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 logging in as root in the GUI being discouraged whereever you happen to ask.  So essentially the pot finally boiled over and we no longer have this option standard at least on the latest Fedora releases.  This effects Gnome, KDE and the whole lot.

Essentially the problem relies in the GDM file and here is how to bring this back:

SOLUTION

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Well folks, it's upgrade time again.  It's been raining releases from Fedora lately, each one coming out almost every 6 months so here we are.  My own installation is over 4 years old and I took it from Fedora 1 to Fedora 10 in that time. (You can search here for the older upgrade procedures)  So the process RedHat has put together for upgrades is fairly robust.  The Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 upgrade follows the general procedure outlined on the first Fedora Core upgrade page (Hasn't changed in years, which is good):

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DCOP server is essentially communication software used by various Linux systems to allow applications to talk to each other.  For example, copying and pasting from kword to say firefox would occur through klipper (KDE clipboard) currently and the way the copied data moves between these applications is DCOP.  More recently, DCOP has been started to be phased out in favour of DBUS, a new messaging system implemented in KDE 4.X (Recently 4.0, 4.1, 4.2). (While digging for a solution here, I had a stab at using DBUS however according to this article, konsole hasn't yet been updated to use DBUS)  This particular change occurred more recently and prominantly between Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 upgrade discussed in another article here.  One of the issues to this problem is that in the process of moving from KDE 3.X to KDE 4.X is that the dcopserver is no longer turned on by default.  Unfortunately, applications such as konsole have not yet been udpated to use DBUS and so scripting these applications as one would normally do using DCOP, no longer work and functionality like renaming tabs in konsole dynamically therefore no longer work either using traditional methods.  Below is how to go about resolving a part if not all of the issues related to it and how we can reenable it to reduce errors between old applications on a distribution.

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PROBLEM

When trying to access http://localhost:631/ for the cupsd / cups configuration, you receive:

404 Not Found

SOLUTION

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Some time back I was introduced to konsole and never went back to terminal emulators like xterm, however a list of good tabbed linux terminal emulator alternatives is provided below in case konsole isn't available to all.  There are ones such as putty however this is an Windows ssh client.   Just the fact that I could start multiple sessions in tabs from a single window freed my desktop from alot of clutter I could do without.  One thing I wanted to do from an early start with konsole is to have the tabs renamed depending on where I was working with such as including the host name when working with multiple hosts so I could easily tell where I was amongst the many tabs I had open.  Here's how to go about renaming tabs using the DCOP communication protocol bound to DCOP commonly used on Fedora 8 and earlier.  including all applications not yet updated to use the newer KDE communication protocol DBUS that came with Fedora 9 and above. 

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PROBLEM

When trying to play MP3 files in any version of WinAmp, there is no sound.  The same file may play well in other players like Windows Media Player but not in WinAmp.

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In the not so distant past, there has been an explosion of ISP's on the web which caused the only thing all of them could: dirt cheap hosting.  In fact, the web is virtually flooded with ISP's offering everything imaginable under the sun and space has literally become a door prize.   But what really separates a great host from scams and basement ran hosting companies that are fleeting at best.  The answer isn't as easy to find as it appears and true value doesn't exist in the up front offers but what happens once you actually join.

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Here is a set of things to try for those of you suffering from poor PC performance, very slow boot up times, very slow application start up times, generally slow windows performance, security problems and other annoyances on Windows systems. 

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