This is a fine one.  Anyone who uses WordPress may need to deal with this.  Unfortunately, despite using reCAPTCHA, Akismet still picks up tons of span on my blog.  So why am I getting spam comments when I have reCAPTCHA?  Read the rest of this entry »

PROBLEM

Another day brings another bug. This time it’s with the Akonadi server failing or unable to start.  This error followed a recent update I’ve done on my Fedora box.  This is what greeted me each time I started up KDE:

The QtSQL driver ‘QMYSQL’ is required by your current Akonadi server configuration.
The following drivers are installed: QSQLITE, QMYSQL3, QMYSQL.
Make sure the required driver is installed.

Personally, I don’t like uninvited guests, especially the ones that crash the party.  So off I went to see what broke.  The error gave some clues where I should look which included MySQL, akonadi and QtSQL.  Here’s how I went about resolving this one.

SOLUTION
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PROBLEM

On Linux, you receive this error when trying to open up links from inside Thunderbird emails:

Error showing url: Failed to execute child process "/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.5/firefox" (No such file or directory)

SOLUTION

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PROBLEM

Just today an issue came up for me installing the google toolbar.  (This Google toolbar has been in Beta for a while now, which caught my attention and may or should catch yours: Beta releases are buggy.  That may be beside the point though since I don’t care as long as it does it’s job well since some company’s betas are better then other companies official releases.  :)    )

I got this cryptic error:

Firefox could not install the file at

http://dl.google.com/firefox/google-toolbar-beta-linux.xpi

because: Signing could not be verified
-260

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Hashes are a certainly very important part of any language.  If you’re not used to hashes, you may not see their potential at first.  However, having used them in several languages now, hashes always ended up reducing my code significantly especially when only complex solutions would only do otherwise.  However, bash or ksh for that matter, don’t really come with such a construct.  Reading up on how to do such a thing really didn’t provide any elegant solutions that I wanted for most scenarios.  What I really wanted is something that had these features: Read the rest of this entry »

INTRODUCTION

Most people today know or have some idea what a firewall is.  For those not too familiar with it, it’s essentially a piece of software or hardware that sits between your computer and the internet (outside world) helping to prevent unauthorized access to your computer / workstation.  The firewall does this by blocking certain ports on your workstation that applications normally use to communicate with over networks. It does this to hide vulnerable applications from being exposed to potentially malicious break in attempts.  The firewall’s granularity typically reaches and is limited to filtering the type of protocols allowed on as little as a single IP, the direction (IN / OUT = TO / FROM your computer) of the traffic and as broad as blocking entire sets of IP’s (For example 50.N.N.N - 150.N.N.N).  This is really the broad range of what a typical firewall can do. Read the rest of this entry »

Apache HTTPD is the most popular web server to date.  It’s extensible and configurable to meet various needs both small and big.  Here we’ll focus on extending it’s reporting functionality by enabling full status capability to see more granularity in status reports.  As you probably know, the service on Red Hat Linux systems can be controlled with the service command like this: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s still a surprise to most just how much scanning and probing by either hackers or malicious software is going on on the web when they do find out.  I mean, do you really know how many times your workstation or home network get’s hit by attempted intrusions and invasions?  I was never able to find this sort thing out or to see it until I ran Linux.  This, imho, makes the Linux OS a bit more open to reporting such things, which is one of the things I like about it. 

Just recently looking over my logs I see there is a large 0-Day scan hitting boxes around the web with regards to the roundcube webmail application. The scan has been spreading over the web and has now been hitting my box since yesterday.  Initially I responded with an ad-hoc solution to this and I’ve blocked some IP’s namely the ones below: Read the rest of this entry »

PROBLEM

One of the first things that went wrong after upgrading to Fedora 10 was the UI screen was unreadable / undescernable.  The screen was entirely messed up and though the keyboard worked fine, it wasn’t easy to discern the UI windows from the shades of red, yellow, blue, green etc grany dots that showed up.  In my case, I’ve solved this by lowering the video resolution in the below manner.  I have the ATI Radeo 9600 card.

SOLUTION

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PROBLEM

In Fedora 10, the root login was disabled into the GUI, giving you a unable to authenticate user message.  You may have noticed that you got a warning about this in Fedora 9 but it wasn’t yet disabled then.  Not so in Fedora 10 so this might be something you would want to do prior to rebooting after upgrading to Fedora 10.  I’m not all too surprised this eventually happened.  It’s not uncommon to hear of this whereever you happen to ask.  So essentially the pot finally boiled over and we have no root login.  This effects Gnome, KDE and the whole lot.

Essentially the problem relies in the GDM file.

SOLUTION

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