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Clean up /var/cache/yum constantly filling file system in CentOS and RHEL Linux

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020

centos-rhel-yum-clean-var-cache-yum
At work recently we hit one of those common system admin problem on a server installed by some colleagues who have weirdly set a very small /var/cache/yum separate partitioned spaced at only 10Gb on a Redhat Enterprise Linux 7.8 Linux. The OS install guys original thinking was that this machine is to be used just for a very simple cluster and to run a Web Hosting services, a Haproxy Clustered service with PCS + Heartbeat and Corosync, but they did not estimated properly, that redhat comes its own rhnsd and updates gets pushed frequently to the machine and the lack of cleaning up the updated / installed rpms would soon leave the system into a full /var/cache/yum partition.

The gradual increase with time even though with few megabytes each and every month is normal behavior as the cache would increase its size based on the frequency of syncing with the yum server.

On this specific machines besides the rhnsd there is also a spacewalk (Free and Open Source systems management) which usually is installed to orchestrate multiple installed systems to centralize installation updates and monitoring of rpm packages.
spacewalk also has its own way to produce its own files in /var/cache/yum with creating a repository clones of defined repository directories.

1. Clean up /var/cache/yum space with yum

The normal way to clean up space as we all know is then to do something with yum:

[user@rhel ~]$ yum clean
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, langpacks
Error: clean requires an option: headers, packages, metadata, dbcache, plugins, expire-cache, rpmdb, all
[user@rhel ~]$

Usually to clean up a bit of space and get rid of partition full problem you can do:

[user@rhel ~]# yum clean metadata

This cleans up any xml metadata that may have been cached from any enabled repository.

[user@rhel ~]# yum clean all

This should clean up all rpms and metadata.

In cases where this works you should frequently re-run it on the machine or set it on a cron job to periodically reduce space occupied by useless downloaded .rpms.

2. Delete /var/cache/yum directly

If this does not help to clean up space another approach is to directly delete /var/cache/yum dir and recreate it.
To make sure you don't need any of the data that is already in /var/cache/yum for laters make a backup under some directory with free space first.

[user@rhel ~]# mv /var/cache/yum /home/user/
[user@rhel ~]# rm -rf /var/cache/yum
[user@rhel ~]# yum check-update

3. Disable Automatic RPM Updates

However if yum clean all does not work another approach is to completely disable automated updates, so you don't get surprises with unknown times when automatic update is triggered and /var/cache/yum is filled with stuff by the rhnsd or yum-updatesd.

[user@rhel ~]# service yum-updatesd stop
[user@rhel ~]# chkconfig yum-updatesd off

[user@rhel ~]# service rhnsd stop
[user@rhel ~]# chkconfig rhnsd off

4. Delete cache and rpm downloads right after install

By default yum retains the packages and package data files that it downloads, so that they may be reused in future operations without being downloaded again. This feature can be turned off by modifying the /etc/yum.conf file and changing the option "keepcache" to 0.

[user@rhel ~]$ grep -i keepcache /etc/yum.conf
keepcache=0

keepcache if set to 0, removes packages right after installation.
Setting keepcache=1 tells yum to keep the cache of headers and packages after a successful installation.

Tags: admin, after, again, ALL, and, another, ANY, automated, CentOS, cron job, file, installation, installed, machine, metadata, packages, repository, updates, var, yum
Posted in CentOS, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »

How to redirect / forward all postfix emails to one external email address?

Thursday, October 29th, 2020

Lets say you're a sysadmin doing email migration of a Clustered SMTP and due to that you want to capture for a while all incoming email traffic and redirect it (forward it) towards another single mailbox, where you can review the mail traffic that is flowing for a few hours and analyze it more deeper. This aproach is useful if you have a small or middle sized mail servers and won't be so useful on a mail server that handels few hundreds of mails hourly. In below article I'll show you how.

How to redirect all postfix mail for a specific domain to single external email address?

There are different ways but if you don't want to just intercept the traffic and a create a copy of email traffic using the always_bcc integrated postfix option (as pointed in my previous article postfix copy every email to a central mailbox). You can do a copy of email flow via some custom written dispatcher script set to be run by the MTA on each mail arriva, or use maildrop filtering functionality below is very simple example with maildrop in case if you want to filter out and deliver to external email address only email targetted to specific domain.

If you use maildrop as local delivery agent to copy email targetted to specifidc domain to another defined email use rule like:

if ( /^From:.*domain\.com/:h ) {
cc "!someothermail@domain2.com"
}

To use maildrop to just forward email incoming from a specific sender towards local existing email address on the postfix to an external email address use something like:

if ( /^From: .*linus@mail.example.com.*/ )
{
        dotlock "forward.lock" {
          log "Forward mail"
          to "|/usr/sbin/sendmail linuxbox@collector.example.com"
        }
}

Then to make the filter active assuming the user has a physical unix mailbox, paste above to local user's $HOME/.mailfilter.

What to do if your mail delivered via your Email-Server.com are sent from a monitoring and alarming scripts that are sending towards many mailboxes that no longer exist after the migration?

To achive capturing all normal attempted to be sent traffic via the mail server, we can forward all served mails towards a single external mail address you can use the nice capability of postfix to understand PCRE perl compatible regular expressions. Regular expressions in postfix of course has its specific I recommend you take a look to the postfix regexp table documentation here, as well as check the Postfix Regex / Tester / Debugger online tool – useful to validate a regexp you want to implement.

How to use postfix regular expression to do a redirect of all sent emails via your postfix mail relayhost towards external mail servers?

In main.cf /etc/postfix/main.cf include this line near bottom or as a last line:

virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual, regexp:/etc/postfix/virtual-regexp

One defines the virtual file which can be used to define any of your virtual domains you want to simulate as present on the local postfix, the regexp: does load the file which is read by postfix where you can type the regular expression applied to every incoming email via SMTP port 25 or encrypted MTA ports 385 / 995 etc.

So how to redirect all postfix mail to one external email address for later analysis?

Create file /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp

/.+@.+/ external-forward-email@gmail.com

Next build the mapfile (this will generate /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp.db )

# postmap /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp

This also requires a virtual.db to exist. If it doesn't create an empty file called virtual and run again postmap postfix .db generator

# touch /etc/postfix/virtual && postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

Note in /etc/postfix/virtual you can add your postfix mail domains for which you want the MTA to accept mail as a local mail.

In case you need to view all postfix defined virtual domains configured to accept mail locally on the mail server.

$ postconf -n | grep virtual
virtual_alias_domains = mydomain.com myanotherdomain.com
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

The regexp /.+@.+/ external-forward-email@gmail.com applied will start forwarding mails immediately after you reload the MTA with:

# systemctl restart postfix

If you want to exclude target mail domains to not be captured by above regexp, in /etc/postfix/virtual-regexp place:

/.+@exclude-domain1.com/ @exclude-domain1.com
/.+@exclude-domain2.com/ @exclude-domain2.com

Time for a test. Send a test email

Next step is to Test it mail forwarding works as expected

# echo -e "Tseting body" | mail -s "testing subject" -r "testing@test.com" whatevertest-user@mail-recipient-domain.com

Tags: after, again, alias, ALL, amp, and, another, ANY, are, article, com, copy, email address, file, How to, MTA, postfix, redirect, traffic, use
Posted in Postfix, System Administration | No Comments »

Postfix copy every email to a central mailbox (send a copy of every mail sent via mail server to a given email)

Wednesday, October 28th, 2020

Say you need to do a mail server migration, where you have a local configured Postfix on a number of Linux hosts named:

Linux-host1
Linux-host2
Linux-host3

etc.

all configured to send email via old Email send host (MailServerHostOld.com) in each linux box's postfix configuration's /etc/postfix/main.cf.
Now due to some infrastructure change in the topology of network or anything else, you need to relay Mails sent via another asumably properly configured Linux host relay (MailServerNewHost.com).

Usually such a migrations has always a risk that some of the old sent emails originating from local running scripts on Linux-host1, Linux-Host2 … or some application or anything else set to send via them might not properly deliver emails to some external Internet based Mailboxes via the new relayhost MailServerNewHost.com.

E.g. in /etc/postfix/main.cf Linux-Host* machines, you have below config after the migration:

relayhost = [MailServerNewHost.com]

Lets say that you want to make sure, that you don't end up with lost emails as you can't be sure whether the new email server will deliver correctly to the old repicient emails. What to do then?

To make sure will not end up in undelivered state and get lost forever after a week or so (depending on the mail queue configuration retention period made on Linux sent MTAs and mailrelay MailServerNewHost.com, it is a very good approach to temprorary set all email communication that will be sent via MailServerNewHost.com a BCC emaills (A Blind Carbon Copy) of each sent mail via relay that is set on your local configured Postfix-es on Linux-Host*.

In postfix to achieve that it is very easy all you have to do is set on your MailServerNewHost.com a postfix config variable always_bcc smartly included by postfix Mail Transfer Agent developers for cases exactly like this.

To forward all passed emails via the mail server just place in the end of /etc/postfix/mail.conf after login via ssh on MailServerNewHost.com

always_bcc=All-Emails@your-diresired-redirect-email-address.com

Now all left is to reload the postfix to force the new configuration to get loaded on systemd based hosts as it is usually today do:

# systemctl reload postfix

Finally to make sure all works as expected and mail is sent do from do a testing via local MTAs.

Linux-Host:~# echo -e "Testing body" | mail -s "testing subject" -r "testing@test.com" georgi.stoyanov@remote-user-email-whatever-address.com

Linux-Host:~# echo -e "Testing body" | mail -s "testing subject" -r "testing@test.com" georgi.stoyanov@sample-destination-address.com

As you can see I'm using the -r to simulate a sender address, this is a feature of mailx and is not available on older Linux Os hosts that are bundled with mail only command.
Now go to and open the All-Emails@your-diresired-redirect-email-address.com in Outlook (if it is M$ Office 365 MX Shared mailbox), Thunderbird or whatever email fetching software that supports POP3 or IMAP (in case if you configured the common all email mailbox to be on some other Postfix / Sendmail / Qmail MTA). and check whether you started receiving a lot of emails 🙂

That's all folks enjoy ! 🙂

Tags: after, ALL, and, another, application, are, available, based, Below, body, case, Central, change, check, com, command, common, Communication, conf, config
Posted in Linux, Postfix, System Administration | No Comments »

June 29 the Feast of The Glorious and First among Apostles Peter and Paul in the Church and What were the names of The twelve Apostles

Tuesday, June 30th, 2020

Saint Apostle Peter and Paul are the most glorious of all Christ desciples thanks to whom by God's mercy and Grace the nations have received the good news of the Lord Jesus's Christ Crucifix for the sins of all us the sinful people whose evils and unthankfullness is on the way to reach its climax in this days of apostacy where the Church built on top of the Holy Martyrs blood and the Blood and tortures for Christ and the Truth of this two holy man is in one of its biggest temptetation caused by the Coronavirus hysteria exeggerated by the mass-media and purposing to mark a slavery upon human mind and took away the freedoms of man and change the life as we know it.

The Holy Apostles day is the End of the post-Pentecostal fasting which is in the Church from the ancient days of the Church. Rhe date selected being the anniversary of either their death or the translation of their relics.

Fasting is among the 4 main fasts in the One Holy Orthodox Church and the feast in the number of the biggest feasts of the Church. If one reads the historical records for all the places this two simple man was to preach the Gospel he is puzzled and couldn't comprehend how could it be for a simple Roman and a Fisherman to be able to walk through so many lands by boats, ships, through rivers, by carrets, on horses, donkeys, axes, elephants and God knows what kind of other animals typical for the multiple countries and lands this two most holy man has visit.
It is even more amazing that their frutis of faith planted in the nations are still present today in so many Christians through the world …

The saint Peter and Paul fasting has been set for the reason the Apostles, have fasted immediately after Pentecost the descent of the Holy spirit over The desciples of Christ on the 50th day after the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The feast has been setup because the Apostles immerse joy of the Holy Spirit who filled their heart spirits, soul and body made them understood how much dirty and how much in sin they and all the humanity is and how much cleanness is necessery in order for them to start their hard mission of spreading the fact of the Resurrection they have witnessed with their own eyes. A small bracket to open here that Saint Paul never had the chance to see in Body the Savior just like Saint Paul and the rest of the Apostles, but he was illuminated by The Lord Jesus Christ's appearance to him on the road of the mask when he was on a journey to hunt for christians and put them to court and to death.

Saint Paul was so fierce (by his zillotism) for the Old Testamental Jewish pharisee faith who was based on human interpretation of God's laws, that he was even physically present on the Killing of Saint Archideacon Stephan.
Saint Paul was the one holding the dresses of the Killers of the first Christian martyr St. Stephan thinking that this devilish deed was truthful and pleasant to God.
But God loved Saint Paul for his Zilotism and his heart aiming to know the Truth and because of that on the Road to Damascus appeared, blinding him from the unbearable light that was emitted by the Lord Jesus Christ who has answered the simple prayer of St. Paul who was honestly looking for the truth. On the Question Saint Paul asked the Unknown bright man who appeared in Glory and surrounded by Angels and Archangels he asked "Who are you Lord"? The reply came, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting'." Acts of the Holy Apostles 9:4-5.

This moment changed Paul forever to make him from a fierce persecutor to a truthful desciple. However as it is said in the Holy Scriptures noone who sees the Lord can't stay alive in the Flesh and perhaps due to that the appearance of Christ left St. Paul to be blind for 3 days until God sent Ananias to heal his eyes by the ordination of Hands in the name of Jesus Christ – again a miracle of God aiming to strengthen the weakness of Faith of Saint Paul and stimulate him to continue on the way of Salvation. Even after the healing of his eyes, later in his eyes by God's providence the eyesight of Paul become weak again and he had to dictate his Apostle letters in the New Testament to his desciples who put it on paper and quite rarely write with his own hand due to his visionary problems. But apperantly the weak physical eye sight doesn't always mean a blindness as with his spiritual eyes the holy apostle was seeing much more than with his physical eyes and one weakness of seeing the physical let him contemplate the eternal.

It is little known fact that saint Paul among with his preaching the Gospel everywhere he went had a profession of making Tents and has worked hardly along with praying day and night, and the sleepless nights of vigil, the tortures by different anti-christians, jews, pagans, philosophers, magicians and others multitude of people who led by his spiritual blindness and passions has done multiple evils and tried in all means to stop Paul to preach the Gospel. But they did not succeeded and we see today the Result as there is rarely a man in the civillized world in all continents who doesn't heard or know about him 20-teen centuries after his martyrdom in the Capital of Roman Empire Rome.

Saint Peter on the other hand was known for his simplicity and he like all of us was suffering of sickness of weakness of faith, he even rejected to know Christ thrice on the Christ trial, even though he was with Christ for the 3.5 years of Christ's preaching his Salvation Way to the world. But again just like with Paul, God made the miracle of preliminary foretelling him the future, warning him that he is about to reject Christ as his teacher a fact that occured just like prophecised by Christ earlier. Saint Peter seeing that The Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God knows the future believed him and recover his trust in the Resurrection and with repentance came to believe and await the Resurrection of Christ which by the mercy of God he soon saw with his own eys. Soon after this mercy of God and his preparation with the Eyes of Christ and his desires to follow the will of God for his life led him to completely sacrifice all he had in his remaining earthly life for Christ. Saint Peter "Simon" (Σίμων Simōn in Greek), means stone and he is called that way for the fact he become a stone on which the Church of Christ was build and this stone is present their in the Church and everyone in both Christians and not Christians knows him well.

Saint-Apostle-Paul-and-Peter-embrace

In a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples (Matthew 16:13–19), Jesus asks, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" The disciples give various answers. When he asks "Who do you say that I am?", Simon Peter answers, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Jesus then declares:

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Cephas (Peter) (Petros), and on this rock (petra) I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Saint Peter is known to have been in Antioch and Corinth and many other lands and is believed to have been the First PopSaint-Apostle-Paul-and-Peter-embrace.jpge of Rome.

Saint-Apostle-Peter-Crucifix-with-head-downed-cross-as-he-said-he-is-unworthy-to-die-as-the-saviour

Early Church tradition says that Peter probably died by crucifixion (with arms outstretched) at the time of the Great Fire of Rome in the year 64. This took place three months after the disastrous fire that destroyed Rome for which the emperor (Nero) wished to blame the Christians. This "dies imperii" (regnal day anniversary) was an important one, exactly ten years after Nero ascended to the throne, and it was "as usual" accompanied by much bloodshed. Traditionally, Roman authorities sentenced him to death by crucifixion. In accordance with the apocryphal Acts of Peter, he was crucified head down. Tradition also locates his burial place where the Basilica of Saint Peter was later built, directly beneath the Basilica's high altar.

On the next day 30th of June the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and some of the other Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrate another great feast The Assembly of the 12 Apostles which honors all the 12 Apostles who were the main building blocks whose preach and martyrdom for Christ put the second stones on the Building of the Church which was based on the main base cornerstone Jesus Christ whom with his holy blood for the Salvation of mankind made the existence of the Ship of Salvation (as the holy fathers) call the Church posslble.

Feast-of-The-Assembly-of-the-Holy-Apostles-and-St-Peter-and-Paul

Below are the Church Troparions and Kontaktions (Praising songs in the Church sang in Holy Liturgy) on 29 of June that every year marks Feast of the Glorious Apostles who enlightened the Universe, I put the songs in Both English and in Cyrillic translated out of Old Bulgarian (Church Slavonic).

Here are the names of the 12 Apostles as we know them by Church Tradition

The 12 disciples of Lord Jesus Christ

1. Peter
2. James
3. John
4. Andrew
5. Bartholomew or Nathanael
6. James, the Lesser or Younger
7. Judas
8. Jude or Thaddeus
9. Matthew or Levi
10. Philip
11. Simon the Zealot
12 . Thomas

Troparion — Tone 4

O first-enthroned of the Apostles, / and teachers of the universe, / intercede with the Master of all / to grant peace to the world, / and to our souls great mercy.

Kontakion — Tone 2

O Lord, You have taken to Yourself the steadfast and divinely-inspired heralds, the leaders of Your disciples, / for the enjoyment of Your blessings for and their rest; / for You have accepted their labors and their deaths as above all burnt offerings, / for You alone know the hearts of men.

Kontakion — Tone 2

Today Christ the Rock glorifies with highest honor / the rock of Faith and leader of the Apostles, / together with Paul and the company of the Twelve, / whose memory we celebrate with eagerness of faith, / glorifying Him Who glorified them.

ТРОПАРЬ, ГЛАС 4-Й

Апостолов первопрестольницы и вселенныя учителие, Владыку всех молите мир вселенный даровати и душам нашым велию милость.

Первенствующие из апостолов и Вселенской Церкви учителя, Владыку всех молите мир миру даровать и душам нашим великую милость.

КОНДАК, ГЛАС 2-Й

Твердыя и боговещанныя проповедатели, верх апостолов твоих, Господи, приял еси, в наслаждение благих Твоих и покой: болезни бо онех и смерть приял еси, паче всякаго всеплодия, Едине сведый сердечная.

Непоколебимых и богогласных проповедников, высших из Апостолов Твоих, Господи, Ты принял в наслаждение благ Твоих и покой, ибо страдания их и смерть благоволил принять как жертву, выше всякой жертвы, Единый, ведающий сердца наши.

ВЕЛИЧАНИЕ

Величаем вас, апостоли Христовы Петре и Павле, весь мир ученьми своими просветившия и вся концы ко Христу приведшия.

Прославляем вас, апостолы Христовы Петр и Павел, весь мир своим учением просветивших и приведших ко Христу народы всей земли.

Let by the Prayers of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul and the Apostle James, John, Andrew, Bartholomew (Nathnael), James (the lesser or Younger), Judas, Jude (Thaddeus), Mathew (Levi), Philip, Simon Zealot and Thomas God have mercy on all Christians in our age and the ages to come till the Second Glorious Coming of Christ and in the Frightening Judgement day.

Tags: about, accordance, after, again, age, Alive, ALL, alone, Amazing, and, animals, anniversary, another, anti, apostacy, Apostle, apostle james, Apostles, Appearance, June
Posted in Christianity, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

What is it like to become a father in the Age of Coronavirus Pandemics – Our baby Dimitar is born

Thursday, June 4th, 2020

After a long 9 months finally on 12.05.2020 12 of May 2020 by God's grace our baby Dimitar was born. He born one day after Saint Cyril and Methodius feast in the Church on the Church Feast of Saint Ephiphanius of Cyprus, Saint German Patriarch of Constantinopol a fierce fighter for the veneration of Holy Icons, Saint martyr Ermogen patriarch of Constantinople (according to new style Calendar) and Saint Basil of Ostrog (in old calendar) . I always loved spring and especially month of May so I'm happy the baby born exactly on this month. For many 2020 broght the coronavirus pandemics brought a lot of pain and surely for us it brought an extra stress with all this mask wearing and super extra precaution measures everywhere and self-isolation but for me 2020 brought me a great joy and a good things in life, after we changed the rented apartment and we moved from Mladost 3 to Geo Milev (a district that is much more fitting my temper), now just 4 months later we have this greatest joy of having a son, something that many people dreamed all their life and suffered. For us it was about 6 years without a baby and the lack of a child in a family seems to extra strain situation. I do suffer and pray for all those people who can't have child and desperately want it and I hope God will bless many with the same joy in the coming years. I have to say having a baby fills up a great hole in the family and brings up new horizons for development of both families and the new born child. Most importantly a new opportunity is there for a new man to get into the kingdom of Heaven know Christ and hopefully end up in eternal blissfulness in Heaven with all the saints by the mercy of God. If you think for a while how all of us some time back in time were also a kid and how our mothers had many sleepless nights and feared for our health and well-being and how from a small baby we become a man who studied excelled in things, failed in others and have the opportunity and rationality to do complex things such as writting this article you get into the conclusion all this is hard to believe mind blowing miracle …

Baby-Dimitar-selected/New-man-born-into-the-world

Right out of Mother's Belly seeing the Light of the World for a first time – First Picture of the Baby before he officially had a name

Many people prayed for the easy birth of my wife as she is already 36 years old and in that years sometimes giving birth is dangerous and often many woman loose babies or are forced to be cut for the baby to be delivered from the belly with Caesarian section cut. Svetlana give a normal birth thanksfully and she delivered the baby for just 3.5 hours after she was accepted in hospital the previous day and doctors did an infusion of oxytocin (a liquid hormone that doctors use to acccelarate the birth process when the baby was over carried just like it was in our case and in the case of many woman) – Svetlana overcarried it with 5 days.

After a long struggle with my wife on selecting the name, we finally named our new born baby Dimitar born 49 centimeters / 2980 grams / Dimitar was named in honour of one of the most notorious and loved saints in the Eastern Orthodox world Saint Demitrius of Thessaloniki after a very long struggle to select the name as my wife Svetlana desired to name him Daniil (Daniel), a name which is also beautiful and belongs to the Prophet Daniel and Saint Daniel the Stylite. Svetlana had some weird ideas to name the boy Elijan (Ilia) as well as some other ideas for names like Andrei (Andrew) a very beatiful name belonging to Saint Andrew the Apostle who by the way preached on the Bulgarian Sea Coast according to Church tradition I was against not because the names are bad but because I wanted strongly to follow our well known tradition in Bulgaria to name the first born male boy after the grandfather in that case I wanted to name baby Dimitar firstly in favour of Saint Dimitar (The Myrh Bearer) of Thessaloniki to be the heavinly guide of the boy together with all the other saints under the Demitrius / Dimitrius name as well as to venerate my father who is a very hard-working and patient parent even over the years with a such a wild child which I am.

Holy Relics of Saint Demetrius the Myrh Bearer in St. Demetrius Basilica in Thessaloniki (Greece)

Saint Demetrius killing Lyaeus the Glariator (depicting the spiritual destroyment of paganism by prayerrs of Saint Demetrius and a remembrance of fact that Christian Nestor killed much powerful Gladiator Lyaeaus who killed thousands of Christians on the Arena before by the all powerful prayers of Saint Demetrius)

I find worthy to name a few of the other kid's heavinly prayer intercessors this is the well known Russian Saint Dimitrius of Rostov, The bulgarian saint Saint Demitrius of Besarabia (an ex-territory of Bulgarian Empire) and Saint Dimitrij Donskoy, there is even more saints undet the Demetrius names canonized by the church over the centuries.

The name selection of a boy turned to be much more complicated than I thought and for anyone out there that has to go through the process of awaiting a new born I recommend you to select the name in advance as selecting the name after birth in negotiation with a woman who gave birth is a terrible and hard to bear experience as her hormones are making swing moods every now and then.

/pictures/Baby-Dimitar-selected

Selecting a kid name in the past was quite an interesting process and there was various approaches here in Bulgaria, from naming the kid after a grandfather, grandmother to naming it after a big saint if he is born on a big saint's Church feast day for example if it is born on 6th of May (saint George's day) in Bulgaria it is common to name the kid Georgi or if it is Saint Cyril and Methodius Cyril.
Due to the fact the kid was born near the feast of Saint Apostole Simon the Zealot one of the names I suggested to Svetlana was Simon or Simeon even though that name was not my choice as a compromise that might fit us both. We had some discussion and we both liked the Kiril (Cyril) name, plus 11 of May was Saint Cyril and Methodius but I had an internal tension about it as we didn't have anyone in family called Kiril.

Baby-Dimitar-doctor-checks-heart

Heart works perfect Praise the Lord ! 🙂

Finally my wife stepped back and she agreed to write the name in birth register the name Dimitar so now the kid in his Birth Certificate is Dimitar Georgiev Georgiev.

Giving birth in Pandemics prevented me to be able to go and see the child until the day he and wife was discharged from Sofia's Maichin Dom University's hospital as clincally healthy.
Please excuse me if I'm turning your attention from the common IT themes Religion and Philosophy which I talk about but I thought putting a few lines for a life changing event as a baby birth is important for me personally to organize things in my head.

/pictures/Baby-Dimitar-selected

The little Big Man

The stress around the baby born is always a big deal both for the mother and the father. But in my case thanks God I was relatively calm. The feelings in the days around birth for the father are quite extreme of course and perhaps this is why many fathers drink till forgetfulness after the baby is born. This however was not the case with me, even though due to the spiritual hardships I have a drinked a couple of beers overall I stayed sober around the birth and right after it before the baby came home.

/pictures/Baby-Dimitar-selected

In front of the Prayer Chapel in Maichin Dom (where yearly the Patriarch of Bulgaria Neofit sanctifies the place with Vodosvet (Sanctification of the Water)

Talking about taking the baby I'm thankful to my dear Friends Angel / Krasimir his wife Irina and Mitko Ivanov, who were the only person to kinda of support me and come for the official dischargement ceremony in hospital. I had to organize a couple of things for the dischargement pay the bills currently in Maichin Dom the overall birth expenses for doctors, midwives, hiring room expenses (for 8 days hospitalization) was lets say normal 1345 LEVA (~ 700 EURO) much lower price than in other non-government funded hospitals in Sofia like Nadezhda where it would have been about 2300 LEVA, this is of course higher than social countries of Western Europe like Germany where a normal state funded birth would cost something like ~ 350 – 400 EUR but still very cheap if Compared to United Stateswhere a good orchestrated birth costs something like 25 to 30 000 USD.
As I heard from wife the birth experience she got was of course harsh but this is normal for the first baby where the levels of stress and uncertainty is absolutely unbearable for the your unexperienced parturient mother.

I have to express my sincere thankfulness to the great Head Doctor Miss Ivet Raicheva thanks to whom my wife succeded in normal birth and we have a healthy baby.as well Doctor Nikolay Gerdzhikov from Hospital Second Baby Specialized Hospital Sheinovo who break off the amniotic fluids baloon of my wife to accelarate the overcarried baby timely birth, as well as all the pregnancy tracking doctors of UMBAL Nadezhda (A Hispital for Woman Health).

Just like I thank warmly to all the people who have given us baby clothes, baby car chairs, subtrates, carriage cangoroos and all kind of baby toys and equipment useful in raising the baby as well as all the friends who helped with advices during the pregnancy and many hardships in this 9 months before baby come to earth and after that. This are Mitko Paskalev, Mitko Ivanov / Anastasia, Krasimir, Hristina, Father Stoyan and his wife Yanna, our godfather Familiy Galin and Andrea, uncle Emilian, Vasil Kolev, Father Flavian and all others who helped us with warm prayers and good words during the hardships of pregnancy during the Coronacrisis.

Due to the Covid, every time I had to go to the hospital to bring my wife food, pampers, fruits etc. was only possible to be delivered by a medicine personal (with a small treatment fee) as entrance of externals like me was not possible.

I did not have the chance to go inside the hospital's 12th floor to pick up my wife with the baby due to the COVID-19 Virus, hospital entrance was only allowed to the parter stage and only after they check your temperature with an electronic wireless gun-like thermometer headed right in your head …
I had to then wait with the few bouquet of flowers, chocolate candys and alcohol to hand in to the main degenerating doctor which in our case was Ivet Raicheva, I have to kindly thank this professional woman for doing all the best for my wife in assisting her in birth and succeeding in a normal birth process which in our age is quite rare about at least 80% of woman give birth with a C-Section.

Baby-with-Angel-Krasimir-Irina-and-Mitko-Ivanov

Friends and Brothers / Sisters from the Church Angel, Krasi, Irina and Mitko Ivanov

Krasimir and Irina

/pictures/Baby-Dimitar-selected

In front of Maichin Dom Me seeing my boy for a first time !

After Svetlana was accompanied in the entrance stage with a medicine worker, we made the standard few remembrance pictures on the floor and infront the hospital and on a Volkswagen Taxi headed home with the baby being in fear for the baby in every car bump.

aking-the-baby-home

The great joy of blessing to be with your Son for a first time

Once Dimitar was already home we rejoiced and placed him in his already prepared baby crib and left home wife for 40 minutes together with the baby and went out to for a quick treat for friends who were so kind to come for the baby.
The routine afterwards is expected as to every new born, a lot of breast feeding for wife, adaptated milk sometimes, changing pampers, baby bathing every day, swinging, singing songs to calm him down when he songs etc.

The responsibilities for the father of course suddenly rise as you have to be a products supporter as your wife is quite weak over the 40 days after birth, you have to clean, buy food or prepare something to eat, prepare her a breastfeeding teas, confort her and calm her. But the overall it is clear that the woman becomes much more stable version of herself after the birth she starts thinking more to the ground and dream less in fantasies as the baby helps her better see the reality and learn to sacrifice more.

Georgi-Baby-Dimitar

Let God bless and protect Dimitar by the prayers of the Holy Virgin Mary Theotokos and All Sains and help him in all the hardships from the cradle to a fully grown and wise man that he'll become one day by God's mercy!

Tags: about, absolutely, after, against, birth, case, day, Dimitar, due, kid, named, normal, Once Dimitar, process, saint, svetlana, USD, western europe, woman, years
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Christ is Risen Eastern Orthodox Resurrection Paschal Greeting in Different Languages

Friday, April 24th, 2020

Happy Easter to All Orthodox Christians worldwide !
We are the the bright week – this is the week after The Feast of Feasts Resurrection of Christ. This year in 2020, we Orthodox Christians celebrated this feast on 19th, 20th and 21st of April. The celebrations of the Feast of Christians and the Paschal joy continues for the whole week, so I found some time to quickly blog to share the Joy of the Resurrection of the Savior Jesus Christ who has freed all People from the Fear of the Death by Manifestating Death has been overtaken by Life Eternally.
Earlier years, I've blogged shortly on the Christ is risen in many languages. But this time I decided to extend my previous blog by adding some more details on which are the Member Churches consisting the Christ body of Holy Orthodoxy, What is the Creed of Faith (Symbol of Faith) difference Between Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics and why we're not catholics and do celebrate Easter on a different date from Roman Catholics. Finally I will post the Paschal Greeting translated to as many languages I could find.

In the Eastern Orthodox Christian world which is the True Church of Christ consists of 15 National Churches each traced back to the Holy Apostles of Christ, each of Churches is in eucharistic Communion with the other.

Canonical Orthodox Christ Churches as of year 2020 are the following:

1. Orthodox Church of Constantinople
2. Orthodox Church of Alexandria
3. Orthodox Church of Antiochia
4. Jerusalem Patriarchal Orthodox Church
5. Bulgarian Orthodox Church
6. Georgian Orthodox Church
7. Serbian Orthodox Church
8. Russian Orthodox Church
9. Romanian Orthodox Church
10. Orthodox Church of Cyprus (archibishopship)
11. Greek Orthodox Church
12. Albanian Orthodox Church
13. Polish Orthodox Church
14. Orthodox Church of Chech Lands and Slovakia
15. American Orthodox Church

Historically Christ Church was one before the Great Schism that was perhaps the greatest tragedy of mankind after Christ's Crucifix it occured in 1054 A.D. About this saddening events, the manuscripts and contemporary saints says with this terrible event, the whole world shaked its basis. The result of the Bulla brought by Pope's messangers in Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople in the Holy Alter of the Church putting in document of official schism and the Church of the east condeming the Western Church Cuhrch action headed by the pope due to the false Creed of faith inclusion legallized by the pope with the so called 'Filioque' word formula that changed the original agreement of Church fathers decisions on the First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. (which by the way puts Anathemas on anyone who dares to change the Creed of Faith as well change by the Popes in the well known ancient Baptism Formulas like oilment (receving the sign of the holy spirit during baptism).

The historical number of Orthodox Churche dioceses were much more numerous but with the time and the hardships this are the only ones that left as official Churches, many dioceses were destroyed by the Muslims Conquests and Roman Catholics orders like the Jesuits whose fight against orthodoxy has been severe in their attempt to make the whole world to turn to the pope, this is very well known by the many remains of Uniates around Europe, especially in nowadays Ukraine. There is a lot of nations like Chechz and Hungarians whose for many centuries confessed orthodoxy but due to the economic relations with the West and the converion of their rulers (princes / Kings) etc. to Roman Catholicism has gradually converted their Eastern Churches to Roman Catholics.

The origional Nicean Creed (Nicea-Constantinople) creed of faith reads as this:

Nicean Creed of Faith ( Agreed on 381 Anno Dommini in Emperor Constantine City of Byzantine Empire Constantinople)

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

by whom all things were made;

who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man;

he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;

from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead. ;

whose kingdom shall have no end.

* And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.

In one Holy Catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The Western Church head Bishop the Pope and local priests due to some historical regions of Spain and other parts of Western Europe's aim to fight heresies included the word Latin word Filioque in above translated text (Word which is translated as "And from the Son") in above starred line 'And in te Holy Ghost, The Lord Giver of Life who proceedeth from the Father' become 'And in the Holy Ghost, The Lord Giver of Life who proceedeth from the Father (Filioque) = and from the Son.' this was acceptable for the Eastern Churches until the moment when this Confession of Faith has been legalized for the Whole Western Church with a decree so called pope 'Bulla' with which it become the official confession of faith for the whole Catholic Church. The Eastern Church of course was following the accepted Canon rules from the first Ecumenical Council in 381 A.D. and rejected to accept the definition of the Pope at first in the Face of Saint Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople (year 810 – 893) and become official in 1054 by the rule of Pope Leo whose legates tried to claim Headship of the Pope over the whole Church and questioned the title of the Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarch Michael I Cerularius.
Along with the chages of the Creed of Faith the West, the years during centuries VII and IX centuries has already put a lot of differences in the East and West Church along doctrinal, theological, linguistic, political, and geographical lines so the split was a reflection of all this. The Latin Church was much more power hungry and more progressive for its time and authoritarian, trying to combine the Worldly power with the Spiritual one given by the line of Apostoles from Christ Ceasaris-Papism, where the Eastern Church was governed in the ancient model of the Worldly power in face of Eastern Roman empire Emperor and the Patriarch who was a governor of the Spiritual power. The schism was worsened also by the many Latins raids in the Eastern Empire Christian brothers and the sacking of Constantinople in 8-13 April year 1204. Of course both Wester and Eastern Roman Empire had an appetite for a conquest over the other and often this has lead the secular rulers on both sides to try to manipulate activities of the spiritual leaders of both to work for their interests, but the schism would never occur if the spiritual establishment of the Church which are the Holy Canons (decision of the Ecumenical Councils) were not breached by the Western Church.
One of this breaches of the Ancient canons is the Celebration of Eastern Pascha which says the Christian Pascha should never coincide with Jewish Pascha. However in the Western Church this rule was breached and nowadays The Eastern (The Day of the Resurrection of Christ) in the Roman Catholic Church (Western Church) coincides most of the years with Jewish Pascha (both Roman Catholics and the executors of Christ who never accepted him the Jews celebrate together … a sad fact).

Nowadays most of the Ancient Churches of the East together with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, who are confessing the Faith of Christ such as it was handed by the Saint Fathers has a very specific ancient way of confession of faith similar to the Creed of Faith which was a very common short ancient way to confess the faith when two Christians met it is perhaps originating from the times of the Heresies in the 1st century right after the Christ Crucifix, when the pupil of Christ used it to confirm the Glorious and unexplainable Miracle of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the Death in Real Body in the 3rd day from the Grave in the Cave where his body was buried.

The Greeting Formula is the well known in the Eastern Orthodox Churches such as in Bulgaria / Greece / Russia / Serbia etc. Christ is Risen.
On every easter Almost everyone in the Orthodox Christian Countires greats everyone else both in homes on the street at work or anywhere relatives friends and even unfamiliar people who has to do business deeds with the immersely joyful greeting.

ХРИСТОС ВОСКРЕСЕ / CHRIST IS RISEN !!!!! !!!

Then the greeted Person answers back

ВОЙСТИНУ ВОСКРЕСЕ / TRULY HE IS RISEN (INDEED HE IS RISEN) !!!!!!!!

In the Orthodox Churches, believers do greet themselves with this heartful joyful greeting for the whole 40 days after the Feast of Resurrection of Christ.

In Russia, Ukrain, Belarus and the surrounding Slavonic lands there is this tradition that the greeting is repeated 3 times as an interaction between person A and person B, for example.

Person A (3 times) greets:
ХРИСТОС ВОСКРЕСЕ = CHRIST IS RISEN !!!
Person B (3 times) answers:
ВОЙСТИНУ ВОСКРЕСЕ = TRULY HE IS RISEN !!!

Below is a good list with Paschal Resurrection Greeting in multiple languages, for those who has curious polyglot minds who want to learn few words in different languages.

Indo-European languages

Greek: Χριστὸς ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! (Khristós anésti! Alithós anésti!)

Voskresenie-Gospoda-Nashego-Iisusa-Hrista-Mosaic

Slavic languages

Church Slavonic: Хрїсто́съ воскре́се! Вои́стинꙋ воскре́се! (Xristósŭ voskrése! Voístinu voskrése!)

Belarusian: Хрыстос уваскрос! Сапраўды ўваскрос! (Chrystos uvaskros! Sapraŭdy ŭvaskros!)

Bulgarian: Христос воскресе! Воистину воскресе! (Khristos voskrese! Voistinu voskrese!), as if in Church Slavonic; Христос възкресе! Наистина възкресе! (Khristos vâzkrese! Naistina vâzkrese!) in Modern Bulgarian

Croatian: Krist uskrsnu! Uistinu uskrsnu!

: Kristus vstal z mrtvých! Vpravdě vstal z mrtvých!

Macedonian: Христос воскресе! Навистина воскресе! (Hristos voskrese! Navistina voskrese!), traditional; or Христос воскресна! Навистина воскресна! (Hristos voskresna! Navistina voskresna!)

Polish: Chrystus zmartwychwstał! Prawdziwie zmartwychwstał!

Russian: Христос воскрес(-е)! Воистину воскрес(-е)! (Khristos voskres(-е)! Voistinu voskres(-е)!) (the version with -e is in Church Slavonic, one without it is in modern Russian; both are widely used)

Rusyn: Хрістос воскрес! Воістину воскрес! (Hristos voskres! Voistynu voskres!)

Serbian: Христос васкрсе! Ваистину васкрсе! (Hristos vaskrse! Vaistinu vaskrse!) or Христос воскресе! Ваистину воскресе! (Hristos voskrese! Vaistinu voskrese!)

Slovak: Kristus vstal z mŕtvych! Skutočne vstal (z mŕtvych)! (though the Church Slavonic version is more often used)

Slovene: Kristus je vstal! Zares je vstal!

Ukrainian: Христос воскрес! Воістину воскрес! (Khrystos voskres! Voistynu voskres!)

Tosk Albanian: Krishti u ngjall! Vërtet u ngjall!

Armenian

Western Armenian: Քրիստոս յարեա՜ւ ի մեռելոց: Օրհնեա՜լ է Յարութիւնն Քրիստոսի: (Krisdos haryav i merelotz! Orhnyal e Haroutyunen Krisdosi!)

eastern dialect, Քրիստոս հարյա՜վ ի մեռելոց: Օրհնյա՜լ է Հարությունը Քրիստոսի: (Khristos haryav i merelotz! Orhnyal e Harouthyoune Khristosi!); literally "Christ is risen! Blessed is the resurrection of Christ!")

Germanic languages

Anglic languages

Scots: Christ has ryssyn! Hech aye, he his ain sel!

English: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Or Christ is risen! Truly, he is risen!

Old English: Crist is ārisen! Hē is sōþlīċe ārisen!

Middle English: Crist is arisen! Arisen he sothe!

Danish: Kristus er opstanden! Sandelig Han er Opstanden!

West Frisian: Kristus is opstien! Wis is er opstien!

German: Christus ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaft auferstanden! or Der Herr ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!

Icelandic: Kristur er upprisinn! Hann er sannarlega upprisinn!

Faroese: Kristus er upprisin! Hann er sanniliga upprisin!

Low Franconian languages

Dutch: Christus is opgestaan! Hij is waarlijk opgestaan! (Netherlands) or Christus is verrezen! Hij is waarlijk verrezen! (Belgium)

Afrikaans: Christus het opgestaan! Hy het waarlik opgestaan!

Norwegian

Bokmål: Kristus er oppstanden! Han er sannelig oppstanden!

Nynorsk: Kristus er oppstaden! Han er sanneleg oppstaden!

Swedish: Kristus är uppstånden! Han är sannerligen uppstånden!

Italic languages

Latin: Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

Romance languages

Aromanian: Hristolu anyie! Di alihea anyie!

Catalan: Crist ha ressuscitat! Veritablement ha ressuscitat!

French: Le Christ est ressuscité ! En vérité il est ressuscité! Or Le Christ est ressuscité ! Vraiment il est ressuscité !

Galician: Cristo resucitou! De verdade resucitou!

Italian: Cristo è risorto! È veramente risorto!

Portuguese: Cristo ressuscitou! Em verdade ressuscitou! or Cristo ressuscitou! Ressuscitou verdadeiramente!

Arpitan: Lo Crist es ressuscitat! En veritat es ressuscitat!

Romanian: Hristos a înviat! Adevărat a înviat!

Romansh: Cristo es rinaschieu! In varded, el es rinaschieu!

Sardinian: Cristu est resuscitadu! Aberu est resuscitadu!

Sicilian: Cristu arrivisciutu esti! Pibbiru arrivisciutu esti!

Spanish: ¡Cristo resucitó! ¡En verdad resucitó!

Walloon: Li Crist a raviké! Il a raviké podbon!

Baltic languages

Latvian: Kristus (ir) augšāmcēlies! Patiesi (viņš ir) augšāmcēlies!

Lithuanian: Kristus prisikėlė! Tikrai prisikėlė!

Celtic languages

Goidelic languages

Old Irish: Asréracht Críst! Asréracht Hé-som co dearb!

Irish: Tá Críost éirithe! Go deimhin, tá sé éirithe!

Manx: Taw Creest Ereen! Taw Shay Ereen Guhdyne!

Scottish Gaelic: Tha Crìosd air èiridh! Gu dearbh, tha e air èiridh!

Brythonic languages

Breton:Dassoret eo Krist! E wirionez dassoret eo!

Cornish: Thew Creest dassorez! En weer thewa dassorez!

Welsh: Atgyfododd Crist! Yn wir atgyfododd!

Indo-Iranian languages

Ossetian:Чырысти райгас! Æцæгæй райгас! Or бæлвырд райгас! (Ḱyrysti rajgas! Æcægæj rajgas or bælvyrd rajgas!)

Persian: مسیح برخاسته است! به راستی برخاسته است!‎ (Masih barkhaste ast! Be rasti barkhaste ast!)

Hindi: येसु मसीह ज़िन्दा हो गया है! हाँ यक़ीनन, वोह ज़िन्दा हो गय یسوع مسیح زندہ ہو گیا ہے! ہاں یقیناً، وہ زندہ ہو گیا ہے!‎ (Yesu Masīh zindā ho gayā hai! Hā̃ yaqīnan, voh zindā ho gayā hai!)

Marathi: Yeshu Khrist uthla ahe! Kharokhar uthla ahe!

Abkhazian: Kyrsa Dybzaheit! Itzzabyrgny Dybzaheit!

Afro-Asiatic languages

Semitic languages

Standard Arabic: المسيح قام! حقا قام!‎ (al-Masīḥ qām! Ḥaqqan qām!) or المسيح قام! بالحقيقة قام! (al-Masīḥ qām! Bi-l-ḥaqīqati qām!)

Aramaic languages

Classical Syriac: ܡܫܝܚܐ ܩܡ! ܫܪܝܪܐܝܬ ܩܡ!‎ (Mshiḥa qām! sharīrāīth qām! or Mshiḥo Qom! Shariroith Qom!)

Assyrian Neo-Aramaic: ܡܫܝܚܐ ܩܡܠܗ! ܒܗܩܘܬܐ ܩܡܠܗ!‎ (Mshikha qimlih! bhāqota qimlih!)

Turoyo: ܡܫܝܚܐ ܩܝܡ! ܫܪܥܪܐܝܬ ܩܝܡ!‎ (Mshiḥo qāyem! Shariroith qāyem!)

East African languages

Tigrinya: Christos tensiou! Bahake tensiou!

Amharic: Kristos Tenestwal! Bergit Tenestwal!

Hebrew: המשיח קם! באמת קם!‎ (Hameshiach qam! Be'emet qam!)

Maltese: Kristu qam! Huwa qam tassew! or Kristu qam mill-mewt! Huwa qam tassew!

Egyptian

Coptic: (Pi'Christos aftonf! Khen oumetmi aftonf!)

Judeo-Berber: Lmasih yahye-d ger lmeytin! Stidet yahye-d ger lmeytin!

Dravidian languages

Tamil: கிறிஸ்து உயிர்த்தெழுந்தார், மெய்யாகவே அவர் உயிர்த்தெழுந்தார்.

Malayalam: ക്രിസ്തു ഉയിര്ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു! തീര്ച്ചയായും ഉയിര്ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു! (Christu uyirthezhunnettu! Theerchayayum uyirthezhunnettu!)

Eskimo–Aleut languages

Aleut: Kristusaaq Aglagikuk! Angangulakan Aglagikuk!

Pacific Gulf Yupik: Kristusaq ungwektaq! Pichinuq ungwektaq!

Central Yupik: Kristuussaaq unguirtuq! Ilumun unguirtuq!

Mayan languages

Tzotzil: Icha'kuxi Kajvaltik Kristo! Ta melel icha'kuxi!

Tzeltal: Cha'kuxaj Kajwaltik Kristo! Ta melel cha'kuxaj!

Austronesian languages

Malayo-Polynesian

Batak: Tuhan nunga hehe! Tutu do ibana hehe!

Carolinian: Lios a melau sefal! Meipung, a mahan sefal!

Cebuano: Nabanhaw Si Kristo! Nabanhaw gayud!

Waray: Hi Kristo nabanwaw! Matuod nga Hiya nabanhaw!

Chamorro: La'la'i i Kristo! Magahet na luma'la' i Kristo!

Fijian: Na Karisito tucake tale! Io sa tucake tale!

Filipino: Nabuhay muli Si Kristo! Nabuhay talaga!

Hawaiian: Ua ala hou ʻo Kristo! Ua ala ʻiʻo nō ʻo Ia!

Indonesian: Kristus telah bangkit! Dia benar-benar telah bangkit!

Kapampangan: Y Kristû sinûbli yáng mèbié! Sinûbli ya pin mèbié!

Malagasy: Nitsangana tamin'ny maty i Kristy! Nitsangana marina tokoa izy!

Cook Islands Māori: Kuo toetu’u ‘ae Eiki! ‘Io kuo toetu’u mo’oni!

Austroasiatic languages: Mon-Khmer

: Preah Christ mean preah choan rous leong vinh! trung mean preah choan rous leong vinh men!

Vietnamese

: Chúa Ki-tô đã sống lại! Ngài đã sống lại thật!

Thai

Thai: พระคริสต์เป็นขึ้นจากความตาย! or พระคริสต์ทรงกลับคืนพระชนม์ชีพ!

Basque

Basque: Cristo Berbiztua! Benetan Berbiztua!

Japanese

Japanese: ハリストス復活！実に復活！ (Harisutosu fukkatsu! Jitsu ni fukkatsu!)

Korean

Korean 그리스도 부활하셨네! 참으로 부활하셨네! (Geuriseudo buhwalhasyeonne! Chameuro buhwalhasyeonne!)

Na-Dené languages

Athabaskan languages

Navajo: Christ daaztsą́ą́dę́ę́ʼ náádiidzáá! Tʼáá aaníí daaztsą́ą́dę́ę́ʼ náádiidzáá!

Tlingit: Xristos Kuxwoo-digoot! Xegaa-kux Kuxwoo-digoot!

Niger–Congo languages

: Kristo Ajukkide! Kweli Ajukkide!

Swahili: Kristo Amefufuka! Amefufuka kweli kweli!

Gikuyu: Kristo ni muriuku! Ni muriuku nema!

Quechuan languages

Quechua: Cristo causarimpunña! Ciertopuni causarimpunña!

Mongolic languages

Classical Mongolian: Есүс дахин амилсан, Тэр үнэхээр амилсан! (Yesus dahin amilsan, ter uneheer amilsan)

Turkic languages

Turkish: Mesih dirildi! Hakikaten dirildi!

Uyghur: ‫ئەيسا تىرىلدى! ھەقىقەتىنلا تىرىلدى!‬‎ (Əysa tirildi! Ⱨəⱪiⱪətinla tirildi!)

Azerbaijani: Məsih dirildi! Həqiqətən dirildi!

Chuvash: Христос чĕрĕлнĕ! Чăн чĕрĕлнĕ! (Hristos čĕrĕlnĕ! Čyn čĕrĕlnĕ!)

Khakas: Христос тірілді! Сыннаң тірілді! (Hristos tíríldí! Sınnañ tíríldí!)

Uzbek: Масих тирилди! Хақиқатдан тирилди! (Masih tirildi! Haqiqatdan tirildi!)

Sino-Tibetan languages

Chinese: 基督復活了！他確實復活了！ (Jīdū fùhuó-le! Tā quèshí fùhuó-le!) or 耶穌復活了，真的他復活了！ (Yēsū fùhuó-le, Zhēnde tā fùhuó-le!)

Uralic languages

Estonian: Kristus on üles tõusnud! Tõesti on üles tõusnud!

Finnish: Kristus nousi kuolleista! Totisesti nousi!

Hungarian: Krisztus feltámadt! Valóban feltámadt!

Karelian: Hristos nouzi kuollielois! Tovessah nouzi!

Constructed languages

International auxiliary languages

Esperanto: Kristo leviĝis! Vere Li leviĝis!

Ido: Kristo riviveskabas! Ya Il rivivesakabas!

Interlingua: Christo ha resurgite! Vermente ille ha resurgite! or Christo ha resurrecte! Vermente ille ha resurrecte!

Quenya: (Hristo Ortane! Anwave Ortanes!)

Klingon: Hu'ta' QISt! Hu'bejta'!

Tags: about, action, adding, after, again, against, aim, ALL, amen, American, ancient churches, and, anno, Apostles, Arabic, are, around, attempt, Aug, BACK, christ risen, how many orthodox churches, orthodox easter, roman catholic easter, Slavonic, truly
Posted in Christianity, Various | 2 Comments »

How to unlock AIX user UNIX account / Reset failed login count

Thursday, January 30th, 2020

As part of my daily sysadmin job I had to unlock the user of a colleague who had been locked on some obscure AIX UNIX machine.
IBM AIX Operating System is used mainly for corporate crtical applications within Airports, Financial institutions Banks, U.S Army, Navy, the Stock Exchange etc.

Due to its complexity and price and the lack of people with any expertise, it is now only used for a critical businesses for its great possibilities of Native Application clustering etc.

But enough rant if you happen to come around AIX and need to reset failed login counter which is part of AIX integrated Login Security and blocks the user
after a preset count number here is how.

1. Become superuser

# su – root

2. Check the number of previous unsucessful logins for the account to confirm it is blocked

# lsuser -a unsuccessful_login_count <userid>

i.e.

# lsuser -a unsuccessful_login_count hipo
hipo unsuccessful_login_count=10

3. Reset unsucessful login counter

# chsec -f /etc/security/lastlog -a unsuccessful_login_count=0 -s hipo

4. Unlock the locked account

# chuser account_locked=false hipo

5. Lock account

If for some reason you need to lock some old and no longer used user (instead of completely deleting it).

# chuser account_locked=true hipo

6. Check account lock / unlock state

# lsuser hipo
hipo id=2086 pgrp=group groups=users,admin home=/home/hipo shell=/usr/bin/bash gecos=Official Name login=true su=true rlogin=true daemon=true admin=false sugroups=ALL admgroups= tpath=nosak ttys=ALL expires=0 auth1=SYSTEM auth2=NONE umask=7 registry=files SYSTEM=compat logintimes= loginretries=3 pwdwarntime=14 account_locked=false minage=1 maxage=13 maxexpired=12 minalpha=1 minloweralpha=0 minupperalpha=0 minother=1 mindigit=1 minspecialchar=0 mindiff=3 maxrepeats=2 minlen=8 histexpire=40 histsize=10 pwdchecks= dictionlist= default_roles= fsize=2097151 cpu=-1 data=262144 stack=65536 core=2097151 rss=65536 nofiles=2000 time_last_login=XXXXXXXXXXXX time_last_unsuccessful_login=XXXXXXXXXXX tty_last_login=ssh tty_last_unsuccessful_login=ssh host_last_login=10.10.10.1 host_last_unsuccessful_login=1.2.3.4 unsuccessful_login_count=0 roles=

7. How to reset failed login counter on RedHat / CentOS Linux

Corporate Linux distributions like RHEL / CentOS and SLES have also a similar security feature that allows the sysadmin to block user after a number of unsucessful login count.
To unblock a prohibited to login user, less say due to multiple failure to remember his own password do:

[root@linux: ~]# pam_tally2 –user=Username pam_tally2 –user=Username –reset

Tags: Account, admin, after, AIX, ALL, allows, and, ANY, application, applications, Army, around, bin, Blocks, CentOS, centos linux, check, colleague, complexity, core
Posted in AIX, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »

Windows 7 how to configure Separator delimiter Divider between Pinned and Running Opened programs on Taskbar Classic theme pane

Saturday, October 12th, 2019

I've started to work as a External Consultant for Equens Worldline, who lately merged with Atos – a French multinational information technology.

As the company is mostly into the financial business and as any company that is involved with OLTP Online transaction processing , an information systems that typically facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, e.g. in a mortal language takes care for a numerous companies Credit / Debit card online payments.

Of course the technologies used both on a Server / Data Center level and for Employee personal used are a bit old fashioned. In that relation, most of the computers, I've seen used by Worldline – Atos including my work PC notebook is still running a custom version of Windows 7.

Once I had the Computer ready with the OS from the HelpDesk colleague, then it was ready to install, unfortunately, I didn't have administrator account on the Lenovo L serie laptop so I couldn't install applications. To get around this I've used PortableApps – the world's most popular portable software solution allowing you to take your favorite software with you with no need for any Installation and on Win OS computers, where you have limited access.
PortableApps is fully open source and free platform, it works from any synced cloud folder (DropBox, Google Drive, Box, etc), from your local PC on an internal or external drive, or on any portable storage device (USB flash drive, memory card, portable hard drive, etc). Because the applicatons are installed without being really binded to the Win OS, once the PortableApps ported Application is installed it can be easily moved by simply copying between PCs.

portableapps_windows_list-of-installable-programs-screenshot
PortableApps.com is currently used by millions of users all over the world and is the Largest Portable full collection of open source and freeware software, compatible commercial software, and partners in hardware industry for Microsoft Windows.

As I do often with the Windows fresh installed Windows machines I have to work on, install the great set of tools prior described in must have software on any fresh installed Windows OS as this is essential if you're a sysadmin or Advanced user for the daily work with the WinBlows

OS Graphical Interface simplicity is a crucial thing to me, cause if I have to work with Windows and spendan 8 hours each day 5 days a week in front of the Computer Display with this Complex unnecessery coloring (that Windows 7 / Windows 10 default Theme introduced), together with the visual aids on the Window Minimize and Maximize, puts a useless additional eye strain and besides that "fries" the brain (as the brain has to process all this mambo-jambo "virtual" reality graphics turning all down and up and mixing up the gamma of unreal colors for nothing …

So far so good I've set the needed software from above list and continued further to Change my Windows start menu to look like Windows 2000. Start menu and Theme To be the Classic Theme.

After setting up the Windows Classic Theme (which by the way is unfortunately, no longer available in Windows 10), I love to set my Windows Background picture to be a Sold Black Color, I do this as Black color is the less exhausting for the eyes – as one views the desktop picture thousand times and this is extra unnecessery work for the brain.

However next, unpleasant thing faced is even though now my Windows Start and Windows borders looked old-fashioned in the Windows 2000 Server, "wooden" style, the order of my (Open) Running applicaitons on the start menu bar were not isolated but were mixing, with the rest of my Pinned Program Starter icons

! Notice the Windows Media player icon being in the middle between the Lync, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer line … !

I spend some time to rewind some memories on how I did make the pinned program to distinguish itself (separate) from the rest of the Opened Runnign Windows, and had in mind that I used some kind of separator added custom Toolbar, but the bad thing was I couldn't remember exactly how so I spend some good amount of time to Google around.

And found few articles on the topic proposing to add a new Custom empty launcher program of cmd.exe and change the icon of the empty launcher to a | graphical string
I've tried a lot of this approach but it didn't work and after some experimentations, finally I figured it out. The way to do it is to add a New Toolbar that is Pointing to a Directory with a list of Programs whose icons you want to have listed with icon launchers next to Start menu.

Here is step by step what I've done to achieve configuration of Hard Separator Delimiter between my Program Launchers and Running Applications.

1. Create a New Folder somewhere under your User Home directory, lets say:
C:\Users\Username\TaskbarPrograms

2. Add a shortcut or copy the programs starters (icons) to the TaskBar Programs

3. Unlock the Windows 7 Taskbar
E.g. Click over on any of the empty space on the taskbar after Windows Start menu button and untick Lock the Taskbar

4. Remove any Pinned programs (you have placed there earlier)

windows-7-unpin-program-from-taskbar

5. Again On an empty place on the Taskbar press the last button Mouse (Rightest button) to open Taskbar properties menu and
Go to ToolBars menu and Choose (New Toolbar)

new-toolbar-screenshot-windows-os-7

6. As a location for the new toolbar place C:\Users\Username\TaskbarPrograms

add-custom-Quick-Launch-Toolbar-Images-screenshot

The result should be that all the programs in the selected folder will appear in the Windows pane

8. Now go over the empty space of the Windows start menu bar
and untick Show Text / Show Title

9. Hold over the Taskbar Programs holder and drag and drop it constantly holding the left mouse button
and place it over the default separator Holder (for clarity marked in below screenshot as Marked over here).

10. Move the default separator that will appear on the left close to the list of shown applications
(shown in screenshot)

11. Open any of the applications (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, MobaXterm, Opera, RDP, VLC) the result should be a fine ordered icons. Hooray !!!

12. To make more space for the Opened Active (Running) Windows, a good hint is to stretch the start menu pane field – this is done by holding a right mouse button on the edge of the gray line, like shown in below screenshot.

Note that, you will need to remove any icons that are left over binded to the default separator (holder).

13. Finally on the Taskbar (empty space) menu with the Mouse, click again right mouse button and tick on the Lock the Taskbar

That's it now your Windows 7 start menu bar will look pretty much like Linux's GNOME 2.x and GNOME Mate, and if you're a a long years Linux Desktop user you will feel at home even on Windows 7.

To further tweak the Taskbar a very useful Program is Windows 7+ Taskbar Tweaker

"7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you configure various aspects of the Windows taskbar which can't be tweaked via registry or taskbar properties. The tweaker is designed for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.

windows-7-taskbart-tweaker-combine-grouped-buttons

I install it mostly because one single feature Combined Grouped Buttons which makes similar Windows to group together. Just having a number of Windows of the same type floating around the Taskbar is really irritating and becomes really confusing once multiple windows.

For example if you have opened 10 Windows of Explorer they will be group under the same window title pointer.

To make the Windows even more bizarre and feel more like a Linux powered Box go on and install MobaXterm as a substitute for Linux's gnome-terminal as well as the rest of things such as CygWin / GNUWin32 / GVim etc.

Also some good start up list of software I do install on new Windows Desktop PCs is described in my previous article Some standard software programs to install on Windows to make your Windows feel more like a Linux / Unix Desktop host

This time I did not needed that but on other locations another Windows useful hint I use every now and then is to set some custom programs (Lets say a PortableApps program) to Automatically run – described earlier in my earlier article how to add startup Windows 7 / 8 program run on startup.

P.S. I've tried to setup the same Classic Theme and Start menu button with the same order on Windows 10 OS, but even though a similar interface could be achieved, I've had problems with setting up the proper Running application Ordering, due to a different behavior of the Delimiter / Separators in Windows 10.

For me this Custom Windows interface and Window ordering works pretty well it saves me a lot of the eye strain and brain overcalculation for nothing.

After all, Lets not forget that God is in the Simplicity ! 🙂

Tags: access, Account, administrator, administrator account, after, again, aids, ALL, amount, and, another, ANY, application, applications, are, around, article, available, background, being
Posted in Everyday Life, Various, Windows | 1 Comment »

Scanning ports with netcat “nc” command on Linux and UNIX / Checking for firewall filtering between source and destination with nc

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Netcat ( nc ) is one of that tools, that is well known in the hacker (script kiddie) communities, but little underestimated in the sysadmin world, due to the fact nmap (network mapper) – the network exploratoin and security auditing tool has become like the standard penetration testing TCP / UDP port tool.

nc is feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool with tons of built-in capabilities for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP.

Its Plethora of features includes port listening, port scanning & Transferring files due to which it is often used by Hackers and PenTesters as Backdoor. Netcat was written by a guy we know as the Hobbit <hobbit@avian.org>.

For a start-up and middle sized companies if nmap is missing on server usually it is okay to install it without risking to open a huge security hole, however in Corporate world, due to security policies often nmap is not found on the servers but netcat (nc) is present on the servers so you have to learn, if you haven't so to use netcat for the usual IP range port scans, if you're so used to nmap.

There are different implementations of Netcat, whether historically netcat was UNIX (BSD) program with a latest release of March 1996. The Linux version of NC is GNU Netcat (official source here) and is POSIX compatible. The other netcat in Free Software OS-es is OpenBSD's netcat whose ported version is also used in FreeBSD. Mac OS X also comes with default prebundled netcat on its Mac OS X from OS X version (10.13) onwards, on older OS X-es it is installable via MacPorts package repo, even FreeDOS has a port of it called NTOOL.

The (Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux) busybox includes a default leightweight version of netcat and Solaris has the OpenBSD netcat version bundled.

A cryptography enabled version fork exists that supports that supports integrated transport encryption capabilities called Cryptcat.

The Nmap suite also has included rewritten version of GNU Netcat named Ncat, featuring new possibilities such as "Connection Brokering", TCP/UDP Redirection, SOCKS4 client and server support, ability to "Chain" Ncat processes, HTTP CONNECT proxying (and proxy chaining), SSL connect/listen support and IP address/connection filtering. Just like Nmap, Ncat is cross-platform.

In this small article I'll very briefly explain on basic netcat – known as the TCP Army knife tool port scanning for an IP range of UDP / TCP ports.

1. Scanning for TCP opened / filtered ports remote Linux / Windows server

Everyone knows scanning of a port is possible with a simple telnet request towards the host, e.g.:

telnet SMTP.EMAIL-HOST.COM 25

The most basic netcat use that does the same is achiavable with:

$ nc SMTP.EMAIL-HOST.COM 25
220 jeremiah ESMTP Exim 4.92 Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:39:41 +0300

Beside scanning the remote port, using netcat interactively as pointing in above example, if connecting to HTTP Web services, you can request remote side to return a webpage by sending a false referer, source host and headers, this is also easy doable with curl / wget and lynx but doing it with netcat just like with telnet could be fun, here is for example how to request an INDEX page with spoofed HTTP headers.

nc Web-Host.COM 25
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: spoofedhost.com
Referrer: mypage.com
User-Agent: my-spoofed-browser

2. Performing a standard HTTP request with netcat

To do so just pype the content with a standard bash integrated printf function with the included end of line (the unix one is \n but to be OS independent it is better to use r\n – the end of line complition character for Windows.

printf "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: www.pc-freak.net\r\n\r\n" | nc www.pc-freak.net 80

3. Scanning a range of opened / filtered UDP ports

To scan for lets say opened remote system services on the very common important ports opened from UDP port 25 till, 1195 – more specifically for:

UDP Bind Port 53
Time protocol Port (37)
TFTP (69)
Kerberos (88)
NTP 123
Netbios (137,138,139)
SNMP (161)
LDAP 389
Microsoft-DS (Samba 445)
Route BGP (52)
LDAPS (639)
openvpn (1194)

nc -vzu 192.168.0.1 25 1195

UDP tests will show opened, if no some kind of firewall blocking, the -z flag is given to scan only for remote listening daemons without sending any data to them.

4. Port Scanning TCP listening ports with Netcat

As prior said using netcat to scan for remote opened HTTP Web Server on port 80 an FTP on Port 23 or a Socks Proxy or MySQL Database on 3306 / PostgreSQL DB on TCP 5432 is very rare case scenario.

Below is example to scan a Local network situated IP for TCP open ports from port 1 till 7000.

# nc -v -n -z -w 5 192.168.1.2 1-7000

           nc: connect to host.example.com 80 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
           nc: connect to host.example.com 20 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
           Connection to host.example.com port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!
           nc: connect to host.example.com 23 (tcp) failed: Connection refused

Be informed that scanning with netcat is much more slower, than nmap, so specifying smaller range of ports is always a good idea to reduce annoying waiting …

The -w flag is used to set a timeout to remote connection, usually on a local network situated machines the timeout could be low -w 1 but for machines across different Data Centers (let say one in Berlin and one in Seattle), use as a minimum -w 5.

If you expect remote service to be responsive (as it should always be), it is a nice idea to use netcat with a low timeout (-w) value of 1 below is example:

netcat -v -z -n -w 1 scanned-hosts 1-1023

5. Port scanning range of IP addresses with netcat

If you have used Nmap you know scanning for a network range is as simple as running something like nmap -sP -P0 192.168.0.* (to scan from IP range 1-255 map -sP -P0 192.168.0.1-150 (to scan from local IPs ending in 1-150) or giving the network mask of the scanned network, e.g. nmap -sF 192.168.0.1/24 – for more examples please check my previous article Checking port security on Linux with nmap (examples).

But what if nmap is not there and want to check a bunch 10 Splunk servers (software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a Web-style interface.), with netcat to find, whether the default Splunk connection port 9997 is opened or not:

for i in `seq 1 10`; do nc -z -w 5 -vv splunk0$i.server-domain.com 9997; done

6. Checking whether UDP port traffic is allowed to destination server

Assuring you have access on Source traffic (service) Host A and Host B (remote destination server where a daemon will be set-upped to listen on UDP port and no firewall in the middle Network router or no traffic control and filtering software HUB is preventing the sent UDP proto traffic, lets say an ntpd will be running on its standard 123 port there is done so:

– On host B (the remote machine which will be running ntpd and should be listening on port 123), run netcat to listen for connections

# nc -l -u -p 123
Listening on [0.0.0.0] (family 2, port 123)

Make sure there is no ntpd service actively running on the server, if so stop it with /etc/init.d/ntpd stop
and run above command. The command should run as superuser as UDP port 123 is from the so called low ports from 1-1024 and binding services on such requires root privileges.

– On Host A (UDP traffic send host

nc -uv remote-server-host 123

If the remote port is not reachable due to some kind of network filtering, you will get "connection refused".
An important note to make is on some newer Linux distributions netcat might be silently trying to connect by default using IPV6, bringing false positives of filtered ports due to that. Thus it is generally a good idea, to make sure you're connecting to IPV6

$ nc -uv -4 remote-server-host 123

Another note to make here is netcat's UDP connection takes 2-3 seconds, so make sure you wait at least 4-8 seconds for a very distant located hosts that are accessed over a multitude of routers.

7. Checking whether TCP port traffic allowed to DST remote server

To listen for TCP connections on a specified location (external Internet IP or hostname), it is analogous to listening for UDP connections.

Here is for example how to bind and listen for TCP connections on all available Interface IPs (localhost, eth0, eth1, eth2 etc.)

nc -lv 0.0.0.0 12345

Then on client host test the connection with

nc -vv 192.168.0.103 12345
Connection to 192.168.0.103 12345 port [tcp/*] succeeded!

8. Proxying traffic with netcat

Another famous hackers use of Netcat is its proxying possibility, to proxy anything towards a third party application with UNIX so any content returned be printed out on the listening nc spawned daemon like process.
For example one application is traffic SMTP (Mail traffic) with netcat, below is example of how to proxy traffic from Host B -> Host C (in that case the yandex current mail server mx.yandex.ru)

linux-srv:~# nc -l 12543 | nc mx.yandex.ru 25

Now go to Host A or any host that has TCP/IP protocol access to port 12543 on proxy-host Host B (linux-srv) and connect to it on 12543 with another netcat or telnet.

to make netcat keep connecting to yandex.ru MX (Mail Exchange) server you can run it in a small never ending bash shell while loop, like so:

linux-srv:~# while :; do nc -l 12543 | nc mx.yandex.ru 25; done

Below are screenshots of a connection handshake between Host B (linux-srv) proxy host and Host A (the end client connecting) and Host C (mx.yandex.ru).

host-B-running-as-a-proxy-daemon-towards-Host-C-yandex-mail-exchange-server

Host B netcat as a (Proxy)

Host-A-Linux-client-connection-handshake-to-proxy-server-with-netcat
that is possible in combination of UNIX and named pipes (for more on Named pipes check my previous article simple linux logging with named pipes), here is how to run a single netcat version to proxy any traffic in a similar way as the good old tinyproxy.

On Proxy host create the pipe and pass the incoming traffic towards google.com and write back any output received back in the named pipe.

# mkfifo backpipe
# nc -l 8080 0<backpipe | nc www.google.com 80 1>backpipe

Other useful netcat proxy set-up is to simulate a network connectivity failures.

For instance, if server:port on TCP 1080 is the normal host application would connect to, you can to set up a forward proxy from port 2080 with

nc -L server:1080 2080

then set-up and run the application to connect to localhost:2080 (nc proxy port)

/path/to/application_bin –server=localhost –port=2080

Now application is connected to localhost:2080, which is forwarded to server:1080 through netcat. To simulate a network connectivity failure, just kill the netcat proxy and check the logs of application_bin.

Using netcat as a bind shell (make any local program / process listen and deliver via nc)

netcat can be used to make any local program that can receive input and send output to a server, this use is perhaps little known by the junior sysadmin, but a favourite use of l337 h4x0rs who use it to spawn shells on remote servers or to make connect back shell. The option to do so is -e

-e – option spawns the executable with its input and output redirected via network socket.

One of the most famous use of binding a local OS program to listen and receive / send content is by
making netcat as a bind server for local /bin/bash shell.

Here is how

nc -l -p 4321 -e /bin/sh

If necessery specify the bind hostname after -l. Then from any client connect to 4321 (and if it is opened) you will gain a shell with the user with which above netcat command was run. Note that many modern distribution versions such as Debian / Fedora / SuSE Linux's netcat binary is compiled without the -e option (this works only when compiled with -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE), removal in this distros is because option is potentially opening a security hole on the system.

If you're interested further on few of the methods how modern hackers bind new backdoor shell or connect back shell, check out Spawning real tty shells article.

For more complex things you might want to check also socat (SOcket CAT) – multipurpose relay for bidirectional data transfer under Linux.
socat is a great Linux Linux / UNIX TCP port forwarder tool similar holding the same spirit and functionality of netcat plus many, many more.

On some of the many other UNIX operating systems that are lacking netcat or nc / netcat commands can't be invoked a similar utilitiesthat should be checked for and used instead are:

ncat, pnetcat, socat, sock, socket, sbd

To use nmap's ncat to spawn a shell for example that allows up to 3 connections and listens for connects only from 192.168.0.0/24 network on port 8081:

ncat –exec "/bin/bash" –max-conns 3 –allow 192.168.0.0/24 -l 8081 –keep-open

9. Copying files over network with netcat

Another good hack often used by hackers to copy files between 2 servers Server1 and Server2 who doesn't have any kind of FTP / SCP / SFTP / SSH / SVN / GIT or any kind of Web copy support service – i.e. servers only used as a Database systems that are behind a paranoid sysadmin firewall is copying files between two servers with netcat.

On Server2 (the Machine on which you want to store the file)

nc -lp 2323 > files-archive-to-copy.tar.gz

On server1 (the Machine from where file is copied) run:

nc -w 5 server2.example.com 2323 < files-archive-to-copy.tar.gz

Note that the downside of such transfers with netcat is data transferred is unencrypted so any one with even a simple network sniffer or packet analyzier such as iptraf or tcpdump could capture the file, so make sure the file doesn't contain sensitive data such as passwords.

Copying partition images like that is perhaps best way to get disk images from a big server onto a NAS (when you can't plug the NAS into the server).

10. Copying piped archived directory files with netcat

On computer A:

export ARIBTRARY_PORT=3232
nc -l $ARBITRARY_PORT | tar vzxf –

On Computer B:

tar vzcf – files_or_directories | nc computer_a $ARBITRARY_PORT

11. Creating a one page webserver with netcat and ncat

As netcat could listen to port and print content of a file, it can be set-up with a bit of bash shell scripting to serve
as a one page webserver, or even combined with some perl scripting and bash to create a multi-serve page webserver if needed.

To make netact serve a page to any connected client run in a screen / tmux session following code:

while true; do nc -l -p 80 -q 1 < somepage.html; done

Another interesting fun example if you have installed ncat (is a small web server that connects current time on server on connect).

ncat -lkp 8080 –sh-exec 'echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\nThe date is "; date;'

12. Cloning Hard disk partitions with netcat

rsync is a common tool used to clone hard disk partitions over network. However if rsync is not installed on a server and netcat is there you can use it instead, lets say we want to clone /dev/sdb
from Server1 to Server2 assuming (Server1 has a configured working Local or Internet connection).

On Server2 run:

nc -l -p 4321 | dd of=/dev/sdb

Following on Server2 to start the Partition / HDD cloning process run

dd if=/dev/sdb | nc 192.168.0.88 4321

Where 192.168.0.88 is the IP address listen configured on Server2 (in case you don't know it, check the listening IP to access with /sbin/ifconfig).

Next you have to wait for some short or long time depending on the partiiton or Hard drive, number of files / directories and allocated disk / partition size.

To clone /dev/sda (a main partiiton) from Server1 to Server2 first requirement is that it is not mounted, thus to have it unmounted on a system assuming you have physical access to the host, you can boot some LiveCD Linux distribution such as Knoppix Live CD on Server1, manually set-up networking with ifconfig or grab an IP via DHCP from the central DHCP server and repeat above example.

Happy netcating 🙂

Tags: access, addresses, after, ALL, ALLOW, allowed, allows, checking, command, destination, due, firewall, linux windows, network, nmap, Scanning, script kiddie, security policies, tool, unix
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Networking | 1 Comment »

Howto Configure Linux shell Prompt / Setup custom Terminal show Prompt using default shell variables PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4

Tuesday, August 27th, 2019

System Console, Command Operation Console or Terminal is a Physical device for text (command) input from keyboard, getting the command output and monitoring the status of a shell or programs I/O operations generated traditionally with attached screen. With the development of Computers, physical consoles has become emulated and the input output is translated on the monitor usually via a data transfer protocol historically mostly over TCP/IP connection to remote IP with telnet or rsh, but due to security limitations Consoles are now accessed over data (encrypted) network protocols with SHA2 / MD5 cryptography algorithm enabled such as over SSH (Secure Shell) network protocol..
The ancestors of physical consoles which in the past were just a Terminal (Monitoring / Monitor device attached to a MainFrame system computer).

Mainframe-physical-terminal-monitor-Old-Computer

What is Physical Console
A classical TTY (TeleTYpewriter) device looked like so and served the purpose of being just a communication and display deivce, whether in reality the actual computing and storage tape devices were in a separate room and communicating to Terminal.

mainframe-super-computer-computing-tape-machine
TTYs are still present in modern UNIX like GNU / Linux distrubions OSes and the BSD berkley 4.4 code based FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD if you have installed the OS on a physical computer in FreeBSD and Solaris / SunOS there is also tty command. TTY utility in *nix writes the name of the terminal attached to standard input to standard output, in Linux there is a GNU remake of same program part called GNU tty of coreutils package (try man tty) for more.

The physical console is recognizable in Linux as it is indicated with other tree letters pts – (pseudo terminal device) standing for a terminal device which is emulated by an other program (example: xterm, screen, or ssh are such programs). A pts is the slave part of a pts is pseudo there is no separate binary program for it but it is dynamically allocated in memory.
PTS is also called Line consle in Cisco Switches / Router devices, VTY is the physical Serial Console connected on your Cisco device and the network connection emulation to network device is creates with a virtual console session VTL (Virtual Terminal Line). In freebsd the actual /dev/pts* /dev/tty* temporary devices on the OS are slightly different and have naming such as /dev/ttys001.
But the existence of tty and pts emulator is not enough for communicating interrupts to Kernel and UserLand binaries of the Linux / BSD OS, thus to send the commands on top of it is running a System Shell as CSH / TSH / TCSH or BASH which is usually the first program set to run after user logs in over ptty or pseudo tty virtual terminal.

linux-tty-terminal-explained-brief-intro-to-linux-device-drivers-20-638

Setting the Bash Prompt in Terminal / Console on GNU / Linux

Bash has system environments to control multiple of variables, which are usually visible with env command, one important variable to change in the past was for example USER / USERNAME which was red by IRC Chat clients such as BitchX / irssi and could be displayed publicly so if not changed to a separate value, one could have known your Linux login username by simple /whois query to the Nickname in question (if no inetd / xinetd service was running on the Linux box and usually inetd was not running).

Below is my custom set USER / USERNAME to separate

hipo@pcfreak:~$ env|grep USER
USERNAME=Attitude
USER=Attitude

There is plenty of variables to tune email such as MAIL store directory, terminal used TERM, EDITOR etc. but there are some
variables that are not visible with env query as they're not globally available for all users but just for the single user, to show this ones you need to use declare command instead, to get a full list of All Single and System Wide defined variables and functions type declare in the bash shell, for readability, below is last 10 returned results:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ declare | tail -10
{
    local quoted=${1//\'/\'\\\'\'};
    printf "'%s'" "$quoted"
}
quote_readline ()
{
    local quoted;
    _quote_readline_by_ref "$1" ret;
    printf %s "$ret"
}

PS1 is present there virtually on any modern Linux distribution and is installed through user home's directory $HOME/.bashrc , ~/.profile or .bash_profile or System Wide globally for all existing users in /etc/passwd (password database file) from /etc/bash.bashrc
In Debian / Ubuntu / Mint GNU / Linux this system variable is set in user home's .bashrc but in Fedora / RHEL Linux distro,
PS1 is configured from /home/username/.bash_profile to find out where PS1 is located for ur user:

cd ~
grep -Rli PS1 .bash*

Here is one more example:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ declare|grep -i PS1|head -1
PS1='\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '

hipo@pcfreak:~$ grep PS1 /etc/bash.bashrc
[ -z “$PS1” ] && return
# but only if not SUDOing and have SUDO_PS1 set; then assume smart user.
if ! [ -n “${SUDO_USER}” -a -n “${SUDO_PS1}” ]; then
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '

Getting current logged in user shell configured PS1 variable can be done with echo:

hipo@pcfreak:~$ echo $PS1
\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$

So lets observe a little bit the meaning of this obscure line of (code) instructions code which are understood by BASH when being red from PS1 var to do so, I'll give a list of meaning of main understood commands, each of which is defined with \.

The ${debian_chroot} shell variable is defined from /etc/bash.bashrc

Easiest way to change PS1 is to export the string you like with the arguments like so:

root@linux:/home/hipo# export PS1='My-Custom_Server-Name# '
My-Custom_Server-Name# echo $PS1
My-Custom_Server-Name#

\a : an ASCII bell character (07)
\d : the date in “Weekday Month Date” format (e.g., “Tue May 26”)
\D{format} : the format is passed to strftime(3) and the result is inserted into the prompt string; an empty format results in a locale-specific time representation. The braces are required
\e : an ASCII escape character (033)
\h : the hostname up to the first ‘.’
\H : the hostname
\j : the number of jobs currently managed by the shell
\l : the basename of the shell's terminal device name
\n : newline
\r : carriage return
\s : the name of the shell, the basename of $0 (the portion following the final slash)
\t : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format
\T : the current time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format
\@ : the current time in 12-hour am/pm format
\A : the current time in 24-hour HH:MM format
\u : the username of the current user
\v : the version of bash (e.g., 2.00)
\V : the release of bash, version + patch level (e.g., 2.00.0)
\w : the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
\W : the basename of the current working directory, with $HOME abbreviated with a tilde
\! : the history number of this command
\# : the command number of this command
\$ : if the effective UID is 0, a #, otherwise a $
\nnn : the character corresponding to the octal number nnn
\\ : a backslash
\[ : begin a sequence of non-printing characters, which could be used to embed a terminal control sequence into the prompt
\] : end a sequence of non-printing characters

The default's PS1 set prompt on Debian Linux is:

echo $PS1
\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$

As you can see \u (print username) \h (print hostname) and \W (basename of current working dir) or \w (print $HOME/current working dir)
are the most essential, the rest are bell character, escape character etc.

A very good way to make your life easier and learn the abbreviations / generate exactly the PS1 PROMPT you want to have is with Easy Bash PS1 Generator Web Utility
with which you can just click over buttons that are capable to produce all of the PS1 codes.

1. How to show current hour:minute:seconds / print full date in Prompt Shell (PS)

Here is an example with setting the Bash Shell prompt to include also the current time in format hour:minute:seconds (very useful if you're executing commands on a critical servers and you run commands in some kind of virtual terminal like screen or tmux.

root@pcfreak:~# PS1="\n\t \u@\h:\w# "
14:03:51 root@pcfreak:/home#

PS1-how-to-setup-date-time-hour-minutes-and-seconds-in-bash-shell-prompt

export PS1='\u@\H \D{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M;%S%z}] \W ] \$ '

Make superuser appear in RED color (adding PS1 prompt custom color for a User)

root@pcfreak:~$ PS1="\\[$(tput setaf 1)\\]\\u@\\h:\\w #\\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"

how-to-change-colors-in-bash-prompt-shell-on-linux-shell-environment

In above example the Shell Prompt Color changed is changed for administrator (root) to shebang symbol # in red, green, yellow and blue for the sake to show you how it is done, however this example can be adapted for any user on the system. Setting different coloring for users is very handy if you have to administer Mail Server service like Qmail or other Application that consists of multiple small ones of multiple daemons such as qmail + vpopmail + clamd + mysql etc. Under such circumstances, coloring each of the users in different color like in the example for debugging is very useful.

Coloring the PS1 system prompt on Linux to different color has been a standard practice in Linux Server environments running Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SuSE Enterprise Linux and some Desktop distributions such as Mint Linux.

To make The Root prompt Red colored only for system super user (root) on any Linux distribution
, add the following to /etc/bashrc, e.g.

vim /etc/bashrc

# If id command returns zero, you've root access.
if [ $(id -u) -eq 0 ];
then # you are root, set red colour prompt
PS1="\\[$(tput setaf 1)\\]\\u@\\h:\\w #\\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"
else # normal
PS1="[\\u@\\h:\\w] $"
fi

2. How to make the prompt of a System user appear Green

Add to ~/.bashrc following line

PS1="\\[$(tput setaf 2)\\]\\u@\\h:\\w #\\[$(tput sgr0)\\]"

3. Print New line, username@hostname, base PTY, shell level, history (number), newline and full working directory $PWD

export PS1='\n[\u@\h \l:$SHLVL:\!]\n$PWD\$ '

4. Showing the numbert of jobs the shell is currently managing.

This is useful if you run and switch with fg / bg (foreground / background) commands
to switch between jobs and forget some old job.

export PS1='\u@\H \D{%Y-%m-%d %H:%M;%S%z}] \W \$]'

Multi Lines Prompt / Make very colorful Shell prompt full of stats info

PS1="\n\[\033[35m\]\$(/bin/date)\n\[\033[32m\]\w\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u@\h: \[\033[1;34m\]\$(/usr/bin/tty | /bin/sed -e ‘s:/dev/::’): \[\033[1;36m\]\$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed ‘s: ::g’) files \[\033[1;33m\]\$(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed ‘s/total //’)b\[\033[0m\] -> \[\033[0m\]"

prompt-show-how-many-files-and-virtual-pts-ps1-linux

5. Set color change on command failure

If you have a broken command or the command ended with non zero output with some kind of bad nasty message and you want to make, that more appearing making it red heighlighted, here is how:

PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1="\[\033[0;33m\][\!]\`if [[ \$? = “0” ]]; then echo “\\[\\033[32m\\]”; else echo “\\[\\033[31m\\]”; fi\`[\u.\h: \`if [[ `pwd|wc -c|tr -d ” “` > 18 ]]; then echo “\\W”; else echo “\\w”; fi\`]\$\[\033[0m\] “; echo -ne “\033]0;`hostname -s`:`pwd`\007"'

6. Other beautiful PS1 Color Prompts with statistics

PS1="\n\[\e[32;1m\](\[\e[37;1m\]\u\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]jobs:\j\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]\w\[\e[32;1m\])\n(\[\[\e[37;1m\]! \!\[\e[32;1m\])-> \[\e[0m\]"

another-very-beuatiful-bash-colorful-prompt

7. Add Muliple Colors to Same Shell prompt

function prompt { local BLUE="\[\033[0;34m\]” local DARK_BLUE=”\[\033[1;34m\]” local RED=”\[\033[0;31m\]” local DARK_RED=”\[\033[1;31m\]” local NO_COLOR=”\[\033[0m\]” case $TERM in xterm*|rxvt*) TITLEBAR=’\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]’ ;; *) TITLEBAR=”” ;; esac PS1=”\u@\h [\t]> ” PS1=”${TITLEBAR}\ $BLUE\u@\h $RED[\t]>$NO_COLOR " PS2='continue-> ' PS4='$0.$LINENO+ ' }

colorful-prompt-blue-and-red-linux-console-PS1

8. Setting / Change Shell background Color

export PS1="\[$(tput bold)$(tput setb 4)$(tput setaf 7)\]\u@\h:\w $ \[$(tput sgr0)\]"

tput Color Capabilities:

tput setab [1-7] – Set a background color using ANSI escape
tput setb [1-7] – Set a background color
tput setaf [1-7] – Set a foreground color using ANSI escape
tput setf [1-7] – Set a foreground color

tput Text Mode Capabilities:

tput bold – Set bold mode
tput dim – turn on half-bright mode
tput smul – begin underline mode
tput rmul – exit underline mode
tput rev – Turn on reverse mode
tput smso – Enter standout mode (bold on rxvt)
tput rmso – Exit standout mode
tput sgr0 – Turn off all attributes

Color Code for tput:

0 – Black
1 – Red
2 – Green
3 – Yellow
4 – Blue
5 – Magenta
6 – Cyan
7 – White

9. Howto Use bash shell function inside PS1 variable

If you administrate Apache or other HTTPD servers or any other server whose processes are forked and do raise drastically at times to keep an eye while actively working on the server.

function httpdcount { ps aux | grep apache2 | grep -v grep | wc -l } export PS1="\u@\h [`httpdcount`]> "

10. PS2, PS3, PS4 little known variables

I'll not get much into detail to PS2, PS3, PS4 but will mention them as perhaps many people are not even aware they exist.
They're rarely used in the daily system administrator's work but useful for Shell scripting purposes of Dev Ops and Shell Scripting Guru Programmers.

PS2 – Continuation interactive prompt

A very long unix command can be broken down to multiple line by giving \ at the end of the line. The default interactive prompt for a multi-line command is “> “. Let us change this default behavior to display “continue->” by using PS2 environment variable as shown below.

hipo@db-host :~$ myisamchk –silent –force –fast –update-state \
> –key_buffer_size=512M –sort_buffer_size=512M \
> –read_buffer_size=4M –write_buffer_size=4M \
> /var/lib/mysql/bugs/*.MYI
[Note: This uses the default “>” for continuation prompt]

PS3 – Prompt used by “select” inside shell script (usefulif you write scripts with user prompts)
PS4 – Used by “set -x” to prefix tracing output
The PS4 shell variable defines the prompt that gets displayed.

You can find example with script demonstrating PS2, PS3, PS4 use via small shell scripts in thegeekstuff's article Take control of PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4 read it here

Summary

In this article, I've shortly reviewed on what is a TTY, how it evolved into Pseudo TTY and how it relates to current shells which are the interface communicating with the modern UNIX like Operating systems's userland and kernel.
Also it was reviewed shortly how the current definitions of shell variables could be viewed with declare cmd. Also I went through on how to display the PS1 variable and on how to modify PS1 and make the prompt different statistics and monitoring parameters straight into the command shell. I've shown some common PS1 strings that report on current date hour, minute, seconds, modify the coloring of the bash prompt shell, show processes count, and some PS1 examples were given that combines beuatiful shell coloring as well as how the Prompt background color can be changed.
Finally was shown how a combination of commands can be executed by exporting to PS1 to update process counf of Apache on every shell prompt iteration.
Other shell goodies are mostly welcome

Tags: access, adding, administrate, administrator, after, algorithm, ALL, amp, bash shell, Below, command, current time, default shell, echo, email, home, How to, root linux, Virtual Terminal Line, VTL
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