Category Archives: Personal

Personal opinions and thoughts

Setting up your Raspberry Pi (headless)

Raspberry Pi Hardware List

Initial Software Setup

If you’ve already set up your pi and you need to get to this menu again, the command is.

sudo raspi-config

Couple of assumptions I’m making here, your running Raspbian, you have a passing familiarity with Linux (you don’t have to be an expert) and the other, is that your Pi is already built and connected to your home network.

I’m going to be running DNS, DHCP, NTP and IPv6 Tunnel services on this Raspberry Pi, so I’m going to be running it headless (no keyboard, mouse or monitor). If this isn’t what you want to use your Pi for, then this howto probably isn’t for you. :-)

Select expanding the root filesystem and press Return, this will expand the filesystem from 2Gig to the full size of your SD card.

expand_rootfs

I’m going to run this pi headless and secure shell into it over my home network, at the moment, memory is shared equally with the graphics card which is a bit of a waste. So I’m going to select memory split and release more memory from the graphic card to the operating system.

memory_split

Select 16M, if you decide at a later date you want to run a GUI then you can go back and change it back.

memory_split_amount

Select Ok above, then select Finish.

finish

Secure Shell login attempts

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. :-D

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

Just playing about with QR Code’s

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.

Website QR Code

References:

Wikipedia – QR code
Online QR-Code Generator
KTAR.com – tattooing QR codes
QR Code Tech Info : MECARD Format
Creat a QR code image in MECARD format – Commandlinefu.com

Setting up a IPv6 Gateway on Hurricane Electric using Ubuntu 10.04.2

First thing you’ll need to do is register at the Hurricane Electric website and create your tunnel. I’m not going to go over that since there’s a lot  of help on the Hurricane Electric Website about it. These instructions only apply to you after you’ve registered as a user and set up your tunnel on there website.

These instruction’s  apply to Debian and Ubuntu derivatives, I’m sure they will work for other distributions with a little tweaking. Thanks to angelou on the Hurricane Electric web forum for doing most of the hard work. These instructions are mostly his work, with ufw firewall instructions are provided by me.

Continue reading

Setting up IPv6 access for a home network using Ubuntu Linux

Before starting this howto, I would suggest that you get IPv6 working by following the instructions here. If you’ve followed all the instructions in the previous post, you should now have a linux workstation that allows you to view IPv6 websites.

If you want to extend this ability and enable all the workstations on your network to have the same ability then feel free to follow the instructions provided.

First things first, you need to register with Freenet6 who will be your IPv6 tunnel provider, the registration page is here. Take a note of your password and username, you will need this later. Continue reading

Setting up IPv6 access for a home workstation under Ubuntu Linux

My current home workstation is running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but I’m sure you should be able to adapt the following to run on debian or other Ubuntu flavours.

This part only applied to setting up a single workstation, at some point, I’m going to set up my linux home server, to act at an IPv6 gateway for all the IPv6 enabled home devices.

First we have to install the IPv6 gateway client.

sudo apt-get install gw6c radvd

The default installation connects to Freenet automatically and anonymously so that should be it. Continue reading