January 2011 | Linux Blog

How to add CD-ROM to the sources.list file in Ubuntu / Debian Linux

If you'd rather use your CD-ROM for installing packages or updating your system automatically with APT, you can put it in your sources.list.
Open up your terminal and type following command to add CD-ROM to your sources.list file

sudo apt-cdrom add

Linux Remote Support Software - Bomgar

Do you use both windows and Linux? Wish you could remote into Windows from Linux and to other Linux distributions? Well, you can. Just like when using a Remote Desktop Connection between Microsoft platforms (or remoting between Linux machines), you can bring up the desktop of the other platform. You can click around the desktop and run applications just as if you were sitting in front of the computer.

Linux has a strong foothold in the server market and an increasing number of companies and government institutions standardizing on it. If your enterprise is strong on support, then you owe it to yourself to try something more standard and secure solutions.

How to test DNS server for host Resolution

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a standard technology for managing the names of Web sites and other Internet domains. DNS is an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because domain names (example - google.com) are alphabetic, they're easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.google.com.com might translate to 209.85.153.104.

The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn't know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.

Text Watermarking and Watermark Recovery - Snowdrop

The traditional watermarking relies on embedding some information in a binary file (such a proprietary format document - Adobe PDF, MS Word or multimedia files) to identify the origin of a particular copy. Watermarking can be combined with steganography to hide this data from a casual viewer.

Snowdrop is intended to bring (relatively) invisible and modification-proof watermarking to a new realm of "source material" - written word and computer source codes. The information is not being embedded in the least significant portions of some binary output, as it would be with a traditional low-level steganography, but into the source itself.

Real-time user logins monitoring tool - whowatch

Whowatch is an interactive ncurses who-like utility that displays information about the users currently logged on to the machine, in real-time. Besides standard informations (login name, tty, host, user's process), the type of the connection (ie. telnet or ssh) is shown. Display of users command line can be switch to tty idle time. Certain user can be selected and his processes tree may be viewed as well as tree of all system processes. Tree may be displayed with additional column that shows owner of each process. In the process tree mode SIGINT and SIGKILL signals can be sent to the selected process. Killing processes is just as simple and fun as deleting lines on the screen.

Whowatch has no command line options or configuration file.

Linux Small Business Server (SMBs) - Zentyal

About 99% of companies in the world are small and medium businesses (SMBs) and generate more than half of the global GPD. But in times of crisis, this is the most vulnerable segment of the economy and therefore, the one that most urgently needs to reduce costs and increase productivity.

One of the best ways to reduce costs and to increase productivity in the SMBs is by introducing information and communication technologies (ICT). And the statistics of recent years, that show over 50% annual growth in the adoption of ICT solutions depending on the segment, support this fact.

Dynamic Managing the swap file creation & deletion - Swapd

Swap or virtual memory is a technique used to write some memory content, not used at the moment, to the hard disk to make room for a process which needs more memory now. swap is said to be 1000 times slower than having "real", physical memory.

By using swap space, programs can be started even when the memory is used to its maximum without having to shut down processes first. This also make a good buffer for when peaks of memory usage occur. Linux can add swap space in two ways, either as a swap file within the file system or as a separate partition.

Linux Distribution Specially for Children – DoudouLinux

DoudouLinux is a computer environment designed for children that is as simple to use as a gaming console. It is freely downloadable and contains about 50 applications that were selected on the basis of being easily accessible for children and/or dedicated specifically to children. Not to mention most were also selected because they are very fun and addictive! The selection includes educational and fun games, art-oriented applications (drawing, music), and work-oriented programs (dictionary, calculator, communication). Reading is not required for use and DoudouLinux is so simple that children as young as 2 years old can use it and quickly become autonomous. In addition, because most games teach along with entertaining, children actually learn many skills along the way.

Kills all of the user's processes - Slay

Slay is a simple yet very handy shell script that kills all of the processes belonging to a specific user and displays an (optional) "Your current session has been terminated." to the user being booted.

slay finds and kills all the user's processes at once, saving you the trouble of hunting them down and killing them yourself. slay has four modes: nice, normal, mean, and butthead. Mean mode kills any nonprivileged user who attempts to slay another user. Set your desired mode in slay shell script.

UI Application to find and remove orphaned libraries under Ubuntu - GtkOrphan

GtkOrphan (a Perl/Gtk2 application for debian systems) is a graphical tool which analyzes the status of your installations, looking for orphaned libraries. It implements a GUI front-end for deborphan, adding the package-removal capability.

This software is designed for Debian based distributions. It must be run with root privileges.

GtkOrphan Features include:
  * Simple, intuitive utility
  * On-the-fly changes
  * Shows packages in hibernation status
  * Internationalization support

Speed up web site using HTTP accelerator - Varnish

Varnish is a state-of-the-art, high-performance web accelerator. It uses the advanced features in Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 6/7 and Solaris 10 to achieve its high performance.

Some of the Varnish features include:
  * A modern design
  * VCL - a very flexible configuration language
  * Load balancing with health checking of backends
  * Partial support for ESI
  * URL rewriting
  * Graceful handling of “dead” back-ends

Parental Control System on Ubuntu Linux - Nanny

Nanny is an easy way to control what your kids are doing in the computer. You can limit how much time a day each one of them is browsing the web, chatting or doing email. You can also decide at which times of the day they can surf the net, email or chatting.

Nanny can also filters what web content for each specified users, so you can block all undesirable webs for your kids with ease of mind, no more worries!

Automatic SQL injection tool - sqlmap

Whatever you do with this tool is uniquely your responsibility. If you are not authorized to punch holes in the network you are attacking be aware that such action might get you in trouble with a lot of law enforcement agencies.

sqlmap goal is to detect and take advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications. Once it detects one or more SQL injections on the target host, the user can choose among a variety of options to perform an extensive back-end database management system fingerprint, retrieve DBMS session user and database, enumerate users, password hashes, privileges, databases, dump entire or user's specific DBMS tables/columns, run his own SQL statement, read specific files on the file system and more.

How to Reset Windows (NT / 2k / XP / Vista / Win7) password using Ubuntu - chntpw

chntpw is a Linux utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your Windows NT / 2k / XP / Vista / Win7, by modifying the crypted password in the registry's SAM file. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one. It works offline i.e., you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a linux floppy disk or on the dual boot system.

In addition it also contains a simple registry editor (same size data writes) and an hex-editor which enables you to fiddle around with bits and bytes in the file as you wish.

Advance Music Player and Organizer - Clementine

Clementine is a multiplatform music player. It is inspired by Amarok, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching, organizing and playing your music.

Utility to Optimize / Compress JPEG files under Ubuntu Linux - jpegoptim

Jpegoptim can optimize / compress jpeg files. Jpegoptim support lossless optimization, which is based on optimizing the Huffman tables. So called, "lossy" optimization (compression) is done by re-encoding the image using user specified image quality factor.

Jpegoptim Installation:
Open up the terminal and type following command to install Jpegoptim:

sudo apt-get install jpegoptim

How to Disable SELinux in Fedora 14

SELinux is a security enhancement to Linux that allows users and administrators more control over which users and applications can access which resources, such as files. Standard Linux access controls, such as file modes (-rwxr-xr-x) are modifiable by the user and applications that the user runs whereas SELinux access controls are determined by a policy loaded on the system and not changeable by careless users or misbehaving applications.

SELinux also adds finer granularity to access controls. Instead of only being able to specify who can read, write or execute a file, for example, SELinux lets you specify who can unlink, append only, move a file and so on. SELinux allows you to specify access to many resources other than files as well, such as network resources and interprocess communication (IPC).

Easy steps to tune-up your Ubuntu / Kubuntu Linux System

Below are few very simple and easy steps to fast tune your Ubuntu / Kubuntu Linux system.

Disable IPv6:
IPV6 got many new exciting features but if you are not on an IPV6 network, I don't think there is any benefit to having this protocol enabled.
Check here - How to disable ipv6 in Ubuntu Linux

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