Where the hell's the *nix thread?

[JMG]

I'm feeling a little nerdy that I understand what y'all are talking about. Been a while since I've messed with it though.

[metulj]

Solution B: ConnectBot (the Android SSH client) has a (non-default) option to make the camera shutter button double as Esc. Well damn. Wish I'd rooted around for that to start with.

ConnectBot is an excellent SSH client all around. I like it when people BOTHER to think about what is needed in a program and what isn't needed. As for the Esc option with the shutter button, I can see why that is a non-default option, but c'mon how hard is it to code a key that sends "esc?"

[Hayduke]

Here's a reason to keep that Hacker's Keyboard installed: tab completion. For some reason the tab character sent by the default and Swype keyboards doesn't work for that.

HK also has Ctrl & Alt keys for the "Jane, stop this crazy thing" Ctrl-Z combo. Haven't tested to be sure that works, but needed it playing around with NcFTP and went dyslexic on a port number. Instead of just failing it wanted to keep trying every 20 seconds... forever. The extra keys show up only in landscape mode and the option to switch ConnectBot to landscape isn't accessible once you're connected. Sort of cryptic in that the option says it's to switch when a hard keyboard is extended. I don't have one, but "Automatic" rotates with the phone.

[Hayduke]

Any Vim users here? It's not exclusively *nix related, but I just discovered the jV add-on for Firefox that treats a text area like a Vim edit session.

jV 0.51
by Eric Uhrhane

This extension makes all html textareas into a very stripped-down version of Vi[m]. It's modal, supports infinite undo, has register support, search, visual mode, and various movement and editing commands. There's a lot yet to implement, but I've tried to cover all the basics that you'd use every day to type an email, edit a wiki page, etc. That being said, you'll note that the version number hasn't hit 1.0 yet.

If you like the power of ItsAllText, but want something a bit lighter-weight, give it a try.

So far it's working well (OK, so this post is the first try with it). Good for Vim practice or maybe just for getting really confused in all the places it doesn't work. There are some heavier weight solutions, but this is simple and customizable. I never seem to be able to write a sentence on the Blab without editing it (often with disjointed results), so this is already making life easier and less mousy.

[Hayduke]

So this was weird. I started getting messages from my hosting service that my VPS was about to go over the 500GB bandwidth limit for the month. WTF? I had a cron job set up to do horrible amounts of screen scraping and MySQL calls to store the pilfered data (only on huge retailers who won't notice my abuse of their servers) and figured that must be to blame even though it shouldn't be able to use that much bandwidth. I turned off the cron job and made a note to look into a) making the bot more efficient and b) buying some more bandwidth. But I kept getting the messages and the bandwidth number kept going up.

OK, so it's not me. Nothing on that server has any potential to go viral. I started rooting through the log files, but none of them were of any significant size, until I looked at btmp (failed logins). 64MB! Something has been trying to brute force an SSH connection at about 3 tries per second. IP traces to Indiana somewhere, but certainly just a compromised machine whose owner is wondering why it's so damned slow.

And it's never going to work. It's currently hammering on root, which isn't directly accessible on that machine (you have to login as someone else and then su), but it had previously tried things like "oracle" and "admin." All my ssh accounts are semi-obfuscated shorthand for their related domains and the passwords are nice long gobbledygook.

Anyway,
iptables -A INPUT -s 209.131.201.184 -j DROP
and it goes away, but yesterday was a different IP, and the day before that yet another, and who knows what they'll hit me with tomorrow.

This site gives a pair of iptables lines to block an ip for three minutes after 3 attempts, but I get
iptables: Unknown error 4294967295
when I try the first line. Googling indicates it's either CentOS, the virtualizer, or some combination. Not sure I can do anything about it.

Maybe write a Perl script to go look at the date of btmp every 10 minutes and then go boot any recent multiple offenders if it changes? The script would have to run iptables as root though, which might substitute a real security hole for an aggravation.

Thoughts?

[CAFKIA]

Perhaps you could redirect all inquires from that ip to files that only contain single or multiple copies of the classic goatse image. Maybe create a hundred gig or so of spoof files that only contain copies of that image. Give the files fun and interesting names like "banking records", "classic rock", "downloaded movies", "little sister webcam", "master p/wds" etc.

[Hayduke]

The upside of a honey pot is that at least the bot will quit hammering my server. Downsides include that it will still be costing me bandwidth and there's a fair chance the login will get handed off to a more sophisticated assailant who will recognize the trap and decide it's worth a more serious look.

So far today just manually checking the date stamp on the btmp file and there's no action since my last test.

[Hayduke]

From the department of stupid vim tricks

make the display line wrapping break on whitespace for text editing/reading:

set formatoptions+=1
set lbr

Doesn't insert any actual EOL, just makes the display easier to read. There are some things this wouldn't serve for, but editing html and text is way sweeter. Wish I'd found this earlier. I stuck it in the .vimrc files of various machines I have to work on and a simple ":set nolbr" temporarily toggles it back to normal.

[Ian]

I've had fairly effective results with DenyHosts and the oddly-named Fail2ban (and I currently have excellent results with Icefloor, but you'll need a more civilized flavor of *nix for that).

[Hayduke]

If you have any desire for a little headless arm server, NewEgg has these suckers on sale for $29.99. They're incorrectly labeled as POGOB01, but the picture and the actual item is POGO-E02, the one with no internal SATA bay, but 4 external USB2 ports, a 1.2 GHz arm5, 256MB RAM, 128MB NAND, & Gigabit Ethernet. Any color you like as long as it's pink.

Putting ArchLinuxArm on it was relatively easy and painless assuming you know your way around a bash prompt and/or are really good at following instructions.
http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/ar...ug-v2-pinkgray

I have the OS on a little 2GB thumb drive and plugged a big 3TB external drive. Having the OS on a removable drive solves any bricking worries because you can just put it in another machine to fix it or replace it if something goes haywire.

Plenty of space and processor to serve SAMBA, Calibre, DLNA, transmission, SABnzbd remotely. OK, I don't know if it could run all of them simultaneously, but I've run three at the same time on my old Seagate GoFlex with half the RAM and the same setup. Tons of other stuff in the repositories if you wanted to go crazy. If you have a specific application in mind, check the package lists for arm5 and the forums first. It's a long list, but I wouldn't gamble on getting anything else compiled and running.

I'll have more to say once I get files copied over and start playing with it. 1.8TB at 8MB/sec takes a while.