First off, let’s test ssh access: host user $ ssh x.y.z.w ssh: connect to host x.y.z.w port 22: Connection timed out host user $ Let’s add ssh access. Go to Applications->System Settings->Security Level: If you are not root, you will get a prompt to enter the root password: Be default nothing is enabled as trusted. […]
Configuring the Red Hat Enterprise Firewall
Running a Quick Ping Scan using NMAP
Nmap can make quick of work of doing a ping sweep of your network: [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ nmap -sP 10.50.100.1-255 Starting nmap 3.70 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2005-06-13 15:50 PDT Host 10.50.100.1 appears to be up. Host 10.50.100.2 appears to be up. Host 10.50.100.22 appears to be up. Host mondo (10.50.100.72) appears to be up. Host […]
Securing PHP
The first step to secure PHP is from the system perspective. Only provide what you have to. Of course, the code needs to be secure as well by using proper input validation, encryption, etc., but as systems administrators, we can head off some problems. First off, you can view a complete rundown of your current […]
Setting Up a Windows Server 2003 Host Based Firewall
There is a false sense of security when you envision your network as inside and outside, with a firewall protecting you from hostile users on the outside. One particularly nasty problem is when users bring their laptops home, surf, read email, and then plug it right back in to the corporate LAN on Monday morning. […]
Spike in Port 12345 Traffic
We have noticed a surge in traffic on port 12345. This could be NetBus, or a variant. We suspect that some trojan backdoor is in the wild tacked on to a new worm. The worm is looking for other friendly hosts listening on port 12345. To see a historical chart of activity on this port, […]
Using the AFICK File Integrity Checker
One important component of securing a system is to use a file integrity checker.There are multiple tools out there that can do this, including AIDE, and Tripwire. One project that does what we need, has few installation requirements, is fairly easy to install, and is multi platform is AFICK. In this article we will install […]
Customizing the AFICK File Integrity Checker
In this article, we set up AFICK. Let’s adapt AFICK to use a particular directory tree and a different database. This way, we can fingerprint the OS on one run, and fingerprint more dynamic content with a different job. Here is our configuration file: [root@ids afick]# cat /etc/afickweb.conf database:=/var/lib/afickweb/afick history := /var/lib/afickweb/history archive := /var/lib/afickweb/archive […]
WinSCP Freeware SFTP and SCP client for Windows
WinSCP is a full featured GUI SCP client. This means that communication between the server and the client is encrypted well, unlike FTP or Explorer. WinSCP also includes synchronization options that will help minimize the amount of traffic needed to mirror filesystems. We installed all of the options: Here you can see the array of […]
Running KeePass Password Management on GNU/Linux with Wine
Managing all of the passwords one needs to know for both personal and job-related security is quite a challenge. KeePass is a password management program for Windows. It is open-source and released under the GPL, which means it is highly likely that this project will stay around in some form. It also appears to use […]
ClamAV Free AntiVirus Software
ClamAV is a GPL virus scanner that will integrate with mail servers, scan filesystems from the command line, and automatically update its virus signatures. There are many ports of ClamAV to various platforms, including Windows. This article will show how to compile and install ClamAV for a single user on GNU/Linux. First, we grab the […]
Microsoft Windows Metafile Exploit Workaround
[January 5 update: Microsoft released a fix for this vulnerability available here. The below information has some related procedures that may be useful. ] There is a zero day expoit in the wild that can infect your Windows system via email and web browsing. There is no known fix yet, but there is a workaround […]
Monitor Default Web Logs
Most web addresses are all name based on the server side. That is, netadmintools.com and associated logs are monitored and tracked in a different file than requests to the IP address. The first entry in the VirtualHost section of the httpd.conf file for Apache is where the requests without a name go. Stick a very […]
Adding a BugTraq Feed to Firefox
There is a cool feature in Firefox that will put live RSS feeds right on the toolbar simply by clicking the orange icon in the URL window. We have this capability on NetAdminTools. Clicking on the Add Live Bookmark will add a list of our latest articles. For the RSS 2.0 specification, see this page. […]
Tricking out your desktop with Blackbox
After Ximian locking up my console hard, and general disgust with complicated window managers, I decided to trick out a minimalistic window manager. For those of you that are interested, check out Blackbox. The source is 235k. I kid you not. Funny thing is that I wanted to use a more configurable xterm, so I […]
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
The lack of a web browser that works well with Linux is one of my (and many other peoples) big complaints. For those network administrators out there contemplating a migration to GNU/Linux on the desktop, the traditionally buggy performance and lack of features of web browsers for Linux is a huge stumbling block. I have […]
GNUCash 1.6.2 Compile/Installation
[[LFS Notes: This article worked.. kinda… for my existing Red Hat 7.1 system, and was actually the inspiration for exploring LFS. See the GNUCash 1.6.3/LFS article.]] A few days ago I wrote about improvements in Mozilla. The release of the new Mozilla has made my desktop experience with GNU/Linux oodles better. I decided to push […]
Gnome 1.4 from Source
[[LFS Note: This article was based on my Red Hat 7.1 install. See GNUCash 1.6.3/LFS and the hint on LFS for more info on installing Gnome for LFS or you want to dig really deep into the libraries.]] In the article on GNUCash 1.6.2 Compile/Installation I mentioned that Gnome was more stable after I had […]
XFree86 4.1.0 from Source
[[LFS Note: The below procedure works fine with LFS 3.0]] In my continuing search for compatibility, stability and performance, I decided to compile XFree86 4.1.0 from source and install it. I removed the RPMs for my version earlier version of X, as well as Freetype. I also removed my old fonts. I didn’t have any […]
XFig from Source vs. Xaw3d
I discussed compiling XFree86 from source in my article XFree86 4.1.0 from Source. One problem if you nuke all associated RPMs, is that the Athena Widget Set is included in the XFree86 distribution. This is in xc/lib/Xaw of the XFree86 source tree. What is a Widget Set? Well, this is the style of buttons and […]
KDE 2.2.1 from Source
[[LFS Note: the following was from a Redhat 7.1 perspective. It may or may not work well on an LFS system. For LFS, use the LFS hint to install zlib-1.1.3, jpegsrc.v6b, libpng-1.0.12, lcms-1.07, libmng-1.0.3, tiff-v3.5.5, qt 2.3.1 (change -system-mng to -system-libmng), Openssh (LFS HINT) , lesstif-0.93.9. I added: pcre-3.4, audiofile-0.2.2, libxml-1.8.16, libxml2-2.4.5. After you get […]
