Europe a few times too.

If you ever need to analyze a complete machine memory dump … er … for some reason, then learning a little about Volatility would be a good idea.

The purpose of Volatility is computer memory forensics.

Get the F/LOSS tool here

If you ever need to analyze the memory from a Microsoft computer OS, it is possible to use Volatility to read normally secured memory locations for all sorts of handy data like Domain credentials, TrueCrypt keys, analyze spyware and viruses that are not caught by the normal file-based scanning tools. Lots of good stuff in there.

We just need to cause a BSOD and dump first, which we all know is not difficult at all. With the dump file, turn Volatility loose.

From a security standpoint, this tells us to never leave a running PC with credentials, do not hibernate, suspend, and do not walk away.

I’m sure there is much more that Volatility can be used for, but Karl didn’t have time to teach everything. The video is here

Today the blog was spammed by an IP that DNS resolves back to a Microsoft Corporate subnet address. It was a Chinese language spam, if that means anything. I expect this to happen from Joe’s Pizza of San Jaquine, but not from Microsoft.

I added another rule to the firewall, which already has a few thousand similar rules.

/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s  168.61.0.0/16  -j DROP

I hate having to block large subnets, but if they can’t keep their network free from botnets, I don’t want them visiting my little blog.

The actual offending IP is 168.61.72.70 so if someone from MS wants to respond with a little more data, I’d love to hear it. I have no idea what that machine is, since even running an nmap could get me into trouble.. It could be a honeypot run by MS. I don’t know.

Subnet blocked. Sorry Microsoft.

I’m I being too harsh? What would you do?

All computers have network problems from time to time. Usually everything works fine, but sometimes something goes wrong. The first step to determining what to fix is to determine where the issue lies. Below is outlined the first troubleshooting steps to determine where the problem lies.

Update May 2021

sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt autoclean
dpkg -l 'linux*' | awk '/^rc/{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt purge -y

that will clean up removed Linux kernels, Linux headers, and Linux modules on Debian systems.

The Original Article

The script linked below stopped working recently on Ubuntu 14.04 systems. The issue was that I used a trivial regex to determine kernel names, so it is easily fixed as kernels move forward. A generic solution is a little harder. I’ll see what I can do to fix it. For now, if it doesn’t find any kernels in the list you’ll want to modify the regex to do so – or manually deal with this issue.

This isn’t a big problem, until it is. If you use LVM, then the Linux installer will create a small ext2 /boot partition. Something similar probably happens with encrypted installations. Eventuall, that partition will become full.

After a few months, there will be at least 5 kernels and perhaps 20 or more. If the /boot partition runs out of storage, bad things happen. The least of which could prevent a newer kernel being installed, but if the space filled up during a kernel install, the system may not boot.

Because this happened to me a few weeks ago, I decided to add a kernel-cleanup script to my weekly patch management efforts. Because I’m lazy, like all good system administrators, a script was needed. See below.

I’m often told that I’m too paranoid when it comes to computer security because I block ads, flash, javascript, and refuse to surf on the internet with a Microsoft Windows PC.

Well, seems that attacks have been created that come from highly reputable websites – News website included. Every website you visit has potential to infect your system with nasty software. None of them are trustworthy.

Be careful out there folks. We all need to be a little more paranoid because they are out to get everyone, not just you and me.