Posts Tagged ‘move’
Monday, October 25th, 2021
If you have to work on servers in a protected environments that are accessed via multiple VPNs, Jump hosts or Web Citrix and you have no mean to copy binary files to your computer or from your computer because you have all kind of FTP / SFTP or whatever Data Copy clients disabled on remote jump host side or CITRIX server and you still are looking for a way to copy files between your PC and the Remote server Side.
Or for example if you have 2 or more servers that are in a special Demilitarized Network Zones ( DMZ ) and the machines does not have SFTP / FTP / WebServer or other kind of copy protocol service that can be used to copy files between the hosts and you still need to copy some files between the 2 or more machines in a slow but still functional way, then you might not know of one old school hackers trick you can employee to complete the copy of files between DMZ-ed Server Host A lets say with IP address (192.168.50.5) -> Server Host B (192.168.30.7). The way to complete the binary file copy is to Encode the binary on Server Host A and then, use cat command to display the encoded string and copy whole encoded cat command output to your (local PC buffer from where you access the remote side via SSH via the CITRIX or Jump host.). Then decode the encoded file with an encoding tool such as base64 or uuencode. In this article, I'll show how this is done with base64 and uuencode. Base64 binary is pretty standard in most Linux / Unix OS-es today on most Linux distributions it is part of the coreutils package.
The main use of base64 encoding to encode non-text Attachment files to Electronic Mail, but for our case it fits perfectly.
Keep in mind, that this hack to copy the binary from Machine A to Machine B of course depends on the Copy / Paste buffer being enabled both on remote Jump host or Citrix from where you reach the servers as well as your own PC laptop from where you access the remote side.
Base64 Encoding and Decoding text strings legend
The file copy process to the highly secured PCI host goes like this:
1. On Server Host A encode with md5sum command
[root@serverA ~]:# md5sum -b /tmp/inputbinfile-to-encode
66c4d7b03ed6df9df5305ae535e40b7d *inputbinfile-to-encode
As you see one good location to encode the file would be /tmp as this is a temporary home or you can use alternatively your HOME dir
but you have to be quite careful to not run out of space if you produce it anywhere 🙂
2. Encode the binary file with base64 encoding
[root@serverB ~]:# base64 -w0 inputbinfile-to-encode > outputbin-file.base64
The -w0 option is given to disable line wrapping. Line wrapping is perhaps not needed if you will copy paste the data.
Base64 Encoded string chunk with line wrapping
For a complete list of possible accepted arguments check here.
3. Cat the inputbinfile-to-encode just generated to display the text encoded file in your SecureCRT / Putty / SuperPutty etc. remote ssh access client
[root@serverA ~]:# cat /tmp/inputbinfile-to-encode
f0VMRgIBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAMAPgABAAAAMGEAAAAAAABAAAAAAAAAACgXAgAAAAAAAAAAA
EAAOAALAEAAHQAcAAYAAAAEAAA ……………………………………………………………… cTD6lC+ViQfUCPn9bs
4. Select the cat-ted string and copy it to your PC Copy / Paste buffer
If the bin file is not few kilobytes, but few megabytes copying the file might be tricky as the string produced from cat command would be really long, so make sure the SSH client you're using is configured to have a large buffer to scroll up enough and be able to select the whole encoded string until the end of the cat command and copy it to Copy / Paste buffer.
5. On Server Host B paste the bas64 encoded binary inside a newly created file
Open with a text editor vim / mc or whatever is available
[root@serverB ~]:# vi inputbinfile-to-encode
Some very paranoid Linux / UNIX systems might not have even a normal text editor like 'vi' if you happen to need to copy files on such one a useful thing is to use a simple cat on the remote side to open a new File Descriptor buffer, like this:
[root@server2 ~]:# cat >> inputbinfile-to-encode <<'EOF'
Paste the string here
6. Decode the encoded binary with base64 cmd again
[root@serverB ~]:# base64 –decode outputbin-file.base64 > inputbinfile-to-encode
7. Set proper file permissions (the same as on Host A)
[root@serverB ~]:# chmod +x inputbinfile-to-encode
…
8. Check again the binary file checksum on Host B is identical as on Host A
[root@serverB ~]:# md5sum -b inputbinfile-to-encode
66c4d7b03ed6df9df5305ae535e40b7d *inputbinfile-to-encode
As you can md5sum match on both sides so file should be OK.
9. Encoding and decoding files with uuencode
If you are lucky and you have uuencode installed (sharutils) package is present on remote machine to encode lets say an archived set of binary files in .tar.gz format do:
Prepare the archive of all the files you want to copy with tar on Host A:
[root@Machine1 ~]:# tar -czvf /bin/whatever /usr/local/bin/htop /usr/local/bin/samhain /etc/hosts archived-binaries-and-configs.tar.gz
[root@Machine1 ~]:# uuencode archived-binaries-and-configs.tar.gz archived-binaries-and-configs.uu
Cat / Copy / paste the encoded content as usual to a file on Host B:
Then on Machine 2 decode:
[root@Machine2 ~]:# uuencode -c < archived-binaries-and-configs.tar.gz.uu
Conclusion
In this short method I've shown you a hack that is used often by script kiddies to copy over files between pwn3d machines, a method which however is very precious and useful for sysadmins like me who has to admin a paranoid secured servers that are placed in a very hard to access environments.
With the same method you can encode or decode not only binary file but also any standard input/output file content. base64 encoding is quite useful stuff to use also in bash scripts or perl where you want to have the script copy file in a plain text format . Datas are encoded and decoded to make the data transmission and storing process easier. You have to keep in mind always that Encoding and Decoding are not similar to encryption and decryption as encr. deprytion gives a special security layers to the encoded that. Encoded data can be easily revealed by decoding, so if you need to copy between the servers very sensitive data like SSL certificates Private RSA / DSA key, this command line utility tool better to be not used for sesitive data copying.
Tags: access, Ascii, binary files, chmod, com, copy paste, home, How to, linux?, match, move, plain, Select, servers, Set, tar, text, text ascii, transfer, unix, use
Posted in Curious Facts, Hacks, Linux, System Administration, Various | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 10th, 2017 
How to Increse Hard Disk size of VirtualBox Virtual Machine .VDI file to Free Space on root Partition or Howto move /usr large partition to separate new partition?
I just wondered how to increase hard disk size of Virtualbox Virtual Machine image .VDI, because for some stupid reason I've created my initial hard disk size for Linux partition to be the default 10 Gigabytes.
The problem is the packages I need to have installed on the Virtual Machine which will be a testbed for future tests of a production website applications are taking up too much space, once installed so I'm left with no space
in /var/lib/mysql for the database import. So what can I do in that case is to simply free up disk space or Merge ROOT partition with another partition.
Since merging the partition is not a trivial job and would require me to have installable CD with the Linux distro (in my case that's Debian Linux) or have a bootable USB flash drive, I preferred second approach to problem e.g. to free up disk space on ROOT partition by creating a second partition and move the /usr folder to reside there.
Before that it is of course necessery to have extended the .VDI file using VirtualBox, so more space than the default 10GB preconfigured are available, this is easily done on Windows OS as, VBox is provided with GUI clickable option to do it, but for who knows what reason that is not the case with Linux, so Linux users only option to increase VDI file is to manually run command part of the virtualbox package, that is not a hard task really but it requires some typing and basic knowledge on how to run commands in terminal.
To .VDI resize (extend), we first go to default location where VirtualBox stores its image .VDI files (by default as of moment of writting this article – this is ~/"VrtualBox VMs" (or home directory of logged in user dir VirtualBox VMs), the command to use is VBoxManage
root@jericho:/home/hipo# cd VirtualBox VMs/
root@jericho:/home/hipo/VirtualBox VMs# ls
Debian 6 Debian 9 Windows 10
root@jericho:/home/hipo/VirtualBox VMs# cd Debian 6/
root@jericho:/home/hipo/VirtualBox VMs/Debian 6# ls
Debian 6.vbox Debian 6.vbox-prev Debian 6.vdi Logs NewVirtualDisk1.vdi Snapshots
root@jericho:/home/hipo/VirtualBox VMs/Debian 6# VBoxManage modifyhd Debian 6.vdi –resize 20000
0%…10%…20%…30%…40%…50%…60%…70%…80%…90%…100%
root@jericho:/home/hipo/VirtualBox VMs/Debian 6#
Above command does resize the 10GB default created partition for Linux, where I have installed Linux which was 99% full of data, because of the many packages I installed to 20GB size, to make it bigger just use the respective size, be it 30000 (for 30GB) or 100000 (for 100GB) etc.
Even though in this example VBoxManage virtual partition resize command was done for GNU / Linux Operating System, it can be done for any other Operating as well to resize the size of the Virtual .VDI file (Virtual Machine) partition, be it Windows 7 / 8 / 10 or the rest of Free Operating systems FreeBSD / OpenBSD / BSD that are installed in a VM etc.
Next Launch the Virtual Machine with VBox Server client Program and install there Gparted (GNU Parted), as we'll need it to create a new Hard Disk Partition:
$ VirtualBox
Inside virtualmachine's in gnome-terminal / xterm etc. depending on the graphical environment used do install with apt-get:
debian:# apt-get install –yes gparted
…
debian~:# gparted
Notice that gparted has to be ran as a root superuser.
Run GParted and create new EXT3 filesystem that is 10GB (the size of the new created partition).
If you have installed Debian to place all partitions under / (root directory /dev/sda1) then the fresh new partition to create should be
/dev/sda3, anyways just look closely in EXT3 and in your case if the partiition is named differently create according to proper partition /dev/ naming.
I'll not run into details on how to create the partition with GParted as the program interface is very self-explanatory, the only thing is to apply the update to create partition and the ext3 filesystem, that's being done
with a green tick:
Next step is to check with fdisk whether, we have ext3 properly created filesystem as we've done already with GPARTED:
Once we have the partition created with EXT3 filesystem, we're ready to move /usr temporary to other folder, I use usually /root for the move but you can create anywhere a new folder for that and move to there.
To move to /root directory run again in terminal:
debian:~# mv /usr /root
debian:~# mkdir /usr
Note that during the move operations, your Desktop icons will become without (with broken) pictures and the default Debian background picture is to disappear, that's because the GUI environment will soon realize /usr/ libraries that're periodically reloaded in memory are missing and will be unable to reload them as it does in a cycle.
That should take a few minutes, so grab a coffee or if you're a smoker (hope not as smoking kills 🙂 ), in 5 / 10 minutes time depending on your computer / server configuration, it will be over, so we're ready to create new /usr dir and mount the new partition:
debian:~# mount /dev/sda3 /usr
Now we check with mount command whether mount is fine:
Now /dev/sda3 is mounted under /usr and we have to move back /root/usr directory content back to the newly mounted /usr so we run command:
debian:~# mv /root/usr/* /usr/*
Finally we need to create proper records for the new partition inside /etc/fstab (fstab –FileSystem Tab file – the file which describes instructs the Linux OS what partition to boot where, what)
HOW TO CHECK LINUX UUID FOR A PARTITION??
Before adding anything to /etc/fstab you need to check the UUID of /dev/sda3 (or whatever the partition is called), without proper UUID, the system might fail to boot.
So here is how to check the UUID we'll need for config:
hipo@debian:~$ /sbin/blkid /dev/sda3
/dev/sda3: UUID="2273db4b-3069-4f78-90fc-e7483c0305bd" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
hipo@debian:~$ ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 100 Oct 6 05:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 Oct 6 05:16 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 6 05:16 2273db4b-3069-4f78-90fc-e7483c0305bd -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 6 05:16 b98d92cd-41aa-4e18-a474-9b8df445dbe5 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 6 05:16 f27f7448-f200-4983-b54f-b9e5206f77ac -> ../../sda5
As you can see our /dev/sda3 UUID is 2273db4b-3069-4f78-90fc-e7483c0305bd
Further on lets view and edit /etc/fstab you can also download a copy of my Virtual Machine fstab here
debian:~# cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=b98d92cd-41aa-4e18-a474-9b8df445dbe5 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=f27f7448-f200-4983-b54f-b9e5206f77ac none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
We need to add following line to /etc/fstab:
UUID=2273db4b-3069-4f78-90fc-e7483c0305bd /usr ext3 error=remount-ro 0 1
Open the file with your favourite text editor (gedit / nano / pico / vim / joe) etc.
debian:~# vim /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=b98d92cd-41aa-4e18-a474-9b8df445dbe5 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=f27f7448-f200-4983-b54f-b9e5206f77ac none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
UUID=2273db4b-3069-4f78-90fc-e7483c0305bd /usr ext3 error=remount-ro 0 1
Basicly it should be possible to add (for historic reasons) also instead of UUID=2273db4b-3069-4f78-90fc-e7483c0305bd /dev/sda3
So it looks like so but, the better practice is to use UUID line given.
Well that's all folks now /usr directory will contain all your heavy root partition (disk filling) libraries and files, so you can happily use /var/lib/mysql or /var/lib/postgresql /var/www to store your web application files and import your databases.
Big thanks to Ubuntu Forums article – How do I increase the hard disk size of the Virtual Machine article for inspiring this post.
Hope that helps anyone and thanks and other comments are always welcome ! 🙂
Tags: CentOS, debian linux, fedora, gentoo increase VBox VM size, GPARTED, Hard Disk Partition, home directory, Hope, linux increase virtual machine size, mount dev, move, need, root directory, usr, UUID, VDI, Virtualbox Virtual Machine, VM free space on disk partition
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, System Administration, Virtual Machines | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 10th, 2014
Budget of European Union for 2011 is 142 billion Euro. Main source of budget income are installments from country members. Installments paid to EU consist about 1 of countries GDP – and approximately this is the amount of money paid per EU country member.
For Bulgaria installment is about 426 million euro. The bigger GDP is the bigger the amount of money the respective country pains to the overall European Union budget. Even though payments of member countries is only 1% of GDP, this is the source for about 70% of income of EU.
Other source of money for European Union community comes from VAT taxes, and countries customs taxes (over import / export goods) collected on external border of EU community. In national budgets. Member countries give out 75% of their quotes over the custom incomes, collected in external borders of EU. In national counry budget only 25% of money made from customs control imports and imports influx. In Bulgaria's case we can be talk about the import crossing borders of Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey. Import from VAT taxes in 2011 are 3 370 billion leva and from customs 131 million leva. What percantage of this money went to European Union knows only experts.
For last year the Brussels money for Bulgaria are only 1.33 billion Euro (just to compare Poland received 16 736 billion euro). What is even more sad is that money coming from European union for so called funds influx into the pockets of well known oligarchs.
As it looks even though the glorifications with which Bulgarian government gave to the acquisition of this 1.33 billions eur-obrussel gifts during last year our coutnry still remains net sponsor of European budget. Here are not included the country econonic losses of the membership in EU, for example the closure of reactors of our Nuclear Power Plant in Kozloduy. In mean time about 1% of budget of EU community comes from installments from EU employees, unspent money from EU country members as well as receipts from fines from firms and companies for breachment of laws for protectition of competition and normative acts.
Primary supplier in European Union budget is Germany.
- In 2011, Germany paid to EU 27 954 billion euro. This is about 19.7 of all the Union incomes.
- Second to Germany by paid country member fee to EU is France with 23.273 billion euros, about 16.4% of all EU income.
- Third is Italy with 18 447 billion euros or 13% of all EU budget.
As prior mentioned in 2011 direct installment of Bulgaria is 0.426 billion euro (without VAT quotes and incomes from taxation). Less installments paid Esthonia, Lithuania, Malta, Cyprus, Luxemburg (!!!) and Slovenia. Even though all this countries has less teritoriy and less population all this countries are much richer and has a higher GDP per capita!
- Hungary (10 million people)'s installment is 1.135 billions and Romania's installment (Romania – 21.7 million people) was 1.419 billion euro.
Finally – lets take a look of EU country installments per capita of some of member countries.
- Last year the avarage european give for Brussels burocracy 0.78 euro a day!
Question is how it is possible for everyone to pay 0.78 euro for European Adminsitration? – if there is high unemployment in Bulgaria and a lot of people doesn't receive even 0.78 a day?
European Union returned money in terms of funds does not create fabrics or industry and therefore doesn't create employment – doesn't reduce unemployment ?
Does really Bulgaria and we Bulgarians advantage of the European Union?
Avarage Bulgarian paid 0.16 euro per day – the lowest individual installment in union.
As some of European Union citizens might not known,few million of Euro of this money is spend on a move of European deputies from Brussels to Strasburg every month (money given for travel costs of EU deputies and physical move of resources from Brussels to Strasburg). The exact sum spend per year for this unmeaningful move (in order to fulfil European community old legislation varies from 150 to 200 million a year!)
Tags: article, bulgaria net sponsor of eu welfare, Bulgarian, com, countries pay per person for EU, country, european union, how much bulgaria pay for european union per person, import, installment, last, Main, money, move, net, option, php, statistics on how much country gives for european union, Third, www, year
Posted in Curious Facts, Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2014 
Listing hidden files is one of the common thing to do as sys admin. Doing manipulations with hidden files like copy / delete / move is very rare but still sometimes necessary here is how to do all this.
1. Find and show (only) all hidden files in current directory
find . -iname '.*' -maxdepth 1
maxdepth – makes files show only in 1 directory depth (only in current directory), for instance to list files in 2 subdirectories use -maxdepth 3 etc.
echo .*;
Yeah if you're Linux newbie it is useful to know echo command can be used instead of ls.
echo *
command is very useful on systems with missing ls (for example if you mistakenly deleted it 🙂 )
2. Find and show (only) all hidden directories, sub-directories in current directory
To list all directories use cmd:
find /path/to/destination/ -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type d
3. Log found hidden files / directories
find . -iname ".*" -maxdept 1 -type f | tee -a hidden_files.log
find . -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 type d | tee -a hidden_directories.log
4. Delete all hidden files in current directory
cd /somedirectory
find . -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type f -delete
5. Delete all hidden files in current directory
cd /somedirectory
find . -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type d -delete
6. Copy all hidden files from current directory to other "backup" dir
find . -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec cp -rpf '{}' directory-to-copy-to/ ;
7. Copy and move all hidden sub-directories from current directory to other "backup" dir
find . -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec cp -rpf '{}' directory-to-copy-to/ ;
– Moving all hidden sub-directories from current directory to backup dir
find . -iname ".*" -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec mv '{}' directory-to-copy-to/ ;
Tags: command, copy, Delete, dir, directory, echo, echo command, example, exec, hidden, iname, Linux, list, maxdepth, move, show, sub, sys admin, type, use
Posted in System Administration | No Comments »
Saturday, June 16th, 2012 
I've been thinking about our modern day progression and what our "progressed" society looks like in reality.
We think we have progressed, we have built machines that serves us well (computers). We plan for a bright painless easy future day by day. This bright "perfect" society future is nothing more than the dream of communism in its complete form.
But in what sense we have actually progressed ?? Everyone who really sees what happens around us notice the big changes we experience. On the surface it looks like our life has become much easier with all this technology surrounding us. The number of computers which is said to help us to leap towards this bright future increases day by day. With this however increases the need to support technology. Suddenly it happens that the old believe that computers are just a tool to make our life earier becomes a modern day slavery. Most of the developed or under development countries people are nowdays almost full time spending in front of the computer screen on the internet. We put our lifes in the mercy of man-created computers and it has become impossible that we live or exist independetly without them.
Computers are everywhere around us starting from the work Desk, at hand with a notebook, ipad, mobile phones, cars, airplanes. There is rarely to see any technology we use which works with not some kind of primitive or advanced computer embedded ,,,
In the rise of computers as we know it computer was just a tool to help us along with the other overall thought and inventions development. Now from just being a tool to help us progress Computers become the common ground on which almost everything in life works.
I'm sure many people who started learning computer technology 15-20 years ago (like me) never imagined computers will integrate so heavily in our daily activities as they eventually did.
We use computers for the sake of planning which in "spiritual language" is predicting the future or prophecise what is about to come in the short future. In reality what we do mostly even not realizingly is to try to predict and modify the future through technology.
This concept is also existing in most sci-fi movies, made in last 60 years. Mobile phones revolution give the humanity a tool through which telepathy we've seen in so many SCI-FI is reality. The mobile phone is just a platform through which (phone calls) or better said voice telepathy has become possible. In that manner of thoughts it is obvious that Video phone calls is a voice + visual telepathy. The Skype revolution and Video and voice conferences is brought was just until recently seen on the sci-fi movies where spaceship crews communicated with other spaceship crews by using a Visual conferences like skype.
It is really hard to believe that for just few years now everyone can speak with ease with everyone else on the planet in the same way just like we've seen in the movies as some foreign abstract concept!
Now suddenly most people on earth are equipped with technology with gives them the power to do everything but it is my firm believe people are not ready to wisely use this power. Therefore instead of using this higher technology wisely technology is used mostly senseless and the more technological advancement grows and becomes more accessible to the masses the more the tendency to use the technology for shit grows.
I'm sure people who have a good knowledge on programming and how computer works are already seriously aware of this enormous problem.
Another severe problem with the raise of technology is the language slang it introduces. This tech-slang is adopted quickly all around the society and suddenly as a result the human language as we know it is seriously substituted by a vague tech words mambo-jambo words. Actually the adoption of tech buzz words in modern day society language makes a great harm for the reason communication between people becomes less descriptive and therefore harder.
In short the result of this tech slang language inside our national languages is inability for people to communicate properly. This tendency is well seen if you for example try to make a comparison between old and newer movies. The newer the movie the less meaningful it is. It is true newer ones has much more as a visual adds than the predecessor but when talking about consistency the newer films are missing this point seriously.
As newer generations are born and raised up with this newer movies and "advanced" TV and computers this people doesn't even have most of the time the opportunity to see older human taped knowledge.
Even for youngesters who have somehow a wise parents enough to teach them in a religious way or just have the "luck" to have parents with old world mindset it will be extremely hard if not impossible for this kids to understand the old knowledge, as most of their same age school / university fellows will only talk about the newer things.
Besides all this, computers as they grow needs more and more support "nurturing" so day by day more and more people has to be busy with managing and supporting tech stuff. Suddenly it is no longer clear if computers serve us or we serve them, this tendency is already somehow evident but not so clearly as it will be in the short 5 to 10 years.
Therefore we slowly but surely are moving to a society which might become "enslaved by technology". Why I say here enslaved, because if we spend our time on fixing computers and technology and working with one virtual reality (which is non-reality) in essence this means we no longer have a physical freedom in the sense it was God given.
There is no doubt computers at present appears to do us a big good, but if you think a bit strategically it is obvious this good has it's price. By adopting all this technology without questioning ourselves on how this will impact our human freedom, we build a computerized jail around us. At first this jail appears to be so wide that it seems it does not interfere with our freedom, but with the introduction of newer and newer computer technology this jail becomes narrower as to the point where it could threat our physical existence freedom.
For those who could argue my thoughs I will ask two simple questions to show you how dependent we've become on technology;;;
What was the last time you switched off your mobile for a week ?
What was the last time you didn't used computers and the internet for a week time ?
Obviously rarely we can find someone that will answer positively to this question or even the thought of switching off from this so globalized society by dropping off tech stuff for a week seems scary.
This constant connectiodness that we're day-by-day heavily exposed to is scary, because it steals little-by-little our natural freedom for seclusion / pravicy / solitude.
This freedoms, were essential and especially for Christian saints and many of the people in the Holy Bible if we read closely we will find out they have used this freedom in parts of their lives especially the seclusion to hear and understand God's will for their life.
Since technology is stealing us the freedom to seclude ourselves this means it steals our basic natural freedom to communicate with God and our natural self ,,,
The consequence of this separation from God and unification with "the world" surely will lead to spiritual blindness and lack of good foundation or higher life purpose, in other words lost path in life.
This is happening all along right in front our eyes now.
Maybe the worst thing of globalization is it doesn't unite people on a soul level but rather separates them. The unification that tech boom gives to people is in the "virtual reality" but this is not a real unification as it is unification in a media which is not real.
Yes Virtual Reality is not real, that's why it is called Virtual isn't it?
I've been thinking over all this problems more and more and I'm starting to come to conclusion that people who wish to keep their essential physical freedom need to GET OUT from this tech lie, we have lived in.
For this however more people need to first realize that;;;
1. TECHNOLOGY LEADS US NOWHERE!
2. People who want to live without technology need to organize in groups – (and get used to a natural living growing food, being near to a natural springing water, taking care for each other, living in a Christian commune like – like in the old days)
Actually if we read the old testament's story of Moses escaping the upcoming flood, I believe what is about to come to us as a consequence of this out of boundaries technologization is pretty much like the old testamental flood (this should happen sooner or later).
Moses was wise enough to make himself an Ark and prepare himself for the storm. Today most people are so busy that they don't see the storm coming. I'll be glad to hear from people who has the same thinking as me and want to organize in a groups and live an old humble way of life without technology.
I'm convinced people who have realized all this tech short future bad consequences on humanity, need to have a common communication media and share their knowledge on how we can find a way to live tech free in this age. I'm curious am I the only one with such thoughts or other get into this insight too. If you have come to conclusions I did please contact me in comments. Thank you.
Tags: advanced computer, airplanes, Auto, cars, common ground, communism, computer screen, computer technology, Degression, development countries, Draft, earier, everything, form, full time, future, inventions, Mobile phones, modern day slavery, move, need, notebook, phone, power, predicting the future, progress, quot, revolution, sake, screen, slavery, spaceship, spending, spiritual language, surface, technology, time, tool, work, work desk
Posted in Christianity, Everyday Life, Various | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 23rd, 2012 Every now and then my gnome keyboard layout switcher hangs. When my keyboard switcher hangs I can't switch between my two defined languages English and my native Bulgarian
The hang up of the language switcher is makes switching between my two defined languages impossible until I logoff and login again or kill the current GNOME session with CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE.
Sometimes logging off again is not necessery so I have to logoff and login to GNOME few times until finally the gnome keyboard layout switcher reacts to an issued change language via Alt+Shift or by clicking on it.
Unfortunately the gnome keyboard layout switcher is not available as a process so there is no way to simply kill -HUP the process responsible for it.
Just until today I couldn't find a way how to restart the gnome keyboard layout switcher when it hangs.
Now today I finally found a way to restart it without restarting the whole gnome session or killing completely the Xorg server.
To "fix" up the keyboard switcher when its not responding, I had to issue in gnome-terminal or via ALT+F2:
hipo@noah:~$ gnome-keyboard-properties
As you can see in the screenshot below, one has to press the Move Up button to switch the default order of languages. Once this is done the keyboard layout switcher starts working again. Once working I just used the move up once again to revert back my default language order as it used to be.

I'm not sure what exactly is causing the GNOME 2 keyboard layout switcher to hang (when it does), my guess is it is due to some kind of version incompitability between gnome versions or configurations specific to my computer. In the past I was running Debian Testing/Unstable and then downgraded back to Debian stable, probably this is the reason of the language switcher hangs.
Tags: Button, change, change language, Computer, default language, f2, Gnome, guess, hipo, HUP, incompitability, keyboard layout, keyboard switcher, kind, languages, layout, login, move, necessery, noah, order, reason, revert, screenshot, switch, switcher, testing, today, Unstable, version, way
Posted in Gnome, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2011 Do you remember the old arcade spaceship shooter Xenon 2 Megablast? I do 😉 For all those who are too young to remember, here are two screenshots:


Even though Xenon 2 Megablast original can now be played using dosbox DOS emulator. Its interesting to mention I've found two Linux games that more or less can be qualitified to resemble Xenon 2.
The games are Native Free Software games and existing in package repositories of most Linux distributions and *BSD port trees.
Geki 2 and Geki 3 are of a less quality to Xenon but still, the game experience is nice and is among the Arcade shooter games to bring you fun in the boring days if you're on GNU / Linux or FreeBSD Free OS platforms.
Installing Geki2 and Geki3 on Debian and Ubuntu Linux is standard with apt:
debian:~# apt-get install geki2 geki3
...
On Debian GNU / Linux , after installed the games would not create GNOME Applications -> Games -> game startup shortcuts, however the game startups will get added in GNOME Applications Menu under:
Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Geki 2
and
Applications -> Debian -> Games -> Action -> Geki 3
The games can be launched also manually with commands:
geki2

or
geki3

Geki 2 is a way closer to Xenon 2 as it has similar look and feel and the same vertical direction the spaceship is navigated.
In Geki 3 still the shoot 'em' up spaceship like arcade is present, however instead of penguin you have to fly a flying penguin, as well as the spaceship move direction is horizontal.
Both the games have the same sound and music effects. The game music and effects are not of top quality but are not bad. In general the games surely gives some of the arcade atmosphere.

Geki 2 Xenon 2 Megablast like on Debian Linux
In the tradition of the arcade games at the end of each level in both games you face the Level Boss Enemy, you should destroy.

As you can see in below's screenshot the overall graphics of GEKI 3 is poorer while compared to GEKI 2
still GEKI 2 gampley is fun and addictive and I would say not less enjoyable than GEKI 2.
At times I even think that Geki 3 is more fun because it is more dynamic.
Maybe other reason, why I enjoyed more Geki 3 is also the fact that Geki 2 is a way harder to play. Dying only 3 times in the game you get GAME OVER and the next game you're started from the beginning of the same level you died in …

Something really annoying that affects both the games; there is no option to play them in Fullscreen mode! ARGH!
Game controls for Geki2 and Geki3 are identical as follows:
Up - Arrow up key
Down - Down arrow key
Right - Right arrow key
left - Left arrow key
Shoot - z or Space
Pause - s
Geki2 and Geki3 are fun and can kill some time, but definitely aren't that (professional) as other spaceship shoot'em'up arcades for Linux and BSD. Games like Starfighter , Critical Mass or powermanga .
Lest that they are two worthy to install and play on your Free Software OS.
Tags: action gt, arcade shooter, atmosphere, boring days, BSD, debian gnu, Dying, Free, free software games, fun, game experience, game music, game startup, Geki, Gnome, gnome applications, gnu linux, gt games, key, level, linux games, megablast, menu, most linux distributions, move, music effects, nbsp, option, os platforms, package, penguin, reason, screenshot, shooter, shooter games, software, something, Space, spaceship, startup, time, Ubuntu, ubuntu linux, vertical direction, xenon 2
Posted in Entertainment, Games Linux, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 Do you remember that oldschool Arcade VolleyBall game which was so popular on 16 bit (8086 XT) computers.
I remember this game from the years I was 12 years old, back in the days where we the gamers distributed all the DOS games on 360 KB 5.25" diskettes
I was looking over the games available to install on my Debian GNU / Linux today just to be happily suprised to find GPL Arcade Volleyball an identical game remake of the old Arcade Volleyball 8086 classic freeware game.

I remember we spend many hours with friends playing on the old Manifactured in Bulgaria Pravetz 16! computers
During communism and post communism Pravetz was the only computer brand we could buy from the market, as there was limitations on the exported and imported tech equipment within the USSR union.
Pravetz computers are a literal remake of 16 bit IBM 8086 computers and the computer design and integrals was stolen from IBM 16 bit 8086 / 8088 PC architecture
Arcade Volleyball has set a mark on my generation and I believe many people will remember the times this game was a hit with a bit of Nostalgia 😉

Besides being an identical remake of PC Arcade Volleyball , GPL Arcade Volleyball is even expanded as it includes extra features which the original game lacked. Game includes:
- Network Volleyball client / server Game (up to 4 players)
- 6 Game Themes which completely change the game look & feel to be modernistic
Here are few GAV screenshots of the different existing game Themes:


Yisus GAV Theme gameplay screenshot


GAV – Unnamed Theme Gameplay

GAV – FaBeach Theme Gameplay
GAV supports both Window and fullscreen modes. To enable Fullscreen mode, while inside the game use:
Extra -> Fullscreen (Yes)
Saving preferences is also something which I if I recall correctly the original game lacked. This is done by navigating to:
Extra -> Save Preferences
GAV is said to support Joystick in resemblance to the original DOS game, though I've never tested it with a joy.
One of the greatest GAV game (hacks) is the Inverted Theme. Selecting it inverts the order in the game, where the game player becomes the volleyball ball and the ball becomes the player 😉

GAV does not yet not have a Free / Open / Net BSD port as far as I currently see, anyways since the game is Free Software probably soon a port will be available for BSDs as well.
The default GAV game controls are a bit untraditional. By default the one player game starts you play Volleyball game player positioned on the left.
For left player the default control keys are:
- z – move player left
- c – move player right
- left shift – jump
Right player controls are:
- Left – left (arrow key)
- right – right (arrow key)
- jump – up cursor key
GAV supports also a shortcut key for switching between windowed and full screen game mode by pressing F10
Installing the game on Debian and Ubuntu Linuces is done with:
linux:~# apt-get --yes install gav
Unfortunately gav does not have a definition to be added to GNOME or KDE Applications menus, thus to start the game after installed one has to do it manually by typing either in gnome RUN (Alt+F2) or on command line:
linux:~$ gav
Happy playing 😉
Tags: amp, architecture, arrow, bulgaria, change, client, client server, communism, computer brand, computer design, debian gnu, dos game, dos games, equipment, EXTRA, Free, freeware, freeware game, fullscreen, game themes, Gameplay, generation, Gnome, integrals, joystick, Manifactured, mark, modes, move, nbsp, nev, nostalgia, pc arcade, pc architecture, player, Pravetz, quot, resemblance, right, screenshot, server game, something, ussr, volleyball game, window, Yisus
Posted in Entertainment, Games Linux, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 
As a Child I've been baptized in the Orthodox Church and since then I've been a complete atheist until the age of 21.
What is the reason to get my faith in God in 21? This is a short post to shed some light on the great efforts of communism to erradicate faith in God in Communistic countries and change faith in God with faith in man and how this kind of approach devastates societies.
During the communism it's a well known fact that communists, all the members in the Bulgarian Communist's Party (BCP),has led an anti Bulgarian Orthodox Church government politics. The fact that Communistic Governments are fighting Churches and faith in God is less known among youngesters and hardly known by people part of western democratic societies.
I did not lived this time myself, but I heard many stories about the stupidities of communism.
Many older people say, when communism came to rule the Communist Government did immediately destroy some Orthodox Christian temples, some priests were convinced in crimes they were not responsible for etc…
Other priests were send in the Concentration camps and many of them never returned in the society.
"Access" to the Churches was limited and sometimes prohibited to the orthodox layman and often to clergy.
During these terrible communism era, it was prohibited to everybody who is a member of BPC to attend Orthodox Church services or identify himself as christian in public.
I've heard from my grandma an interesting story she witnessed, while she was working as a cleaner in the militia (police).
Here is the story:
One day my grandma wanted to go to the Church St. George located on the city centre of Dobrich city Bulgaria.
A policeman stopped her when she was entering the temple and since he knew her as an employee in the police called her by name and told her that she is not allowed to enter the church building, because she is working in the police.
My grandma asked the militiaman to let her enter the temple to pray for just few minutes and light up a candle (just for this time) without reporting for that in the police.
The policeman agreed to let us in and keep silent that she entered the Church this time,but warned her that if he sees her another time entering the church he is going to report to the respective authorities.
Another part of the Government active politics against the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was by placing an ex-criminals who were sentenced for thefts, rapings, agression or other crimes as a priests in the Church.
By this move the supreme counsel of the bulgarian communist party wanted to break the people confidence in the Church as the true holy apostolic Church. The most fierce communists during these days did their best to present the church of God as a corrupted and void institution who only steals from people and exists only to deceive society.
Yet many years after the fall of communism this people distrust in the church that communists sow through the years.
What is pity is even after the communism is gone for a long, time the churches are only full on biggest feasts and no more than 5% of the citizens are regularly going for Church service or have even the basic knowledge on the Church truths and mysteries.
Following the fall of communism the democratic governments who come to power, elected in a citizen democratic elections did not do much to help the church either, some of them does lead politics openly hostile to our Bulgarian Church.
The last government selected, seems to be less hostile to our Church, but people have once been cut away from the Church and now its really hard for our nation to get back to faith.
The severe crisis (a word that means judgement in greek) and the hardships many people experience started to make some people rethink about what is the meaning of life and made them occasionally go back to faith of our fathers orthodoxy.
What will happen further nobody knows, we need to pray and hope God will have mercy and people will repent for their sins and come back to faith again.
Tags: age, anti, aske, atheist, bpc, bulgarian orthodox church, candle, centre, change, Child, christian temples, church government, city, communism, Communist, communist government, Communistic, communistic countries, communists, concentration camps, democratic societies, dobrich, everybody, faith in god, government politics, grandma, interesting story, layman, Light, militia, move, party, police, policeman, pray, priests, quot, reason, st george, story, supreme, time
Posted in Christianity, Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »
Friday, October 21st, 2011 I needed to convert a file which had a Bulgarian text written in UTF-8 encoding to Windows CP1251 in order to fix a website encoding problems after a move of the website from one physical server to another.
I tried first with enca – ( detects and convert encoding of text files from one encoding to another).
The exact way I tried to convert was:
linux:~# enca -L bg /home/site/www/includes/utf8_encoded_file.php
...
Unfortunately this attempt to conver was unsucesfully, and the second logical guess was to use iconv – Convert encoding of given files from one encoding to another to do the utf8 to cp1251 conversion.
I reached for some help in irc.freenode.net, #varnalab channel and Alex Kuklin helped me, giving me an example command line to do the conversion.
iconv winedows to cp1251 conversion line, he pointed to me was:
linux:~# iconv -f utf8 -t cp1251 < in > out
Further on I adapted Alex’s example to convert my utf8_encoded_file.php encoded Bulgarian characted to CP1251 and used the following commands to convert and create backups of my original UTF8 file:
linux:~# cd /home/site/www/includes
linux:/home/site/www/includes# iconv -f utf8 -t cp1251 < utf8_encoded_file.php in > utf8_encoded_file.php.cp1251
linux:/home/site/www/includes# mv utf8_encoded_file.php utf8_encoded_file.php.bak
linux:/home/site/www/includes# mv utf8_encoded_file.php.cp1251 utf8_encoded_file.php
Tags: alex, attempt, bg, bulgarian text, cd home, command, conver, conversion, Convert, enca, file, file linux, freenode, gnu linux, guess, help, home, iconv, includeslinux, line, Linux, lt, move, mv, order, outFurther, php, physical server, UTF, varnalab, way, www
Posted in Linux, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »