Here I would like to take you through the steps to configuring and securing a router (In this case we will use the WRT54G as an example) for your home or small office setup. 

Securing a router can be very important especially when the wireless function is enabled.  Likely the most important reason is to prevent would be hackers / criminals from attacking other larger networks or institutions by hijacking your network or PC to do so with.  This could have unpleasant consequences for you even though you would be just a pawn in such a mess.

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Fedora 13 has been out now since around May 25th, so it's time for the semi annual upgrade.  Unlike with previous versions, I've now switched to the GNOME desktop since I have been finding the KDE desktop to be far less intuitive then it's former competitor and far less responsive.  (As you recall from the previous upgrades, KDE was introduced rewritten almost entirely in Qt4).  The only benefactors of the new KDE appear to be my kids.  The start menu panel in KDE seams more easy to use for them then GNOME's start menus, though I'm sure a little tweaking in GNOME can fix that.
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PROBLEM

You get this when trying to SSH to a host from some IP (Let’s assume it’s 111.22.33.44 for the scope of this problem):

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

What to do? Read the rest of this entry »

PROBLEM

A little tidbit of Windows knowledge.  When highlighting a section of a Microsoft Word document and pressing the delete key, nothing happens.  No errors or messages at all.  Try this to fix it…

SOLUTION

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Skype is a popular text, video and voice (VoIP) chat client.  A more detailed article can be found on the Wikipedia Skype page.  Here is a list of some of the hurdles I’ve ran into getting the client to work on my own distribution.

PROBLEM

Skype for Linux had poor video in the not so distant past so having upgrade to Fedora 12 recently, I’ve decided to see if my setup still worked fine.  So the typical problem you might run into is that Skype will simply crash when doing anything with a webcam (When using a command like # /usr/bin/skype & or from your UI menus which defaults to that command anyway).  Here’s one way how to resolve this issue that worked for me.

SOLUTION

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Fedora 12 has been out of the oven since about Nov 17 so it’s high time I upgrade before it spoils.  As with the previous release, I look forward to any new features in KDE 4.3.  (As you recall from the previous upgrades, KDE was introduced rewritten almost entirely in Qt4).  Also noteworthy to mention is the issues in ATI graphics that popped up after upgrading.  Hopefully the community has had time to catch up as at the time support for my old Radeon 9600 was dropped and after some searches at the time not even ATI was maintaining support for Linux drivers for the family of chipsets of the cards.  Unfortunately, there was even some division around how cards like Radeon are supported from Linus himself.  (As far as I’m concerned David can do what he wants  just like Linus did  ).
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Since around Fedora 8 and KDE 4.0, the default DESKTOPMANAGER that greets you before you login to your GUI  is  set to GNOME (Even now with Fedora 13 out, the same is still true).  Now I was an avid KDE user and though I started on Gnome, KDE just grew on me up until about Fedora 12.  After that, I'm now a GNOME user, pending numerous fixes the KDE team is still working on.  The fact that I had a GNOME login panel at the beginning as I'm going to login to KDE didn't really make at the time.  Now I have another reason.  What I wanted was something that looked a little bit more completed:

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Following a recent upgrade, Xorg was apparently also updated to version xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.6.1.901-1.fc11.i586 which unfortunately didn’t play nicely with version xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.12.2-14.fc11.i586 .  After a brief investigation, the combination resulted in this error:

 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so: undefined symbol: DRIOpenDRMMaster

Ultimately, this had the following effect:

• No GUI (System never got as far as showing any graphics let alone KDE, Gnome etc)
• No Keyboard functionality: Couldn’t open console window with CTRL-ALT-F1-9 keys.
• No mouse functionality.
• No error message on the screen.  Just an empty screen.

Not good.  The system was frozen and unresponsive and nothing I tried on the terminal did anything.  Here’s how to go a about solving this issue.

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Here we’ll go over how to connect, configure and format a SATA I / II hard drive on Linux.  The intent for this drive ultimately was to share the drive through SAMBA between our home PC’s and to hold home movies from the Sony HDR-SR7 camcorder I have.  Ultimately, I will be using this drive and ffmpeg to convert movies from M2TS format to AVI format using the x264 codec available on Linux.  I’ll need the space.

Here’s how to go about doing just this:

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There are plenty of ways to share resources and files between two or more computers.  You could do things like:

• Email yourself an attachment.
• Use FTP between the two PC’s.
• Use SSH between the two computers.
• Use sneaker-net: copy the files to Flash Disk, DVD, CD, (gulp) floppy etc. and walk over to the other computer then load them up.
• Copy the file by hand.
• etc (It pretty much just goes downhill from here).

Or you could enable NFS or better yet, as we will discuss here, use SAMBA and share entire folders, allowing you to simply save to a shared folder making the file / folder visible from other PC’s on your network. 

We will therefore do two things over the network in this post using SAMBA:

• Mount Windows shared folders on Linux.
• Map Linux shared folders (Using Map Network Drive… option) on Windows.

This of course will be different then simply mounting partitions on the same machine as we have outlined in Windows / Linux: Mutually accessing various filesystems on the same PC. since will be doing this type of sharing over the network instead of just on the same PC.  In this post we will share folders between Fedora Linux and Windows, though the general config of the applications can apply to other distributions.  Here’s how to get this done:

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