« Posts under Server

Cups and Windows 7 without SAMBA

03:47, 2011/12/12 / posted in Linux, Server / No Comments

Unfortunately I can’t use Linux everywhere, and work is one of those examples. My work laptop dual boots, but it has to be in Windows 7 most of the time sadly. This makes sharing the printer a tad bit more complicated, and everything I saw told me I had to use SAMBA to share a CUPS printer. Why? Isn’t CUPS a server? Finally after searching around I found a solution that worked, so I wanted to share it. FYI, this all assumes you already have CUPS up and running.

It’s actually pretty easy, but uses the registery editor in Windows 7 so be careful! »Read More

Fixing “terminal unknown” errors when ssh’ing around

02:48, 2011/09/22 / posted in Linux, Server / 2 Comments

Something I’ve run into quite a few times is the stupid “terminal unknown” error message when ssh’ing into remote servers. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it is very noticeable to me when it does happen, since I use ‘clear’ a lot, and I can’t when this error crops up.

There are essentially two fixes for this, one quicker than the other, and one better than the other. After the break I will go over both fixes so you can get rid of these annoying messages.

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vsftpd and Virtual Users

00:24, 2011/05/24 / posted in Linux, Security, Server / No Comments

For those of you who don’t know vsftpd is probably the most secure ftp out there right now.  As a whole I think that ftp is going the way of telnet, but it seems that developers still use it quite a bit (at least that’s what my developers tell me).  So anyway, if you have to use an ftp server, I highly recommend vsftpd.

Onto the topic at hand: Virtual Users.  One of the outstanding security features of vsftpd is the ability to have virtual users that can connect to the ftp server.  From a security standpoint this helps to lock down server access via other means (ssh, telnet, etc) because the users are restricted to only that ftp server.  In addition, you can also lock the ftp users into the directory of your choosing, which also prevents unauthorized file-system browsing.

While setting this up I had a hard time finding a cohesive set of instructions on how to do this (one that newer than 2009 at least).  They way I settled on seems to be only one possible way, but uses db to generate a database file that is used to lookup usernames and passwords.  I am going to make the instructions as generic as possible so that it applies to as many *NIX platforms and distributions as possible.

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