average admins

I have been a fan of Fluxbox, an open-source window manager for X-Windows (.X.org & XFree86), since I started using FreeBSD about this time last year. When I first started using Linux I would switch between Gnome and KDE like it was nobody’s business, and really, it’s not! Sure, Gnome and KDE have tons more eye candy, more, better, and more better integrated applications, and it seems, better support and cult-like followers than other lesser known window managers (hence they are lesser known window managers). However, in my gray and balding old age (dern near 30 now…), I prefer a little something simpler for my desktop experience.

(more…)

I am going to try and make a Live CD before too long using the FreeSBIE toolkit. This CD will be based on FreeBSD but will contain a number of third-party applications. My question to you is, what kind of applications, or even better, what specific applications would you want on a Live CD/DVD? Which window managers would you want to be available on a Live disc? File Managers? Security/forensic tools? Productivity software? CD/DVD utilities? Games/Entertainment software?

Until next time…

I have been looking for some virtualization software for running guest operating systems on a FreeBSD host for a while. In the FreeBSD ports tree there are two versions of VMware workstation available but they are version 2 and 3. I want to run Workstation 5.5… Not happening. Thus far, the only alternative I have found is Qemu. I had great success getting Qemu to install and run but I recently found that it wouldn’t run a necessary Windows application I need for work. It would die for some reason and I couldn’t figure it out (I may still report it to the qemu-devel mailing list). I then went on an extended hunt for virtualization software for FreeBSD and pretty much came up empty handed.

Last week I started to see if anyone had successfully ported Win4Lin to FreeBSD but found nothing. I was getting a little frustrated because I want to be cool like Chris, who is running Debian GNU/Linux on his work box, and run FreeBSD on my work machine. I had basically decided to go ahead with the FreeBSD install on my work machine and setup a little Windows XP desktop to RDP (Remote Desktop) in to for Windows functionality. Then it happened… I saw the following e-mail come across the advocacy@ FreeBSD mailing list:

(more…)

If you read my article the other day titled VSFTPd on FreeBSD, you’ll remember that the reason I went through the install of vsftpd was to move some data from an older machine to a newer machine for archival purposes. Well, last night I found myself in a similar situation except this machine wouldn’t even boot into Windows 98. Explorer.exe failed right off the bat but left a pretty turquoise background on the monitor for me to stare at wondering how I was going to get this non-profit’s data off the hard drive.

I did not want to remove the drive from the PC in question and install it in one of my PCs to burn the data to a CD so I was looking for some alternatives. Since the PC wouldn’t boot successfully into Windows, I couldn’t use my external USB hard drive to copy the data off like I ended up doing the other night and I couldn’t install an FTP client to move it either. My options were looking pretty grim until I thought about using a live CD.

Since I am currently a FreeBSD fanboy, I decided to hunt down a project I had heard about a while ago, FreeSBIE, a FreeBSD based live CD distribution. I downloaded the ISO, burnt it to a CD, and booted the old PC up without a hitch.

(more…)

I have a couple of boxes (boxen?) at home that I like to access remotely. My broadband provider is really good about a.) not having connectivity issues, and b.) rarely changing my IP addresses. However, I have issues with using Dynamic DNS providers, specifically DynDNS.org, as they will remove your free account if you do not send an IP update at least once a month. Well, having dynamic DNS configured on my routers doesn’t do me any good because they will only send an update to DnyDNS.org if the external IP address changes, which it hasn’t in a very long time. Therefore, my DynDNS.org account is constantly being removed and I have to set it up again.

I know, you’re thinking if the IP never changes, why use dynamic DNS, right? Well, it does change from time to time and I don’t want to pay for a hosted DNS service, no matter how cheap.

While reading Richard Bejtlich’s blog the other day, TaoSecurity, I noticed he did a review on the recently released book Building an Internet Server With Freebsd 6 by Bryan J. Hong. Since I am very interested in FreeBSD, and still new to a lot of the concepts and abilities of the OS, I decided I would buy it, especially since Richard gave it 4 stars on Amazon.com.

Thumbing through the book initially I noticed a chapter on a tool called ddclient, a dynamic DNS update tool for FreeBSD, Linux, and I’m guessing anything that can run Perl and has a connection to the Internet. Since my routers don’t update DynDns.org frequently enough I felt that this tool was worth looking in to. It works like a champ and here is a little how to for setting this up on your machines to update your external IP with DynDNS.org, although it can be configured to work with other dynamic DNS providers.

(more…)

This evening I needed to move some files from a friend’s old PC to one of mine for archival purposes. I could have easily used an external USB drive to accomplish this task, but what fun is that?! I wanted to setup an FTP server on one of my FreeBSD boxes so I could move the files from the old PC to the server and then retrieve them from one of my desktop machines.

I got to looking on the AA blog to see if I had documented this before. I knew I had installed and configured an FTP server on FreeBSD before and didn’t want to duplicate the content on the blog unnecessarily. My searches turned up the An Affordable Surveillance System post I wrote a while back but I didn’t document the FTP software install or configuration, only the inetd configuration. I will attempt to make sense of the whole process in this one post. Don’t be upset if the whole procedure takes only a few minutes for setting up a simple FTP server on FreeBSD.

(more…)

I posted a link for screen on the old AA blog, but I found a really cool howto on using screen earlier today when looking for a way to split my screen window into two panes (one for IRC and another for my normal activities).

From my original post:

This article is meant to serve as a quick introduction to using Screen, a linux virtual terminal application.

Here’s a great example of why you need to be familiar with this application. Let’s say that you are interested in participating in the Folding@Home project (http://averageadmins.com/blogentry.php?id=11). With screen, you simply SSH into your Linux box, type screen to create a new session, install, configure, and run the Folding@Home software, and then press “CTRL-a d” to detach your session. If you hadn’t run your Folding@Home software in a Screen session, when you disconnected your program would have terminated. When you’re ready to reattach to your Screen session, you SSH into your box and type “screen -r” to resume.

Screen gives you the ability to keep sessions going, even when you disconnect from the remote host.

Think of Screen as a command-line version of Remote Desktop. Anything you run in the Remote Desktop session will continue to run until you either stop it yourself or you reboot your server. The same thing is true for Screen.

Screen is extremely customizable and offers a ton of features. This is a great URL that describes a lot of the features you’ll find in Screen: http://linuxjournal.com/article/6340

I like to keep a collection of text files that contain quick instructions for the programs I like to use. Here are the contents of my screen.txt file:

Ctrl-a c will create a new screen window
Ctrl-a Shift-m to monitor the current window for output
Ctrl-a _ to monitor for silence (30 seconds by default)
Ctrl-a ” and you will be presented with a list of the current open windows
Ctrl-a Esc to go into scrollback mode. Enter key will exit scrollback mode.
Ctrl-a Shift-a to name the current window
Ctrl-a d to detach from your screen

screen -ls to list screens at a normal prompt (not from within screen)
screen -x will let two people attach to the same screen

http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6340
a few other examples and a good .screenrc file.

another set of good examples:
http://palm.freshmeat.net/articles/view/581

As you can see, with a quick glance I can find the screen commands I use most often.

I don’t use Screen all the time, so I don’t have a fancy .screenrc to share. I simply use it when I want to run several linux terminals in one SSH session.

You can find the very detailed howto I found earlier today here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Using_screen

I was reading on some of the FreeBSD mailing lists the other day (I subscribe to many so I can’t remember which one it was) that someone had successfully installed the Google Earth for Linux application on FreeBSD. Someone else chimed in and stated that they would work on a port for it for the FreeBSD ports tree. Well, it is now ported to FreeBSD and in the ports tree as /usr/ports/astro/google-earth.

I installed it last night on my laptop and it worked like a champ. It is a little bit sluggish due to the fact that I have an Intel graphics chipset and the OpenGL support for my card, in Windows or FreeBSD, is not what it should be. Running the application with software acceleration worked but the Google Earth application did warn me that it might not perform as one would want.

So, this is cool. You can now run Google Earth on Linux as well as FreeBSD with the Linux binary compatibility features of FreeBSD. I think that is cool! Every time something new is ported to FreeBSD it makes me feel good that the FreeBSD community is staying on top of the applications available to FreeBSD users. A huge thank you goes out to the FreeBSD port maintainers for all their hard work and dedication to the project.

Until next time…

The FreeBSD team released the latest version of the 6.x branch of FreeBSD, 6.1-RELEASE, on May 8th, 2006. FreeBSD also publicly released their new logo and it is in use now on their web site, along with “Beastie“.

I upgraded my laptop over the weekend, using the instructions located here, with success! It took a little while, but not as long as I expected, to download and compile all of the system and kernel sources. The process defined in the previously mentioned tutorial was basically the same thing you can get from the FreeBSD Handbook here. The tutorial basically dumbs down the steps and has them all in one place. Very helpful!

However, recompiling all 348 of my installed ports and packages took a very long time because I wasn’t able to sit down and babysit my laptop to answer all of the make configuration prompts that some ports have. Out of the 348 installed ports on my system, only 9 failed. One of them was OpenOffice.org and I am glad it failed. Last time I compiled OOo it took about 42-48 hours. I don’t really remember the exact compile time but it was long. Some of the other ports that failed I uninstalled as I never use them and it wasn’t worth my time to research the issue and resolve it.

I have noticed some performance increases since I upgraded to 6.1. I don’t know if they are true increases or if it is just like when you used to get new kicks in school: you could always jump higher and run faster with your new kicks on. Maybe this is the same thing, I don’t know, but it does seem faster! I also have support for my iPod Video now and that rocks!

Until next time…

A week or so ago I wrote about the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash Player for Linux being removed from the FreeBSD Ports tree due to licensing issues. FreeBSD was not a supported OS and therefore was not mentioned on the EULA for the Flash Player as an authorized operating system. On April 24th and e-mail (PR) was received from Adobe that basically said “FreeBSD is not supported, run it if you want.” The www/linux-flashplugin7 port was thankfully added back to the FreeBSD Ports tree.

I will post a How-To on how to get this working on FreeBSD soon.