Posts Tagged ‘Debian’

Problem with OpenOffice after upgrade on Debian Sid Testing/Unstable – (openoffice.org: Component manager is not available.)

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

A few days ago I did an upgrade using apt-get which upgraded my openoffice to 3.2.04 on my Desktop machine (a notebook running Debian Sid – Testing/Unstable). Since then I haven’t started the openoffice, however today an ex-college colleague of mine (Burcu), drop by home to give her some help about a project. In that relation I had to open a .doc file. I launched my oowriter in an attempt to open the document without success a stupid error poped up saying something is wrong with some kind of Openoffice registry and most importantly claiming the following error:

openoffice.org: Component manager is not available.

First thing I tried in order to resolve the issue was simply moving my ~/.openoffice.org/ and ~/.openoffice-org2/ directories to ~/.openoffice.org-bak/ and respectively ~/.openoffice.org2:

hipo@noah:~$ mv ~/.openoffice.org/ ~/.openoffice.org-bak/
hipo@noah:~$ mv ~/.openoffice.org2/ ~/.openoffice.org2-bak/

Regrettably I realized this this approach failed when I launched the oowriter to regenerate it’s working directories.

Therefore I executed another strategy 🙂 to fix the issue completely reinstalling the openoffice with apt:

hipo@noah:~# apt-get install --reinstall openoffice.org-core

After a while, now all is back to normal with my Openoffice :)Though it’s a real lose of time implying such a dumb workarounds, I always hated linux as a desktop platform just because of misbehaves like that.

Disable DNS recursion and AXFR requests in BIND on Debian Linux and FreeBSD / How to test a nameserver if AXFR requests are allowed with dig command

Monday, March 15th, 2010

I am playing with bind on a newly configured server and therefore doing my best to configure the nameserver in a good manner. In that manner of thoughts I remembered about the good old “recursion” which could pose a security hole in your DNS systems. I won’t buffle on how bad it is for a BIND domain resolver to have Domain recursion switched on, there is plenty of information you can read further online. Anyways here is a brief overview on recursion:
Recursive DNS is essentially the opposite of Custom DNS. Custom DNS is an authoritative DNS service that allows others to find your domain, and Recursive DNS allows you to resolve other people’s domains.

So considering the above definition if you decide to leave the default behaviour of the Bind nameserver (which by the way is also default behaviour of many other DNS servers including Microsoft DNS), this would mean that your DNS will be left open for the whole world to be able to serve resolve requests for any domain name requested by end users. In other words somebody out there might decide to use your nameserver to resolve all internet domains, like: google.com, yahoo.co.uk etc.

It is wise to enable recursion only for localhost on your bind name server, So to achieve that on Debian:
Open /etc/bind/named.conf.options and insert into it
Right before the options {

acl recurseallow { 1.2.3.4; 127.0.0.1; };

Also in the options {} include the following lines:

allow-recursion { recurseallow; };recursion yes;

On FreeBSD you need to include the same in /var/named/etc/namedb/named.conf by default or any other location if you have some specific named.conf file location.

Another truly Vital things to include in /etc/bind/named.conf.options on Debian Lenny among options {} is:

auth-nxdomain no;

Including this in the options {} configuration block would completely disable AXFR transfer requests on your nameserver on FreeBSD the procedure is absolutely analogous, just open /var/named/etc/namedb/named.conf and include the auth-nxdomain no; in the options configuration block.

To stress out the importance of disable AXFR it’s important to know that if you don’t disable the AXFR which is enabled by default in many nameservers out there you’re risking that a malicious person could list the whole zone files for each and every of the configured domains in the DNS server and consequently the attacker can learn a lot about the DNS topology of your network etc.
So to complete the article I’m gonna give an example on how the dig command can be used in order to check a certain DNS server if it has enabled the AXFR requests (e.g. if it’s vulnerable to this type of DNS information leak).

dig @somenameserver.net somedomainname.net axfr

In the above example somenameserver.net = is a random name server hosting a specific DNS domain
somedomainname.net = is the DNS domain name / (a.k.a. zone file) hosted on somenameserver.net

If everything is configured properly in your the namesever you’re running the axfr test against you should see something like:

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P1 <<>> @somenameserver.net somedomainname.net axfr
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
; Transfer failed.

Quake3 Arena on Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze / Sid Unstable

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

quake 3 arena logo
I wanted to have running Quake3 on my Debian GNU/Linux just like I have it running on my FreeBSD system thus.
1. I’ve downloaded linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run .
2. I executed :# chmod +x linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run; linux32 ./linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run
Note: make sure you have installed linux32 and ia32-libs packages!I tested directly executing # linuxq3apoint-1.32b-3.x86.run, but that was a failure, since the self extracting binary could not recognize the amd64 system architecture
After installing it via linux32, all went smoothly. Next I needed to copy all my game pak files into
/usr/local/games/quake3/baseq3. Remember that here it’s absolutely vital to have q3config.cfg file to your baseq3 directory.To make your life easier I’ve tarred the Quake Arena pak files, so you can freely fetch them via this baseq3 link
Now untar the newly fetched baseq3.tar.gz to /usr/local/games/quake3/Last step in the installation is to link the game binary to your /usr/games, I did this via
ln -sf /usr/local/games/quake3/quake3-smp /usr/games/
In your case it might be not necessary to link quake3-smp if you’re not running 2 Core CPU.
Hopefully, Now with God’s grace you should be having a fully functional Quake 3 Arena installation on your Debian Unstable GNU/Linux.
Enjoy!END—–

An absolutely must have installed packages to have a complete Ubuntu / Debian Desktop

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Every time after installing a plain new Debian or Ubuntu system, I feel ridiculous cause of the fact. That many of the programs I do use in my daily work with my pc ain’t there ready to use. In that manner of thoughts it’s really really irritating for me to try to memorize the whole list of programs I usually use not to mention that I hardly could remember the exact name of the packages containing the programs. Moreover it’s really irritating to type a hundred times
apt-cache search programname;
apt-get install programtoinstall;
.To make my daily life and hopefully my blog readers life easier I’ve decided to make a list of all the packages to install:
here is the one liner command required to install the whole heap of packages
$ apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly libxine1-ffmpeg vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc mplayer wifi-radar extremetuxracer powermanga supertux chromium kbedic transmission openoffice.org deluge alltray xine-ui dodgindiamond2 zblast-x11 blobwars briquolo kamefu blender inkscape gftp xchat k3b gnochm tecnoballz audacious audacity rezound opencubicplayer virtualbox gnomad2 kino grip xawtv cheese mozilla-helix-player abiword bgoffice-computer-terms sun-java-fonts sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-source sun-java6-jre sun-java6-demo dia gajim mc dpkg-dev amsn elinks lynx iptraf sniffit ettercap wireshark bluefish thunderbird screenlets verse bible-kjv dict-easton gnomesword sword-text-kjv realplayer pidgin ncurses-dev cbedic awn-manager centerim-utf8 apachetop alsa-oss oss-compat iftop
For your convenience I’ve also prepared a small shell script I’ve called desktop-bundle.sh download desktop-bundle.sh here
Just in case if you’re wondering what exactly is the above package bundle installation good for.
Here is a few explanatory notes next to it:

mozilla-plugin-vlc – Allows mozilla to play in embeded player various video files

gftp – Gnome’s FTP client

xchat – IRC Gnome Chat program

cheese – A program to make pictures and suchalike

k3b – kde’s cd burner

kino – video editor

sun-java6-jdk, sun-java6-jre, sun-java6-plugin – allows you to run properly java applications on your Linux system both from the command line and in browser

screenlets – explained in my previous post here

wifi-radar – a gnome wifi detection and connection tool

cbedic – a bulgarian / english console dictionary I heavily use

dia – Diagram drawing software (handy to draw your for instance network diagrams)

kbedic – kde Bulgarian / English dictionary. To make it work properly you’ll need also the bedic data files, which could be downloaded here

verse, bible-kjv, gnomesword – This and the rest bible related packages are a nice packages I use to daily read and research the bible, since I’m an Orthodox Christian

vlc – Nowdays I’m changing in using vlc to watch videos since mplayer is getting more and more old fashioned and it’s behaviour is a bit disappointing sometimes

gnomechm – An app to read Microsoft’s CHM help file

grip – Program to RIP audio files

opencubicplayer – the good old Cubic Player we all enjoyed in MS-DOS and Novell DOS to play various XM, S3M, MOD, IT etc. files, it’s really nice that this version supports MP3 file format

audacity – An application to record sounds, supports songs sound reverse, for example you can use it to listen your mp3 files backwards, let’s say to check if a song contains a satanic message or not 🙂

dosbox – dos emulator to run old school dos games I love this one

inkscape – 2D vector design software

blender – 3D design software

gajim – might need that one in case if you intend to use Jabber

pidgin – the program I use as an ICQ, MSN client

transmission, deluge – nice bittorrent softwares

kompozer, bluefish – editors similar more or less to the famous dreamweaver. kompozer is more advanced and is much closer to dreamweaver

virtualbox – The Sun’s Virtual Machine substitute for VMWare, works okay maybe 20 or 30% slower than VMWare

rezound – again a nice sound editor, like audacity

xine – video player, most people who remember the times before few years should know it

amsn – MSN chat client

avant-window-navigator – A MacOS X like panel for the GNOME Desktop. Features a taskbar behaving similar to Mac OSX’s dock.
There is one drawback it doesn’t support the dock to be positioned anywhere except on the bottom of the screen
chromium, supertux, powermanga etc. – this and many of the rest are nice games I love to play every now and then when I get completely pissed off

Well that’s all for now. Hope this post would be interesting to somebody out there.

END—–

Install Apache2 with SSL support on Debian Lenny Linux / (Quick way to generate Self Signed SSL certificate)

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

1. Install apache2 on your Debian Lenny

server# apt-get install apache2

2. Install openssl and it’s corequirements

server# apt-get install openssl ssl-cert

In case if you need php support as well on your Lenny:
server# apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

3. Generate Self Signed SSL certificate

server# openssl req $@ -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /etc/apache2/apache.pem -keyout /etc/apache2/apache.pem
You might consider changing the /etc/apache2/apache.pem to whatever you like your ssl certificate file to be called.
Now you must ensure yourself that the newly generated ssl certificate has proper permissions issue the command.

server# chmod 600 /etc/apache2/apache.pem The default behaviour of the Apache server is to server unencrypted HTTP traffic on port 80, however in our case we need to enable SSL connections and therefore configure apache to serve and listen for traffic on port 443.

Therefore, we need to have Listen 443 in our /etc/apache2/ports.conf another thing we should do is to enable the ssl module with command:

server# a2enmod ssl

That should be it, now we have to restart the Apache webserver:

server# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

To enable SSL on virtualhosts it’s required to change NameVirtualHost * in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file
to:
NameVirtualHost *:80
NameVirtualHost *:443

To use SSL encryption on a specific Virtualhost, all you need to do is:
include:

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/apache.pem

Fix to an “Unknown DAV provider: svn” on Debian GNU Linux

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

I’ve been installing subversion with WebDAV support on Apache2. After
configuring in the VirtualHost to have support for WebDAV:
I encountered the following error while testing apache configuration:
Unknown DAV provider: svn
In order to fix the problem I had to install libapache2-svn.
Here is how;

apt-get install the libapache2-svn

This fixed the issue.

Running VirtualHosts under separate user ids (uid) and group ids (gid) on Debian Lenny (Apache 2.2.x) – A substitute alternative to suphp with Apache MPM-itk

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Before we start it might be a good idea to check out apache-mpm-itk’s officialhomepage to get a general idea of what apache mpm-itk is.
So please visit Apache2-mpm-itk’s homepage here
Now let’s continue with the installation;

1. Install Apache2-mpm-itk

# apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk

2. Configure Apache2-mpm-itk
In order to configure Apache-MPM-ITK we have to do it for each of the configuredVirtualHosts, e.g. no global options are required.
There is only one configuration Directive that has to be included in each and every Virtualhost configured in your Apache.
This is the AssignUserId and takes two parameter, (user name and group name), this are the user name andgroup name that the files on the specified virtualhosts will be executed as.

3. Here is an example on how to configure it for the default Apache virtualhost and the “example” user and group id.

<IfModule mpm_itk_module>
AssignUserId web1_admin web1
</IfModule>

So for instance edit vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and place there;


<IfModule mpm_itk_module>
AssignUserId web1_admin web1
</IfModule>

4. Last step is to restart Apache for the new VirtualHost configuration to be preloaded.

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The End 🙂

Quick way to install mod_qos on Debian Lenny to protect from Slowloris

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I’m gonna do a fast walk through on installing and enabling mod_qos on Debian, original article is available in Bulgarian on mpetrov’s blog .
So let’s go…
1. Install required development files and tools to be able to proper compile:

debian-server# apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev gcc

2. Download the mod_qos latest archive from sourceforge

debian-server# cd /usr/local/srcdebian-server# wget http://freefr.dl.sourceforge.net/project/mod-qos/mod-qos/9.7/mod_qos-9.8.tar.gz

3. Unarchive (Untar) the mod_qos archive and compile the module

debian-server# tar zxvf mod_qos-9.8.tar.gz
debian-server# cd mod_qos-9.8/apache2/
debian-server# apxs2 -i -c mod_qos.c

You can see from the compile output module is installed to; usr/lib/apache2/modules

4. Now let us create mod_qos configuration files

debian-server# cd /etc/apache2/mods-available/
debian-server# echo "LoadModule qos_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_qos.so" > qos.load

debian-server# vim /etc/apache2/mods-available/qos.conf

## QoS module Settings
<IfModule mod_qos.c>
# handles connections from up to 100000 different IPs
QS_ClientEntries 100000
# will allow only 50 connections per IP
QS_SrvMaxConnPerIP 50
# maximum number of active TCP connections is limited to 256
MaxClients 256
# disables keep-alive when 70% of the TCP connections are occupied:
QS_SrvMaxConnClose 180
# minimum request/response speed (deny slow clients blocking the server,
# ie. slowloris keeping connections open without requesting anything):
QS_SrvMinDataRate 150 1200
# and limit request header and body (carefull, that limits uploads and post requests too):
# LimitRequestFields 30
# QS_LimitRequestBody 102400
</IfModule>

5. All left is to load the mod_qos module into Apache and restart the webserver

debian-server# a2enmod qos
debian-server# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Congratulations, Now slowloris and many other Apache DoS techniques won’t bother you anymore!

Solution to a problem with VirtualHosts on Debian Lenny (Default Virtualhost opening by default overwritting the rest of the configured VirtualHosts)

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Configuring some Virtualhosts on a Debian server I administrate has led me to a really shitty problem. The problem itself consisted in that nomatter what kind of the configured VirtualHosts on the server I try to access the default one or the first one listed among Virtualhosts gets accessed. Believe me such an Apache behaviour is a real pain in the ass! I went through the VirtualHosts configurations many without finding any fault in them, everything seemed perfectly fine there. I started doubting something might prevent VirtualHosts to be served by the Webserver. Therefore to check if VirtualHosts configurations are properly loadedI used the following command:

debian-server:~# /usr/sbin/apache2ctl -S

Guess what, All was perfectly fine there as well. The command returned, my webserver configured VirtualHosts as enabled (linked) in: /etc/apache2/sites-enabled I took some time to ask in irc.freenode.net #debian channel if somebody has encountered the same weirdness, but unfortunately noobody could help there. I thinked over and over the problem and I started experimenting with various stuff in configurations until I got the problem.

The issue with non-working Virtualhosts in Debian lenny was caused by;
wrong NameVirtualHost *:80 directive
It’s really odd because enabling the directive as NameVirtualHost *:80 would report a warning just like there are more than one NameVirtualHost variable in configuration, on the other hand completely removing it won’t report any warnings during Apache start/restart but same time VirtualHosts would still be non-working.

So to fix the whole mess-up with VirtualHosts not working I had to modify in; my /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default as follows;

NameVirtualHost *:80 changes toNameVirtualHost *

The rest of the Virtualhost stays the same;
This simple thing eradicated the f*cking issue which tortured me
for almost 3 hours! ghhh

Zen Mozaik 2G and Debian Linux

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Today was a comparingly a nice day. Although my observations show me that my spiritual problems are pretty serious …I really don’t know how to manage them and the only thing I do is trust in the Lord Jesus that he had mercy on me the sinnerand fix that. Today we had International Labour Law class and we went through a ILLW case about a wrongfully preparedemployee agreement. The situation was that a company has conducted an agreement with a company which explicitly statedthat the extra time won’t be paid at the same time the contract had a clause saying that Collective Labour Agreement isapplicable. The contract was conducted for 1.5 y. The company was obliged to pay a higher sallary to the employee tocompensate the worked overtime via a higher sallary for the employee. However after the contract’s period of validityhas passed, the employee sued the company for not paying him the overtime work. He did bring the case to court becauseaccording to Collective Labour Agreement legislation overtime is always required to be paid, nomatter the case. Andsince in the contract has explicitly stated that Collective Labour Agreements rule apply to the employee’s consideringthe fact that the Collective Labour Agreement has a higher weight than the clauses of the contact the employee has won.OK let me stop here with school stuff and continue with a small examination of what has happened during the rest of the day.I went to my room K111 pretty much depressed with big internal pain and struggles. This days I’m badly suffering. I thinkmy soul is hurted a lot, on top of this I’m more and more starting to think that I have hearing problems as well asam having various health issues. My spirit is quite often pretty much broken. I have that feeling pretty oftenthat various demons crawl around me and try to torment me. I even quite often think that I’m infested with evil spirits.I’m trying to fight this spirits in the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. But they turn back for a while thenthey try to come back and torment me again. After being in my room I switched on my laptop and the browser’s sessionwith every content I have left opened since yesterday night poped up. A song of the Christian Metal Band Messiah Prophet has poped up.Nice listening to Christian Metal does make me feel better and leave me take breath. Sometimes I can hardly breathe.Of course there is nothing strange about that considering my past ungodly antichrist past life for years.I just hope that the Our Holy Father in the Name of the son and our saviour Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit will prevail and hold me tight in his embrace me with his loving kindness and deliver me from all this terrible hellish statethat try to control and influence my spirit.A demons probably with whom I had communion in my past are frequently tring to return to me and torment me in a various ways,but the Lord is always true and delivers me and safeguards me! Blessed be our God the master of Heavens and earth! Glory be to hisHeavenly Throne! Amen!The past week I spend in a hesitation what do I really want from life. I’m feeling bad that I’m not completely be able to servethe Lord with my life. I somehow feel like sticking to this life because I’m studying in university and confortingto the life of the world less or more. I should say I hate it earnestly. Sometimes I realize I don’t have even lovefor the neighbor nor for God. Terrible, the only time when I have love is when God grants me his grace by his mercy.I quite often feel lonely and forgotten. I’m reading the bible everyday at least few pages per day, also I try to prayon morning and evening time. Another thing that’s really hard for me is to manage the language aperantly my englishlanguage level is quite poor. My mind is not a brillian one. I try to google around and advance it somehow but quiteoften the fact that I forgot the words when I want to say something is really terrible experience. This constantforgetting thing is most probably based on the stress I live daily with. I should say a Big thanks to God for takingcare for the servers I manage and bringing me money. Thanks Lord Almighty ! Through the week I didn’t have much workwith the servers and praise the Lord it’s like this otherwise I won’t simply be able to bear it. I’m hardly bearingmy spiritual burden quite often … Some of the Spiritual guys who read that would definetely know what I mean.I have that rule that everyday I commit my life in our Saviour Jesus Christ’s hands and beg the God (The Holy Trinity)for mercy over me the sinner, and HalleluJah! The Lord is never slow in helping me. Here in the Netherlands it’s terribleme and the others eat a big amounts of food ! When I tell you big then I mean BIG, A Really big ones! It’s horrible.Let me go back to my story after I went back from the university back to the dorm. I saw in youtube a reference pointing toLarry Norman’s songs. For all Christian Metalheads that don’t know Larry Norman you might want to read in wikipedia about him.In short he is believed/said to be the father of Christian Hard Rock/Metal. One of his most favourity songs is “Why the Devil sohuld Havel all the Good Music”, and my personal favourite, a one called “Sweet, Sweet Song of Salvation”. Trust me Larry Norman is Good.He started writing music around 1960’s, and is famous for being a member of the band “People!”. This guy is a really legend,and has done wonderful work spreading the Lord of our saviour Jesus Christ. Unfortunately he has departered from lifethis January (2008), after a short illness and a heart break after a heart attack. I’ve sinked again into details.A little later Ina and Riri (an indonesian colleague) came to my room and asked me if I’m joining to the city center.To be honest I did as always tried to refuse. But they were convincing and thanks God, the argument that made them convince methe most is that we were going to look for a tradition Netherlands souvenirs for our families. We did so.We took the bus after that I remembered of my intention to buy an mp3 player so we dropped by to MediaMarkt (the local consumer electronicsstore). After a little bit of thiking over I decided to take A Creative Zen Mozaik 2G mp3 player. One major motive was the pricesince it costed only 55 EUR and I didn’t wanted to spend too much on an mp3 player. After we took the mp3 player. We took our wayfor the souvenirs grocery store. I realized I was hungry and asked Riri where I might get some food she suggested me to eat froma kiosk located on our way. In the kiosk it was produced a typical ViVietnamese kind of food, at least that what the advertisement says.I didn’t wanted to have a meaty portion so I took the vegetarenian one. The peddlar asked me something and I couldn’t get it, so Riri transleated. The mister asked if I want a sour or sweet sauce. It’s really strange here in The Netherlands, that usuallyput sour or sweet sauce on their meails. For comparison in Bulgaria it’s completely different story. They always ask you if you wantketchup and mayonese or both and that’s it. Anyways we went to that souvenir shop, after the girls hanged around in few stores (well girls,you know them they are always crazy about shopping). We went afterwards to the Barbershop where Riri had to have her haircut. The hairstylist happened to be a gay and Riri felt unconfortable that I called him a couple of times a gay, but yes that’s me it’s in mynature to call things with their real names and be a little bit more blatant. In the meantime we had a coffee with a traditional cookie (a waffle) I should acknowledge it was a really nice one. We went back to the gay barber coz Riri had to have her haircut. Ina had the desireto have her haircut as well but the hair stylist has an already full schedule list. We went afterwards to a clothing store”New Yorker” and Riri and Ina bought some stuff. Ina bought a kind of open blouse and a scarf (for her brother) and Riri took a scarf as well.Later on we went to a household store “Xema”? or something I couldn’t precisely remember the name. And we went to another coffeebecause we have to wait some time for another indonesian friend of Riri. After the girl came and we were completed we went toa really cheap chineese restaurant named “Ho-Me”. The meal was nice for the price only 3.45 EUR! Riri told us that a lot of students areeating there. Afterwards we took the Bus from a “Willensplein” this is quite a lot famous place where usually people arrange meetingsjust like the place “The Clock” we have in Dobrich. We went home and I tried my new mp3 player. It worked nice. But I’ll say more on thatin a separate post because I think that might be helpful to some GNU/Linux enthusiasts like me out there. Just to conclude this really stretched post.For all the day and the rest passed days I gave the Glory to the Lord of Hosts who keeps me, sustains me and provides me with more than required in my daily life! Thanks Lord! Oh yes I just remembered for all interested into Christian Metal you might want to check my newly created account in youtube’s playlist the location of the address is Here! Let our Lord and Saviour be Glorified with this account and the account bring a lot of people to God who’s will is that everybody comes to repentance and accepts his love for us the sacrifice of his only begotten son and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through which everything is and will be now and Forever and Ever . Amen! I pray the The Father in the name of Jesus Christ that this link brings abundant harvest and save as much as he will through his grace and providence leading them to him through that collection of Christian Metal great Metal Music and consequently save them and guide them in his divine grace. Amen!END—–