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I have noticed brute force attempts for years now. I have a simple script that adds hosts with a number of failed attempts to /etc/hosts.deny automatically. If a host logs in successfully, all its past "mistakes" are forgiven.

This has helped cut down on the invalid login attempts by >90%. This is by no means a perfect defense, since each botnet slave has three "shots" at guessing my passwords, but it still helps mitigate the problem.

To use my script, you need to add this to your sshd_config:

    MaxAuthTries 3

And this to your root cronjob:

    @reboot tail -F /var/log/auth.log | ~/bin/AutoDenyAttacker.pl &

(Replace the path for AutoDenyAttacker to fit your needs). You can download the script here: http://apocalypse.rulez.org/~upi/AutoDenyAttacker.txt (This is a perl script -- rename it to .pl after you download.)

This script works well for debian etch and lenny, and I expect it would work on other systems too, perhaps with a bit of tweaking.

Regards,
UPi.

(As posted to my blog)

A couple of weeks ago, I bought Psychonauts for the PS2, conviced by NoobToob, and the fact that it's written by Tim Schäfer (man, did I love Day of the Tentacle) that it's going to be a great game with clever humour. So I started it up with great anticipation, and was soon disappointed. While it delivered on the humour front, as a game, it was a pain in the ass to play, due to unbearable loading times and frequent framedrops and slowdowns.

Now, what does this have to do with our subject? Well, it got me thinking about how I nearly always finish movies or books I start. No matter how boring and pompous, sitting through a movie is never really tedious. There are lots of movies where shitty execution covers an otherwise solid concept, and I'm sure everyone's read books that are poorly written yet have messages that are definitely worth absorbing.

But if it's a game, and even one that shows so much promise for its writing as does the first couple of levels in Psychonauts, if I have to waste 20-30 seconds each time I go from one place to another looking at a boring "loading..." screen, sooner rather than later I'm going to say "fuck that shit" and just not care what witty humour awaits in the next room.

And this is not the same as whining about superficial stuff like graphics. Take Shadow of the Colossus, for instance. After I've finished this truly marvelous game, I've read on a lot of sites how horrible its graphics and textures are by today's standards. But when I was playing it, I was so overwhelmed by the experience, as opposed to the sensation, that even at this point I still can't look at screenshots and not be awed.

Actually it's MULTIplayer only. And it's quite a bit of work that you have to do before you can play as yourself, but it works. See the Character_HOWTO.

bleh, boot into windows, defrag and use gParted from within the Ubuntu Live CD to resize the partition,

No.

If something goes wrong with the resize, I'll just use his restore disks... oh wait, he doesn't have any yet.

Your advice is not helpful.

unless WinMCE did something stupid like use an NTFS partition

Are you kidding?

0) NTFS is the best file system Microsoft has. If his computer wasn't NTFS it would be FAT32, and FAT32 is really lousy compared to NTFS (or ext3, or any decent file system). All recent Windows computers come set up with NTFS. I don't think it is reasonable to call this "stupid".

1) Ubuntu should be able to resize an NTFS partition anyway, with ntfsresize. But I don't dare try it because he has no restore disks yet.

Your comment is not insightful.

steveha

For all who are wondering what appened, an image explains better than thousand words: here it is

N.B.: Duh, server's slow :\ should be under maintenance.

Sorry folks, couldn't resist

Afrodot. News for idiots.

Oh good grief! DO NOT USE partion magic! Bad things can happen.

Try ntfsresize. It's worked well for me!

For best results, do it BEFORE you first boot windows! (Some versions of windows like to put a swapfile at the end of the window's partition.)

Quote from the Ntfsresize FAQ

Windows boot problem occurs if one edited the partition table by Parted/libparted version less than 1.6.12 based partitioning tool. This is especially true if a Linux 2.6 kernel was used. The Linux 2.6 kernels report different disk geometries as previously for the same disk an incompatible way therefore fooling softwares like Parted. Unluckily many partitioning tools weren't adjusted accordingly thus in some cases they might render Windows unbootable and even your data inaccessible by saving an incorrect partition table. Known major distributions having this problem are but not limited to Mandrake 10, SUSE 9.1, Fedora 2.

If you used a distribution having this problem then please check your vendors errata or see below for possible recovery solutions. As far as we know, all major vendor solved this problem in their latter releases. We'd also like to emphasize again, this is not only an NTFS related problem and it is not caused by the usage of ntfsresize.

You forgot the link

Feb 24, 2005: Ubuntu 5.04, codenamed "Hoary Hedgehog", is the newest distribution that added support for non-destructive NTFS resizing during installation by the use Partman and ntfsresize. Here is how you can do it when the [Partitioning disks] screen appears:

1. Choose the "Manually edit partition table" option.
2. Choose the NTFS partition you want to resize.
3. Choose the "Size:" line.
4. Choose if you are asked about "Write changes to disk and resize the partition?".
5. Enter the new size.
6. Please wait patiently until the resize process frees the needed space for Ubuntu installation.

He propably meant Gparted altough in Ubuntu 5.04 "Hoary Hedgehog" Partman is used.

Regardless, I was actually curious to see what kind of burning solution they bring to Linux. So far most (if not all) graphical burners are just frontends for cdrdao, cdrtools or dvd+rw-tools.

Rumour has it they used GnomeToaster for the interface. If NeroLinux is just another frontend, then it will be quickly dismissed by serious Linux users, who already have several established alternatives to choose from.

But the NeroLinux presentation mentions all kinds of goodies, including "NeroAPI 6.6" interfacing with 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. A new player in the Linux burning arena, coupled with an actual full port of Nero to Linux, would be a wonderful thing IMO. Serious competition is always good.

Either way, this is good news for the Linux user base. One less application for the newbies to worry about when pondering switching to Linux. Nevermind if it comes with a native burning solution or not; just knowing that "Nero has a Linux version" will encourage people to switch. I personally heard many say Nero was the last app holding them back. This is one of the highest profile apps for Windows, and now it has established a Linux presence. This is great news.

well, i figgered u must have some more pictures in that directory, so i took a look around...good collection, kept me busy for a good 1/2 hr.

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/ some favorites: http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/book4.jpg http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/mod_perl.jp g http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/sweet_local host.jpg sincerely yours, djdavetrouble

well, i figgered u must have some more pictures in that directory, so i took a look around...good collection, kept me busy for a good 1/2 hr.

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/ some favorites: http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/book4.jpg http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/mod_perl.jp g http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/sweet_local host.jpg sincerely yours, djdavetrouble

well, i figgered u must have some more pictures in that directory, so i took a look around...good collection, kept me busy for a good 1/2 hr.

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/ some favorites: http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/book4.jpg http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/mod_perl.jp g http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/sweet_local host.jpg sincerely yours, djdavetrouble

well, i figgered u must have some more pictures in that directory, so i took a look around...good collection, kept me busy for a good 1/2 hr.

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/ some favorites: http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/book4.jpg http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/mod_perl.jp g http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/sweet_local host.jpg sincerely yours, djdavetrouble

Mine's Better.....

It's not as easy to destroy all data as usually thought. In theory, three things might go wrong during resizing an NTFS partition and setting it up for dual boot,

1. NTFS resizing by ntfsresize.
2. Repartitioning by fdisk, cfdisk, Parted, QTParted, DiskDrake, YaST, etc.
3. Boot manager setup using LILO, GRUB, etc.

In all cases, we have met, the problem was introduced in either step 2 or step 3 and not by the use of ntfsresize. In most cases this means, your data is still intact but you can't access it.

Most often a Windows boot problem occurs if one edited the partition table by Parted version less than 1.6.12 or a libparted based partitioning tool. This is especially true if a Linux 2.6 kernel was used. The Linux 2.6 kernels report different disk geometries as previously for the same disk an incompatible way therefore fooling softwares like Parted. Unluckily many partitioning tools weren't adjusted accordingly thus in some cases they might render Windows unbootable and even your data inaccessible by saving an incorrect partition table. Known major distributions having this problem are but not limited to Mandrake 10, SUSE 9.1, Fedora 2.

If you used a distribution having this problem then please check your vendors errata or see below for possible recovery solutions. We'd like to emphasize again, this is not an NTFS related problem and it is not caused by the usage of ntfsresize.

The problem was fixed in a recent parted what QTParted and most other partitioners use internally.

However, I warn you strongly to back up anything important - I tried using qtparted (from a knoppix disc) to resize a ntfs partition on my laptop, but when I booted to Windows, it said that the partition was not formatted, and wanted to format it. Luckily the partition was empty at that time.

I read somewhere that early versions of ntfsresize (I was using knoppix 3.4) destroyed partitions, but I believe that the newer versions are fine. YMMV.

they want to make sure everyone is nice and compliant about upgrading when they decide to take httpd over to java like all the other java kool-aid they are selling --- Maven is Jonestown, lets all program in XML because its standard! Cultures breakdown when there is too little disent and questioning of authority, the apache foundtion is headed in that direction.

Lets move on, SOA and all that, most people don't need any of this mod_* crap and could use:
thttpd he has other servers there, too and http_load.
lighttpd I'm moving to this sweet little server for most apps and the home site runs ea php and ruby on rails
AOLServer like OpenACS runs on
Boa
fnord from our boy who did the (in)famous benchmarks
Cherokee I root for this one for some reason.
gatling
cthulhu
yaws in erlang, should support more simul. connections than the unlying OS can support.
dhttpd
Litespeed check out their php benchmarks
thy
roxen
mini-httpd never tried this one
xitami I have a intranet server running for 5 yrs (without upgrading xitami) on xitami Solaris, simple, small, easy to admin, never dies max uptime was 1000 days+.
eddiefor complex load bal and geographic distribution
hiawatha

And for the love of god, please at least design your sites to get their images from images.mysite.com if possible so that you can use a non-bloatware web server to server the images, reserving horsepower on your apache server for stuff that actually _requires_ some features of apache.

http://www.hcsw.org/awhttpd/ updated on 12-06-2004
http://www.norz.org/zawhttpd.html
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html

Don't forget about Suse's YAST installer. Last I checked it was slightly more user-friendly that RedHat's Anaconda because YAST can resize NTFS partitions using ntfsresize, while RedHat has opted to leave out that functinality, citing safety concerns (which I admit, are warranted, but it doesn't make Anaconda any more user-friendly).

The other very annoying consequence is that, ntfsresize from ntfsprogs became also too old hereby and QTParted or ntfsresize can't resize fragmented NTFS. I had to switch to SystemRescueCD. A very cool, up-to-date admin & rescue CD!

Last I heard write was still experiencing random failures [...]

That was 4-5 years ago. Then Anton Altaparmakov disabled the unreliable write support and started to write a new driver from scratch. Today that one is included in Linux 2.6 kernels and it's reliable. Altough the write support is still limited but for example NTFS resizing is widely used and very reliable for over two years.

There are also two additional binary-only, full-featured, read-write NTFS drivers. One of them is Captive NTFS, using Windows' own NTFS driver the Wine way, and the other one is Paragon's NTFS driver.

Knoppix has four of the NTFS drivers:
1) old, broken NTFS in 2.4 kernels
2) new, safe NTFS in 2.6 kernels
3) Captive NTFS
4) userspace utilities: shared code with 2) but no kernel driver needed

http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/Europa1.jpg

> tail -f - Great for keeping track of logs realtime in a vtty or xterm window. Like tail -f /var/log/messages

or more fancy + still cool:

# tail -f /var/log/*/* | ccze -A

ccze

See this.

Is it reliable?

Yes, it is reliable. Since July of 2002, when ntfsresize became publicly available, there were countless success reports for both enlarging and shrinking Windows XP/2000/NT4, Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn NTFS filesystems on both workstation and server versions (Home, Professional, Server, Advanced Server). No destroyed filesystem was reported who followed the instructions correctly.

I should have known from my overflowing inbox that my story had gotten posted on Slashdot...

Well, after reading all 118 e-mails to date and re-reading the column itself, I'd like to address the questions that have come up about it. I'll start by addressing the contention that I am some sort of shill for Microsoft: Please read a few of my recent columns and tell me if you think I'm doing any favors to the good people in Redmond.

Second, the "why didn't you cover distribution X, Y and Z?" question. Since there are only so many hours in the day, I decided I'd only look at distros using the 2.6 kernel; I'd also only look at the distributions readers might already recognize--either by seeing them for sale in computer stores, or by seeing books about them in bookstores.

Third, my comment about NTFS disk partitioning. Throw all the rotten tomatoes at me that you want, because I got this wrong; SuSE and Mandrake can resize NTFS partitions, although Fedora and many other distros cannot. (Granted, there are apparently a few bugs in their implentation of this, but still...)

Fourth, the "what's so hard about using the command line?" gripe. Command-line interfaces have gone out of style in consumer operating systems for Very Sound Reasons. They're not remotely "discoverable"--unlike a row of menus or toolbar icons, a blank command-line prompt has no way of telling you what you *can* do. They're unforgiving--one typo in the command and it won't work.

Fifth, my complaints about the problems of installing software in Linux: The results I reported came from my attempts to install software as most Windows refugees might: by downloading fairly well-known applications (for instance, Firefox and AbiWord) and double-clicking them once they had landed on my desktop.

I went on to note that there are automated package-installers, then focused on Fedora's in particular (I did give Cobind's YumGUI a whirl too, but since that's a) in beta and b) not included with Fedora, I can't consider that the answer). I could have discussed Mandrake's rpmDrake instead, in which case I would have criticized the way it's buried four menus deep (will any new user even think to look under the "Packaging" sub-menu?). I also could have used SuSE's YAST2 as an example, in which case I would have had to note how this was smart enough to alert me of dependency issues while installing downloaded SuSE RPMs, but not smart enough to fix them automatically.

If anybody's actually read this far, I'd add that my goal in this column was to try to assess these three releases not as a Linux expert might find them, but as somebody moving from Windows might find them. I.e., the vast bulk of the potential user base.

I personally found all three of these distributions quite usable once set up properly--certainly much more so than the versions of SuSE, Mandrake and Lycoris that I reviewed two years ago, or the Red Hat release I tried out in late 2002--but that doesn't mean that, say, my brother or my mom would put up with the initial setup work. And I'd be lying to readers if I didn't tell them that.

This page says that SuSe 9.1 was the first to include ntfs resizing. It also has links to install images for most of the major distros that have a (non destructive) partionining utility (that includes NTFS support).

Cheers

Here's a picture of a big cock
Here's a picture of a nice pussy
Here's a picture of a duck
Here's a great view of the beach

--
Afrodot. News for Idiots. It doesn't matter. Really.

Here's a picture of a big cock
Here's a picture of a nice pussy
Here's a picture of a duck
Here's a great view of the beach

--
Afrodot. News for Idiots. It doesn't matter. Really.

Here's a picture of a big cock
Here's a picture of a nice pussy
Here's a picture of a duck
Here's a great view of the beach

--
Afrodot. News for Idiots. It doesn't matter. Really.

Here's a scan of the new licensing plans.

hi whats your name

Agreed. Fedora is free, but it doesn't mean that it is free of responsibility.

There's even less excuse for SuSE and Mandrake since *they* also have the bug in their *commercial* products which should be held to at least as high a standard.
Mandrake Bug
SuSe Bug
Read This Page for more details.

Finally half way down the thread someone admits It's not just a Fedora issue. SuSe 9.1 also has the problem
Mandrake Bug
SuSe Bug
Read This Page If you want to find out whats responsible.

How safe is [resizing an NTFS partition] anyways?

With the latest versions of ntfsresize, fairly safe. I did it on a machine at work with very important data on it (yes, I backed it up first), and had no trouble at all. However, all ntfsresize can do is truncate an NTFS partition's free space. In other words, it won't relocate blocks to other free areas of the disk. So the most you can shrink it is by however much free space you have at the end of the partition. ((After Googling around a bit, I've learned that the most recent versions of ntfsresize will now move datablocks around, so apparently that restriction is now gone. I have not personally tested this, however.))

Incidentally, ntfsresize is part of Knoppix, and gets run through QTPartEd, a partition editing tool. It is an older, non-relocating version, however.

Schwab

Repartitioning on 2.6 kernels can result incorrect partition table for Windows boot and they stop booting. Mandrake 10 and SUSE 9.1 have the same problem. There is more information and potential solutions on this site.

Google says Bob will use XP with the preinstalled NTFS and it's quite probable he doesn't want to dump it immediately and because Debian still doesn't support non-destructive NTFS resizing thus the install will fail for him.

How many of those operating systems use Apache?

You mean including Windows, all of them can, but there are fare more webservers available for Unix like systems than there are for Windows. Thttpd, wn, Thy, Roxen, Fnord, Dhttpd, Caudium, Bozotic, Boa, and AOLserver are all available in Debian in addition to Apache. Most of these are IPv6, ssl/tls, and cgi capable. They all have their strengths, and they all are being actively maintained. Most of these will operate as a drop-in replacement for Apache for most sites.

You are correct that most of the web servers on the net are Apache installations of one type or another. Most sites do not need or use all of the features that Apache offers, but install Apache anyway. Sound familiar? They are still thinking in traditional market terms, instead of looking at what is available to them. They treating Unix as if it were Windows, but if an cross-platform Apache-specific worm were to affect them adversely, there will be alternatives available to them that they would not have on Windows.

The point is that Unix like operating systems offer greater variety of more services in more implementations than Windows does or ever will. There is more room for fault tolerance, more methods available, and more capability to find new solutions to new and old problems (including security) in Free Software than any company or group of companies is capable of providing.

You are the one who is the ball licker. fp45

That's almost a high-quality fp. However, it lacks fp45. Please release a patch to fix this error.

fp45

I hope that Apache gets some viable competition.

It's not like there isn't options.

There's several other capable open source (Free Software) http servers available.

I would list a few of the better ones but I can't be bothered sifting through Freshmeat's unmoderated topic entries for http servers. But, by all means, have a look - there are some good ones there.

One that I've seen quite a few updates for on Freshmeat is Thy.

Although the way you relate Apache's monopoly to that of Windows is unfair. Apache is forcing a monoculture because it is that much better than the best of the rest, although the lesser known projects are fighting to be heard because everybody just looks to Apache or IIS for their http server needs.

On the one hand, you're a member of the GNAA, and have a first post inferior to fp45. But on the other hand, you make some very real and valid points about Linux and its very dead status.

I invite all slashdot users to help sway my opinion of this poster and his organization with some well-thought-out debate and fact showing.

So if you make it, say, 2GB, you throw away a lot of space on bigger drives. And like I said, partimage can't write NTFS properly.

Another trick for dd is to zero out the empty space on the disk before copying - that way gzip can easily shrink the unused space to almost nothing. (To empty out the free space simply append zeroes to a file until the disk is full and you get a write error).

Still I can't say I use DD for everything - just for Windows. Good old tar works great for my linux systems.

As a sidenote, I think it's atrocious that Windows doesn't even come with a workable backup mechanism. Their backup tool doesn't even back up the OS! (Hence the unfortunate need for something like Ghost). It's unpardonably greedy to sacrifice such basic functionality in the vain hope of some tiny reduction in piracy.

OWNED

Your fp is almost as good as fp45.

Almost.

FP45 you tea-cocking bag smoker.

Here is a picture

The fp45 guy certainly is gay!