I had to convert Adobe PDF file to Microsoft Word ( .doc) file on Microsoft Windows OS for a friend. There is plenty of software available to convert PDF to DOC on Windows, as well as few web-site services claiming to convert correcly PDF to DOC. Converting PDF to DOC is easy and can be done with Open Office, however the reverse process is a real pain in the ass. I tried a dozen of free web serviecs to convert an ancient Latin writting PDF to DOC but none of them couldn’t properly convert it. Failing with the web services as a tool to convert, I’ve turned to seeking a tool that will do the trick. After trying few PDF to DOC converters which failed to produce a properly structed edittable DOC from the PDF file, I’ve come across ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0. Abbyy PDF Transformer finally did it …
I’ve tried hard to look for a free software good PDF to DOC converter alternative for Windows but it seems as of time of writing this post there is no GPLed free software that does properly convert PDFs to MS WORD DOC ….
Using Abbyy PDF Transformer 2.0 is a piece of cake all I had to do is select the PDF file (pressing Open PDF) and then click on Convert (in right bottom corner). Below is a shot of Abby PDF transformer in action.
I've recently noticed one of the qmail SMTP servers I adminster had plenty of logged spammer emails originating from yahoo.com.tw destined to reache some random looking like emails (probably unexisting) again to *@yahoo.com.tw
The spam that is tried by the spammer is probably a bounce spam, since it seems there is no web-form or anything wrong with the qmail server that might be causing the spam troubles. As a result some of the emails from the well configured qmail (holding SPF checks), having a correct existing MX, PTR record and even having configured Domain Keys (DKIM) started being marked, whether emails are sent to *@yahoo.com legit emails.
To deal with the shits, since we don't have any Taiwanese (tw) clients, I dediced to completely prohibit any emails destined to be sent via the mail server to *@yahoo.com.tw. This is done via /var/qmail/control/badmailto qmail control variable;
Here is content of /var/qmail/control/badmailto after banning outgoing emails to yahoo.com.tw;;;
There are four major plugins as of writting of this that can be used to reduce significantly the amount of registration spam in Elgg 1.8.x <= (1.8.3) Probably there are other plugins to protect against spam in elgg, however I personally tried just this ones to work with elgg 1.8.3..
1. Elgg Anti bot spam registartions with Text Captcha
As you can see in the picture this plugin requires, skills in maths 😉 For serious websites it also looks a bit ridiculous, besides that is actually an easy one to handle by spam bots, probably plenty of the nowdays spam bots crawling the net could trespass it.
2. Protecting elgg registration formw tih Image Capcha
One note to make here is the 4 Captchas did not work together if enabled from elgg administration panel. You will have to use one at a piece. I haven't tested to I don't know which one is the most efficient. Anyhow I really think Image Captcha is looking best from all of them and more intuitive to the user. I'm quite happy Image Captcha is available and works fine in 1.8.3 in prior version 1.6.x generation, I couldn't find any decent plugin to filter login spam and my experimental social network based on elgg, got quickly filled with Spam. Now will wait and see if the Image Captcha will stop the drones.
I've experienced plenty of problems with Pulseaudio and Skype output sound hell crappy. This stupid proprietary program Skype is a total crap … Anyways again thanks to ArchLinux's wiki, I've used the two mentioned steps to fix all this Skype in / out problems …
1. Fix problems with Glitches, voice skips and crackling In file /etc/pulse/default.pa its necessery to substitute the line;
load-module module-udev-detect
with
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
2. Resolve Choppy sound in (Pulseaudio) -> Skype
In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf two lines has to be also substituted:
; default-sample-rate = 44100
Should become;
default-sample-rate = 48000
3. Change /etc/default/pulseaudio to allow dynamic module loading
It is a good idea to the default settings from DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=1 to DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=0 .This step is not required and I'm not sure if it has some influence on solving sound in / out problems with Skype but I believe it can be helpful in some cases..
So in /etc/default/pulseaudio Substitute:
DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=1
to;
DISALLOW_MODULE_LOADING=0
4. Restart PulseAudio server
After the line is changed and substituted a restart of PulseAudio is required. For PulseAudio server restart a gnome session logout is necessery. Just LogOff logged Gnome user and issue cmd:
debian:~# pkill pulseaudio
This will kill any left pulseaudio server previous instances.
My FreeBSD router has started running out of space, I looked for ways to clean up some space. So I remembered some programs are generating core files while they crash. Some of these files are really huge and ban be from 1Mb to > 1G.
I used find to first list all my produced core files starting from root directory (/) , like so:
find / -name core -exec du -hsc {} ;
....
Having a list of my core files with the respective core file size and after reviewing, I deleted one by one the cores which were there just taking up space. It’s a wise idea that core dumps file generation on program crash is completely disabled, however I forgot to disable cores, so I had plenty of the cores – (crash files which are handy for debug purposes and fixing the bug that caused the crash).
Further on I used an /etc/rc.conf – dumpdev=NO , variable which instructs the kernel to not generate core files on program crash:
freebsd# echo 'dumpdev=NO' >> /etc/rc.conf
Next, to make dumpdev=NO , take affect I rebooted the server:
freebsd# shutdown -r now
...
There is a way to instruct every server running daemon to know about the newly set dumpdev=NO by restarting each of the services with their init scripts individually, but I was too lazy to do that.
I’m responsible for some GNU/Linux servers which are shared hosting and therefore contain plenty of user accounts. Every now and then our company servers gets suspended because of a Phishing websites, Spammers script kiddies and all the kind of abusers one can think of.
To mitigate the impact of the server existing unwanted users activities, I decided to use the Clamav Antivirus – open source virus scanner to look up for potentially dangerous files, stored Viruses, Spammer mailer scripts, kernel exploits etc.
The Hosting servers are running latest CentOS 5.5. Linux and fortunately CentOS is equipped with an RPM pre-packaged latest Clamav release which of the time of writting is ver. (0.97.2).
Installing Clamav on CentOS is a piece of cake and it comes to issuing:
[root@centos:/root]# yum -y install clamav
...
After the install is completed, I’ve used freshclam to update clamav virus definitions
[root@centos:/root]# freshclam
ClamAV update process started at Fri Aug 12 13:19:32 2011
main.cvd is up to date (version: 53, sigs: 846214, f-level: 53, builder: sven)
WARNING: getfile: daily-13357.cdiff not found on remote server (IP: 81.91.100.173)
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-13357.cdiff from db.gb.clamav.net
WARNING: getfile: daily-13357.cdiff not found on remote server (IP: 163.1.3.8)
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-13357.cdiff from db.gb.clamav.net
WARNING: getfile: daily-13357.cdiff not found on remote server (IP: 193.1.193.64)
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-13357.cdiff from db.gb.clamav.net
WARNING: Incremental update failed, trying to download daily.cvd
Downloading daily.cvd [100%]
daily.cvd updated (version: 13431, sigs: 173670, f-level: 60, builder: arnaud)
Downloading bytecode.cvd [100%]
bytecode.cvd updated (version: 144, sigs: 41, f-level: 60, builder: edwin)
Database updated (1019925 signatures) from db.gb.clamav.net (IP: 217.135.32.99)
In my case the shared hosting hosted websites and FTP user files are stored in /home directory thus I further used clamscan in the following way to check report and log into file the scan results for our company hosted user content.
I prefer running the clamscan in a screen session, because it’s handier, if for example my ssh connection dies the screen session will preserve the clamscan cmd execution and I can attach later on to see how scan went.
clamscan of course is slower as it does not use Clamav antivirus daemon clamd , however I prefer running it without running the daemon, as having a permanently running clamd on the servers sometimes creates problems or hangs and it’s not really worthy to have it running since I’m intending to do a clamscan no more than once per month to see some potential users which might need to be suspended.
Also later on, after it finishes all possible problems are logged to /var/log/clamscan.log , so I can read the file report any time.
A good idea might also be to implement the above clamscan to be conducted, once per month via a cron job, though I’m still in doubt if it’s better to run it manually once per month to search for the malicious users content or it’s better to run it via cron schedule.
One possible pitfall with automating the above clamscan /home virus check up, might be the increased load it puts to the system. In some cases the Webserver and SQL server might be under a heavy load at the exactly same time the clamscan cron work is running, this might possible create severe issues for users websites, if it’s not monitored. Thus I would probably go with running above clamscan manually each month and monitor the server performance. However for people, who have “iron” system hardware and clamscan file scan is less likely to cause any issues, probably a cronjob would be fine. Here is sample cron job to run clamscan:
I’m interested to hear if somebody already is using a clamscan to run on cron without issues, once I’m sure that running it on cron would not lead to server down-times, i’ll implement it via cron job.
Anyone having experience with running clamscan directory scan through crond? 🙂
One client asked for his account primary domain name in WHM to be changed, to solve that I entered the WHM admin and navigated to:
Main >> Account Functions >> Modify an Account
A plenty of options concerning the user registration are available for changing from WHM’s Modify an Account, the only one I had to change was under the field Primary Domain e.g.:
Primary Domain: server-domain-name.com
Chainging it to let’s say new-server-domain-name.com and Saving the settings changes the primary domain for the user.
Bear in mind that if the user has already tried to modify his primary domain himself changing the list of his addon domains the above decribed procedure won’t work out because of a WHM Cpanel admin bug. If this happens a shitty error msg Unable to change domain name will appear and the Save button on Modify Account will not work out.
The only resolution to this I’m aware of is to completely delete the problematic user account and add it to Cpanel again.
