Project Updates

03:40, 2011/07/15 / posted in Linux, Security, [project2501] / No Comments

Figured it has been a while since I have posted, so I would do a quick little update on all the shit I am working on.

First, [project2501] is still up and running, and I am working on another release scheduled for this month. Arch recently decided to depreciate aufs2 (they did have good reason), and thus my development of [project2501] has been slowed. I have moved most everything over to my netbook, which runs a custom kernel that supports aufs2, but it is a netbook, and thus not the fastest horse on the track. Things are moving along though.
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[project2501] release 0.2 Beta / possible change

01:17, 2011/06/13 / posted in Linux, [project2501] / No Comments

New release of [project2501] available today. This was mostly an update version, but I gave it a full version number since there were a few changes and additions made besides the updates. The biggest issue I haven’t gotten around to fixing is still the issue with cards that need to use the proprietary graphics drivers. I’ll get to it eventually, but haven’t had that much time to really sit down and scope it out. Again if anyone knows how this is accomplished, please let me know.

So, on the note of change, I think I may ditch Firefox in favor of Chromium. I have been using Chromium on a more regular basis, and frankly like its security practices a little better. So unless I get a slew of messages otherwise, it will probably happen in the next release.

Anyway, here is the full changelog for the current version:
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Theme / Site Updates

04:16, 2011/06/11 / posted in Site Update / No Comments

I have been wanting to make some changes to my site for some time now, but have never gotten around to it. Finally today I was able to sit down and make the changes I wanted and now I have the site displaying information the way I want it to. I really only changed two things, but they both required some code/hackery on my part:

1) Add the post time to normal blog posts, as it only displayed date before
2) Remove both the time/date stamp, and the comments/pingbacks section from the static pages

As for number two there, I would much rather have comments made on the posts rather than on the pages. I know that I already had some comments on the [project2501] page, but I don’t want to get into a situation where there are pages and pages of comments on a single static html page that go back years. I always found that to be annoying when I visited sites, especially when searching the site. Rest assured that if I change my mind though, that the comments are still in the database, just hidden now.

All of this was done for the SimpleDark theme by Justice.
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xmonad.hs updates

23:50, 2011/05/29 / posted in Linux / No Comments

After installing Arch on a new laptop the other day, I went and cloned my config repository into the directory and went to work getting my basic setup up and running. I realized that since this install was on a system with a larger screen, I wanted to have two dzen status bars instead of one.

I haven’t completely finished it yet, as I want to talk to brisbin and see if we can set percentage values in his dzen library for the y_position. I also still need to do some cleanup on the colors, and further put more things into variables up front. Then I need to set up another version that has names for the workspaces instead of icons. I want to make this as portable as possible across systems.

I also don’t quite know where I want to put this. I was thinking about having two sets of configs sitting in the .xmonad folder on the portable configs repository … probably makes the most sense, and then I can essentially merge the desktop and portable-configs repositories.

Anyway, here are my quick edits for two status bars:
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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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