While skimming through Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager v2.2 help file, I came across this in bold red text:
Note: This feature is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Instead of importing servers, you should create a new .rdg file. The format is fairly easy to decipher and will probably be documented someday.
Someday… Probably…
Awesome!
While setting up my file server, I encountered an odd difference in what I was seeing on my Ubuntu server, versus what I was told works perfectly on Debian. Specifically, on the latter, you can mount --bind a directory and make it read-only at the same time, but on Ubuntu mount --bind explicitly cannot change the mount options, and the same operation (mount -o bind,ro ...) requires two distinct commands (mount --bind ... && mount -o remount,ro ...)!
I know Ubuntu isn’t Debian, but it is based on it! Sure, it does things “the Ubuntu way”, which isn’t necessarily “the Debian way”, but you would expect a low-level utility like mount — especially one that is common across all the *nixes! — to behave basically the same between Ubuntu and its spiritual (if not actual) upstream Debian. So very strange that it would not, very strange indeed…
Will post about my file server build and setup (including this very odd discovery) later. Just wanted to share this confusion and ask if anyone knows of any other odd differences between Debian and Ubuntu, or know of the reason for this one.
Recently, my file server suffered a hard drive failure. Fortunately, as was the primary purpose of said file server, I had backups and thus lost no data. But, instead of simply replacing the failed disk, I’m taking the opportunity to upgrade and rebuild the thing, and doing a few things differently. Continue reading
For years, I’ve run everything web-based on the standard LAMP (or, on occasion, WAMP) stack. I never really thought much about it, to tell you the truth: It’s what everyone seemed to be using, and it worked, so why question it?
When my server began to frequently encounter out-of-memory errors, it took me a while to come up with the solution of adding a cron job that nightly restarted MySQL and Apache, as those were my memory-gobbling culprits, the latter frequently guilty of heavy swapping. With cron job in place, though, life was good again, and I never thought much more about it.
Until completely by accident I discovered Nginx. Continue reading
So if you haven’t already noticed, the site is now using a new theme. I think this one feels cleaner and more friendly than the old one. What do you think? Leave your feedback in the comments, including suggestions for alternative themes if you have any.
The server’s running on new software now. Replaced Apache with nginx, and am now using PHP via PHP-FPM. I may remove the latter, though, in favor of just the basic FastCGI interface — this isn’t exactly a high-traffic site, so doesn’t really need FPM per se.
I’ll go into more details in another post. So far, though, I’m very happy — maybe it’s just me, but I really think I actually notice the difference in the site’s performance.
I figure it’s a good time to also play with the site’s theme and layout. So far, though, I’ve not found a theme that looks good and doesn’t make my code snippets look like crap.
I’m trying out a new service that uses a CDN-like technology to both increase this site’s security as well as simultaneously improving page load times. They’re still in beta themselves, so the site may behave unpredictably in the meantime; let me know if you encounter any issues and I’ll pass them along to their support folks (who have already impressed me by responding within minutes to a bug I reported). As for who they are, they want to keep things quiet until they make a big announcement at a tech conference, so I’ll respect their wishes and not name them yet.
I normally won’t be getting political on this blog, but I came across this story and was absolutely floored. Whether or not you support gay marriage, you have to agree that the blatant disregard for due process, existing legal statuses and rights, and simple human decency is frankly appalling! The actions Sonoma County undertook here have no justification, and the end result was an old man who’d lived an amazing life was forced to spend his final months in forced isolation while all his material possessions – keepsakes collected throughout his life – were stripped away and sold off for mere pittances. Meanwhile his partner was forced into a care facility and held there against his will, denied the right to be there for his loved one’s final moments.
What justification could there possibly be for this atrocity??
If you manage one or more servers, chances are you employ SSH for remote management of that server. If you’ve checked the logs for your SSH server (you do check your logs, don’t you?), chances are you’ve seen plenty of these:
Mar 21 12:25:15 odin sshd[28010]: Did not receive identification string from 61.184.104.106
Mar 21 12:29:32 odin sshd[28011]: Invalid user webmaster from 61.184.104.106
Mar 21 12:29:33 odin sshd[28011]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): check pass; user unknown
Mar 21 12:29:33 odin sshd[28011]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=61.184.104.106
Mar 21 12:29:35 odin sshd[28011]: Failed password for invalid user webmaster from 61.184.104.106 port 53329 ssh2
Mar 21 12:29:41 odin sshd[28013]: User root from 61.184.104.106 not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups
Mar 21 12:29:41 odin sshd[28013]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=61.184.104.106 user=root
Mar 21 12:29:43 odin sshd[28013]: Failed password for invalid user root from 61.184.104.106 port 56109 ssh2
Mar 21 12:29:45 odin sshd[28015]: Invalid user ftp from 61.184.104.106
Mar 21 12:29:45 odin sshd[28015]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): check pass; user unknown
Mar 21 12:29:45 odin sshd[28015]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=61.184.104.106
Mar 21 12:29:47 odin sshd[28015]: Failed password for invalid user ftp from 61.184.104.106 port 59859 ssh2
There’s countless ill-intentioned folks out there who would love to gain access to your system. SSH is a great doorway, all they need to do is find the key; hopefully they haven’t (but if they had, would you know?), and today I’m going to show you 4 ways to keep your server safe. I won’t harangue you on strong passwords or using public keys instead of passwords; instead, I’ll show you other measures you can take to improve the security of those mechanisms. Continue reading
So, the after-effects of the drugs have cleared up, replaced by pain. I’ve got the ice pack they gave me wrapped around my head again, and beyond that all I can say is that I’m glad for the invention of Vicodine!
The bleeding’s stopped, though – that’s good!
