Recently I had to use PuTTY which I haven't used for years to open a number of SSH Pernanent Tunnels necessery for my daily work as a SAP Consultant.
I've saved them under a certain new profile and saved the set SSH Tunnel configuration not in the default Session but in separate named one, therefore had to press Load button every time after clicking over my Putty shortcut icon.
That was annoying and took few seconds out of my life every next morning for about a week, so finally I found osme time to google it and it seemed it is pretty easy to have any Putty sessoin loaded you like.
Here is how:
1. Create a new Putty Shortcut
Click over Putty icon while holding CTRL + SHIFT (Control SHIFT keys simultaneously ) and move the mouse somewhere on the desktop to create the shortcut.
fill out "target" field of shortcut using above code (alter to your own properties). click Apply button.
If you need to pass a user and password from Shortcut itself (which is a bad practice for security but sometimes useful, for not so important Tunnels – for example a tunnel to an Open Proxy), do it by typing in the target field like so:
Having a combination of Apache webservice Reverse Proxy to redirect invisibly traffic to a number of Tomcat server positioned in a DMZ is a classic task in big companies Corporate world. Hence if you work for company like IBM or HP sooner or later you will need to configure Apache Webserver cluster with few running Jakarta Tomcat Application servers behind. Scenario with necessity to access a java based application via Tomcat which requires logging (authentication) relaying on establishing and keeping a session ID is probably one of the most common ones and if you do it for first time you will probably end up with Session ID issues. Session ID issues are hard to capture at first as on first glimpse application will seem to be working but users will have to re-login all the time even though the programmers might have coded for a session to expiry in 30 minutes or so.
… I mean not having configured Session ID prevention to Tomcats will cause random authentication session expiries and users using the Tomcat app will be unable to normally access below application with authenticated credentials. The solution to these is known under term "Sticky sessions" To configure Sticky sessions you need to already have configured Apache/s with following minimum configuration:
enabled mod_proxy, proxy_balancer_module, proxy_http_module and or mod_proxy_ajp (in Apache config)
And configured and tested Tomcats running an Application reachable viaAJP protocol
Below example assumes there is Reverse Proxy Load Balancer Apache which has to forward all traffic to 2 tomcats. The config can easily be extended for as many as necessary by adding more BalancerMembers.
In Apache webserver (apache2.conf / httpd.conf) you need to have JSESSIONID configured. These JSESSIONID is going to be appended to each client request from Reverse Proxy to each of Tomcat servers with value opened once on authentication to first Tomcat node to each of the other ones.
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/ stickysession=JSESSIONID
ProxyPassReverse / balancer://mycluster/
The two variables route=delivery1 and route=delivery2 are routed to hosts identificators that also has to be present in Tomcat server configurations In Tomcat App server First Node (server.xml)
Once Sticky Sessions are configured it is useful to be able to track they work fine this is possible through logging each of established JESSSIONIDs, to do so add in httpd.conf
After modifications restart Apache and Tomcat to load new configs. In Apache access.log the proof should be the proof that sessions are preserved via JSESSIONID, there should be logs like:
Last 10+ years I worked on GNU / Linux as Desktop. Last 7 years most of my SSH connections were managed from GNOME and I'm quite used to gnome-terminal ssh tabbing. In my new Employee Hewlett Packard. I'm forced to work on Microsoft Windows 7 and thus I used for a month or so Putty and Kitty fork from version 0.63 of PuTTY advertising itself as the best telnet / SSH client in the world. Both of the two lack tabbing and have interface which is pretty unfamiliar to me. As I'm so used to using native UNIX terminal. Fortunately a colleague of mine Ivelin was using an SSH client called MobaXTerm which very much did emulation similar to my favourite gnome-terminal. MobaXterm is not free software / open source app but this doesn't matter so much to me as anyways I'm running a non-free Win OS on my desktop. What makes MobaXterm so attractive is its rich functionality (cosmic years infront of Putty).
Here is website description of MobaXterm quoted from its website:
MobaXterm is an enhanced terminal for Windows with an X11 server, a tabbed SSH client and several other network tools for remote computing (VNC, RDP, telnet, rlogin). MobaXterm brings all the essential Unix commands to Windows desktop, in a single portable exe file which works out of the box.
embedded X11 server for easily exporting your Unix/Linux display
a session manager with several network utilities: SSH, RDP, VNC, Telnet, Rlogin, FTP, SFTP and XDMCP
passwords management for SSH, RDP, VNC, SFTP (on demand password saving)
easy graphical file transfer using drag and drop during SSH sessions
advanced SSH tunnels creation tool (graphical port forwarding builder)
tasks automation using scripts or macros
Mobaxterm is portable just like Putty so its useful to use on HOP stations to servers like used in big companies like HP. Featured embedded Unix commands (e.g., ls, cd, cat, sed, grep, awk, rsync, wget) gives a feeling like you're working on pure Linux console making people addicted to Linux / BSD quite confortable. Some other very useful terminal emulator functions are support for anti-aliasing session manager (save / remember passwords for ssh sessions in Crypted format so much missing in Putty) and it even supports basic macros. Basic UNIX commands embedded in MobaXterm are taken and ported from Cygwin project – Linux-like environment for Windows making it possible to port software running on POSIX systems (such as Linux, BSD, and Unix systems) to Windows. A very cool think is also MobaXterm gives you a Linux like feel of console navigation in between basic files installed from Cygwin. Some downside I found is program menus which look at first glimpse a bit confusing especially for people used to simplicity of gnome-terminal. Once logged in to remote host via ssh command the program offers you to log you in also via SFTP protocol listing in parallel small window with possibility to navigate / copy / move etc. between server files in SFTP session which at times is pretty useful as it saves you time to use some external SFTP connector tools like WinSCP.
From Tools configuration menu, there are few precious tools as well; – embedded text editor MobaTextEditor – MobaFoldersDiff (Able to show diffeernces between directories) – AsciiTable (Complete List of Ascii table with respective codes and characters) – Embedded simple Calculator – List open network ports – GUI Tool to list all open ports on Windows localhost – Network packets capture – A Gui tool showing basic info like from UNIX's tcpdump! – Ability to start quickly on local machine (TFTP, FTP, SFTP / SSH server, Telnet server, NFS server, VNC Server and even simple implementation of HTTP server)
Below are few screenshots to get you also idea about what kind of configuration MobaXterm supports
To configure and use Telnet, RSH, RDP, VNC, FTP etc. Sessions use the Sessions tab on top menu.
One very handy thing is MobaXterm supports export of remote UNIX display with no requirement to install special Xserver like already a bit obsolete Xming – X server for Windows. The X Display Manager Control Protocol (XCMCP) is a key feature of the X11 architecture. Together with XDMCP, the X network protocol allows distributed operation of the X server and X display manager. The requesting X server runs on the client (usually as an X terminal), thus providing a login service, that why the X server ported to MobaXterm from Cygwin also supports XDMCP. If, for example, you want to start a VNC session with a remote VNC server, all you have to do is enter the remote VNC server’s IP address in the VNC area; the default VNC port is already registered.
Accessing the remote Windows server via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is also a piece of cake. Once you establish a session to RDP or other Proto it is possible to save this session so later you just choose between session to access. The infamous (X11 Port Forwarding) or creation of SSH encrypted tunnels between hosts to transfer data securily or hide your hostname is also there.
MobaXterm is undoubtedly a very useful and versatile tool. Functionally, the software is well mannered, and Windows users who want to sniff a little Linux/Unix air can get a good idea of how Linux works. A closer look reveals that anything you can do with MobaXterm can be achieved directly with freely available tools (Cygwin) and Unix tools ported from Cygwin. However, although Cygwin provides a non-Posix environment for Windows, it doesn’t offer a decent terminal, which is one thing Moba-Xterm has going for it.
Admittedly, in pure vanilla Cygwin, you can start an X server automatically and then use xterm, but xterm lacks good-quality fonts, whereas MobaXterm conveniently lets you integrate a font server.
Richard Stallman the main person thanks to whom the GNU (GNU is not UNIX) organization, free software as we know it and GNU / Linux free operating system exists has been notable for being a pain in the ass for politicians. RMS has dedicated his life for the only goal to propagate his ideas that all computer software should be free as in freedom. He is known to have engaged in various petitions and peaceful protest events as well doing his best to raise awareness in people that our Freedoms as we know it are large endangered due to a daily introduced laws throughout the world aiming to limit us and take away our constitutional (democratic) freedoms.
In his lectures RMS at many times puts his thoughts on the lack of real democratic decision taking in the European Union.
A good example on how un-democratic the EU is a Software Patent session being held in Brussels just a a year ago. The Software patent session is officially said to be opened, (so anyone from the public) can participate. What is really weird about the whole thing is that an European institution is trying to campaign a software patents to be legislated in Australia. Hmm isn't that weird, wasn't the European Union to be mainly engaged in minding for the European member countries and european economy or software situation. Why on earth they try to in-force software patents in Australia if Australia has nothing to do with the EU. Didn't the EU has enough problems already caused by patenting … The patent session held was completely "bribed" as Stallman points out, the people attending was "computer specialists" and patent experts who were all only in favor of software patents and there was no practical representative of any tech-expert who was not in favour of software patents. Stallman tried to peacefully protest the unwalful meeting by just holding a big signature saying "NO TO SOFTWARE PATENTS". He entered the hall and tried to stay in the back of the room with the NO SOFTWARE PATENTS slogan without even saying a word. A short after a policeman come and took him away for no apparent reason, obviously showing that peaceful protesting to any of what the EU is lobbying about is no longer possible. Now how this is a democracy and how comes the European Union is proclaiming being democratic if even a peaceful protesting of someone or bunch of people opposing an idea, agenda or meeting can't take place?
GNU founder tries to peacefully protest in European Patent session, being pushed away by police
Did you have to regenerate your SSL certificate for your mail server’s IMAP and IMAP SSL service? Did you have to find out if the newly installed certificates are fine after install?
The output returned by this two commands will be the imap and imaps configured certificates as well as extensive info concerning the installed SSL, the last chunk of info to be spit is most crucial to know if certificate is fine. It should be something like:
...
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
Protocol : TLSv1
Cipher : AES256-SHA
Session-ID: 0B69E91022CB56D64F56CFA08405944D9C4C0069EE4097890B98F1406CF084D5
Session-ID-ctx:
Master-Key: 13745B94E0C5A0604EB7529E7409251961DFD5F4134F3A8F
Key-Arg : None
Start Time: 1309265383
Timeout : 300 (sec)
Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate)
---
. OK CAPABILITY completed
closed
I needed to check my mail via ssh connection, as my installed squirrelmail is curently broken and I’m away from my own personal computer.
I did some online research on how this can be achieved and thanksfully I finallyfound a way to check my pop3 and imap mailbox with a console client called alpine , better known in unix community under the name pine .
I installed pine on my Debian with apt:
debian:~# apt-get install alpine
Here is my pine configuration file .pinerc used to fetch my mail with pine:
To attune the pop3 server configuration in the sample .pinerc above one needs to change the value of:
inbox-path= For example to configure pine to fetch mail from the pop3 server mail.www.pc-freak.net and store it locally in my home directory within a file called INBOX I have configured the inbox-path .pinerc variable to look like so:
In above configuration’s inbox-path variable configuration the /pop3/ specifies I want to fetch my mail via the pop3 protocol , if one wants to use imap this has to be substituted with /imap/
The value user=hipo@www.pc-freak.net specifies my vpopmail created user which in my case is obviously hipo@www.pc-freak.net
The other variables which are good to be changed in .pinerc config are:
personal-name=
This variable has to be set to the name of the Email Sender which will be set, if pine is used to send email.
I also changed the user-domain variable as it’s used to set the domain name from which the pine client will send the emails from:
As my domain is www.pc-freak.net I’ve set the domain name variable to be:
user-domain=www.pc-freak.net
Now after launching pine it prompted me for my email password, putting in the pass did fetch all my new unread mails via pop3 protocol.
The only annoying thing was that each time I quit pine and start it up again, I’m now asked to enter the email password.
This behaviour is really shitty, but thanksfully one can easily workaround that by letting pine be constantly running detached in gni screen session.
I’ve encountered a shitty problem while trying to access my phpmyadmin. Here is the error: phpMyAdmin - Error "Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given
in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly. After some time spend in investigation I’ve figured out something wrong is happening with my php sessions, therefore I had to spend some time assuring myself php sessions are working correctly. To achieve that I used a php code taken from the Internet.
After reconsidering the whole situation I remembered that since some time I’m using varnishd therefore the problem could have something to do with the varnish-cache. After checking my default.vcl file and recognizing a problem there I had to remove the following piece of code from the default.vcl file:
Yesterday and today we had Management Games and Theathre Games with Joop Vinke.At the management game we play a sort of Human Resources Management game. All the students are devided into groups and we play a simulator game. We had to manage a company. First we setup our 2 year goals and then we play the game on quarters (6 quarters). Every quarter we have to made some managerial decisions (invest money into different stuff, hire personnel, promote ppl etc.).
Basicly the company consists of 660 employees, there are 5 levels in the company starting from 1 where there is unqualified specialists and 5 which are the top management.
When we make our choices then all this data is inputed into a computer which gives us some feedback which helps us in taking the decisions for the next quarter. At the meantime Vinke organizes fun games to entertain us and make us feel comfortable with him and through this games he tries to show us basic concepts in business. The last two days I really enjoyed.
Today the game that impressed me the most was called
“The Werewolves from Wackedan”. Basicly it’s a strategic game with roles. In it you’ve got a bunch of ppl who play different roles, 3 of them are werewolves, others are citizens others are ppl who have special abilities to foresee who are the werewolves.
We had cards in front of us turned back to prevent others except us to see the cards. Some of the cards are citizens and ppl who belong to the citizens other 3 are werewolves.
Every night the werewolf kills a person (by selecting somebody from the crowd, when they sleep), because the werewolves are out at night when everybody sleeps. At the morning citizens awake and one of their friends is dead so they try to revenge by pointing someone to be killed (it may be a citizen again it may be a werewolf).
At the end only werewolves or citizens should servive 🙂 It was a big fun today to play this simple game. At the end of the day at 18:00 we had a session of the so called Theathre/Games. Theathre Games include different entertaining games which are designed to improve our communication skills and teach us to act like an actors plus they are pretty entertaining 🙂 That’s all thanks to God everything seems to run smoothly around my life. Except my health I’m still having some health issues although I can say I have an improvement I am not still healed and I still drink herbs.
At 20:00 I was out with Narf and we went to the fountain a little later Kimmo and Yavor joined us and we spend some time their. Well that’s most of the day at night I went to my grandma just to see how she is doing and now I write this post tomorrow the Management Game continues at 09:00. So probably after few minutes I’ll go for the night prayers and then I’ll go to sleep. END—–
Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God. -- John 16:30
