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How to make sure your Linux system users won’t hide or delete their .bash_history / Securing .bash_history file – Protect Linux system users shell history

Monday, July 19th, 2010

linux-bin-bash-600x600logo
If you're running multi user login Linux system, you have probably realized that there are some clever users that prefer to prevent their command line executed commands to be logged in .bash_history.
To achieve that they use a number of generally known methodologist to prevent the Linux system from logging into their $HOME/.bash_history file (of course if running bash as a default user shell).
This though nice for the user is a real nightmare for the sysadmin, since he couldn't keep track of all system command events executed by users. For instance sometimes an unprivilegd user might be responsible for executing a malicious code which crashes or breaks your server.
This is especially unpleasent, because you will find your system crashed and if it's not some of the system services that causes the issue you won’t even be able to identify which of all the users is the malicious user account and respectively the code excecuted which fail the system to the ground.
In this post I will try to tell you a basic ways that some malevolent users might use to hide their bash history from the system administrator.
I will also discuss a few possible ways to assure your users .bash_history keeps intact and possibly the commands executed by your users gets logged in in their.
The most basic way that even an unexperienced shell user will apply if he wants to prevent his .bash_history from sys admins review would be of directly wiping out the .bash_history file from his login account or alternatively emptying it with commands like:

malicious-user@server:~$ rm -f. bash_history
ormalicious-user@server:~# cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history

In order to prevent this type of attack against cleaning the .bash_history you can use the chattr command.
To counter attack this type of history tossing method you can set your malicious-user .bash_history’s file the (append only flag) with chattr like so:

root@server:~# cd /home/malicious-user/
root@server:~# chattr +a .bash_history

It’s also recommended that the immunable flag is placed to the file ~/.profile in user home

root@server:~# chattr +i ~/.profile

It would be probably also nice to take a look at all chattr command attributes since the command is like swiss army knife for the Linux admin:
Here is all available flags that can be passed to chattr
append only (a)
compressed (c)
don~@~Yt update atime (A)
synchronous directory updates (D)
synchronous updates (S)
data journalling (j)
no dump (d)
top of directory hierarchy (T)
no tail-merging (t)
secure deletion (s)
undeletable (u)
immutable (i)

It’s also nice that setting the “append only” flag in to the user .bash_history file prevents the user to link the .bash_history file to /dev/null like so:

malicious-user@server:~$ ln -sf /dev/null ~/.bash_history
ln: cannot remove `.bash_history': Operation not permitted

malicious-user@server:~$ echo > .bash_history
bash: .bash_history: Operation not permitted

However this will just make your .bash_history append only, so the user trying to execute cat /dev/null > .bash_history won’t be able to truncate the content of .bash_history.

Unfortunately he will yet be able to delete the file with rm so this type of securing your .bash_history file from being overwritten is does not completely guarantee you that user commands will get logged.
Also in order to prevent user to play tricks and escape the .bash_history logging by changing the default bash shell variables for HISTFILE an d HISTFILESIZE, exporting them either to a different file location or a null file size.
You have to put the following bash variables to be loaded in /etc/bash.bashrc or in /etc/profile
# #Prevent unset of histfile, /etc/profile
HISTFILE=~/.bash_history
HISTSIZE=10000
HISTFILESIZE=999999
# Don't let the users enter commands that are ignored# in the history file
HISTIGNORE=""
HISTCONTROL=""
readonly HISTFILE
readonly HISTSIZE
readonly HISTFILESIZE
readonly HISTIGNORE
readonly HISTCONTROL
export HISTFILE HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE HISTIGNORE HISTCONTROL

everytime a user logs in to your Linux system the bash commands above will be set.
The above tip is directly taken from Securing debian howto which by the way is quite an interesting and nice reading for system administrators 🙂

If you want to apply an append only attribute to all user .bash_history to all your existing Linux server system users assuming the default users directory is /home in bash you can execute the following 1 liner shell code:

#Set .bash_history as attr +a
2. find /home/ -maxdepth 3|grep -i bash_history|while read line; do chattr +a "$line"; done

Though the above steps will stop some of the users to voluntary clean their .bash_history history files it won’t a 100% guaranttee that a good cracker won’t be able to come up with a way to get around the imposed .bash_history security measures.

One possible way to get around the user command history prevention restrictions for a user is to simply using another shell from the ones available on the system:
Here is an example:

malicious-user:~$ /bin/csh
malicious-user:~>

csh shell logs by default to the file .history

Also as far as I know it should be possible for a user to simply delete the .bash_history file overwritting all the .bash_history keep up attempts up-shown.
If you need a complete statistics about accounting you’d better take a look at The GNU Accounting Utilities

In Debian the GNU Accounting Utilities are available as a package called acct, so installation of acct on Debian is as simple as:

debian:~# apt-get install acct

I won’t get into much details about acct and would probably take a look at it in my future posts.
For complete .bash_history delete prevention maybe the best practice is to useg grsecurity (grsec)

Hopefully this article is gonna be a step further in tightening up your Server or Desktop Linux based system security and will also give you some insight on .bash_history files 🙂 .

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Posted in Computer Security, Linux, System Administration | 14 Comments »

Preparing your Linux to work with the Cloud providers – Installing aws , gcloud, az, oc, cf CLI Cloud access command interfaces

Wednesday, October 10th, 2018

howto Install-Cloud-access-tools-for-google-aws-azure-openshift-cloud-foundryCloud_computing-explained-on-linux.svg

If you're a sysadmin / developer whose boss requires a migration of Stored Data, Database structures or Web Objects to Amazon Web Services / Google Clourd or you happen to be a DevOps Engineer you will certainly need to have installed as a minimumum amazon AWS and Google Clouds clients to do daily routines and script stuff in managing cloud resources without tampering to use the Web GUI interface.

Here is how to install the aws, gcloud, oc, az and cf next to your kubernetes client (kubectl) on your Linux Desktop.
 

1. Install Google Cloud  gcloud (to manage Google Cloud platform resources and developer workflow
 

google-cloud-logo

Here is few cmds to run to install  gcloud, gcloud alpha, gcloud beta, gsutil, and bq commands to manage your Google Cloud from CLI

a.) On Debian / Ubuntu / Mint or any other deb based distro

# Create environment variable for correct distribution
export CLOUD_SDK_REPO="cloud-sdk-$(lsb_release -c -s)"

 

# Add the Cloud SDK distribution URI as a package source
# echo "deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt $CLOUD_SDK_REPO main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list

 

# Import the Google Cloud Platform public key
$ sudo curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add –

 

# Update the package list and install the Cloud SDK
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-sdk


b) On CentOS, RHEL, Fedora Linux and other rpm based ones
 

$ sudo tee -a /etc/yum.repos.d/google-cloud-sdk.repo << EOM
[google-cloud-sdk]
name=Google Cloud SDK
baseurl=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/cloud-sdk-el7-x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg
       https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg
EOM

# yum install google-cloud-sdk

 

That's all now the text client to talk to Google Cloud's API gcloud is installed under
/usr/bin/gcloud

Latest install instructions of Google Cloud SDK are here.


2. Install AWS Cloud command line interface tool for managing AWS (Amazon Web Services)
 

AmazonWebservices_Logo.svg

AWS client is dependent on Python PIP so before you proceed you will have to install python-pip deb package if on Debian / Ubuntu Linux use apt:

 

# apt-get install –yes python-pip

 

It is also possible to install newest version of PIP a tiny shell script provided by Amazon get-pip.py

 

# curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
# python get-pip.py –user

 

# pip install awscli –upgrade –user

 

3. Install Azure Cloud Console access CLI command interface
 

Microsoft_Azure_Cloud-Logo.svg

On Debian / Ubuntu or any other deb based distro:

# AZ_REPO=$(lsb_release -cs)
# echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/azure-cli/ $AZ_REPO main" | \
$ sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azure-cli.list
# curl -L https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add –
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https azure-cli

 

Finaly to check that Azure CLI is properly installed run simple login with:

 

$ az login

 


$ sudo rpm –import https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc
$ sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[azure-cli]\nname=Azure CLI\nbaseurl=https://packages.microsoft.com/yumrepos/azure-cli\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc" > /etc/yum.repos.d/azure-cli.repo'
$ sudo yum install azure-cli

$ az login


For Latest install instructions check Amazon's documentation here

4. Install OpenShift OC CLI tool to access OpenShift Open Source Cloud

 

OpenShift-Redhat-cloud-platform

Even thought OpenShift has its original Redhat produced package binaries, if you're not on RPM distro it is probably
best to install using official latest version from openshift github repo.


As of time of writting this article this is done with:

 

# wget https://github.com/openshift/origin/releases/download/v1.5.1/openshift-origin-client-tools-v1.5.1-7b451fc-linux-64bit.tar.gz
tar –xvf openshift-origin-client-tools-v1.5.1-7b451fc-linux-64bit.tar.gz

 

# # mv openshift-origin-client-tools-v1.5.1-7b451fc-linux-64bit oc-tool

 

# cd oc-tool
# echo'export PATH=$HOME/oc-tool:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc

 

To test openshift, try to login to OpenShift cloud:

 

$ oc login
Server [https://localhost:8443]: https://128.XX.XX.XX:8443


Latest install instructions on OC here

5. Install Cloud Foundry cf CLI Cloud access tool

cloud-foundry-cloud-logo

a) On Debian / Ubuntu Linux based distributions, do run:

 

$ wget -q -O – https://packages.cloudfoundry.org/debian/cli.cloudfoundry.org.key | sudo apt-key add –
$ echo "deb https://packages.cloudfoundry.org/debian stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cloudfoundry-cli.list
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install cf-cli

 

b) On RHEL Enterprise Linux / CentOS and Fedoras

 

$ sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/cloudfoundry-cli.repo https://packages.cloudfoundry.org/fedora/cloudfoundry-cli.repo
$ sudo yum install cf-cli


For latest install insructions on cf cli check Cloud Foundry's install site

There plenty of other Cloud providers with the number exponentially growing and most have their own custom cli tools to access but as there use is not so common as the 5 ones mentioned below, I've omited 'em. If you're interested to know the complete list of Cloud Providers providing Cloud Services check here.

6. Install Ruby GEMs RHC tools collection

If you have to work with Redhat Cloud Storage / OpenShift you will perhaps want to install also (RHC) Redhat Collection Tools.

Assuming that the Linux system is running an up2date version of ruby programming language do run:

 

 

root@jeremiah:~# gem install rhc
Fetching: net-ssh-5.0.2.gem (100%)
Successfully installed net-ssh-5.0.2
Fetching: net-ssh-gateway-2.0.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed net-ssh-gateway-2.0.0
Fetching: net-ssh-multi-1.2.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed net-ssh-multi-1.2.1
Fetching: minitar-0.7.gem (100%)
The `minitar` executable is no longer bundled with `minitar`. If you are
expecting this executable, make sure you also install `minitar-cli`.
Successfully installed minitar-0.7
Fetching: hashie-3.6.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed hashie-3.6.0
Fetching: powerbar-1.0.18.gem (100%)
Successfully installed powerbar-1.0.18
Fetching: minitar-cli-0.7.gem (100%)
Successfully installed minitar-cli-0.7
Fetching: archive-tar-minitar-0.6.1.gem (100%)
'archive-tar-minitar' has been deprecated; just install 'minitar'.
Successfully installed archive-tar-minitar-0.6.1
Fetching: highline-1.6.21.gem (100%)
Successfully installed highline-1.6.21
Fetching: commander-4.2.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed commander-4.2.1
Fetching: httpclient-2.6.0.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed httpclient-2.6.0.1
Fetching: open4-1.3.4.gem (100%)
Successfully installed open4-1.3.4
Fetching: rhc-1.38.7.gem (100%)
===========================================================================

 

If this is your first time installing the RHC tools, please run 'rhc setup'

===========================================================================
Successfully installed rhc-1.38.7
Parsing documentation for net-ssh-5.0.2
Installing ri documentation for net-ssh-5.0.2
Parsing documentation for net-ssh-gateway-2.0.0
Installing ri documentation for net-ssh-gateway-2.0.0
Parsing documentation for net-ssh-multi-1.2.1
Installing ri documentation for net-ssh-multi-1.2.1
Parsing documentation for minitar-0.7
Installing ri documentation for minitar-0.7
Parsing documentation for hashie-3.6.0
Installing ri documentation for hashie-3.6.0
Parsing documentation for powerbar-1.0.18
Installing ri documentation for powerbar-1.0.18
Parsing documentation for minitar-cli-0.7
Installing ri documentation for minitar-cli-0.7
Parsing documentation for archive-tar-minitar-0.6.1
Installing ri documentation for archive-tar-minitar-0.6.1
Parsing documentation for highline-1.6.21
Installing ri documentation for highline-1.6.21
Parsing documentation for commander-4.2.1
Installing ri documentation for commander-4.2.1
Parsing documentation for httpclient-2.6.0.1
Installing ri documentation for httpclient-2.6.0.1
Parsing documentation for open4-1.3.4
Installing ri documentation for open4-1.3.4
Parsing documentation for rhc-1.38.7
Installing ri documentation for rhc-1.38.7
Done installing documentation for net-ssh, net-ssh-gateway, net-ssh-multi, minitar, hashie, powerbar, minitar-cli, archive-tar-minitar, highline, commander, httpclient, open4, rhc after 10 seconds
13 gems installed
root@jeremiah:~#

To start with rhc next do:
 

rhc setup
rhc app create my-app diy-0.1


and play with it to install software create services on the Redhat cloud.

 

 

Closure

This are just of the few of the numerous tools available and I definitely understand there is much more to be said on the topic.
If you can remember other tools tor interesting cloud starting up tips about stuff to do on a fresh installed Linux PC to make life easier with Cloud / PaaS / SaaS / DevOps engineer please drop a comment.

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Posted in Cloud services, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »

Ansible Quick Start Cheatsheet for Linux admins and DevOps engineers

Wednesday, October 24th, 2018

ansible-quick-start-cheetsheet-ansible-logo

Ansible is widely used (Configuration management, deployment, and task execution system) nowadays for mass service depoyments on multiple servers and Clustered environments like, Kubernetes clusters (with multiple pods replicas) virtual swarms running XEN / IPKVM virtualization hosting multiple nodes etc. .

Ansible can be used to configure or deploy GNU / Linux tools and services such as Apache / Squid / Nginx / MySQL / PostgreSQL. etc. It is pretty much like Puppet (server / services lifecycle management) tool , except its less-complecated to start with makes it often a choose as a tool for mass deployment (devops) automation.

Ansible is used for multi-node deployments and remote-task execution on group of servers, the big pro of it it does all its stuff over simple SSH on the remote nodes (servers) and does not require extra services or listening daemons like with Puppet. It combined with Docker containerization is used very much for later deploying later on inside Cloud environments such as Amazon AWS / Google Cloud Platform / SAP HANA / OpenStack etc.

Ansible-Architechture-What-Is-Ansible-Edureka

0. Instaling ansible on Debian / Ubuntu Linux


Ansible is a python script and because of that depends heavily on python so to make it running, you will need to have a working python installed on local and remote servers.

Ansible is as easy to install as running the apt cmd:

 

# apt-get install –yes ansible
 

The following additional packages will be installed:
  ieee-data python-jinja2 python-kerberos python-markupsafe python-netaddr python-paramiko python-selinux python-xmltodict python-yaml
Suggested packages:
  sshpass python-jinja2-doc ipython python-netaddr-docs python-gssapi
Recommended packages:
  python-winrm
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ansible ieee-data python-jinja2 python-kerberos python-markupsafe python-netaddr python-paramiko python-selinux python-xmltodict python-yaml
0 upgraded, 10 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,413 kB of archives.
After this operation, 22.8 MB of additional disk space will be used.

apt-get install –yes sshpass
…

 

Installing Ansible on Fedora Linux is done with:

 

# dnf install ansible –yes sshpass

 

On CentOS to install:
 

# yum install ansible –yes sshpass

sshpass needs to be installed only if you plan to use ssh password prompt authentication with ansible.

Ansible is also installable via python-pip tool, if you need to install a specific version of ansible you have to use it instead, the package is available as an installable package on most linux distros.

Ansible has a lot of pros and cons and there are multiple articles already written on people for and against it in favour of Chef or Puppet As I recently started learning Ansible. The most important thing to know about Ansible is though many of the things can be done directly using a simple command line, the tool is planned for remote installing of server services using a specially prepared .yaml format configuration files. The power of Ansible comes of the use of Ansible Playbooks which are yaml scripts that tells ansible how to do its activities step by step on remote server. In this article, I'm giving a quick cheat sheet to start quickly with it.
 

1. Remote commands execution with Ansible
 

First thing to do to start with it is to add the desired hostnames ansible will operate with it can be done either globally (if you have a number of remote nodes) to deploy stuff periodically by using /etc/ansible/hosts or use a custom host script for each and every ansible custom scripts developed.

a. Ansible main config files

A common ansible /etc/ansible/hosts definition looks something like that:

 

# cat /etc/ansible/hosts
[mysqldb]
10.69.2.185
10.69.2.186
[master]
10.69.2.181
[slave]
10.69.2.187
[db-servers]
10.69.2.181
10.69.2.187
[squid]
10.69.2.184

Host to execute on can be also provided via a shell variable $ANSIBLE_HOSTS
b) is remote hosts reachable / execute commands on all remote host

To test whether hour hosts are properly configure from /etc/ansible/hosts you can ping all defined hosts with:

 

ansible all -m ping


ansible-check-hosts-ping-command-screenshot

This makes ansible try to remote to remote hosts (if you have properly configured SSH public key authorization) the command should return success statuses on every host.

 

ansible all -a "ifconfig -a"


If you don't have SSH keys configured you can also authenticate with an argument (assuming) all hosts are configured with same password with:

 

ansible all –ask-pass -a "ip all show" -u hipo –ask-pass


ansible-show-ips-ip-a-command-screenshot-linux

If you have configured group of hosts via hosts file you can also run certain commands on just a certain host group, like so:

 

ansible <host-group> -a <command>

It is a good idea to always check /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg which is the system global (main red ansible config file).

c) List defined host groups
 

ansible localhost -m debug -a 'var=groups.keys()'
ansible localhost -m debug -a 'var=groups'

d) Searching remote server variables

 

# Search remote server variables
ansible localhost -m setup -a 'filter=*ipv4*'

 

 

ansible localhost -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_domain'

 

 

ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_domain'

 

 

# uninstall package on RPM based distros
ansible centos -s -m yum -a "name=telnet state=absent"
# uninstall package on APT distro
ansible localhost -s -m apt -a "name=telnet state=absent"

 

 

2. Debugging – Listing information about remote hosts (facts) and state of a host

 

# All facts for one host
ansible -m setup
  # Only ansible fact for one host
ansible -m setup -a 'filter=ansible_eth*'
# Only facter facts but for all hosts
ansible all -m setup -a 'filter=facter_*'


To Save outputted information per-host in separate files in lets say ~/ansible/host_facts

 

ansible all -m setup –tree ~/ansible/host_facts

 

3. Playing with Playbooks deployment scripts

 

a) Syntax Check of a playbook yaml

 

ansible-playbook –syntax-check


b) Run General Infos about a playbook such as get what a playbook would do on remote hosts (tasks to run) and list-hosts defined for a playbook (like above pinging).

 

ansible-playbook –list-hosts
ansible-playbook –list-tasks


To get the idea about what an yaml playbook looks like, here is example from official ansible docs, that deploys on remote defined hosts a simple Apache webserver.
 

—
– hosts: webservers
  vars:
    http_port: 80
    max_clients: 200
  remote_user: root
  tasks:
  – name: ensure apache is at the latest version
    yum:
      name: httpd
      state: latest
  – name: write the apache config file
    template:
      src: /srv/httpd.j2
      dest: /etc/httpd.conf
    notify:
    – restart apache
  – name: ensure apache is running
    service:
      name: httpd
      state: started
  handlers:
    – name: restart apache
      service:
        name: httpd
        state: restarted

To give it a quick try save the file as webserver.yml and give it a run via ansible-playbook command
 

ansible-playbook -s playbooks/webserver.yml

 

The -s option instructs ansible to run play on remote server with super user (root) privileges.

The power of ansible is its modules, which are constantly growing over time a complete set of Ansible supported modules is in its official documenation.

Ansible-running-playbook-Commands-Task-script-Successful-output-1024x536

There is a lot of things to say about playbooks, just to give the brief they have there own language like a  templates, tasks, handlers, a playbook could have one or multiple plays inside (for instance instructions for deployment of one or more services).

The downsides of playbooks are they're so hard to write from scratch and edit, because yaml syntaxing is much more stricter than a normal oldschool sysadmin configuration file.
I've stucked with problems with modifying and writting .yaml files and I should say the community in #ansible in irc.freenode.net was very helpful to help me debug the obscure errors.

yamllint (The YAML Linter tool) comes handy at times, when facing yaml syntax errors, to use it install via apt:
 

# apt-get install –yes yamllint


a) Running ansible in "dry mode" just show what ansible might do but not change anything
 

ansible-playbook playbooks/PLAYBOOK_NAME.yml –check


b) Running playbook with different users and separate SSH keys

 

ansible-playbook playbooks/your_playbook.yml –user ansible-user
 
ansible -m ping hosts –private-key=~/.ssh/keys/custom_id_rsa -u centos

 

c) Running ansible playbook only for certain hostnames part of a bigger host group

 

ansible-playbook playbooks/PLAYBOOK_NAME.yml –limit "host1,host2,host3"


d) Run Ansible on remote hosts in parallel

To run in raw of 10 hosts in parallel
 

# Run 10 hosts parallel
ansible-playbook <File.yaml> -f 10            


e) Passing variables to .yaml scripts using commandline

Ansible has ability to pre-define variables from .yml playbooks. This variables later can be passed from shell cli, here is an example:

# Example of variable substitution pass from command line the var in varsubsts.yaml if present is defined / replaced ansible-playbook playbooks/varsubst.yaml –extra-vars "myhosts=localhost gather=yes pkg=telnet"

 

4. Ansible Galaxy (A Docker Hub) like large repository with playbook (script) files

 

Ansible Galaxy has about 10000 active users which are contributing ansible automation playbooks in fields such as Development / Networking / Cloud / Monitoring / Database / Web / Security etc.

To install from ansible galaxy use ansible-galaxy

# install from galaxy the geerlingguy mysql playbook
ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.mysql


The available packages you can use as a template for your purpose are not so much as with Puppet as Ansible is younger and not corporate supported like Puppet, anyhow they are a lot and does cover most basic sysadmin needs for mass deployments, besides there are plenty of other unofficial yaml ansible scripts in various github repos.

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Posted in Cloud services, Educational, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »

Change Linux Wireless Access Point connection from text terminal with iwconfig

Monday, October 8th, 2018

wireless-change-wireless-network-to-connect-to-using-console

If you have configured a couple of Wireless connections at home or work on your Laptop  and each of the remote Wi-FI access points are at different distance (some APs are situated at closer range than others) and your Linux OS keeps connecting sometimes to the wrong AP by default you'll perhaps want to change that behavior, so you keep connected to the Wi-Fi AP that has the best Link Quality (is situatated physically at closest location to your laptop integrated wifi card).
Using a Graphical tool such as Gnome Network Manager / Wicd Network Manager or KDE's Network Manager is great and easy way to do it but sometimes if you do upgrade of your GNU / Linux and the upgrade fails and your Graphical Environment GNOME / KDE / OpenBox / Window Maker or whatever Window Manager you use fails to start it is super handy to use text console (terminal) to connect to the right wiki in order to do a deb / rpm package rollback to revert your GUI environment or Xorg to the older working release.

Connection to WPA or WEP protected APs on GNU / Linux on a low level is done by /sbin/iwlist , /sbin/iwconfig and wpa_supplicant

wpasupplicant and network-manager (if you're running Xorg server).

 

/sbin/iwlist scan
 

 

wlp3s0    Scan completed :
          Cell 01 – Address: 10:FE:ED:43:CB:0E
                    Channel:6
                    Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
                    Quality=64/70  Signal level=-46 dBm  
                    Encryption key:on
                    ESSID:"Magdanoz"
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
                              9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
                    Bit Rates:24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Mode:Master
                    Extra:tsf=00000032cff7c214
                    Extra: Last beacon: 144ms ago
                    IE: Unknown: 00084D616764616E6F7A
                    IE: Unknown: 010882848B960C121824
                    IE: Unknown: 030106
                    IE: Unknown: 0706555320010B1B
                    IE: Unknown: 2A0100
                    IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1
                        Group Cipher : TKIP
                        Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP
                        Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
                    IE: Unknown: 32043048606C

 

iwlist command is used to get more detailed wireless info from a wireless interface (in terminal this command shows you the wifi networks available to connect to and various info such as the type of Wifi network the Wifi Name / network quality Frequency (is it it spreading the wifi signal at 2.4 Ghz or 5 Ghz frequency) etc.

 

# ifconfig interafce_name down

 

For example on my Thinkpad the wifi interface is wlp3s0 to check what is yours do ifconfig -a e.g.

 

root@jeremiah:~# /sbin/ifconfig -a
enp0s25: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 00:21:cc:cc:b2:27  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
        device interrupt 20  memory 0xf3900000-f3920000  

 

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 350  bytes 28408 (27.7 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 350  bytes 28408 (27.7 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

wlp3s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.0.103  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet6 fe80::6267:20ff:fe3c:20ec  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 60:67:20:3c:20:ec  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 299735  bytes 362561115 (345.7 MiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 1  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 278518  bytes 96996135 (92.5 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

 

Next use iwconfig on Debian / Ubuntu Linux it is part of wireless-tools deb package.

 

root@jeremiah:~# /sbin/iwconfig interface essid "Your-Acess-Point-name"

 

To check whether you're connected to a wireless network you can do:

https://www.pc-freak.net/images/check-wireless-frequency-access-point-mac-and-wireless-name-iwconfig-linux

root@jeremiah:~# iwconfig
enp0s25   no wireless extensions.

 

lo        no wireless extensions.

wlp3s0    IEEE 802.11  ESSID:"Magdanoz"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 10:FE:ED:43:CB:0E   
          Bit Rate=150 Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=61/70  Signal level=-49 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:5  Invalid misc:1803   Missed beacon:0


N.B. ! To get a list of all your PC network interfaces you can use cmd:

 

root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# ls -al /sys/class/net/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 Oct  8 22:53 .
drwxr-xr-x 52 root root 0 Oct  8 22:53 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Oct  8 22:53 enp0s25 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:19.0/net/enp0s25
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Oct  8 22:53 lo -> ../../devices/virtual/net/lo
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Oct  8 22:53 wlp3s0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.1/0000:03:00.0/net/wlp3s0

show-all-network-interfaces-with-netstat-linux

or use netstat like so:

root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# netstat -i | column -t
Kernel   Interface  table
Iface    MTU        RX-OK   RX-ERR  RX-DRP  RX-OVR  TX-OK   TX-ERR  TX-DRP  TX-OVR  Flg
enp0s25  1500       0       0       0       0       0       0       0       0       BMU
lo       65536      590     0       0       0       590     0       0       0       LRU
wlp3s0   1500       428112  0       1       0       423538  0       0       0       BMRU

 


To get only the Wireless network card interface on Linux (e.g. find out which of the listed above interfaces is your wireless adapter's name), use iw command (that shows devices and their configuration):

 

root@jeremiah:/home/hipo# iw dev
phy#0
    Interface wlp3s0
        ifindex 3
        wdev 0x1
        addr 60:67:20:3c:20:ec
        type managed
        channel 6 (2437 MHz), width: 40 MHz, center1: 2427 MHz
        txpower 15.00 dBm

 

linux-wireless-terminal-console-check-wireless-interfaces-command

  • If you need to get only the active Wireless adapter device assigned by Linux kernel

 

root@jeremiah:~# iw dev | awk '$1=="Interface"{print $2}'

 

To check the IP / Netmask and Broadcase address assigned by connected Access Point use ifconfig
with your Laptop Wireless Interface Name.

show-extra-information-ip-netmask-broadcast-about-wireless-interface-linux

root@jeremiah:~# /sbin/ifconfig wlp3s0
wlp3s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.0.103  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet6 fe80::6267:20ff:fe3c:20ec  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether 60:67:20:3c:20:ec  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 319534  bytes 365527097 (348.5 MiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 1  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 285464  bytes 99082701 (94.4 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0


As you can see in above 3 examples iwconfig could configure various settings regarding the wireless network interface.

It is really annoying because sometimes if you have configured your Linux to connect to multiple access points, the wifi adapter might keep connecting to an access point that is more distanced from you and because of that the Bandwidth might be slower and that could impact your Internet connectivity, to fix that and get rid of any networks that are automatically set to connect to that you don't want to, just delete the correspodning files (the Wifi file name coincides with the Wireless AP network name).
All stored Wi-FI access points that your Linux is configured to connect to are stored inside /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/

For example to delete an auto connection to wireless router with a name NetGear do:

 

root@jeremiah:~# rm -f /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/NetGear

 

For a complete list of stored Wifi Networks that your PC might connect (and authorize to if configured so) do:

 

root@jeremiah:~# ls -a /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
Magdanoz
NetGear
LinkSys
Cobra
NetIs
WirelessNet
…
 

After deleting the required Networks you want your computer to not automatically connect to to make NetworkManager aware of that restart it with:
 

hipo@jeremiah:~# systemctl restart NetworkManager.service


or if you hate systemd like I do just use the good old init script to restart:

 

hipo@jeremiah:~# /etc/init.d/network-manager restart


To get some more informatoin on the exact network you're connected, you can run:

show-information-about-wireless-connection-on-gnu-linux

 

hipo@jeremiah:~# systemctl status NetworkManager.service
● NetworkManager.service – Network Manager
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/NetworkManager.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Mon 2018-10-08 22:35:09 EEST; 15s ago
     Docs: man:NetworkManager(8)
 Main PID: 13721 (NetworkManager)
    Tasks: 5 (limit: 4915)
   CGroup: /system.slice/NetworkManager.service
           ├─13721 /usr/sbin/NetworkManager –no-daemon
           └─13742 /sbin/dhclient -d -q -sf /usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-helper -pf /var/run/dhclient-wlp3s0.pid -lf /var/lib/NetworkManager/dhclie

 

Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6657] dhcp4 (wlp3s0): state changed unknown -> bound
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah dhclient[13742]: bound to 192.168.0.103 — renewal in 2951 seconds.
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6735] device (wlp3s0): state change: ip-config -> ip-check (reason 'none') [70 80
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6744] device (wlp3s0): state change: ip-check -> secondaries (reason 'none') [80 9
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6747] device (wlp3s0): state change: secondaries -> activated (reason 'none') [90
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6749] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_LOCAL
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6812] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_GLOBAL
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6813] policy: set 'Magdanoz' (wlp3s0) as default for IPv4 routing and DNS
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6816] device (wlp3s0): Activation: successful, device activated.
Oct 08 22:35:15 jeremiah NetworkManager[13721]:   [1539027315.6823] manager: startup complete

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Networking, Various | No Comments »

Linux: GNOME Flashback missing Desktop Icons fix – Hack to add desktop icons via gnome-shell in GNOME 3.28 onwards

Monday, September 24th, 2018

how-to-fix-workaround-gnome-3.30-missing-desktop-icons-on-linux

I just upgraded my notebook fom Debian Stretch 9.5 Linux to Buster (current Testing Debian release). All went fine except I got a lot of headaches because it seems in Buster the GNOME Flashback 3.30 which I use has removed the support for Show Desktop Icons in Nautilus because of some migration reasons of Nautilus to a newer version 4, (hopefully that would be temporary) from gnome-tweak-tool whose package now contains no binary for gnome-tweak-tool, instead an equivalent tool now is called gnome-tweaks and this tool is no longer working under Gnome Flashback but only with GNOME Classic 3.30 and the regular GNOME 3.30 launcher available from gdm3 (the Gnome Display manager).
 

1. Displaying Missing Desktop icons on GNOME version 3.30


The way to display Desktop icons in GNOME 3.28 onwards at the moment of writting this post and the whole issue with the removed handling of Desktop icons in Nautilus is explained well by Carlos Soriano a gnome shell extension developer in his blog post Desktop icons goes beta.

The good guy C. S. wrote  the his desktop icons gnome shell extension which is on github.com
To use it you have to fetch it and enable it by fetching the repo source code to gnome-shell extensions directory:
 

hipo@linux:~$ cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
hipo@linux:~$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/desktop-icons
hipo@linux:~$ mkdir 'desktop-icons@csoriano'
hipo@linux:~$ mv desktop-icons/* 'desktop-icons@csoriano'/
hipo@linux:~$ rm -rf desktop-icons/


Now you should use the gnome-tweaks command tool to enable the new added gnome-shell extension.

 

 

hipo@linux:~$ gnome-tweaks


gnome-tweak-on-debian-testing-linux-screenshot

Once enabled your Desktop icons will appear as usual as seen in below shot, the downside this solutions is icons as seen in below screenshot is that pictures doesn't have Thumbnail pictures generated … and icons when kept on with mouse over can move only in a selected square like perimeter (when moved left / right / up down side). That "woody" icon movement sucks a bit but much better than no icons at all.

gnome-3.30-general-desktop-solved-missing-icons-desktop-screenshot-on-debian-linux

 

2. Displaying Missing Desktop icons in GNOME Flashback 3.30

 

I really love GNOME Flashback as it used to be a good replacement for Linux MATE (which is the fork of GNOME2 and not bad but lacks Metacity Window Manager and some of the Eye Candy that GNOME 3 and beside that even MATE had to be slightly hacked to make look more like Classical GNOME 2 – for more on that check my previous article Fixing Mate Adwaita Theme problems on Debian and Ubuntu). 

At the moment when I tried to run gnome-tweaks under a GNOME Flashback session I got the following error:

 

hipo@jericho:~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions$ gnome-tweaks 
WARNING : Shell not installed or running
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gtweak/app.py", line 30, in do_activate
    self.win = Window(self, model)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gtweak/tweakview.py", line 38, in __init__
    self._model.load_tweaks(self)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gtweak/tweakmodel.py", line 104, in load_tweaks
    mods = __import__("gtweak.tweaks", globals(), locals(), tweak_files, 0)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gtweak/tweaks/tweak_group_general.py", line 14, in <module>
    _shell_not_ubuntu = _shell.mode != 'ubuntu'
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'mode'

 

In regular GNOME session gnome-tweaks works fine and with the help of an GNOME Shell Extension addon it is possible to add the Missing Desktop icons however the only working fix for GNOME FlashBack 3.30 is to substitute nautilus (the default GNOME file manager) with NEMO (which is The Official file manager for Cinnamon Desktop Environment).
Thanksfully this is done relatively easy and all I had to do is to use a little "hack", e.g. install nemo.

 

root@linux:~# apt-get install –yes -qq nemo

 

And add a new auto-launcher for gnome that launches nemo file manager instead of nautilus.

To add the auto-launcher in GNOME I had to add a file with following content:

 

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Nemo
Comment=Start Nemo desktop at log in
Exec=nemo-desktop
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;
AutostartCondition=GSettings org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons
X-GNOME-AutoRestart=true
NoDisplay=true

 

to ~/.config/autostart/

For those who don't know GNOME has this handy way to set an autostart programs by using the specific .desktop extension files that have to be placed under $HOME/.config/autostart (where $HOME = the logged in user home directory).

The one liner to do so is:

 

echo '[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Nemo
Comment=Start Nemo desktop at log in
Exec=nemo-desktop
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;
AutostartCondition=GSettings org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons
X-GNOME-AutoRestart=true
NoDisplay=true' >> ~/.config/autostart/nemo.desktop

 

Then I had to restart my GNOME FlashBack session (e.g. Log Out and Login with a new session) and the icons appeared.

classic-gnome-flashback-debian-gnu-linux-hipos-desktop-screenshot

The downside of this dirty workaround is that desktop icons even though showing up couldn't be moved (rearranged) freely on any location of desktop (are pretty much static) and the even worser  fact about this hack is you can't actually copy paste easily copy files from your Desktop within another desktop folder … 
 I know that's shitty but at the moment there is no better solution and this is better than nothing at all.

 

P.S. I tried downgrading my Debian Testing to Stable Stretch Linux again with the idea to use the old GNOME 3.22 that the Stable Debian distro provides but, ended up with a lot of mess after experimenting to downgrade using /etc/apt/preferences file records and substitution in /etc/apt/sources.list to include the stable .deb repository and apt dselect and aptitude package management tools. Officially downgrades are not encouraged and supported by Debian, but I hoped I could relatively easily do it by manually fixing the broken dependencies after removing debian packages manually combined with short for bash loops like I did in the past, but it seems this time I broke the system worse, so I could hardly return it back to normal operation in upgrading packages with a lot of manual hacking with apt-get and few one liner scripts. Thus I abandoned as a fix the possiiblity to downgrade Testing Debian to stable, I even considered switching from GNOME desktop environment to something more light as OpenBox / Cinnamon / XFCE and gave them one more try but the results weren't nice, I reconsidered again to go back to using the Good Old GNU Step Window Maker as a GNOME alternative which in my opinion is still a great GUI environment for security crackers / sysadmins /hackers (programmers) and eventually perhaps I will switch back to using it, because GNOME is becoming more and more bloated with the years and I can hardly stand it … I mean I did not expected GNOME to be developed in the shitty Mobile Interface  (Unity) way, I have been a loyal user to GNOME for so many years and have lived trhough  all its mess over the years, its painful to see how the good and efficient GNOME 2 went the bad broken road of changing completely concepts and interface in GNOME 3.x …
 

3. Closure

GNOME Desktop icons has been with GNOME users already for about 15+ years so IMHO the missing ability to add them easily through gnome tweak tool or Gnome Control Center is a absurd stupidity and killed at least 5 times out of my time to solve and the solution is far from good … I understand that in future the GNOME developers want to make GNOME as modular as possible through GNOME Shell Extensions however if you're removing such an important functionality that's for ages in most mainstream operating systems such as M$ Windows / Mac OS is an insanity. Through my quick research online I found the Missing Desktop Icons is experienced by other people on other Linux distros besides Debian I saw complains by Ubuntu / Fedora and Arch Linux users in forums and mailing lists.
What puzzles me why the reaction of such a major complained are not seriously considered by GNOME developers, especially after all the problems with transition from GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3 which already pushed a lot of GNOME users to move from GNOME to KDE / MATE  (like in Linux Mint whose GUI is based on Linux Mint). Definitely such a general issues would drive further enthusiasts from GNU / Linux and makes a great harm to the Free Software software community.
Hopefully the missing desktop icons hell will be solved in upcoming GNOME releases.

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Posted in Gnome, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 1 Comment »

Things to install on newly installed GNU / Linux (My favourite must have Linux text and GUI programs missing in fresh Linux installs)

Thursday, September 7th, 2017

must-have-packages-to-install-on-a-freshly-brand-new-linux-installed-on-desktop-computer-gnu-linux-logo

On every next computer I use as a Desktop or Laptop, I install with Debian GNU / Linux I install the following bunch of extra packages in order to turn the computer into a powerful Multimedia, User, Sys Admin army knife tools, A Programmer desktop and Hacker / Penetration Testing security auditting station.

The packages names might vary less or more across various Debian releases and should be similar or the same in Ubuntu / Linux Mint and the rest of Deb based distribtuions.

Also some of the package names might given in the article might change from time of writting this article just like some  already changed in time from a release to release, nomatter that the general list is a collection of packages I have enjoyed for the last 8 years. And I believe anyone who is new to GNU / Linux and  or even some experienced free software users in need of  full featured computer system for remote system administration purposes or general software development and even small entertainment such as Movie Watching or Playing some unsophisticated basic games to kill some time might benefit from the list of programs collected from my experience as a Free Software GNU / Linux users over the last 12 years or so.

So here we go as you might know, once you have a Debian GNU / Linux, first thing to do is to add some extra repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list

For example my debian 9 Stretch sources.list looks like this:

cp -rpf /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list-bak

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

And delete / substitute everything within with something as following:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main non-free
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-updates main

deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main

deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security stretch/updates main contrib

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian stretch contrib

If you're using an older Debian release for example debian 7 or 8, the sources.list codename stretch word should be changed to wheezy for legacy debian 7 or jessie for debian 8, do it respectively for any future or older Deb releases.

Then proceed and update all current installed packages to their latest release with:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

If you're running on a very old Debian GNU / Linux release , you might encounter errors from above cmds, if that's your case just follow the online guides and update to a newer still supported Deb release.

Once all this is done assuming you have connected to the internet via LAN network or if on a laptop via Wireless, here are some useful stuff to install especially if you're planning to use your computer effectively in both console and graphics environment.

 

1. Install some basic packages necessery if you're planning to be using compilers on the freshly installed GNU / linux

apt-get install –yes gcc autoconf build-essential fakeroot devscripts equivs libncurses5-dev g++ make libc6-dev fontconfig gdc

The most notable package here is build-essential it provides the following collection of C / C++ programs on Deb package based distributions Debian / Ubuntu / Mint etc.
 

  1. libc6-dev – C standard library.
  2. gcc – C compiler.
  3. g++ – C++ compiler.
  4. make – GNU make utility to maintain groups of programs.
  5. dpkg-dev – Debian package development tools.

2. Install w3m lynx elinks text browsers

apt-get install –yes lynx elinks w3m-img w3m

3. Install wireless and networking tools
 

apt-get install  –yes tcpdump vnstat wpasupplicant wpagui dnsutils

4. Install Network sniffing, penetration testing and network evaluation tools
 

apt-get install  –yes wireshark nmap zenmap sniffit iptraf iptraf-ng tshark dsniff netsniff-ng netwox netwag sslsniff darkstat kismet netcat ngrep hashcat hydra hydra-gtk ophcrack ophcrack-cli

————–

wireshark – GUI network traffic analyzer

nmap – nmap port mapper and security audit tool

zenmap – GUI frontend to nmap

sniffit – console text based basic packet sniffer and monitoring tool very used tool to sniff servers authenticatoins in the past

iptraf-ng – Next Generation interactive colorful IP Lan mointor

tshark – another network traffic analyzer console version

dsniff – Various tools to sniff network traffic for cleartext insecurities

netsniff-ng – Linux network packet sniffer toolkit

netwox – Provides more than 200 tools to solve network problems with DNS, FTP, HTTP, IRC, NNTP, SMTP, SNMP, SYSLOG, TELNET, TFTP

netwag – graphical frontend to netwox

sslsniff – SSL/TLS man-in-the-middle attack tool

darkstat – network traffic analyzer

kismet – wireless sniffer and monitor (very useful in the past for sniffing passwords on a Wi-Fi network)

netcat – TCP / IP swiss army knife (good tool to listen and connect to local and remote ports)

ngrep – grep like tool for network traffic

hashcat – Claims to be world's fastest and most advanced password recovery utility, capable of attacking more than 160 highly optimized hashing algorithms, supports CPU and GPU (using the video card CPU to enhance password cracking speed), also could be used for distributed password cracking

hydra – Very fast network logon cracker, supports webforms works with dictionary attacks etc.

hydra-gtk – GTK GUI version of Hydra

ophcrack – Microsoft Windows password cracker using rainbow tables GUI

ophcrack-cli – Console version of Microsoft Windows password cracker using rainbow tables for speed

————

 

5. Install multimedia, entertainment few useful tools and other useful stuff
 

apt-get install –yes workrave xscreensaver xscreensaver-data xulrunner xutils zenity yelp zgv   tracker-utils alltray ant apt-utils bsdutils  aumix bwidget ca-certificates pulseaudio-module-jack aumix audacious ffmpeg bluefish bluefish-plugins blender blueman bluez cabextract bluez-firmware bsdmainutils dcraw dmidecode evtest file fonts-liberation fonts-stix fonts-uralic fonts-opensymbol fonts-lyx fonts-cantarell fuse gimp gimp-data-extras gimp-plugin-registry git gnupg gnupg2 imagemagick imwheel inkscape iw less 


bsdutils – Provides some nice old school programs such as :

-=-=-=-=-=-

wall – a program to write to every logged in user console, used in old times on time sharing servers to notify all users about sys admin planning for a reboot or for some other update activity

renice – allows to renice priority over already prioritized process with (nice command)

script – Allows you to do a recorder like saves of user activity on a console / terminal

logger – send logging output from programs to syslog 

-=-=-=-=-=-

alltray – A small program that allows you to bring to dock any program useful to make Thunderbird appear in Gnome / Mate / KDE Dock in a similar manner as Outlook does in m$ Windows

zgv – SVGAlib graphical (picture viewer) useful to view pictures from tty consoles

zenity – allows to display graphical dialog boxes by using shell scripts

aumix – Simple text based mixer control, useful to tune up sound values and mic recording volume from console

WorkRave – is a useful program to periodically remind you to stand out of the computer on a specified interval and shows you graphically some exercies to do to prevent your physical health to not deteriorate by standing all day immobilized

Bluefish – Is Advanced GTK+ HTML Editor useful if you're about to edit HTML / CSS and other Web files

dcraw – Decode raw digital images

dmidecode – Text program that reports your computer hardware

blueman, bluez – Programs to enable USB support on your Linux

evtest – evtest is a utility to monitor Linux input devices

file – little tool to determine file type based on "magic numbes"

fontsliberation – Fonts with same metrics as Times, Arial and Courier

—


6. Install Text based console Multimedia Mp3 / Mod / S3m players

apt-get install –yes mpg321 mpg123 cmus mp3blaster mplayer sox  ogg123 mikmod cplay cdcd cdck eject

———

mpg321, mpg123 – Mp3 and Ogg Vorbis console player historically one of the earliest I used to play my music

cmus – Another awesome ncurses menu based small music player

mp3blaster – Full Screen ncurses text console mp3 and Ogg vorbis music player

mplayer – An awesome old school (the defacto standard) and still one of the best Music and Video player for GNU / Linux

sox – Swiss army knife of sound processing, contains (sox, play, rec and soxi commands), which could be used to play, rec and add effects to WAV and other popular old sound formats

ogg123 – Play Ogg Vorbis .OGG Free encoding file format in console

mikmod – The most famous Tracker (S3M, MOD, IT) music player for *NIX, play the old soundtracker formats on your GNU / Linux

cplay – A really nice text front end to music players, the cool thing about it it shows how much is left for the song to over using ASCII

cdcd – play Audio CDs from console

eject – eject your CD Drive from console

cdck – tool to verify the quality of written CDs/DVDs

———


7. Install Games

apt-get install –yes xpenguins frozen-bubble alex4 bsdgames bb ninvaders blobwars btanks chromium-bsu criticalmass figlet freetennis njam swell-foop dreamchess extremetuxracer gltron gnuchess wesnoth njam wing nikwi dreamchess gltron gnome-games swell-foop aisleriot prboom

———–

xpenguins – little penguins walk on your screen great to use as a screensaver

frozen-bubble – cool game with bubbles you have to pop out

blobwars – platform shooting game

njam – pacman like game with multiplayer support

extremetuxracer – 3D racing game featuring Tux the Linux penguin mascot

gltron – 3D remake of the good well known Tron Game

gnuchess – GNU remake of classic Chess game

wing – arcade Galaga like game for GNU / Linux

wesnoth – Fantasy turne based strategy game

dremachess – 3D chess game

swell-fool – Colored ball puzzle game

gnome-games – A collection of Games for the GNOME Desktop

nikwi – platform game with a goal to collect candies

aisleriot – GNOME solitaire card game 

prboom – PrBoom, a remake of the Doom 3d shooter classic game using SDL (supports OpenGL), to play it you will need WAD files if you don't have it install (doom-wad-shareware) package

figlet – Make large character ASCII banners out of ordinary provided text (just provide any text and get a nice ASCII picture out of it)

———-
 

8. Install basic archivers such as rar, zip, arj etc.

apt-get install –yes zip unrar arj cpio p7zip unzip bzip2 file-roller


———–

cpio – GNU cpio, a program to manager archive files

bzip2 – BunZip2 block compressor decompressor utility (necessery to untar the .tar.bz2 tar balls)

unzip – De-archiver for .zip files console version

rar, unrar – Archiver Unarchiver for .rar files in terminal / console (unfortunately non-free software)

file-roller – Archive manager for gnome

gpg – gnu privacy guard to be able to generate gpg keys

————-

If you're looking for an advanced file archive, dearchive software GUI that be a substitute for Windows WinRar,  WinZip there is also the proprietary software PeaZip for Linux, as I stay as much as possible away from non-free software I don't use PeaZip though. For me file-roller's default GNOME archiver / unarchiver does a pretty good job and if it fails someties I use the console versions of above programs
 

9. Install text and speech synthesizer festival freetts
 

apt-get install –yes festival festival-cmu festvox-kallpc16k festvox-ru mbrola-en1 speech-dispatcher-festival freetts flite yasr gnupg2

————-

Festival – Is the general multi-lingual speech synthesis system

yasr – is a basic console screen reader program

flite – a small run time speech synthesis engine alternative to festival, another free software synthesis tool based built using FestVox

————–

Festival is great if you want to listen to text files and can easily be used to convert basic PDFs or DOC files to listen them if you're lazy to read I've explained on how you can use festival to read speak for you PDFs and DOCs, ODF (Open Document Format) here
 

10. Install linux-header files for latest installed Debian kernel

apt-get install –yes linux-headers-$(uname -r)

You will need that package if you need to compile external usually DRM (Digital Rights Management)  external modules that could be loaded to current Debian precompiled kernel, I recommend you abstain from it since most of the modules are DRMed and doesn't respect your freedom.
 

11. Install GUI programs and browsers

apt-get install –yes gnome-themes-standard gnome-themes-standard-data epiphany-browser dconf-tools gnome-tweak-tool

epiphany-browser – Intuitive GNOME web browser (I love this browser, though sometimes Crashing I prefer to use it as it is really fast and lightweight I think Mac OS's Safari has been partially based on its programming code)

dconf-tools – Dconf is a low-level key / value database designed for storing desktop environment variables (provides dconf-editor – which allows you to tune tons of gnome settings tunable only through this database it is something like Windows regedit registry editor tool but for GNOME)

gnome-themes-standard / gnome-themes-standard-data – The name says it all it provides beautiful gnome standard themes

gnome-tweak-tool – Graphic tool to adjust many advanced configuration settings in GNOME in GNOME 3.2, many of the old GNOME 3.0 and 2.X capabilities such as Desktop icons or Computer on the Desktop and many more useful gnome capabilities you might be used for historically can be enabled through that handy tool, it is a must for the GNOME user

12. Install text and GUI mail clients

apt-get install –yes mutt fetchmail bsd-mailx mailutils thunderbird aspell-bg aspell-en aspell-ru

I use primary 3 languages Russian, Bulgarian and English, so by installing the 3 packages aspell-bg, aspell-en, aspell-ru, that would add a possiility for Thunderbird and LibreOffice to have ability to spell check your mails and ODF documents, if your native language is different or you speak different languages do run:
 

apt-cache search aspell 


And install whatever languages spell check support you need

 


13. Install filesystem mount, check and repair tools
 

apt-get install –yes ntfs-3g sshfs dosfstools ext3grep  e2fsprogs e2fsck-static growisofs  e2undel extundelete recover bleachbit


———–

ntfs-3g – read / write NTFS driver support for FUSE (Filesystem in UserSpace) or in other words install these to be able to mount in read/write mode NTFS filesystems

sshfs – filesystem client based on SSH File Transfer Protocol, that little nitty tool enables you to mount remotely SSH Filesystems to your local Linux Desktop, it is also useful to install across servers if you need to remotely mount SSH Filesystems

e2fsprogs – ext2 / ext3 / ext4 filesystem utilities to check, fix, tune, defragment resize and create etc. new filesystems  (provides crucial commands such as fsck.ext2, fsck.ext3, fsck.ext4, e2label, lsattr, chattr, resize2fs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mkfs.ext4 …)

dosfstools – tool giving you ability to check, create and diagnose DOS and Windows FAT 32 Filesystems provides commands such as dosfsck, mkdosfs, dosfslabel, fsck.msdos, fsck.vfat, mkfs.msdos

growisofs – DVD+ RW / Read Only Recorder

ext3grep – tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems

e2undel – Undelete utility for ext2 filesystems
———–

14. Install emulators for PC OS Emuation (Qemu), DOS and Wine to run native Windows programs on GNU / Linux
 

apt-get install –yes qemu qemu-utils aqemu dosbox mame mame-extra os8 simh wine nestopia dgen


—————-

Qemu – Virtual Machine emulator with support UEFI firmware

Aqemu – Qemu QT VM GUI Frotend

Dosbox – Dos Emulator, great to have to play the good old DOS games on your GNU / Linux

Mame – Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, great if you want to play the old arcade games of your youth such as The Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Captain America, Robocop, Captain Commando, Wonderboy and so on the list goes on and on …

simh – PDP-1 PDP-4 PDP-7, PDP-9, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-15 HP 2100, IBM System 3, IBM 1620, Interdata, SDS, LGP-21, LGP-30, DEC VaX emulator

nestopia – Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom Emulator

dgen – Sega MegaDrive GNU / Linux Emulator

—————
 


15. Install Network Time protocol daemon and ntpdate (time synchronizing text client)

apt-get install –yes ntpdate ntp

16. Install Djview and CHM books reader

apt-get install –yes djview djview4 djvulibre-bin xchm kchmviewer chm2pdf

Install this packages to be able read DjView and CHM book formats

17. Install other text stuff

# Install text calculator I always prefer and use this console tool instead of the GUI gnome-calculator

apt-get install –yes bc

18. Install printing CUPs and printing utilities

apt-get install –yes cups-client cups-daemon cups-server-common hplip hplip-data printer-driver-hpcups printer-driver-hpijs ghostscript 

A bunch of packages for your Linux Deskto po properly support printing, you might need to install some extra packages depending on the type of printer you need to use, perhaps you will have to take few minutes probably to configure CUPs.

19. Install text monitoring tools

apt-get install –yes htop atop  dnstop  iftop iotop  jnettop ntopng  pktstat  powertop  sntop mariadb-client  iotop  itop jnettop kerneltop logtop
pgtop powertop


—————–

htop – More interactive colorful process viewer similar to top

atop – Monitor for system resources and process activity

dnstop – Console tool for analyze DNS traffic

iftop – displays bandwidth usage information on a chosen network interface

iotop – simple top-like I/O (I / O) information output by the Linux kernel

jnettop – View hosts / ports taking up the most network traffic

ntopng – High-Speed Web-based Traffic analysis and Flow Collection tool

pktstat – top like utility for network connections usage

powertop – tool to diagnose issues with power consumption and management (useful for Linux running laptops)

sntop – A ncurses-based utility that polls hosts to determine connectivity

mariadb-client – this is the new name for the old mytop / mtop MySQL top package

kerneltop – shows Linux kernel usage in a style like top

pgtop – Show PostgreSQL queries in a top like style

lograte – real time log line rate analyzer

—————-

20. Install text command line tools for transferring data from Web sites and FTP

apt-get install –yes curl wget lftp filezilla gftp transmission linuxdcpp

———-
curl – command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax

wget – tool to retrvie files and html from the web

lftp – sophisticated command-line FTP/HTTP/BitTorrent client program

filezilla – Full-featured graphical FTP/FTPS/SFTP client

gftp – X/GTK+ and console FTP client

transmission – lightweight Bittorrent client

linuxdcpp – Port of the Windows file-sharing program DC++

———–

21. Install text based communication programs

apt-get install –yes irssi freetalk centerim finch

———-

Irssi – Great console IRC chat client with support for encryption

FreeTalk – console based jabber client

centerim – Console based ICQ client

finch – Multi protocol Text console client for AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, IRC, Jabber / XMPP / Google Talk Sametime, MySpaceIM, Napster, Zephyr, Gadu-Gadu, Bonjour, GroupWise

———-

22. Install Apache Webserver and MySQL

This two are necessery if you're about to use your computer as a PHP / MySQL develment station

apt-get install –yes mysql-server phpmyadmin apache2 libapache2-mod-php php-pear php php-mysql  ant ant-contrib apache2-dev apache2-ssl-dev

———-

mysql-server – MySQL community edition

ant – Java based build tool like make (necessery for building many third party apache modules and code)

libapache2-mod-php5 – the php module loaded into apache

phpmyadmin – Webtool admin to manage your MySQL database

——–

23. Install mouse support for consoles

apt-get install –yes gpm


———–

gpm – is the general purpose mouse interface, if you want to have support for your mouse in TTY consoles (the ones you go to with CTRL + ALT + F2, CTRL + ALT + F3 and so on install it).

———–

24. Install various formats converter tools

apt-get install –yes html2text pdf2djvu unoconv oggconvert webkit2pdf img2pdf gsscan2pdf netpbm dir2ogg soundconverter


————

gsscan2pdf – GUI program to produce PDF or DJVU from scanned documents

img2pdf – Lossless conversion of raster images to PDF

webkit2pdf – export web pages to PDF files or printer

html2text – Advanced HTML to text converter

oggcconvert – convert media files to free format 

netpbm – Graphics conversion tools between image formats

dir2ogg – converts MP3, M4A, WMA, FLAC, WAV files and Audio CDs to the open-source OGG format.

soundconverter – GNOME application to convert audio files into other formats

————

There are probably a lot of more handy packages that other Free Software users like to install to make the GNU / Linux desktop notebook even more entertaining and fulfillful for daily work. If you can think of other useful packages not mentioned here you tend to use on a daily basis no matter where Debian based or other distro, please share that would help me too to learn a new thing and I'll be greateful.

Enjoy !

UPDATE: If you get errors with missing packages, just delete them out of the apt-get lines. The reason is some packages are beying removed from .deb repositories or the software package name has changed due to some reason.
 

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Posted in Curious Facts, Educational, Everyday Life, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Various | 1 Comment »

Virtualbox Shared folder set up on Linux between Host and Guest OS – Set up Virtualbox shared folder to Copy files from PC Host to Guest

Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

mount-shares-between-host-OS-and-guest-virtual-machine-howto-virtualbox-vbox-logo

How to set-up Virtualbox shared folder to Copy files from PC Host  and Guest Virtualized OS?

Running VirtualBox Host is an easy thing to set-up across all Operating Systems.  Once you have it sooner or later you will need to copy files from the VM Host OS (that in my case is GNU / Linux) to the virtualized Guest operating system (again in my case that's again another Linux ISO running indide the Virtual Machine).

Below are steps to follow To use Virtualbox Shared Folder functionality to copy files between VBox and your Desktop / server Linux install.

1. Install Virtualbox Guest Additions CD Image ISO

I've explained how to add the Guest Additions CD image thoroughfully in my previous article Howto enable Copy / Paste Virtualbox betwen Linux guest and Host OS
Anyways I'll repeat myself below for sake of clarity:

To do so use Oracle VBox menus (on the booted virtualized OS VBox window):

 

Devices -> Insert Guest additions CD Image

 

Mount the ISO inside the Linux Virtual Machine:

root@debian:~# mount /media/cdrom1/
 

If the mount fails and there are no files inside the mount point it might be because the virtualbox-dkms and virtualbox-guest-dkms packages might be missing on the Host OS.

To install them (on Debian GNU / Linux) assuming that you're using virtualbox default distro packages /etc/apt/sources.list :
 

apt-get install –yes -qq virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-guest-dkms


and run:

 

root@debian:/media/cdrom1# cd /media/cdrom1; sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
…


2. Create directory for Shared Folder that will be used to access Host / OS files from the Guest Virtualized OS
 

root@debian:~# mkdir /mnt/shared_folder

 

3. Map from VBox program interface Shared folder settings and Mount /mnt/shared_folder location

virtualbox-virtual-machine-devices-shared-folders-shared-folder-settings-linux-screenshot

 

Devices -> Shared Folder -> Shared Folder settings -> Transient Folders (click blue folder add small button right)

 

From Transient Folders add whatever directory you want to be shared from your local notebook / PC to the VM.

virtualbox-devices-Shared-Folder-Add-Shared-Folder-add-share-linux-screenshotDepending on whether you would like to mount the shared folder only for reading files (choose Read Only) to make it a permanent shared folder (and not just for the one session of current running Virtual Machine until its killed use Make Permanent) or check Auto-Mount tick if you want the shared_folder mapping to be mounted on every VM boot.

Once the shared_folder directory location is set-up from GUI menu click OK and in order for the settings to take effect, you'll need to restart the VM Guest with Linux (use halt command from terminal) or Power Off the Machine via the VBox menus.

To mount use command like:

mount -t vboxsf name_of_folder_linked_from_vbox  /mnt/name_folder_guest_os/


mount-vboxsf-shared-folder-mnt-shared-linux-guest-screenshot

In my case I wanted to share home folder /home so the command I used is:

root@debian:~# mount -t vboxsf  shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder


If everything is fine your Host OS file content from /home will be visible (for read and write if you Mapped it so) 
under /mnt/shared_folder …

And as Turtles Ninja used to heavily say Cowabunga !!! 🙂
You have it mounted and ready for file share between Desktop -> Virtualized OS.
 

Bear in mind that above mount command has to run as root (superuser) to succeed.

You now could copy files from your Host OS (running the Virtual Machine) and the Guest OS (Virtualized OS) using /mnt/shared_folder mount point without problems.

The example is if you want to share files between VirtualBox installed Linux and the Guest (Desktop / server) OS, however at many cases mounting your Host OS directory for root users might be not very practical but, instead you might prefer to do the mount for specific non admin user, for example I prefer to do the shared folder mount with my pointed non-root username hipo.

Here is how to do above VM shared_folder mount for non-root user:

First you need to know the exact UID / GID (User ID / Group ID) of user, you can get that with id command:

 

hipo@linux:~$  id
uid=1000(hipo) gid=1000(hipo) groups=1000(hipo),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),108(netdev),114(bluetooth),115(lpadmin),119(scanner)

 

As you see UID / GID in my case are 1000 / 1000

hipo@linux:~$ sudo mount -t vboxsf -o rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder

 

mount-virtual-box-shared_folder-with-non-administration-permissions-non-root-permissions-id-and-mount-command-screenshot-linux


4. Mounting configured shared_folder to automatically mount into the Guest OS Linux on every boot

a) Configuring shared_folder auto-mount using /etc/rc.local

If you need the shared_folder to automatically mount next-time you boot the virtual machine quickest way is to add the mount command to /etc/rc.local (on Debian 8 and Debian 9 and newer Ubuntu Linuxes rc.local is missing by default to enable it to work like it worked before read follow my previous article ).

b) Configuring auto-mount for shared_folder through /etc/fstab

The more professional way to auto-mount on emulated OS VM boot time,  you could add the vboxsf mount definitions to /etc/fstab with your favourite text-editor mcedit, nano, joe etc. … (for me that's vim).

Syntax of /etc/fstab is as follows:
 

<Device> <Mount Point> <Type> <Options> <Dump> <Pass>

root@linux:~# vim /etc/fstab

 

shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder                                vboxsf rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

Note that you will want to change 1000 / 1000, id / gid with the ones of the non-admin user you would like to add to mount it for.

A quick way to add it to /etc/fstab with a shell one-liner is with command
 

root@linux:~# echo 'shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder                                vboxsf rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 0  0' >> /etc/fstab

An alternative way to add a user to have permissions for vboxsf file system (without specifying the long -o uid=1000,gid=1000 options is to simply add the username in question to group vboxsf like so:

c) Adding non super user username to vboxsf group

root@linux:~# usermod -G vboxsf hipo
root@linux:~# grep -i vboxsf /etc/group
vboxsf:x:999:hipo

 

hipo@linux:~$ sudo mount -t vboxsf  shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder

 

without the extra arguments and the options to pass to /etc/fstab (for eventual requirement to auto mount the shared_folder) would be more simple e.g.:

 

echo 'shared_folder /mnt/shared_folder                                vboxsf ' >> /etc/fstab

 

One note to make here is if the uesr is added to vboxsf the line for /etc/fstab to auto mount to mount for root user and non-root will be identical.

Then you can get the /etc/fstab auto-mount configured tested by running:

c) Checking auto-mount is working

hipo@linux:~# mount -a
hipo@linux:~# mount |grep -i vboxsf
shared_folder on /mnt/shared_folder type vboxsf (rw,nodev,relatime)


5. What if you end up with mounting failed errors ? – What might be causing the mounting failed Protocol error (a few things to check to solve)


In case of troubles with the mount you might get an error like:

hipo@linux:~# mount -t vboxsf  share_folder /mnt/shared_folder

/sbin/mount.vboxsf: mounting failed with the error: Protocol error


This error might be caused because of Insert Guest Additions CD Image might be not properly enabled and installed using the ISO provided VBoxLinuxAdditions.sh shell script.
Other common reason you might get this error if you have mistyped the Folder name: given in Shared Folders -> Folder Path -> Add Share for example I have given shared_folder as a Map name but as you can see in above mount -t vboxsf, I've mistyped share_folder instead of the correct one shared_folder inserted.
In some VBox releases this error was caused by bugs in the Virtual Machine.
 

virtualbox-virtual-machine-shared-folder-transient-folder-add-folder-linux-VM-guest-linux

One useful tip is to be able to check whether a Virtualbox Virtual Machine has a configured shared_folder (if you're logging to manage the machine on remote server – nomatter whether you have logged in with VNC / Teamviewer / Citrix etc. or via SSH session.

To do so use VBoxControl as of time of writting usually located on most distributions under (/usr/bin/VBoxControl)
 

 

hipo@linux:~# VBoxControl sharedfolder list -automount
Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions Command Line Management Interface Version 5.2.18
(C) 2008-2018 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

 

Auto-mounted Shared Folder mappings (0):

No Shared Folders available.

You can use VBoxControl command to get set and list a number of settings on the VBox VM, here is an useful example with it where you get information about numerous VBox info values:

 

root@linux:~# VBoxControl guestproperty enumerate
Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions Command Line Management Interface Version 5.2.18
(C) 2008-2018 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

 

Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Product, value: Linux, timestamp: 1536681633430852000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP, value: 10.0.2.15, timestamp: 1536681633438717000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/GUI/LanguageID, value: en_US, timestamp: 1536697521395621000, flags: RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/MAC, value: 08002762FA1C, timestamp: 1536681633442120000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/ServicePack, value: <NULL>, timestamp: 1536681633431259000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/VBoxVerExt, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681619002646000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/Netmask, value: 255.255.255.0, timestamp: 1536681633440157000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Version, value: #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u2 (2018-08-13), timestamp: 1536681633431125000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/VersionExt, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681633431582000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Revision, value: 124319, timestamp: 1536681633432515000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostGuest/SysprepExec, value: <NULL>, timestamp: 1536681619002355000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/LoggedInUsers, value: 1, timestamp: 1536681673447293000, flags: TRANSIENT, TRANSRESET
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/Status, value: Up, timestamp: 1536681633443911000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/Name, value: enp0s3, timestamp: 1536681633445302000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostGuest/SysprepArgs, value: <NULL>, timestamp: 1536681619002387000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/Version, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681633431419000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/VBoxRev, value: 124319, timestamp: 1536681619002668000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/Broadcast, value: 10.0.2.255, timestamp: 1536681633439531000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/HostInfo/VBoxVer, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681619002613000, flags: TRANSIENT, RDONLYGUEST
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/LoggedInUsersList, value: hipo, timestamp: 1536681673446498000, flags: TRANSIENT, TRANSRESET
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/Count, value: 1, timestamp: 1536698949773993000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/Release, value: 4.9.0-7-amd64, timestamp: 1536681633431001000, flags: <NULL>
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestInfo/OS/NoLoggedInUsers, value: false, timestamp: 1536681673447965000, flags: TRANSIENT, TRANSRESET
Name: /VirtualBox/GuestAdd/HostVerLastChecked, value: 5.2.18, timestamp: 1536681702832389000, flags: <NULL>

Hope you enjoyed ! Have phun! 🙂

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Posted in Linux, Virtual Machines | No Comments »

Linux “bash: mail: command not found” error fix – Installing mail cli on Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu

Friday, September 7th, 2018

bash-mail-command-not-found-error-fix-linux-installing-bsd-mailx-linux-fedora-debian-centos

If you just hired a cheap VPS with some kind of Linux OS installed or just installed a home Linux test system environment inside a Virtual Machine (such as VirtualBox) on your notebook and you want to read system email reports delivered by services (e.g. track possible errors with the OS) or simply test whether Email relaying is configured properly

and you end up with shell error:

bash: mail: command not found

because mail command is missing and you wonder what Linux package you have to install in order to have the lovely mail / mailx command back on the OS … this article will help you how you can easily solve it by installing the mailx binary file (e.g. install the package providing it depending on the Linux Distribution Operating System you face the problem on.

1.  Install mailx command on Debian / Ubuntu / Mint and other .deb based Linux
 

root@linux:~# apt-get install –yes bsd-mailx
…

 


An alternative way to install the mailx system binary is to install  mailutils package

which will set up the system with essential mail related programs and set up a light Exim MTA and common server Email surrounding  so you can easily configure default installed Exim Mail Server to serve as an SMTP relay (through dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config) command

 

root@linux~:# apt-get install mailutils
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information… Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light guile-2.0-libs libgsasl7
  libkyotocabinet16v5 libmailutils5 libmariadbclient18 libntlm0
  mailutils-common mysql-common
Suggested packages:
  eximon4 exim4-doc-html | exim4-doc-info spf-tools-perl swaks mailutils-mh
  mailutils-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light guile-2.0-libs libgsasl7
  libkyotocabinet16v5 libmailutils5 libmariadbclient18 libntlm0 mailutils

 

root@linux:~# dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

 

dpkg-reconfigure-exim4-config-debian-linux-exim4-email-server-screenshot

2. Install mailx Linux command on Fedora / CentOS / RHEL e.g. Redhat based distros

 

On RPM based distrubutions the package name is different from debians to install it there you have to fetch and install current distro mailx .rpm

To install mail command on older CentOS / Redhat 7/6/5 distributions

 

[root@centos:~]# yum install -y mailx
…

 

On Fedora 22+ version yum auto-dependency tool was substituted with dnf:

 

[root@fedora:~]# dnf install -y mailx
…

 


3. Send Test Email with mail command

 

root@linux:~# echo "Sample Message Body" | mail -s "Whatever … Message Subject" remote_receiver@remote-server-email-address.com
…

 


Check the mailbox, you just sent the sample email, hopefully if MTA is relaying correctly and the SMTP relay is properly delivering the email should be at the recipient address.

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Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 1 Comment »

Install and use personal Own Cloud on Debian Linux for better shared data security – OwnCloud a Free Software replacement for Google Drive

Thursday, August 23rd, 2018

owncloud-self-hosted-cloud-file-sharing-and-storage-service-for-gnu-linux-howto-install-on-debian

Basicly I am against the use of any Cloud type of service but as nowadays Cloud usage is almost inevitable and most of the times you need some kind of service to store and access remotely your Data from multiple devices such as DropBox, Google Drive, iCloud etc. and using some kind of infrastructure to execute high-performance computing is invitable just like the Private Cloud paid services online are booming nowdays, I decided to give a to research and test what is available as a free software in the field of Clouding (your data) 🙂

Undoubfully, it is really nice fact that there are Free Software / Open Source alternatives to run your Own personal Cloud to store your data from multiple locations on a single point.

The most popular and leading Cloud Collaboration service (which is OpenSource but unfortunately not under GPLv2 / GPV3 – e.g. not fully free software) is OwnCloud.

ownCloud is a flexible self-hosted PHP and Javascript based web application used for data synchronization and file sharing (where its remote file access capabilites are realized by Sabre/Dav an open source WebDav server.
OwnCloud allows end user to easily Store / Manage files, Calendars, Contacts, To-Do lists (user and group administration via OpenID and LDAP), public URLs can be easily, created, the users can interact with browser-based ODF (Open Document Format) word processor , there is a Bookmarking, URL Shortening service integrated, Gallery RSS Feed and Document Viewer tools such as PDF viewer etc. which makes it a great alternative to the popular Google Drive, iCloud, DropBox etc.

The main advantage of using a self-hosted Cloud is that Your data is hosted and managed by you (on your server and your hard drives) and not by some God knows who third party provider such as the upmentioned.
In other words by using OwnCloud you manage your own data and you don't share it ot on demand with the Security Agencies with CIA, MI6, Mussad … (as it is very likely most of publicly offered Cloud storage services keeps track on the data stored on them).

The other disadvantage of Cloud Computing is that the stored data on such is usually stored on multiple servers and you can never know for sure where your data is physically located, which in my opinion is way worse than the option with Self Hosted Cloud where you know where your data belongs and you can do whatever you want with your data keep it secret / delete it or share it on your demand.

OwnCloud has its clients for most popular Mobile (Smart Phone) platforms – an Android client is available in Google Play Store as well as in Apple iTunes besides the clients available for FreeBSD OS, the GNOME desktop integration package and Raspberry Pi.

For those who are looking for additional advanced features an Enterprise version of OwnCloud is also available aiming business use and included software support.

Assuming you have a homebrew server or have hired a dedidacted or VPS server (such as the Ones we provide) ,Installing OwnCloud on GNU / Linux is a relatively easy
task and it will take no more than 15 minutes to 2 hours of your life.
In that article I am going to give you a specific instructions on how to install on Debian GNU / Linux 9 but installing on RPM based distros is similar and straightfoward process.
 

1. Install MySQL / MariaDB database server backend
 

By default OwnCloud does use SQLite as a backend data storage but as SQLite stores its data in a file and is becoming quickly slow, is generally speaking slowre than relational databases such as MariaDB server (or the now almost becoming obsolete MySQL Community server).
Hence in this article I will explain how to install OwnCloud with MariaDB as a backend.

If you don't have it installed already, e.g. it is a new dedicated server install MariaDB with:
 

server:~# apt-get install –yes mariadb-server


Assuming you're install on a (brand new fresh Linux install – you might want to install also the following set of tools / services).

 

server:~# systemctl start mariadb
server:~# systemctl enable mariadb
server:~# mysql_secure_installation


mysql_secure_installation – is to finalize and secure MariaDB installation and set the root password.
 

2. Create necessery database and users for OwnCloud to the database server
 

linux:~# mysql -u root -p
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE owncloud CHARACTER SET utf8;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON owncloud.* TO 'owncloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'owncloud_passwd';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

 

3. Install Apache + PHP necessery deb packages
 

As of time of writting the article on Debian 9.0 the required packages for a working Apache + PHP install for OwnCloud are as follows.

 

server:~# apt-get install –yes apache2 mariadb-server libapache2-mod-php7.0 \
openssl php-imagick php7.0-common php7.0-curl php7.0-gd \
php7.0-imap php7.0-intl php7.0-json php7.0-ldap php7.0-mbstring \
php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-mysql php7.0-pgsql php-smbclient php-ssh2 \
php7.0-sqlite3 php7.0-xml php7.0-zip php-redis php-apcu

 

4. Install Redis to use as a Memory Cache for accelerated / better performance ownCloud service


Redis is an in-memory kept key-value database that is similar to Memcached so OwnCloud could use it to cache stored data files. To install latest redis-server on Debian 9:
 

server:~# apt-get install –yes redis-server

5. Install ownCloud software packages on the server

Unfortunately, default package repositories on Debian 9 does not provide owncloud server packages but only some owncloud-client packages are provided, that's perhaps the packages issued by owncloud does not match debian packages.

As of time of writting this article, the latest available OwnCloud server  version package for Debian is OC 10.

a) Add necessery GPG keys

The repositories to use are provided by owncloud.org, to use them we need to first add the necessery gpg key to verify the binaries have a legit checksum.
 

server:~# wget -qO- https://download.owncloud.org/download/repositories/stable/Debian_9.0/Release.key | sudo apt-key add –

 

b) Add owncloud.org repositories in separete sources.list file

 

server:~# echo 'deb https://download.owncloud.org/download/repositories/stable/Debian_9.0/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/owncloud.list

 

c) Enable https transports for the apt install tool

 

server:~# apt-get –yes install apt-transport-https

 

d) Update Debian apt cache list files and install the pack

 

server:~# apt-get update

 

server:~# apt-get install –yes owncloud-files

 

By default owncloud store file location is /var/www/owncloud but on many servers that location is not really appropriate because /var/www might be situated on a hard drive partition whose size is not big enough, if that's the case just move the folder to another partition and create a symbolic link in /var/www/owncloud pointing to it …


6. Create necessery Apache configurations to make your new self-hosted cloud accessible
 

a) Create Apache config file

 

server:~# vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/owncloud.conf

 

 

Alias /owncloud "/var/www/owncloud/"

<Directory /var/www/owncloud/>
Options +FollowSymlinks
AllowOverride All

<IfModule mod_dav.c>
Dav off
</IfModule>

SetEnv HOME /var/www/owncloud
SetEnv HTTP_HOME /var/www/owncloud

</Directory>

b) Enable Mod_Dav (WebDAV) if it is not enabled yet

 

server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav_fs.conf
server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav_fs.load
server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav.load
server:~# ln -sf ../mods-available/dav_lock.load

c) Set proper permissions for /var/www/owncloud to make upload work properly

 

chown -R www-data: /var/www/owncloud/


d) Restart Apache WebServer (to make new configuration affective)

 

 

server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart


7. Finalize  OwnCloud Install
 

Access OwnCloud Web Interface to finish the database creation and set the administrator password for the New Self-Hosted cloud
 

http://Your_server_ip_address/owncloud/

By default the Web interface is accessible in unencrypted (insecure) http:// it is a recommended practice (if you already don't have an HTTPS SSL certificate install for the IP or the domain to install one either a self-signed certificate or even better to use LetsEncrypt CertBot to easily create a valid SSL for free for your domain

 

installing-OwnCloud-Web-Config-User-Pass-interface-Owncloud-10-on-Debian-9-Linux-howto

Just fill in in your desired user / pass and pass on the database user / password / db name (if required you can set also a different location for the data directory from the default one /var/www/owncloud/data.

Click Finish Setup and That's all folks!

owncloud-server-web-ui-interface

OwnCloud is successfully installed on the server, you can now go and download a Mobile App or Desktop application for whatever OS you're using and start using it as a Dropbox replacement. In a certain moment you might want to consult also the official UserManual documentation as you would probably need further information on how to manage your owncloud.

Enjoy !

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How to mount LVM partition volume on Linux

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018

lvm-logical-volume-logical-volume-groups

(LVM) = Logical Volume Manager is a device mapper offering logical volume management for the Linux kernel. Virtually all modern GNU / Linux distributions has support for it and using LVM is used among almost all Hosting Providers on (dedicated) backend physical and Virtual XEN / VMWare etc. servers because it provides the ability to merge a number of disks into virtual volumes (for example you have a number of SSD Hard Drives on a server that are under a separate /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdb4 etc. and you want all the HDDs to appear as a single file system this is managed by Linux LVM.

Logical-volume-manager-linux-explained-diagram.svg

Picture sources Wikipedia

The use of LVM is somewhat similar to RAID 0 disk arrays, where the good about it it allows the removal and addition of hard disks in real time (broken hard disks) on servers to be replaced without service downtime as well as dynamic HDD volume resizal is possible. LVM allows also relatively easy encryption of multiple HDD volumes
with single password.

Discs can be organized in volume groups (so lets say 2 of the server Attached conventional Hard Disks, SCSI or SSDs can be attached to LVM1 and another 3 Hard Drives could be attached to LVM2 group etc.

LVM has been an integral part of Linux kernel since 1998.

lvm is available for install via apt, yum, dhf etc. under a package called lvm2, so to install it on Debian / Ubuntu Fedora Linux (if it is not already installed on the servers with).

 

– Install LVM2 On Debian / Ubuntu
 

debian:~# apt-get install –yes lvm2

 


– Install LVM2 on Fedora / CentOS (Redhat RPM based distros)

 

[root@centos ~]:# yum install -y lvm2


or

[root@fedora ~]:#  dhf install -y lvm2


I. Mounting LVM2 on Linux server after broken DISK change part of a LVM Volume

For example the HDD failed – due to bad sectors and physical HDD head damage damage  – the easiest way to figure that out if the server is running smartd or via a simple HDD test check from BIOS  ( as the ROOT partition is on a LVM it fails to boot properly. You have changed the broken HDD with a brand new and you need to remount the LVM either physically on the server console or remotely via some kind of BIOS KVM interface).

In my experience working for Santrex this was a common sysadmin job, as many of the Virtual Client servers as well as others irons situated in various DataCenters, were occasionally failing to boot and the monitoring system was reporting about the issues and we had to promptly react and bring the servers up.

Here is shortly how we managed to re-mount the LVM after the SSDs / HDDS were substituted:

    1.1. Execute fdisk, vgscan / lvdisplay command

fdisk-lvm-screenshot

lvdisplay-screenshot

vgscan scans all supported LVM block devices in the system for VGs (Virtual Groups)

vgscan-vgchange-screenshot-lvm

    1.2. Next issue vgchange command to activate volume
 

vgchange -ay


   
    1.3. Type lvs command to get information about logical volumes

 

lvs


   
    1.4. Create a mount point using the mkdir command

      That's because we wanted to check the LVM will get properly mounted on next server reboot).
   
     1.5. Mount an LVM volume using
 

server:~# mount /dev/mapper/DEVICE /path/to/mount_point

 

     1.6. To check the size of the LVM (mount points, mounted LVM /dev/names sizes and the amount of free space on each of them use)
 

server:~# df -T

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