The Internet made me do it!

New York Marathon 2012

Posted on January 12, 2012 by billy

Got a guaranteed place in the New York Marathon this year, Yehh! Perseverance does pay off it seems.

Posted in Personal, Running | Leave a comment

Making outgoing IRC DCC work with NAT and XChat

Posted on November 9, 2011 by billy

This is basically a reminder to myself in case I need to set this up again, if you want to do this for more than one PC behind a NAT firewall-router, then you will of course have to use a different port range for each PC. I’m using 20 ports per PC so that I can have 20 simultaneous connection.

I’m making the assumption that your router has the ability to create a virtual servers (an inbound port range that can map to an Internal Class C Private address range). I’ve called the Virtual server below “DCC Chat Workstation”, since workstation is the hostname of my main PC (original ehh). I’ve also given it an internal and external port range of 54000 to 54019, to be forwarded to the IP address of my Workstation.

On my workstation I start the XChat IRC client, select Settings –> Preferences –>File Transfer and change the First DCC send port to 54000 then change the Last DCC send port to 54019. That will give you 20 ports to play with. Also select (tick) “Get my address from the IRC server”.

All done.

If you happen to run iptables or similar on your linux/unix box, then remember to allow the port range listed above access. If like me, your running ufw on ubuntu then the command is

sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 54000:54019

Reference:
Making outgoing IRC DCC work with NAT

Posted in Linux | Tagged Home PC, Linux | Leave a comment

The Register

Posted on October 25, 2011 by billy

It looks like the tech website “The Register” has managed to accidentally send my e-mail address to 3000 other people. Thanks for that! *sarcasm*,

I do understand that these things happen, and nothings fool proof, still, if you slag other people off in the industry for doing that. Then you really need to be make sure that it doesn’t happen to you. Otherwise your credibility as a technology website kind of goes out the window.

Hello,

This morning the name and email address you used to register for The
Register was mistakenly sent to 3,521 individuals, also readers of
The Register.

We've contacted them asking them to delete the email and respect your
privacy.

We are of course terribly sorry for this error and have reported
ourselves to the ICO. Our initial statement is here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24/email_blunder/

You are free to edit or delete your account details here:

http://account.theregister.co.uk/register/

If you have any questions or would just like to rant at us please
send emails to mailto:*****@theregister.co.uk

Best Regards
The Register

Anyway, rant over, I’ll still be visiting their website, as at the end of the day, at least it was only my e-mail address. Unlike Sony who managed to totally ruin my day a few months ago.

Posted in Wordpress | Leave a comment

Secure Shell login attempts

Posted on July 11, 2011 by billy

After getting the following secure shell login attempts, I’ve decided to remove winbind from my home linux boxes. It’s not a big deal as I’ve only got a few workstations and I’m not running Active Directory at home. They are all in a windows workgroup so no problems.

Jul 10 09:12:18 workstation sshd[14329]:
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): getting password (0x00000388)
Jul 10 09:12:18 workstation sshd[14329]: pam_winbind(sshd:auth):
pam_get_item returned a password
Jul 10 09:12:18 workstation sshd[14329]:
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): request wbcLogonUser failed:
WBC_ERR_AUTH_ERROR, PAM error: PAM_USER_UNKNOWN (10), NTSTATUS:
NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER, Error message was: No such user
Jul 10 09:12:28 workstation sshd[14331]:
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): getting password (0x00000388)
Jul 10 09:12:28 workstation sshd[14331]:
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): pam_get_item returned a password
Jul 10 09:12:28 workstation sshd[14331]:
pam_winbind(sshd:auth): request wbcLogonUser failed:
WBC_ERR_AUTH_ERROR, PAM error: PAM_USER_UNKNOWN (10), NTSTATUS:
NT_STATUS_NO_SUCH_USER, Error message was: No such user

To remove winbind from a Ubuntu or Debian workstation, type the following.


sudo apt-get remove winbind

Job done.

To prevent brute force login attempts on workstations running ssh (secure shell), I would always suggest either installing fail2ban or denyhosts.

References:
Samba.org winbind

Ubuntu Forum – SSH login attempts using winbind

Posted in Linux, Personal | Tagged Home Linux Server | Leave a comment

Just playing about with QR Code’s

Posted on April 26, 2011 by billy

I’ve just been reading all about QR Codes and I’ve generated on for this website, makes for an interesting read (if your technically minded otherwise I wouldn’t bother). I also noticed that they seem to be getting popular as tattoos as well.