Here are the pictures of the holy relics which were temporary sojourned in Pomorie’s Monastery for veneration in the the period 04.05.2011 – 14.05.2011.
It’s been like a tradition that the monastery is blessed with having a different saints holy relics on the Monastery feast day (St. George’s day).
This year the holy relics the good tradition by God’s grace was continued as the holy relics of the saints:
Saint Great Martyr George
Saint Venerable Macrina
Saint Marina
Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina
were for veneration in the Monastery Church called also Saint Great Martyr George / Sveti Velikomachenik Georgi
Here are the pictures of the holy relics I was able to obtain:
Saint Great Martyr George hand holy relics Saint Venerable Macrina Holy Relics (hand bone) Saint Cyprian and Justina Holy relics Saint Martyr Marina Holy relics There were also few other particles of saints which are permanently in the Pomorie monastery and christian pilgrims can freely go there to venerate them so I would not post pictures of this holy relics here.
What is really striking is that all the Holy relics had a very specific odor (similar to Roses) but as the monk Father Sergii said (an Odor not of this world). God’s grace can be felt with one’s spiritual heart when he is near the holy relics of this great saints, the monk father Sergii also told me that the reason for the odor is that God testifies in through the odor that the holy relics belong to his holy saints. Each saint holy remains had a different (parfume like) odor, it’s really amazing and hard to believe if you don’t smell it yourself but I have smelled the scent myself, the almost 15th century old bones (miraculously preserved by today) emits a specific beautiful odor. The preservation of this holy relics for all this centuries is another great miracle of God, as any normal not hermetically preserved bone kept for veneration for all this years would have decayed by so far, however this saints relics are obviously not! As you can see truly Great is God in his saints! Glory be to the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit now and forever and ever. Amen!
I had been assigned the not easy task to make a Windows XP Pro which is located behind an ADSL modem to be remotely accessible via VNC
The Windows is connected to the Bulgarian Vivacom Intrnet provider through their ADSL service and hence there is an ADSL router modem which is configured to disallow all inbuond connections by default.
The Windows Pro PC where the VNC server was needed to be accessible did not have a real IP address (e.g. was assigned a virtual IP address by the ADSL modem.
The exact ADSL model used to connect the computer via a lan cable to the internet was Huawei SmartAX MT882
As the device is owned by Vivacom (the ex BTK tele communication company) I did not have any admin user and pass credentials for the ADSL modem to configure the ADSL router to do a port NAT forwarding of port 5800 and 5900 used by the VNC software I installed on the PC (TightVNC)
Nevertheless the missing user and password I decided to check in google if I can find some default passwords that Vivacom ADSL modems are configured to work with
After a few minutes spend in Google I already had found few passwords which were said to work fine with the Vivacom ADSL router. Here are the passwords I found for the Vivacom ADSL Internet modems:
I tried some old school brute force techniques 😉 by trying all the passwords via the ADSL web interface located on http://192.168.1.1 (I was not sure which model the Vivacom ADSL modem is as on the router there was nothing written concerning the modem type but only the Vivacom logo was present.
After a bit of time I already knew that the ADSL modem model, user and pass was:
My next step was to configure port forwarding for the SmartAX MT882 ADSL in order to achieve from modem’s web administrator I had to follow the menus:
Advanced Setup -> Virtual Servers
Next in the NAT — Virtual Servers section I pressed the Add button to create new automatic redirection (port forwarding) rule.
Configuring ADSL SmartAX MT882 TightVNC NAT port redirection screenTightVNC requires also NAT port redirection rule for port 5900 in order to be able to connect to the VNC server behind the dsl, so analogically I added a Virtual Server NAT rule for port 5900.
Note that the private IP address of the Windows host was assigned by the ADSL router to the ip 192.168.1.3
Further on I expected the adsl port forwarding created rule would now allow me to connect to the VNC server on the pc located behind the dsl firewall, but I was wrong… even though all seemed to be configured just fine in the ADSL router still the port unmbers 5800 and 5900 were showing up as closed during nmap scan as well as a simple telnet connection to port 5800 and 5900 failed to get established.
My logical assumption was that some configured Firewall on the Windows PC is blocking port connections to 5800 and 5900 thus I decided to check the default Windows Firewall settings as a first possible cause for the vnc ports being blocked.
I did that via the Windows menus:
Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Windows Firewall
However weirly enought it seemed the Windows Firewall was disabled e.g. the Off (not recommended) option was set for the firewall.
A bunch of other lookup over all the running system and services on the windows hosts I have found the PC is protected by NOD32 Antivirus – Personal Firewall
The default behaviour of NOD32’s Persnal firewall was extremely restrictive and I found it’s causing a port filter of the 5800 and 5900 vnc connection ports.
To solve the filtering nod32 did I had to open NOD32 and navigate to the following menus:
Setup -> Personal Firewall -> Configure rules and Zones
In the Zone and rule setup menu config window I had to further press on: New button to add new personal firewall rule.
In the New rule: menu I filled in the following info: In the General tab:
Name: vnc
Direction: Both
Action: Allow
In the tab Local
I pressed over the Add Port
Number: 5800
in the Remote tab once again I had to fill in: Number: 5800
Then to confirm settings just pressed OK
Next on I added in the same manner an allow rule for port 5900.
After this settings I restarted the NOD32 firewall to make sure the new settings takes place by pressing over the Personal firewall button Disable filtering: allow all traffic and right after enabling the firewall once again.
Now remote tightvnc connections to the Windows XP Pro pc works like a charm once again, Thanks God 😉
I needed a handy way to recover some old data of an expired domain containing a website, with some really imprtant texts. The domains has expired before one year and it was not renewed for the reason that it’s holder was not aware his website was gone. In the meantime somebody registered this domain as a way to generate ads profit from it the website was receiving about 500 to 1000 visitors per day. Now I have the task to recover this website permanently lost from the internet data. I was not able to retrieve anything from the old domain name be contained via google cache, yahoo cache, bing etc. It appears most of the search engines store a cached version of a crawled website for only 34 months. I’ve found also a search engine gigablast which was claimed to store crawled website data for 1 year, but unfortunately gigablast contained not any version of the website I was looking for.Luckily (thanks God) after a bit of head-banging there I found a website that helped me retrieve at least some parts from the old lost website.
The Wayback Machine , guys keeps website info snapshots of most of the domain names on the internet for a couple of years back, here is how wayback machine website describes its own provided services:
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips.
Another handy feature wayback machine provides is checking out how certain websites looked like a couple of years before, let’s say you want to go back in the past and see how yahoo’s website looked like 2 years ago.
Just go to web.archive.org and type in yahoo and select a 2 years old website snapshot and enjoy 😉
It’s really funny how ridiculous many websites looked like just few years from now 😉
It is the second year I take the time to come for a pilgrimage in Pomorie’s Monastery st. great Martyr George (Georgi).<</b>
I’m named after the great Christian saint (It’s my Name day today :)!) and I do wanted to receive a spiritual blessing here in the monastery.
The believing Orthodox Christians this year could receive a spiritual blessing this year from the Monastery as some of the Holy Relics of many great saints are temporary in the monastery for the Monastery’s feast day which is the day we commemorate our great Orthodox Christian martyr saint Georgi.
It’s unique that this year by God’s grace the monastery has temporary received a small particle of the holy relics of st. George. The pilgrims could come here and does venerate the great saint martyrs for which I thank God for being allowed by his providence to be here in the monastery and venerate the holy relics.
Here are few photos of the Holy relics from the monastery, on the pictures you see the holy relics of Saint Cyprian & St. Justina on the right, st. George’s holy relics in the center and st. Macrina’s holy relics on the left.
On the picture above you see the Abbot of Pomorie monastery Father Ierotei (who is a truly great father and a wonderful spirited man !) with the holy relics (bones) of saint Macrina on his left.
On this last picture you can see the holy relics of the Pomorie’s monastery embedded into icons (the two icons on the right).
I thank God for blessing me with being here in this holy cloister and blessing me with being able to venerate the holy martyrs relics and through this bless me and strengthen me.!
It’s important to say that we the orthodox Christians had the tradition to venerate our saint holy remains as a way to venerate God himself in accordance to the holy bible psalm which says Great and Glorious is God in his saints!
I’m sorry to provide my readers with this bad quality pictures, I’ll try to put some better quality pictures of the holy remains in very short time. Being able to show this holy remains to other orthodox christian brother and sisters is also a great grace and blessing which by God’s grace was given to us the sinners! Just to close I’ll say glory be to our God – The Holy Trinity now and forever and ever amen!
Though I really hate facebook, I was asked today by a friend who is not really into computers to disable, mail notification for him.
The mail notification, annoying feature is one of the stupidest idea someone ever had, as very active facebook users had their inbox totally spammed like with messages from facebook …
Anyways, here is how I removed the facebook email notification
1. Login to facebook
2. Go to Account Settings and click on notifications and then uncheck the option, e.g.:
Account Settigns -> Profile Settings -> Messages
There are a number of messages that facebook by default sents, so in order to remove the mail notification messages I scrolled down and unchecked all related to facebook email notification.
In short I’ll explain here what is Grsecurityhttp://www.grsecurity.net/ for all those who have not used it yet and what kind of capabilities concerning enhanced kernel security it has.
Grsecurity is a combination of patches for the Linux kernel accenting at the improving kernel security.
The typical application of GrSecurity is in the field of Linux systems which are administered through SSH/Shell, e.g. (remote hosts), though you can also configure grsecurity on a normal Linux desktop system if you want a super secured Linux desktop ;).
GrSecurity is used heavily to protect server system which require a multiple users to have access to the shell.
On systems where multiple user access is required it’s a well known fact that (malicious users, crackers or dumb script kiddies) get administrator (root) privileges with a some just poped in 0 day root kernel exploit. If you’re an administrator of a system (let’s say a web hosting) server with multiple users having access to the shell it’s also common that exploits aiming at hanging in certain daemon service is executed by some of the users. In other occasions you have users which are trying to DoS the server with some 0 day Denial of Service exploit. In all this cases GrSecurity having a kernel with grsecurity is priceless.
I would skip the details on how to compile the kernel and simply show you some picture screens with GrSecurity configuration options which are working well and needs to be set-up before a make command is issued to compile the new kernel.
After preparing the kernel source for compilation and issuing:
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ make menuconfig
You will have to select options like the ones you see in the pictures below:
[nggallery id=”8″]
After completing and saving your kernel config file, continue as usual with an ordinary kernel compilation, e.g.:
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ make
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ make modules
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ su root
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source# make modules_install
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source# make install
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source# mkinitrd -o initrd.img-2.6.xx 2.6.xx
Also make sure the grub is properly configured to load the newly compiled and installed kernel.
After a system reboot, if all is fine you should be able to boot up the grsecurity tightened newly compiled kernel, but be careful and make sure you have a backup solution before you reboot, don’t blame me if your new grsecurity patched kernel fails to boot! You’re on your own boy 😉 This article is written thanks to based originally on his article in Bulgarian. If you’re a Bulgarian you might also checkout static’s blog
Every now and then my FreeBSD router dmesg ( /var/log/dmesg.today ) logs, gets filled with error messages like:
pid 86369 (httpd), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space
swap_pager_getswapspace(14): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(11): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(12): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(14): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(8): failed
Using swapinfo during the swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed messages were logged in, I figured out that definitely the swap memory over-use is the bottleneck for the troubles, to find this I used the command:
freebsd# swapinfo
Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Type
/dev/ad0s1b 49712 45920 3792 92% Interleaved
After some investigation, I’ve figured out that the MySQL server is causing the kernel exceeded swap troubles.
My current MySQL server version is installed from the ports tree, whether I’m using the bsd port /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server/ and it appears to work just fine.
However I have noticed that the mysql-server is missing a my.cnf file!, which means the mysql server is running under a mode with some kind of default configurations.
Strangely in the system process list it appeared it is using a default my.cnf file located in /var/db/mysql/my.cnf
Nevertheless it appeared the sql server is running the file /var/db/mysql/my.cnf conf was not existing! This was really weird for me as I’m used to have the default my.cnf from my previous experience with Linux servers!
Thus the next logical thing I did was to create my.cnf conf file in order to be able to have a proper limiting configuration for the sql server.
The FreeBSD my.cnf skele files are found in /usr/local/share/mysql/, here are the 4 files one can use as a starting basis for further configuration of the mysql-server.
freebsd# ls -al /usr/local/share/mysql/my-*.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4948 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-huge.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 20949 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-innodb-heavy-4G.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4924 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-large.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4931 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 2502 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-small.cnf
I have chosen to use the my-medium.cnf as a skele to tune up, as my server is not high iron one e.g. the host I run the mysql is a (simple dual core 1.2Ghz system).
Further on I copied the /usr/local/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf to /var/db/mysql/my.cnf e.g.:
As a next step to properly tune up the default values of the newly copied my.cnf to my specific server I used the Tuning-Primer MySQL tuning script
Using tuning-primer.sh is really easy as all I did is download, launch it and follow the script suggestions to correct some of the values already in my.cnf
Now I really hope the shitty swap_pager_getswapspace: failed errors would not haunt me once again by crashing my server and causing mem overheads.
Still I wonder why the port developer Alex Dupre – ale@FreeBSD.org choose not to provide the default mysql51-server conf with some kind of my.cnf file? I hope he had a good reason.
I’ve been struggling with fixing a nasty error with wicd network manager for about 2 hours. The exact error message I faced was:
Connection Failed: Bad Password
The issue occured after some suggested updates from the Ubuntu graphical update tool. The wireless network to which it was connected was a WPA-PSK (WPA2) Passphrase authentication. The network key was properly typed in and was working well on another system so the error Connection Failed: Bad Password made no sense.
There was nothing unusual in /var/log/wicd/wicd.log , that made me even more curious about what might be causing the error.After a lot of try outs and a lot of readings and tests I finally got the cause of the weird Bad Password errors produced by wicd
Weirdly enought, somehow the Ubuntu package update tool has installed the default gnome network-manager package. The installed network-manager package has mismatched somehow the way wicd connects to wireless networks and as a cause the wpa_supplicant binary was not properly invoked.
As a consequence of the network-manager being present on the system the wpa_supplicant process which made the exact connection to the wireless network was not launching in, the exact wpa_supplicant invocation missing was:
Are you looking for free software version of the old-school absolute Nintendo classic Super Mario Bros. ? 🙂
If you’re an old-school geek gamer like me you definitely do 😉 I was lucky to find Secret Mario Chronicles a Linux version of Super Mario while I was browsing through all the available for installation Linux games in aptitude .
The game is really great and worthy to be played. It’s even a better copy of the classical arcade game than SuperTux (another Mario like Linux clone game)
Both Super Mario Chronicles and Super Mario Bros are available for installation as .deb packages in the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian and most likely the other Debian direvative Linux distrubtion.
To install and play the games out of the box, if you’re a Debian or Ubuntu user, just issue:
linux:~# apt-get install smc supertux
The other good news are that both of the games’s engine, music and graphics are GPLed 🙂
To Launch the games after installation in GNOME I’ve used the menus:
Applications -> Games -> Super Mario Chronicles
andApplications -> Games -> Arcade -> SuperTux
The games can also be launched from terminal with commands:
debian:~$ smc
debian:~$ supertux
The only thing I don’t like about Super Mario Chronicles is that it doesn’t have a good music and only sounds, just to compare SuperTux has an awesome level music. Along with being an absolute classic I should say that these two games are one of the really good arcade games produced for Linux and if I have to rank them as a gamer among all the other boring arcade games today available for Linux this two ones ranks in the top 10 arcade games prdocuced for Linux
Saint Great Martyr George hand holy relics
Saint Venerable Macrina Holy Relics (hand bone)
Saint Cyprian and Justina Holy relics
Saint Martyr Marina Holy relics
Configuring ADSL SmartAX MT882 TightVNC NAT port redirection screenTightVNC requires also NAT port redirection rule for port 5900 in order to be able to connect to the VNC server behind the dsl, so analogically I added a Virtual Server NAT rule for port 5900.
Jesus is Risen song (Easter in Lebanon Mall Store)
Friday, May 13th, 2011Here is how Easter is being celebrated in Lebanon Mall.
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